Free Republic

Their signs may have read “united for students” but little about the recent teachers’ strikes in Chicago and Detroit public schools actually benefited the city’s children. That’s because teachers in both cities have staged “sickouts,” forcing schools to close and sending roughly 450,000 students into the streets of two of America’s most dangerous cities. At the helm of these protests are unions that use collective bargaining disputes to call on teachers to leave the classroom and block traffic during rush hour. These strikes are just the latest example of how unions can manipulate workers and taxpayers to advance their own...

Bernie Sanders was hit hard last week when the CEO of Verizon called him out on his hypocritical support of employment practices that will make it harder for Bernie’s voter base—Millennials—to earn a living wage. “Feeling the Bern of reality yet, Bernie?” Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam asked after the socialist senator accused Verizon of planning to “outsource decent paying jobs” due to “corporate greed”—and then hugged union supporters on the Verizon picket line in Brooklyn, New York. Verizon workers went on strike in Washington, D.C. and nine eastern states last week. It’s notable that New York’s presidential primary is on...

The plan to further bend the media dial in the direction of liberal political goals-- regarding a staffing move at NBC News and MSNBC. OBAMA ALUMNI: “Stephanie Cutter has joined NBC News and MSNBC as a Political Analyst. She will contribute exclusively on a range of topics across all platforms including Meet the Press, TODAY, Nightly and MSNBC.” Stephanie Cutter is a veteran of the Obama political machine and the fact that she’s no longer directly on the administration payroll hasn’t changed the tune she sings. The NBC announcement came on the same day as another bit of breaking political...

While everyone’s focus was on the voting in Nevada and South Carolina, the next batch of Hillary Clinton’s bathroom server emails hit the open market with some revelations that would likely be shocking and offensive if they weren’t so typical of all the missives that came before. There was the usual collection of classified ones, natch, but by this point it just seems to be assumed that such a significant portion of her communications never should have left the government firewall that it’s almost becoming a non-story. There were a couple of other subjects, however, which caught the attention of...

Does this qualify as a “gaffe” when defined in classic Washington terms? Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean sat down with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC to talk about the New Hampshire primary and seems to have lost control of his better partisan senses for a moment. Mitchell was quizzing him about all the money that Hillary Clinton has taken from special interest groups though her Super PACs and her paid speaking engagements, relating these bits of history to recent attacks coming from Bernie Sanders’ campaign. Dean is one of Clinton’s most vocal (and frequently incomprehensible) supporters and he didn’t take kindly...

Another touching story from the American heartland crosses our desk this morning, dealing with the dedicated efforts of labor unions to care for their workers and ensure the prosperity of the working class. The United Auto Workers have been in a long series of negotiations with the nation’s auto manufacturers in the latest round of contract wrangling. The result was a deal which should make everyone happy, if by “everyone” you mean the people running the unions. At the heart of the debate was the issue of outsourcing, where American companies ship their facilities (and all of the associated jobs)...

President Obama on Wednesday called on U.S. business, labor and political leaders to “refashion the social compact” and strengthen union powers across the country, arguing that the troubling trend of declining middle-class wages can be turned around by redefining the basic principles of workers’ rights. During a speech at a White House summit on working Americans, the president drew a direct link between drops in union membership and the stagnation of most workers’ wages. Mr. Obama also said that workers’ anxiety about their job security and whether they’ll be afford to feed their families contributes to “anti-immigration sentiment” and other...

Like a significant number of conservatives I thought Scott Walker would be the right man to lead the Republican Party to victory next year. He seemed to have what it takes to fight Democrats and win even in a Blue State. His list of accomplishments impressed others as well. Then came the first Presidential Debate. Walker’s performance was stunningly poor. Worse still was his disappearance in the second debate which cost him the support of 98% of his previous backers. In the first debate he was a silent crash dummy. In the second go-round Walker, the guy who had built...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker plans to focus Monday on weakening labor by proposing to abolish unions for federal workers, create a national "right-to-work law" and eliminate the National Labor Relations Board.At a Las Vegas manufacturer, he also plans to call for requiring all unions to hold periodic votes so workers can decide whether they should continue to exist, according to his campaign. He will also cancel President Barack Obama's Labor Day order that federal contractors provide paid sick leave and work to end policies requiring some salaried workers to receive overtime—saying in some cases they should get time off instead."It's...

The NumbersUSA Grade Committee met this week to consider all the immigration statements made by Presidential candidates since we last met. We changed lots of category ratings for most of the candidates (see below). To see the statements on which ratings are based, be sure to go to the big Grid with all Presidential candidates and click on the photo of a candidate: www.NumbersUSA.com/2016. You will also find the source and link for all of them. The ratings adjustments resulted in changes in overall grades of only three candidates DEMOTED Fiorina demoted from C-minus to D. Christie demoted from C+...

Raising the wages of low to unskilled workers to $15.00 an hour will only help the Democrats and the extortionist unions who “represent” these workers. If low level salaries are doubled to $15.00 an hour, causing half of a shop’s workforce to be fired, the unions are way ahead. They will just double the dues for the remaining workers and not lose a cent in income. Better still, when employers fire half their workers just to survive, there will be half the number of members to bother union thugs with demands for services. The unions will still be able to...

Studies show there are three things you can do that will almost guarantee you will never live in poverty: (1) finish high school, (2) get a full time job and (3) get married, but wait until you are 21 and don’t have children until you are married. Do these three things and it’s very unlikely you will be poor. If you are, you won’t be poor for very long.So how does public policy affect these choices? Inner city schools dominated by powerful teacher unions are not meeting the needs of poor minority students. The welfare state (185 federal/state means test...

Hard-core Communists in Hollywood, and by that I mean those with party cards and whose allegiance was to Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union, not the United States, made a major effort to take over the movie industry and nearly succeeded. The much-maligned House Un-American Activities Committee, as even liberal Hollywood historians Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund acknowledge, uncovered over 200 party members in Hollywood. My dad, Morrie Ryskind, one of the few outspoken anti-Communist screenwriters in Hollywood, said the number was closer to 300. They were part of a broad conspiracy of subversives who had penetrated America’s most critical...

Of course this group is based in San Francisco – where else? If this were 1915 rather than 2015, the positions taken by the Pacific Educational Group (PEG) would be properly attributed to the Klu Klux Klan. Even today if any “unapproved of” group said these things the media would ride in with their keyboards blazing to destroy anyone who even whispered what this liberal think tank is saying out loud. PEG uses what it calls Courageous Conversations to say the things it does; but it’s still idiotic. PEG tells teachers that Blacks are, “…less likely to respond to fundamental...

The budding “revolutionary guards” among WalMart employees may be learning a lesson about economics in the real world; a course they were never offered during their substandard public educations. The pressure from militant employees and union thugs has brought about a series of raises for WalMart workers, which is supposed to be good news. But is it? Some of these raises will start immediately and others will follow until all REMAINING workers will see remarkable increases in their salaries; some will be getting $80 per week raises. Nevertheless, WalMart has not become the largest retailer in the world by voluntarily...

1.) Who’s Fighting For 15? Workers Or Big Labor. A nationwide minimum wage protest planned for Wednesday is being called out by critics who claim the self-proclaimed grassroots movement is actually just a paid stunt by big labor. “This is an orchestrated effort,” Ryan Williams, media advisor for Worker Center Watch, said during a press call Monday. “The union has invested upwards of $20 million.” Additionally, as sources for The Daily Caller News Foundation point out, the SEIU has spent $637,243 in strike benefits to some groups involved despite them not reporting any members. The concept refers to when a...

The New Republic (NR) is trying a new approach to saving the Democrats’ ATM machine unions. NR is offering the novel argument that since the Republicans have been so successful in chopping away at the power of unions they should now stop their attacks because the weakened unions are finally not worth the effort to attack. This position sounds more than a little “please don’t throw me in the briar patch-ish.” Unions have not generally been a good thing for America’s workers for a very long time. They have been the Democrats’ “bagman” – collecting and sharing dues money from...

Members of the National Right to Work Foundation believe two German labor groups have failed to completely disclose their full level of involvement in the United Auto Workers’ attempts to set up shop in Chattanooga. As previously reported, the UAW wants to formally establish itself at Chattanooga’s Volkswagen plant. The UAW’s attempts have so far been unsuccessful. VW workers, by a tally of 712-626, for instance, voted in February not to join the UAW. Members of the NRTW represent an unspecified number of VW workers who oppose the union. They say that VW’s Global Works Council and IG Metall, a...

The just passed $1.1 trillion Cromnibus (Continuing Resolution and Omnibus) check float that successfully got through the Republican controlled US House contains language that could gut pension plans, according to analyses by both conservative and leftist web writers. “The pension provision was made public late Tuesday night,” says a web source that blasts efforts to write down public pension allotments. (1) Mike Adams of Health Ranger warns that “all the pension benefits that have been promised government retirees are about to be stolen back from retirees.” (2) Quoting a WaPo article, Adams also points out that “the proposal would torpedo...

Given that our Commander in Chief is a surprisingly decent firearm salesman, it’s a little odd that one of America’s most prolific gun manufacturers might soon be facing an agonizing financial death. But, that’s exactly where Colt is headed if things don’t change drastically. It takes a very specialized form of failure for a gun company to miss out on the Obama-inspired run on guns, the “assault weapon” craze of the 2000’s, and the proliferation of Concealed Carry in the 1990’s, but that’s exactly what happened. And, worse, this isn’t Colt’s first foray into fiscal failure. In fact, this...