In 2005, Hoffa led the Teamsters out of the AFL-CIO and into the more radical breakaway labor federation, the SEIU-endorsed Change to Win coalition. During the years leading up to that split, the AFL-CIO had become increasingly radical. Then-president John Sweeney, a member of the neo-communist group Democratic Socialists of America, had rescinded a longstanding rule preventing Communist Party members from holding leadership positions within the federation and the unions belonging to it.
Sweeney had also instituted the “Union Summer” training program which required its young participants to regurgitate Marxist boilerplate “that we produce the world’s wealth, that we belong to the only class with a future, that our class will end all oppression.” But none of this was radical enough for Hoffa, who also criticized the AFL-CIO for being insufficiently aggressive in recruiting new members. “In our view, we must have more union members in order to change the political climate that is undermining workers’ rights in this country,” said Hoffa. “The AFL-CIO has chosen the opposite approach.”
By Hoffa’s reckoning, “Wall Street’s greed, stupidity and fraud” was chiefly responsible for creating America’s economic crisis of 2008. In the fall of 2011 Hoffa strongly supported the Occupy Wall Street movement, which excoriated the financial sector as irredeemably corrupt, and he boasted that Teamsters members “all over the country are participating in Occupy Wall Street events.”
When introducing President Barack Obama at a Labor Day rally in 2011, Hoffa shouted, “We got to keep an eye on the battle that we face: The war on workers. And you see it everywhere, it is the Tea Party.” “Let’s take these son[s] of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong,” he added. After the event, Hoffa told ABC News that conservatives and Tea Party activists “want to roll the clock back to about 1900.”
When Wisconsin voters in 2011 gave their Republican governor Scott Walker a clear mandate to cut public spending, Hoffa lashed out. In February 2011 he characterized Walker’s modest proposal that state workers shoulder a small percentage of the costs for their healthcare plans and pensions as “a vindictive attack” that was part of a “union-busting” campaign and a “one-sided class war.”
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2546
“After the event, Hoffa told ABC News that conservatives and Tea Party activists “want to roll the clock back to about 1900.” More like 1776 to 1790.