There’s no love lost between Harold Meyerson and this organization — or really any organization that is based in the real world, we suppose. But we have to give him credit for being honest about the anti-corporate Left’s use of environmental rhetoric for ulterior motives. Carter Wood at NAM points to the following Meyerson statement:

Later this month — at the prompting of community activists furious at having to breathe Los Angeles’s deadliest air, the Teamsters Union, port drivers and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa — the city’s Harbor Commission is likely to pass regulations requiring cleaner trucks, a change that advocates have devised to reshape the industry into one featuring large, hence unionizable, employers. It’s the kind of effort that other communities, industries and government officials must heed if the American middle class is to have something more promising than a glorious past.

We added the emphasis because it’s worth noting. Carter’s interpretation:

Organized labor is acting in concert in Los Angeles with environmental groups and machine politicians to put small businesses out of work: Too bad, little (immigrant-owned) trucking company. Through environmental regulations, we are going to make it too expensive for you to do business. Only big companies can afford the additional costs. Then we’ll mau mau the companies into unionizing.

A clever, disciplined strategy of economic fence-building through the use of environmental regulations. Clean air isn’t driving the process. Raw politics is. And that’s the kind of America Meyerson holds up as ideal.

If anything, Carter may be going too easy on the Teamsters. This is Big Labor screwing the Little Guy big time. Meyerson may  not mind, but most Americans would. On that note, don’t be surprised if we have a little more to say about Meyerson’s antics later.