Candidate Obama declared the firmest possible support for the rights of unions to organize, strike, and bargain collectively.

That was then,  but this is now… and as Stephen Webster comments over at AlterNet:

Despite efforts by state-level Republicans in Wisconsin, Tennessee, Michigan, Ohio, Maine, Florida and Indiana to curtail collective bargaining rights, the President has yet to appear at a single protest or picket line.

Realistically, I guess we can’t expect the President to slip into some comfy shoes and and offer even a photo-op on a picket line; but a throwaway comment during a news conference, something about collective bargaining or the right to strike ,would be appreciated. Oh wait a minute…wouldn’t want to annoy the Republicans.

Did the President just announce he would be running again in 2012? And an important part of his base is……?

Join working Americans and their unions who will be out on the streets on April 4th all across this country…In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, on the anniversary of his assassination, while he was in Memphis in solidarity with sanitation workers who were demanding dignity on the job and the right to collective bargaining.

Join Us!   Monday, April  4th  at 4 pm  for a Solidarity Rally. Meet at Pancho Villa Park —  -  Downtown Tucson (Broadway & Church Ave. by the statue)  Then,  at 5  pm,  march to Armory Park 221 South 6th Ave. (less than a one mile hike) for hot dogs and other picnic food and probably more rally. This is a family event – bring your kids, your friends, and your co-workers. Bring blankets or outdoor chairs for park.

Please RSVP to Laura Hogan @ (520)388-4139  or to http://local.we-r-1.org/weareone/events/show/32 so we know how much food to bring.

Sponsored by the Pima Area Labor Federation.

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Leonard Pitts’ column in today’s Arizona Daily Star is a commentary on the event tomorrow’s march honors. These excerpts are particularly worth noting.

It will come as a surprise to some that the civil-rights leader was also a labor leader, but he was. He had this in common with Asa Philip Randolph, who suffered long years of privation to establish the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. And with Walter Reuther, brutally beaten when he organized sitdown strikes that helped solidify the United Automobile Workers.

These people and many others fought to win the rights now being taken away.

Granted, those rights have sometimes been abused – used to shelter the incompetent or reward the greedy.

But to whatever degree our workplaces are not filled with children working adult hours, to whatever degree an employer is required to provide a clean and safe workplace, break time, sick time or fair wages, that also reflects organized labor’s legacy.

It is instructive that this campaign to roll back that legacy is contemporaneous with a New York Times report on how General Electric earned $14.2 billion in profit last year, yet paid no U.S. taxes. Indeed, the Times says, GE netted a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

What’s it tell you that some of us are on the offensive against working people but breathe scarcely a peep when a giant corporation somehow slips through government-provided loopholes, paying no taxes? If need is a character flaw, what, then, is greed?

Read  Pitts’ column here.