|
Dear Eric,
Ever wonder why our battle to eliminate waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government is so difficult? [Note: I've known about government thieves for half a century] Mallory Factor's shocking new exposé -- SHADOWBOSSES -- answers that question definitively by showing us how government employee unions are driving up costs for taxpayers, siphoning off funds needed for essential services, and impeding those policymakers who sincerely want to cut the size and scope of government.
SHADOWBOSSES will show you that the biggest challenges of our time -- our ballooning national debt, our states' ruinous finances, and bloated bureaucracies at all levels of government -- are tied up with the growth of government unions and the resulting growth of big government. [Note: Read this and watch the videos at the end.]
This is a critically important book that will give you the facts you need to fight government waste and excess. I urge you to order SHADOWBOSSES now.
Sincerely,
Thomas A. Schatz
President, CAGW
During 125 years CONgresses, Presidents, and the Courts have created an impenetrable, faceless, unaccountable bureaucracy whereby almost any violation or infringement of the Constitution can occur without eventually isolating the bureaucrat(s) ultimately responsible for the failure. The bureaucracies of hundreds of agencies are NEVER ELIMINATED and NEVER REDUCED in size even if the original purpose is now obsolete!
The PRIMARY cause of the government agenda to effectively confiscate guns (can't repeal 2nd Amendment) with various kinds of CONTROL (background checks, national registration, etc.) is the socio-progressive mindset of many elected officials (Sen. Chuckie Shoeshiner for one) and their lackeys, the permanent bureaucrats who remain after elections, the government employees who pay forced-dues to UNIONS. The bigger government gets, the more FORCEFUL control government can exert on its citizens. After all, government bureaucrats need something to do on the job besides playing games, viewing porn on their computers, or talking on the phone.
BIG government continues to get bigger almost ENTIRELY because government employee unions implicitly threaten elected officials into a quid-pro-quo deal, i.e. unions will donate their union's dues to candidates who support the expansion of government. Expansion includes higher pay, automatic raises, automatic promotions, and more new hires to expand the union's dues revenue. Examples of recent expansions are Homeland Security (Big Brother), the TSA, the NSA's new Utah Data Center and ObamaCare's 16,000 new IRS employees who, in the end, will be destructive of our civil rights in their futile attempt to enforce the 'individual mandate' just as the DEA has been and is incapable and unable to stop 'illegal' drug trafficking.
Bureaucracies are ineffective and inept because 1/2 to 2/3 of union employees were hired to do 'make-work' jobs, i.e. they're deadweight! The organization of bureaucracies is completely unmanageable and employees are COMPLETELY UNACCOUNTABLE. A goverment-union employee cannot be fired, reprimanded, admonished, or retrained without the direct and threatening involvement of the union. Action against a government employee that does not meet with union approval can cause 'work slow-downs' and other disruptive work environment problems. The end result might be that the union provides financial support for the opposing candidates in the next election especially if those candidate(s) make an under-the-table deal with the union for union bucks. THIS KIND OF UNION ACTIVITY HAS DESTROYED AND CONTINUES TO DESTROY COMPANIES IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR.
Only the government can tolerate this employee insubordination because the government is supported by the TAXPAYER (and the Federal Reserve)! If the Taxpayer won't pay higher taxes (pay-check extraction), then CONgress figures new, sneakier, and more complex means of stealing from citizens or the Fed floods the economy with more money out-of-thin-air to fund these expansions. Government will never go out of business except taxpayer money will disproportionately be redistributed to union workers unless genuinely insulated elected officials can be found who will defund and/or eliminate unnecessary departments/agencies and reduce the entire government to the barest, most efficient form. Government can no longer be a workfare employer of last resort.
Government Employee Unions contribute their forced-dues (compulsory as a condition of employment) to Democrat and sympathetic Republican candidates. The same union members, the staff of elected Democrats and Republicans sit at the contract negotiation table where excessive salaries (40% higher than private sector) and lavish benefit packages (pensions that pay $100-200K a year at retirement) plus multiple sick days, holidays, and vacation days are "negotiated". If any candidate or incumbent stands up against a specific proposal to add (or increase an existing) agency or generally stands up to cut goverment, all of the financial resources of the unions are used in the next election to defeat the incumbent or a challenging opponent who espouses any government cutting policy. Does anyone see the conflict-of-interest?
I estimate that one-third to one-half of government employees do productive work for only two hours a day. The net result is that GOVERNMENT MUST GROW! In the book Shadowbosses, the author writes that their are only two groups of people in the USA --- Pie-makers and Pie-eaters or Taxpayers and Taxreceivers. In the private sector, most unions are careful not to demand too much for fear of driving their employer into bankruptcy or out of business entirely. In the public sector, the Pie-eaters expand their government gravy train endlessly at will and the Federal reserve and the Pie-makers pay for the never-ending government expansion. More and more union members are hired every year to continue this de facto corruption.
FROM Shadowbosses:
"The percentage of private sector workers in unions has been declining since the 1950s, both because unionized businesses have been failing and because workers in new businesses don't choose to unionize. Basically, private sector unions have been driving themselves out of business for sixty years."
"Government employee unions are a totally different animal. Government employee unions use politics as the central plank of their business plans --- unlike private sector unions, which have far less need for politics to maintain their bottom line."
"Then, these unions keep our government inefficient by preventing it from reorganizing, streamlining, and privatizing government services, because more efficient government would mean less union dues revenue. There will be a tipping point when our government gets so big that the last remaining taxpayers in America will no longer be able to support the enormous cost of running our government. And we are rapidly approaching this point."
|
|
Here is a breakdown of the top 10 most outrageous Big Labor paybacks of the Obama administration:
- Hiding union boss expenditures. Obama started his term strong. Shortly after getting elected, Obama appointed forced-unionism partisan Hilda Solis to run the Department of Labor. Solis, in combination with numerous Obama executive orders, promptly rolled back any (albeit modest) progress in union boss transparency and disclosure that had been made the prior eight years. Now it is even more difficult for workers to know where their forced dues dollars are being spent.
- Neutering the watchdog. Obama’s first budget slashed funding for the Office of Labor and Management Standards (OLMS), the federal agency that enforces union disclosure laws. It’s one of the few areas of the budget that Obama has proposed cutting.
- Fox guarding the henhouse. Obama appointed union lawyer Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that administers and enforces federal labor law. Becker was never confirmed by the U.S. Senate because of bipartisan opposition to his nomination. Obama appointed him to the NLRB via recess appointment.
- Throwing away election ballots. Becker was a key vote in striking down any protections workers had against card-check union organizing drives, despite the fact that he previously participated as a union lawyer in the very case that established those worker protections. These limited protections allowed workers to petition the NLRB for a secret ballot election within 45 days of a coercive card-check union organizing campaign. Ballots from any pending elections to remove a union after a card check were chucked into the trash. This decision directly affected thousands of workers such as Barbara Ivey, a Kaiser IT department employee in Washington State who is now stuck under Service Employees International Union (SEIU) boss control for at least two years.
- Ambushing workers. The Obama NLRB pushed new rules to make union organizing campaigns as one-sided as possible by ambushing workers into union membership and dues payments. The new rules dramatically shortened the time frame individual workers have to share truthful information with their coworkers about the adverse effects of unionization and to hear their employers’ views on the subject.
- Compelling employers to promote unionism. The Obama NLRB pushed new rules requiring job providers to post pro-union notices in their facilities. Tellingly, no new requirement was made for unions to post notices informing workers of their right to refrain from union activities or throw out an unwanted union.
- Persecuting job providers. Obama-appointed NLRB Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon used the federal agency to punish Boeing for locating production of its 787 Dreamliner jets in right-to-work South Carolina over non-right-to-work Washington State. The frivolous persecution of Boeing eventually fizzled, but only after the company guaranteed future jobs would go to Washington State, where union bosses get to collect forced dues as a condition of employment.
- Constitution out on “recess.” Earlier this year, Obama subverted the U.S. Constitution and installed two pro-forced unionism lackeys onto the NLRB as “recess” appointments even though the U.S. Senate was not in recess. Not surprisingly, the NLRB continues to churn out lopsided decisions in favor of union bosses.
- Runaway (unionism) train. Obama’s appointments to the National Mediation Board (NMB), the federal agency that administers labor law in the railway and airline industries, changed the election procedures of unions organizing under the Railway Labor Act (RLA). The two Obama-appointed NMB members who approved the new rule, Harry Hoglander and Linda Puchala, are former union officials with the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) and Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) unions, respectively. Both unions are a major part of an American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) union-led coalition that urged the three-member board to discard its election policy of 75 years. The new procedure stacks the deck in favor of unionization by granting a union monopoly bargaining power over railway or airline industry workers if the union acquires support from just a bare majority of eligible workers in an election, no matter how few actually vote. This means that a small bloc of workers could force union boss “representation” on the whole group rather than having a true majority of all workers deciding for themselves.
- Obamacare(s) for union bosses. The effects of Obama’s pro-forced unionism agenda will be felt long after his stay in the White House ends. Obamacare is full of sweetheart deals aimed at placating union bosses. For example, nonunion medical facilities are basically ineligible to participate in Obamacare’s professional-development grant program for healthcare workers. The funds in this program must be administered jointly with a labor organization — much like the Department of Labor’s grants for construction apprenticeship programs, which have turned into a cash cow for construction industry union officials on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Obamacare is full of these sorts of provisions — provisions that further unionize the healthcare industry.
|
Mark Mix is the president of National Right to Work.
The 2012 Story of Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO union boss
Dear Eric,
"If I were advising a candidate, I would advise him or her very strongly that this is not someone you want to embrace."
Former federal prosecutor Charles LaBella's warning about AFL-CIO union boss Richard Trumka before the Democrats' national convention in 2000 fell on deaf ears -- and not much has changed a dozen years later.
You see, in 1999 Trumka was implicated in a money laundering scheme during his tenure as treasurer of the AFL-CIO.
As the Wall Street Journal explained, "Trumka has taken the Fifth Amendment both before a Congressional committee and court-appointed election monitor, but remains in office despite a 40-year old AFL-CIO rule calling for removing of officials taking such refuge."
A few years earlier, Trumka and other United Mineworkers union bosses were charged in a $27 million wrongful death suit by the widow of Eddie York, a nonunion contractor who was shot in the back of the head and killed while leaving a worksite near a UMW strike.
After fighting the suit intensely for four years, UMW lawyers settled suddenly in 1997 -- just two days after the judge in the case ruled evidence in the criminal trial would be admitted.
Despite this ugly history of violence and corruption, Trumka is now top dog at the nation's largest union umbrella organization. And on Tuesday night, Trumka watched this year's DNC in Vice President Joe Biden's private suite.
A day later, Trumka spoke to the entire convention.
It's no wonder Big Labor is betting big on Barack Obama once again this year.
Obama Labor Board rulings, executive orders, and even Obamacare have all expanded union-boss power over American workers.
And the Democrats' 2012 platform is chock-full of promises to oppose Right to Work laws, government-sector monopoly bargaining reforms, and laws to protect workers' right to a secret ballot in unionization campaigns.
Of course, while Richard Trumka and the Obama Administration continue to embrace each other, rank-and-file workers forced to pay union fees don't always feel the same way.
Take Dylan McHenry, a Ford technician in Minnesota who found out that Teamster Local 974 union officials funneled some of his forced fees into the Teamster hierarchy's political action committee –- a clear violation of federal law.
Even worse, the NLRB regional office in Minneapolis is allowing them to get away with it. With free legal aid from National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys, McHenry has filed an appeal.
As union bosses unleash another Billion Dollar political spending blitz, I expect our offices to be flooded with calls from victimized workers in cases just like this one.
No other nationwide organization is poised to spring into action immediately to stop Big Labor's illegal use of forced-dues cash to advance its political agenda.
That's why I hope you'll consider chipping in with a tax-deductible contribution of $10 or more right away.
Sincerely,
Mark Mix
|
|
