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Obama’s NLRB Attacks South Carolina and the US Constitution

by 1389AD ( 56 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Economy, government, Liberal Fascism, Regulation, Socialism, Unions at April 22nd, 2011 - 4:30 pm

US Constitution printed on toilet paper

The Obama Administration is attacking not only Boeing, but also the State of South Carolina and the US Constitution.

Real Clear Politics: The Newest Labor War: Union, Feds Attack Boeing

(h/t: vagabond trader)

April 22, 2011
By Tom Bevan

Welcome to South Carolina, the newest front in America’s organized labor wars.

On Wednesday, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against Boeing, seeking to prevent the aircraft manufacturer from opening a second production facility in Charleston, South Carolina for its new 787 Dreamliner.

The NLRB alleges that Boeing violated the law, opening the non-unionized South Carolina plant in retaliation against union workers for past strikes at its facility in Everett, Washington and also as part of an effort to discourage future strikes. The NLRB wants an administrative court to force Boeing to relocate its second production line back to a unionized plant in Washington.

Needless to say, with labor controversy still roiling some states across the country, particularly in Wisconsin, news of the story rang out like a shot at Fort Sumter.

South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint denounced the move as “nothing more than a political favor for the unions who are supporting President Obama’s reelection campaign.” DeMint vowed to “use every tool at my disposal to stop the president from carrying out this malicious act.”

His GOP colleague in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, called the NLRB’s complaint “one of the worst cases of unelected bureaucrats doing the bidding of special interest groups that I’ve ever seen.”

On the other side, the International Association of Machinists District 571, which filed the grievance in March of last year, predictably hailed the filing as “a victory for all American workers.”

At issue is not whether companies can retaliate against union workers – they can’t – but whether they have the right to open new facilities (or relocate old ones) where they choose based on a variety of business factors, including the consideration of potential labor strikes in the future.

The IAM has had a collective bargaining agreement with Boeing since 1975, and in that time has led five strikes in the Seattle plants, two of them in the past six years. Boeing CEO Jim MnNerney has been open about his desire for “dual sourcing” capabilities so that the company can meet its obligations with “strikes happening every three to four years in Puget Sound.”

The union contends that the opening of the new non-union facility in South Carolina amounts to intimidation, and that its workers will now be forced to either to accept employment concessions or face the prospect of seeing more and more production migrate from Everett to Charleston. Acting NLRB General Counsel Lafe Solomon fully embraced with the union’s novel legal theory, and stated in his Wednesday order that he will seek an order requiring Boeing to build the second 787 Dreamliner assembly line in Washington.

In response to the uproar Thursday spokeswoman Nancy Cleeland responded in an e-mail: “As Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon made clear in his statement yesterday, this is about the law. The right to strike is guaranteed by the National Labor Relations Act, and employers must stay within the law in making their business decisions.”

Boeing’s lawyers slammed that claim as “legally frivolous” and said the NLRB’s effort to restrict the company’s business represents a “radical departure” from precedent. They were quick to point out two 1965 Supreme Court cases affirming employers’ right to consider potential strikes in making business decisions, and they refuted the union’s claims of intimidation by pointing out that in the eighteen months since the announcement of the South Carolina plant, Boeing has added more than 2,000 union jobs in the Puget Sound area.

The NLRB’s complaint is controversial because of its conspicuousness – labor experts can’t seem to recall any similar complaints or comparable court cases – and also because of the board’s inherently political nature. With Democrats taking control of the five-member board in 2008, the New York Times described the move against Boeing as “the strongest signal yet of the new pro-labor orientation of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama.”
[…]
Unlike Wisconsin, however, the battle in South Carolina is unions and the federal government pitted against private business and “right to work” states. At stake is whether unions have the power to effectively veto companies’ decisions about where they choose to do business.

Also unlike Wisconsin, South Carolina is a critical – some would even argue determinative – early primary state in the Republican presidential nominating process, which is just getting under way. Some, but not all, of the prospective Republican presidential hopefuls are scheduled be in South Carolina in less than two weeks for the first televised debate of the primary season, hosted by Fox News.

The subject of the NLRB’s complaint will surely arise. This issue might even prompt candidates who hadn’t figured on attending the South Carolina debate to tinker with their schedules. And because of South Carolina and Wisconsin, the war between the federal government and unions versus states and the private sector is sure to be a defining issue of next year’s presidential race.

Tom Bevan is the co-founder and Executive Editor of RealClearPolitics. Email: tom@realclearpolitics.com

Read it all.

This shameful attempt to impose tyranny on Boeing and on the State of South Carolina is nothing more than liberal fascism combined with institutionalized union thuggery. Whether or not the NLRB ultimately succeeds, the very fact that they even attempted such an infringement will encourage our few remaining US-based manufacturers to move their entire operations overseas. Once outside of the jurisdiction of the US federal government, their companies will no longer be subjected to the malicious whims and depredations of American democracy – and yes, I do mean mob rule in every sense of that word. The US was founded as a republic, not a democracy, with the powers of the federal government strictly limited to those provided in the US Constitution. Evidently, the Constitution in general, and the Tenth Amendment in particular, has gone by the wayside.

Chile is looking better and better! (See 2.0: The Blogmocracy: Chile Says No to Collective Bargaining.) Unlike the US, the nation and people of Chile love and respect liberty.


Bill Would Free Tennessee Children From Teachers’ Unions

by 1389AD ( 201 Comments › )
Filed under Diary of Daedalus, Education, LGF, Republican Party at February 3rd, 2011 - 6:30 pm

Legislators in the State of Tennessee are taking the first steps to free their taxpayers, and more importantly, their children, from being held hostage to the teachers’ unions. I, for one, hope that all fifty States will follow, and the sooner the better!

If you agree, please contact your own State legislators!

Tennessee State Flag

As an aside, I can’t wait to see how the infamous libelblogger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs will react to this attempt to roll back the progressive assault on our liberties. I am still laughing about his Tennessee Boer delusional moment, in which CJ thought he saw a neo-Nazi flag at a Tea Party rally – which turned out to be the flag of the State of Tennessee. CJ apparently mistook it for the flag of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging. Yes, that’s mighty farfetched, but then, malignant narcissists see only what they want to see, not what the rest of us see.

Bill would put taxpayers back in charge of public education

(h/t: Iron Fist)

It looks like the leaders of the Tennessee Education Association are in for some sleepless nights.

But education reformers, taxpayers, parents and many dedicated teachers are celebrating the news that two Tennessee lawmakers have filed the initial paperwork to introduce a bill that would effectively eliminate teacher unions in the Volunteer State.

Even though Tennessee is a “right to work” state, state law gives public school teachers the right to collectively bargain with their local school board over issues such as working conditions, salaries and fringe benefits. No other public sector employees (such as firemen or police officers) have that privilege.

House Bill 130, sponsored by Rep. Debra Maggart, a Republican who represents Hendersonville, Gallatin and portions of Goodlettsville, and Rep. Glen Casada, Republican from College Grove, would prohibit “any local board of education from negotiating with a professional employees’ organization or teachers’ union concerning the terms or conditions of professional service on or after the effective date of this bill.”
In plain English, the bill would put the taxpayers back in charge of public education. Cash-strapped local school boards would be able to make spending decisions based on what’s best for children, instead of what will keep adult employees happy.
[…]
It would also give individual teachers the ability to negotiate directly with their administrators and school board. Teacher unions say that unionization is necessary for educators to be treated as professionals. The exact opposite is true. True professionals want to be rewarded for their individual performance, whereas the union’s fixation on tenure protection and seniority rules have the effect of treating teachers as interchangeable workers, no better and no worse than any other.

It terms of serious education reform, it appears that HB 130 is the tip of a very large iceberg. This group of state legislators also wants to end the practice of withholding union dues from teacher paychecks, and loosen the union’s power to appoint members to state boards.

Read it all.


The cold December weather, the climate hoax, and…secession?

by 1389AD ( 90 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Breaking News, Climate, Economy, Elections 2010, Environmentalism, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Liberal Fascism, Regulation, Weather at January 3rd, 2011 - 1:30 pm

(The owners of Blogmocracy do not share this contributors opinion of secession. However, in the interest of the free flow of ideas, we are posting this in its entirety even though the owners think secession is a horrible idea and we do not want this blog ‘tagged’ as a pro-secessionist blog. We have not given up on the American Experiment yet, some some folks have. What are other ideas short of secession that states can do, in reality, to prevent fedgov from destroying local economies?)

.

Let’s begin by hearing expert meteorologist Joe Bastardi of AccuWeather debunk “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW). He minces no words in refuting those who would claim that the cold weather in December 2010 is somehow caused by human activity. It’s refreshing to hear him speak:

AccuWeather’s Bastardi debunks global warming causing cold weather myth, warns of severe 2011 drought

(h/t: Climate Depot)

By Jeff Poor – The Daily Caller

Much of the United States and Europe is suffering through extreme wintery weather conditions. But what is causing it?

Some have blamed global warming, specifically the “Arctic paradox.” However, AccuWeather’s chief hurricane and long-range forecaster Joe Bastardi told the Fox Business Network on Tuesday you can chalk it up to three things – oceans, sunspots and volcanoes.

“A few years ago, about why we have to start looking for more and more of this [cold weather],” Bastardi said. “It’s called the triple crown of cooling – the natural reversal of the oceans cycles. Three years ago the Pacific went into the cold state. Solar activity, very low sunspot activity and volcanic activity, not the kind you see in the tropics but the kind we had in the Arctic regions a couple of winters ago — and this is something that could be causing a return to for instance, the times of the Victorian era when they used to have ice fairs in the early-1800s around Christmastime on the Thames and you’re seeing that type of thing go on.”

As for those who are blaming global warming, Bastardi said that theory was childish and presented instead the possibility of long-term global cooling.

“Well, I’ve been saying what I believe is going on is this is the big debate between the natural cycles and the forces of AGW [anthropogenic global warming] – by the way, these folks claiming that global warming is causing severe cold is like the kid on the playground who doesn’t get his way and takes his ball home. The fact of the matter is the forecast that was made by this forecaster three years ago that we we’re going to start seeing these things because of this and it opens up the big debate – are the natural cycles taking over and are we going to see cooling over the next 20 to 30 years? You see, we started measuring temperatures with satellite at the end of the last cold cycle in the Pacific. We had nothing but warm in the Pacific and warm in the Atlantic. What’s going to happen to the temperatures if the oceans are warm? Now that they’re cooling let’s see what’s going to happens in the next 20 to 30 years.”

Read the rest.

Climate change fraud as a political weapon

The Obama Administration and the Democrat Party have doubled down on the anthropogenic “climate change” agenda, despite the fact that the science behind it has been thoroughly debunked as a deliberate fraud. The progressives are pushing intensive government regulation to “save the world” from the nonexistent threat of manmade climate change, not because they truly believe it will happen, but because they are our enemies. A glimpse of our pre-industrial past reveals the quality of life they have in mind for us – though not for themselves – in the future.

A startling evisceration of the motives of the progressive/green faction appears on 2.0: The Blogmocracy: Progressives claim blizzards are a sign of global warning. On that thread, Pat comments:

Indeed. The vast majority of Warmists are really totalitarians. The government is highly in favor of this hoax of AGW being a serious issue because it will lead to higher taxes, it will eliminate the free market, and it will involve government in every aspect of your life from what you eat, what you do, what you think to how many children you will be allowed. The latter to make room for the hordes of immigrants we are morally bound to support as reparations.

Obama’s malignant narcissism, hubris, and megalomania are evidently boundless. In his latest attempt to make an end-run around the US Constitution, he does not hesitate to “mess with Texas” – one of the few States in the US that still has any traces of a functioning economy.

Investors.com: Messing With Texas

(h/t: Da_Beerfreak)

…Two days before Christmas, EPA Regional Administrator Al Armendariz, in a letter to industry, said the agency was taking permitting authority over refineries, power plants and cement facilities in Texas away from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) as of Jan. 2, 2011.

Happy New Year!

The EPA’s new rules — continuing an Obama administration pattern of using regulations to circumvent the will of the people in implementing what it cannot get through Congress, such as cap-and-trade — were issued after the U.S. Supreme Court said it had the authority to regulate carbon dioxide, the basis of all life on the planet and what we exhale, as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

Texas was not amused and is the only state to refuse to implement the rules, filing suit against the EPA.

In Texas’ suit, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said the documented IPCC and CRU fraud, on which EPA findings are based, made any policy decisions based on that work flawed and unjustified.

Abbott cited several examples in which he said climate scientists engaged in an “ongoing, orchestrated effort to violate freedom of information laws, exclude scientific research and manipulate temperature data.”

“With billions of dollars at stake, EPA outsourced the scientific basis for its greenhouse gas regulation to a scandal-plagued international organization (the IPCC) that cannot be considered objective or trustworthy,” Abbott argued.

[Texas Gov. Rick] Perry, a champion of the 10th Amendment, says, “This legal action is being taken to protect the Texas economy and the jobs that go with it, as well as defend Texas’ freedom to continue our successful environmental strategies free from federal overreach.”

Two days after the midterm elections, President Obama served notice that the failure of the outgoing Congress to pass cap-and-trade and the unlikelihood of a GOP House pursuing the matter would not be an impediment.

“Cap-and-trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way,” he said. “I’m going to be looking for other means to address this problem.”

Read it all.

This is an outright attempt to ruin the economy of Texas.

Obama is punishing Texas for having voted Republican; this is exactly how Chicago politicians behave.

Obama is making an example of Texas, so as to threaten regulatory strangulation and extinction against any other State that resists submission to his arbitrary will.

Obama is deliberately crippling the economy of Texas, because it supplies the rest of the US with a viable domestic source of energy. Domestic fossil fuels and nuclear energy must be shut down, in order to make various “green” boondoggles appear profitable when they are not, and in order to make us more dependent on oil imports from our Muslim enemies. To put it bluntly, Obama is selling us out to fraudsters at home and jihadis abroad.

I doubt that the citizenry of the US as a whole is capable of dismantling the tyranny of the federal government. This tyranny has crept too deep into the culture and the structure of society in too many parts of the US.

Secession is another way out of that stranglehold. The State of Texas is obviously big enough to stand on its own, and if it does, most or all of the Southeast is likely to join with it.

While the following writer does not quite come out and say “secession,” he hints at it strongly enough:

The Red and Blue States’ Fort Sumter

(h/t: The Osprey)

By William Tucker on 12.28.10 @ 6:09AM

The opening shot of the War Between the Red and Blue States may have been fired last Friday when the Environmental Protection Administration announced its intention to take over Texas’s authority on issuing clean air permits to new industrial facilities as of January 2.

It is hard to imagine a more stark confrontation between public and private sector-oriented economies. Texas has the strongest economy in the nation, based on its philosophy of limited government. The Texas Legislature convenes only in odd-numbered years is constitutionally limited to meeting only 140 days. Until this year, Texas has had a budget surplus and still has $7.5 billion in a rainy-day fund created by voters in 1988. During 2006 and 2007, Texas created 52 percent of all new jobs in the nation, according to a study done by the Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business. People are flocking to the state so fast that Texas will gain four seats in the House of Representatives in the new decade.

Washington, on the other hand, has run up a trillion-dollar budget deficit and destroyed private-sector jobs all over the country while expanding the government and presiding over 10 percent unemployment. The states on the East and West Coast that adhere most closely to Washington’s philosophy are approaching insolvency. Yet they continue to pursue dreamy energy agendas, trying to close down existing power plants and refusing to build new ones while planning for a world running on windmills and solar collectors.

Now Washington is going to try to impose this blue-state agenda on Texas. The struggle will dwarf the Arizona-versus-Washington contest over immigration.

In fact the conflict over energy production has been brewing for decades. As far back as the 1920s, Texan entrepreneurs built natural gas pipelines to carry their surplus gas north, only to run into Progressive Era reforms saying that utilities had to be regulated as “natural monopolies.” In 1936, the Roosevelt Administration extended this municipal regulation back to the gas pipelines themselves, giving the Federal Power Commission authority to fix prices across the country. Then after endless prodding from northern consumer states, the U.S. Supreme Court finally decided in 1954 that the whole diversified collection of thousands of wildcatters and individual well owners in Texas and Louisiana constituted a “monopoly” that could be regulated by the federal government. Over the next twenty years, the D.C. Court of Appeals tried every trick imaginable to prod gas out of its Texas owners’ hands. It developed the “life of the field” doctrine saying once gas had been put into interstate commerce it could not be withdrawn. Even if a well owner went bankrupt, he was still obliged to keep sending gas to northern consumers at prices fixed by federal regulators. Still, Texas managed to keep as much gas as possible at home. When the Arab Oil Boycott prompted thousands of northern businesses and residences to convert from oil to gas, the whole system collapsed in the Natural Gas Crisis of 1976, when factories and schools closed for weeks in Ohio and Pennsylvania for lack of gas. Meanwhile Texas was using gas to generate half its electricity. The Carter Administration was appalled to discover these distortions but decided to solve them in typical fashion by extending federal price controls even further into Texas as well. Bumper stickers sprouted all over Texas and Louisiana declaring “Let the Yankees Freeze in the Dark.”

Fortunately, the Reagan Administration came along and solved the problem by appointing new members to the Federal Power Commission who deregulated gas prices within a decade. Prices fell as new supplies gushed forth and for the first time the nation had adequate supplies of natural gas — so much so that we resumed the wasteful practice of burning gas for electricity after environmentalists stymied everything else. When conventional supplies peaked in 2000, however, prices quadrupled and gas-dependent industries such as plastics, chemicals, and fertilizer started fleeing for foreign shores. Once again, Texas came through, this time through a stubborn Fort Worth oil man named George Mitchell who spent ten years experimenting with various techniques of horizontal drilling and fracturing hard rock until he devised a way of “fracking” huge gas deposits out of the Barnett Shale. Once again, Texas had rescued the nation.

Read the rest.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

More here:


Originally published on 1389 Blog.