Pages
Stay In Touch
More
© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting that union leader Thomas Balanoff of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was contacted by President Obama to act as a go-between to help Obama friend Valerie Jarrett secure his vacated Illinois Senate Seat when now former Governor Rod Blagojevich was trying to sell the seat to the highest bidder.
Balanoff appeared as a witness at the Blago corruption trial today. He said that Obama called him the day before he was elected president.
“Tom, I want to talk to you with regard to the Senate seat,” Obama told him.
Balanoff said Obama said he had two criteria: someone who was good for the citizens of Illinois and could be elected in 2010.
Obama said he wasn’t publicly coming out in support of anyone but he believed Valerie Jarrett would fit the bill.
“I would much prefer she (remain in the White House) but she does want to be Senator and she does meet those two criteria,” Balanoff said Obama told him. “I said: ‘thank you, I’m going to reach out to Gov. Blagojevich.”
Balanoff testified that Blago broadly hinted that he’d love to be offered the top spot at Health and Human Services, but Balanoff also said he couldn’t deliver that.
Obama appointed Jarret to a position at the White House after the election.
Last week the Chicago Tribune published an editorial detailing the biggest reason why unions as they have operated in the U.S. for decades are an illegitimate venture. The Trib published a plea to new Chicago teachers union chief Karen Lewis not to protect the bad teachers under her charge and to help the younger teachers that haven’t yet proved to be bad for kids by allowing the bad ones to be laid off without complaint.
The Trib’s editorial called the practice of keeping bad teachers “dancing lemons,” revealing the sad practice of shuffling bad teachers around the system instead of firing merely because they may have tenure on the job. While new teachers are automatically laid off due to budget cuts, teachers that have a disciplinary problem or a troubled history are kept because they’ve been on the job longer. This is wrong and reflects badly on the union and teachers alike, not to mention that it leads to a bad education for our kids.
There is no doubt that layoffs will have to be made and soon in the Chicago Public Schools. The schools are out of money and the state is tapped out so layoffs are in the cards no matter what else occurs. Unfortunately, it isn’t likely that the bad teachers will get their just deserts and we the tax payers will be stuck paying their undeserved freight while new teachers that deserve a chance to prove themselves won’t get one.
The Trib also makes a salient point about merit evaluations. Teachers constantly rail against them as if it is some crime against their profession. But every other profession in the world is held to standards and expected to perform, so why not teachers? Why do they think they are more special than anyone else? Who do they think they are, anyway?
I have to echo the Trib’s plea to new union chief Lewis. Let Chicago Public Schools Chief Ron Hubeman fire the bad teachers. Don’t stand in his way. It will raise some good will with parents, students and the taxpayers of Illinois and will prove that she is a sensible and visionary leader.
Unfortunately, I doubt she’ll step up to the plate. Lewis will more than likely go to the mat to protect these teachers that are helping ruin our kid’s education. And more’s the shame for this common union practice, one that leads to such a bad reputation.
But here’s to hope that Lewis will prove a different sort.
Liz Peek wrote a great piece on the danger that unions present to the farming industry on FoxNews. Headlined “Unions are the Biggest Threat to Farm Workers,” Peek makes some salient points.
Peek reveals that Obama’s Dept. of Labor is yet again wallowing in big government expansion just like every other sector of Obama’s regime.
According to a release from Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, the Obama administration has hired an additional 250 investigators – a 33% increase – to more energetically oversee those who employ migrant workers, such as blueberry farmers in North Carolina. They are especially on the lookout for growers who have hired children under the (legal) age of 12, or who have paid less than minimum wage to pickers. To rein in abuses, the Labor Department has ramped up penalties. Fines now range up to $11,000 for violations previously costing $1,000. In addition, the department is supporting a bill that would make it more difficult for young people to work on farms
Unlike what the Dept. of Labor is supposed to be for, of course, Solis is using her position as Labor Sec. to be a union flak instead of standing as an unbiased authority intent on a fair adjudicator between labor and business.
Peek notes that Solis is hiding behind a faux expression of caring for the welfare underaged workers. But in truth she is merely acting the shill for Big Labor.
Why does Big Labor care so much about migrant families? Perhaps because there are hundreds of thousands of nonunion workers who, each year, cultivate the produce of the United States, 85% of which is done by hand. As union enrollment has declined across the private sector, organizers have anxiously searched for new members, especially among the Hispanic community. Those at the bottom of the work pyramid are easily convinced that a beneficent union can secure higher pay and can demand better protections against abuses. They don’t realize that union organizers could well cost them their jobs — a reality that accounts for the decades-long slump in union totals elsewhere.
Peek notes that Solis has made multiple attempts to give Big Labor big wins within these six months she has filled her position. The result, Peek says is no battle to support children but “it is yet another salvo against small business owners by organized labor and the Obama administration.”
Please do read the whole article because it is a good one.
The Hill is reporting that Iowa’s leading Democrat, Senator Tom Harkin, is promising that the lame-duck Senate will again take up Big Labor’s favored Employee Free Choice Act, (EFCA), the famous card check act that is neither good for employees nor one that facilitates “free choice” of any kind.
Apparently, what’s bad for the nation is easier to push when Democrats already feel that the 2010 election will erase their giant majorities in Congress so they want to launch a last ditch effort to sneak this through before the people can speak at the ballot box.
And isn’t that just the thing, here? The people did speak in 2006 and 2008, after all. They spoke in favor of Democrats. Yet, even with all that support Harkin and his far left cronies couldn’t lead their overwhelming majority to pass the jobs killing bill. Even their fellow Democrats were against it because they knew the voters stood against it.
Yet now, when they feel that many of them will lose their seats anyway, they want to go back to pushing this bad policy? Isn’t that an admission that Democrats do not care what the people want?
Plainly it is.
Yet, Harkin is claiming that the lame-duck Senate will take this up anyway.
“To those who think it’s dead, I say think again,” Harkin said on the liberal Bill Press radio show.
Harkin is unashamedly saying, “Damn the people, we have big money donors in Big Labor to satisfy.”
Those of you that stand against federal control of our worker’s wages, benefits, and pensions and those of you that stand against union bosses being given the color of federal authority to place their iron boots on the neck of our struggling economy should call your senators and representatives and again urge them to steer clear of the EFCA.
On June 24 the House of Representatives passed by a bare minimum number of votes the DISCLOSURE Act, a law that is supposed to be a new effort to get around the recent US Supreme Court decision that struck down parts of Congress’ campaign finance law. Bare minimum or no there is no doubt that this new law is an unconstitutional mess that unfairly limits the free political speech of some Americans while giving an unfair advantage to unions and certain lobbyists — lobbyists including the National Rifle Association and Big Labor groups such as the AFL-CIO and the SEIU.
The DISCLOSURE Act (full name, Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act) was passed through the House by a 219 to 206 vote with only two Republicans voting in favor and 36 Democrats voting against. The two Republicans that voted in favor were Mike Castle of Delaware and Joseph Cao of Louisiana.
So what is this law supposed to do? For one thing the law would require “special interest group officials to physically appear at the end of campaign ads they sponsor, acknowledging their campaign contributions.” It would also require that advocacy groups detail on their public websites every campaign they’ve donated to.
But, as it turns out, Democrats excluded some of the biggest spenders on political ads and campaigns in the country, most of them their patrons. In a manager’s amendment the Democrats excluded any organization that has over 1 million members. That leaves Big Labor free and clear of these new disclosure rules. It also leaves the National Rifle Association free of the new requirements.
And this is precisely what makes the whole thing unconstitutional. It is true that Congress has made rules requiring disclosure of campaign donations and it is also true that the courts have declared it constitutional. But those laws were all levied equally on everyone. The laws affect everyone that donates a certain amount of money and higher, for instance. This law treats some donations as necessary of disclosure while affording other donations the luxury of secrecy.
The Constitution of the United States has always been conceived as one that affects everyone equally. But if the courts let this law stand, then we will be solidifying into law the concept that Congress can make laws that discriminate against some Americans while giving other Americans more freedom. This is a dangerous precedent to set.
One thing is sure, disclosure of campaign donations have been used by advocacy groups for opposition research. California’s recent pro-traditional marriage vote, for instance saw disclosure of donors put into the hands of groups that used the lists to track down and personally attack individual donors. In California such donor lists left folks that donated to protect traditional marriage for religious reasons open to personal attacks by gay advocacy groups.
The fact is that disclosure can go too far and have unintended consequences and this should also be taken into consideration and be weighed for effect.
For his part Republican Leader John Boehner is already denouncing the law.
With this misguided bill, Democrats would restrict free speech and violate the First Amendment. But not for everyone. This bill would muzzle small businesses but protect labor unions. It allows the Humane Society to speak freely, but not the Farm Bureau. It would protect the AARP’s rights, but not 60-Plus. And lastly it would protect the National Rifle Association but not the National Right to Life. The NRA is carved out and gets a special deal in this bill. The NRA is all about protecting the Second Amendment, but apparently its leaders don’t care about protecting the First Amendment. That’s very disappointing.
This is a potentially dangerous piece of legislation, but it isn’t law yet. The U.S. Senate has to pass it and then the president has t sign it. There is still time to defeat this unconstitutional favoritism for Big Labor and other Democrat constituencies (and the NRA, curiously enough — politics does make strange bedfellows at times).
The president of the Seafarers International Union’s Gulf Coast District, Dean Corgey, recently penned an op ed in which he noted an interesting fact: deepwater oil drilling rigs are “100 percent non-union.” With this in mind one of union bought president Barack Obama’s major decisions — in fact, one of his few actual decisions — in the BP Oil mess was to shut down the very oil rigs that unions have been trying to organize for decades with a six-month moratorium.
Naturally, as is evident by Corgey’s op ed, unions are claiming the whole BP incident is a result of non-union workers and with Obama trying to shut down these platforms he lends credence to the union claims. Unions are sure to try and use the moratorium as a reason to convince skeptics against organizing workers of deepwater rigs.
But unions or no, Obama’s moratorium will potentially cause 120,000 jobs to be lost in the Gulf area just when the economy of the Gulf states is at its worst.
Because of the economic hit, several Texas congressmen immediately introduced a bill to lift the offshore oil drilling moratorium as a jobs savings measure. Representative Pete Olson (R, TX) and other area congressmen joined together to prevent the job loss.
In introducing the bill, Olson and Vitter both pointed to the fact that offshore drilling provides 30 percent of all U.S. oil production; is the second largest source of revenue to the federal government at $6 billion annually and has a direct employment of 150,000 individuals.
Olson made a salient point in his remarks to the press. “We don’t shut down the entire airline industry while NTSB investigates a plane crash and we shouldn’t do the equivalent to the energy industry,” he said.
In the meantime, federal judge Martin L.C. Feldman issued an injunction to block Obama’s moratorium on offshore drilling. Judge Feldman held that Obama’s administration failed to prove that the offshore drilling poses an imminent danger. “…the federal government has been pressed by what happened on the Deepwater Horizon,” Feldman said, “into an otherwise sweeping confirmation that all Gulf deepwater drilling activities put us all in a universal threat of irreparable harm.”
Obama’s administration even purposefully misconstrued what its own impaneled experts said on the spill. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar falsely implied that the panel of experts that Obama gathered to advise him on the Deepwater Horizon spill supported the six-moth moratorium.
The experts sent a letter to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal vociferously denying that they supported the moratorium and that the moratorium policy was instituted after they ceased their own deliberations and was never part of their discussions.
In part this panel of experts have said that, “a blanket moratorium is not the answer. It will not measurably reduce risk further and it will have a lasting impact on the nation’s economy which may be greater than that of the oil spill. We do not believe punishing the innocent is the right thing to do.”
The Obama administration has ignored its own experts, flouted the desires of congress and put in place policies that will hurt the economy of the Gulf states even worse than it already is. One cannot see the logic in any of Obama’s moves unless one takes into account the interests of unions that want to expand into the oil industry, unions that are using the whole incident as a doomsday, scare tactic to force their will on the Gulf.
Eric Odom (Media Director)
Warner Todd Huston