The Right to Join or NOT a Union

As we all try to understand the dramatic changes that have overcome our nation with regards for the continuing decline of our liberties we have to educate ourselves and be ready to uphold the standard of freedom wherever it is being attacked more so than ever in today's climate of hostility to the ideas and hard fought for rights as written in our Founding Documents. The following is from "Michigan's Grassroots Campaign for LIberty".

Nobody should be forced to not join or join a union.

There may be here and there a worker who for certain reasons unexplainable to us does not join a union of labor. This is his right, no matter how morally wrong he may be. It is his legal right and no one can or dare question his exercise of that right."

- Samual Gompers, first and longest-serving President of the American Federation of Labor (AFL)

Before the 20th century, unions were voluntary organizations where workers had the freedom to associate, or not associate, with anyone they choose. Businesses could also choose to bargain with employees as individuals or groups.

We believe Samual Gompers is correct and we believe that Michigan should be a Freedom to Work state!

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• As of December 2010, Michigan has the third highest unemployment rate in the nation.
• In 1965, Michigan was 9th in per capita personal income. Since then, 28 states have surpassed Michigan which has become a comparatively poor state, ranking 39th.
• Americans are moving from forced-unionism states to RTW states. As a result, forced-unionism states have lost a total of 25 Congressional seats over the past 30 years. [BLS/Census]
• From 1993-2009, private sector employment increased 37.9% in RTW states (15.8 million jobs) compared to 19.6% (14.5 million jobs) in forced-unionism states. [Haver Analytics/BEA]
• RTW states experienced a 497,041 net increase in private sector business establishments from 1993 to 2009. This is 46% greater than the 339,834 new private sector businesses added in forced-unionism states over that same period.

Unions Should Disintegrate Into the Dust-Heap of History

Finally the day of reckoning with entitlements has come. After more than 50 years of some people getting transfers of cash from other people it's time we the people went on strike. Why should I be working to support the lifestyle of a union member? Do you get that? NO MORE UNIONS! Most people get a job by interviewing, landing the job, doing good work on the job and then getting rewarded with a paycheck. Union members join a club where their job is guaranteed and their wages are higher than most people's wages in the private sector and they don't even have to prove that they are worthy of holding on to the job. Is that American? NO! Like other bad ideas - socialism, communism, fascism, Gadhafi - it's time the Unions disappear into the dust-heap of history.

"Rubicon: A River in Wisconsin," Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, February 25

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....

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.

"The Left Is Running Out of Utopias"

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 thinkseveryone 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...READ at TIADaily.com (The Intellectual Activist by Rob Tracinski).

"Shakedown" by Steven Malanga - How The Unions are Using Taxpayer Money to Fund Their Leftist Ideology

I Don't Recognize America Anymore - Do You?

As the Government payroll gets larger and larger and Obama is looking to add more people on the dole - I mean on the Union payrolls Americans have to sit down and take a good long look at what we are becoming. A reflection of socialist Europe. We must fight this cancer creeping through our society spreading ever faster as Washington is changing the meaning of our country. Read this excellent commentary by Bill Frezza, "Are the Greek Riots a Picture of Our Future?"

...Wake up America! How many million unionists are we expected to carry on our public payrolls? How long can we keep government employees on defined-benefit pension plans while the rest of us scramble to fund our 401(k)s ? How many more people are we going to drop from the income tax rolls as we lean on a smaller and smaller slice of citizens to carry an ever greater percentage of the load, leaving the rest free to vote for tax increases? How large a swath of our population can we pretend to keep supplied with newly manufactured economic rights like free healthcare as Social Security and Medicare careen toward insolvency? How much more do we think we can borrow from the Chinese to fund day-to-day government operations? How long do we think we can afford to police the world?

What the world's political leaders and those who elect them need most right now is a shocking example of the only possible outcome of trying to practice redistributive justice on a national or even global scale. Rescuing Greece is a mistake. What they deserve is a good hard dose of exactly what they are asking for - unvarnished socialism.

Throw Greece out of the European Union. Let them default on their debts. Teach buyers to beware before they invest in sovereign bonds. Dare Greece to print Drachmas by the wheelbarrow. Put the whole country on the public payroll then challenge them to demonstrate what a truly egalitarian society looks like. Maybe a dramatic spectacle of what a workers paradise looks like under the media's glare will teach us what's in store if we don't change our ways.

Democracy is broken. You can't mix Freedom and Free Lunch. One or the other has got to go.

Unions Get the Taxpayers Dough But Brown May Get Massachusetts

The Intellectual Activist has a great article on the suicide of the Democratic party - at least for now. They are totally bankrupt (not that the Republicans aren't bankrupt as well) and they don't seem to realize it. With Obama giving cash and favors to those that vote the right way, it is truly obscene what passes for politics today. Fortunately, regular Americans do seem to realize it as the upcoming election Massachusetts is showing us. Scott Brown has come out of nowhere and is ahead in the polls for the Senate seat left open after Ted Kennedy's death. Maybe the people have had enough of Washington corruption and we can kick the bums out.

...That brings us to the latest on the health care bill. The unions had objected that an excise tax on generous health insurance plans would hit some of their workers. So the Obama administration agreed to eliminate the tax—for the unions. According to reports on the compromise, "In a significant victory for unions, the 40 percent excise tax would not apply to policies covering workers in collective bargaining agreements, state and local workers and members of voluntary employee benefit associations through Dec. 31, 2017."

This is the key to the economic system President Obama wants to create: a system in which economic benefits go only to those with the right political connections—which is always the real meaning and end result of a socialist economy, anyway.

In less than a year in power, the Democrats have exposed themselves to the public as the party of massive, open, brazen corruption. In return, I suspect that they are about to be dealt a string of devastating political defeats.

The latest poll on the special election in Massachusetts shows Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown ahead by 50-46. This is significant, not just because of Brown's numbers, but because it is the first poll showing Democrat Martha Coakley below 50%. For the incumbent, or in this case the presumptive leader in the race, to slip below 50% is usually an indication that voters are inclined to take a chance on the challenger.

A few weeks ago, nearly everyone—myself included—described Scott Brown's candidacy as a shot in the dark, with nearly impossible odds of succeeding. He is quickly becoming the favorite. Read at www.TIADaily.com.

Dissing The Rule of Law: California and Chrysler

The political objectives of the Obama administration is to keep the union happy and to hell with creditors and taxpayers. Your property rights are nothing when social justice and/or the public good come into play. This is no longer the land of the free and the brave but the land of the moochers and parasites.

"Years and years of bankruptcy law says if you are a secured creditor you come first in the line". Watch this discussion video at the WSJ.

Obama Throws The Rule of Law Out The Window

Over at the Wall Street Journal Todd J. Zywicki explains Obama's strong arming of Chrysler. It's stench is horrible and America is the worse for this sad disregard for the inviolability of contracts.

The rule of law, not of men -- an ideal tracing back to the ancient Greeks and well-known to our Founding Fathers -- is the animating principle of the American experiment. While the rest of the world in 1787 was governed by the whims of kings and dukes, the U.S. Constitution was established to circumscribe arbitrary government power. It would do so by establishing clear rules, equally applied to the powerful and the weak.

Fleecing lenders to pay off politically powerful interests, or governmental threats to reputation and business from a failure to toe a political line? We might expect this behavior from a Hugo Chávez. But it would never happen here, right?

Until Chrysler.

The close relationship between the rule of law and the enforceability of contracts, especially credit contracts, was well understood by the Framers of the U.S. Constitution. A primary reason they wanted it was the desire to escape the economic chaos spawned by debtor-friendly state laws during the period of the Articles of Confederation. Hence the Contracts Clause of Article V of the Constitution, which prohibited states from interfering with the obligation to pay debts.
Hence also the Bankruptcy Clause of Article I, Section 8, which delegated to the federal government the sole authority to enact "uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies."

The Obama administration's behavior in the Chrysler bankruptcy is a profound challenge to the rule of law. Secured creditors -- entitled to first priority payment under the "absolute priority rule" -- have been browbeaten by an American president into accepting only 30 cents on the dollar of their claims. Meanwhile, the United Auto Workers union, holding junior creditor claims, will get about 50 cents on the dollar.

The absolute priority rule is a linchpin of bankruptcy law. By preserving the substantive property and contract rights of creditors, it ensures that bankruptcy is used primarily as a procedural mechanism for the efficient resolution of financial distress. Chapter 11 promotes economic efficiency by reorganizing ...(READ at WSJ).