I haven’t written in a while because so much has been going on in my own life and especially, in the world, I just couldn’t figure out what would make more sense to write about. I sat down several times to write about the Tucson AZ shootings and the outrageous accusations made by liberals, especially in the press, attempting to link the murderous actions of that lunatic Loughner to conservative political speech, all while excusing by way of omission the hate speech and lies offered up minute-by-minute by rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth liberals. But I didn’t need to – conservatives have done a spectacular job of derailing this worse than usual liberal smear job, especially Michelle Malkin. I recommend that everyone visit her website, http://www.blogger.com/www.michellemalkin.com.
A couple of days ago something caught my eye which hasn’t received a lot of media attention so I thought I’d throw in my two cents worth on this one. It’s an article written for the Detroit News by James P. Hoffa, son of Teamsters Union heavy man Jimmy Hoffa, titled “American Ills Not Caused by Unions.”
I take exception immediately to just the title. I often find myself wondering about liberals/socialists/modernists: “Is this one of the stupid or gullible ones, or is this one of the clever mendacious types?” There are no in betweens; liberals are either ignorant or they are liars, or both.
His title is a ploy, a sophism, typically employed by liberals, whereby a statement is made to defend a non-existent accusation, thereby making it seem as though his adversaries are treating him or his cause unfairly. This is precisely why the stupid liberal thinks that good conservatives are a fringe group of extremists. Has anyone ever said that unions are responsible for America’s ills? Not to my knowledge. I would posit that the modern day union is partly responsible for some of America’s ills, but that for the most part unions are a symptom of a far greater ill. And I think Hoffa knows this; he knows that that is the real criticism. His article begins:
“The 19th-century robber baron Jay Gould once said, ‘I can hire half the working class to shoot the other half.’ Gould's vision of class warfare is being played out today in the shameful attacks on public employees.”
“These attacks are secretly financed and planned by modern-day Jay Goulds who aim to keep their own taxes low.”
“Some vastly powerful corporations and billionaires want to cripple all unions and turn America into a low-wage banana republic.”
Hoffa, true to his name, paints the modern day union as the saving grace of the downtrodden worker, and anyone or any entity that disagrees is “powerful” and “eeeevillll!” Anyone who knows anything about unions these days can tell you that the public unions deprive taxpayers and under-perform. How many hundreds of billions of dollars of state deficits are out there purely because of the ridiculous sweetheart deals made between liberal Democrat state legislators and governors (like Jerry Brown of California) and public unions? Talk about Robber Barons! How about those (unfunded) pension plans offered to automotive workers, teachers, miners, etc., etc. There is no money to pay for them! So now it falls to the taxpayers, some of whom hadn’t been born when these slimy backroom deals were made? Say again? That’s fair? Hoffa goes on:
“They're succeeding. Across the country, new governors and new legislatures are demanding cuts to jobs, pensions and concessions from public employee unions. Their demands are nothing more than payback for the billions of dollars that the ultra-rich have poured into political campaigns.”
“Scapegoating public employees has almost become a sport. In New York City, a city councilman accused sanitation workers of a deliberate slowdown in removing snow during the Christmas blizzard. It turned out that slow snow removal was actually caused by the layoffs of 400 workers and the failure to call a snow emergency quickly enough.”
Gee whiz! What caused the layoffs of 400 workers? It wouldn’t have anything to do with New York City’s debt crisis, would it? It wouldn’t have anything to do with the union’s failure to accept renegotiated contracts to help save those 400 jobs….would it? And by the way, in that now famous video of the union employee who carelessly tried to free a snow plow despite repeatedly smashing into an SUV… did he do that because 400 workers got laid off too? How come 400 employees were laid off, but he didn’t get fired for that? Oh yeah – he’s in a union that protects bad employees.
“In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich wants to ban collective bargaining for public employee unions and get rid of the prevailing wage.”
As well he should! These people are paid by the taxpayers who do not get to directly supervise them. That’s why the quality of work by unions usually sucks!
“In Wisconsin, Scott Walker suggests banishing unions for government workers. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said he won cooperation from unions because he threatened "to take a bat out and hit you."
“Christie's threat isn't funny to anyone who remembers the Memphis sanitation strike in 1968. All the workers wanted was to earn above-starvation wages and to be respected as human beings. Peaceful workers were gassed, dragged, arrested and threatened by armed National Guardsmen in tanks.”
Another sophism - that people didn’t respect the sanitation workers as human beings. These peaceful workers shut down sanitation work which affected the entire city – poor included. The bottom line, as with any employee anywhere, is that they don’t need the power of collective bargaining since they already possess the power of individual bargaining; if you don’t like your job or your pay you are free to seek employment elsewhere.
“Only after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed while in Memphis supporting the struggle did city officials come to their senses and recognize Local 1733 of AFSCME as the bargaining representative for the sanitation workers. Just think where those workers would be today without a union.”
Hoffa is just full of sophisms! He makes it sound as if King Jr. was assassinated because he supported the strikers! Nowhere has it ever been suggested that this was the case. By trying to connect the two, Hoffa is engaging in the worst sort of opportunism. Rather than being the savior of poor workers, unions stifle and constrain the natural human ambitions and individualism that allow us to rise above the economic and cultural status in which we are born. I can imagine where those sanitation workers might be today – they might have decided to work elsewhere for better pay; they might have pursued better educations and earned degrees with substantial bargaining power.
“It's time for a reality check. Government employees did not blow a hole in any state budget, including Michigan. Economist Dean Baker points out that shortfalls were almost entirely caused by the recession. ‘If revenue had increased in step with normal growth (2.4 percent real growth, plus inflation), state and local governments would have had an additional $290 billion since the start of the downturn,’ Baker notes.”
Another fallacious argument. Notice how Hoffa shifts focus from all unions to simple government employees. No one denies the recession deeply affected state budgets. The real problem is why the recession affected state budgets so deeply. Furthermore the rise in the numbers of government employees increased dramatically since the recession. Since Barack Obama took office there has been an increase of over 200, 000 government employees and that number is bound to go up to facilitate new legislation such as “Obamacare.” The real issue here is that our government, at the federal, state and municipal levels is spending too much money on entitlement programs. Social Security, Medicare and other welfare programs account for over half of the yearly federal budget. Medicaid is crippling the states. Now throw in lifelong pension plans for union employees and not only are states out of money, they are in a major debt crisis. State budgets need to be recession-proofed, and one way to do this is to cancel all the sweetheart deals created between unions and their corrupt and complicit partners within the Democrat political machine. One last bit of B.S.:
“It's also important to remember, as economist Robert Reich points out, that the typical public employee's pension is only $19,000 a year.”
Robert Reich is one of those “economists” who provides anecdotal evidence to people like Hoffa so that these sophisms can be created in the first place. Notice that lifelong healthcare, at taxpayer expense, for these employees is purposefully not mentioned. The “typical” public employee pension is an average of all the pensions. So those who retired 30 years ago or longer when a pension of $17,000.00 a year with lifelong healthcare was considered decent are included. Hoffa fails to mention what the average will be in say, oh, 10 years.
It isn’t just that unions are bad by the way. It’s the tactics they use. Just today it has been reported that a teacher’s union in Wisconsin has resorted to some outrageous methods in a collective bargaining disagreement there. Click the link to watch some video – but the fact is some teachers are pulling students out of class to have them join a protest against the governor. This is being done without the consent or knowledge of the kids’ parents, and as the video shows, the kids don’t even know for what they are protesting! Looks a lot like the majority of Obama 2008 supporters to me. No, America's ills may not be caused by unions; they are caused by socialists like Hoffa who turn the natural social order upside down in order to acquire peer recognition, wealth and power.
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