By Saman Mohammadi, The Excavator October 29, 2011
It is hard to pierce the psychology of psychopathic rulers and politicians without having some understanding of their philosophy towards life. Our civilization would be better served if the belief system of politicians was discussed on the campaign trail and on television. We would all be in for some stomach-turning surprises.
It is a well understood fact that a number of high-level Iranian politicians believe in the coming of the Mahdi.President Ahmadinejad and his closest advisers produced a documentary for senior government officials that showcased their belief in Islamic end times prophecy. Watch the documentary with English subtitles here.
The sensational documentary was made to indoctrinate the soldiers of Islam in Iran and elsewhere into thinking that they are fighting for God and the prophet Muhammad, when in reality they are fighting for the clerical oligarchs and the political elite that rule the Islamic Republic of Iran.Their martyrdom will help pave the way for a new world order.
But the Iranian government is not unique in its belief in end times prophecy. The United States of America is also led by crazy rulers who share similar beliefs about a new age and have similar religious aspirations for the new world. The only difference is they believe in another kind of end times babble, one that is not Islamic or Christian, but Satanic.
Indeed, a Luciferian philosophy is the inspiration for the creation of a new world order and a one world totalitarian government. Barack Obama, like the Bushes and Clinton before him, has spoken of the need for a new world order.
Vice President Joe Biden also expressed his love for the new world order in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed in 1992 called, “How I Learned to Love the New World Order.”That’s not really that surprising or scary. I expect big power players to make plans to continue their domination of the world in a new form and under a new flag. That’s just politics.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is known to be a creepy egomaniac with a messianic complex.Netanyahu believes he is the Jewish answer to Winston Churchill and Iran is the 21st century Nazi Germany that represents all evil in the world. It is a very bizarre belief that’s not grounded in reality, but it is very politically convenient and a lot of Israelis are falling for this scam.
The people of Israel seem to be losing sight of the fact that Israel is not an occupied concentration camp under totalitarian rulebut a highly advanced military state that can defend itself very easily against the slightest aggression from the Iranian government or any other nation.
But Netanyahu wants to keep the Israeli people in the dark and use their insecurity to seize political glory for himself. He is a danger to Israel and the world because of his demonic nature.
Netanyahu is not the only psychopath who wants a world war and mass death. There are a lot of psychopaths in high places in America, Israel, Iran, England, France, Italy, Russia, and all over the world.
The Earth is truly Satan’s Kingdom. And there are many puppets in politics, the military, media, entertainment and business who love to serve Satan and do evil.
After nearly three years in office, it should be clear to everyone that President Barack Obama is a psychopath who serves Satan. And you can add George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich, John McCain, and many other U.S. political leaders to that list.
When you know that Barack Obama is a Satanic thief and a lying psychopath then you’re not shocked when you see him on late night television with Jay Leno calling the mass murder of the Libyan people by NATO drones and Al-Qaeda terrorists a “recipe for success.”In reaction to that interview, the writer at cryptogon.com wrote:
A recipe for success?
The grinning, shill, international terrorist President of the United States talks up the regime’s atrocities on a late night comedy show, with the host, audience and millions of people out in TV land going along with it…
Holy shit.
Holy shit is right. Barack Obama is evil on the scale of Mt. Olympus, and America is the land of the Dead.
How did America and humanity fall so far, into the very depths of hell? I wish I knew.
Knowing the life-guiding beliefs of major politicians and public officials is more important than knowing their opinions about tax policy or small-scale issues.
And forget politicians’ tax records, the public needs to know their mental health records to find out how their brain works. If they are clinically insane then that fact alone will mean the end of the current political system because it is obviously broken and demonic.
If it is shown that high-level politicians lack basic social qualities like empathy and they show signs of psychopathy and mental illness then they must be taken to mental institutions.
This is not just a problem in America. Every modern society seems to be under the horrific hypnosis of political and religious power in the hands of totalitarian myth makers who are members of secret societies.
Another question we should be asking is who is more mentally sick? The blind sheepish believer that is the modern voter, or the arrogant psychopathic deceiver that is the modern politician?
Both are obviously made for each other.
The rest of us have to watch the dark show and suffer because we get ridiculed by the first group and killed by the second group.
Many people believe there is a war between heaven and hell that is being fought right now. I used to regard those beliefs as spiritual in nature and having no significance in politics and real life. It is obvious the ruling elite are speaking in a symbolic code. And it is obvious they are on the side of Lucifer in this war. If that is the reality of the present situation and I’m not over-paranoid, then mark me down as Lucifer’s adversary.
To get a glimpse into the nature of psychopathy and psychopathic political leaders, read the following articles:
“There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million can diagnose.” - John Maynard Keynes (The Economic Consequences of the Peace, 1920, page 235)
“This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.“ - Ayn Rand (Gold and Economic Freedom, Objectivist newsletter, 1966, last paragraph)
In Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, Rand describes what an incredibly unique advancement America represented at its outset, that “for the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work…” that for the first time “there appeared the real maker of wealth…” and that “no other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity—to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted of obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.”
On September 17, 1787, as he was leaving Independence Hall in Philidelphia, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a citizen.” What have you given us ?” Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
What were some of the events leading up to Franklin’s famous statement?
Several decades earlier, in the 1750s, the Colonies were very prosperous. There was no income tax, no unemployment, and stable prices. When asked to explain this prosperity to leaders back in the motherland, Benjamin Franklin replied:
“That is simple. In the Colonies we issue our own money. It is called Colonial Script. We issue it in proper proportion to the demands of trade and industry to make the products pass easily from the producers to the consumers. In this manner, creating for ourselves our own paper money, we control its purchasing power, and we have no interest to pay to no one”.
In 1764, the production of Colonial Script was made illegal by the Currency Act, passed into law in England (of course due to pressure from the Bank of England) prohibiting the Colonies from issuing their own money, ordering them to use only the money that was provided (in insufficient quantities) by the English bankers. Benjamin Franklin said:
“In one year, the conditions were so reversed that the era of prosperity ended, and a depression set in, to such an extent that the streets of the Colonies were filled with unemployed”.
The effect that the English bankers were having on the Colonies was by far the most significant reason for the Revolutionary War in 1775, in contrast to what is taught in our history books. Benjamin Franklin was clear about this:
“The colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been for the poverty caused by the bad influence of English bankers on the parliament which has caused, in the colonies, hatred of England and the revolutionary war”.
Although the Declaration of Independence was made in 1776, it wasn’t until the Treaty of Paris in 1783 that the new sovereign nation was recognized. The Colonies were once again free to control their own currency.In 1787, the founding fathers made certain that the control of currency was provided for in the United States Constitution. Article 1, section 8, paragraph 5, states:
“The Congress shall have the power to coin money and to regulate the value thereof”.
It’s clear that the issuance of currency is of utmost importance to any free society. The abuse and/or exploitation of the issuance of currency has been alluded to by a great many influential people throughout history.And although the Colonies had gained their independence, the fledgling country was far from out of the dark.Enter the looters (to borrow Rand’s terminology) of the era, the Rothschilds.
The Rothschilds were expert looters, i.e.; they had figured out how to enrich themselves at the expense of people who actually worked and produced.
“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.” - Mayer Amschel Rothschild
It has been said that “the wealth of Rothschild consists of the bankruptcy of nations” . It has also been said that “the19th century was the age of the Rothschilds”, and estimated that during this period the Rothschilds owned as much as half of the world’s total wealth. Though this is a bit hard for me to believe, suffice to say that they were extremely wealthy and powerful. They were bankers, yet they controlled and manipulated entire governments because they controlled “national banks” and thus the issuance of currency.Benjamin Disraeli characterized Nathan Rothschild as “the lord and master of the money markets of the world, and of course virtally lord and master of everything else.”
Nathan Rothschild ran the Bank of England during the period when the 13 Colonies sought their independence.He understood the potential of the new fledgling country in North America and the problems it could pose to imperial England in the future. Though the British could easily have crushed the Colonies in the American Revolution, they didn’t need to.England would be better served by allowing independence and establishing a “national bank” on the United State’s soil which England would control. Alexander Hamilton, the Minister of Finance, supported the idea of such a bank, but Thomas Jefferson, the Secretary of State, strongly opposed it. Jefferson’s opposition to central bankers is legendary:
“I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.”
“I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies, and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale”
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation then by deflation, the banks and the corporations will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”
President Washington eventually sided with his Finance Minister, under the premise that making funds available for business and strengthening the national economy was desirable, and the cleverly named The Bank of the United States was established in 1791 with a 20 year charter. When the charter ran out in 1811, Congress voted against it’s renewal on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.
The Bank of England, under the direction of Nathan Rothschild, declared that either the renewal of the charter be granted, or the United States would find itself in “a most disastrous war”. Nevertheless, on March 4,1811, the Bank of the United States was dissolved. And on January 20, 1815, President Madison vetoed another bill that would have created a second National Bank.
But finally, on January 8, 1816, faced with the financial hardship from the War of 1812 (just as Nathan Rothschild had promised …) Congress approved another national bank.
In 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoed another move to renew the charter of the ‘Bank of the United States’ . As a result, the bank went out of business in 1836. President Jackson was the only one of our presidents whose administration totally abolished the National Debt.
“Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal God, I will rout you out!”
When asked what he felt was the greatest achievement of his career Andrew Jackson replied,
“I killed the bank!”
James Garfield became President in 1881. With regard to the European bankers, he said:
“Whosoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce… And when you realise that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.”
Today our central bank is called “The Fed” or ‘Federal Reserve’, again a clever and intentionally misleading name. (Similiarly the “Bank of England” is nothing of the sort, but cleverly named to instill confidence in the populace. The bank sold shares to “private investors”, the names of which were never disclosed.)
After signing the act in 1913, President Wilson said:
“A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is privately concentrated.The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world, no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.”
“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something.They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”( both from The New Freedom: A Call for the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People (New York and Garden City: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1913)
Just after the Federal Reserve Act was passed, Congressman Charles Lindbergh said,
“The act established the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government of the monetary power will be legalized” … “the greatest crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking and currency bill.”
The international bankers had created a currency panic in 1907 in order to get the American people to swallow the idea of the ‘Federal Reserve’ in classic Hegelian dialectic form. In 1911, John Moody’s ‘The Seven Men’ was in McClure’s Magazine. In it he states:
“Seven men on Wall Street now control a great share of the fundamental industry and resources of the United States. Three of the seven men, J.P. Morgan, James J. Hill, George F. Baker, head of the First National Bank of New York belong to the so-called Morgan group; four of them, John D. and William Rockefeller, James Stillman, head of the National City Bank, and Jacob H. Schiff on the private banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb Company, to the so-called Standard Oil City Bank group…the central machine of capital extends its control over the United States…The process is not only economically logical; it is now practically automatic.”
Consider the function of the Fed. Today’s dollar is “fiat money”, meaning it is not backed by anything of value (gold) as it used to be, but it is backed only by government decree, by the “full faith and credit” of the United States government.
What are the economic effects of printing money carte blanch;, i.e., uninhibited by the need to have something of real value (and therefore something of limited supply…) behind the currency? With gold backing there is something quantifiable behind our money, something of precise value that keeps money creation and thus economic growth in check.
Currently, getting more money is as easy as turning on the printing presses (incurring more debt…) printing dollars by pure fiat, ‘out of thin air’, as it were.Problem is, our government has to issue bonds to get those dollars. This arrangement is great for whoever is running The Fed… whoever is receiving the bonds… but not so great for the government that issues them.In making good on the bonds they issue, our government not only has to pay full face dollar value (on dollars that cost about 5 cents for the Fed bankers to print) but interest as well!
The US Government (i.e. you and I) gets strapped with the bill each time the “Fed” turns on it’s printing presses.In this manner, our government is taken to the cleaners by our own central bank. To add insult to injury, every time new dollars are printed and the money supply increases, your income and savings are worth less. This has been referred to as a “stealth tax”.
In lockstep, our national debt goes through the roof, increasing tens of thousands of dollars every second – billions of dollars every day. And is it a coincidence that we see a massive acceleration of national debt in the early 1970s, precisely when President Nixon announced that the government was abandoning the Bretton Woods Agreement (August 15, 1971), removing gold backing from the dollar? Check out any graph of our national debt. The correlation is pretty hard to miss.
The 10 PLANKS stated in the Communist Manifesto and some of their American counterparts are:
1. Abolition of private property and the application of all rents of land to public purposes.
Americans do these with actions such as the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (1868), and various zoning, school & property taxes. Also the Bureau of Land Management (zoning laws are the first step to government property ownership).
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Americans know this as misapplication of the 16th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (1913), The Social Security Act of 1936.; Joint House Resolution 192 of 1933; and various State "income" taxes. We call it "paying your fair share".
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
Americans call it Federal & State estate Tax (1916); or reformed Probate Laws, and limited inheritance via arbitrary inheritance tax statutes.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
Americans call it government seizures, tax liens, Public "law" 99-570 (1986); Executive order 11490, sections 1205, 2002 which gives private land to the Department of Urban Development; the imprisonment of "terrorists" and those who speak out or write against the "government" (1997 Crime/Terrorist Bill); or the IRS confiscation of property without due process. Asset forfeiture laws are used by DEA, IRS, ATF etc...).
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
Americans call it the Federal Reserve which is a privately-owned credit/debt system allowed by the Federal Reserve act of 1913. All local banks are members of the Fed system, and are regulated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) another privately-owned corporation. The Federal Reserve Banks issue Fiat Paper Money and practice economically destructive fractional reserve banking.
6. Centralization of the means of communications and transportation in the hands of the State.
Americans call it the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Department of Transportation (DOT) mandated through the ICC act of 1887, the Commissions Act of 1934, The Interstate Commerce Commission established in 1938, The Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Communications Commission, and Executive orders 11490, 10999, as well as State mandated driver's licenses and Department of Transportation regulations.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state, the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
Americans call it corporate capacity, The Desert Entry Act and The Department of Agriculture… Thus read "controlled or subsidized" rather than "owned"… This is easily seen in these as well as the Department of Commerce and Labor, Department of Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Mines, National Park Service, and the IRS control of business through corporate regulations.
8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Americans call it Minimum Wage and slave labor like dealing with our Most Favored Nation trade partner; i.e. Communist China. We see it in practice via the Social Security Administration and The Department of Labor. The National debt and inflation caused by the communal bank has caused the need for a two "income" family. Woman in the workplace since the 1920's, the 19th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, assorted Socialist Unions, affirmative action, the Federal Public Works Program and of course Executive order 11000.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of population over the country.
Americans call it the Planning Reorganization act of 1949 , zoning (Title 17 1910-1990) and Super Corporate Farms, as well as Executive orders 11647, 11731 (ten regions) and Public "law" 89-136. These provide for forced relocation and forced sterilization programs, like in China.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.
Americans are being taxed to support what we call 'public' schools, but are actually "government force-tax-funded schools ."Even private schools are government regulated. The purpose is to train the young to work for the communal debt system. We also call it the Department of Education, the NEA and Outcome Based "Education". These are used so that all children can be indoctrinated and inculcated with the government propaganda, like "majority rules", and "pay your fair share".
WHERE are the words "fair share" in the Constitution, Bill of Rights or the Internal Revenue Code (Title 26)?? NO WHERE is "fair share" even suggested!! The philosophical concept of "fair share" comes from the Communist maxim, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need!" This concept is pure socialism ... America was made the greatest society by its private initiative WORK ETHIC ... Teaching ourselves and others how to "fish" to be self sufficient and produce plenty of EXTRA commodities to if so desired could be shared with others who might be "needy"... Americans have always voluntarily been the MOST generous and charitable society on the planet.
Do changing words, change the end result? ... By using different words, is it all of a sudden OK to ignore or violate the provisions or intent of the Constitution of the united States of America?????
The people (politicians) who believe in the SOCIALISTIC and COMMUNISTIC concepts, especially those who pass more and more laws implementing these slavery ideas, are traitors to their oath of office and to the Constitution of the united States of America... KNOW YOUR ENEMY ...Remove the enemy from within and from among us.
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship." - Justice Litle, Is America’s Economic Recovery on the Whole Based on a Rotten Sham?, Daily Markets, April 20, 2010
"If one understands that socialism is not a share-the-wealth programme, but is in reality a method to consolidate and control the wealth, then the seeming paradox of super-rich men promoting socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead, it becomes logical, even the perfect tool of power-seeking megalomaniacs. Communism or, more accurately, socialism is not a movement of the downtrodden masses, but of the economic elite." - Gary Allen, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, Concord Press, 1971
Chicagoan Oprah Winfrey dismisses the idea that there is only one way to God when she says, "There couldn’t possibly be just one way." The Gospel of Christ says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me" (John 14:6). "There is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved" (Acts 4:12). "And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved" (Acts 2:21).
The city has a unique history of launching the careers of powerful black politicians -- which is part of the reason Obama moved there.
...When Obama stood before the Democratic National Convention in 2004 to deliver the keynote address, he kicked off his speech with a nod to "the great state of Illinois -- crossroads of a nation, land of Lincoln." That wasn't just a shout-out to the home folks. It was an acknowledgment of how the entire state had placed him on that stage.
Much as it dominates Illinois, Chicago can't elect a senator by itself. Black candidates also need support in downstate Illinois, which happens to be a region with a history of working out racial questions for the rest of the country. The prairie towns still cherish the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. When I lived in Decatur, smack in the middle of the state, I drank in the Lincoln Lounge, passed a courthouse statue depicting Lincoln as a young lawyer, and fished in the Sangamon River at the Lincoln homestead, west of town.
It's no coincidence that two Illinoisans ended slavery -- Lincoln, by signing the Emancipation Proclamation, and Ulysses S. Grant, by accepting Lee's surrender at Appomattox. Before the Civil War, Illinois was evenly divided between Southerners who'd migrated up from Kentucky and Tennessee, and Yankees who'd reached the state through the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes. More than a generation before the rest of the nation took up the dispute, Illinois held a bitter plebiscite on slavery. The southern counties voted aye, the northern counties nay. The argument was continued in the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. In his Senate primary, Obama finished second downstate, but ran well in central Illinois, where Lincoln had traveled as a circuit-riding lawyer. He even won Lincoln's hometown of Springfield.
"It's clear that white voters in this state are willing to vote for qualified black candidates statewide," says John Jackson of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University. "You just don't find very many states where white voters are willing to vote for black candidates."
Part of it is Chicago's ability to groom those candidates, part is the moderate character of the state's Republicans and independents, and part is the Yellow Dog Democratic vote in poor, rural southern Illinois, Jackson says.
Later, when Obama faced Alan Keyes in the nation's first black-on-black Senate contest, columnist Amity Shlaes wrote that,
"Illinois has a record as host to such innovation" and was "yet again emerging as the venue for a shift on race."
It was an election in which skin color was not an issue, won by a black candidate who has shown unprecedented appeal to white voters. That Illinois would become the birthplace of post-racial politics was no surprise to Obama. Early in his Chicago years, he realized his adopted home was a perfect training ground for solving America's problems, racial and otherwise. Last year, the Associated Press crowned Illinois "most average state" because its demographics so closely match the nation's. The United States is 13.4 percent black. Illinois is 14.9 percent black.
"Part of what attracts me about Illinois generally is I think it's a microcosm of the country: north, south, east, west, black, white, urban, rural, southern, northern," Obama once said. "For somebody who cares deeply about the country, and about the issues and struggles this country's going through, I can't think of a better laboratory to work on some of the pressing issues we confront."
Barack Obama came to Chicago decades after the Great Migration, but for a young black man with political ambitions, it still turned out to be the promised land.
Recently, Crain’s Chicago Business reported on Chicago winning an award from Fast Company magazine.
“Chicago stood out in our reporting for its creativity and vitality,” Editor and Managing Director Bob Safian said at a press conference here. “Chicago offers something distinctive.”
Fast Company Magazine is representative of much of the media: not much on hard facts about Chicago. The Windy City has distinctions but not positive ones. Chicago’s retail sales tax is the highest in the nation at 10.25 percent.Unions, high taxes, and political corruption have made Chicago one of the leaders in big city decline.
One of the great modern myths of big city America is that Chicago is some sort of successful town and a role model for others. By any traditional performance standards Chicago has failed. Like many old, big industrial cities, Chicago peaked in the 1950 Census with a population of 3,620,962. In the 1950s over two percent of the entire U.S. population lived within Chicago city limits. Over a half century later, while America’s population doubled, Chicago’s population declined. The 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990 Census numbers showed Chicago losing population.
Mayor Daley and Chicago residents were quite excited about the 2000 Census showing Chicago gaining over 112,000 people (a growth rate at half the national average for the 1990s). It appears the 1990s were an anomaly for Chicago. Since the year 2000, according to Census estimates, Chicago again continued its population decline with a loss of 63,000 from 2000 to 2006 leaving a total of 2,833,321.
Recently, the Web site Real Clear Politics listed two Chicago area Congressional districts among the country’s ten fastest-shrinking districts, in terms of percentage of population lost between 2000 and 2005. Jan Schakowsky’s district lost 7.9 percent of its population. Congressman Rahm Emanuel’s district lost 5.1 percent.
Though 2000 was a somewhat positive year, that year’s Census numbers mask some rather disturbing trends. The white flight out of Chicago continued with 150,000 non-Hispanic white people leaving Chicago from 1990 to 2,000. African-Americans, for the first time, began leaving Chicago with a net loss of 5,000. The population gain in Chicago during the 1990s was due to Hispanics.
One of the great fables urban lovers of Chicago like to talk about is some comeback of the city. The comeback, according to this urban legend, involves white families staying in Chicago to raise their children. With Chicago’s 150,000 white population decline from 1990 to 2000: Chicago was only 31.3 percent non-Hispanic white.
What is even more pronounced is the lack of white children in the public school system. The entire Chicago Public School System is only 9 percent white. Not a single public high school has a population that is majority white. Not one.
Recently, the stubborn facts of Chicago’s population decline made news. As CBS TV Chicago reported in January of 2008:
Half-empty schools are ‘unacceptable’ because they don't serve their students or the communities they're supposed to anchor, Mayor Richard M. Daley said Thursday, setting the stage for the biggest wave of school closings in decades.
Officials contend 147 of 417 neighborhood elementary schools are from half to more than two-thirds empty because enrollment has declined by 41,000 students in the last seven years. A tentative CPS plan calls for up to 50 under-used schools to close, consolidate with other schools or phase out over the next five years.
Most of the underused schools are on the South and West Sides, often where the student population is largely African-American, and in lakefront neighborhoods that include Lincoln Park, Lake View, Uptown and North Center.”
The situation isn’t any better in Chicago’s Catholic School System. The Chicago Tribune reported on February 27, 2007:
Nicholas Wolsonovich, superintendent of schools for the archdiocese, called the exodus from Chicago's Catholic schools ‘mind-boggling.’ In 1964, he said, some 500 schools were spread across the diocese, with about 366,000 students. Now, the system has 257 schools and fewer than 100,000 students. Over the last decade statewide, the number of Catholic schools has dropped from 592 in 1997 to 510 this year, according to figures released at the conference.
Chicago’s political elite love to give speeches about the importance of public education, but not for their children. Mayor Daley sent his children to private schools. Deborah Lynch, the former head of the Chicago Teacher’s Union, sent her kids to private schools. America’s newest political superstar, Barack Obama, sends his kids to private schools. With the exodus of the rich from Chicago’s public schools, 69 percent of the children in the Chicago Public School system are poor.
The horrible public schools, high taxes, and crime have driven families out of Chicago. The city’s job base cannot compete with anti-union places like Houston and Phoenix.
Chicago used to be the number one convention town in America but Las Vegas and Orlando now lead the pack. Chicago has lost its top spot as busiest airport to Atlanta. Chicago's high priced unions and restrictive work rules have driven business elsewhere. For decades, Chicago was a major banking center with two major banking headquarters located on LaSalle Street. Continental Bank and First National Bank of Chicago were always among the top ten largest banks for much of the twentieth century.
No longer. Continental was purchased by Bank of America while First National Bank of Chicago was purchased by JP Morgan. Not a single bank in the top 25 largest banks in America is headquartered in Chicago. While Chicago’s financial district declines Charlotte, North Carolina has emerged as a bigger banking town. Charlotte has the headquarters of two of the four largest banks in America: Wachovia and Bank of America.
Other elements of Chicago’s financial district also show major weaknesses. Chicago doesn’t have one major mutual fund company headquarters. Chicago’s mutual fund job base is smaller than Denver, Indianapolis, or Baltimore. Chicago has a few major hedge funds but nothing like New York City or London. Chicago is the futures capital of America with the merger of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade but even here the news isn’t all positive. Computers have shed tens of thousands of jobs in the futures industry. Futures trading floors are headed for extinction within the next three to seven years, eliminating even more jobs.
Chicago’s high tax life style has driven businesses and jobs to the suburbs.Chicago is one of the only towns in America with an employee head tax on employment. Companies with over 50 employees must pay $4 a month per employee to the city. Most of the major corporate headquarters in the Chicago area are located in Chicago’s suburbs. Motorola, Walgreens, All State, Kraft, Anixter, Illinois Tool Works, McDonald’s, Alberta-Culver, and Abbott Labs all have their corporate headquarters outside city limits.
Recently, Chicago got its first Wal-Mart. In most places in America, politicians allow consumers to decide whether a business should fail or succeed. In Chicago, with the power of the unions, Chicago’s city council has made it difficult for Wal-Mart to open up any more stores. Chicago’s poor are relegated to paying higher retail prices and have less access to entry-level jobs. The adjacent suburb of Niles has the unusual distinction of being the only town in America (with less than 45,000 people) with two Wal-Marts. One of the Niles Wal-Marts is located right across the street from Chicago.
The largest employer in the city of Chicago is the Federal government.Followed by the City of Chicago Public School system.Other major employers are the city of Chicago, the Chicago Transit Authority, the Cook County government, and the Chicago Park District. These thousands of government workers provide the backbone of the coalition for higher taxes, generous pensions and “political stability.”
Chicago’s political system is inefficient and costly. There are no term limits in Chicago.The Democratic Party has controlled the Mayor’s office since 1931(a big city record).There’s no opposition: Democrat’s control 49 out of 50 seats on the city council. Corruption is everywhere. Barely a month can go by without a major scandal. The FBI has the largest public corruption squad in the United States located in Chicago. Chicago voters don’t seem to care. Those who care about high taxes, good public schools, and low crime are a small minority in Chicago.
In conclusion, Chicago’s long decline continues. In the coming years, public pension commitments will test even the high tax tolerant Chicago residents. Look for low regulation, low tax Houston to overtake Chicago in population in the next eight to 15 years.
Government employees dominate the Chicago economy. The government industry alone employed 481,300 workers during May, according to the United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to the list of largest employers by Crain’s Chicago Business, five of the top six are in government.
The largest, of course, is the federal government, with 78,000 full-time local employees.Chicago Public Schools is second with 43,910 full-time local employees, followed by the City of Chicago in third with 35,570 full-time local employees, Cook County in fifth with 22,142 employees, and last the State of Illinois.
The rankings, which have been along the same lines for several years, show the scope of the role that government plays in the local economy. It also puts into perspective the importance that President Barack Obama is placing on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which is meant to provide federal money to stimulate the economy.
Oddly enough, the lone private employer to make its way onto the list is Wal-Mart, coming in at number four with 23,453 employees. The Chicago City Council had previously proposed a “big-box ordinance,” which would have imposed a higher minimum wage and fringe benefit requirements on stores with 90,000-square-feet of space that are part of companies with more than $1 billion in revenues. However, Mayor Richard M. Daley vetoed that ordinance in an effort to help create more jobs.
In fact, the City Council will soon vote on an ordinance to allow a Wal-Mart to be built at 83rd Street and Stewart Avenue. That store would create hundreds of union construction jobs and about 500 permanent jobs. It also would generate up to $3.7 million in city sales tax revenue.
Who is Rahm Emanuel? How did he get into politics? The Emanuel family; just how powerful are they? What influence do they have on lobbying, and power politics? His workings with the Chicago Democratic Machine, how did he get started, is there a shady past he is trying to hide? Is Rahm being blackmailed because of his past with Obama on Chicago’s North Side? The Blago trial; why was he and others never questioned about Obama, Valerie Jarret, and Jesse Jackson Jr. What role did he play in the attempt to bring the Olympics to Chicago? What is the connection to key players in Chicago and Washington DC winding up dead? Are there secret video tapes waiting to surface? If he is Mayor, what will the city of Chicago look like? Could he become another Rudy Giuliani? In this exclusive Special Investigation the Reality Report goes deep and digs up the dirt that no Chicago media outlet would dare to report. This is a must see expose for anyone who has questions about Rahm Emanuel but just didn’t know who to ask.
Investigators: Julio Rausseo and Wayne Madsen Producer: Gary Franchi
Chicago - where former presidential chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is running for mayor - has a reputation as a key city in the national politics of the US. Why? Chicago was once home to arguably the most powerful local politician in America. Richard J Daley was mayor of the city for more than 20 years, the man at the apex of a political system known as the Machine. Chicago was not the only place in the U.S. to be dominated by Machine-style politics, but it lasted longer and grew bigger there than in most American cities. Machine politics was a system of extended quid pro quo, accompanied by a rigid political organisation from grass roots upwards. It was done by "by using patronage, by providing favours, by co-opting possible enemies", says Dominic Pacyga, author of Chicago: A Biography... "Chicago has been an important barometer of Democratic politics for a long time," says Pacyga. "It is vital for a national presidential election to take Chicago and take Illinois..." Now it has provided a president. - Why is Chicago important?, BBC News, October 1, 2010
With the federal government being the largest employer in Chicago, Emanuel should have no problem winning the mayoral election, because he will get the votes of union-backed federal employees and public school teachers by promising them big wages and lavish benefits from the public treasury.
By Deadline Hollywood October 20, 2010
I've just learned that five well-known Hollywood Democrats -- David Geffen, Bob Iger, Peter Chernin, Haim Saban, and Ari Emanuel -- are hosting a November 4th fundraiser for Ari's brother Rahm Emanuel in his bid to become Chicago's next mayor. Rahm, a former Democratic U.S. Representative from Illinois' 5th Congressional District (2003-2009), resigned as President Obama's White House Chief Of Staff on October 1st to throw his hat into the mayoral race following the retirement of Richard M. Daley whose last name more or less owned that political office the way most families would takeover the dining table. The Hollywood fundraiser will be held at Saban's palatial Beverly Hills home.
For those keeping score, Geffen is the former DreamWorks SKG partner and longtime music and film mogul. Iger is the CEO of the Walt Disney Company. Chernin is the former No. 2 of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and now a busy Fox TV and film producer. Saban is a private equity investor and entertainment producer best known for making the Power rangers into a worldwide hit and co-owner of the largest Spanish language media company in the U.S., Univision, as well as one of the Democratic party's single largest donors. And Ari is the co-CEO of WME Entertainment, one of the largest Hollywood talent and literary agencies and now expanding into marketing and investment banking. All the men are Democratic Party donors, with Geffen, Chernin, Ari Emanuel, and Saban the most politically active, and Geffen and Saban over the years among the party's biggest single donors.
Because of his brother and because of his Democratic Party fundraising, Rahm knows all the major Hollywood players who are active in politics very well. Rahm was chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the 2006 mid-term elections and was elected chairman of the Democratic caucus when the party regained control of the U.S. House Of Representatives that year. He remained a top strategist for House Democrats during the 2008 cycle while he worked on behalf of Obama's presidential candidacy. Two days after Obama's election win, Rahm was tapped for White House Chief of Staff.
Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who assisted the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the 1991 Iraq war and whose father was in Irgun, is a strong supporter of AIPAC; he personally introduced fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama to the organization's directors during the 2008 presidential campaign. "Rahm is the Democrats' Newt Gingrich," says Bruce Reed, who served with Emanuel in the Clinton White House. "He understands how much ideas matter, he always knows his message, he takes no prisoners, and he only plays to win." Friends and enemies agree that the key to Emanuel's success is his legendary intensity... the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the President's enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting "Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!" and plunging the knife into the table after every name. "When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape," one campaign veteran recalls. "It was like something out of The Godfather. But that's Rahm for you." - Obama Picks Israeli Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff, HAARETZ, November 6, 2008
Federal workers now earn, in wages and benefits, about twice what their private sector equivalents get paid. They often have Cadillac health plans and retirement benefits far above the private sector average: 80 percent of public-sector workers have pension benefits, only 50 percent in the private sector. Many can retire at age 50... Merely rolling federal employee pay back to where it was in 1998 relative to the private sector, and shifting state and local government pay back to 2005 relative levels, would save $116 billion annually from government costs.
By Ed Lasky, American Thinker February 12, 2010
Barack Obama may not have learned much at Harvard regarding the Constitution, but he did learn in Chicago how politics works: the Chicago way. Reward supporters, and keep the bribery as opaque as possible. Chicago mores have been brought to Washington.
There has recently been a flurry of critical columns examining the devastation done to our nation's fiscal health by government workers. Our cities, states, and federal government are in critical condition. Cities have begun declaring bankruptcy, and states such as California and Illinois are tottering. The federal government, which supplied a big chunk of stimulus dollars merely to keep states on life support, is running massive deficits and accumulating debts as far as the eye can see. What caused the problems?
There are two sides of the ledger responsible. Declining state tax receipts (considered "earnings" by government) played a role (the receipts side). But the real scourge has been on the expense side of the ledger: salaries and pension benefits given -- and I do mean given -- to government workers.
Public-sector unions have amassed great power to extract taxpayer dollars from politicians. Politicians reward government workers with our dollars, and they in turn are rewarded at election time by donations, free labor (phone banks, people who pass out flyers), and votes.
Barone describes the corruption at the core of this dealing:
Public-sector unionism is a very different animal from private-sector unionism.It is not adversarial but collusive. Public-sector unions strive to elect their management, which in turn can extract money from taxpayers to increase wages and benefits -- and can promise pensions that future taxpayers will have to fund.
The results are plain to see. States such as New York, New Jersey and California, where public-sector unions are strong, now face enormous budget deficits and pension liabilities. In such states, the public sector has become a parasite sucking the life out of the private-sector economy.
Obama and the Democrats have been well-rewarded for their patronage. Unions contributed up to 400 million dollars to Democrats in 2008 and engage in skullduggery to advance their aims. The latest revelation: a union-funded slush fund secretly targeting GOP candidates through the use of money-laundering and front groups. Unions have funded all sorts of political activity -- undoubtedly the major reason Obama, in one of his first acts as president, ended union disclosure rules requiring them to report how their members' dues were being spent. So much for transparency.
This is one reason why the recent Supreme Court decision leveling the playing field, allowing corporations to exercise their First Amendment rights by contributing to candidates, inflamed unions and President Obama. He violated precedent by attacking the Supreme Court in his State of the Union address. Maybe the title should be changed to State of the Unions.
Government work is one sector of our economy that is booming (besides pawnshops and bankruptcy lawyers). Rich Lowry noted the paradox: We suffer, and government workers prosper.
For most Americans, the Great Recession has been an occasion to hold on for dear life. For public employees, it's been an occasion to let the good times roll.
The percentage of federal civil servants making more than $100,000 a year jumped from 14 percent to 19 percent during the first year and a half of the recession, according to USA Today. At the beginning of the downturn, the Transportation Department had one person making $170,000 or more a year; now it has 1,690 making that.
The New York Times reports that state and local governments have added a net 110,000 jobs since the beginning of the recession, while the private sector has lost 6.9 million.
The gap between total compensation of public and private workers has only widened during the downturn, according to USA Today.In 2008, benefits for public employees grew at a rate three times that of private employees.
Nor does the boom look likely to end anytime soon.
The President's new budget can be symbolized by the old wartime poster: Uncle Sam Wants You. Until Barack Obama came into office, the number of federal employees had held relatively constant. But that was so 2008. That number jumped from 1.875 million in 2008 to 1.98 million in 2009, and it looks to jump a farther in 2010 -- a 14.5% leap in two years. (And the boom is in federal agencies, not the military; hiring at the IRS, EPA, and the Justice Department is a big portion of the increase. Big Brother is getting bloated -- maybe we can get Michelle to work on this obesity problem.)These jobs come with munificent salaries and benefits.
Federal workers now earn, in wages and benefits, about twice what their private sector equivalents get paid. They often have Cadillac health plans and retirement benefits far above the private sector average: 80 percent of public-sector workers have pension benefits, only 50 percent in the private sector. Many can retire at age 50.
The pensions are manipulated upwards and gold-plated, too, as I noted in "Taxpayers: Eat your hearts out, suckers." Many others have begun to notice the drain on public finances by pensions for government workers, and the public pension tsunami has just begun.This is the engine driving our ballooning deficits and public debt.Merely rolling federal employee pay back to where it was in 1998 relative to the private sector, and shifting state and local government pay back to 2005 relative levels, would save $116 billion annually from government costs.
We know this will never happen as long as Democrats are in power. They like this perpetual motion machine. A government bureau, Ronald Reagan quipped, is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on earth. But we can try, and there is certainly potential for Republicans to seize on this problem as it begins to gain traction in the public mind. The issue seems tailor-made for Tea Partiers.
Meanwhile, Big Brother, like many big brothers, has become a bully. The Internal Revenue Service is on a hiring binge to crack down on taxpayers; fees on candy, plastic bags, iPod downloads, sugar, and many other things that make life fun are going up and up; our tax rates are inflating; and studies show that there has even been an explosion in parking tickets and fines for every picayune sort of "violation" that the bureaucrats can dream up in all their spare time -- phantom taxes, they have been called. The leviathan must be fed.
The massive debt accumulating will be our responsibility to pay in the decades ahead. Obama blames Bush for the problems he inherited, but we know whom to blame for the problems our children and grandchildren will inherit. This debt will be an albatross around the neck of our economy. Our taxes will go toward these pensions and debt repayment instead of investments that will help our economy grow.
But even this good deal is not good enough for Barack Obama. He is a very mischievous man whose Modus Operandi is to distract and defame and engage in a great deal of sleight of hand. If he truly is a "sort of God" (as one of his adoring Newsweek pundits characterized him), that God would be Janus of two faces. While he talks the talk about the deficit and freezing discretionary spending, Obama engages in a spending binge that would make Imelda Marcos proud. But look what else the Magician-in-Chief is doing: giving even more money and benefits to government workers, and doing it in a very untransparent and sneaky way.
Barack Obama is planning a major overhaul of the Federal government pay system that would boost pay for government workers while loosening scrutiny on how they do their jobs. When he released his budget, there was a section titled "Improving the Federal Workforce." Sounds good, right? But watch what the man and his minions do, not what they say.
First, the document tries to justify the high salaries government workers are paid (responding to the mounting criticism).
But then comes the trickery, disguised as "reform" and "refreshing" the system. This team is addicted to euphemisms (and their thesauruses are well-thumbed).
John Berry, director of the Office of Personnel Management, is engaged in a major effort to overhaul the G.S., or General Schedule, classification and pay system that began in 1949. Change is coming, and it will gladden the hearts and fill the wallets of government workers. In a Washington Postinterview:
Berry mused about eliminating the first two ranks of the 15-grade GS system and adding grades 16 and 17. Berry did not explicitly advocate a pay raise for federal workers during the interview, but those in the added grades presumably would be paid more than the current top rate.
Berry made noises about tying pay to performance (consider this chaff to deflect observation and criticism), but then he tipped his hand:
"I'm a strong proponent of breaking the chain to the desk and breaking the chain to the time clock," he said. He wants government to "move in a direction to empower and trust our employees to get the job done ... and not focus so much on where they're sitting and what hours they're sitting there."
Does that sound like a plan to increase efficiency of government workers? Give them higher pay, but allow them to set their own hours and work from...where? Starbucks? Home? The zoo?
And how is this "reform" going to happen? Are the people or our representatives going to have a say in how our money is spent? Need one ask?
The plans are in the final stages and will be put in place by a presidential memorandum or executive order. In other words, they'll be implemented by presidential fiat. This is the form of government we have now -- or at least did, before Scott Brown was elected.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research - ...The emphasis on manufacturing as a singular path to good jobs and stable employment for African Americans in the postwar era is puzzling in light of the history of public employment as a course of labor market advancement for African Americans.
Efforts to open public employment to nonwhites, especially federal jobs, have been longstanding in the US.Once in these jobs, blacks benefited from higher wages, more generous pensions, longer tenures, greater opportunities for advancement and higher rates of unionization than in the private sector. Though rarely remarked upon in Fordist and post-Fordist accounts of urban restructuring, scholars widely agree that employment within the high-wage, highly unionized public sector contributed significantly to black upward mobility in the postwar decades (e.g. Harrison and Osterman, 1974; Freeman, 1976; Landry, 1987; Katz et al., 2005).
The first significant movement by blacks into federal jobs can be traced to the establishment of the federal civil service commission in 1883 as legislated by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act.With the implementation of a merit system in hiring and promotions, black representation in federal employment was ‘sustained, vigorous, and definite’ for the next several decades (Krislov, 1967: 19).
Reconstruction-era civil rights legislation also helped facilitate black federal employment. Notably, Congress repealed a statute in 1865 that had barred blacks from the postal service—ironically, the federal agency that was to become the single largest employer of blacks through the twentieth century (ibid.: 9–10).
Efforts to desegregate and open federal employment to nonwhites continued during the following decades, but were most vigorous during the 1920s. Desegregation of federal units such as the Census Bureau and the departments of Commerce, Interior and Treasury moved forward with such visible results that several Southern Congressional members complained of ‘delegate buying’ (ibid.: 22). By 1928, blacks were estimated to comprise 15–30% of the workforces at major urban post offices (ibid.).
During the New Deal era, blacks slowly continued to move into federal employment apart from their high representation in WPA programs. But more significant gains were on the horizon. The 1940s heralded a great burst in black economic advancement that scholars have attributed to various factors, chief among them shifts in labor demand, government intervention (e.g. Roosevelt’s 1941 Executive Order 8802 that outlawed racial discrimination in the defense industry), and accelerated migration from the South (Margo, 1995).
Public sector employment contributed to the reduction of wage inequality (Margo and Finegan, 2002), and, as Landry (1987: 121) argued, the ‘first breach in the solid wall of prejudice against the employment of blacks in middle-class jobs was achieved through employment in the federal government . . . in the 1940s’.
The most pronounced growth in black public employment occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. During this period, black employment in the public sector increased at twice the rate of whites (Eisinger, 1982b; Collins, 1983: 373; Carrington et al., 1996: 465). By the mid-1970s, 25% of all black men and 34% of all black women were employed in the public sector compared to 16% of all white men and 24% of all white women (Carrington et al., 1996: 463).
Scholars have attributed most of this growth to the expansion of government under the Great Society. Driven largely by black political pressure, antipoverty programs of the 1960s yielded an array of concessionary public services that benefited blacks as both consumers and producers—as low-income service recipients in their neighborhoods and as middle-income service providers working for the expanded public agencies (Piven, 1973: 384; Brown and Erie, 1981; Darity, 1986). Aggressive affirmative action policies, such as the Equal Opportunity Act of 1972 that expanded civil rights coverage to the public sector, helped blacks move into these jobs and, to employ Lieberson’s (1980: 379) term, the ‘special niche’ of government work for blacks became firmly entrenched within urban economies. Katz et al. (2005: 88) have called this growth of black public employment the ‘hidden labor market policy’ of the War on Poverty and the Great Society.
Scholars widely agree that this expansion of government employment contributed significantly to building the ‘new black middle class’, a group of salaried professionals no longer dependent upon work within the segregated black community (e.g. Wilson, 1978; Brown and Erie, 1981; Collins, 1983; Darity, 1986; Landry, 1987). Between 1960 and 1976, 55% of the increase of black professional and managerial jobs occurred in the public sector, compared to 34% of the increase for whites (Brown and Erie, 1981). In 1970 nearly half of all black male professionals and two-thirds of all black female professionals worked in the public sector. Comparatively, only one-third of white male and half of all white female professionals did (Freeman, 1976). By 1980, nearly 54% of all black professionals and managers worked in the public sector, compared to only 28% of whites (Edsall and Edsall, 1991).
Additionally, public employment played a crucial role in shoring up and expanding the black middle class by providing blacks a critical channel for intergenerational mobility (Erie, 1980). Eisinger (1986), for example, found that municipal employment served as a pathway to intergenerational mobility for urban blacks in a way that it did not for whites. In his study of a NewYork City public agency, black professionals were much more likely than whites to come from lower-class backgrounds. Hout’s (1984) findings confirmed the link between public sector employment and mobility — both intergenerational and individual. On the latter, Hout (1984: 317) found that the ‘risk of downward mobility is much greater for men in private employment than it is for public employees’. Hout’s analysis showed that among black men employed in a non-manual occupation in 1962, only 7% of those initially employed in the public sector moved to lower manual occupation by 1973, compared to 21% of black men initially employed in the private sector. Few researchers have subsequently recognized this feature of public employment as an economic buffer.
Government jobs have widely been viewed as good jobs because of their relatively high wages and generous benefits. Studies on data from the 1960s onward have consistently found that similarly skilled blacks across all educational levels and occupational statuses have earned higher wages in the public sector than the private sector, despite shrinking wage differentials in recent decades (Harrison and Osterman, 1974; Freeman, 1976; Landry, 1987; Boyd, 1993; Zipp, 1994; Bernhardt and Dresser, 2002).
Like other groups, less-educated blacks (those without a college degree) have profited most from public employment. That is, their public sector wage premium has been higher than that of more educated workers (Poterba and Rueben, 1994; Bernhardt and Dresser, 2002). Public sector jobs also provide substantially more generous benefit packages.In 1998, 82% of all black men employed in the public sector had employer-provided health insurance and 76% had a pension plan compared to 55% and 41% in the private sector, respectively (Bernhardt and Dresser, 2002: 9).
Lastly, racial wage inequality has been less pronounced within the public sector (Long, 1975; Freeman, 1976; Erie, 1980; Smith, 1980). Though recent trends indicate a reversal among federal employees, racial wage inequality has continued to steadily decline among state and municipal employees (Zipp, 1994).
Higher unionization rates largely account for the public sector’s higher wages and more generous benefits — a causal factor unique to the last 30 years (Freeman, 1986; Card, 2001). Prior to the 1960s, few public sector workers were covered by a union contract due to their exclusion under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. In 1962, President Kennedy granted unionization rights to federal employees through executive order, opening the doors to public sector organizing. Many states quickly followed the federal government’s lead in authorizing public sector collective bargaining, and rates of public sector unionization increased dramatically at all levels of government through the 1960s and 1970s. By the mid-1980s, union density in the public sector far exceeded that in the private sector — a trend that continues today.
In 1984, 44% of all government workers were covered by a collective bargaining agreement (36% were union members) compared to only 18% in the private sector (Freeman, 1986: 41). In 2008, nearly 37% of all government employees belonged to a union compared to 8% in the private sector (Zipperer, 2009). The numbers for workers in the Chicago CMSA reflect a similar trend. In 1987, union density in manufacturing was 27% (18% in all private employment) compared to 49% in the public sector. By 2000, union density in manufacturing in the Chicago region had fallen to 17% (14% in all private employment) compared to 50% in the public sector (Hirsch and Macpherson, 2003).
Politics and public employment
In sum, public employment has accorded black workers multiple socio-economic benefits not available to them in the private sector and has fostered the most racially equitable, albeit imperfect, employment domain available to black workers. This route to upward mobility and economic prosperity has depended on politics and policy to a greater degree than other employment pathways because of the distinctively direct effect of politics on public employment and the degree to which government employment has been targeted to address racial incorporation and economic equality.
Government employment is more proximate to the political process than private sector employment for a number of reasons.Firstly, politicians serve as employers in the former, but not the latter, domain. Patronage exemplifies this distinction —politicians can directly distribute jobs in exchange for votes.US politicians have long exercised their role as public employers to accommodate new voting blocks, through both explicit patronage systems and less explicit social mandates (e.g. Clark, 1975). The growth of black public employment at both the federal and local level reflects these attempts by politicians, black and otherwise, to secure the growing urban black vote (Brown and Erie, 1981; Eisinger, 1982a).
In particular, the Chicago machine was exceptionally adept at incorporating the black vote through patronage throughout much of the twentieth century (Grimshaw, 1992). Eisinger (1982b: 754) has described the reciprocal reinforcing effect between politics and public employment for blacks in which black political power creates access to public jobs and public jobs function ‘as a path to power’, increasing access to jobs further.
Secondly, the political process directly bears upon the demand curve for labor in the public sector, whereas politics indirectly influences the demand curve for labor in the private sector. In the former case, politicians can decide to directly expand or contract the public sector workforce. City officials may increase the size of the police force or slash the number of teachers. By contrast, politicians indirectly influence the size of the private sector workforce through contracts, tax incentives, and other policy mechanisms. Though such policy actions strongly influence economic outcomes, they are indirect, and less visible, than political actions that affect the size and working conditions of public sector employment.
Thirdly, in its capacity as an employer, government can directly hire and set wages according to social agenda goals, such as inequality reduction, and other nonmarket considerations (perhaps patronage of another from, but not as narrowly instrumental as explicit patronage). This ‘social equity function’ is peculiar to public employment (Lobao and Hooks, 2003: 520). Thus, government employment can contribute to the racial equity agenda by hiring more black workers at comparable wages to whites, as it did aggressively at the federal level during the 1960s and 1970s.
But government can pursue alternate social agendas through its treatment of public employment, as the 1980s attest. Under the Reagan administration, prior political norms and practices that had facilitated the advancement of minority public employment were abruptly abandoned, and public employment became the target of severe cutbacks and restructuring policies that impacted black workers disproportionately. Minorities were laid off at a rate of 50% greater than white federal employees (Landry, 1987: 212), and black federal workers who managed to keep their jobs experienced increased racial wage inequality (Zipp, 1994).
Lastly, the government’s role as employer also positions unionization issues within the public sector as more proximate to the political process than in the private sector. Not only are public sector unionists’ bread-and-butter issues inextricably linked to decisions regarding state policies and funding, politicians negotiate such issues with public sector unionists simultaneously as their employers and as their elected representatives. To put the emphasis differently, public employees exert influence at the bargaining table as both workers and voters.
As Freeman (1986: 42) has argued, ‘public sector unions, more so than private sector unions, can influence employer behavior through the political process . . . Private sector unions . . . do not in general help elect the board of directors of companies or top management’.
This relationship has been especially important in efforts to win collective bargaining rights for government employees.
An example from Chicago highlights the implications of black political power for public sector unionization. Before 1983, multiple attempts to pass public sector collective bargaining legislation in Illinois had foundered on opposition from Chicago’s mayors who feared collective bargaining would undermine patronage (e.g. contract rules would disallow politically motivated transfers, promotions and dismissals; Saltzman, 1988: 53).
Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, reversed this political trend. Immediately upon winning the Democratic primary in 1983, Washington committed strong political support to the legislative effort, largely on behalf of his black public sector constituency (Saltzman, 1988). Passage of the legislation quickly followed, extending collective bargaining rights to segments of Chicago’s heavily black municipal workforce that previously had been barred from bargaining.
To summarize, blacks’ disproportionate representation in government employment and the latter’s proximate relationship to the political process render black public employment especially sensitive to politics and policy...
UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education April 5, 2011
Since January 2009, state and local governments have laid off 429,000 public workers. As governments contemplate additional layoffs, it is important to note that few commentators have examined the racial implications of this reduction in government employment. This is an important question to address because often policy prescriptions that are race-neutral on the surface can have decidedly racial impacts. This research brief explores the issue by analyzing the nature of Black employment in the public sector.
The results of this study are striking:
The public sector is the single most important source of employment for African Americans.
During 2008-2010, 21.2 percent of all Black workers were public employees, compared with 16.3 percent of non-Black workers. Both before and after the onset of the Great Recession, African Americans were 30 percent more likely than other workers to be employed in the public sector.
The public sector is also a critical source of decent-paying jobs for Black Americans. For both men and women, the median wage earned by Black employees is significantly higher in the public sector than in other industries.
Prior to the recession, the wage differential between Black and white workers was less in the public sector than in the overall economy
For blacks and others, “the best anti-poverty program is union organizing,” the UC Berkeley Labor Center notes on its website.”
And so moves by Republican governors like Scott Walker in Wisconsin and John Kasich in Ohio to shred the ability of public employees to bargain for a decent middle-class life are also specifically targeting the ability of women and black workers to remain in the economic mainstream.
Today, about 86 percent of African Americans from 25 to 29 years of age have graduated from high school, a rate comparable to that of whites. In 1980, 8 percent of African Americans were graduating from college, still less than half the white rate of 17 percent. Today, about a third of black high school graduates attend college and 13 percent graduate. Although the gap is narrowing, white students attend college at a higher rate (about 42 percent) than African Americans, and about 23 percent graduate.
As a result, African Americans hold a wide range of jobs. They have been particularly successful in securing middle-income employment in the public sector. African Americans are twice as likely as whites to work for city, state, or federal government.
Robert L. Harris JR, February 1999, “The Rise of the Black Middle Class”
Anne Field, May 1, 2006,”Twilight of the Middle Class”
Jim Emerson, September 1, 2001, “African Americans”
Fred Tannenbaum, February 25, 2005, “An emerging middle class”, Charlotte Business Journal
At least this explains why Andy Stern spends so much time at the White House. The Heritage Foundation looks at union penetration in the private and public sectors and finds that the government’s where it’s at, baby. While labor unions have more trouble getting workers to organize at private firms, government workers now comprise more than half of all union members in the country:
Who do the words “union members” bring to mind? United Auto Workers building cars in Detroit? Teamsters truckers hauling freight? Steel workers in Pennsylvania?
Not any more. Newly released numbers show that the actual face of today’s union movement is the teller at your local Department of Motorized Vehicles.
Preliminary estimates of union membership this year show that most union members now work for the government. The overall unionization rate between January and September 2009 stood at 12.4%, unchanged from last year. However, this difference masks a large difference between unions in the private and public sectors.
Union membership has fallen to 7.3% of private sector workers — the lowest rate since Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act into law. But it is a completely different story in the public sector: 37.6% of government employees belong to unions, up almost a percentage point since last year. Those 7.9 million unionized government employees are 51% of all union members nationwide. Most union members today now work for Uncle Sam.
That gives us two unofficial parties pushing for big government — Democrats and the labor movement. As Heritage notes, this evolution has serious political consequences. It makes labor a partner to statists looking to expand the role of government in order to maximize the hiring potential, not because larger government benefits the nation. It presents a pressure point for inexorable trends towards greater government control and greater loss of individual liberty, even without the collectivist approach of unions in general.
As Heritage notes, it also turns union management into tax-hike advocates. On the West Coast, unions are pushing for big tax hikes and fighting politicians opposed to them. None of the tax hikes have anything directly to do with labor issues or even government hiring. However, reductions in revenue would force states to start shedding jobs — which are union jobs, of course. They want greater tax hikes to keep those people employed, rather than force states to reconsider big-government bureaucracies and look for efficiencies.
When Obama told the SEIU he wanted to paint the nation purple, this is exactly what he had in mind. The union movement has become completely co-opted by the nanny-state movement.
By Warner Todd Huston, Publius' Forum October 19, 2010
With a recent Federal Election Commission decision Obama’s government has ruled in favor of the SEIU’s illegal kickback scheme and decided that such law breaking it is A’OK as far as he is concerned.
Ostensibly, FEC law states that unions cannot require member locals to pay a specific amount of money into a union’s political action committee (PAC) fund. PAC contributions by the locals are supposed to be voluntary and not forced by rules from the main HQ. This year, however, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has handed down rules from its Washington HQ that locals must send $25,000 each to the SEIU political PAC or face a “fine” of $37,500 from the main office in DC. This clearly violates FEC rules.
Once this violation came to light Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, filed a complaint with the FEC. In response, Obama’s FEC has decided that the SEIU’s law breaking is nothing to worry about.
Worse, the graft of Obama’s FEC is such that it ignored the advice of its own general counsel who affirmed that the SEIU was indeed violating the law. And it gets worse yet. The FEC is supposed to immediately give its reply to the interested parties within a 60-day reply period so that everyone gets a chance to see the decision and comment upon it. But Obama’s crooked FEC didn’t reveal its decision for 111 days, long after the reply period was over, thereby preventing appeal and comment.
The NRWF is not amused.
“They can’t do that,” said foundation president Mark Mix, who is vowing to challenge the commission’s actions. “We will pursue the appeals process. We are working on it now,” adding that he’s prepared to file a new complaint, if necessary.
No one at the FEC “will speak in reference to this case,” spokeswoman Julia Queen told Fox News.
But Obama’s union bought government ruled in favor of… surprise… the unions. Obama does not mind law breaking as long as it is his folks doing it.
By Warner Todd Huston, Publius' Forum October 11, 2010
A Chicago Park District employee is seen on this video attacking his union for spending his dues on political causes that he doesn’t support.
This Park District employee works for the Service Employees International Unions (SEIU) and was asked his thoughts on union spending at the Palos Tea Party’s American Voter Rally in Tinley Park, Illinois, on October 10, 2010.
One has to wonder how many other union members are upset like this — not just of the SEIU but all unions across the country? Over the last few decades unions have spent billions of their member’s dues money on extremely left-wing causes. Why, just a few weeks ago dozens of unions got together to spend their member’s dues money supporting a rally sponsored by actual, hardcore communist and socialist groups.
And unions are spending millions this term, too. They desperately want to keep overspending, socialist-leaning Democrats in power. And all this money being spent comes right out of the pockets of the rank and file union members.
By Warner Todd Huston, Publius' Forum October 13, 2010
A government employees union just released a very hackneyed and amateurish video attack ad against all you “Tea Baggers” out there. Joe Schoffstall has the story today at Eyeblast.TV.
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) has released its new cartoon-styled ad showing a cheering section of Republicans marked as “Tea Baggers Section.”
By Warner Todd Huston, Publius' Forum October 9, 2010
Oh, it was a thing to be celebrated when Obama’s payoff to the teachers unions back in August “saved” the job of Ohio school teacher Amanda VanNess. It was such a thing of wonder that the big guy flew the elementary school teacher all the way to D.C. for an Oval Office signing ceremony.
But there is good news. VanNess’s job only cost the American people $26 billion dollars. So we have that going for us, which is nice.
Of course, the $26 billion was supposed to “save” or “create” jobs for teachers, wasn’t it? So what happened to these best laid plans? Turns out the school district that VanNess works for… er, I mean worked for… was in such a budget crisis that programs were cut and the money was used to try to make due. On top of that enrollment has been down in the area because families have moved away due to the depressed job market in Toledo, Ohio.
So, despite all the fan fare only a few months ago, Amanda VanNess was laid off anyway.
By Warner Todd Huston, Publius' Forum October 8, 2010
Pensions are fast becoming the time bomb that will destroy the financial well being of our state budgets. Because public employee unions have been allowed to outrageously grow their retirement benefits by supplying billions in campaign donations to compliant politicians, most state pension plans are deeply in the hole.
Many states have at last begun to realize that the golden goose (or as we call them, the taxpayers) was long ago killed by this self-serving triangle of unions, bought and paid for politicians, and similarly bought and paid for courts that implement union demands.
So states have begun to employ some fancy accounting tricks to fool the voters into thinking they’ve begun to address the problem. One is called an “actuarial trick.” But this head-fake is starting to get real actuaries worried that the sleight-of-hand trick is making matters worse by hiding rather than fixing the mess America’s states are rushing headlong into.
What the states are doing is cutting pension benefits for future hires (not the current ones) and then claiming that these “savings” are real today. Then taking this unrealized, but possible savings and applying them to today’s budget claims. This allows the states to appear as if they are saving money and cutting costs.
Unfortunately for the truth, no pensions have been cut, the exorbitant benefits that greedy unions have paid politicians to give them are either still growing or at the least staying constant, and budgets are still in the red.
Cuts for workers not yet hired do not save much money in the present — but that’s where actuaries can work their magic. They capture the future savings for use today by assuming, in essence, that 100 percent of today’s work force is already earning tomorrow’s skimpier benefits. When used in actuarial calculations, that assumption has a powerful effect. It reduces the amount a government must put into its workers’ pension fund every year.
The cuts and changes to pensions will take decades to be realized but states are trying to fool everyone into thinking the savings are already happening.
Illinois is the state that brought this accounting trick to the attention of actuaries. With its claims as reported in the media, Illinois was claiming all sorts of savings that seemed dubious to some actuaries. These experts began to look into the claims of other states and found the fake savings claims to be widespread.
“Responsible funding methods do not work this way,” said Jeremy Gold, an independent actuary in New York who has been outspoken about the distortions built into pension numbers.
He said the technique was much like the mortgages with very low teaser rates that proliferated during the housing bubble.
“You aren’t paying down your principal,” Mr. Gold said. “You’re not even keeping up with the interest. You are actually increasing your debt every year.”
Once again what we see is our politicians lying to us in order to protect unions. They want to protect unions because unions give them billions in campaign donations. And unions continue to give them billions so that the politicians will lie to us to protect them.
Public employee unions should be illegal like they were before 1958 as they are antithetical to good government.
By Warner Todd Huston, Publius' Forum October 7, 2010
The Chicago Public School system is out of money. Like every business in the real world one solution was to layoff workers, in this case some 700 teachers. In the real world that is the way the cookie crumbles. Such employees would put themselves on the market and look for new jobs. Life moves on. But in the world of public employees unions, such employees run to the judges they’ve bought and the law they wrote themselves and had passed by politicians bought and paid for. So taxpayers are forced to give them concessions, paybacks, and special favors. It all amounts to more proof of union graft and corruption at its most common.
This has happened once again in Chicago as the teachers union went to court to prevent the everyday, common cost cutting measure of laying off workers that every normal American is faced with. And, like the true Chicago Way- styled politics that Illinois is used to, the “law” that was written by unions, paid for by unions, and passed by unions was invoked by judges placed in their court rooms by union money.
And who is left holding the bag? The taxpayers, of course.
As we find out in the Tribune story, tenured teachers continue to get paid for up to 10 months AFTER being laid off while they search for a new job. So even when teachers are laid off the government has to keep paying them for almost a year.
If any normal American had that sweet deal they’d never work more than two months a year!
Now, don’t mistake my point here. I am 100% positive that more cutting could be had in the administration end of the Chicago Public School system. I am in no way saying that by only laying off a few teachers the budget crunch would be solved.
But the arrogance of these teachers to demand that the taxpayers pay them as they sit at home watching Oprah for up to 10 months is a conceit worth highlighting. No one in the real world has such a sweet deal, for sure.
It should be pointed out that these backroom deals that make suckers out of the taxpayers are common between these big money unions and the politicians, lawyers, and judges they have bought. It is not just teachers unions we are talking about here but every public employee union.
It is a criminal racket they have going, for sure. They buy politicians that give them great benefits and shiny new laws that give them favors. Then they supply the lawyers for these compliant pols so that these new kickback laws can be written because Lord knows none of our politicians actually write their own legislation anymore. Then compliant, bought and paid for judges back them up when these tailor made, illicit laws are “violated.”
And notice who is completely cut out from this political, legislative, and judicial circle? Yep, the voters who are forced to pay for it all. They have no say whatever in the special deals that the unions purchase with their millions in political campaign donations.
This is the reason that public employee unions should be made illegal. They are antithetical to good government.
By Warner Todd Huston, Publius' Forum September 27, 2010
Michael Barone, one of media’s sharpest observers of America’s political scene, has noted an interesting trend in Democrat politics: unions are knocking out regular liberal Democrats in America’s big cities. Barone calls it a civil war raging in the Democrat Party.
He points to several big city campaigns in which unions rose up to defeat the “gentry liberals,” as Barone calls them, and have replaced them in primaries with union backed, ultra liberals. For proof Barone points to several races in New York, Maryland, and Washington D.C.
In each there was a split between the public employee unions that do so much to finance Democratic campaigns and the gentry liberals who provide Democratic votes in places like Manhattan, the Montgomery County suburbs of Maryland, and Northwest Washington, D.C. And in each case the public employee unions won.
The most disastrous election result, at least for school children, is the loss of Mayor Adrian Fenty whose hiring of school chief Michelle Rhee gained accolades from school reformers across the nation and an equal amount of opprobrium from unions. Fenty lost to ultra lib Vincent Gray — a wholly bought union hack — who has promised to dump reformer Rhee and kowtow to all teacher’s union demands.
“Gentry liberals and public employee unions were allies in the Obama campaign in 2008. But now they’re in a civil war in city and state politics,” says Barone.
What is most interesting in all this is the idea of “extremists” in politics. The left is consumed with attacking the Tea Party movement as the right’s extremists taking over the GOP. Yet here we have the exact same thing in reverse happening in the Democrat Party. The Democrat’s most extreme members are gaining power and preparing to push politics in some of our largest cities and our most blue states even further to the extreme left.
The socialists really are killing off the moderate Democrat, not just in Congress as Nancy Pelosi kills the Blue-dogs, but in local politics as unions kill of the conventional liberals and replacing them with their own, bought and paid for candidates.
In a day when nearly every state budget is deeply in the red due to the unearned, overly generous union salaries, benefits, and pensions of their public employees unions, we see these cities doubling down on the failed policies that put them in this position in the first place.
Amusingly, unions seem to think that conventional liberals aren’t attentive enough to union demands. After all these years of Democrats bending over backwards for unions, union demands have grown so extreme that no reform at all will be allowed.
So, while the left may claim that the right is being taken over by its “extremists,” it is the left, rather, that is being taken over by its own worst parts: unions and socialists (one and the same, of course).
Of course, this political direction will drive America’s cities further into despair and poverty as union greed and corruption further empties the treasury into the pockets of thugs and thieves.
The big question is this: how long will Democrats be able to hold onto the cities at this rate? Even as they are gaining power in the big cities, many unions are shying away from criticizing Democrats up for federal elections as reported last week.
By Warner Todd Huston, Publius' Forum September 22, 2010
Daniel Bice of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has a gem of a report wherein a union operative admits on tape that he and his union pals intend to launch a big campaign against Wisconsin’s GOP Gubernatorial candidate Scott Walker. That news isn’t much of a surprise, of course, but what is a surprise is that this union hack admitted on tape that Milwaukee’s local TV stations and local politicians are both sympathetic to and assisting in the union’s getting its message out.
The tape features the voice of John-David Morgan, an operative for the Service Employees International Union Local 1 (SEIU), on Sept. 10 near the Y-Not II tavern on E. Lyon St. in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Morgan was recorded by a Walker campaign staffer on his cell Phone who then turned it over the Bice at the Journal-Sentinel.
The union hack admitted on tape that he is working with County Board members — such as Supervisor John Weishan — to get the goods on Walker.
“I’ve got county supervisors to do this stuff so, you know, it’s not just the labor union,” Morgan said.
That is bad enough but what union hitman Morgan said of the local media is the most interesting:
That’s not to mention all the free media that Morgan has gotten from TV news coverage of his union’s rallies and activities.
Morgan specifically mentioned WTMJ-TV (Channel 4) for its coverage of the union’s press-friendly inspection of county facilities last month. Like the Journal Sentinel, the station is owned by Journal Communications.
“They’ve really been willing partners in it,” Morgan claimed of the news stations. “They come in with the TV cameras, and (channels) 58, 12 come, and 6 doesn’t always. But, yeah, they’ve been really helpful. They think it’s fun.”
So there you have it. This SEIU hitman is working closely with both local politicians and the local media to attack Republicans. Now you can see how the deck is stacked against Republicans with unions that make their living from public money working with the Old Media and elected officials both to attack them.
**UPDATE**
LOOSE LIPS SINK… UNION HACKS
Well, poor old John-David Morgan was fired by the SEIU for letting slip the fact that unions are aided and abetted by the Old Media.
The Service Employees International Union Local 1 announced Tuesday that it had fired an employee who was secretly recorded talking about his union’s plans to work with Democrats to try to defeat Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker in the governor’s race.
Unions just hate it when they are exposed like that!
By Warner Todd Huston, Publius' Forum September 22, 2010
Earlier in this election cycle unions were pumped up with an assumed sense of supreme power, they had spent millions to elect their guy to the White House, and they were ready to flex their muscles. Unions began to direct that assumed power against Democrats that were reticent to support Obama’s takeover of our healthcare system. In some early primaries unions spoke out against these so-called Blue-dog Democrats and said they would not support them, but at the other end of this primary season unions are singing a different tune.
With the obvious downturn in support that Democrats have seen in these primaries and in the polls of American voters, unions have gotten the hint (like a club over the head) that the arrogance they evinced of daring to attack Democrats for not having a pure enough devotion to union ideals was maybe not such a great idea.
Unions, once sure they could force Democrats to toe the line, are now backing off their criticism of Blue-dog Democrats and instead are suddenly supporting them. The Hill notes that unions are now supporting Democrats they were only months ago criticizing.
Unions are finally just beginning to get the idea that they are in a losing situation and are backing off the arrogance in which they only recently wallowed. This is yet one more example that points to a Republican victory in November.
By Warner Todd Huston, Publius' Forum September 18, 2010
When voters are not enthused, even unions find it harder to get their supporters to rally to an election; and this is one of the worst years for Democrats on record. Unions are finding their efforts hard slogging just like the rest of the Democrat Party is. It’s so bad even The New York Times is reporting the Union’s woes.
As we’ve repeatedly talked about here, The Times reports that Big Labor is pumping millions into the Democrat’s pockets in hopes of fighting off the conservative Tea Party enthusiasm out there this election year. Apparently, though, unions are finding that, like other Democrat constituencies, their members are not “feeling particularly enthusiastic about the party.”
Unions have been bitterly disappointed by Obama. When they voted for him only two years ago, they thought that they had won the battle for all the freebies and payoffs that they’d ever want. But they’ve been frustrated by key losses — such as an inability to get cap and trade, green initiatives, and their most desired legislation, the Employee Free Trade Act (EFCA).
Many unionistas have been upset at various members of the Democrat majority that have backpeddled on union demands because voters have spoken so loudly against then unions. For a while there unions were even making noise, as if they’d actually work against Democrats that didn’t bow on bended knee before Big Labor. A few primary races earlier in the year even saw unions work against recalcitrant Democrats. But apparently that idea has fallen by the wayside, as far as Big Labor’s bosses are concerned, as more evidence of how badly Democrats might lose in November comes to light.
It is a measure of the dread among Democrats and their labor allies that several unions are no longer threatening to withhold endorsements from some conservative or moderate Democrats, like Representative Zack Space of Ohio, because they had bucked labor on health care legislation or other issues. Now, unions are generally backing those Democrats, feeling labor cannot afford such a strategy when the Democrats’ prospects seem so troubled.
The specter of a rout has scared Big Labor back to strict alliance with incumbent Democrats instead of trying to flex muscle against certain Democrats that have not been heeding labor’s call.
Big Labor sees a big spanking coming their way and they are scared. But this is a whirlwind unions deserve to reap.
It really is a bad year to be a Democrat incumbent. How bad is it you ask? Well, longtime federal-employee advocate Steny Hoyer, whose Congressional seat is usually so safe (his district is home to thousands of federal employees) that he uses his campaign cash to help other Democrats, is now spending his money to run ads on the airways. Charles Lollar (in the video above) forced Steny Hoyer to actually campaign for 2010 elections. - AnotherBlackConservative
By Warner Todd Huston, Publius' Forum September 11, 2010
The Washington Examiner asks a few substantive questions about unions this Labor Day weekend. Why do they seem to have such an outsized power when their dues paying members are fewer than ever, when they work in fewer industries than ever, and when they have such money troubles?
Ah, but the answer is what we all know. They have a president in Washington that’s bought and paid for.
Here are just some of the favors that Obama has given to his patrons in Big Labor as the Examiner notes:
» Only 10 days after taking the oath of office, Obama signed three executive orders that, respectively, limited what federal contractors can say to employees during union organizing drives, made it harder to fire incompetent employees of government contractors, and directed federal contractors to insure that employees are aware of their organizing rights.
» One week later, Obama signed another executive order that requires federal agencies to use union-favored Project Labor Agreements on large federally-funded construction projects. Not only does that mean many state government construction projects must use a PLA, but so must many economic stimulus-funded projects.
» Hilda Solis, Obama’s secretary of labor, has nullified disclosure rules issued during the Bush administration that were designed to increase union financial transparency on forms required to be filed with the government under the Landrum-Griffin Labor Management Reporting Disclosure Act of 1959. The disclosure requirements, which were not enforced before Bush, made it possible for union members to see what their officers were doing with their dues.
» Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner forced financially-troubled General Motors and Chrysler into bankruptcy, then imposed settlements on the two corporations that granted ownership stakes of 17.5 percent and 55 percent, respectively, to the United Auto Workers Union.
Yes, it is no wonder that unions have their lowest approval rate ever.
By Warner Todd Huston, Publius' Forum September 8, 2010
Back in 2007 Andy Stern, the now former President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), attended a forum sponsored by the NDN Globalization Initiative, and during the question and answer period after his remarks he said that he was “totally involved in distorting the political system.” Here the president of one of America’s most powerful unions just said that he feels his job is to purposefully subvert America’s political system.
Sadly, this union thug doesn’t care much about the integrity of our political system, eh?
It should also be remembered that since Democrats are the handmaiden of Big Labor this, by extension, is the same way that Democrats feel about our American political system. They have no interest in its integrity and will “distort” it whenever they feel like it.
By Warner Todd Huston, Publius' Forum September 9, 2010
It is the most important hill that folks interested in good government have yet to conquer and that is the elimination of government employee unions. The Heritage Foundation reports the sad and disgusting news that the majority of union members now work for government, an intolerable situation to say the least.
The BLS’s annual report on union membership shows the labor movement’s decline in membership continued in 2009. While a full 23.0 percent of Americans belonged to labor unions in 1980, by 2008 only 12.4 percent did. In 2009, that figure dropped slightly to 12.3 percent.[2] There are now 15.3 million union members in the United States, 770,000 fewer than in 2008.
…What is newsworthy, however, is another figure reported by the BLS: 52 percent of all union members work for the federal or state and local governments, a sharp increase from the 49 percent in 2008. A majority of American union members are now employed by the government; three times more union members now work in the Post Office than in the auto industry.
This is a travesty. Unions are one of the main causes of budgets going into the red in states all across the country. The incestuous relationship between politicians greedy for union political contributions and unions donating to them in order to get ever grater pay and benefits (all conveniently cutting out the will of the voters and destroying good, fiscally responsible government) has about ruined this country.
The Heritage Foundation’s piece also details how these greedy, needless, corrupt unions are spending millions of dollars in campaigning to raise your taxes. You see, without higher taxes, these greedy union thugs can’t continue to push their bought and paid for politicians to continue raising union pay scales, benefits, and pension rates — all of which are exceeding that of the private sector at this point.
Heritage writer James Sherk suggests that Congress reject union demands for higher taxes and should also reject “proposals to increase union membership in the government.” I’d go further. Governments, all governments, should make unions for public employees again illegal like they once were.
It may not be well known, but public employee unions did not exist prior to 1958 when New York Mayor Robert Wagner (Dem.) first signed what he called “The Little Wagner Act” to allow city employees to collectively bargain with the government. A few years later, in 1962, President John Kennedy followed that with Executive Order 10988 that did the same thing for federal employees.
It has become wholly obvious, though, that unionizing government employees is one of the worst ideas ever. In fact, much as I dislike Franklin D. Roosevelt and disagree with the socialist policies that he foisted on America as “helping” her, I have to agree with him on public employee unions. He was against them because he clearly saw the conflict of interest that it would cause.
Our goal as American voters should be to work towards eliminating these destructive unions, not reforming them.
By Warner Todd Huston, Publius' Forum September 7, 2010
Deroy Murdock over at the National Review has a great column detailing a dozen or so instances of rank hypocrisy perpetrated by unions. Deroy says that for all of Big Labor’s yammering about worker’s right: “Such class-warfare sloganeering would be easier to stomach if Big Labor were internally consistent.”
Murdock gives all sorts of examples of unions violating their own supposedly closely-held tenets. From unions firing employees for trying to organize the union’s own office workers, to unions using non-union labor to build their own offices, unions prove to be filled with liars and hypocrites.
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
The New World Order Plan is spiritually based: it is a conflict between God and His forces, on the one hand, and Satan and his demonic forces on the other side. Anyone who does not know Biblical doctrine about God and Satan, and who does not know Scriptural prophecy, cannot comprehend the nature of the struggle facing the world today. - David Bay, Cutting Edge Ministries
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. - Ephesians 6:12
Now the brother shall betray the brother to death, and the father the son; and children shall rise up against their parents, and shall cause them to be put to death. And ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake: but he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved. - Mark 13:12,13
For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence... Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. - President John F. Kennedy, April 27, 1961
The book in which they are embodied was first published in the year 1897 by Philip Stepanov for private circulation among his intimate friends. The first time Nilus published them was in 1901 in a book called The Great Within the Small and reprinted in 1905. A copy of this is in the British Museum bearing the date of its reception, August 10, 1906. All copies that were known to exist in Russia were destroyed in the Kerensky regime, and under his successors the possession of a copy by anyone in Soviet land was a crime sufficient to ensure the owner's of being shot on sight. The fact is in itself sufficient proof of the genuineness of the Protocols. The Jewish journals, of course, say that they are a forgery, leaving it to be understood that Professor Nilus, who embodied them in a work of his own, had concocted them for his own purposes.
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