re: #323 Lidane

Right-wing groups including Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform are also working to defeat the union drive; billboards from ATR’s Center for Worker Freedom warn workers that “The UAW spends millions to elect liberal politicians, including BARACK OBAMA” and (quoting Reuters) that “almost every job lost at U.S. car factories in the last 30 years has occurred at a unionized company …” The Center for Worker Freedom is directed by Matt Patterson, the co-author of a May Op-Ed that described the UAW drive as “an invading union force from the North,” and said that “the people of Tennessee routed such a force in the Battle of Chickamauga,” when the Confederate Army stymied “an invading Union army” during the Civil War. “Let their descendants go now and do likewise,” he urged. (ATR did not respond to a Friday inquiry.)

But wasn’t the Confederate Army itself a form of collective action, a coercive entity, a kind of, uh, “union” of people organized to accomplish an objective?