In 2008, unions spent $400 million-plus to elect Barack Obama; in 2010, 94% of union political contributions went to the Democratic Party; in 2012, union leaders say they will spend at least $400 million on national, state and local elections. George Soros and Moveon.org, along with the left-wing Hollywood elite are funneling millions into the DNC coffers. Middle class America wake up!
Obama is now handing out goodies. He hopes that the bill (and pain) will not come due until after he is reelected in 2012. He would like to blame all problems on Bush, from the past, and hopefully his successor in the future.
Labor unions continued to receive the overwhelming majority of waivers from the president’s health care reform law since the Obama administration tightened application rules last summer. Ignored by the media is the fact that unions backed the health care overhaul, a law from which nearly a half million of their workers are now exempt. What happened to Obama’s promises of Change and Transparency?
Best Friends: Obama and AFL –CIO boss Richard Trumka
Documents released in a January 6 news dump show that labor unions representing 543,812 workers received waivers from President Barack Obama‘s signature legislation since June 17, 2011. By contrast, private employers with a total of 69,813 employees, many of whom work for small businesses, were granted waivers.
The biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers. Unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.
Nothing shows the utter cynicism of the unions and the politicians who do their bidding like the so-called “Employee Free Choice Act” that the Obama administration tried to push through Congress. Employees’ free choice as to whether or not to join a union is precisely what that legislation would destroy.
Workers already have a free choice in secret-ballot elections conducted under existing laws. As more and more workers in the private sector have voted to reject having a union represent them, the unions’ answer has been to take away secret-ballot elections.
The most fundamental fact about labor unions is that they do not create any wealth. They are one of a growing number of institutions which specialize in siphoning off wealth created by others, whether those others are businesses or the taxpayers.
On March 9, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that 227,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs were created by the economy during February. Is the government’s claim true?
No. Statistician John Williams reports that 44,000 of these jobs, or 19 percent, consist of an add-on factor derived from the BLS’s estimate that 44,000 more unreported jobs from new business start-ups were created than were lost by unreported business failures. The BLS’s estimate comes from the bureau’s “birth-death model,” which works better during normal times but delivers erroneous results during troubled times such as the economy has been experiencing during the past four years.
Taking out the 44,000 added-on jobs reduces the February jobs number to 183,000 but does not provide a full correction. In an economy as troubled as the U.S. economy is, most likely the deaths exceeded the births, but we don’t know what the number is. Was it 20,000? 50,000? What number do we deduct from the 183,000? We simply do not know.
Last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics again reported that 227 thousand jobs were created in February and that unemployment remained at 8.3%. It also admitted 1.2 million jobs have been lost in the last six months.
More importantly, and what was not said, is there are 5.2 million fewer jobs in the U.S. than there were four years ago.
Let’s look now at the kind of jobs that were created. Of the new jobs reported by BLS,
92 percent are in services. Of this 92 percent, only 7 percent could possibly relate to exportable services: architectural, engineering and computer systems services.
Of the reported new service jobs, 29 percent are in health care and social services. The categories that account for the health services jobs are ambulatory healthcare services and hospitals. Waitresses and bartenders account for 20 percent of the reported new jobs.
Employment services account for 29 percent of the new reported jobs. Transportation and warehousing accounted for 5 percent of the reported new jobs, despite a loss of 60,000 jobs in general merchandise and department stores.
In other words, the vast majority of the new jobs are low-paying jobs, except for a few truck driving jobs.
What happened to the industrial might that won World War II and led to the emergence of Superpower America?
The United States has nothing to export to reduce its massive trade deficit, which has, sooner or later, disastrous implications for the U.S. dollar.
Middle-class-income jobs are declining, with polarization at the two extremes.
U.S. economic policy continues to focus on the mega-rich at the expense of 99 percent of the population. U.S. interest rates are kept at or near zero in order to maximize mega-bank earnings while depriving tens of millions of retired Americans of interest income on their lifetime savings, forcing them to spend their capital in order to live, thus depriving their heavily indebted children of inheritance.
In short, the United States is well on its way to becoming a Third World country.
Rich Republicans are to blame, right? If that’s the case, who is attending those Obama fundraisers paying $8,000 to $35,000 a plate for runner chicken and bad champagne?
President Barack Obama and Big Labor allies in the Senate are now feverishly scheming to bury the National Right to Work Act without a vote. As you know, the right to decide freely whether or not to join a union was taken away from American workers by Congress almost 75 years ago.
This is a crucial right that unions want to take away from workers. The actions of union mobs in Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere give us a demonstration of how little they respect the rights of those who disagree with them and how much they rely on harassment and threats to get what they want.
A result of back-room deals between union bosses and their tax-and-spend Congressional puppets, compulsory unionism provisions in federal law currently empower union officials to:
*Force nearly 11 million Americans to pay tribute to a union boss to get or keep a job …
*Brazenly loot union treasuries to fund the election of their hand-picked political puppet candidates like Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid … Go back to the lead-in for this article and reread it.
*Terrorize workers and communities with violent strikes — where they get away with beatings, arson — even murder.
At one time, U.S. Steel was the largest steel producer in the world and General Motors the largest automobile manufacturer. No more. Their unions were riding high in their heyday, but they too discovered that there is no free lunch, as their members lost jobs by the hundreds of thousands.
Workers have also learned that there is no free lunch, which is why they have, over the years, increasingly voted against being represented by unions in secret ballot elections.
One set of workers, however, remained largely immune to such repercussions. These are government workers represented by public sector unions.
While oil could replace coal, while U.S. Steel dropped from number one in the world to number ten, and Toyota could replace General Motors as the world’s leading producer of cars, government is a monopoly. Nobody is likely to replace the federal or state bureaucracies, no matter how much money the unions drain from the taxpayers.
That is why government unions continue to thrive while private sector unions decline. Taxpayers provide their free lunch.
