2. The Obamacare Chutzpah Rule. The past year was marked by a slew of competing court rulings on the constitutionality of the individual mandate, the cornerstone of Obamacare. The law requires U.S. citizens to obtain health insurance or face financial penalties imposed by the Internal Revenue Service. Never before has the federal government attempted to force all Americans to purchase a product or service. To allow this regulatory overreach to stand would undermine fundamental constitutional constraints on government powers and curtail individual liberties to an unprecedented degree.

3. The Nationalization of Internet Networks Rule. Regulations that took effect on November 1 prohibit owners of broadband networks from differentiating among various content in managing Internet transmissions. (In other words, the Federal Coercion Communications Commission effectively declared the broadband networks to be government-regulated utilities.) The FCC imposed the “network neutrality” rule despite explicit opposition from Congress and a federal court ruling against it. The rule threatens to undermine network investment and increase online congestion.

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10. The Unions Rule Rule. New rules require government contractors to give first preference in hiring to the workers of the company that lost the contract. Tens of thousands of companies will be affected, with compliance costs running into the tens of millions of dollars—costs ultimately borne by taxpayers. The rule effectively ensures that a non-unionized contractor cannot replace a unionized one. That’s because any new contractor will be obliged to hire its predecessors’ unionized workers and thus be forced by the “Successorship Doctrine” to bargain with the union(s).

See the full list at The Heritage Foundation.

National Labor Relations Board Chairman Mark Gaston Pearce today released details of his proposal to amend certain election procedures in order to reduce unnecessary litigation in disputed cases. The amendments are drawn from a comprehensive overhaul of the election process proposed this summer through the federal rulemaking process.

The Chairman’s resolution will be considered and put to a vote at a public meeting of the Board set for Wednesday afternoon at 2:30. The text of the Chairman’s resolution is here, and an explanation of the amendments can be found here. The meeting will be streamed live from the Board’s website at www.nlrb.gov.

If the resolution is approved by a majority of the Board, a final rule will be drafted and circulated among the members for a subsequent vote. No final rule can issue without such approval.

Chairman Pearce issued the following statement in connection with the resolution:

“The vast majority of NLRB-supervised elections, about 90%, are held by agreement of the parties – employees, union and employer – in an average of 38 days from the filing of a petition. The amendments I propose would not affect those agreed-to election

Rather, the amendments would apply to the minority of elections which are held up by needless litigation and disputes which need not be resolved prior to an election. In these contested elections, employees have to wait an average of 101 days to cast a ballot. And as several employees testified at our hearing in July, that period can be disruptive and painful for all involved.

Today an election can be held up by pre-election appeals to the Board, which in the end are rarely granted and even more rarely result in a changed outcome. An election can also be delayed by raising irrelevant issues in pre-election hearings, which are intended to be quick and non-adversarial. Such unnecessary litigation wastes enormous amounts of time and resources for the parties and the agency. The amendments I propose would simply address these procedures, by 1) limiting subjects that can be raised in a pre-election hearing to those that are directly relevant to the election, and 2) postponing any election-related appeals to the Board until after the election.

I continue to believe that modernizing and streamlining the Board’s processes as originally proposed would greatly increase the efficiency of the agency in carrying out its statutory mission. However, because the Board may lose a quorum in a matter of months, I am putting forward a more limited resolution at this time. Other portions of the original rule will remain under consideration by the Board for possible future action.”

To view the NLRB press release, go here.

Read more at Labor Union Report.

General Motors was too big to fail. This is why President Obama had to ride in on his white steed with billions of taxpayers dollars in hand to bailout GM rechristening it Government Motors. Besides, we were told it would be a great deal, a money maker, right? Well, not so much. The Administration has reported a dramatic increase in the money We The People have lost on the GM bailout.

This week the Treasury Dept. has announced that the estimates of our loss has gone from $14.33 billion tax dollars to $26.6 billion.

To put it in terms easier to understand, for the American people to just break even on the bailout deal the more than 500 million shares owned by the U.S. Treasury must sell at $53 a share. Unfortunately for all of us, GM stock has tumbled to just $22.99 (as of closing on Nov.14). We are waaay off from the break even point, folks!

And all this for the benefit of unions.

So, what is Obama going to do about this failed bailout program? How is he going to rectify it all? He intends to make it worse by changing fuel standards to the point where new cars will cost another $2,000 per car.

Obama has decreed through his powers to regulate that the auto industry must raise fuel efficiency standards by five percent by 2025. There is only one little problem with these demands. Current technological development and science cannot yet reach those goals. Obama has set standards just because he feels like it, not standards based on realistic goals.

These requirements will make cars harder to afford for folks in the middle class and lower middle class not to mention the additional burdens it will place on small businesses trying to purchase cars for their businesses.

Worse, with the costs of new cars skyrocketing, the costs of used cars will go up commensurately. And none of this will help GM’s stock prices go up high enough for the American people to break even on the billions our president gave away to the auto giant.

Sadly, Obama’s polices don’t appear to be too big to fail.

The now thankfully former Speaker of the House Nancy “San Fran Nan” Pelosi said in a recent interview that a Boeing plant in South Carolina should either unionize or be shut down by the iron fist of government. So much for America being the land of the free, eh?

Pelosi appeared on CNBC with hostette Maria Bartiromo. Bartiromo asked about the famed Boeing plant being harassed by Obama’s union-sold National Labor Relations Board.

“Do you think it’s right that Boeing has to close down that plant in South Carolina because it’s non union?” Bartiromo asked. “Yes” insisted the former Speaker.

A flat out “yes.” No equivocation.

Lachlan Markay notes that the workers at the Boeing plant in question overwhelmingly voted not to join a union.

Pelosi may or may not know that workers at the South Carolina plant in question voted resoundingly (199-68) to decertify their union two years ago. Government policies that would close the plant for being a non-union shop would simply be punishing those workers for exercising their right to determine union representation for themselves.

So, not only is Pelosi violating what the company wants she’s even violating the will of the very workers she claims she cares about. Why does she imagine she knows more than the workers themselves do?

I’ll answer that for you: she doesn’t.

This is an arrogant, un-American attitude from Pelosi, of course. She is saying that she is the one that should decide what any business does. There is no freedom in the dark, authoritarian world of Nancy Pelosi. All are ruled by her majesty in Washington D.C.

But Nancy Pelosi’s Fascism is not an outlier. It is part-and-parcel to the Democrat Party governing philosophy in this era. They know better than you about what you should be allowed to do. Democrats have become an un-American party.

The Occupy Wall Street protests that began as a nebulous mix of social and economic grievances are becoming more politically organized — with help from some of the country’s largest labor unions.

Labor groups are mobilizing to provide office space, meeting rooms, photocopying services, legal help, food and other necessities to the protesters. The support is lending some institutional heft to a movement that has prided itself on its freewheeling, non-institutional character.

And in return, Occupy activists are pitching in to help unions ratchet up action against several New York firms involved in labor disputes with workers.

In one case, Occupy activists have helped union workers disrupt the rarified environs of Sotheby’s art auction house, which is engaged in a contract dispute with about 40 of its art handlers…

Read the rest at The Washington Post.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa accused the National Labor Relations Board of another misstep in the agency’s complaint against Boeing Co., this time alleging it deliberately withheld documents from the committee to hide potentially damaging email exchanges between NLRB staffers.

As evidence, Mr. Issa, a California Republican, cited documents that Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog organization, recently obtained from the NLRB through a Freedom of Information Act request. The documents included emails “that demonstrate the lack of impartiality of the NLRB” in the Boeing complaint, Mr. Issa said in a letter sent Monday to NLRB Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon. For example, in one email that contained a union press release praising the case, an NLRB attorney proclaimed: “[h]ooray for the red, white and blue,” Mr. Issa said in his letter…

Read the rest at The Wall Street Journal.