Christiane Amanpour: So, George, Wisconsin. Is this the sort of battle that we’re going to see shaping up around the country? Is this really the sort of political and philosophical debate that’s going on right now about what these cuts are going to mean?
George Will: It would have been even if the president hadn’t intervened. But in the span of three days, Christiane, he first submits a budget that would increase the federal deficit and, two days later, he mobilizes his party, his own political machine, and organized labor, which is an appendage to his party, to sabotage Wisconsin’s attempt to do what he will not do, which is deal with the insolvency of their government. In doing so, he has set the stage for 2012 by saying the Democratic Party is the party of government, not just in having an exaggerated view of the scope and competence of government, but because its base is in public employees.
h/t Fred
When Unions were allowed to organize in the public sector for the first time in the US it was in WI in ’58. Two years later JFK let the federal pse’s organize. Right around that time the percentage of workers in the US private sector hit its peak. From that point the private sector unions began a decline to today where they are little over 5% of the workforce. Those unions didn’t lose to non-unions, rather, they destroyed the profitability of the sectors they were in. Today, not a single sector that America was a leader in in 1958 that was unionized then exists to any significant degree today with one single exception – aerospace – which gets a high percentage of it business from govt military spending. Steel, electronics, automotive (outside of Right-To-Work [RTW] states where there are no unions), textiles, and on and on, they are all shadows of what they were 50 years ago and they all had closed shop unions.
By contrast, the PSE unionization levels have grown or remained stable over the same period. They have no foreign competition. A state or federal employer meets its commitments to the unions by taxing others or incurring debt – the government doesn’t go out of business.
Until now.
Now Governments are faced with the very real prospect of default (or worse). Cutting out the weapon of collective bargaining is now an act of survival. (and one day the Firefighters and police will (and should) lose that power. One achievable step at a time.) By doing so, the gov’t puts the bargaining process on an equal and hopefully sustainable footing.
The next step is for states like WI and those in the Rust belt to bring in RTW legislation – outlawing closed shop union rules. The Unions, I think, know this, and they know that it is the end of them as a power in American politics. One wonders what happens to their political host the Democratic party in the aftermath. Unions are a parasite that, left unchecked, kills the host organization.
Thus, this is shaping up as a titanic struggle between Unions, the democratic party, their corporate supplicants and the POTUS and the rest of America. Numerically this is about a 20:80 split, but this isn’t all about numbers, its about power and relatively speaking the Left has the upper hand in many key places.
Expect more than a few government showdowns including at the federal level where even the milquetoast RINOs are having a rod shoved up their backs by the wave of fiscal conservative concern.
…
And Canada is no better by the way – if anything it is worse as there is no RTW. All of the sectors we should be dominant in that were heavily unionized fifty years ago are gone or are kept alive by massive injections of public funds – the paper industry, for example. One day, hopefully soon, RTW will come to Canada and the process of saving the country from the blight of closed shop unions can begin. The Wild Rose Alliance has RTW as one of its party platforms.
Thank you for that, Gord. Most interesting!
Black Mamba, I just muted the ads and watched for the program with my peripheral vision then unmuted it and listened while working on something else. Made me realize why I no longer watch TV; very low bandwidth information channel. If I had a greater stake in this issue would watch the program with the sound off to see what emotional messages were being transmitted.
What I found interesting was that WI was a DemocRatic state that has now elected a Republican Governor and the people want government spending curtailed. The future doesn’t look very bright for Obozo who has begun to interfere in the affairs of a state where a majority of people have voted in favor of reigning in out of control unions. As Phantom notes, the voters are Not Amused. Kate has commented previously that it may be a failed Conservative policy not to riot in the streets: I do know that if the union goons start to get violent the pushback from the Tea party supporters is going to make them very sorry that they decided to take a political disagreement to that level.
loki – do you mean dizy’s link @6:53? It was just like a really bad action movie trailer.
The air traffic controler union was going to go on strike in the US when Reagan was elected president.He fired everyone of them and prohibited them from grtting a federal govt job.The media and the dems said that there would be airplanes falling from the sky as a result.There were fewer accidents after his edict than before.They forgot about the USAF and its thousands of air traffic controlers.
Black Mamba, have to read more carefully before I post — thought you meant the original video, not the one posted by dizzy. Same criticism applies: a transcript of so much faster to read than sitting through a discussion among slowly talking people.
// the one posted by dizzy. Same criticism applies: a transcript of so much faster to read than sitting through a discussion among slowly talking people. //
There is a transcript at the link I gave.
Black Mamba only watched the introduction “Six and a half minutes of my life” As I mentioned, the videos load automatically — [there are four 6:24 & 17:03 & 15:07 & 5:43
in length]. The funny stuff comes later.
Amanpour artfully assembled matching pairs who have drawn opposite conclusions —
Two who lost relatives —
PETER GADIEL, SON KILLED ON 9/11 & DONNA MARSH O’CONNOR, DAUGHTER KILLED ON 9/11:
Two religious leaders of the fundamentalist pursuasion —
FRANKLIN GRAHAM, PRESIDENT, SAMARITAN’S PURSE & Imam Anjem Choudary in London
Two activists —
ROBERT SPENCER, JIHAD WATCH: & DAISY KHAN, AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR MUSLIM ADVANCEMENT:
Two wackos —
Imam Osama Bahloul of Tennessee & Gary Bauer – Former Republican Presidential Candidate
Two female intellectuals from muslim lands —
Ayaan Hirsi Ali author Infidel, Nomad & AZAR NAFISI, AUTHOR: Reading Lolita In Tehran
Two gadflies —
BRAD GARRETT: Terrorism expert? & REZA ASLAN, WRITER, “THE DAILY BEAST”
A taste —
REV. FRANKLIN GRAHAM, THE BILLY GRAHAM EVANGELISTIC ASSOCIATION: First, Christiane, I understand what the Muslims want to do in America. They want to build as many mosques and cultural centers as they possibly can so they can convert as many Americans as they can to Islam.
Imam Anjem CHOUDARY: Well — well, let me just say that Islam has a solution for all of the problems that mankind faces. […] Indeed, we believe that one day, the flag of Islam will fly over the White House. Indeed, there’s even an oration of the Prophet where he said, “The day of judgment will not come until a group of my oma… — ”
DONNA MARSH O’CONNOR: Can I just — ?
CHOUDARY: “Conquer the White House.”
[…]
AMANPOUR: I just want to go to Reza Aslan, who’s busy shaking his head from Amsterdam.
REZA ASLAN: No, I was just enjoying the conversation. And I think that Anjem and Franklin Graham ought to go grab a cup of coffee —
(LAUGHTER)
After watching that Democratic useful idiot, it brought back all the reasons I don’t watch TV anymore.
JMO
Robert…While I look over the pool here in P.V., (time off from running two businesses), it looks to me like people need to take off their narrow visors and start asking really hard questions. Rhetoric does not cut the muster, it only compounds the problems. Lowering business taxes is sure great for me and my lot, is it the answer for the majority who are way over leveraged? I think not.
At Wiki, the chart on USA personal income shows that 47.7% of all US workers make less than $25000/yr.
At the Wisconsin Teachers site
http://teacherportal.com/salary/Wisconsin-teacher-salary
it shows that teachers start at $25000/yr and the average teacher salary is $46690/yr.
And that there is 14.7 students per teacher in Wisconsin.
Gee, maybe the Mayans are right after all.
Whose hair is weirder, Black Mamba, Brazile’s or Wills’s?
It’s gotta be Brazile’s (seeing as hers is real and his is a rug, I’m sure. I can smell a rug a mile away, even over the Internet.)
It just came to me who she looks like: the Bride of Frankenstein (Elsa Lancaster).
http://uglyblackjohn.blogspot.com/2009/10/beauty-is-learned.html
Re the link above, Donna Brazile’s hair and “beauty is learned,” I guess she never learned.
Sorry silly people, read the stats, union membership has sunk to record lows. The middle class has shrunk along the same time lines.
Union membership is at all time lows because the unions caused the relocation of manufacturing plants to non-union nations where manufacturing can continue without environmental overregulation and the threat of continuous strikes.
The fact that the middle class needed those jobs is why the middle class is shrinking along the same lines.
The fault doesn’t lie with the manufactureres who built the plants that provided the jobs, it lies with the Leftists who run the unions and agitate for the environmentalist strangulation of industry.
Conservatives have been warning this would happen for decades.
Industry and Occupation of Union Members
In 2010, 7.6 million public sector employees belonged to a union, compared with 7.1
million union workers in the private sector. The union membership rate for public
sector workers (36.2 percent) was substantially higher than the rate for private
sector workers (6.9 percent). Within the public sector, local government workers
had the highest union membership rate, 42.3 percent. This group includes workers in
heavily unionized occupations, such as teachers, police officers, and fire fighters.
Private sector industries with high unionization rates included transportation and
utilities (21.8 percent), telecommunications (15.8 percent), and construction (13.1
percent). In 2010, low unionization rates occurred in agriculture and related indus-
tries (1.6 percent) and in financial activities (2.0 percent). (See table 3.)
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
The disparity between public and private sector unionization is a big part of the problem.
It is easy to negotiate happy union member results when negotiating with the seemingly bottomless pit provided by public debt and/or increased taxes. It’s not so easy to do the same when the bottom line (in or out of business) is a stumbling block to negotiations.
Public service unions should be abolished. Here is a good article explaining why:
http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2011/02/the-case-against-public-sector-unionism.html
Oz, you nailed it at 2:51 pm
jan, exactly.