John Edwards, Crusader for the Poor & Unions

Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards' antics are just too hilarious for words sometimes. Take this past week.

First we learn that, while promising legislation to shut down offshore fund managers, Edwards actually worked for one for at least the past year. That's right. Edwards worked for Fortress, LLC, the prominent hedge fund that has recently begun allowing public investment into itself.

Edwards earned some $400,000+ last year at Fortress. When asked to explain this association, he said that he wanted to learn how hedge funds related to poverty. You can't this stuff up. Nobody would believe it.

This weekend, in the Wall Street Journal, it was reported that Edwards, who likes to style himself as the "son of a millworker," rather than the former class action lawyer that he is, went to bat to strip workers of their rights in North Carolina.

At issue is union pressure on Smithfield Foods. The Democrats, led by Edwards, are attempting to force the company, whose employees have thus far resisted union organizers, to replace a secret ballot with the 'card check.' This latest liberal Democratic idea allows unions to simply count every signature gathered publicly as a 'vote,' thus using thuggery and intimidation to organize workers.

Of course, the goal of this is higher union wages at Smithfield. The Journal article recounts how this strategy backfired on UNITE, a textile union, when they organized Fieldcrest Cannon in 2002. The resulting union demands on the company, as it emerged from bankruptcy, left it no choice but to close its operations in the North Carolina county in question.

So much for trying to hold back global economic tides.

Further on, the article provides an interesting statistic,

"From 1997 to 2005 the 10 states with the highest rates of union membership- which include California, New York and Michigan, among others- had slower growth than the bottom 10 states. North Carolina is among just five states with union membership rates below 5%. ....Further unionizing the workforce will likely only make the state look more like the old Northeast and Rustbelt than the New South."

It's sort of comical to put these two stories together. Here's John Edwards, multi-millionaire class-action, corporate-shakedown attorney, raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars from the type of company he publicly lambastes. Then he turns around and supports an erosion of workers' rights which will likely lead to more of them being jobless, as their unions raise wages too high for companies like Smithfield Foods to continue operating in North Carolina.

As the Journal piece notes, for better or worse, Edwards has lashed himself to big labor for this election. It's going to be interesting to see how Edwards tries to tack back from this socialist stance, should he somehow actually win the Democratic nomination for President.