Unions and elections

My opinions for Unions have been expressed before. In fact, I have done so on more than one occasion. I have worked in two different workplaces that would be considered a union shop. One of the biggest problems with a union shop is that they are run as a democracy, with the majority making decisions that everyone must abide by. Another big problem is that certain members of the union use power and influence to control what the majority thinks and votes for. This can result in some pretty underhanded dealings.

The most recent union shop is the one that I am about to retire from. The issue that has brought this to light is a recent vote that was taken by the union at my current employer. Let me begin by saying that I am retiring in 5 weeks, and will not be affected by this vote, but that doesn’t mean that I approve of how it was done.

The vote is to change the fire department schedule from a 24 hours on, followed by 48 hours off, to a schedule where firefighters work 48 hours on duty, followed by 96 hours off. This topic has come up for debate every year at contract time, for about the last five years and has not ever been approved. There are a lot of conflicting opinions on this, and I will not debate or air them here. Instead, I want to talk about HOW the vote was done.

There is a core of firefighters that want the schedule to change, and they have been pressing for it for a few years now. An election was recently held for union president, and the new president is in the 48/96 camp. As his first act, he decided to lobby everyone for the schedule change and held a vote, which he said would require a 65% supermajority to implement. Everyone would be able to vote, even employees who would be affected by the change, but were not even union members. Sounds fair, right? I thought so too, but the devil, as they say, is in the details.

The vote was done by secret ballot. Each voter was given a piece of paper and told to write which schedule they preferred. There are 90 firefighters who work for the fire department, and the vote was close to not passing with the required 65%: There were 60 votes for, and 27 against, meaning that the new schedule was approved by one more vote than was required.

There is a catch: At least three votes were not counted. Mine, another firefighter who has said that she is leaving in February, and a firefighter assigned to a 40 hour work week in the front office. The excuse for that is because two of us were quitting, and the third was not going to work that schedule, our votes shouldn’t count. Additionally, there were people who wrote “I don’t care” and another who wrote “I have no opinion until I see details” and both of those were counted as “yes” votes.

Complicating things further, the president, who was the one pushing for the new schedule, was the one who collected and counted the ballots, which he claims to have thrown away after counting them.

This whole issue is like our elections process in miniature.

And before anyone comments here about how unions are evil, stuff it. Corporations are no better: Enron, Citigroup, GM, and many others have proven that people are the problem, not the organizations that they create to gain power.

Of laws and tyrants

There are some lawyers who are arguing about the legality of the Declaration of Independence. Let me settle this: Of course declaring Independence from the King was illegal: If it weren’t, then it wouldn’t have been necessary. No tyrant ever makes it legal to resist his power.

The only difference between George Washington and Osama Bin Laden is that Washington won. Let me explain:
Did the colonists burn down the homes of tax collectors, and kill their families? Yep.
Did the colonists use force to destroy public property to further their political aims? Yep.

There was little difference between what the American Revolution attempted to do, and any other citizen uprising. What made the American Revolution unique is not the Declaration of Independence, it was what came after the revolution was run. Very few revolutions succeed in providing more freedom, many simply cause one tyrant to be replaced with another. When Washington became president, he insisted that he not be a king, and that the office remain one of the people, and that the Federal government was to remain a servant of the states, and of the people. That held true until the beginning of the civil war, nearly 100 years later.

Was it legal for the southern states to secede? Of course not, but they did. They only came back through military conquest. When the civil war ended, so did the republic. What replaced it has become far worse than that which caused our founders to declare independence from the King.

The Soviets were free

There are an estimated 800,000 full-time law enforcement officers in the United States: 120,000 Federal and 620,000 State and local.

That breaks down to 1 Fed for every 2,500 citizens, and one cop for every 375 citizens. Contrast that with this article about the Stasi and Gestapo:

The Soviet Union’s KGB employed about 480,000 full-time agents to oversee a nation of 280 million, which means there was one agent per 5,830 citizens. Using Wiesenthal’s figures for the Nazi Gestapo, there was one officer for 2,000 people. The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. 

(even though the math for the Soviets is incorrect)
We have ratios of police versus citizens that is more than that of the Soviet communists, and rivals that of  the Gestapo.

But we don’t live in a police state. This is a free country, after all.

CBS news bias

With the Obama’s planning to take another vacation to Martha’s Vinyard, CBS news has come to his defense as the Republicans attack him for taking too many vacations. CBS news correspondent Mark Knoller, a self-proclaimed presidential statistician, claims that Obama has had 61 vacation days over his 31 months in office.

Now, I am one of those who believes that a President is always working, and no matter where they are. I thought the complaints about Bush vacations were silly partisan sniping, and I believe that the same can be said about the attacks on Obama for his vacation. After all, President Bush was just as capable of carrying out the business of the Executive branch from his ranch in Texas as he is from the White House.

Mark Knoller, in an article written in January of 2010, about Obama’s first year in office, claimed that Obama spent 27 days at Camp David, and another 26 days on vacation in his first year. That totals 53 days. In addition, he spent 29 days playing golf. It doesn’t appear that accuracy in reporting is Mr. Knoller’s strong suit, because in July of 2010, he claimed that Obama had taken 35 vacation days so far in his Presidency.

 Mark Knoller claimed on December 31st of 2010 that Obama took 32 days of vacation in 2010, and took 58 days of vacation in 2009. According to my math, that is a total of 90 days for 2009 and 2010. So how can the same man claim that, as of 2011, Obama has taken a total of 61 days of vacation? I think Mark Knoller just makes up numbers as he goes along.

No, today’s post is about the press and their partisan bias, not about Presidential time off. Much hay is made in lefty circles about how Fox news is biased. Names like “Faux News,” yet this is an obvious, provable falsehood. This should be no surprise, since more than half of the items that CBS news is selling in their online store is Obama memorabilia.

Tell me again that Fox is biased, and CBS is not.

(Incidentally, I could not find a source that listed the number of days that Obama has vacationed.)

Only Fox news has biased coverage

Recently, there was an attack by a group of forty or more teens against a neighborhood, and one of the residents used a rifle to scare them off. Some of the people reading the article were asking why the news didn’t mention the fact that it was a group of forty black teens attacking residents of a white neighborhood, and the further alleged that if it had been a large group of white teens terrorizing a black neighborhood, it would have been the largest headline possible. Calls from the press to pass hate crime laws would have been heard. Instead, crickets.

The Chicago Tribune responded by saying:

It’s the newspaper’s sound general policy not to mention race in a story, whether about crime or anything else, unless it has some clear relevance to the topic. 

 Really? Let’s see:

Editorial accusing people who disagree with Obama of racism.

Story accusing Arizona of racism because they crack down on illegal immigrants, who happen to be Mexican because the Mexican border is closer to Arizona than the Canadian border.

Story about how blacks do not save their money like whites do.

Story about a man charged with a hate crime for pointing at another man and calling him a name.

The Chicago Tribune fails to realize that the race of people involved with a story only becomes relevant when you report the race of the people. Ignoring the fact that an attack is racially motivated makes the race of those people irrelevant and shows your bias.

Poverty

The poverty threshold is an amount of money that is required to meet a certain minimum standard of living. That is, it is computed by determining what amount of money it takes to live in an apartment and eat at a certain minimum level. The government’s definition of poverty is not tied to an absolute value of how much an individual or family can afford, but is tied to a relative level based on total income received. For example, the poverty level for 2011 was set at $22,350 (total yearly income) for a family of four, and $10,890 for a single person. Here is the table:

Persons in
Family Unit
48 Contiguous States
and D.C.
Alaska Hawaii
1 $10,890 $13,600 $12,540
2 $14,710 $18,380 $16,930
3 $18,530 $23,160 $21,320
4 $22,350 $27,940 $25,710
5 $26,170 $32,720 $30,100
6 $29,990 $37,500 $34,490
7 $33,810 $42,280 $38,880
8 $37,630 $47,060 $43,270
Each additional
person adds
$3,820 $4,780 $4,390

(source: US Dept of Health and Human Services)

Currently, 12.6% of the US population, or 37 million people, are below this poverty threshold. So, could we fix this problem by merely giving every person below the poverty level a million dollars? The answer is no. The reason for this, is that as we pour money into the poor community, those people will by things, thus placing an inflated demand for products like food and housing on those communities. Additionally, no one will go to work, because they are all millionaires. The only way for businesses to produce the goods that are under such high demand is for wages to increase to the point where the nouveau riche will stop the buying spree long enough to go to work. These two factors will cause prices to rise until the supply/demand curve stabilizes at a new price level- a price level that is much higher than it was before we handed out the money.

This is why a war on poverty where the wages of the rich are confiscated and given to the poor can never be successful.

Not only that, but let’s face it: The United States doesn’t have a poverty problem. We are the only country in the world where the poorest portions of the population own cell phones and televisions. According to Nielson, 96.7% of American households own a television. Cellular ownership is high as well: 94% of Americans own a cell phone. Tell me again why my money needs to be confiscated so that someone else can get a free cell phone and television.

Republicans: America’s Taliban

See Florida Governor Rick Scott as he delivers his daily video address to the state. I know that the Republicans don’t kill and torture like the Taliban, so don’t bother sending me hate mail.

There is a parallel here that I want you to understand: There are many Americans who are completely turned off by the fascination that the Republican party has with preaching instead of governing. You need to keep your religious views to yourself when you are running the nation’s governments. We do not want to be preached to. Religion is like a penis, it is sometimes good to have one, just don’t go ramming it down people’s throats unless they ask you to.

Still going to vote for Democrats or Republicans?

News tonight is that Congress has reached an agreement on the debt:

In a conference call with his rank and file, Boehner said the agreement “isn’t the greatest deal in the world, but it shows how much we’ve changed the terms of the debate in this town.”

 Changed? What has changed? The deal makes cuts totaling $1.2 trillion over 10 years


Way to trim that budget, guys! When George W was president, Dems blasted him for the 2008 budget deficit: $485 billion. Obama’s latest deficit: $1.4 trillion. With the cuts suggested by today’s deal: $1.28 trillion, or more than 2 times the 2008 Bush deficit. Also, consider that since the cuts are to take place over ten years. This Congress and this President will have left office long before, meaning that the cuts will likely never actually happen.
 

Anyone who believes that either party has any interest in changing anything is rather foolish.

The downgrade is near

From the Wall Street Journal:

Medicare, the program for the elderly, was supposed to cost $12 billion by 1990 but instead spent $110 billion. The costs of Medicaid, the program for the poor, have exploded as politicians like California Democrat Henry Waxman expanded eligibility and coverage. In inflation-adjusted dollars, Medicaid cost $4 billion in 1966, $41 billion in 1986 and $243 billion last year. Rather than bending the cost curve down, the government as third-party payer led to a medical price spiral.

According to the most recent government data, today some 50.5 million Americans are on Medicaid, 46.5 million are on Medicare, 52 million on Social Security, five million on SSI, 7.5 million on unemployment insurance, and 44.6 million on food stamps and other nutrition programs. Some 24 million get the earned-income tax credit, a cash income supplement.

By 2010 such payments to individuals were 66% of the federal budget, up from 28% in 1965. (See the second chart.) We now spend $2.1 trillion a year on these redistribution programs, and the 75 million baby boomers are only starting to retire.

On Monday night Mr. Obama blamed President George W. Bush’s “two wars” for the debt buildup. But national defense spending was 7.4% of GDP and 42.8% of outlays in 1965, and only 4.8% of GDP and 20.1% of federal outlays in 2010. Defense has not caused the debt crisis.