Unions: Dupes, Thugs, and Politicians

By Alan Caruba

Growing up in New Jersey and having been a journalist here, my memory of news about unions in the Garden and Empire States is that of headlines concerning the indictment and sentencing of various union chiefs and their underlings.

The alignment between unions and the Mafia is so well known it has been the subject of movies such as “On the Waterfront”, “The Godfather”, “Goodfellas” and “Casino.” To this day the rumor persists that Jimmy Hoffa is buried somewhere between the goalposts of Giants stadium in the Meadowlands.

As events unfold in the very progressive capital of Wisconsin, Madison, the public is being treated to the way unions have very nearly always functioned. Intimidation has been their stock in trade with campaign contributions running a close second. We are watching an epic battle between Wisconsin voters and entrenched, self-serving unions.

In his 2006 book, “Solidarity for Sale: How Corruption Destroyed the Labor Movement and Undermined America’s Promise”, Robert Finch, a former labor organizer and later a faculty member at Cornell and New York University, told the story of how and why unions were and are rotten to the core.

Finch’s book reads like a Hollywood movie script, replete with the names of Mafia families like that of New Jersey’s Vito Genevese and a host of others throughout the nation.

“Corruption,” says Finch “had been built into the labor movement from its very inception.” The politicians who benefited from union support have always done their best to ignore “five generations of racketeering, Mafia rule, bribery and extortion, job selling, benefit fund theft, and simple thievery, going back to the days of the early-twentieth-century labor czars.” This dates back as well to the creation of the National Labor Relations Board created by Congress in 1935. It is another legacy of the FDR years that have left the nation on the brink of bankruptcy.

Suffice to say that the National Labor Relations Board is a useless, allegedly “independent” government entity, often looking with favor on the union’s unceasing demands. Among the issues conservatives want to thwart are card check regulations to enhance union power. Reportedly, Republicans have cut $50 million from the NRLB’s budget as a part of the effort to cut the bloated Obama budget.

Finch notes that “In 1986, the President’s Commission on Organized Crime had identified the four most mobbed-up unions; the Teamsters, the Laborers, the Hotel and Restaurant Workers, and the East Coast Longshoremen. The close relationship between labor unions and the Democratic Party is too often obscured by the mainstream media. “According to the Center for Responsible Politics”, Finch noted, “seven of the top ten campaign contributors in the last decade are not Fortune 500 corporations. They’re AFL-CIO unions.”

Little wonder that public service union members are howling for the head of Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker or that several Wisconsin Democrat politicians have fled to Illinois to avoid debating his proposals. His demand that unions forego collective bargaining rights is, in fact, not that unusual. Twenty-two States have curbed union power with “right to work” legislation.

Perhaps the greatest error regarding the union movement came in 1962 when President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order to grant all federal government employees the right to unionize and collectively bargain with departments and agencies. This accounts for the rise in power of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) with its 1.8 million members and the deceptively named National Education Association (NEA), a union, the largest in the nation. It has 3.2 million members and employs more than 550 staff.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the NEA is responsible for the horrid test scores of U.S. students throughout the nation despite their incessant demands for higher wages, along with healthcare and pension programs well in excess of the private sector. Since the 1960s, they have been at the heart of the deteriorating condition of education in America. A four-part series on this topic is posted on the website of The National Anxiety Center which I founded in 1990.

Leading the SEIU is Andy Stern whose many visits to the White House since Obama was elected have become legendary. His rise in the union began with organizing hundreds of thousands of home care and day care workers. Despite unionizing, their pay has never really improved. “The SEIU,” Finch noted, “is now the largest AFL-CIO union.”

During his campaign and since, President Obama has never made any secret of how beholden he is to the SEIU and the union movement that contributed millions toward his election. It should come as no surprise that he has spoken up regarding the Wisconsin riots on the side of the union members. This ignores the fact that a majority of Wisconsin voters put the Governor in office, along with giving political power to Republicans there. They campaigned on the very issues the unions are protesting against.

Wisconsin, like other States that are essentially broke, must win the struggle to reduce the taxpayer burden that government worker and public sector unions represent.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

We're Broke. Now What?

By Alan Caruba

“Let’s get real. The U.S. is bankrupt. Neither spending more nor taxing less will help the country pay its bills.” So said Laurence Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University, in a commentary on Bloomberg.com, August 10.

His solution was to “radically simplify its tax, health-care, retirement and financial systems, each of which is a complete mess.” Unmentioned is the fact that it has taken since 1913 when the income tax was introduced to reach this point.

Social security and Medicare are “social justice” programs which, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were created to protect people against themselves, encouraging dependency on the federal government instead of expecting personal responsibility. They have managed to drain the national treasury.

Social justice is one of those terms like “progressive” designed to hide the implementation of programs that can literally be found in the Communist Manifesto along with the abolition of property rights and other nasty “solutions” to the fact that life is not fair.

I recommend you get a subscription to The Heartland Institute’s Budget & Tax News monthly publication because it is one of the best ways I know to gain a quick insight to the real state of the economy. The August edition has some revealing headlines.

“Report Fuels Effort to Double Michigan’s Gas Tax”
“Proposed Washington State Income Tax Not Deductible, Attorney General Says”
“Oregon Raises Taxes, But Budget Situation Worsens”
“Illinois Lawmakers OK Budget Billions Out of Balance”
“Is the Pensions Bill Just a Bailout?”
“North Carolina Doubles Tax Reviews of Large Families”

One article, however, explains why most, but not all States are broke. “In Indiana, as Revenue Drops, So Does Spending.” What a novel idea. If you don’t take in enough money, you cut government spending.

Its author, Steve Stanek, a research fellow at The Heartland Institute, is the editor of Budget & Tax News. “Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) who took office in 2005, insists on fiscal discipline” and his enforcer is Christopher Ruhl, the Indiana Budget Director.”

While President Obama has complained from the day he took office that it’s all Bush’s fault, when Gov. Daniels took office he inherited a $800 million deficit. By dramatically reducing spending, the State turned a deficit into a $1.8 billion surplus. Unfortunately, Congress, even under the Bush administration, have not followed suit.

The Keynesian notion that a government can spend its way out of a deficit is, one hopes, now dead. The Roosevelt administration embraced Keynes, a British economist, throughout the 1930s and the result was the Great Depression.

One reason Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey (R) is now a rock star is because, on taking office, he confronted the state’s power teacher’s union and began to cut the budget to reduce an $8 billion deficit. What many Americans are only now realizing is that it has been the civil service unions that have been draining state and local budgets thanks to unrealistic salaries along with healthcare and pension benefits.

The Democrat Party has successfully portrayed the Republican Party as wanting nothing more than to put widows, orphans, and all others out on the street. It is pure demagoguery and it reflects the torrent of lies President Obama told throughout his campaign and since his election.

Kotlikoff explained why most Americans have been unaware of how bad the situation was. “Based on the Congressional Budget Office’s data, I calculate a fiscal gap of $202 trillion, which is more than 15 times the official debt.“

“This gargantuan discrepancy between our ‘official’ debt and our actual net indebtedness isn’t surprising. It reflects what economists call the labeling problem. Congress has been very careful over the years to label most of its liabilities ‘unofficial’ to keep them off the books and far into the future.”

Well, guess what? The future has arrived and, for a generation or two of Americans, unless the debt is dramatically reduced, they will be little more than slaves of the federal government who exist to pay off all the borrowing and all the imploding social justice programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

I frankly have zero faith that either the Democrats or Republicans, whoever is in Congress after the midterm elections, will do much more than nibble around the edges of the fiscal crisis.

As for the States, they are more likely to take some action, but even then you will have to cross your fingers. A good start would be the forced renegotiation of civil service contracts.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Putting the Garden State on a Diet

By Alan Caruba

The Greens and the teachers in New Jersey are in a state (no pun intended) of panic. Under a succession of liberal Democrat governors, they have been able to get away with all manner of greed and foolishness, but Republican Governor Chris Christie, a former U.S. prosecutor, has as little patience with them as he did with corrupt politicians who he sent to jail with regularity.

I dare say, if every governor followed his example, the States would benefit from trimmed budgets, reductions in their regulatory mess, and confiscatory public service unions brought to heel.

The latest news from the Garden State is Gov. Christie’s move to take $65 million, the entire allocation, from the state’s global warming fund and apply it to reducing the state’s $10 billion deficit. He also took $5.9 million from the toxic waste site cleanup program.

Since there is no global warming why throw $65 million at something that does not exist? As for toxic waste site cleanups, they are another Environmental Protection Agency boondoggle that is often based on finding little of anything toxic while at the same time rendering countless sites too costly for any new development and thus new jobs or housing.

It just keeps getting better. The State’s Department of Environmental Protection has a proposed $380.6 million budget and Gov. Christie is likely thinking of trimming some of its 1,300 state employees. To save another $1.4 million, their workweek would be reduced from 40 hours to 35 hours. It is doubtful that many New Jerseyeans will be in the streets protesting.

New Jersey has been very Green for a long time. Between 1995 and 2009, the legislature and former governors approved 450 bills to increase the powers of the DEP. Ironically, the number of its employees decreased from 3,700 to 2,995. Its staff is assigned to 57 commissions, 42 “extraneous” bodies, and 30 federal external or national non-profit boards! All contribute in one way or another to increased public funding; often of dubious programs.

The New Jersey Audubon Society, the State’s leading conservation organization, just joined forces with the National Wildlife Federation to get more power with which to demand that every species roaming the state be protected. It’s not like the State isn’t already overrun by huge flocks of federally protected Canada geese, marauding herds of white-tailed deer, black bears that wander into populated areas, coyotes, wild turkeys, and a host of other critters constantly in need of culling.

The other group currently quaking in its boots is the State’s teachers and school administrators. Not far behind are the rest of the civil service union members. These civil servants and their unions have managed to run up huge pension and healthcare benefits that make the private sector look puny by comparison.

The State’s schools, despite chronic budget problems, have been on a hiring spree. As a recent New York Post article reported, “Since 2001, just as budget problems began in earnest, public school enrollment in Jersey has risen by less than 3 percent, or slightly more than 36,000 students. But total school hiring has jumped by 14 percent, or nearly 28,000 employees, according to federal Census statistics.” Do the math; that’s nearly as many new teachers as students!

Working for the schools, state, county, or local entities in New Jersey had benefited employees to the extent that just one example is sufficient to illustrate the fiscal insanity involved.

Writing for American Thinker.com, Claude Sandroff noted in March that in New Jersey “A retired teacher paid $62,000 toward her pension and nothing—yes, nothing—for full family medical, dental, and vision coverage over her entire career. What will we pay her? $1.4 million in pension benefits and another $215,000 in health care benefit premiums over her lifetime.” That pattern is repeated over and over again to the tune of millions per retired public service employee.

The National Education Association, a union, is protesting the pink slips that will be going out to teachers around the nation as towns and cities trim back from the excesses in education spending that have many states in de facto bankruptcy. They want $23 billion from the stimulus bill to be handed over to people who, year after year, produce students who cannot academically compete with their counterparts in nations that spend far less.

The bill has come due for the billions in wasted dollars on cockeyed environmental programs and underperforming schools nationwide.

© Alan Caruba, 2010