by Steven Malanga, City Journal Spring 2010
The camera focuses on an official of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), California’s largest public-employee union, sitting in a legislative chamber and speaking into a microphone. “We helped to get you into office, and we got a good memory,” she says matter-of-factly to the elected officials outside the shot. “Come November, if you don’t back our program, we’ll get you out of office
The video has become a sensation among California taxpayer groups for its vivid depiction of the audacious power that public-sector unions wield in their state. The unions’ political triumphs have molded a California in which government workers thrive at the expense of a struggling private sector. The state’s public school teachers are the highest-paid in the nation. Its prison guards can easily earn six-figure salaries. State workers routinely retire at 55 with pensions higher than their base pay for most of their working life. Meanwhile, what was once the most prosperous state now suffers from an unemployment rate far steeper than the nation’s and a flood of firms and jobs escaping high taxes and stifling regulations. This toxic combination—high public-sector employee costs and sagging economic fortunes—has produced recurring budget crises in Sacramento and in virtually every municipality in the state.
How public employees became members of the elite class in a declining California offers a cautionary tale to the rest of the country, where the same process is happening in slower motion. The story starts half a century ago, when California public workers won bargaining rights and quickly learned how to elect their own bosses—that is, sympathetic politicians who would grant them outsize pay and benefits in exchange for their support. Over time, the unions have turned the state’s politics completely in their favor. The result: unaffordable benefits for civil servants; fiscal chaos in Sacramento and in cities and towns across the state; and angry taxpayers finally confronting the unionized masters of California’s unsustainable government.
Read the rest here: www.city-journal.org
ACORN
04/19/2010
02/25/2010
Was the Stimulus a Jobs Bill, or Special Interest Spending? | The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.
Was the stimulus (A) a job creation bill or, (B) a liberal spending wish list? A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) study suggests that option B is closer to the truth. Small wonder it did not bring unemployment down.
Obama publicly argued that America needed the $862 billion bill to create jobs and singled out “green job” spending as the key to an economic recovery. The stimulus itself, however, looked a lot like not letting “a good crisis go to waste” and pouring public money at liberal special interests.
Remember all the green jobs weatherizing homes that Obama said the stimulus would fund? Because Obama would not waive regulations that benefit unions the Department of Energy has weatherized just 1 out of every 65 homes they planned to.
The Davis-Bacon Act (DBA) requires contractors on all federal construction projects to pay “prevailing wages.” In theory, those prevailing wages are supposed to be market wages. In practice, the Department of Labor uses slow, error-ridden, and unscientific methods to estimate them. As a result Davis-Bacon rates typically echo union wage scales: an average of 22 percent above market wages. By law the government hires four construction workers for the price of five.
Unions love this. No one can charge taxpayers less than they do. Jobs that would otherwise go to nonunion workers instead go to them at wages no one else would pay.
02/24/2010
ACORN: We're Still Around ... But Maybe Not For Long
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and John Brennan, Barack Hussein Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, spoke at the National Governors Association’s Special Committee on Homeland Security and Public Safety in Washington last SundayDepartment of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and John Brennan, Barack Hussein Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, spoke at the National Governors Association’s Special Committee on Homeland Security and Public Safety in Washington last Sunday
Image by David Bugnon (http://twitpic.com/photos/davidbugnon)
ACORN is pushing back against reports that it's on the verge of collapse as a national organization, in the wake of last year's hidden camera scandal. But it's not making any long-term predictions about its future.
Yesterday, City Hall News of New York City reported that ACORN "has been forced to suspend most operations as of today." It also reported that the organization's New York branch had morphed into a new group, New York Communities for Change, but was still being led by many of the same people as previously. The California branch of ACORN also recently split off.
In an interview with TPMmuckraker, Kevin Whelan, a spokesman for the national ACORN group, pushed back somewhat against the notion that the national organization is disintegrating. "Bertha Lewis is still the CEO, ACORN still has members across the country," said Whalen.
But he suggested that other local chapters may soon follow New York and California out the door. "I wouldn't be surprised if there are some other additional groups that split off," said Whelan, declining to offer specifics.
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