In another one of Andrew Klavan’s creative tongue in cheek political commentaries, he explains and exposes the real issues and factors regarding public unions in an entertaining and quite informative fashion.
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The supportive arguments regarding the pay, rights, importance and contributions of public sector workers have been presented in a highly over exaggerated, asymmetrical fashion to almost a chimerical degree by the news media, labor bosses, members and Democrats. Meanwhile, the other side of these issues, that is, the one where the interests of the taxpayers and the financial viability of the States are concerned, has received sparse and denigrating reportage.
Ann Coulter’s editorial below simplifies, elucidates and places into perspective the issues involved in this “controversy”. It is quite eye opening particularly since this information is conveniently ignored by the Left.
Six-Figure Bus Drivers & Other Working-Class Heroes
Ann Coulter 03/09/2011
Can we stop acting as if people who work for the government are the heroes of working people?
Fine, we understand that Wisconsin public sector employees like the system that pays them an average of $76,500 per year, with splendiferous benefits, and are fighting like wildcats against any proposed reforms to that system. But it's madness to keep treating people who are promoting their own self-interest as if they are James Meredith walking into the University of Mississippi.
This isn't how we usually view people fighting for their own economic interests.
When Wall Street opposes financial reforms or a tobacco company opposes new cigarette taxes, no one hails them as "working men and women" who "deserve a decent pay and decent retirement." We're not told Wall Street has a "fundamental right" not to be regulated, or tobacco companies promoting their own interests are just trying to "help working people and middle-class people retain a good job in America." People on the other side of the issue aren't said to be "just trying to kick the other guy in the shin and exterminate him."
And yet all that was said by the Democratic governor of Illinois, Pat Quinn, on MSNBC's "Hardball" last week, about government workers fighting to preserve their own Alex Rodriguez-like employment contracts.
Yes, we understand that public sector employees got themselves terrific overtime, holiday, pension and health care deals through buying politicians with their votes and campaign money. But now, responsible elected officials in Wisconsin are trying to balance the budget.
MSNBC is covering the fight in Wisconsin as if it's the 9/11 attack -- and the Republicans are al-Qaida. Its entire prime-time schedule is dedicated to portraying self- interested government employees as if they're Marines taking on the Taliban. The network's Ed Schultz bellows that it is "morally wrong" to oppose the demands of government employees.
Yes, and I guess pornographers are noble when they launch a full-scale offensive against obscenity laws.
Public sector workers are pursuing their own narrow financial interests to the detriment of everyone else in their states. That's fine, but can we stop pretending it's virtuous?
Because of the insane union contracts in Wisconsin, one Madison bus driver, John E. Nelson, was able to make $159,000 in 2009 -- about $100,000 of which in overtime pay. Jackie Gleason didn't make that much playing bus driver Ralph Kramden on "The Honeymooners." Seven bus drivers took home more than $100,000 that year.
When asked about the outrageous overtime pay for bus drivers -- totaling $1.94 million in 2009 alone -- Transit and Parking Commission Chairman Gary Poulson said: "That's the contract."
It's ludicrous to suggest that these union contracts were fairly bargained. Only one side was at the negotiating table. Ordinary people with jobs were not at the meetings where public sector compensation was discussed.
Union hacks play on our heartstrings, weeping about the valuable work government employees do: These are the people who educate our children, run into burning buildings and take dangerous criminals off our streets!
Politicians who do not immediately acquiesce to insane union demands are invariably accused of hating teachers, nurses or cops. In California, this has been standard operating procedure for decades. The voters never seem to catch on.
In 1972, E. Richard Barnes lost his re-election campaign to the California state Assembly after being accused by cops and firefighters of coddling criminals.
In fact, Barnes, a conservative Republican, had one of the toughest records on crime. But he had voted against fringe benefits and better pension benefits for public employees.
Years later, in 2005, Don Perata, Democratic state senator from Oakland, suggested that the legislature reconsider the requirement that 40 percent of the entire state budget be spent on public schools. The teachers' unions instantly plastered his district with fliers calling him anti-education. Perata is a far-left Democrat, who had himself been a teacher for 15 years before entering politics.
Fine, we like teachers, firemen and police officers. We appreciate them. (And for the record, it is statistically more dangerous to be a farmer, fisherman, steelworker or pilot than a cop or fireman. Soldiers also have pretty dangerous jobs, and they don't get to strike.)
Does that mean we should pay them $1 million dollars a year? How about $10 million? After all, these are the people who educate our kids, run into burning buildings and take dangerous criminals off our streets!
Assuming the answer is no, then apparently we're allowed to discuss government workers' compensation -- even though they do important work. As George Bernard Shaw concluded his famous quip (often attributed to Winston Churchill), "Now, we're just negotiating over the price."
Why do public sector employees have absurd overtime rules? Why don't they pay for their own health insurance? Why do they get to retire at age 45 with a guaranteed pension of 65 percent of their last year's pay -- as state police in New Jersey do?
This is asymmetrical warfare. Seven percent of the population cares intensely about public sector union contracts -- and nothing else. The remaining 93 percent of voters can't be bothered to care.
Meanwhile, state after state spirals into bankruptcy.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=42215
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Despite the lying and the intentional misrepresentation of the situations regarding the public unions by Obama, the news media and the labor unions, it it the public unions who are the Goliath seeking to continue to exert their dominance over the States and their taxpayers. Their
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Public Sector Unions Versus the Taxpayer
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The following article elucidates the involvement of the White House and the Democratic Party in supporting the public union in Wisconsin and how their choice to battle here might have been a major blunder that can have a domino effect.
Richard Pollock stated it succinctly and definitively:
“The decision by the Democratic Party and its allies to draw a line in the sand in Wisconsin was the wrong strategy, in the wrong state, at the wrong time, on the wrong issue, and executed in the wrong way.”
Let’s hope that is the Lexington and Concord of a revolution of crucial changes regarding the public unions and their relationship with State governments and to their benefactor taxpayers.
Why Obama and the Dems Blundered in Wisconsin
Richard Pollock February 21, 2011
It is becoming clear that the Wisconsin battle was a strategic political blunder for President Obama and the Democratic Party. The decision by the Democratic Party and its allies to draw a line in the sand in Wisconsin was the wrong strategy, in the wrong state, at the wrong time, on the wrong issue, and executed in the wrong way.
The White House, which for the last two years seemed so tone deaf over health care, jobs, and the economy, may again be displaying a stunning political miscalculation. Unless the Democrats pull the plug on their ill-conceived Wisconsin campaign, the statewide and national backlash now beginning to emerge may continue to resonate all the way to the 2012 presidential elections.
It will take time to unearth exactly who designed and sold the Wisconsin strategy to the president. But what is emerging is that the White House may have developed two strategies for 2011, not one. The first track, clear to us all, was for the president to tack to the right on the national stage, seek the statesmanlike high road, and negotiate deals with national Republicans.
The second strategy, now emerging, was to pick a target outside the beltway that could serve as a broad political narrative, attack it, nationalize it, and use it to rally Obama’s demoralized political base. It was a bold strategy. They chose Madison, Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker’s budget-tightening initiative, and his effort to rein in public employee unions. They further decided to let loose angry union members serve as shock troops. Wisconsin would be the first test case, which would be replicated in other states, including Ohio, Indiana, and Idaho.
The plan seems to have been born both within the war room of the Democratic National Committee and within the Oval Office. The overall coordination for the operation was the remnants of the president’s 2008 political campaign organization, Organizing for America (OFA). The strategy would be launched by the DNC and by the president, who, during the height of the Egyptian crisis, incongruously granted an exclusive interview to a Milwaukee TV reporter over union policy. While Cairo burned, he took time to decry a Wisconsin governor’s effort to rein in the budget and limit union benefits. Shaping the narrative for the attack, he said that Gov. Scott Walker’s effort “seems like more of an assault on unions.” [1]
The Wisconsin political blitzkrieg on Gov. Walker was not a spontaneous eruption. It is now clear that it was a highly organized operation planned in Washington, D.C., to unleash a national counterattack on the gains made by Republicans and Tea Party activists. Getting OFA and the president to act in close coordination was itself no small feat. The plan included busing in thousands of government employees, arranging for Democratic lawmakers to flee to an adjoining state, flying speakers and political organizers into Madison, organizing thousands to leave their jobs in public safety and in classrooms, and staging rallies inside and outside the statehouse. They even enticed sympathetic doctors to draft bogus doctor excuses for government workers.
It all worked like a charm. Except that it struck all the wrong notes and portrayed all the wrong images. There is nothing more unseemly that to see a president serve as healer in Tucson and a political hack in Madison.
For in the end, the images and messages tell the story. The showdown in Madison pits pampered public employees against hard-pressed taxpayers. It portrays union workers as an angry mob against those seeking orderly legislative deliberation. It paints Democratic lawmakers as outlaws on the run, undermining the democratic process. It launched a national debate about the generous salaries and benefits for government workers during a time of economic shortages. And it showcased school teachers who abandoned their children in favor of narrow, partisan political gain.
This is a bad unraveling of a political campaign.
The miscalculation by Democrats is understandable. They still believed Wisconsin was one of the key populist centers for Midwest radicalism. Living on history long past, they envisioned Madison as ground zero for a resurrection of progressivism. It was, after all, the home for progressives’ champions, whose heroes included the La Follette family, led by former Governor Robert La Follette, Sr. The La Follette family has been a radical left Wisconsin political dynasty for the last century. Robert Sr. ran for president under the Progressive Party; his son succeeded him as governor. His other son, Robert, Jr., served in the state Senate for 22 years and led the pre-WWII isolationist movement, a precursor to the present day anti-war movement. In 2010, Doug La Follette was the only surviving Democrat to win statewide office in the November election.
But there also is the lure of Madison, Wisconsin for radicals, many of whom populate the political leadership of the Democratic Party and the unions. Madison was the Midwest home for the far-left counterculture and for the violent, revolutionary Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, an anti-war van loaded with six barrels of explosives detonated outside the Mathematics building [2] [2]at the University of Wisconsin, killing a physicist who was working late at night. The bombing became a sensation for SDS, and overnight the four suspects were put on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. During one of the many Madison political protests, there was a three-day riot that led to the arrest, twice, of a student activist named Paul Soglin. He was later rewarded by being repeatedly elected mayor of Madison [3].
Surely behind this long history of progressive left politics, Democrats and union organizers might have thought Madison would be the first place to strike against the belt-tightening moves of a new, untested Republican governor. A line was drawn in the sand, and Madison would become ground zero in the unions’ effort to turn around their political prospects.
But they perhaps were tone deaf about Madison, just as they have been tone deaf nationally. They forgot that Wisconsin has been turning from blue, to purple, to bright red. In the 1990s it was former Republican Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson who drew another line in the sand over welfare reform. He won, and President Bill Clinton signed into law a sweeping change that sought to reward work over welfare. Thompson also was a champion for school choice, a campaign bitterly fought by the same teachers’ union that abandoned their classrooms last week for partisan gain.
Then came the latest 2010 election in Wisconsin in which there was a statewide sweep for Republicans [4]. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), long considered safe, was defeated. The governor and lieutenant governor swept to power. Today, five of the eight members of the state’s U.S. congressional delegation are Republicans. The sole Democrat in the government is Doug La Follette, who is secretary of state. The legislature is in Republican hands. And the architect of the victorious 2010 Wisconsin campaign was GOP Chairman Reince Priebus.
So the showdown in Wisconsin may assume national proportions. Priebus now will aim a national campaign against President Obama and the Democrats. And the Democrats chose Priebus’ state as their launching pad to smash Republicans.
The Wisconsin battle is not over. But it could be the beginning of a moment of clarity in which a small but entrenched special interest — government workers — is dislodged by fed-up taxpayers. And it could be a contagion that spreads to other states across the country.
UPDATE: Politico’s Ben Smith and Maggie Haberman report this morning [5] on how the unions’ high-risk Wisconsin strategy may come at a potentially steep cost: “Some strategists and labor officials watching the protest conflagration from the outside are beginning to fret that a large-scale defeat in Wisconsin [6] will have a devastating ripple effect, weakening labor state by state throughout the rest of the country.”
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/why-obama-and-the-dems-blundered-in-wisconsin/?singlepage=true
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Despite the rhetoric from unions, Democrat politicians and the far left news media, this is a metaphor for the real situation. The greedy unions are raping the taxpayer with salaries and compensation packages far in excess of comparable jobs in the private sector. And that is still not enough!
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In the following editorial, Michelle Malkin spells out some of the relevant issues regarding the public union strike in Wisconsin. With her trademark incisiveness and cynicism she noted that:
“… the so-called progressives truly believe that bringing American union workers into the 21st century in line with the rest of the work force is tantamount to dictatorship.”
and
“… the so-called progressives truly believe that by walking off their jobs and out of their classrooms, they are "putting children first."”
Clearly, there are a lot more issues in play than most have discussed. For example, how can the public unions even defend their exorbitant and ever escalating salaries and compensation packages which substantially exceed that which their taxpaying benefactors are receiving when their students’ test scores continue to plummet further year after year?
Another issue which Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker hasn’t really articulated is that the legislation that he is defending will do away with tenure of teachers (which is what the union is fighting) and base their employment on merit.
What a novel idea! Keep the good teachers and get rid of the bad ones. Hmm.
Right now the union contract reads that the last teacher hired is the first one fired so that many energetic, educated, and enthusiastic younger teachers who may relate well to the students and their parents are axed instead of some of the old dead wood, teachers far past their prime who shouldn’t be teaching any longer but who have been granted tenure.
In Wisconsin, It's The Unions Vs. Democracy
Michelle Malkin 02/18/2011
Welcome to the reckoning. We have met the fiscal apocalypse, and it is smack dab in the middle of the heartland.
As Wisconsin goes, so goes the nation. Let us pray it does not go the way of the decrepit welfare states of the European Union.
The lowdown: State government workers in the Badger State pay piddling amounts for generous taxpayer-subsidized health benefits.
Faced with a $3.6 billion budget hole and a state constitutional ban on running a deficit, new GOP Gov. Scott Walker wants public unions to pony up a little more.
He has proposed raising the public employee share of health insurance premiums from less than 5% to 12.4%. He is also pushing for state workers to cover half of their pension contributions.
To spare taxpayers the soaring costs of byzantine union-negotiated work rules, he would rein in Big Labor's collective bargaining power to cover only wages unless approved at the ballot box.
As the free-market MacIver Institute in Wisconsin points out, the benefits concessions Walker is asking public union workers to make would still maintain their health insurance contribution rates at the second-lowest among Midwest states for family coverage.
Moreover, a new analysis by benefits think tank HCTrends shows that the new rate "would also be less than the employee contributions required at 85 percent of large Milwaukee-area employers."
Obama Speaks Up
This modest call for shared sacrifice has triggered the wrath of the White House-Big Labor-Michael Moore axis. On Thursday, President Obama lamented the "assault on unions."
AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union bosses dubbed Walker the "Mubarak of the Midwest," while their minions toted posters of Walker's face superimposed on Hitler's.
Moore goaded thousands of striking union protesters to "shut down" the "new Cairo" while the state's Democratic legislators bailed on floor debate over the union reform package.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan spurned the opportunity to condemn thousands of Wisconsin public school teachers for lying about being "sick" and shutting down at least eight school districts across the state to attend Capitol protests (many of whom dragged their students on a social justice field trip with them).
Instead, Duncan defended teachers for "doing probably the most important work in society." Only striking government teachers could win federal praise for not doing their jobs.
Yes, the so-called progressives truly believe that bringing American union workers into the 21st century in line with the rest of the work force is tantamount to dictatorship.
Yes, the so-called progressives truly believe that by walking off their jobs and out of their classrooms, they are "putting children first."
If ever there was proof that public unions no longer work in the public interest, this is it.
Big Labor dragoons workers into exclusive representation agreements, forces them to pay compulsory dues that fatten Democratic political coffers and then has the chutzpah to cast itself as an Egyptian-style "freedom" and "human rights" movement.
Meanwhile, union leaders elsewhere are quietly forcing their low-wage members to share the sacrifice in order to preserve teetering health funds.
In New York state, Skidmore College campus janitors, dining service workers and other maintenance employees received late notice from the SEIU that 4.15% of their gross earnings will now be deducted from their paychecks to cover the cost of the health plan provided through the behemoth 1199 SEIU Greater New York Benefit Fund. (If the name sounds familiar, it's because this is one of several privileged SEIU affiliates that has received an ObamaCare waiver.)
These workers are forced to join the union in order to preserve their jobs, and unlike non-union workers, they are locked into a single health plan.
The SEIU has now decreed that they must pay new fees to include spouses on their plans and has hiked employee co-pays for doctor visits and prescription drugs.
What's necessary for New York union workers is necessary for Wisconsin union workers — and for the rest of the protected union-worker class in bankrupt and near-bankrupt states across America.
The "persuasion of power" so ruthlessly and recklessly exercised by the SEIU and its thuggish allies must be broken by the moral courage of fiscal discipline.
It's now or never.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/563689/201102181848/In-Wisconsin-Its-The-Unions-Vs-Democracy.aspx
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