2012 Presidential Election

It’s “news” to the MSM. Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office released a report that confirmed what conservative labor analysts James Sherk and Jason Richwine have known (and written about) for some time: Federal government employees receive more in total compensation than their private-sector counterparts. Specifically, the CBO report found the following: Federal civilian employees with no more than a high Read this post

The pot, the kettle and an election. A revealing union representation election is currently underway. Both the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) and the Association of Flight Attendants-Communications Workers of America (AFA-CWA) want to represent the 20,000 to 25,000 flight attendants in the newly merged United and Continental Airlines workforces. The AFA-CWA wants the privilege so badly it has Read this post

NLRB to businesses: No easy move for you. The complaint against Boeing might have just been the beginning. It seems the National Labor Relations Board can’t bear to let businesses relocate without allowing unions to have a say. Current NLRB rules allow a business to move without first negotiating the relocation with its union — provided the decision doesn’t turn on labor costs. Read this post

The times they are a’changing. While much of the nation’s attention in matters concerning the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has been rightly focused on the affairs of Boeing in South Carolina, the board has also been busy elsewhere. Last Friday they filed a lawsuit against the State of Arizona over the not yet enforced Proposition 113. In case you Read this post

And will it be enough? Senate Republicans have proposed a change to the National Labor Relations Act that will block the National Labor Relations Board from interfering in corporate decisions to open facilities in “right to work” states.  Such states require “open shops,” which prevent unions from collecting dues involuntarily from workers.  But will the bill have a chance in Read this post

What is it called when a government creates a state-sponsored “news” agency, again? Ah yes, it’s called government propaganda. And that is what the Obama administration seems interested in creating if the words of Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis’s senior advisor Carl Fillichio can be believed. On Nov. 19 Fillichio attended the annual meeting of the International Labor Communications Association and in his address to the room he laid out a few “revolutionary” plans and policy ideas one of which was to create a new media agency that would act as a sort of ministry of Big Labor information all run out of the Secretary of Labor’s office in Washington D.C. The advisor to the Secretary of Labor told the audience that one of the things that vexed his department is that it was so hard to get their “news” reported by the media. “We battle every single day when we try to put something out,” Fillichio told the audience . Fillichio reported to the conference that he’d hired a person for his office solely to deal with labor media propaganda efforts. He also gave out the person’s email address and phone number so the union members in attendance at the meeting could have easy access to this government sponsored media director. “We cannot depend on those other people – the traditional media – to get that message out,” Fillichio said. Imagine what is being said here. A person of high position in the Department of Labor is proposing that he be the one to “report” labor news. He is proposing that the government itself become a media agency in an effort to get around “the traditional media.” Every totalitarian government has such government-controlled agencies, of course. Who can forget the U.S.S.R.’s famed Pravda and Izvestia news agencies? Of course, there was an old Soviet joke about those two largest Soviet “news” agencies. It goes like this: “there’s no pravda in Izvestia and no izvestia in Pravda.” You see, in Russian the word pravda can be defined as “truth” and izvestia translated as “news.” Hence there was no truth or news in the Soviet’s daily newspapers. This is essentially what we’d get with the Obama administration’s idea of a new ministry of labor information sponsored by none other than Obama and his hand-picked, big labor-friendly, minions. Government officials that tend toward an authoritarian view of their job often dream of fully controlling what the media reports about their office. They also closely guard what information goes out to the media. But it is one thing to closely guard what information is released and a whole other thing to create an agency to “report” the news. Lastly, think of this for just a minute. If Fillichio and Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis don’t think that the left-wing, Old Media is fair enough to them, just imagine how biased and left-wing the “news” that this new ministry of Big Labor information would be disgorging! I mean if the leftists in the Old Media aren’t leftist enough to suit Obama’s Dept. of Labor, I shudder to think how far left these guys really are. Chalk this up as yet one more step toward authoritarianism evinced by this president and his administration.

The rest is here:
Obama’s Labor Dept. To Create Gov’t Sponsored ‘Labor News’ Agency?

If James O’Keefe and I were to release a video catching disguised al-Qaeda members casually joking about blowing up the Brooklyn Bridge, the mainstream media would likely be most interested to know who pays our salaries. Upon the release of our ACORN videos which featured federally-funded ACORN employees aiding a “pimp” and a “prostitute” in setting up a brothel for 14-year-old El Salvadoran sex slaves, the MSM shifted the narrative towards James and Hannah, whether they were lying about their budgets, if Fox News hired them, and whether they were actually dressed as pimps and prostitute while entering the ACORN offices. Predictably, the MSM has sounded the same recycled narrative in the midst of our more recent release of “ Teachers Unions Gone Wild ,” evidencing tenured teachers calling black students the “N” word without proper reprimand, teachers using a taxpayer-funded New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) conference to rally for “slander” against New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and union leaders sharing anecdotes about rigged elections and voter fraud, among other things. Rather than investigate the findings of our investigation, the media has found it more pressing to investigate us. It’s embarrassing enough that we mere twenty-somethings manage to scoop seasoned, established mainstream journalists on outing corruption, fraud, and waste in government. So it is ironic that mainstream journalists feel compelled to embarrass themselves further by dismissing the juicy meat of our exposés to cover our material with awkwardly petty and irrelevant lines of questioning. They are like high school cheerleaders envious over the new girl who just started dating the captain of the football team. Like, do you have a rich family? Are you like, just a poseur or something? I am sure the parents of New Jersey are just so fascinated with the financial logistics of our investigative videos rather than the inescapable fact that their children are subject to arrogant, sleazy, sometimes racist teachers committing voter fraud, wanting to f*** with kids, and calling black kids n*****s without consequence. And as Gov. Chris Christie himself said regarding our video, “ [i]t hurts the great teachers just as much as it hurts our kids .” However, rather than evince any concern for the behavior of our subjects caught on tape, the union has sought to ease the public’s concern by insisting our tapes were “doctored” and “dubbed.” I hate to be a nuisance and have to delegitimize the adorable little last-minute narratives being drummed up by the NJEA members and some of our esteemed colleagues in the journalism world, but having directed “Teachers Unions Gone Wild,” edited and supervised the whole post-production process, I kind of, sort of happen to have all the raw footage directly at my disposal. Do I selectively edit the videos? Well, against the risk of boring my audience with the tedious entirety of all the dozens of hours of raw footage we have, yes. After all, it was Hitchcock who said that film is “life with all the boring parts cut out.” But is “selective” synonymous with “deceptive”? No. I would not call out CNN for, in a recent documentary about me , selectively separating my most interesting soundbites from my mundane rambling, nor has anyone else. But if our detractors are so eager to be bored to death, I am more than happy to release the raw footage in context. But what’s even more interesting — actually fascinating, and to us, disappointing — is Alissa Ploshnick’s recent self-reduction in the form of a hereby provable lie about something so petty that I cannot imagine why it warranted such a forfeiture of integrity. Ploshnick now establishes (to the MSM’s mouthwatering delight) a predictable “heavily edited” narrative by way of her spokesman Steve Wolmer’s talking points. NJEA Communications Director Steve Wolmer has come forward on behalf of the “sheltered” Ploshnick, insisting that the recorded talking points of hers we have — including her emphasis on how “hard” it is to fire a tenured teacher, as well as her sharing of an anecdote in which a tenured teacher called a student the “N” word only to be slapped on the wrist with a demotion — were manipulatively tossed into the same context when they were uttered in totally separate contexts. Wolmer explains that Ploshnick was recounting an episode from her own high school days in Clifton High twenty years ago, in which a mere student called another student the “N” word in the hallway, insinuating it was shared in a totally separate context from her emphasis on how hard it is to fire tenured teachers. Most saddening to me is the fact that Alissa Ploshnick, while arguably a star in our video, until recently has held a rather clean bill of health. All she did, according to our video, is unwittingly blow the whistle on a fellow teacher who called a black student the “N” word, and subsequently (albeit bizarrely) avoided James’s approach for follow-up and in due course tried to stalk him on his way home. Basically, she had neither done, nor said anything wrong — until now. Via her spokesman, Wolmer, in an unfortunate attempt to discredit us, Ploshnick has unnecessarily discredited herself by insisting I manipulatively grouped her emphasis on the difficulty of firing a tenured teacher with her anecdote about a colleague calling a black student the “N” word. Did I separate the two soundbites to accommodate a voice-over punctuation in between? Yes I did. But now, I will present to you the monolithic clip incorporating both soundbites side-by-side which she has since claimed to be uttered on separate terms: While I enjoy observing the desperation and creative conspiracy theories of these teachers in suspect and the liberal press for my own amusement purposes, my journalistic ethics compel me to set the record straight. It was never our intention to bring Ploshnick down, thus it is saddening to me that she has insisted on bringing herself down with an unnecessary lie and distortion of the facts in an apparent (and unsuccessful) attempt to protect her brothers in arms (or at least not be seen as a whistleblower thereof). I both regret Ploshnick’s Nixonian cover-up and wonder how Wolmer himself sleeps at night, and possibly returns home to a wife and children knowing he is a shameless liar with zero hesitation to mislead the public for the sole sake of protecting his fellow union flock. I now have no choice but to view both instances as disturbing testament to otherwise-innocent individuals committing credibility suicide in the name of corrupt union fraternization. They didn’t need to do this to themselves, but in challenging our credibility, they ended their own. Despite the 20-gauge holes in these detractors’ testimonies, the mainstream media has seen fit to give them the benefit of the doubt. Media Matters, who has apparently decided that rigged elections, voter fraud, and institutionalized racism don’t matter, made their concerns clear in the headline “ James O’Keefe doesn’t show up for his own press conference ,” challenging Trenton Tea Party Leader Daryl Brooks to explain why O’Keefe didn’t show up to a conference O’Keefe never promised to show up to. This, of course, was at the expense of pursuing any investigation into the transgressions of the teachers in suspect, merely ridiculing Brooks for taking O’Keefe’s claims of video authenticity at face value. Out of blind respect for Media Matters, I hereby challenge them to hold Steve Wolmer to the same standard, going equally so far as to ridicule him for taking Ploshnick’s testimony at face value — to the detriment of his own credibility and his own integrity, what with the disclosure of the above video. We live in a society where in the past couple months several gay students have tragically ended their lives as a response to homophobic bullying. As a result, media muckrakers Wanda Sykes and Kathy Griffn have taken it upon themselves to establish a narrative implicating conservatives as indirectly culpable for their deaths. Will the MSM now shrug off evidence of not a student, but a teacher, bullying a student with the worst possible racial epithet, in the name of Proletarians of the World Unite? The coming days will tell us, and this is their moment to prove our expectations wrong. So far, they get a resounding “F.”

See the rest here:
Teachers Unions Gone Wild: The Director’s Commentary

Reuters – New claims for jobless benefits hit a two-month low last week, hinting at some stability in the labor market, while the contraction in factory activity in the Mid-Atlantic region slowed in September.

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Jobless claims at two-month low
(Reuters)

-By Warner Todd Huston So imagine that you are working out of your home or the home of a friend. Say you are helping care for your own developmentally disabled relative or that of another. You are working for a family, not a company, and you are not employed by the state. Then one day you get a letter in the mail that says you have been forced by the state to join a union and henceforth you will be paying dues by having some of your salary removed by the state and given to the union. Does this sound like you are living and working in America? It is if you are a home healthcare worker in the State of Michigan. Because of a special deal made behind the scenes between Mich. Gov. Jennifer Granholm and two unions, the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), Michigan’s 40,000 in-home healthcare workers were unionized by a shady “vote” of less than 20% of these workers in 2006 via a mail-in ballot that most workers had no idea even existed. The forced unionization has been in and out of courts since 2006 and now it is about to go back in again as a group of in-home healthcare workers is suing the state for driving them into a union against their will. The suit has been filed earlier this year by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation on behalf of these workers. The suit challenges a scheme created by Granholm, Michigan Department of Human Services (DHS) officials, and a union front group called “Child Care Providers Together Michigan” (CCPTM) to designate home-care providers who accept state assistance as “state employees” and foist CCPTM union political “representation” on them. CCPTM is an operation run by the United Autoworker (UAW) and American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSME) unions. Under Granholm’s direction, DHS officials created the “Michigan Home Based Child Care Council” to provide the union bosses with an entity to deal with as the “management” of the home child-care providers. Even though only 15 percent of the 40,000 day-care providers voted in the union certification election, the CCPTM union hierarchy was granted monopoly bargaining privileges and political representation of all the home-care providers. This lawsuit is wending its way through Michigan’s court system still and bears watching because if Granholm’s backroom deal with Big Labor is thrown out this could easily effect similar situations in 16 other states.

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Michigan Home Healthcare Workers Sue State Over Forced Unionization

-By Warner Todd Huston The New York Times gave a glowing review of Ana Burger’s career as a most divisive member of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). But how could one be less arrogant and pushy than would seem natural for a union that set out to fashion itself an “international” union? Burger, 59, was supposed to be the heir apparent to former President Andy Stern, himself a petulant and arrogant figure. But it was not to be. When Stern stepped down from heading the SEIU, Burger was passed over for another by the membership. And now she is retiring from her 14-year-long position as secretary-treasurer of the SEIU after 38 years in Big Labor. Apparently, though, Burger retires “frustrated,” as the Times has it. She leaves as the power of Big Labor seems to be on the wane. Fewer unions, fewer members, and fewer political supporters seem to be the immediate future of Big Labor. Right now Big Labor has an entirely outsized influence on Washington because it has a president that has bought and paid for by Big Labor. But this won’t last forever and there are fewer and fewer politicians of lesser status these days willing to be as loudly vocal in support of Big Labor as past pols once were. This is all good for the country, of course. But we aren’t safe from the destructive activities of unions quite yet. A great fight between grasping, anti-democratic, and fiscally disastrous public employees unions still looms ahead. We need to destroy these unions, utterly eliminate them and at the heart of the dark side stands Burger’s still powerful SEIU. If we do our jobs well, Burger will get more “frustrated” still and in the near future, too! So, off you go into retirement, Anna Burger. Let us hope that the sort of power you wielded is also as “frustrated” in the future and you are feeling now.

Originally posted here:
SEIUs Anna Burger to Retire