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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.

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Posted in Barack Obama, Economy, government, Liberal Fascism, Regulation, Socialism, Unions | 56 Comments »

The Obama Boom is the Obama Bust

by Phantom Ace ( 147 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Economy, Elections 2010, Progressives at August 16th, 2010 - 4:30 pm

The Obama Boom which the media was banking on to prevent Democratic losses in November and would propel Barack Hussein Obama to a 2nd term has failed. It will be remembered as one of the biggest flops since Ishtar, considering all the media hypebehind it. In recent months, the economy is slowing dramatically as the stimulus and government programs wear off. The Keynesian theories behind these actions have proven a failure and has lead to more debt. Borrowing money leads to economic stagnation and restricts growth. The Obama regime was ready with its Recovery Summer propaganda push, but recent events have forced them to pull back.

Declaring a “Recovery Summer” victory tour at the start of June must have looked like a pretty safe wager for the Obama administration. The economy seemed to have shifted firmly into gear during the spring. Lawrence Summers, director of the National Economic Council, told the Financial Times in early April that the economy was “moving toward escape velocity. You hear a lot less talk of ‘W’-shaped recoveries and double-dips than you did six months ago.”

A big reason for White House optimism was a stronger job market. The economy added an average of 320,000 net new jobs a month during March, April, and May, about half of them in the private sector. Granted, the unemployment rate still hovered close to 10 percent. But if the economy kept growing at a 3 percent annual clip or greater—creating lots and lots of new jobs in the process—unemployment would eventually fall, perhaps dramatically. As one White House insider remarked upon reviewing all the macro-indicators and then evaluating the economic team’s performance, “It looks like we got things just about right.”

Since then, however, the economy has fallen back to earth, and “Recovery Summer” looks more like a bad bet. Private sector job growth has fallen by two-thirds, and the unemployment rate is still at a sky-high 9.5 percent. And if the size of the U.S. workforce, as measured by the Labor Department, had stayed constant since April—instead of shrinking by a million—the unemployment rate would be 10.4 percent. Jobless claims are at their highest level since February. Worse yet, the expansion is decelerating. After growing by 5.7 percent in the final quarter of 2009 and 3.7 percent in the first quarter of 2010, GDP advanced by just 2.4 percent from April through June, according to the Commerce Department. And new data show the final second-quarter number may actually be closer to flat, with growth for the rest of the year just 1 to 2 percent at best.

The White House didn’t count on a summer swoon. Then again, it has suffered bouts of premature and unfounded economic optimism before, a malady that has led it to make a number of losing bets and faulty assumptions—which, in turn, have created an even worse environment for growth and jobs.

Read teh rest: Obama’s Bad Bets “Recovery Summer” goes bust

The mythical Obama Boom has turned into the Obama bust and recoverless summer. The regimes propaganda machine has been exposed as a lie and all it’s done is anger the American people even more. Goodbye Obama Boom, we hardly knew you!

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Posted in Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Economy, Elections 2010, Progressives | 147 Comments »

Why Obama has failed so miserably to deliver

by Mojambo ( 180 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Economy, Misery Index, Progressives at July 22nd, 2010 - 2:00 pm

I guess when you have this misplaced faith in the power of big and growing government to create jobs, combined with a cabinet with the lowest levels of private sector experience, the end result is what we have today. As the author points out, Obama may have “inherited a mess” but it was a mess that he contributed to by his support of TARP and substantial hikes in the minimum wage. If you are an employee of state or local government – you benefited from the “stimulus” package and are part of the “jobs saved” statistic that Joe “Plugs” Biden loves to throw around.

by Daniel J. Mitchell

The White House last year released a supposedly scientific analysis that claimed to show that adopting the “stimulus” bill would cut unemployment. Indeed, the report specifically estimated that the unemployment rate today would be down to 7.5 percent.

Something obviously went wrong. The actual unemployment rate is 9.5 percent, a statistic that doesn’t include the millions who’ve given up looking for work or can only find part-time jobs. What were President Obama’s biggest mistakes?

Part of the problem was a misplaced faith in Keynesian economics — that is, in the discredited notion that politicians can borrow money from the economy’s right pocket and increase prosperity by dumping money in the economy’s left pocket.

But the bigger stumbling block is the folks in the White House seem to have no clue how the real-world economy works. Critics have noted that the Obama Cabinet sets the record for the lowest-ever level of private-sector experience. That doesn’t necessarily mean people who don’t understand how and why jobs are created — but that seems to be the case with this administration.

Profit and Investment Are Necessary For Job Creation

LET’S start with two common- sense observations. First, businesses are not charities. They only create jobs when they think that the total revenue generated by new workers will exceed the total cost of employing those workers. In other words, if it’s not profitable to hire workers, it’s not going to happen.

Second, it takes money to create jobs. More specifically, labor isn’t very useful or productive unless investors are providing capital. Truck drivers won’t get jobs unless someone has invested to buy trucks. Software programmers aren’t worth much if their employer doesn’t buy computers for them to work on. Even the green-energy companies the White House favors can’t hire workers unless somebody (ideally venture capitalists rather than taxpayers) provides seed money.

The problem is not a lack of capital. Businesses have plenty of extra cash — with the Federal Reserve reporting this month, for example, that nonfinancial firms are sitting on $1.8 trillion, about a quarter more cash-on-hand than when the recession started.

[…….]

* The new bailout legislation, though labeled “financial reform,” raises costs for financial firms, meaning loans will be more expensive. That is, investing in that truck or computer for that new hire will cost you more.

TO be fair to President Obama, the problem began before his inauguration. President George W. Bush signed a big minimum-wage hike that has hit hard at less-experienced and lower-skilled workers. If a worker is only worth $6.50 per hour, then a required wage of $7.15 is a one-way ticket to the unemployment line.

And Bush was responsible for the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) bailout, which has squandered precious capital by steering it to such inefficient firms as Citigroup and General Motors, which are unlikely to create jobs over the long run.

Of course, Obama supported these and other Bush economic policies, so the “mess he inherited” is also a mess he helped to make. All that matters from a jobs perspective, though, is that government has made it more expensive to hire workers and more expensive to provide the capital needed to make workers productive. This is a bad combination — whether politicians call themselves Democrats or Republicans.

Read the rest: O’s jobs errors

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Posted in Barack Obama, Economy, Misery Index, Progressives | 180 Comments »