A humorous and practical guide to surviving the idealized Keynesian world the Left dreams of for us, and the tools to rebuild from the collapse that will likely result.
Public sector unions came under increased scrutiny due to the outrageous antics of the union machine - and the Democrat senators - in Madison. Obama expressing "solidarity" with the unions just pumped 93 octane fuel onto the already billowing bonfire.
They all got the attention they sought. And it's probably a good thing they did, although I doubt they got the outcome they anticipated.
This event brought some important issues into the public discourse. It gave some flesh-and-bones to the topic of public sector unions. It humanized it and gave some us some image of who "the union worker" really is, how they protest, and an idea of their collective values.
It also allowed the public to experience the impact of unions on our political system. While most people wouldn't read past the tag line of a piece exploring the legitimacy of public sectors unions in the 21st century, the drama and antics coming out of "Madtown" were simultaneously hard to ignore, and a guilty pleasure to watch. A real time Survivor series, episode after episode, with no commercial breaks.
Always a questionable proposition, unionization of the public sector, for a period, seemed a luxury we could afford. Yeah, public workers had job security and great benefits, but their pay was lower, so it seemed a fair trade-off. Over the last couple decades that implicit understanding was upended…public sector pay moved much higher and those great benefits were jacked up on steroids. Worse, we’ve recently learned that the benefits aren’t actually ‘paid for.’ As a result, we face the prospect of far higher taxes to meet these past promises.
At the same time, globalization and the natural forces of competition changed the economic equation for many of us in the private sector. We have had to become more productive, shoulder a greater share of our benefits and assume greater responsibility over our retirement. We’ve also realized that past politicians’ promises about Social Security were checks that couldn’t be cashed.
For the past couple of years, we’ve stayed awake at night wondering whether we would keep our job or whether our employer would stay in business. We saw our take-home pay eroded by higher state and local taxes and higher contributions to our own benefits. We watched in December as politicians of both parties congratulated themselves that they weren’t going to take even more of our earnings–well, for at least a couple more years. After that, who knows…
The recap:
We’ve allowed labor unions to become monopoly personnel providers for many state and local governments
We force employees to make weekly payments to union leaders
The union leaders use these payments to hire lobbyists to agitate for more government spending
The union leaders use these payments to spend millions on campaigns to elect politicians
The union leaders then negotiate with these politicians to set pay, benefits and work rules for their members
The politicians know that if they cross the union leaders, their reelection plans are more complicated
We fund the whole thing
And so the public - whom the Democrats always assume to be their useful idiots - have an uneasy feeling as they are forced to wrestle with two key questions at a very personal level.
1) Why should I pay to give others job security AND a standard of living that I don't have?
2) If the Democrats, the unions, and the Obama political machine are all organized to promote this, doesn't that mean they are organized to take advantage of me?
Public sector unions were a questionable concession that was tolerated initially. One person's mole is another person's beauty mark. But now it's time to surgically remove these radically malignant cells before they consume the host.
It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s foreign relations or domestic disputes, President Obama is always on the wrong side of history. Millions took to the street during Iran’s Green Revolution that protested a patently phony election which declared Ahmadinejad the president within an hour of the polls closing. That mind blowing speed is not bad for a country mired with an authoritarian religion and culture based in the 7th century. It’s also impossible. Yet, our president kept silent for 10 days in 2009.
His initial comments were actually supportive of the government. We wouldn’t want to be construed as meddling, would we? Ultimately, his only admonition to the government was to be nice to the demonstrators. That worked well. Ask all the dead ones. He never called for new elections or even to request that the opposition to be a part of any negotiations.
But fast forward to today in Wisconsin. We have a democratically elected Governor Scott Walker and a state legislature with a state that’s going broke because of the burden of union payrolls and pensions. Here is a Republican governor and a Republican legislature that wants to do the right thing, reign in out-of-control spending and balance the budget. Hmm, isn’t this something the American people think Obama should be doing in Washington? Remember, the last election in 2010? Republican swept the House. So what does Obama do? He has the nerve to open his yap to object to the Wisconsin governor and release the dogs to attack and bring havoc to his state. This is Ahmadinejad and his goons redux here in America. Obama is inciting a riot. Outrageous.
It’s outrageous on several fronts:
1)State’s Rights. Not only is Obama interfering in state politics (suing Arizona wasn’t enough). Obama doesn’t understand state’s rights. He needs to read the Constitution; it’s in there. Everything else Obama supports: Obamacare, GM bailout, etc. is not. He then sends in his storm troopers, literally. His Organizing with America, his political arm, has been coordinating the chaos and mayhem in Wisconsin in concert with union thugs.
2) The Organizer In Chief can’t get his own house in order. Obama’s position of opposing the reigning in of union largesse is now clearly shown for the world to see. It stands in sharp contrast to Obama’s own federal budget plan. There he is expanding the size of his deficit with his proposed federal budget, while simultaneously giving lip service to “deficit reduction” and being “business friendly”. Why he’s even met with top business execs this past week in Silicon Valley. Helloooo, just how stupid does he think the American people are? Plenty stupid, apparently. But America is not buying what Obama is serving. A Rasmussen poll released today shows just 23% of Americans strongly approving and 41% Strongly disapproving of the president. Memo to Michelle, it’s not too early to ask your army of valets to start packing.
Incredible as that might be, it doesn’t end there.
3) A New Level of Radicalism. How radical is Obama’s position? Obama finds himself very alone in his rabid support for his union thugs. He’s now given up on playing that “centrist card”. That didn’t last long. His mentor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose New Deal and a Supreme Court packed with statists and lefties steered America more leftwards than any other president in American history, could not even support public civil service unions.
“Meticulous attention,” President Roosevelt declared in 1937, “should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government….The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”
Why did Roosevelt say that? Because as later expressed;
“[a] strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable.”
Here’s how the Socialists are working the Wisconsin civil unrest- they love it.
The taxpayers are paying for the teachers to demonstrate. They’re unlawfully using their sick days. This underscores the very reasons why Governor Walker is right in demanding reforms of the outrageous labor laws. And as of today, the governor is not blinking and standing his ground. In most states, like Wisconsin and California, the labor unions write their own ticket and a kowtowing legislature rubber stamps it. How else can we daily read about all the outrageous: pensions, overtime, padding, lifetime employment, health benefits and salaries that make a normal working stiff wince? The outrageous gravy train of benefits have already toppled a dozen cities and now threatens to topple scores more cites, counties and states. 4) Who is Getting Screwed? The Students, Parents, and the hapless Taxpayers.
Obama opposes the workings of a democratically elected Wisconsin governor and legislature. The people voted in fair and open elections, this is what Obama doesn’t like. He apparently likes rigged elections like those in Iran, where he supported the government- over the democracy movement during the Green Revolution there.
Maybe, Wisconsin should borrow a page from Iran and develop its own nuclear bomb, that’ll quickly quiet up Obama, the nation’s first and hopefully last Community-Organizer-in-Chief. Obama’s Alinsky-ite rantings are all to the detriment of students who have no classes, parents who must lose work to care for their stay at home students and for the hapless taxpayers of Wisconsin who are underwriting the demonstrations.
The ferment in Wisconsin is no workers' uprising against the rich and powerful. It is instead political muscle-flexing by a well-funded special interest group, which is limbering up for President Obama's re-election bid. Obama's campaign, operating as Organizing for America, is bussing protesters to the state capitol and manning phone banks to apply pressure to state legislatures. Obama himself has called Gov. Scott Walker's bill curbing government-sector collective bargaining "an attack on unions."
While liberal writers wax romantic about a workers' uprising (former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote on Twitter "Wisconsin is spreading to Ohio -- America's microversion of Tunisia and Egypt. People are taking to the streets to get their rights"), what we're really seeing is the labor movement acting as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party.
Liberals and the White House try to blur the issue by lumping together government unions and labor unions in general. Obama wrongly calls Walker's bill "an attack on unions." It is, at its heart, a measure changing the way the state government procures labor -- Walker would end single-source contracts with a politically connected special interests.
Government unions in Wisconsin perfectly match the definition of "special interests," a term Obama often invokes. Four of the top six Wisconsin contributors to the 2010 elections were labor unions, with the state's teachers union giving $119,342 and the Wisconsin chapter of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees spending $83,888. The teachers union gave 96 percent of its money to Democrats, while Wisconsin AFSCME gave Democrats every penny.
Government unions spent $573,868 on Wisconsin's 2010 elections -- almost all of it going to Democrats -- while government employees spent another half million, with most going to Democrats.
Another characteristic of "special interests" is that they benefit at the expense of the public interest. Start with teachers unions that often work against students. Even setting aside the Wisconsin teachers abandoning their students last week in order to protest for higher pay and benefits, the teachers union has fought on the state level to interfere with Milwaukee's trail-blazing school choice program, which is so popular that Democrats in 2009 voted to cap the number of enrollees.
And of course, there's the budget question. Wisconsin has raised taxes in recent years, and is still facing a multibillion-dollar deficit. Other state programs are being trimmed, and Walker's effort would be about spreading the pain -- specifically shifting some of the government workers' retirement contributions from taxpayers to the workers. If the government unions win, they guarantee more pain for everyone else, especially taxpayers.
In the romantic liberal vision of this union uprising, determined workers are standing up to the powerful. But there's no fat-cat owner wanting to pocket more profits here. The unions' target in Wisconsin is the taxpayer.
At bottom, this is the unions versus the people.
For much of the Left, though, this about protecting the power of labor. Again, this ignores the fundamental difference between public-sector unions and private-sector unions. Even Franklin Roosevelt said, "The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service."
As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, campaign contributions by government-sector unions, collected through mandatory dues, help elect the public officials who are then supposed to negotiate with them: "The unions sit, in effect, on both sides of the bargaining table."
With this kind of leverage, it's no wonder that unions are thriving in the public sector -- only 6.9 percent of private-sector workers are unionized while 36.2 of government workers are. Moreover, as conservatives have long argued, when unions overreach in the private sector, they drive their employers out of business, and so unions only flourish under those employers -- governments -- that can't go out of business.
While governments won't go out of business, they are going broke. The electorate apparently now has an appetite for austerity, as evidenced by the Tea Party's success, Chris Christie's election in New Jersey, and Walker's election in Wisconsin.
Obama has shown how the Democrats will play this: as an opportunity to rally the base and try to pump more money out of the unions that spent tens of millions of dollars to elect him. It could backfire if taxpayers see the likes of Walker as a rare grown-up under attack by opportunistic and utterly politicized unions populated by overpaid government workers.
It's still unclear how Republicans will play this, though. Walker seems to be following the Christie model of standing up to the unions. Knowing Ohio Gov. John Kasich's temperament, he'll do the same. But will any GOP governors feel tempted to go the Arnold Schwarzenegger route of playing ball with the government unions?
With state budgets in crisis and the Democratic machinery already in all-out campaign mode, war has already been declared -- and if the unions win, the people lose.
