Today was the Labor Day Parade in Downtown Wilmington — a long-standing tradition of organized labor, their families and supporters and (during an election year) politicians who want to be seen supporting labor marching down King St. This year, the union rat was also on parade courtesy of the Building Trades (I’m told — I was not at the parade this year) and this year, they put the face of John Kowalko on it — in protest of his not supporting the Newark Data Center. Pretty despicable behavior — especially towards someone who is routinely very supportive of labor issues in Dover. Even more delusional when you factor in the fact that Rep. Kowalko was actually representing his *constituents* in the Data Center matter. Even union members can get that sometimes the people that actually vote in an area are pretty important to hear — and in the long run, it isn’t as though they’d be able to replace him with someone who is more committed to labor issues. I’ll also point out that these folks taking the cowards’ route in criticizing Kowalko today haven’t been able to find anyone who could credibly run against him — and seriously labor folks, if you think you can get someone more supportive of your agenda AND make those residents happy, then man up and get that person to run against Kowalko. Otherwise, what you did today was not worthy of what today is supposed to represent and it was just basic bullshit. A picture (thanks to my anonymous source) of today’s labor bullshit is here:
There are genuinely better targets for this critique today — starting with the entirety of the Delaware General Assembly, who ran away from making the Transportation Fund whole (with the jobs that would do the work of fixing and expanding the state’s infrastructure gone) and who also ran away from establishing a fund to clean up Delaware’s waterways, also a potentially rich vein for decent construction jobs. What legislators are out there that you routinely support and who routinely let you down? Get serious folks — there are real fights to be had and you were largely unheard from on the Transportation Tax issue.
I should also say I didn’t have a dog in this fight, except to push back against the hype. Your plant is not “State-of-the-Art” if it is burning fossil fuels. And it looks from here that the community got the outcome it wanted, so I don’t see that as a bad thing.