Suicide by Government

Via-NRO

Detroit is responsible for its own demise.

By Rich Lowry

The case of the city of Detroit isn’t much of a murder mystery. Various suspects have been fingered in its demise: The global economy. The fall of the auto industry. The decline of manufacturing generally. But it’s simpler than that. Detroit died of its own hand.

The city undertook a controlled experiment in what happens if you are governed by a toxic combination of Great Society big spenders, race hustlers, crooks, public-sector unions, and ineffectual reformers. It spent and misgoverned itself into the ground. It tried to defy the axiom of the late economist Herb Stein that “if something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Detroit’s bout of self-destruction lasted for a few decades, and now may finally stop only when there is little left to destroy.

The city was at the pioneering edge of urban liberalism and discovered that all the social spending in the world doesn’t deliver order, family stability, education, economic dynamism, or effective governance. In the hands of Detroit’s rotten political class, it proved inimical to all of those things.

The city’s downfall started long before anyone imagined that the Big Three would ever be anything but overwhelmingly dominant. Hardly anyone had heard of Toyota in 1967, when riots ripped the city and a long crime wave began that made it unlivable. According to Henry Payne of the Detroit News, the murder rate climbed from 13 per 100,000 residents in 1966 to 51 per 100,000 by 1976.

The Unions vs. Obamacare

Via-The Weekly Standard

Disenchantment sets in.

Mark Hemingway


"I heard [Obama] say, ‘If you like your health plan, you can keep it,’ ” John Wilhelm, chairman of Unite Here Health, representing 260,000 union workers, recently told the Wall Street Journal. “If I’m wrong, and the president does not intend to keep his word, I would have severe second thoughts about the law.” Besides Wilhelm, some of the nation’s largest union bosses have taken to publicly criticizing the Affordable Care Act.

Of course, keeping your health care plan, like many Obama-care promises, has turned out to be demonstrably untrue. According to the Congressional Budget Office, about 7 million Americans stand to lose insurance coverage through the law by 2022. But unlike most private-sector workers expected to lose their current health coverage, union workers were a powerful Democratic constituency granted specific exemptions from Obama-care. Labor leaders are just now realizing that those protections are fleeting, and Obama-care regulations and cost increases will fall on the politically connected and unconnected alike.

The Obama administration has thus far issued waivers from Obama-care’s onerous requirements to unions representing 543,812 workers. By contrast, the administration has issued waivers for only 69,813 nonunion workers. While these waivers are a significant benefit, they accrue to a small fraction of the nation’s 14 million union workers. Further, many of the waivers have been granted on an annual basis, and no waiver has been granted for longer than two-and-a-half years. Eventually even union health plans are going to have to comply with Obama-care regulations.

Toons

The Battle of Lansing

Via-NRO

In a stunning development, Michigan is on the verge of passing a right-to-work law.

By Rich Lowry


Michigan gave birth to the United Auto Workers. The union was founded at a convention in Detroit in 1935. After its famous sit-down strike in Flint, Mich., in 1937, the UAW won recognition by General Motors and, in the next several years, by Chrysler and Ford. It was the advent of an era of industrial unionization that may be coming to a symbolic end in the same place it started.

Michigan is on the verge of passing the kind of “right to work” law that is anathema to unions everywhere and is associated with the red states of the Sun Belt, not the blue states of the Rust Belt. To say that such a development is stunning is almost an understatement. Michigan is to unionization what Florida is to sand, Texas is to oil, and Alaska is to grizzly bears. The union model hasn’t just been central to its economy, but to its very identity.

At its inception, UAW officials got roughed up by company thugs at the famous “Battle of the Overpass,” when Ford was still resisting signing a contract with the union. Some 70 years later, the union movement is getting undone by simple economic realities.

Read entire article

Failure Of Walmart Walkout Underscores Union Decline

Via-IBD

Despite gaining a stranglehold over the public sector, unions are losing ground in the private sector. This was seen again in the failed union walkouts against retail giant Wal-Mart.

The idea was simple: Take a day of little news, create a big stink, and watch a gullible media swallow it hook, line and sinker. That's what the United Food & Commercial Workers union did, in asking non-unionized Walmart workers to leave their jobs on the busiest day of the year in protest
.
Unfortunately for the union, the tactic appears to have been an epic bust. The tone was set early at the St. Cloud, Fla., Walmart where one — yes, just one — employee walked off the job.

Chart Of The Day

source

Toon

Wisconsin: Left's war on democracy

Via-NY POST

By MICHAEL A. WALSH

With the world's attention focused on Libya and the events in the Arab world, it's easy to forget that, back in Wisconsin, a group of 14 rogue state senators is still holding representative democracy hostage. Worse, the stunt has now morphed into an attack on the legitimacy of elections.

The 14 "fleebaggers" left the state in mid-February in order to stop an impending vote on Gov. Scott Walker's plan to defang the public-employee unions -- a vote they were certain to lose.

Now, their supporters are organizing recall petitions for the governor and eight targeted Republican senators, and claim to already have reached 15 percent of the number of signatures they need. Yet the whole effort, at least as far as the governor is concerned, is illegal. Under Wisconsin law, public officials aren't subject to recall until one year into the term for which they were elected. But the man leading the drive to recall Walker, ex-Rep. David Obey, doesn't care: He argues that Walker's desire to roll back collective-bargaining rights of public-employee unions is "abusive" and thus justifies ignoring the law.

Let's call this what it is: a campaign to nullify the 2010 election, by a sore-loser party that doesn't like the results.

The Democrats are trying to cast themselves as the heroes -- noble prisoners of conscience engaged in an act of civil disobedience by denying Walker a quorum so the vote can be held. But, like the sheriff played by Cleavon Little in "Blazing Saddles," the gun at their heads is being held in their own hands.

We've seen this act before, and from the same political party. Eight years ago, Democratic state legislators in Texas vamoosed twice, to Oklahoma and later to New Mexico, to avoid voting on a redistricting plan they didn't like. In the end, one returned, the quorum was established, the vote was held and they lost.

This time, however, the stakes are higher: Whatever happens in Wisconsin will set a precedent for the rest of the nation, which is why Madison has become a critical battleground in a fight that neither side can afford to lose.

In a bid to protect one of its core constituencies -- public-sector unions -- the left has thrown a prime temper tantrum within and without the marble halls of the state capitol, trotting out its '60-era playbook of chants, signs and sickouts to create a media narrative that the cruel and heartless governor is trying to "destroy the unions."

But this fight is no longer simply about Walker's attempt to balance Wisconsin's wobbly budget, or even about whether public-employee unions ought to have the right to collective bargaining -- they shouldn't, and in fact they shouldn't even exist, as FDR himself warned.

It's now about whether we are to have an orderly democracy or legislative and executive anarchy, whether elections can be delegitimized and even overturned by the daily plebiscites of the polls, by the flouting of sacred oaths of office and by the trampling on the laws of the state.

It must stop. As President Obama liked to remind the GOP during the first two years of his administration, elections have consequences. From the Republican point of view, there was plenty not to like about Obama's program, including the stimulus and the health-care bill, but they voted anyway and took their lumps like grownups.

What the Democrats are doing in Wisconsin is more than just a disgrace. It's a danger to our republican form of government, a formula for permanent, no-holds-barred combat long after the polls have closed and the people have spoken.

What the Unions Fear

Via-American Spectator

By Peter Hannaford

Demonstrators at the Wisconsin capitol, union representatives and absent Democratic state senators concede in interviews that they don't object to a bill requiring teachers and other public employees to pay 12.5 percent of their health insurance (up from five percent), or up to half of their pension deposits. It is the curbing of collective bargaining that has brought on near hysteria and a fierce campaign to discredit Governor Scott Walker's legislation.

For the union leaders the consequences of passage of the legislation could be devastating to their sinecures. Amid all the shouting, placards and banging on pots and pans in the capitol, two elements of the bill have received only passing attention. One would stop state collection of union dues. The other would require the unions to be recertified, by vote of all members, every year.

Currently, the State of Wisconsin automatically deducts union dues from public employee paychecks and it goes to the unions. The unions then use as much of the money as the leaders wish to give to candidates who will look favorably on their demands (almost always Democrats). Thus, the taxpayers are subsidizing partisan election donations.

This "closed shop" arrangement would change under the new law. Once it passed the state would no longer deduct union dues from paychecks. Employees would only pay dues voluntarily by signing a union card. The unions would have to go through the process of collecting the dues. This would increase their administrative costs and thus reduce the amount of money available for campaign donations. And, the union leaders would have to persuade employees of the value of joining. That's a lot more work than sitting back and staring at the ceiling while a trove of dues comes pouring in from the state.

The legislation would require each public employee union to hold an annual election to see if a majority of the members want to continue to be represented by it. If they do, it continues; if not, it's pffft to the union leaders and their comfy incomes.

Some of the demonstrators at the capitol in Madison have hollered about collective bargaining as a "basic right." Not really. Not only is it not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but also nearly half the states have "open shops" with no collective bargaining (or permit it only for first responders).

The governor's reasoning for restricting collective bargain for public employee unions only to wages rests on two elements: (1) to balance its budget, the state must reduce funds sent to counties and cities; and (2) restricted collective bargaining means that these local governments can adjust their own pension and health care contracts and thus help close their own budget gaps.

Those AWOL Democratic state senators say they will return soon. This means the bill will pass.

They have been reading polls (led by the New York Times, with its skewed sampling) and think the Democrats' campaign has made the governor and the Republican legislative majorities sufficiently unpopular that recall and referendum petitions will succeed and they can overturn the legislation in November.

Anyone who reads a poll in the heat of battle in March and thinks the results will be unchanged eight months later, needs a course in Politics 1A.

Toon

Public Unions & the Socialist Utopia

Via-RCP

By Robert Tracinski

The Democratic lawmakers who have gone on the lam in Wisconsin and Indiana-and who knows where else next-are exhibiting a literal fight-or-flight response, the reaction of an animal facing a threat to its very existence.

Why? Because it is a threat to their existence. The battle of Wisconsin is about the viability of the Democratic Party, and more: it is about the viability of the basic social ideal of the left.

It is a matter of survival for Democrats in an immediate, practical sense. As Michael Barone explains, the government employees' unions are a mechanism for siphoning taxpayer dollars into the campaigns of Democratic politicians.

But there is something deeper here than just favor-selling and vote-buying. There is something that almost amounts to a twisted idealism in the Democrats' crusade. They are fighting, not just to preserve their special privileges, but to preserve a social ideal. Or rather, they are fighting to maintain the illusion that their ideal system is benevolent and sustainable.

Unionized public-sector employment is the distilled essence of the left's moral ideal. No one has to worry about making a profit. Generous health-care and retirement benefits are provided to everyone by the government. Comfortable pay is mandated by legislative fiat. The work rules are militantly egalitarian: pay, promotion, and job security are almost totally independent of actual job performance. And because everyone works for the government, they never have to worry that their employer will go out of business.

In short, public employment is an idealized socialist economy in miniature, including its political aspect: the grateful recipients of government largesse provide money and organizational support to re-elect the politicians who shower them with all of these benefits.

Put it all together, and you have the Democrats' version of utopia. In the larger American culture of Tea Parties, bond vigilantes, and rugged individualists, Democrats feel they are constantly on the defensive. But within the little subculture of unionized government employees, all is right with the world, and everything seems to work the way it is supposed to.

This cozy little world has been described as a system that grants special privileges to a few, which is particularly rankling in the current stagnant economy, when private sector workers acutely feel the difference. But I think this misses the point. The point is that this is how the left thinks everyone should live and work. It is their version of a model society.

Every political movement needs models. It needs a real-world example to demonstrate how its ideal works and that it works.

And there's the rub. The left is running low on utopias.

The failure of Communism-and the spectacular success of capitalism, particularly in bringing wealth to what used to be called the "Third World"-deprived the left of one utopia. So they fell back on the European welfare state, smugly assuring Americans that we would be so much better off if we were more like our cousins across the Atlantic. But the Great Recession has triggered a sovereign debt crisis across Europe. It turned out that the continent's welfare states were borrowing money to paper over the fact that they have committed themselves to benefits more generous than they can ever hope to pay for.

In America, the ideological crisis of the left is taking a slightly different form. Here, the left has set up its utopias by carving out, within a wider capitalist culture, little islands where its ideals hold sway. Old age is one of those islands, where everyone has been promised the socialist dreams of a guaranteed income and unlimited free health care. Public employment is another.

Now the left is panicking as these experiments in American socialism implode.

On the national level, it has become clear that the old-age welfare state of Social Security and Medicare is driving the federal government into permanent trillion-dollar deficits and a ruinous debt load. Even President Obama acknowledged, in his State of the Union address, that these programs are the real drivers of runaway debt-just before he refused to consider any changes to them. You see how hard it is for the Democrats to give up on their utopias.

On the state level, public employment promises the full socialist ideal to a small minority-paid for with tax money looted from a larger, productive private economy. But the socialist utopia of public employment has crossed the Thatcher Line: the point at which, as the Iron Lady used to warn, you run out of other people's money.

The current crisis exposes more than just the financial unsustainability of these programs. It exposes their moral unsustainability. It exposes the fact that the generosity of these welfare-state enclaves can only be sustained by forcing everyone else to perform forced labor to pay for the benefits of a privileged few.

This is why the left is treating any attempt to fundamentally reform the public workers' paradise as an existential crisis. This is why they are reacting with the most extreme measures short of outright insurrection. When Democratic lawmakers flee the state in order to deprive their legislatures of the quorum necessary to vote, they are declaring that they would rather have no legislature than allow voting on any bill that would break the power of the unions.

National Review's Jim Geraghty describes these legislative walk-outs as "small-scale, temporary secessions." The analogy is exact. One hundred and fifty years ago, Southern slaveholders realized that the political balance of the nation had tipped against them, that they could no longer hope to win the political argument for their system. Faced with a federal government in which they were out-voted, they decided that they would rather have no federal government at all. The Democrats' current cause may not be as repugnant-holding human beings as chattel is a unique evil-but it has something of the same character of irrational, belligerent denial. More than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the left is still trying to pretend that socialism is plausible as an economic system.

The Democrats are fleeing from a lot more than their jobs as state legislators. They are fleeing from the cold, hard reality of the financial and moral unsustainability of their ideal.

Rubicon: A river in Wisconsin

Via-WAPO


By Charles Krauthammer
 

The magnificent turmoil now gripping statehouses in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and soon others marks an epic political moment. The nation faces a fiscal crisis of historic proportions and, remarkably, our muddled, gridlocked, allegedly broken politics have yielded singular clarity. 

At the federal level, President Obama's budget makes clear that Democrats are determined to do nothing about the debt crisis, while House Republicans have announced that beyond their proposed cuts in discretionary spending, their April budget will actually propose real entitlement reform. Simultaneously, in Wisconsin and other states, Republican governors are taking on unsustainable, fiscally ruinous pension and health-care obligations, while Democrats are full-throated in support of the public-employee unions crying, "Hell, no."

A choice, not an echo: Democrats desperately defending the status quo; Republicans charging the barricades. 

Wisconsin is the epicenter. It began with economic issues. When Gov. Scott Walker proposed that state workers contribute more to their pension and health-care benefits, he started a revolution. Teachers called in sick. Schools closed. Demonstrators massed at the capitol. Democratic senators fled the state to paralyze the Legislature.

Unfortunately for them, that telegenic faux-Cairo scene drew national attention to the dispute - and to the sweetheart deals the public-sector unions had negotiated for themselves for years. They were contributing a fifth of a penny on a dollar of wages to their pensions and one-fourth what private-sector workers pay for health insurance. 

The unions quickly understood that the more than 85 percent of Wisconsin not part of this privileged special-interest group would not take kindly to "public servants" resisting adjustments that still leave them paying less for benefits than private-sector workers. They immediately capitulated and claimed they were only protesting the other part of the bill, the part about collective-bargaining rights. 

Indeed. Walker understands that a one-time giveback means little. The state's financial straits - a $3.6 billion budget shortfall over the next two years - did not come out of nowhere. They came largely from a half-century-long power imbalance between the unions and the politicians with whom they collectively bargain. 

In the private sector, the capitalist knows that when he negotiates with the union, if he gives away the store, he loses his shirt. In the public sector, the politicians who approve any deal have none of their own money at stake. On the contrary, the more favorably they dispose of union demands, the more likely they are to be the beneficiary of union largess in the next election. It's the perfect cozy setup. 

To redress these perverse incentives that benefit both negotiating parties at the expense of the taxpayer, Walker's bill would restrict future government-union negotiations to wages only. Excluded from negotiations would be benefits, the more easily hidden sweeteners that come due long after the politicians who negotiated them are gone. The bill would also require that unions be recertified every year and that dues be voluntary. 

Recognizing this threat to union power, the Democratic Party is pouring money and fury into the fight. Fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers are unionized. The Democrats' strength lies in government workers, who now constitute a majority of union members and provide massive support to the party. For them, Wisconsin represents a dangerous contagion. 

Hence the import of the current moment - its blinding clarity. Here stand the Democrats, avatars of reactionary liberalism, desperately trying to hang on to the gains of their glory years - from unsustainable federal entitlements for the elderly enacted when life expectancy was 62 to the massive promissory notes issued to government unions when state coffers were full and no one was looking. 

Obama's Democrats have become the party of no. Real cuts to the federal budget? No. Entitlement reform? No. Tax reform? No. Breaking the corrupt and fiscally unsustainable symbiosis between public-sector unions and state governments? Hell, no. 

We have heard everyone - from Obama's own debt commission to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - call the looming debt a mortal threat to the nation. We have watched Greece self-immolate. We can see the future. The only question has been: When will the country finally rouse itself? 

Amazingly, the answer is: now. Led by famously progressive Wisconsin - Scott Walker at the state level and Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan at the congressional level - a new generation of Republicans has looked at the debt and is crossing the Rubicon. Recklessly principled, they are putting the question to the nation: Are we a serious people?

Public Sector Unions and Basic Morality

Via-American Spectator

By Manon McKinnon

The spectacle in Wisconsin has many of us rethinking the underlying grounds for public sector unions. Many Americans are thinking in terms of the obvious financial implications. But surely others are looking deeper to question the moral underpinnings of these unions and their place in public service.

Years ago President Franklin Roosevelt called the idea of public sector unions "unthinkable and intolerable." Not long after, AFL-CIO President George Meany declared that it was "impossible to bargain collectively with the government." They were both speaking to the morality of public servants making demands on taxpayers' earnings under the threat of withholding public services -- or as FDR put it, "looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it."

Roget's Thesaurus lists moral as: virtuous, honorable, conscientious, righteous, upright, and good; and unions will no doubt claim those qualities for themselves. But is it righteous for garbage collectors to walk off the job and allow filth to pile up in the streets? Would you call it virtuous for striking policemen to give crime a holiday? Or honorable for firemen to desert their posts? And teachers -- can they be seen as conscientious as they organize against children and abandon their classrooms and their obligations -- as we are seeing in Wisconsin? Or could we call legislators upright when they skip out on their legislative duties? Undoubtedly, all this is what FDR foresaw, and what Pennsylvania union leader Gerald MacIntee meant when he urged his workers to "close down this God-damned state."

We need to remember -- as the Wall Street Journal pointed out -- that "collective bargaining for government workers is not a God-given or constitutional right." True -- and though we take them for granted today, public unions arrived on the federal level by way of executive order only in 1962, and states quickly followed. After five decades, various strikes and walk-outs, $3.32 trillion in state unfunded pension liabilities, and the current state of public education, it is hard to make the case that public sector unions are doing this country much good. And even harder to sustain is the moral case for public sector unions. They have become exactly what FDR feared they would.

Also from Roget's come these words: dishonorable, conscienceless, unconscionable, unscrupulous and questionable. These are words that well describe "the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it." FDR's "unthinkable and intolerable" is taking place in Wisconsin today and who-knows-where tomorrow. For right's sake, it is time to get rid of public unions and return to public service.

Wisconsin: What’s the Right Analogy?

Via-Pajamas Media

Posted By Rand Simberg 

Suddenly, all of the nation’s eyes are on Madison, Wisconsin, as a national battle long in the brewing was set off by the sudden reversal of political fortune last fall in the historical home of the “progressive” movement, when Republicans took over the statehouse and governorship. Public employee unions have been the last redoubt of the union movement, with unionized workers less than ten percent of the private work force. They have served to create an unvirtuous cycle of political graft and contribution that has long played a key element in Democrat electoral strategy, one that was crucial to Barack Obama’s winning the White House in 2008 and will be so again next year. And if they lose in this previously most “progressive” of states, others will surely follow, not just in the upper Midwest, but potentially across the country even to leftist bastions like California, whose shores managed to avoid November’s political tsunami.
So the Democrats, including the president, have correctly assessed that if their public-employee union allies lose this battle and are no longer able to demand ever-increasing wages and benefits, and funnel much of them from their (many of them unwilling) members to Democrat campaign coffers, their political fortunes will fall even further from their well-deserved “shellacking” in November. Like the coming loss of seats due to redistricting, this will be an even greater consequence of this election than mere loss of seats, due to its long-term strategic implications. And so concerned are they that they’ve even been willing to let slip the mask of “moderate’ and “centrist” from the president ^[1] to help their minions.
Several historical analogies to this event have been made over the past few days. Some have called it “Greece with snow ^[2],” as those receiving state largess have been rioting and protesting over even a slight diminution of it. Others have compared it to recent events in Egypt ^[3], which now threaten or promise (depending on one’s point of view of the desirability of the projected outcome) to cause the rest of the region to fall like so many dominoes, releasing a long-pent-up potential energy. It has even been analogized to the Spanish Civil War ^[4], a decidedly uncomfortable fit, given that it was a battle that both sides should have lost, from the standpoint of those who favor individual liberty and not various flavors of collectivism.
Pajamas’ own Richard Fernandez, in also noting the Egypt analogy ^[5], has pointed out similarities with the Battle of Jutland, an “accidental” naval battle in the First World War, accidental in the sense that its location was contingent on an external event and that, while such a clash was inevitable at some point, the location had not been planned by either side. The problem with this analogy is that, while it was the greatest naval engagement of the war, with huge casualties on both sides, it wasn’t really strategically decisive, and ultimately had little influence on the outcome (unless perhaps one wants to counterfactual that the Lusitania somehow wouldn’t have been sunk in its absence ^[6], and America not been drawn in to the war).
From that standpoint, I think that a more interesting analogy is Gettysburg ^[7].
Like the situation with the public-employee unions and the taxpayers, and the British and German navies, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and the Union Army of the Potomac were sure to clash in the north once Lee crossed his own Rubicon, the Potomac, but no one could have predicted exactly where or under what circumstances. Lee didn’t know exactly where the Union army was because General Stuart, the head of his cavalry, had gotten too far from headquarters and wasn’t in a position to report, but they were moving up from Maryland into southern Pennsylvania to prevent a Confederate thrust back south toward Washington. According to the diary of Confederate General Pettigrew, his troops had gone to the small town of Gettysburg because they had heard that there was a warehouse of shoes there, which the war-deprived southern troops badly needed. When Union pickets learned of the Confederate movement toward the town, General Meade started to reinforce it, and the place of the three-day battle, now one of history’s most famous, had been ordained.
At its end, Lee’s troops had been thrown back, never again to invade the north, and on the next day in the west (on July 4th, 1863), Vicksburg had fallen to Grant, giving the Union control of the Mississippi and cutting the Confederacy in half. The war would go on for almost two more years, but Pickett’s failed charge at Gettysburg is now viewed by all historians as the high-water mark of the Confederacy. As William Faulkner wrote:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet…Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago…

Gettysburg was a battle in a war over federalism and states’ rights — in this case the dubious and odious “right” to treat human beings as chattel — a cause that has given the phrase a notorious name for over a century and a half. Madison (ironically, named after a Founder and drafter of the Constitution) is also a battle over states’ rights — in this case the right of a state to rein in the new slaveholders — public employee unions who extort taxpayers to give them better wages and benefits than those who provide their funding by threatening to shut down vital services if their demands aren’t met. And this time, the new slavemasters are being supported by Washington. Let us hope that in this new civil (so far) civil war, in the cold winter battle of Madison, unlike on that hot July day in southern Pennsylvania, the rebels against the central government win, because this time, it will be in defense of human liberty.

When Teachers Strike: A Memoir

Via-American Thinker

By Beverly Gunn

In the early fall of 1980, our family was stationed at an Army Post named Ft. Huachuca, Arizona. The town next to the base was Sierra Vista, Arizona. The teachers of Sierra Vista schools became a testing ground for collective bargaining by the NEA, in one of their early excursions into union control vs taxpayers. But a strange turn of events happened that fall that bear revisiting, since the strikes in Wisconsin center around collective bargaining, and as a consequence, local taxes.

In 1980, teachers at all the schools in the town of Sierra Vista decided to go on strike. They were encouraged by the NEA to do so, since the NEA was powering up to unionize in other states and to try to control local issues usually decided by local tax districts and local taxpayers. The teachers called the strike and schools closed, but the Mayor and Superintendent of schools in the town of Sierra Vista conferred with each other and agreed that collective bargaining would take away from local taxpayers the ability to control local taxes. Collective bargaining may work in a private institutional setting, but when local taxes are involved, collective bargaining essentially means loss of local control, or taxation without representation.

After the two men conferred, they called upon the Commander of Ft. Huachuca. The men came with a simple idea and it was this: many officers worked at the post and many lived in town, so this was affecting their children who were missing school. The men asked the Commander of the Fort if he would ask the officer's wives to commit to come in and cross the picket lines and keep the local schools open, for the betterment of the community. The idea was a sound one because many officer wives held college degrees. In fact so many volunteers stepped up to become a working substitute until the strike was over that there were enough to fill all the classrooms of the schools involved.

I was one of the volunteers. I was a mother of three, the youngest being an eighteen month old. I had a friend who offered to sit my children, but the Commander of the Base had also hired extra workers in the Post childcare facility to provide enough care for all those who went to teach. What happened next was my introduction to the really ugly world of unions, picketing, and terrorizing brought at the hands of hired strike agitators from back East, who were brought on to agitate and to win the concessions. It became really ugly in the town of Sierra Vista for the next six weeks.

We were not briefed about what to expect; instead, some of us met in living rooms of other wives who had seen NEA strikes, so they would be able to give us some idea of how ugly things can be. The first day came, and innocently I drove to school with lesson plans, and a prayed up heart, because I knew that the children would have divided hearts and minds. I arrived at my assigned school and parked, said a quick prayer, and stepped out into a line of protesters, agitators, teachers, and others who shouted hideous things and called us by name. It seemed the union bosses had pretty good information channels themselves, as my friends teaching at other schools, encountered the same things at their schools. I wouldn't have expected the picketers to know my name the first day I drove up to teach, but indeed they did.

I learned that the students were being coached outside school by their teachers to be disrespectful and uncooperative with the substitute teachers. My students did not continue to hassle me past the first few days. I let them know I meant business and they needed to learn. They seemed to respect this and they told their teacher who was picketing, and after the first week, I believe she was sorry she ever went on strike. I know the students reported to me that after the first week, when she saw what I was teaching and my effectiveness, she urged her students to cooperate with me and to get on with learning.

After school was out for each day, we substitutes found a huge lump of dread enter our hearts. We knew some of the union agitators who were brought in were dock workers and they were known for physical confrontation, violence, and intimidation. We were also followed by these agitators, until those of us who lived on post reached the safety of the front gate where MP's stood guard. And those dear men and women really stepped up and made sure no agitators found a way to enter the Army Post.

After the first week the phone calls in the evening began. After the first call, I had to not allow my children to answer the phone, as when the first call came, my seven year old answered and she heard an earful of cursing and threats that put her into tears. From that point on, we did not answer the phone in the evening unless I designated my husband to the task. The intimidation was fierce each day, but I kept thinking about what taxpayers would lose if collective bargaining was ratified in this first test case and that kept me resilient. I come from a long line of teachers, school board members, and school administrators, and we consider the field of education as a holy one that is a special and unique calling requiring fidelity to students and to the profession.

The strike lasted roughly six weeks. It became apparent to the striking teachers of Sierra Vista that learning was going on without them. In fact the Superintendent of schools forced a showdown when he held a meeting of the board of school trustees and was ready to recommend hiring all of the substitutes who were filling the classrooms and teaching children. Finally the strike ended and I went back to being a stay-at-home mama and loving it. I had the compliment of the Superintendent calling me at home and offering me any job I wanted in the district, and I thanked him for his offer but declined.

I also had one more small surprise. A few weeks after the strike ended I answered the phone one evening. On the line was the teacher whose class I had taught for all those weeks. She wanted to thank me for teaching her children so well, and it was then she admitted that she must have taken leave of her senses to do something as foolish as agree to a strike in the first place. She told me that she would hold that as the worst decision she had ever made and she fully regretted it. She also said her students had less regard for her since she had, in their eyes, abandoned them. I told her simply that I was praying for her and for her class, as I loved each and every minute of teaching those special students

As I watch the striking teachers in Wisconsin shut down schools, I am thankful that the history of Texas has been that teachers in this state are not unionized. We do not go on strike in this state. We do not ask the taxpayers to give any more than local taxes will bear. It may keep teachers' salaries lower than we think they should be, but it also separates teaching into a special calling, one that values the students over self. States that are running out of funds are meeting hard truths, but I learned many years ago that local taxpayers have a say as well. Now that the till has gone dry in many states, teachers and other unionized workers are learning hard truths, that when the well goes dry and there is no more money, the striking workers will be met by angry taxpayers sick of having lost local control of climbing taxes. The shell game of labor of using generous taxpayer funds is coming to an end.

Athens in Mad Town

Via-WSJ


A seminal showdown between public unions and taxpayers.

For Americans who don't think the welfare state riots of France or Greece can happen here, we recommend a look at the union and Democratic Party spectacle now unfolding in Wisconsin. Over the past few days, thousands have swarmed the state capital and airwaves to intimidate lawmakers and disrupt Governor Scott Walker's plan to level the playing field between taxpayers and government unions.

Mr. Walker's very modest proposal would take away the ability of most government employees to collectively bargain for benefits. They could still bargain for higher wages, but future wage increases would be capped at the federal Consumer Price Index, unless otherwise specified by a voter referendum. The bill would also require union members to contribute 5.8% of salary toward their pensions and chip in 12.6% of the cost of their health insurance premiums.

If those numbers don't sound outrageous, you probably work in the private economy. The comparable nationwide employee health-care contribution is 20% for private industry, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average employee contribution from take-home pay for retirement was 7.5% in 2009, according to the Employee Benefits Research Institute.

Mr. Walker says he has no choice but to make these changes because unions refuse to negotiate any compensation changes, which is similar to the experience Chris Christie had upon taking office in New Jersey. Wisconsin is running a $137 million deficit this year and anticipates coming up another $3.6 billion short in the next two-year budget. Governor Walker's office estimates the proposals would save the state $300 million over the next two years, and the alternative would be to lay off 5,500 public employees.

None of this is deterring the crowds in Madison, aka Mad Town, where protesters, including many from the 98,000-member teachers union, have gone Greek. Madison's school district had to close Thursday when 40% of its teachers called in sick. So much for the claim that this is "all about the children." By the way, these are some of the same teachers who sued the Milwaukee school board last August to get Viagra coverage restored to their health-care plan.

The protests have an orchestrated quality, and sure enough, the Politico website reported yesterday that the Democratic Party's Organizing for America arm is helping to gin them up. The outfit is a remnant of President Obama's 2008 election campaign, so it's also no surprise that Mr. Obama said yesterday that while he knows nothing about the bill, he supports protesters occupying the Capitol building.

"These folks are teachers, and they're firefighters and they're social workers and they're police officers," he said, "and it's important not to vilify them." Mr. Obama is right that he knows nothing about the bill because it explicitly excludes police and firefighters. We'd have thought the President had enough to think about with his own $1.65 trillion deficit proposal going down with a thud in Congress, but it appears that the 2012 campaign is already underway.

The unions and their Democratic friends have also been rolling out their Hitler, Soviet Union and Hosni Mubarak analogies. "The story around the world is the rush to democracy," offered Democratic State Senator Bob Jauch. "The story in Wisconsin is the end of the democratic process."

The reality is that the unions are trying to trump the will of the voters as overwhelmingly rendered in November when they elected Mr. Walker and a new legislature. As with the strikes against pension or labor reforms that routinely shut down Paris or Athens, the goal is to create enough mayhem that Republicans and voters will give up.

While Republicans now have the votes to pass the bill, on Thursday Big Labor's Democratic allies walked out of the state senate to block a vote. Under state rules, 20 members of the 33-member senate must be present to hold a vote on an appropriations bill, leaving the 19 Republicans one member short. By the end of the day some Democrats were reported to have fled the state. So who's really trying to short-circuit democracy?

Unions are treating these reforms as Armageddon because they've owned the Wisconsin legislature for years and the changes would reduce their dominance. Under Governor Walker's proposal, the government also would no longer collect union dues from paychecks and then send that money to the unions. Instead, unions would be responsible for their own collection regimes. The bill would also require unions to be recertified annually by a majority of all members. Imagine that: More accountability inside unions.

The larger reality is that collective bargaining for government workers is not a God-given or constitutional right. It is the result of the growing union dominance inside the Democratic Party during the middle of the last century. John Kennedy only granted it to federal workers in 1962 and Jerry Brown to California workers in 1978. Other states, including Indiana and Missouri, have taken away collective bargaining rights for public employees in recent years, and some 24 states have either limited it or banned it outright.

And for good reason. Public unions have a monopoly position that gives them undue bargaining power. Their campaign cash—collected via mandatory dues—also helps to elect the politicians who are then supposed to represent taxpayers in negotiations with those same unions. The unions sit, in effect, on both sides of the bargaining table. This is why such famous political friends of the working man as Franklin Roosevelt and Fiorello La Guardia opposed collective bargaining for government workers, even as they championed private unions.
***

The battle of Mad Town is a seminal showdown over whether government union power can be tamed, and overall government reined in. The alternative is higher taxes until the middle class is picked clean and the U.S. economy is no longer competitive. Voters said in November that they want reform, and Mr. Walker is trying to deliver. We hope Republicans hold firm, and that the people of Wisconsin understand that this battle is ultimately about their right to self-government.

The new civility

Via-The Blaze

Obama's Trade Contortions

Via-WSJ

Why, besides the Democratic Party's loyalties to the AFL-CIO, is the president not pushing the U.S. free trade agreement with Colombia?

By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

In an interview on CNBC's Squawk Box from the Americas Competitiveness Forum in Atlanta two weeks ago, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke was asked if he found it awkward to face the attending Colombians, who have been waiting since 2008 for ratification of their free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States.

"Actually," Mr. Locke declared, "there are a lot of intense negotiations going on as we speak, and I've been meeting with some of the ministers and representatives of the government of Colombia here." That was news to my Colombian sources familiar with what happened. They told me that there were no such "intense negotiations."

Why should there have been? This deal is already signed by both parties. It is even likely that it would be ratified if President Obama would only send it to Congress for an up-or-down vote under "fast-track negotiating authority." Instead, the administration has been letting it languish in a drawer, and its explanations for doing so grow more convoluted every day.

There's a reason for that. Under Obamanomics, exports are supposed to play the leading role in putting Americans back to work. This makes the Colombia deal good, because it would increase U.S. competitiveness in that South American country. But Big Labor is against free trade agreements and Mr. Obama needs Big Labor. That makes the Colombia deal bad.

How to make the policy fit the politics? Easy: Turn administration officials into contortionists who, while talking about "creating jobs," also justify a position that stands in the way of tariffs reductions for American exports. This would explain why Mr. Locke might have felt pressured to make things up.

The secretary seems to have had damage control in mind when he went on CNBC. Asked about the president's failure to get the amendments he wanted on the signed U.S-South Korea free trade agreement in Seoul, Mr. Locke asserted that the U.S. can't accept "a deal for the sake of a deal" and complained that as it stands now, it doesn't open Korea enough to U.S. producers.

This is mercantilism, a trade philosophy that promises national prosperity through exports. If you are not familiar with the term, it may be because it was last in vogue in the 18th century. It gradually went out of style when policy makers learned that by opening to foreign goods, they could increase the competitiveness of local producers and build wealth.

It is true that mercantilism—a form of economic nationalism—made a comeback in the 20th century under fascism in Europe and Latin America. But that too ended in tears. After World War II, countries relearned the lesson that when both consumers and producers are able to choose from the globe's output, they have the advantage over their counterparts in closed economies. Chile became an export powerhouse by unilaterally opening its markets to the world.

If only Mr. Locke's feeble reasoning ended there, it might be chalked up to confusion. But to make sense of the Obama administration's opposition to a Colombia FTA—when the U.S. is already open to Colombian exports under the Andean Trade Preference Act (ATPA)—takes real mind-bending.

The advantage for Colombia of the trade agreement is that it will codify ATPA, so it doesn't have to be renewed every few years. In exchange, Colombia commits to opening to U.S. foreign investment and exports. Consumers, producers and investors in both countries come out winners.

There are also geopolitical gains for the U.S., which benefits from the institutionalization of open markets. Ideas as well as goods can be expected to flow across the border, and a richer country has more resources and incentives to modernize its infrastructure, including its justice system. Left-wing calls for blocking the Colombian agreement because of political violence ignore the fact that it is isolation that makes populations vulnerable to tyrants. Poor countries have notably poor records of defending equality under the law.

But let's assume the Obama administration is mentally stuck in 1930s Italy and thinking only of exports. It still can't justify its position on Colombia, the third largest market for agricultural imports in Latin America. American farmers now pay an average 16.5% tariff on exports to Colombia. As a result, according to Colombia's ministry of trade, "countries like Argentina [which is part of an FTA] are rapidly displacing U.S. producers. In 2008 American farmers had 46% of the Colombian market; today that share has diminished to 22%."

Next year, Ottawa's Colombia free trade agreement will enter into force, and Canadian producers will join the list of competitors who have an advantage over Americans in the Colombian market. The European Union and South Korea have also signed FTAs with Colombia and will have advantages on the industrial production front.

It's hard to understand what Mr. Obama is thinking about besides his loyalty to the AFL-CIO. But Colombia's plans are clear. It wants to trade with the U.S. But if it is rejected, it will simply buy and sell with the rest of the world.

California’s Assorted Rocks and Hard Places

Via-Pajamas Media

Victor Davis Hanson

News came out on Thursday that the California budget deficit is actually closer to $25 billion, twice what we are told. This follows from last year’s $42 billion shortfall, which was closed by all sorts of one-time tax increases and gimmicks. Here is our general dilemma in a nutshell.

TaxesFact one: California has among the highest taxes in the nation, over 10% on top incomes, and about 9.5% that hits earners when they get above $47,000.

Sales taxes, depending on the county, average close to 10%. The result is that thousands (the exact number is unclear, perhaps between 2,000 and 3,500) of more affluent Californians are leaving the state each week for low- or no-tax states. Raise income taxes or sales taxes or gas taxes higher, and there will be a stampede. Note that property tax rates are not singularly that high in comparison to other states. Yet that fact is of little help since our assessments are often astronomical (given that we like to live on the coast and then, once there, ensure others cannot).

The apparent solution for now is to slap one- or two-year higher taxes on vehicle registration (sky-high), or issue fees to use state facilities, or to hike tuition at public colleges and universities (still cheap in comparison to private counterparts).

State Employees
Fact two: we have among the highest compensated state employees and teachers in the United States, with singularly powerful public employee unions. (I was governed by one for 21 years: professors at the closed-shop CSU were forced to pay union dues — even if we were not in the union, and objected to the union’s efforts to end merit pay and accountability and to ensure near universal tenure).

Yet in many categories we need more state employees to attend to basic services. But we cannot since the state operates a sort of caste system in which we pay so much to the entrenched that we cannot afford to hire more numerous entry-level workers. (Part-time PhDs at the CSU system make Wal-Mart greeters seem privileged in comparison). This is regrettable, because we tend to reward the superannuated and simply write off the younger and idealistic. An entire cohort of young California credentialed teachers and college graduates in general are in limbo, stuck in low-paying part-time jobs for the foreseeable future that won’t pay the interest on their student loans.

The Refined Classes

The Rollback Begins

Via-IBD


Public Pay And Pensions: Voters across the nation — California included — are signaling an end to the government workers' gravy train. Even the unions may be starting to get the message.

Last week's elections didn't just upend the Democratic Party in Congress. They also delivered a warning to the public-sector unions that form the core of the party's support. In nearly all elections where public pay and benefits were an issue, the voters ruled that the era of ever-richer rewards for government was over: Say goodbye to fat pensions at 55. Get used to living like the rest of us.

We can count one contest in which the unions beat back an attempt to trim public workers' benefits. This was in San Francisco, where voters defeated a measure that would have required city workers to pay more for health care and retirement.

But even in that union-friendly town, the unions didn't win them all. Another proposition, to end automatic pay increases as part of reforming the city's transit system, won handily.

Elsewhere in California, voters in eight cities and counties approved measures to cut public pension benefits. In Illinois, dozens of suburban communities voted for a resolution urging the legislature to lower benefits for new state workers.

Six new governors won on platforms that endorsed the idea of moving toward 401(k)-style plans, in which public workers would contribute to their own retirement and are not guaranteed a pension income. Republicans Brian Sandoval of Nevada, Robert Bentley of Alabama, Bill Haslam of Tennessee and Scott Walker of Wisconsin all supported these "defined contribution" plans, which are the norm in most of the private sector.

Republican Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania and independent Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island have endorsed hybrid plans combining defined-contribution elements with those of traditional defined-benefit pensions, which guarantee retirement income.

The Pew Center on the States, at its Stateline Web site, summed up last week's voting as "in some ways the first national referendum on the future of public pensions." It was also a referendum on priorities, with the public choosing to put public services before the self-interest of public workers.

Back when the economy was humming and pensions thought they could get 8% annual returns in the stock market forever, unions seemed to have it both ways. They could make their members richer (especially on the retirement end) without the public feeling any pain.

But people now see how untenable this sweet deal was — and how it endangers the very services that the public workers are paid to deliver. The revenue hits taken by states and localities in the Great Recession have forced the issue by requiring real trade-offs: Either cut pay and pensions or have fewer teachers, police and firefighters.