Yeah, I know… it’s like a broken record around here. But, here is another voice coming to our side to agree with us that public employees unions are antithetical to good government, wholly un-democratic, and, therefore, quite un-American. This time it’s the well-regarded Michael Barone echoing our mantra.

Barone is one of the best political reporters in the country and in his own inimitable way has jumped on the anti-union bandwagon (not that he never has in the past, just that this piece is particularly on par).

Before he gets to government unions, one of his points is that unions aren’t even needed in the private sector anymore because all the evils that employers perpetrated in the days of yore have now been regulated away by governments and laws. Because of an active government unions just aren’t needed to protect workers anymore, says Barone. It is a good point, after all.

Barone then goes onto government employees unions which he says are “not adversarial but collusive.”

Public-sector unions strive to elect their management, which in turn can extract money from taxpayers to increase wages and benefits — and can promise pensions that future taxpayers will have to fund.

Barone then says that this “parasitic” relationship has put the states into bankruptcy. Exactly what we’ve said a hundred times here on the blog.

Barone then notes that Obama is the union’s knight in shinning armor…

One-third of last year’s $787 billion stimulus package was aid to state and local governments — an obvious attempt to bolster public-sector unions. And it was a successful one: While the private sector has lost 7 million jobs, the number of public-sector jobs has risen. The number of federal government jobs has been increasing by 10,000 a month, and the percentage of federal employees earning over $100,000 has jumped to 19 percent during the recession.

Obama and his party are acting in collusion with unions that contributed something like $400,000,000 to Democrats in the 2008 campaign cycle. Public-sector unionism tends to be a self-perpetuating machine that extracts money from taxpayers and then puts it on a conveyor belt to the Democratic Party.

He ends his piece expressing the hope that the next Congress might be less obligatorily obsequious to unions. But I doubt it, myself. My guess is that unions won’t be crippled until a total economic collapse is seen at their hands.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, TheRealityCheck.org, RedState.com, Human Events Magazine, AmericanDailyReview.com, and the New Media Journal, among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. Warner is also the editor of the Cook County Page for RedCounty.com.

He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston

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Two Democrats joined newly seated Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown Tuesday to uphold the Republican-led filibuster against President Obama’s nomination of Craig Becker to head the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The Democrats that joined the filibuster were Blanche Lincoln (D, Ark.) and Ben Nelson (D, Neb.). Both are thought to face losing their seats in the upcoming 2010 elections over the many left-wing votes they’ve recently cast.

The GOP is against the elevation of Becker to the NLRB Chair because his past statements show that he’ll take the position with a Big Labor agenda firmly in mind.

“Mr. Becker’s previous statements strongly indicate that he would take an aggressive personal agenda to the NLRB, and that he would pursue a personal agenda there, rather than that of the administration,” Senator Nelson said.

The final vote was 52-33, falling short of the 60 that Becker needed to sail out of committee and toward an open vote.

This is excellent news and shows how important Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts was to the conservative cause. Both Big Labor and Craig Becker have made it clear that should Becker take over the NLRB he will start a program of warping labor regulations in favor of Big Labor with a special eye toward surreptitiously putting the Democrats controversial Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) into effect even without any actions by the legislative branch.

This agenda proves that neither democrats nor Big Labor have any interest in the legislative process but intend to get their agenda in place by hook or by crook regardless of what the voters want.