Free Republic

[The stream is slated to start at 12:30 p.m., ET. Please refresh the page if you do not see a player above at that time.] President Donald Trump is set to speak publicly for the second time Tuesday at the North American Building Trades Unions legislative conference. Trump will likely address his promises to boost American manufacturing and promote new infrastructure projects. In a town hall with CEOs earlier in the day, Trump touted his pledges to reduce regulations on businesses and encourage companies to make new investments in the United States....

As opponents of the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline continue to fight the project, others who believe it will stimulate the economy recently ensured their voices were heard, sending hundreds of letters expressing a positive view of the pipeline to U.S. lawmakers. The Mid-Atlantic Region of the Laborer’s International Union of America (LIUNA), a union of construction workers and public service employees, on Friday hand-delivered about 1,600 letters from workers to U.S. Sens. Tim Kaine and Mark Warner. The letters express support for the proposed $5 billion natural gas pipeline, which would run about 600 miles from West Virginia to North...

One of the most obnoxious trends in the nation, and one that is particularly acute in California, is the continued push to enshrine public employees as a special, privileged caste of Americans, exempt from the rules and obligations that apply to the rest of us. As I documented in my 2009 book, Plunder!, public employees often now receive the kind of pay, benefits, and protections more fitting for France, where civil service is the highest calling. In the United States, we traditionally valued entrepreneurship and freedom above pencil-pushing and bureaucracy. But times have changed. In California, a raft of public-employee...

It was a love fest. “It was humbling,” Chicago Fraternal Order of Police President Dean Angelo told Sneed after meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday. “Although we did not come away with specific promises on manpower and assistance, it was good to hear President Trump was truly supportive of us.” Angelo said that after the meeting, he and the eight other FOP leaders — including national FOP President Chuck Canterbury — were taken from the Roosevelt Room at the White House and into the Oval Office for a photo in back of the president sitting...

Labor unions representing construction workers have sent an infrastructure priority list to President Donald Trump at his request, as his White House searches for projects to greenlight that require little if any federal funding. North America’s Building Trades Unions sent the White House the wish list of 26 projects, including more than $80 billion worth of energy transmission lines, water and wind projects, and pipelines across the country. More than half of the projects on the list given to Trump aide Stephen Miller are privately financed. All but one are in the midst of permitting and could use the Trump...

Labor unions have been known to do many despicable things to grab dues money from workers who don’t want anything to do with them. A current Minnesota case is about as bad as you’ll ever find. In 2013, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) got one of its favored politicians, Minnesota governor Mark Dayton, to sign an order declaring that home healthcare providers who receive Medicaid money to care for disabled family members were government employees. But they were “employees” only because that made them eligible for unionization. The SEIU figured that it had a good shot at finagling a...

As union honchos for government workers describe it, the paycheck protection legislation that passed the state Senate last month amounts to a political gag order on workers. But if there's any actual “gagging” going on, it's in attempting to swallow this union shibboleth. The Senate bill bars state, local government and school district employers from deducting any portion of union dues from workers' paychecks that fund political activity. Deductions for contract negotiations and other costs remain unchanged.

CA Teachers Union Official Admits That He Has Hit Students Before, But “Made It Look Like an Accident” Published on Mar 21, 2017 This video by James O'Keefe exposes a San Francisco teachers union official admitting that he hit a student. Antonio Mankini of San Francisco United Educators was caught on hidden-camera telling a journalist about his experience with hitting students. Two Project Veritas journalists went undercover–one posed as a friend of a teacher who hit a student, and the second posed as the teacher himself. When the teacher expressed guilt, Mankini told him not to worry because there was...

As with much in the first weeks of the incoming Donald Trump administration, there was a last-second move to delay regulations years in the making. In this case, the Department of Labor fiduciary rule... As it stands, retirement savers lose $17 billion a year just in fees paid to advisors and funds. The vast majority of investors then fail to match the stock market indexes because of those same fees. The fiduciary rule doesn't dictate lower-cost advice. Nor does it remove expensive actively managed funds from the marketplace. Rather, it requires anyone who sells retirement advice for a living to...

Hundreds of thousands of service workers are planning an anti-Trump labor strike for May 1, BuzzFeed reported Saturday. Nearly 350,000 workers plan to strike President Trump’s agenda on International Workers’ Day on May 1. More than 300,000 food chain workers and 40,000 unionized service workers will walk off the job that day, according to a coalition of groups leading the strike.

More than 300,000 workers are planning to walk out of their jobs in protest of President Trump on International Workers Day, according to a new report. The report by Buzzfeed News said that "350,000 service workers plan to strike on May 1, a traditional day for labor activism across the world, in the most direct attempt yet by organized labor to capture the energy from a resurgent wave of activism across the country since the election of Donald Trump." The Service Employees International Union, which endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton for president back in 2015, will be a large component of...

Gov. Cuomo has sworn to protect New York’s immigrants, no matter what the cost. So why are some of his allies turning them over for deportation? New reporting revealed that construction unions closely tied to the governor are leading an effort to report and deport undocumented immigrants in upstate New York. In fact, the Northeast Regional Council of Carpenters is openly boasting about its tactics in Buffalo, which have already led to several raids and arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “The carpenters union devotes a lot of money and resources to this,” said Bill Bing, an official for...

SAN ANTONIO, Texas – Sean McGarvey, the president of North America’s Building Trades Unions, says he fully expects President Trump to keep his promises to push a trillion-dollar infrastructure program and that he expects Congress to enact it by the end of the year. He did not say, however, that all of the tens of thousands of jobs such a program would create would be union jobs. McGarvey brushed aside criticism from some quarters in the labor and allied movements about his meeting with President Trump and three other building trades union leaders at the White House only three days...

New York Senator Charles Schumer was instrumental in getting Bharara appointed to that position and in return was asked from time to time to do favors for the senator and his allies. Up until recently, President Trump had no idea what was really going on. Once President Trump’s staff understood the quid pro quo, they had no choice but to ask for Bharara’s resignation. In 2015, Puerto Rico defaulted on $70 billion in municipal bonds. Those involved panicked. There was ample evidence that the issuing agencies were technically bankrupt when they issued the bonds and that they purchased fraudulent credit...

The union teamed up with the liberal environmentalist group the Sierra Club to host the rally. The Sierra Club has called EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, the former attorney general of Oklahoma, "unfit" to lead the agency. The Sierra Club website states the need to "fight back against Trump," and "protect our planet from Trump."

Despite a massive rally in the stock market, Illinois public pension liabilities continue to grow. GARS, the Illinois General Assembly Retirement System, is only 13.52% funded, down from 17% funded in 2013. How long can GARS last? Meanwhile, Illinois has accrued a combined net pension liability of roughly $130 billion on which it assumes a 7% return. Effectively, that is an interest liability of $9.1 billion a year even though that liability technically does not bear interest. This is a guest post from Michael Lucci at the Illinois Policy Institute. Interest on Illinois’ Pension Debt is $9.1 Billion Per Year...

As hard as it will be to pass health insurance reform, tax reform, and infrastructure legislation, President Trump's toughest challenge will come in trying to cut the numbers of federal workers. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but budget and government experts are calling the planned reductions in the federal workforce a "historic contraction" not seen since the drawdown after World War II.  Cabinet secretaries will have some leeway in how they reduce their departments' workforces.  Some may rely on the normal attrition that occurs in any workforce with retirements and vacancies created by promotions being responsible for...

LAUSD .. schools are under-enrolled. "There are places where we have schools that are basically four blocks away from each other — and at a time, that made sense," Rodriguez says. Now, he says, "Buildings built for 1,000 kids may have something like 400. "It's expensive." ... Today, LAUSD's enrollment is around 514,000, a number that the district estimates will fall below half a million by 2018. But L.A. Unified's costs have not gone down. They've gone up. This year's $7.59 billion budget is half a billion dollars more than last year's. The nation's second largest school district is facing...

New York education officials are poised to scrap a test designed to measure the reading and writing skills of people trying to become teachers, in part because an outsized percentage of black and Hispanic candidates were failing it. The state Board of Regents on Monday is expected Monday to adopt a task force's recommendation of eliminating the literacy exam, known as the Academic Literacy Skills Test. Backers of the test say eliminating it could put weak teachers in classrooms. Critics of the examination said it is redundant and a poor predictor of who will succeed as a teacher. "We want...

Pam Harris, an Illinois mom who made history as the lead plaintiff in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, has a simple message for President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Tom Price. “End the dues skim once and for all.” Harris, who receives a modest monthly Medicaid stipend to care for her disabled son Josh at home, faced an attempt by the Service Employees International Union in 2009 to unionize private caregivers like her. While she was able to beat back the Big Labor’s campaign to turn homes into union workplaces and then win right-to-work privileges...