Free Republic

The biggest news in last week's elections appeared to be the success that public sector union forces had in overturning Ohio's new law that would have required more contributions from government workers toward their benefits and would have suspended some collective bargaining rights. In the wake of the referendum revoking the legislation that he had proposed to gain control of state and local spending, Ohio Gov. John Kasich told towns, cities and school districts that they would have to go back to the negotiating table and extract concessions from public workers to fix their budget problems because there was no...

On Tuesday, November 8 — actually, during the weeks leading up to November 8, thanks to the travesty known as “early voting” – Ohioans have been and will be voting on two crucial ballot issues. One of the results will largely determine whether the Buckeye State continues to be governed like a heading-towards-broke blue state — as it was for over 15 years before current Governor John Kasich took office — or a recovering red one. Both could heavily influence the red or blue direction of the entire nation. Ballot Issue 2 is about whether to keep Senate Bill 5...

‘It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation is all about,” Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid claimed last week. Senator Reid is simply wrong: The private sector has suffered from much deeper job cuts than public-sector workers have faced. Obviously, Americans are hurting, with some 7 million losing their jobs since the start of the recession. And that doesn’t include the 7.2 million people who should have entered the work force over the same time period. But the pain hasn’t been in...

When Beverly Hills residents found out that many of their city’s 950 municipal and public safety employees were earning stunning salaries, 13 weeks of paid vacation, unlimited overtime and other tax-free retirement benefits, taxpayers were outraged and city officials rushed into closed-door sessions to figure out what to do. These revelations, exposed through the efforts of the city’s hometown newspaper, The Beverly Hills Courier, unmasked an even deeper problem: many California cities, and likely other municipalities across the U.S., are being strangled by the cost of ballooning pension benefits they can no longer afford. “What we have now is a...

Should public sector unions be curbed? Is it time to end the ability of governmental employees to form unions? Raymond La Jeunesse, Jr., vice president and legal director of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, believes so. La Jeunesse, who has more than 40 years experience helping employees litigate against compulsory unionism - including arguing four cases

So I was driving the NY Thruway up to Saratoga this past weekend and I saw a few old Obama 2008 bumper stickers. As I saw each one I thought to myself, "How stupid must that person be not to have removed it yet." But then I passed a car with one of those old stickers with a new one that had another with nothing more than "2012" on it pasted next to the old one. A white, 40 something woman was driving. And it hit me. She is a government employee. She is quite happy about what is going...

For a few years, Mike Haege’s sister lived in north Minneapolis. He knows the neighborhood at least a little bit, and when a tornado tore through the area on Sunday, May 22, he took notice. On the news he saw trees strewn about lawns and streets. Then inspiration struck. He wanted to help. His schedule for Monday, May 23, was wide open. And, since he operates Custom Cut, a tree trimming business here, he figured his services could be put to good use. “I thought it would be the perfect chance to help,” he said. “I knew there would be...

When a fully clothed, apparently suicidal man walked into the San Francisco Bay from Shoreline Drive, in Alamdea County, all the would-be rescuers could do was watch. For about an hour. Why their boots stayed dry is a matter of debate Wednesday, the day after 57-year-old Raymond Zack was pronounced dead at an Alameda County hospital. The water's depth and temperature may have played a role. As did budget cuts. The Alameda Fire Department's water rescue program was discontinued in 2009 because of budget cuts. "(The) Alameda Fire Department does not currently have, and is not certified, in land-based water...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIfO4C4njUo&feature=mfu_in_order&list=ULLearn all about how to be a bureucrat and public servant and get rich off the backs of taxpayers.

Battle lines sharpened Thursday over California's public pensions with the release of a new report that concludes pay and benefit packages for public workers are better than those for their counterparts in the private sector. Commissioned by pension overhaul advocates poised to seek changes, the report drew immediate fire from public employee unions, which have muscled up to fight the emerging pension wars. The two-part study, released by the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, also cautions that public pension obligations threaten to crowd out money for public services. The foundation, headed by longtime pension change advocate Marcia Fritz, has proposed...

“Before making a donation to any organization, be sure to review how it spends its money.”~ By: Larry Walker, Jr. ~The American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO of Madison, Wisconsin (AFT-WISC) is a tax exempt organization which is primarily funded by union dues paid by its mostly state and local government employee members. In the fiscal year ended June 30, 2009, AFT-WISC took in 91.5% of its revenue or a total of $3,358,143 from membership dues. On its latest Form 990, Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax, while all of the revenue reported was identified as having been related to...

Across the country, the interests of organized labor, elected officials and taxpayers are colliding over wages, work rules and the astronomical costs of retiree pensions and health care. As important as these specific issues are to resolve, there is another, more fundamental problem causing so many Americans to lose faith in their government: It is not government unions per se but progressive government itself—long celebrated in Wisconsin, New York and elsewhere—that no longer produces progressive results. In the early 20th century, the progressives championed a rule-based approach to public-sector management that was a big step forward from the cronyism and...

Where Solidarity Ends~ By: Larry Walker, Jr. ~Thank God for Governor Walker and the Wisconsin legislature. Clearly there is a line of demarcation between the rights of public-sector and private-sector workers. Patrick J. Wright, a director of the Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, breaks it down in his latest post, "Public-Sector Bargaining Privileges Are Not Inalienable Rights". Mr. Wright concludes with, "the power of government employee unions in collective bargaining necessarily amounts to power over the people themselves, therefore the peopleÂ’s representatives must periodically scrutinize that power and curb excess". Why that's pure natural law, and if you stop to think...

Survey suggests public-sector pensions complex, not necessarily extravagant By Kevin G. Hall khall@mcclatchydc.com Published: Monday, Mar. 7, 2011 - 12:00 am | Page 1A Last Modified: Monday, Mar. 7, 2011 - 12:21 am WASHINGTON – From state legislatures to Congress to tea party rallies, a vocal backlash is rising against what are perceived as too-generous retirement benefits for state and local government workers. For many taxpayers, it's an issue of fairness: Why should public employees have better retirement packages than the recession-battered private sector? And why should those packages be guaranteed even as governments are cutting services to address perennial...

COLUMBUS, Ohio (Reuters) – Ohio joined Wisconsin on Wednesday in advancing a plan to restrict public sector unions, posing a new threat to labor union power in one of the most politically and economically important states. The Republican-controlled Ohio state senate approved a proposal to curb the collective bargaining rights of public employees and forbid government workers from going on strike. The vote followed the Wisconsin Assembly's approval last week of a similar proposal, which has sparked mass protests and a national debate over labor relations. In both states, the plans still must be passed by a second chamber of...

What Is Government Collective Bargaining? * Legal Monopoly: Government collective bargaining gives unions a monopoly on the government’s workforce. The government must employ workers on the terms the union negotiates. It may not hire competing workers. * Private vs. Public-Sector: Unions operate differently in government than in the private sector. Private-sector unions bargain over limited profits. Competition from other businesses moderates wage demands. Governments earn no profits and have no competition. Government unions negotiate for more tax dollars. * Risking Public Services: When government unions strike, they can deprive citizens of essential services—such as education for children—until demands are met....

<p>Shortly after California voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978, open warfare broke out in the union movement between leaders of public and private worker groups.</p> <p>In the Washington Post, an anonymous lieutenant of AFL-CIO president George Meany criticized the aggressive stance of Jerry Wurf, head of American Federation of State County and Municipal workers, in trying to defeat Prop 13, which capped property taxes. The problem, the Post pointed out, was that the AFL-CIO's members were the "taxpaying employers" of Wurf's workers and favored the tax and spending limitations of Prop. 13. "Jerry's big problem with the tax thing lies in convincing the rest of the trade union movement of the legitimacy of the positions he has taken," said the AFL-CIO official.</p>

Just about every time I decide to waste my valuable time on this earth discussing anything with a Progressivevik fingersniffer, one word invariably comes up: "greedy". "CEOs are greedy. The rich are greedy. People who oppose Obamacareless are greedy. The United States is greedy...." Blah, blah, blah, 2+2=5, yadda, yadda, yadda. It's as if their little minds can't come up with another concept. It's fairly apparent that when God was passing out brains, the libs were too busy taking bong hits to care. Critical thinking is certainly not a liberal concept to say the least, since it is the libs,...

I need help. My wife's parents are blue dogs and claim to "look out for the little man"...you know the drill. I challenged them that I'd be able to show them via a reference that DOES NOT COME FROM a conservative source that the public sector employees with benefits have passed the private sector pay average. Rush mentioned this and I've seen stuff on it, but can't track it down. Key here is not from a conservative source.

2010 might be remembered as the year that the edifice of public sector unions began to crumble. Before the 1960s, government workers were generally not allowed to unionize. After all, they work for a monopoly that has no profit margin and thus no reason to oppose their ever expanding benefits at the People's expense. In fact, as Democrats have found, they are much better off giving these unions everything they want in return for lockstep support for the Democrats in money, volunteers and votes. What changed in 2010? First, it became clear that those states that were pro-public union were...

Back in 1869, the Knights of Labor was founded as America’s first organized labor union. During this time, workers were experiencing a decrease in pay along with a decrease in quality of working conditions. Meanwhile, the industrial revolution was booming making captains of industry, like John D. Rockefeller, very wealthy men. The founding of labor unions was certainly justifiable, and the right thing to do. At the beginning the union members requested reasonable things such as child labor laws, the standard 40 hour work week, and a safe working environment. Upon President John F. Kennedy’s “Executive Order 10988” in 1962,...

Last week's dismal jobs figures tell us exactly what the President Obama's stimulus did: It temporarily saved jobs in state and local government -- thereby slowing our recovery. Friday's job scorecard for September -- the last before Election Day -- didn't carry even a hint of an imminent boom. Unemployment stayed at 9.6 percent, with private companies adding 64,000 jobs. And 64,000 jobs is nothing. The economy must create nearly five times that to keep up with population growth and replace 7.6 million jobs lost since 2007. Worse, the new hires were down a third from August -- and the...

According to a Library of Congress survey,  Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, may be second to the Bible as the most influential book read in America.  It is required reading in management training at BB&T, the 12th largest bank in the U.S. and one that resisted taking TARP bailout funds.Since President Obama took office, Atlas Shrugged has been making a renaissance with rising sales and library waiting lists, partly because it explains our current economic woes more straightforwardly than most of what we hear from today’s experts.What happened in Rand’s narrative is coming to pass today, with the public sector...

• There has never been a valid reason for courts to allow unions, uniquely, to be free from the consequences of violence and mob behavior used in pursuit of their own economic ends; • Davis-Bacon prevailing wage legislation is and was little more than a union wage protection racket; • Union practices in job targeting, salting, project labor agreements, environmental permitting, living wage requirements, and corporate campaigns are indistinguishable from ordinary blackmail, extortion, and strong-arm work. No, I don’t think unions are good for America. Unions, and particularly unions in the public sector, may well be our literal undoing.

Government Greed: The city manager of a low-income Southern California suburb has been pulling down nearly $800,000 a year. And get this — he claims he could match that in the private sector. Robert Rizzo was, at this writing, reported to be on the verge of resigning as city manager of Bell, a city of 37,000 about 10 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. He clearly didn't want to leave. It took a week of protests and horrific publicity to pry him loose. And we can see why. He was making $787,637 a year. To hear him tell it, he...

Private employees toil 13½ months to earn what federal workers do in 12. Pay cuts, layoffs and the highest unemployment rates in decades have reignited a debate over the relative treatment of public and private workers. USA Today reported in March that federal workers earn substantially higher wages than private sector employees who work the same types of jobs.White House budget chief Peter Orszag responded that these pay differences merely reflect the superior skills of federal workers, not government largess. Adjusting for education and experience, he said, federal workers make about the same salaries as private workers.

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/statement-president-national-broadband-plan Home • Briefing Room • Statements & Releases The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release March 16, 2010 Statement from the President on the National Broadband Plan America today is on the verge of a broadband-driven Internet era that will unleash innovation, create new jobs and industries, provide consumers with new powerful sources of information, enhance American safety and security, and connect communities in ways that strengthen our democracy. Just as past generations of Americans met the great infrastructure challenges of the day, such as building the Transcontinental...

The Office of Management and Budget reports that total federal revenue more than doubled every decade from 1940 to 1980 (Table 1.3, tables). And from 1980 to 2000, total federal revenue almost doubled every decade, going from $517 billion in 1980 to $1.032 trillion in 1990 to $2.025 trillion in 2000. But in 2010, OMB estimates that total revenue will be only an anemic $2.165 trillion. If the current decade had kept pace with the last two decades, the feds would have receipts in 2010 of $4 trillion. That's more than enough to balance the budget. But the above numbers...

Cuccinelli tells U.Va. to hand over documents on climate changeThe Washington Post Published: May 4, 2010 Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is demanding that the University of Virginia turn over a broad range of documents from a former professor to determine whether he defrauded taxpayers as he sought grants for global-warming research. The civil investigative demand asks for all data and materials presented by former professor Michael Mann when he applied for five research grants from the university. It also gives the school until May 27 to produce all correspondence or e-mails between Mann and 39 other scientists since 1999. The...

Union Influence: The White House picks its most frequent visitor to sit on its deficit commission. He believes in big government, in big spending, and that the workers of the world should unite. What could go wrong? Computer security firms have been known to hire the best former hackers because they know best how to stop others like them. But the appointment of Andy Stern, president of the Service Employee International Union (SEIU), to a bipartisan commission to come up with ways to deal with the rapidly rising federal budget deficit is like having a serial arsonist organize Fire Prevention...

America is awash in deficit spending. President Obama and his allies in Congress are flooding the economy with funny money, but the average American isn't seeing a dime. In fact, the average American can barely hold on to his job. In the midst of an outpouring of federal dollars intended to spark job creation, unemployment remains stubbornly stuck at almost 10 percent, with underemployment much higher. So where is this river of federal money going? The Obama administration's $787 billion "stimulus" dollars seem, in good measure, to have disappeared into a black hole. But in the midst of our jobless...

Nick Schulz at the American Enterprise Institute’s blog presents this graph: I don’t think it will shock anyone that the top people in Democratic administrations tend to have less private-sector experience than their GOP counterparts. Yet the previous low-water mark for private-sector experience since 1900, the JFK administration, was still three times higher than the Obama Cabinet’s level. Here’s what makes this background information about the Obama team even more interesting: As Schulz notes, “public sector employment has ranged since the 1950s at between 15 percent and 19 percent of the population,” yet the Obama Cabinet got more than...

Retired Capistrano Unified School District Superintendent James A. Fleming could face jail if convicted on a felony indictment charging him with using school resources to track his political enemies. But that won't stop his public pensions from rolling in. Fleming collects $141,331 a year in California state teacher retirement funds, on top of the $64,068 pension he collects from working 27 years in Florida. Even if convicted on the 2007 charges, both his pensions will remain untouched. Fleming is one of 3,090 educators in the California State Teachers' Retirement System who make at least $100,000 a year in taxpayer-guaranteed public...

(snip) Before the Republican Party can make a comeback consistent with its principles, it needs help from the private sector. Specifically, it needs a private sector the public can believe in. The core selling point of a conservative political party is that the private sector is inherently more efficient, dynamic and ethical than the public sector. That’s a hard sell these days. There are too many examples of public-sector excess for the public to swallow free-market fundamentalism. It was the private sector, not the government, that got the bright idea to insure bundled mortgages. It’s a private-sector bureaucrat, not a...

Even a casual observer of the Obama administration cannot help but notice the lack of concern about the unemployment rate from the president on down. Obama himself has casually talked about unemployment hitting 10%, his economic advisors have spoken with uncharacteristic candor about a "jobless recovery' and there is no urgency anywhere within the administration to treat the problem. Further, the Stimulus package has been anything but a long-term job creator. In fact, much of the stimulus is merely a hodge-podge of short-term projects, heavy on pork, but short on lasting economic impact. Conversely, the administration seems to be pursuing...

To a man with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. To a community organizer, every citizen looks like a victim entitled to someone else’s money. The Obama campaign and administration has proved that again and again. But both the president and his wife put a fine point on it with commencement addresses this month. (Joe Biden also gave one, but it’s a safe bet that nobody – Joe least of all – knew what he was talking about.) To the Obamas, grads should opt for the virtue of what Michelle has called “helping” careers, and eschew the vice...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/AdvisorsToConductImmediateCyberSecurityReview/ Monday, February 9th, 2009 at 12:00 am President Obama Directs the National Security and Homeland Security Advisors to Conduct Immediate Cyber Security Review THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary _______________________________________________________________ For Immediate Release February 9, 2009 President Obama Directs the National Security and Homeland Security Advisors to Conduct Immediate Cyber Security Review Melissa Hathaway Selected to Lead the Review President Obama has directed the National Security and Homeland Security Advisors to conduct an immediate review of the plan, programs, and activities underway throughout the government dedicated to cyber security. This...

Don't let anyone tell you the American dream has faded. the truth is the U.S. is still minting lots of millionaires. Glenn Goss is one of them. Goss retired four years ago, at 42, from a $90,000 job as a police commander in Delray Beach, Fla. He immediately began drawing a $65,000 annual pension that is guaranteed for life, is indexed to keep up with inflation and comes with full health benefits. Goss promptly took a new job as police chief in nearby Highland Beach. One big lure: the benefits. Given that the average man his age will live to...

Norway's state treasury is set to overflow, local analysts claim. Some think the price of North Sea crude oil will hit USD 130 a barrel, pumping even more "petrokroner" into the state budget and giving politicians few excuses to limit its use. Norway's oil and gas industry is hotter than ever, but many Norwegians complain that government services are nonetheless declining. Some grades of crude oil hit USD 111 a barrel this week, before easing on Friday. The North Sea Brent crude that's been pumping up Norway's economy for years was being traded at just over USD 107 a barrel...

<p>PARIS -- French libraries are said to file their nation's constitutions -- there have been more than a dozen since 1789; the current one is a relatively ancient 49 years old -- under periodicals. Now Nicolas Sarkozy, France's peripatetic new president, has created a commission on constitutional reform. The commission includes Jack Lang who, as minister of culture in 1983 under President Francois Mitterrand, staged a sublimely unserious conference on the (supposed) world economic crisis, featuring the likes of Sophia Loren, Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer.</p>

JEFFERSON CITY — Overturning a 60-year legal precedent, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that teachers and other public employees have a constitutional right to engage in collective bargaining with their government employers.

HARARE (AFP) - Doctors have been on strike for weeks, teachers are boycotting classes and now civil servants are threatening to stay away from their offices in another sign of the general collapse of the Zimbabwean state. President Robert Mugabe, in power since independence in 1980, has found his position largely unchallenged in recent times given splits in opposition ranks. But analysts believe the recent wave of industrial unrest, with workers desperate for pay hikes to keep up pace with the skyrocketing cost of living, could soon boil over and culminate in spontaneous anti-government protests. Mugabe may have dismissed his...

FOR years it has been a workplace truism: jobs with fat paychecks are found in the private sector, while jobs with ho-hum pay but rock-solid benefits are found with the government. But research by the Employee Benefit Research Institute suggests that the truism has not been true for some time.As of June 2005, overall compensation costs were 46 percent higher for state and local governments than for private-sector employers, according to the institute’s research analyst, Ken McDonnell. And when Mr. McDonnell separated the cost of providing current pay from the cost of providing benefits, he found that government employees were...

In my article in Frontpagemag the other day concerning slush money for Islamo-fascism from the faculty union at CUNY I raise the question of the need to reform New York's badly designed and poorly administered Taylor Law. The New York State agency in charge of administering the Taylor Law is the Public Employment Relations Board whose Chair is Michael Cuevas and whose Executive Director is James Edgar. Appointed by Governor Pataki, these guys are union stooges. I have repeatedly inquired with Messrs. Cuevas and Edgar, and with the PERB staff, about (a) Taylor Law's prohibition on management-dominated unions and (b)...

Other than a three-day weekend, most Americans don't give much thought to what they're supposed to be observing on Labor Day. In practice, it's become little more than the unofficial celebration of the end of summer. Back in 1882, when New York City's Central Labor Union inaugurated the holiday, the labor movement was quite a different thing than it is today. Once upon a time, workers had valid grievances regarding pay, hours, conditions and safety. Unions served a positive role in leveraging the collective influence of their members to pressure management to redress those grievances. But labor unions are political...

Public sector gets high marksNorwegians are known for complaining, but a new survey indicates they're generally satisifed with the social services they get for their tax money. Subsidized day care centers get the highest marks, while everything from school dentists to centers for the elderly are clearly popular.Public sector services provided through local townships routinely get plenty of bashing, both directly and through the media. A survey of 15,000 Norwegians nationwide by research firm TNS Gallup, however, found that 77 percent of the services offered got positive evaluations.The survey, which asked Norwegians to rank 43 different services from libraries to...

In American novels, well into the 1950's, one finds protagonists using the future stream of dividends emanating from their share holdings to send their kids to college or as collateral.  Yet, dividends seemed to have gone the way of the hoolah hoop. Few companies distribute erratic and ever-declining dividends. The vast majority don't bother. The unfavorable tax treatment of distributed profits may have been the cause.The dwindling of dividends has implications which are nothing short of revolutionary. Most of the financial theories we use to determine the value of shares were developed in the 1950's and 1960's, when dividends were...

German unions and government negotiators reached a pay deal yesterday for the country's three million public service workers, heading off a strike that could have damaged the weak economy. Under the deal, hammered out in talks that included a 31-hour negotiating session, both sides agreed on a gradual pay rise of 4.4 per cent over a 27-month period, Otto Schily, the Interior Minister, said. "I think this is an acceptable compromise for the employers, [but] a compromise that as far as the financial capacity of the public purse is concerned goes to the limit of what is acceptable," Mr Schily...

More than a century ago, American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers declared Labor Day "the day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would be discussed...that the workers of our day may not only lay down their tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for it." Unions were an emergent force back then. As recently as 1953, more than a third of American workers belonged to a union. Within 30 years, that figure had dropped to a fifth....

Government's budget is in shambles WASHINGTON - Lost in all the outrage over the corporate accounting scandals is one fact politicians do not like to acknowledge: The auditing problems at American companies cannot rival the bookkeeping shambles of the world's largest enterprise - the U.S. government. Exaggerated earnings, disguised liabilities, off-budget shenanigans - they are all there in the government's ledgers on a scale even the biggest companies could not dream of matching. WorldCom executives brought America's second-largest long-distance phone company to the brink of bankruptcy after using improper accounting to pad earnings by $3.8 billion. Last year, when Congress...