The Collectivist News - Thursday highlights

The Collectivist News … excerpts from today’s issue of The Union News.

Experiment in freedom cut short by public servants … As an independent, I follow the debate over which party is to blame and which is to lead with some skepticism. Both parties are to blame. If you dig beneath the rhetoric, you find vested interests: the behavioral economists and billionaires such as George Soros vs. the banks and the energy companies. Currently, TARP and the massive debt are poised the sink the banks while government mandates shift energy use. High-dollar interests use the political parties to do their bidding and sometimes hedge their bets with contributions to both. One party lavishes tax subsidies and contracts to its interests, while the other taxes and shifts money to its own interests. The parties achieve dominance through voter fraud (Florida in 2000, Ohio in 2004 and ACORN in 2008), massive amounts of donations, rules inhibiting the rise of independent candidates, catering to lobbyists and public relations manipulation. The political parties and vested interests wield more power in a practical sense than the Constitution itself. Our founders bequeathed a limited government with checks and balances to us, but they could not protect us from future tyranny. That was to be our contribution to the experiment in freedom. (amarillo.com)


SEIU can’t expunge ACORN, Rathke … A photo retrieved from SEIU Local 100’s website today. The original photo caption reads: “Organizers from Local 100, ACORN, and SEIU, supporters and attorneys celebrate our victory on February 3, 2002.” The man with the sandy hair to the right of the microphones is Wade Rathke, founder and then-chief organizer of ACORN. ACORN did a strange thing today. It scrubbed its website of references to two of its key affiliates, Locals 100 and 880 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), an event reported by Kevin Mooney of the Washington Examiner. Why would the radical left-wing ACORN do that? An observer I spoke with earlier today speculated that organized labor doesn’t want to be associated with ACORN, which is pure PR poison, right now as it presses for the most important item on its legislative agenda: the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) also known as “card check.” Is the labor movement actually taking political heat for its ties to ACORN? It seems like a reasonable hypothesis but I don’t have proof right now. Perhaps in time we’ll find out. In any event, erasing the listings is weird. What is ACORN afraid of? In detail, here’s what went down: ACORN, which until recently proudly listed Locals 100 and 880 of SEIU as affiliates, removed the short blurbs and logos of the two entities from its allied organizations page. As of April 20, one day before Mooney’s article on ACORN and its ties to unions ran in the Washington Examiner, the ACORN website page looked like this. (The link leads to a PDF of the page I made on Oct. 30, 2008.) From the same website, here is a copy that I made on Oct. 24, 2008 of an official list of ACORN’s affiliates, a document called “ACORN, ACORN Affiliate, and COUNCIL Offices.” Moreover, SEIU Local 100’s most recent publicly available IRS Form 990 shows ACORN founder Wade Rathke as that local’s chief organizer (see page 5 of above linked PDF file). (For background information on ACORN, please see the November 2008 issues of Foundation Watch and Labor Watch, two monthly newsletters I edit at Capital Research Center.) (spectator.org)


Gov’t-union greed exposed … So the mayor and the firefighters union have done a good job over the last week of getting out their message that there’s no choice but to close down the Tarkiln Hill Road fire station until July 1. Maybe longer. But I don’t think either side has been frank about what’s really driving Fire Department costs. I’m talking “minimum manning requirements.” Minimum manning requirements are the costly overtime policies that are part of both police and fire union contracts. And they make those departments much, much more expensive to run than they used to be. I initially suspected something unusual was driving the Fire Department costs when I recently examined the list of top city employee wage earners. I was surprised to learn that some 12 firefighters — the deputy chief, seven district chiefs, three captains and a lieutenant — had all earned in excess of $90,000 in 2008. One district chief even made $110,000, to give you an idea of the kinds of money we’re talking about. I didn’t think district fire chiefs, never mind captains and a lieutenant, made that kind of money, so I suspected it involved a lot of overtime. I was right. The New Bedford Fire Department last year paid out more than $847,000 in overtime for 235 employees, or an average of a little more than $3,600 per firefighter. The biggest problems were the district chiefs, who are wrongly defined as union members and not management. The union contract requires two district chiefs per shift, so one ended up earning more than $20,000 just in overtime. Municipal unions right now — the teachers, police, and fire — are the most powerful unions in the county. They are what the Teamsters and steel workers unions used to be. But they are now demanding that private sector workers pony up for the kind of salaries, pension and health care benefits that are no longer available to most private sector workers themselves. That’s an unsustainable position for government unions. And it’s unsustainable in struggling New Bedford even more than other places. (southcoasttoday.com)


Student takes on Collectivist News Network … After the coverage last week of tea parties protesting big government and the liberties and freedoms that the bureaucracy looks to take away, it is clear why the “drive-by” media doesn’t understand what real dissent is supposed to look like. And to me, that’s OK. Susan Roesgen of CNN is a great example. She asked a man why he was protesting. “Because I hear that the president believed in what Lincoln stood for, Lincoln believed that people had the right to liberty.” Susan changed from reporter to journalist. “What does this have to do with taxes?” The man replied, “Lincoln believed that people should bear the fruits of their own labor.” With the stealth of Sandy Berger shoving CIA documents down his pants, Sue became a game show host. “Do you realize that the land of Lincoln gets $50 billion out of the stimulus? That’s $50 billion, sir!” I was surprised that a door didn’t suddenly pop out in front of Sue and the man with a new car behind it. She was a chameleon, changing from a game show host to rabid Cujo. (media.www.mainecampus.com)


Chávez scores propaganda victory over Obama, U.S. … “Handshakes matter,” said David Paul Kuhn in RealClearPolitics. That’s why President Obama is taking flak for clasping hands with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez at the recent Summit of the Americas. (Watch Obama’s encounter with Chávez.) A handshake with an adversary can symbolize detente—as did Ronald Reagan’s with Mikhail Gorbachev. But Obama accomplished nothing, other than handing a propaganda victory to one of America’s “fiercest critics.” (theweek.com)