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© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
You couldn’t get any better proof that unions are little else but hatchet men for the Democrat Party than Jerry Brown’s recent visit to a labor group meeting in California this week.
At a meeting of the Laborers’ International Union of North America in Sacramento, Brown gave marching orders to the unions in his race for the Democratic nomination for California Governor. He wanted them to “attack” the GOP for him.
“We’re going to attack whenever we can, but I’d rather have you attack. I’d rather be the nice guy in this race. We’ll leave [the attacks] to … the Democratic Party and others.”
That’s a pretty cynical campaign, isn’t it? Brown hopes to unleash the “attack” dogs of the unions in his favor, but expects to stand clear of the mud flying so as to appear untarnished… yet HE’S the guy that ordered the mud to fly in the first place?
Jerry Brown may think the voters are stupid but let’s hope they disabuse him of that notion.
Still, it usually goes without saying that the unions are partisan, vicious, and unprincipled in the service of Democrats. They understand that Democrats are their lapdogs, so who wouldn’t expect them to come to Brown’s aid?
The cure for some of this is, of course, eliminating public employees unions so that all that money spent on politicians never gets spent in the first place. The incestuous relationship between campaign contribution greedy Democrats and un-democratic public employees unions must end.
The Oregonian has a disheartening story proving once again why public employees unions should be outlawed.
Here we have a case of a criminal fireman who ripped off the city through a false claim of being injured and unable to work, he admits his guilt and doesn’t press the city for more benefits, yet the union DOES take the city to court to get undeserved benefits for this layabout fireman!
For 12 years fireman Tom Hurley ripped off the city of Portland’s fireman’s disability fund by receiving monthly checks of $3,200 at the taxpayer’s expense despite that he really wasn’t disabled. In fact, he took the city’s money and put himself through cooking school and then went to work in the food service industry. All paid for by the taxpayers.
And when the city finally wised up and cut him off from the honey pot, even Hurley didn’t appeal the decision. He just shrugged his shoulders and moved forward with his new career as a chef.
But the union would have none of this “end of benefits” business. No, the union wouldn’t move on. The union took the City of Portland to court to force the city to keep paying this former fireman scam artist. The union wants the city to pay this layabout fireman $103,000 in “lost” disability payments.
The city is claiming it wants to “go to war” over this whole thing. Let’s hope they do and let’s hope they win. This union ripoff of the taxpayers is unconscionable.
Three interesting stories on unions have hit the media this week that should be watched.
#1- Bush’s Union Transparency Rules Retracted Under Obama
The Washington Times reports that Obama is still giving favors and pay back to Big Labor. This time Obama is eliminating the transparency rules that Bush had put in to try to keep unions honest and legal. Saddly, Obama doesn’t care much if unions are held to the rule of law.
Since President Obama took office, the Labor Department has rescinded or delayed three sets of rules proposed by the George W. Bush administration that would have required unions and their leaders to more specifically detail their finances, according to a review of records by The Washington Times.
So much for the most transparent administration in history, eh?
#2- In a shocker, USA Today pronounces that unions are the problem not the solution…
Our view on school reform: Unions protect bad teachers, harming kids’ education
At this time of high unemployment, one group of professionals has no shortage of job security: bad teachers. Few public school principals in the country are able to dismiss an incompetent teacher without a protracted, expensive struggle, and therefore firings rarely happen. Yet researchers agree that hiring good teachers, and ditching bad ones, is the best way to improve education.
Ouch. If unions are losing friends even in the Old Media, this is bad for them! I say GOOD.
The USA Today piece has some very good points to make and is a must read.
#3- Lastly, The Hill has one on unions lashing out at those Democrats that have the gall to think for themselves…
Unions taking on Dems who don’t toe labor line
The Hill tells us of Big Labor’s desperate attempt to stay relevant even though it has fewer votes to deliver to America’s Democrats every year. Oh, sure, they have a ton of cash to give the politicians, but without the votes to back up the cash, that cash is a bit devalued — though is still a strong call to the Democrats.
Frustrated at seeing their legislative agenda stymied, unions are becoming increasingly active in competitive Democratic Senate primaries.
Look for unions to try to defeat some conservative Democrats in 2010. This, of course, will backfire for them and get Republicans elected… but that’s alright by us, eh?
There is no entity with closer ties to the Obama administration than the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). According to the White House visitor logs SEIU President Andy Stern and Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger visited the White House 58 times in 2009 alone, including 11 meetings with Obama and another with Vice President Biden.
The SEIU is popular in the White House because no other union is as politically active as the SEIU. Stern told the Las Vegas Sun, “We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama — $60.7 million to be exact — and we’re proud of it.” Indeed, right after the SEIU spent a fortune of their members’ money to elect Obama; they promptly fired 75 of their national field staff and organizers and redirected that money to “lobbying and communications in Washington to take advantage of Democrats’ ascendance.”
But as the video above shows, while Stern and his lobbyists meet with Obama and other Washington leftists, they are losing ground in the rest of the country. In California, National Union of Healthcare Workers has been successfully beating the SEIU in elections and the SEIU is not happy about.
So the next time you hear some leftist rhetoric about how the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is necessary to protect workers’ rights, ask yourself if you’d want this woman standing over you demanding you sign a card in support of joining a union, or whether you’d prefer express your opinion with the safety of a secret ballot.
(Shamelessly stolen form The Heritage Foundation.)
The California Teachers Association spent $211,849,298 on lobbying and political spending to get its way in California in 2009. Along with the CTA, the Calif. State Council of Service Employees and 13 other organizations spent a total of one billion dollars on political lobbying of the State House at Sacramento. All of these special interests have helped push California to the brink of insolvency.
But, according to the California Fair Political Practices Commission, the two unions mentioned above far and away top the spending of the other top lobbying spenders in California. The next closest in spending was the Big Pharma clocking in at $104,912,997 on its political spending with various and sundry Indian casino groups whose spending was in the less than $85,000,000 range.
Commission Chairman Ross Johnson said in a press release, “This tsunami of special interest spending drowns out the voices of average voters and intimidates political opponents and elected officials alike.”
The FPPC fully details of the spending of these special interests and unions evoking outrage and proving why voter’s will is meaningless to politicians, not just in California, but across the country.
Here, for instance, is how the FPPC breaks down the teachers union spending:
- Ballot Measures: $144,116,835
- Candidates: $16,716,386
- Political Parties: $6,613,834
- Other Campaign Committees: $5,885,936
- TOTAL SPENT INFLUENCE VOTERS: $173,332,991
- TOTAL SPENT LOBBYING OFFICIALS: $38,516,307
- GRAND TOTAL SPENT: $211,849,298
On one level, one might ask why such spending is so wrong? After all, even The Federalist Papers spoke of “factions,” “interests,” and associations of voters getting together to influence their representatives in Congress. Why should a real American be all upset over such spending meant to influence Congress? Shouldn’t lobbying be considered a quintessentially American political convention?
There is one reason and one reason only that this situation is detrimental to our Republic and it isn’t that lobbying exists. It is because government is too powerful and has been allowed to take on too much authority. Lobbying wouldn’t be the problem it is if government didn’t have the power it has to warp and destroy our lives, the power that these lobbying groups court.
Of course, where it specifically relates to the teachers and the service employees unions we are talking about organizations that shouldn’t even be allowed to exist at all. There should be no such thing as a public employees union as the existence of these entities is wholly against the health our Republic. Still, that aside, if government didn’t have so much power, even these illicit public employees unions wouldn’t be as destructive as they are.
Of course, California, as always, is just the worst, most obscene example of this outrage of Big Government. The truth is that every state in the union is drowning in this sort of morass to one degree or another.
The solution to all of this is to take power away from government.
Carol Platt Liebau posted a piece on RealCleaPolitics.com that also clangs the warning bells over the unsustainable situation that the various states find themselves in between their public employees unions and the states’ fiscal obligations. She focuses on California, but nearly every state in the union is quickly approaching the mess California is in.
Liebau writes of the effort that the teachers union in California led to get kids as young as five-years-old out of school so that they could be bussed to the state capitol in Sacramento in order to protest school budget cuts. Me, I think she races by this outrage too quickly.
It is outright disgusting that these teacher thugs wanted to slight these kid’s day of education in order to use them as political pawns. It is infuriating that these people thought so little of these children that they’d do this to them. And did these union thugs tell the parents that this was going to happen? I don’t know, but likely they didn’t.
Fortunately, the school Superintendent decided that there would be a “safety issue” and nixed the union’s idea.
Still, Liebau did want to get to the more important matter and that is the undeserved riches that these union members are seeing. Liebau reports that California’s teachers make 145% more than other teachers in the nation yet they are still carping and whining about budget cuts.
… a California teacher’s salary is 145% that of an average worker in the state (who works 12 months per year!). What’s more, California teachers are the most highly paid in the entire nation, even as the state teeters on the brink of fiscal collapse. And yet, the prospect of any cuts to state government spending elicits nothing but a storm of protest.
Sadly, even as the state is drowning in red ink, the Democrats in power just keep voting for tax increases as if that is the answer.
Liebau sums up thusly…
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the system, as it exists, is unsustainable. The state’s fiscal crisis is reaching proportions that will require real and significant cuts to avoid an economic meltdown. Making the changes necessary to save the state will necessitate resisting the destructive influence of public sector unions. And that’s fine. It’s long past time that public sector unions start working to serve Californians, rather than demanding that Californians work ever harder to serve them.
And she could be talking of New Jersey, Illinois, or nearly any other state. Public employees unions need to be eliminated as they are destroying our country.
Eric Odom (Media Director)
Warner Todd Huston