Voters to confront the so-called 'Badger 14' Fleebaggers
Video:
Obama surrogate up against the wall
Republicans are on the board with their first recall steaming from the Badger 14s escape to Illinois to avoid voting on the Budget Repair Bill.
A citizen group has collected enough signatures (15,960) to file a recall petition against Sen. Jim Holperin (D Eagle River).
Holperin is the fourth senator, and first Democrat to face a recall over the Budget Repair Bill fiasco. Recalls have been filed for Republican Senators Luther Olsen, Dan Kapanke and Randy Hopper.
With so many recall efforts underway, it may take the state election board more time than normal to rule on the validity of the petition signatures and issue a special election. The petition also must stand up to scrutiny from the Government Accountability Board (GAB) and Sen. Holperin’s team. Holperin has 10 days to challenge signature validity while the GAB has 31 days to make sure petitions meet all the correct formatting and technical requirements. However, GAB spokesperson Reid Magney says the GAB will ask for extended time because of all the recalls in play.
A case of mistaken identity has entangled a small family-owned Des Moines company in union protests and led to a death threat. Angry callers are mistaking Koch Brothers, a Des Moines office supply firm, with the brothers who own Koch Industries, the global energy conglomerate.
Dutch Koch, president of the Des Moines company, wants everyone to know he’s not one of those Koch brothers, and he’s not politically active.
“I initially thought it was humorous to be confused with a multibillionaire,” he said, but then a death threat was left on his answering machine. Koch reported the call to the FBI, which he said traced it to a California man.
The Koch Brothers employ 65 employees in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids. Brothers George, William and Frank Koch founded the company in 1889 as a spinoff from the Des Moines Register and Leader’s job printing shop.
Koch Industries, based in Wichita, Kan., is the nation’s second-largest private corporation. A subsidiary, Flint Hills Resources, owns four ethanol plants in Iowa. Both surnames are pronounced “coke.”
“From time to time, we’ve been confused with Koch Industries, but it’s always been an innocent misunderstanding,” Dutch Koch said. Since the start of the year, Koch said he’s received at least 20 emails and 15 calls from confused protesters.
He said the trouble arises when media reports refer to “Koch brothers.” He figures the protesters are doing little research beyond a quick Google search.
Public employee union reform is all about the union bosses, not the rank-and-file
Fire fighters. Policemen. Teachers. Medics. Those are the professions that Democrats and Big Labor are falsely claiming to be under assault from the well-reasoned folks that support limiting the collective bargaining power of public sector employee unions.
Simply put, those professions are not under attack from anyone.
A troubling report in the Washington Post covered a married couple in Ohio that was feeling as if their professions (one was a fire fighter, the other a nurse) had been marginalized by the recent budget showdowns that have involved several states curtailing the collective bargaining power of the unions.
Indeed, the unions have come under scrutiny, but the employees have not. After all, it is the unions that are bleeding the state dry.
In every case across the nation, Governors are trying to push back against Big Labor to save public sector jobs—not destroy them. It is greedy labor bosses that are standing in the way of keeping America’s public sector employees at work and spreading falsehoods all the while.
When Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker successfully curbed the power of the public employee unions in his state, Big Labor and their Democrat politician goons cried loudly that the governor and his “right-wing” supporters were trying to force the state employees out of their jobs. On the other hand, a fact that Big Labor refused to consider and deceptively hid from the employees that they claim to represent, had Governor Walker not taken the action he did, he would have had to immediately begin laying off state employees.
Irresponsible reports from the main stream media have attempted to change the terms of the debate. Why is it that the Washington Post and numerous other MSM outlets have given up on providing objective coverage in an effort to play nice with the special interest labor unions? The battles in these states are about government budgets that have ballooned beyond belief and politicians that have promised too much with no intention of ever being able to keep those promises. Greedy labor bosses and corrupt politicians have decided that they shall not share the sacrifice that so many are making as state governments are hit with the harsh reality that the money just simply isn’t there.
Instead of being responsible, union bosses and their politician cronies have decided that everyone else must give up their own money to keep them in place through higher taxes. The public employee unions refuse to give an inch of their power to save the jobs of the employees that they claim to represent. So, after one realizes that, one must wonder whose interests they actually represent? Clearly they are representing the interests of the labor bosses and spitting on the state employees whose wages they pilfer for union dues.
At the end of this debate, one can clearly see that Big Labor uses the employees as pawns on the political power chess board, claiming that anyone who disagrees with the power of the union bosses must inherently hate all public employees. They use the employees that they represent as nothing more than a tool to stir up emotions rather than provide responsible representation. Any rational and objective observer of these battles can see through these shameless arguments leveled from the labor bosses. People do not have less respect for firemen today than they did on this day last year—they just have less respect for the “fat cat” labor bosses that represent them while looting the taxpayers.
Union bosses have been engaging in class warfare for so long now that it’s become standard for the media to echo the meme without challenge.
An example of such mainstream Marxism is in today’s Bloomberg piece entitled ‘Runaway CEO Pay’ Could Support 102,000 U.S. Jobs, AFL-CIO Says. Bloomberg’s piece relies heavily on the AFL-CIO’s Executive Pay Watch, which was set up years ago to conduct a haves vs. have nots class warfare campaign to eventually have CEO pay limited by law or regulation. This was something union bosses accomplished to some degree with last year’s “Wall Street Reform.”
However disdainfully un-American it is to argue whether someone makes too much money in what was once the nation known as the land of opportunity, sometimes you have to roll with the pigs in the pigsty to show how stupid their arguments are. So here goes:
Here is the AFL-CIO’s statement:
In 2010, Standard & Poor’s 500 Index company CEOs received, on average, $11.4 million in total compensation. Based on 299 companies’ most recent pay data for 2010, their combined total CEO pay of $3.4 billion could support 102,325 median workers’ jobs.
Using a simple calculator, it is easy to determine that the “workers’ jobs” would pay $33,227 per year (about $16 per hour), not counting union dues, of course.
Given the AFL-CIO’s penchant for pushing an eat the rich ideology, it seemed worthwhile to use the unions’ own logic to run our own set of numbers to determine how many workers’ median jobs one years’ worth of union dues could support.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2010, there were 14.7 million union Americans belonging to unions. While that only represents 11.9 percent of all wage and salary earners, there is a substantial amount of dues money flowing to unions.
If we were to use a conservative figure of $50 per month for union dues, in 2010, unions collected $735,000,000 per month in union dues from America’s unionized workers. Multiply $735,000,000 by 12 months and you get a whopping $8,820,000,000 that was collected in union dues in 2010.
Divide $8,820,000,000 by $33,227 and you’ll find that if unions did not take union dues from workers in 2010, 265,447 workers’ jobs could have been supported.
Since union dues only go to support the salaries and benefits of union bosses, their staffs, and their golf courses, airplanes, and other costs, perhaps the argument really needs to be reversed. Rather than creating or saving jobs, given that unions do not produce a product and can actually be attributed with being masters of manipulation, buying politicians, killing companies, pushing policies that stifle growth, as well as creating huge pension and health care deficits, perhaps it’s really time to rein in union dues.
Voters to confront the so-called 'Badger 14' Fleebaggers
Obama surrogate up against the wallA citizen group has collected enough signatures (15,960) to file a recall petition against Sen. Jim Holperin (D Eagle River).
