Tag Archives: Organized Labor

Media, Organized Labor, Politics

Political Tacticts Of The Left, Page 2, 'Health Care'

In the previous post, I document the tactics that the Obama administration is using, basically lying to the American people, to advance their disastrous health care reform bill, which has deftly shifted to health insurance reform.

That shift is not by accident. That shift is focus group tested. Why? Basically the reason is that most Americans are satisfied with the health care plans they have, and don’t want Obama or the government to mess it up, hence the angry citizens at town hall meetings trying to defend and protect what they have and to voice their objection to the whole socialist v private sector war that the administration is waging.

So, they need a better boogeyman to demonize, the insurance companies. Ahhh yes, that’s it, BIG INSURANCE. Who hasn’t had a bad experience of some sort with an insurance carrier at some time in their life? By shifting to this second ‘front’ in their ‘campaign,’ they hope to, and probably will, fool more people into thinking that Obama feels their pain and he is going to make it better. Fact is, the dumb masses out there won’t even notice this shift in strategy. You can depend on the media ignoring it as well.

Dutifully carrying the water for the administration’s bogus claim that that these protesters are astroturf and organized by BIG INSURANCE, and at the same time ignoring the truly organized effort to quell dissent, another paragraph on page 2 of their playbook is, don’t respond to the objections specifically, instead, paint them as evil agents of BIG INSURANCE.

The media won’t mention this union backed and union organized effort. To wit . . .

Our response is shaped by 3 things:

  • Our targets are Members of Congress who must vote “yes” for this bill. Our targets are not the rightwing extremists. The targets of these attacks are Members of Congress. Those Members are also our targets.
    We need to use these attacks as opportunities to work with the Members in ways that build our relationship in the field and bring us together as allies in health care reform. Members may be more receptive to partnering
    with us if they know we will help them combat the opposition.
  • Our core message is effective, and we should always come back to it. Our campaign plan has always anticipated opposition. No matter what the right-wingers bring up to distract the debate, we should always circle back to our key message. We are on the side of quality, affordable health care for everyone, and we are against turning over health care reform to the insurance companies and lobbyists who got us into this mess to begin with. We need to educate the press and the public that the protesters are aligned with the corporate lobbyists and insurance companies who are trying to stop reform.
  • Our ability to put the extremists into perspective helps us frame our narrative. We should be prepared to respond to the other side, but we don’t need to be reactive or feel pressure to answer their accusations point by point. Instead, we should treat them as agents of the insurance lobbyists who want to maintain the status quo. We can dismiss their radical rhetoric by circling back to the basic things that we know most people care about— affordability, access, and quality.

In many cases, protestors will show up at events or meetings you don’t organize but are participating in as an attendee or sponsor. You can still influence the outcome of these events or meetings, and it’s important for HCAN organizers and leaders to be ready to encounter these protesters in order to make sure that our volunteers and activists respond appropriately as well as capitalize on opportunities to also move our message, work with Members, and educate the public.

{emphasis added}

related link: The AFL-CIO and HCAN Plan Townhall Counterattack

Economy, Fair Tax, Organized Labor, Politics

Cash For Clunkers, A Teachable Moment

It didn’t take more than a few days of the ‘cash for clunkers’ program to illustrate a few things.

  • When people have money in their hands, they will spend it. And consumers spending money is what drives the economy. In this case, it stimulated the auto industry.
  • The program has already had its meltdown in red tape for car dealers, and has run out of money. And Democrats are looking for TWO BILLION more dollars from our grand children’s future to hand out.
  • That the Obama administration believes that they have a right to choose the winners and losers in our economy, instead of the people. They do that by choosing who they want to bail out (with money that hasn’t been printed yet), and ‘everyone’ is not among those that they want to bail out.
  • This cash for clunkers program could have been done BEFORE the administration fired auto executives, put their own people (who’ve never run a business) on the boards of directors, gave a majority ownership stake of the company to the United Auto Workers ahead of secured creditors, thereby nationalizing the auto industry.
  • That this whole scheme was done more as payback to the UAW than it was to improve the auto industry’s bottom line.

Returning to the first point. Once you realize that the money you earn belongs to you and not the government to selectively dole out, what mechanism puts money in the economy without committing inter-generational theft? The answer is tax cuts.

An even better answer to cutting taxes would be to let the people (there’s that ‘everyone’ concept again) keep all the money they earn and finance the government with a consumption tax as proscribed by the Fair Tax.

Organized Labor, Politics

Chicago Politics Spreads To Washington

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President of the United States Barack Obama, is engineering his fix for Chrysler, another ‘private’ corporation. The ‘fix’ is giving a 55% majority ownership of the company to the United Auto Workers union by putting the labor union AHEAD of secured creditors in a ‘White House’ recovery plan. Secured creditors are people and companies who invested in Chrysler, and likely part of someone’s 401k. Under bankruptcy, the secured creditors are always FIRST on the list to recover what they can.

But that is not what happened.  What happened is Obama publicly chastised the few creditors that did not want to go along, and used his Chicago-style political tactics on them to play along with his bankruptcy plan.

A leading bankruptcy attorney representing hedge funds and money managers told ABC News Saturday that Steve Rattner, the leader of the Obama administration’s Auto Industry Task Force, threatened one of the firms, an investment bank, that if it continued to oppose the administration’s Chrysler bankruptcy plan, the White House would use the White House press corps to destroy its reputation.

Obama did prevail, ending up with them settling for 29 cents on the dollar out of $6.8 billion owned by Chrysler. The labor union that invested zero dollars into the company gets 55% ownership, and the investors get 29%.

Returning the nation’s wealth to its rightful owners. It is what he campaigned on.

Update 5/7/09: I’m just dying to call this The Lunch Counter effect, but I won’t. Rush’s podcast from yesterday echos the point.

related links:

Economy, MRIOTD, Organized Labor, Politics

aSide Order

President Examines His 100 Days Himself

Tomorrow completes President Obama’s first 100 days in office. What happens on that day is that the news media focuses on his performance for those 100 days. Except for tomorrow. Tomorrow Barack is going to take care of this assessment and do it himself. He requested prime-time hours from the TV networks to put on his own campaign speech, and FOX is the only network that isn’t bending over.


President Delivers Chrysler To The UAW

GM Chairman (or is it BM Chairman?) and President of the United States Barack Obama, is engineering his fix for Chrysler. Another ‘private’ corporation. The fix is the quid pro quo for their unwavering financial support, giving majority ownership of the company, 55%, to the United Auto Workers union by putting the labor union AHEAD of secured creditors. Secured creditors are people who invested in the company. Under bankruptcy, the secured creditors are always FIRST on the list to recover what they can.

But that is not what happened.  And this is why the Obama administration doesn’t want them to declare bankruptcy. What happened is Obama publicly chastised the few creditors that did not want to go along, causing public pressure on them to play along. Obama forced them into taking less for their claim, that they paid for, and giving the remainder to the labor union, who paid nothing.

Returning the nation’s wealth to its rightful owners. It is what he campaigned on.


TOTUS Responds To POTUS

Feeling the need to respond to the tongue lashing he got yesterday from ‘Big Guy’ (the President), Barack’s teleprompter started up his own blog to discuss the incident where Barack lost his place and became speechless.

Here’s a portion of the transcript.

Big Guy: “In addition to John – sorry, the – I just noticed I jumped the gun here.”
TOTUS: “What? Why are you looking at those file cards? Who gave you those file cards? Ah crap.”
Big Guy: “Go ahead. Move it up.
TOTUS: “WT*! I am moving it up. When we get back to the office, we need to have a sit down …”

Economy, Energy, Organized Labor

Energy Policy Under Court's Thumb

All’s right with the world now as far as energy policy goes. To insure our dependence on foreign oil and higher energy cost at home, setting the stage for yet more government assistance programs, this country’s energy policies are now controlled by the courts and the EPA.

A program to expand oil and gas drilling off the Alaska coast has been canceled by a federal appeals court because of environmental concerns. A three-judge panel in the District of Columbia says the Bush administration’s Interior Department failed to consider the offshore environmental impact and marine life before approving an oil and gas leasing program in the Beaufort, Bering, and Chukchi (CHOOK-chee) seas.”

Nothing new here. Just pointing out liberal tendency to put the wolves in charge of the hen house. EPA dictates energy policy, teachers unions dictate education policies, like labor unions and the EPA team up to dictate the future of the auto industry. All that, combined with a lack of business experience in the entire Obama Cabinet makes the Obama administration uniquely qualified to depress the economy even further.

link: Court Cancels Offshore Drilling

Organized Labor

What If The Boss Calls During Your Furlough

As noted in this post, the Gannett Company has asked its employees to take a week off without pay sometime in the first quarter of 2009. It is called a furlough. Here’s what should happen if your boss calls you while you are on furlough.

From Gannett Blog (not affiliated with Gannett Company),

“Federal and state laws require that employees, whether hourly or salaried, must not work while on an unpaid leave. That includes reading or responding to e-mails, calling or responding to calls from colleagues and being on site at your location at any time during your furlough days.
A furlough means you will not work.”

Economy, Organized Labor, Politics

Card Check, Intimidation?

Here’s an interesting take, and proposal on ‘Card Check,’ the quid pro quo of Democrats for labor unions.

Let the unions have their “card check” provision–allowing them to substitute publicly-collected, signed cards saying “we want a union” for a secret ballot vote. If the union gets 51% of the employees to sign the cards, it gets recognized. But let the employer also collect cards from employees who don’t want a union. If the employer gets 51% the union has to go away for five years. You’d hear soon enough about how collecting cards in public is unfair, opening the door to pressure tactics, intimidation, etc.. …

links: Kausfiles | Employee Free Choice Act Is Democrats’ Quid Pro Quo

Economy, Organized Labor, Politics

Plan B For Automakers, Do Nothing

Executives from the Big 3 automakers are in Washington making their case for $34 billion dollars (up from $25 billion a week ago) to ‘bail’ them out.

Their plan amounts to things they should have done years ago, but still amount to nothing more than duct tape over a gaping hole in the hull of their ship. Not one of them mentioned bankruptcy or getting out from under their current union contracts. That’s where the hole is and that’s why any amount of money now is just duct tape. It will also be nationalizing an industry doomed to failure if it doesn’t cleanse itself of the unnecessary union overhead that a bankruptcy affords them. All for the express purpose of propping up a labor union. I’m sorry, I believe our economy comes before a labor union.

GM’s COO Fritz Henderson is only fooling himself when he says that there is no Plan B. Of course there is. In this case, when you have an operation that ‘can’t fund’ itself, bankruptcy is always an option.

“There isn’t a Plan B,” said GM Chief Operating Officer Fritz Henderson. “Absent support, frankly, the company just can’t fund its operations.”

These auto execs seem unwilling to cut the umbilical cord to the UAW. That leaves the only other option, doing nothing. Why? Because Nancy Pelosi will get them the money they want one way or the other, making the automakers’ appearance this week before congress the obligatory dog and pony show. Pelosi is out to protect and preserve the UAW, not the company that employs them, and these execs know it.

“I believe that an intervention will happen,” Pelosi said at a briefing in Washington. “Everybody is disadvantaged by bankruptcy, including our economy, so that’s not an option.”

Pelosi said Congress will either approve new loans for the auto industry or the Bush administration will provide funding through the $700 billion financial-markets rescue plan approved by Congress last month.

Unfortunately for us taxpayers, and fortunately for the UAW, they will get their (your) money. Don’t you just love it when free enterprise capitalism is interfered with by the government? What makes it worse in this case is that the motivation is only to help big labor, Democrats’ special interest group.

related links: Big Three survival bailout requests rise to $34B | Pelosi Says Bankruptcy by Automakers ‘Not an Option’

Economy, Organized Labor, Politics

Employee Free Choice Act Is Democrats' Quid Pro Quo

Among the first items on President-elect Obama’s agenda will be to pay back labor unions for their generous campaign contributions in the name of the Employee Free Choice Act. As if government is not already involved in all kinds of things of a socialist nature that it should not be involved in, but is, Democrats in Washington, if not by executive order itself by our new President, will resume the effort to boost labor union membership by enacting new legislation. Since when does boosting labor unions membership become a responsibility of the government? The easy answer to that is to follow the money. If you do that then you’ll know why the bill was sponsored solely by Democrats including Barack Obama.

The bill was mis-named on purpose. Had it been named correctly, it would have been named the Employee Forced Choice Act. The meat of the bill will remove the private ballot in union organizing and replace it with a public one. It is more than a little ironic that Democrats would have such contempt for a private ballot when every other kind of vote Americans participate in is a private one.

And be prepared also for the Left to attach this bill to their favorite political tact, class warfare. Last year, Sen. Hillary Clinton was speaking for this bill and said that it is for ‘the middle class’ because, she asserts, labor union members are middle class. Although Democrats purport to support ‘the working people,’ what they really support are labor unions.

Didn’t we just learn that small businesses create something like 80 percent of jobs in this country, and that most of these small business owners and their employees are ‘middle class?’ And that’s why Obama wants a ‘middle class’ tax cut while raising taxes on ‘the rich.’

Let’s examine Barack Obama’s economic theory. He wants to increase minimum wage to over $9/hr. He wants to increase taxes on small businesses with incomes higher than $120,000. He wants to enable labor unions to unionize small businesses. Does this sound like a pro-growth economic policy to you? It sounds like disaster that will only worsen our economic woes.

In 1983, 20 percent of workers in the U.S. were union workers. In 2007 that percentage was 12.1 percent, up .1 percent from 2006.

Much of last year’s growth came in the West. California’s rate of union membership rose one percentage point, to 16.7 percent, an increase of more than 200,000 members. Nevada showed an increase of 15,000 union members, reflecting the organization of casino and construction workers.

As you might expect, union membership in the Midwest decreased.

In the Midwest, manufacturing job losses reduced union membership. Michigan lost 23,000 union members. The largest decrease came in Illinois, where union rolls dropped 89,000. Ben Zipperer, research associate at the Center for Economic Policy Research, said the manufacturing sector — long the stronghold of U.S. unions — is being supplanted by the construction and private health-care fields, where union membership is growing.

The reason union membership has declined over the years is that employers have negated the need for them by paying more and offering benefits that employees want, without them having to pay dues to a union. This so-called Card Check legislation is a mistake for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is that it is not the government’s job to increase labor union membership. The other reason is the negative impact on business that come with unions in vastly increased overhead and payroll expense.

Look what labor unions do the the auto industry. Did you know that . . .

At a time when the average American company requires workers to pay more than $2,000 a year toward family health insurance premiums, the auto industry is among the 4% of employers that offer free family health coverage.

And these figures are from 2005, it is only worse now . . .

The cost of providing health care adds from $1,100 to $1,500 to the cost of each of the 4.65 million vehicles GM sold last year, according to various calculations. GM expects to spend at least $5.6 billion on health care this year, more than it spent on advertising last year.

Granted that it was the management of these automakers that agreed to such extravagant benefits, at the threat of a strike, but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how labor unions can put not only the auto industry, but any industry at a competitive disadvantage, including small businesses that need all the help they can get. If unions go away, no one suffers. If small businesses go away, everyone suffers.

related links: Union Membership Up Slightly in 2007 | Obama renews promise on NAFTA, ‘card check’ | Employee Free Choice Act, Part Two

Organized Labor, Pensacola, Politics

Big Education, Not So Big Students

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Ever notice how politicians in both parties always want to spend more on education at all levels? There never, never seems to be enough money. After all, spending more on education is a feel-good type exercise. It makes our caring-karma glow and helps politicians get re-elected. But what good does it do our children? Why are we not seeing positive results there? Could it be because of the K-Mart (no offense to K-Mart) mentality of educating our children. That is to say, quantity rather than quality, like the editor writes. . .

The problem at the bigger, higher-profile institutions like the University of Florida and Florida State University is that they have been trying to handle too many students with increasingly tight budgets.

Yes, the budgets have risen in total dollars, but not enough to offset the rising costs of providing high-quality education to growing numbers of students.

Time is long overdue to expect more for our money which is already ‘invested’ into educating our children, and to dispel this blank-check, or bottomless-pit theory that if we just spend more money on education that we will get bright and educated children. We’ve had bright and educated children in our history with much smaller expenditures than what we are seeing today.

In financing education in Florida, the lottery shell-game that we all bought into years ago ‘has come home to roost.’ And while some politicians are quick to trash BIG OIL, BIG PHARM, BIG INSURANCE, and BIG ENERGY on costs, where in the world are they on BIG EDUCATION? The assumption that spending more money because costs are rising, instead of addressing the rising cost is where we lose focus on the important thing, teaching our children to be bright, productive, and able to think and reason on their own.

To borrow an overused phrase and campaign slogan, it’s time for change we can believe in. It’s time for politicians to step up and attack the ‘rising cost’ factor like they are so quick to do with other industries, instead of the taxpayers’ wallet. But first, they have to come to terms with their biggest obstacle, BIG LABOR, teacher’s unions.

related link: PNJ editorial, No free lunch on tuition