The Union News.: 2/2/11

2/2/11

Reform Threatens Special-Interest Unions

Collective bargaining leads to public-sector bankruptcy

In plain English, the bill would put the taxpayers back in charge of public education. Cash-strapped local school boards would be able to make spending decisions based on what's best for children, instead of what will keep adult employees happy.

And keeping the teacher unions happy has proven to be an expensive enterprise. Labor costs typically consume 80 percent to 85 percent of a school's total budget. A standard teacher contract includes lavish insurance and pension benefits, automatic annual pay raises for teachers (regardless of classroom performance), generous compensation for unused sick days and numerous other wasteful provisions.

Deep-sixing teachers' collective bargaining privileges would mean that Tennessee's school children will no longer be forced to settle for budget leftovers.

It would also give individual teachers the ability to negotiate directly with their administrators and school board. Teacher unions say that unionization is necessary for educators to be treated as professionals. The exact opposite is true. True professionals want to be rewarded for their individual performance, whereas the union's fixation on tenure protection and seniority rules have the effect of treating teachers as interchangeable workers, no better and no worse than any other.

It terms of serious education reform, it appears that HB 130 is the tip of a very large iceberg. This group of state legislators also wants to end the practice of withholding union dues from teacher paychecks, and loosen the union's power to appoint members to state boards.

Such bold measures would make Tennessee a leader in the education reform movement, alongside Indiana and New Jersey.

Of course, everything hinges on Gov. Bill Haslam's education agenda. If he endorses these reforms, it looks like the sun is about to set for the TEA. Teachers would still have the right to form an association, but they would have about as much political muscle as the local Rotary club.

We're only one month into the new year, but it looks like 2011 could be a year to remember for education reform in Tennessee. Stay tuned.

(from tennessean.com)

Carter-Obama Parallels REVEALED!

Our worst Presidents ever?

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(from iowntheworld.com)

(from moonbattery.com)

Congressional Ruling Class Busted

The thieving Lyin' of the Senate acted alone

Sen. Edward Kennedy’s (D-Mass.) former office manager was convicted on Tuesday of stealing more than $75,000 from the Senate.

Ngozi Pole was found guilty on five counts of wire fraud and one count of theft of government property. For at least 4 years, Pole submitted fraudulent paperwork that caused the Senate to pay him larger bonus payments than either Kennedy or his chief of staff had approved, according to the Justice Department.

Pole tried to hide the paper trail of these unauthorized payments by “repeatedly transmitting information to the chief of staff that falsely showed that he received only those payments that had been authorized.”

The Maryland resident faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years for each of the fraud charges and up to 10 years in prison for the theft of government property charge.

(from thehill.com)

The Pink President

Lightening up a dark winter

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Violent Left NewsBusted Again

Ridicule is man's most potent weapon - Saul Alinsky

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Bonus links:

• Summary of Saul Alinsky's 'Rules for Radicals'
• More Saul Alinsky stories: here
• 'Rules for Radicals' at amazon.com

Union Thug Answers Obama 2012 Call

WH taps BigLabor surrogates for leftwing street violence

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Class struggle(in Marxist ideology) the conflict of interests between the workers and the ruling class in a capitalist society, regarded as inevitably violent.

U.S. Greenlights Popular Terror Group

SEIU operatives form bridge to the Brotherhood

The Egyptian government has information a diplomat at the U.S. embassy in Cairo secretly met yesterday with a senior leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, the nation's major Islamist opposition group, WND has learned.

The topic of the meeting was the future of Egypt following the "fall" of President Hosni Mubarak, an Egyptian intelligence official told WND.

The claim comes amid charges from Cairo that the Obama administration has been encouraging the protests rocking Egypt and targeting the rule of Mubarak, a key U.S. ally in the Middle East.

(from nation.foxnews.com)

Obama Sets Constitutional Crisis

We don't need no stinkin' oversight

The Obama administration snubbed top GOP oversight official Rep. Darrell Issa on his first major document deadline as new chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sending a short letter promising to comply in response to a major information request that was due Saturday at noon.

But Issa is hitting back Tuesday with a demand key documents be sent in two days.

The Obama snub is the first sign of how the administration will respond to demands for documents and testimony by key officials from Republicans in control of the House now that the GOP holds the power of congressional subpoena.

(from dailycaller.com)

Left Will Not Go Quietly

Ugly ending predicted for Our Prog Century

The welfare-entitlement state is likewise a relic. Only a few political dinosaurs are calling for more spending, more entitlements and more taxes.

Fairly or not, most Europeans and Americans accept that the limits of redistribution have been reached. President Barack Obama's talk of "spread the wealth" and "fat cat" bankers has not done much to lower $1.3 trillion deficits and 9.4 percent unemployment. So he has dropped the high-tax, more-benefits, class-warfare rhetoric in favor of writing editorials in The Wall Street Journal assuring business of less regulation and more government help.

Race relations are being redefined as never before. Interracial marriage, integration and immigration have made the old rubrics -- "white," "black," "brown" -- obsolete. Rigid, half-century-old affirmative action preference programs have not caught up with everyday reality. Their overseers are likewise ossified, now that millions in an interracial America do not fit into their precise racial slots, and being white -- to the degree that it can be easily defined -- is not synonymous with innate privilege. The notion that Tiger Woods' children need an admissions or employment edge over natives of Appalachia or immigrants from India is surreal.

Abroad, things are just as upside down. Russia is no longer the avatar of global communism but the world's largest cutthroat capitalist oil producer. China's cultural revolution is now about making tons of money and driving a luxury car. The European Union has been reduced to finger-pointing and standing in line to beg Germany for cash -- a far cry from its advertised 21st century utopian brotherhood. Our old neighbor Mexico is now a near-failed narco-state, bearing a greater resemblance to Afghanistan than to its brethren North American nations.

In response to this topsy-turvy world, the traditional media, tenured professors, well-paid public employees, rigid ethnic and racial lobbies, unions, organized retirees, open-borders advocates and entrenched politicians all are understandably claiming that we live in an uncivil age.

We well may, but we also are seeing the waning of an old established order. And the resulting furor suggests that the old beneficiaries are not going quietly into that good night.

(full story by Victor Davis Hanson at mercurynews.com)

Labor-States Face Doom

Forced-labor unionism deemed a failed policy of the past

One of the under-appreciated fault lines in the U.S. economy is between the 22 "right-to-work" states and the rest of the country. The former have tended to do much better economically. Now some non-right-to-work states such as Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan are thinking about joining this club that allows workers to opt-out of union membership.

Contrary to much union rhetoric, right-to-work laws don't ban or bust unions. They simply grant individual workers the right to join or not to join, even once a workplace is organized by a union. Workers who decline to join the union can't be forced to have dues taken out of their paycheck and thus used to finance union political campaigns. Most right-to-work states are in the South and West, and only Oklahoma has adopted this freedom to choose in the last 20 years.

Right-to-work states outperform forced-union states in almost every measurable category of worker well-being. A new study in the Cato Journal by economist Richard Vedder finds that from 2000 to 2008 some 4.7 million Americans moved from forced-union to right-to-work states.

The study also found that from 1977 through 2007 there was "a very strong and highly statistically significant relationship between right-to-work laws and economic growth." Right-to-work states experienced a 23% faster rise in per capita income over that period. The two regions that have lost the most jobs in recent years, the once-industrial Northeast and Midwest, are mostly forced-union states.