Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa showed a lot of class in introducing the president yesterday at a Labor Day Union Rally in Detroit, Michigan.

Unfortunately, it was all low:

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. And you know, there is only one way to beat and win that war. The one thing about working people is we like a good fight. And you know what? They’ve got a war, they got a war with us and there’s only going to be one winner. It’s going to be the workers of Michigan, and America. We’re going to win that war.

President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Let’s take these son of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong.

Upon taking the stage after that reenactment of a scene from The Sopranos, President Obama proclaimed that he was “proud” of Jimmy Hoffa and other labor leaders.

The president’s speech was full of the same pandering class warfare, per politico.com:

Obama was expected to preview the jobs speech he’s scheduled to deliver later this week, though he told his supporters on Monday that he “didn’t want to give everything away right here, because I want you all to tune in on Thursday.”

Here’s what he did say about the plan: Roads and bridges “need rebuilding,” companies are ready to do it, and there are “more than one million unemployed construction workers ready to get dirty right now.”

The problem, Obama said, is the usual suspect: Congress, and particularly Republicans. Dropping his “g’s” as he does in his enthusiastic campaign speeches, Obama said: “We just need Congress to get on board. Let’s get America back to work.”

…“We’re going to see if we’ve got some straight shooters in Congress. We’re going to see if congressional Republicans will put country before party,” he said. “You say you’re the party of tax cuts? Well, then prove you’ll fight just as hard for tax cuts for middle-class families as you do for oil companies and the most affluent Americans. Show us what you got.”

There was no mistaking the political overtones of Obama’s speech. Alluding to the Bush years, he said, “We’ve come through a difficult decade in which … wealth was valued over work, and greed was valued over responsibility, and the decks were too often stacked against ordinary folks in favor of the special interests.”

While Obama was busy playing his usual class warfare game, he also found time to suck up to the Union workers, Big Time:

Now, the fact is our economy is stronger when workers are getting paid good wages and good benefits. Our economy is stronger when we have broad-based growth and broad-based prosperity. That’s what unions have always been about, shared prosperity.

As in, “share the wealth”?

In a recent phone interview with Craig Smith of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, James Sherk, a labor law expert and the senior policy analyst in labor economics at The Heritage Foundation, answered the following questions:

Q: What’s the state of the labor movement today?

A: In the private sector, unions are not doing very well at all. … They’re down to below 7 percent union membership in the private sector. That’s actually about half the rate that prevailed when FDR signed the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

And the reason for that is basically unions don’t add value to an enterprise. In many ways, they reduce value by making these companies less flexible and less nimble in the marketplace. … What the studies show pretty strongly is (unionized companies) just don’t grow as quickly or they shrink more rapidly.

Q: What about the public sector?

A: Now the public sector is a different animal. In the private sector, you have to earn profits to stay competitive or you lose your marketplace. But if you live in California, you don’t have the opportunity to say, “You know what? I’d rather pay taxes to Texas and receive their services.” You don’t have the option of buying your services from a different government.

So as long as the people aren’t actually physically moving away from the state or from the city, the unions have a far greater capacity to be inefficient.

All that happens is your taxes go up. If you’re a taxpayer, you don’t like that, but from unions’ perspective, they don’t care if you don’t like it as long as you pay. And so in the public sector, they’re steady in their market share — between 35 and 40 percent. They’ve been at that level for basically the past generation.

So, in other words, the Unions within private industry are shrinking, while the Government Service Unions are prospering.

Huh.  Weak in industry, strong in government.

No wonder Obama loves the Unions.