Ken Nelson

I guess we are all scabs now

I’m not surprised that I get to pay a tax on my healthcare plan, but a union fellow with a better plan that he doesn’t pay for, doesn’t have to pay the tax.

And so it looks like they may have reached a deal sooner than otherwise expected: unions get a special two-year exclusion from the tax.

So not only does the healthcare bill kill our medical system it also kills any pretense that this government is of the people, for the people.

The Obama Administration really is the best money can buy.

Feet don’t fail me now!

Instapundit writes:

UH OH: Underfunded Public Pensions as “Stranded” Costs? Two Trillion Dollars? “One question about these obligations is whether taxpayers will stick around to pay them, or instead will vote with their feet. . . . Many of these pension obligations have been incurred by municipalities and others by states, and in some cases the obligations are intertwined. But what happens if voters-taxpayers move out? The assumption has long been that taxpayers are stuck, on account of jobs and other circumstance. But query whether that is necessarily true as the baby boom generation retires.”

This is exactly why politicians bought by unions and public sector employees are attempting to nationalize obligations like healthcare as well as industries unions have killed (automobile initially).

Once nationalized, we won’t be able to run from stupid overly generous under funded post employment obligations.

Do not confuse Democrats with idealists. Sure there are socialists amidst them, but at the core they are bought and sold corrupt politicians eager to please their union and public sector masters.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together have cost the US Taxpayer over $400 billion dollars. And there is no end in sight.

Unlimited bailouts will now allow the Treasury to keep them in conservatorship, which means they can help to conserve the Democratic majority in Congress by increasing their role in housing finance. With the Federal Reserve planning to step back as early as March from buying $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities, Team Obama is counting on Fan and Fred to help reflate the housing bubble.

Yet, with all this cost, and with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac being extensions of government, their CEOs each will get $5 million dollars salary.

So a pay czar only pay czars folks the unions are pissed at? Is that it? Pay no attention to the places where Democrats park their cronies?

Crony capitalism.. brought to you by the Democratic party.  Personally, I’d be ashamed to be associated with that party.

Some folks have asked “Gosh Ken, you can’t really want to get rid of Unions”….  My answer is yes, I do.

But more specifically, I either want to get rid of all of them, or have a LOT more of them. Unions, like any other BUSINESS, should compete. An employee should be able to choose which union to join based on competitive offerings. And if any one union gets too big, or too dominate in a region, business sector, or even a company, it should be broken up or banned.

In other words, unions should be treated like businesses, which is what they are.

The idea that it is bad for only one company to sell cars, but okay for only one company to sell the labor that builds cars makes no sense.

And… if I find unions dividing but coordinating attacks on business or politics, well, I’ll smack them just as hard as I would other businesses attempting end-runs around competition.

This an obvious and needed change that won’t happen because our politicians, like Barack Obama, are already bought by unions like the UAW and SEIU.

 
Fighting terrorism through union activism – join today!

I’ve sorted out how to solve this terror problem… tell the Obama administration that Islamic Jihadists management won’t let local jihadists unionize.  Then sit back and watch the fur fly as world-wide terror has a newly fierce enemy.

But alas, then I wake up, and find our illustrious leaders want to further decapitate our security efforts by unionizing TSA employees.  In light of our recent experiences with union failures, why spread the rot?

Thus, while the terrorists remain nimble, flexible and low overhead, those trying to catch them become even more sclerotic than now.

The Obama administration consistently picks the ONE wrong thing out of millions of right things.

You can’t be that good at being wrong by accident, there has to be some evil puppet master (George Soros, the Devil, any suggestions??) pulling the strings.

We should be getting rid of unions, not making more.

NBA player, steel executive, union busting mayor 

Dave Bing, NBA player turned steel entrepreneur faces the unenviable task of saving a city that doesn’t seem to want to be saved:

In November, 57% of the Detroit voters bought into his tough-love reform agenda. Mr. Bing replaced the disgraced Kwame Kilpatrick, who went to jail earlier this year for spending city funds on his girlfriends—just the publicity boost the city already flat on its back didn’t need.

The mayor’s office is in the heart of downtown Detroit, which has shrunk to about an eight-block radius of high rise office towers, upscale restaurants and stores

His biggest problem?  No surprise, the same thing that killed the biggest employers in town, a unionized workforce.

"Today in the city of Detroit," he tells me, "our union employee benefits cost 68% of what their base wage is. I don’t think that happens in any other place in the country." To give a sense of how excessive those pay packages are, he adds: "When you look at one of the most dominant labor unions in the world, the UAW, they’re nowhere close to what we give our city workers."

He should just fire everybody and hire back scabs.  But for now he holds bankruptcy over their heads:

"This would void all the city contracts," he insists. "That means workers have to make a decision: Do you want to start with zero, or do you want to start from where you are and give up just a little bit? Under bankruptcy you start with zero." Mr. Bing is a hardliner.

This is what happens when a real service oriented person takes office.

All of the US needs a Dave Bing – quickly.

They want us to pay for their health care obligations.

In case you are wondering what all this fuss about healthcare is… the Democrats don’t care a whit about the US running out of money. They are way more concerned that the union management that pays for their elections may have trouble paying the health care bills they owe their membership.

If a Democrat is talking… he/she is lying.

If a Republican is talking… he/she is probably lying but there is a small chance not.

Some crappy choices we get. No wonder Tea Party folks are more popular.

In Detroit a record number of bodies lie unclaimed in the city morgue.

One photographer who produced a series of images for Time magazine said that he often felt, as he moved around parts of Detroit, as though he was in a post-apocalyptic disaster.

More accurate would be to call it “post-Democratic disaster”.

Who is in charge in Detroit?   Democrats.  Who killed the businesses in Detroit? Unions.

Who would want similar folks in charge of all of us?  Idiots.

Looking at the most expensive stimulus projects, virtually all of them are gifts to state education funds:

So the NEA donates a million bucks to mostly Democrats and gets billions in return. They could teach fancy Wall Street finance gurus about leverage.

Put another way… the teachers unions are busy ruining the future of the kids they teach.  I’d have trouble looking at myself in the mirror if I were a teacher and paid dues to the NEA, or other educational unions.

Note also that most of the money goes to the places with the largest Congressional delegations but not particularly to where the jobs are lost. Texas is doing pretty well, as is Washington D.C and Georgia.

The “stimulus” wasn’t about jobs, other than politician’s jobs.

/rant

Union power, the corruption it has spawned in the Democratic party, and the businesses unions have killed, are among the primary reasons this country teeters on the edge of collapse.

I’m not going to make nice and say union members are okay but their management isn’t. That is an intellectual cop out you won’t get on KenNelson.com.  Union members vote in the management, and the races are never close, so therefore THEY ALL SUCK.

If you are in a union, shame on you.

I’d be more supportive of unions if they would compete, like any other business. But having just ONE car making union, and ONE plumber union, means they inevitably become corrupt and do economic and political damage to all of us.

Unions as currently organized are monopolies and should be broken up.

\rant

Wonder why I rant… how about this or this.

A: Crime, high taxes, high costs, nasty traffic, corrupt government, unionized, and bad schools…. 

Q: Why do so many people flee blue states?

The video above compares what union thugs and Marxist protestors say employees of Whole Foods think of their employer versus what they actually say.

Do you think the Marxist protestors want to help Whole Food Workers?  What, really, does the union organizer want?  What about John Mackey, Whole Foods CEO?

Ford made money in the 3rd quarter. About $1 billion dollars. This is the first quarter in four years they’ve made money. They had burned through tens of billions in cash reserves.

So how is Ford rewarded for putting up its own money for years to keep it a going concern, succeeding, getting profitable and being the most secure of the Big 3 automakers?

Its improving fortunes were the main reason cited by the United Automobile Workers on Monday for rejecting another round of labor concessions that would have roughly matched concessions that workers at Chrysler and General Motors approved in the spring.

Now, just when Ford is ready to grab market share from competitors and make their futures more secure, its own employees put a wrench in the plans.   It is almost like they own the competitors… oh THEY DO…

I don’t see how the UAW can fairly represent Ford employees when it owns much of Ford’s domestic competitors.   

Monopoly laws need to be applied to unions.

Was  Cash for Clunkers just for Lamborghinis or Ferraris?  You might think so given that each incremental vehicle sold cost your children and grandchildren $50,000.

Three billion dollars is a lot of taxpayer money to stimulate sales of just 56,000 cars — over $50,000 each, and many of them foreign brands. As is so often the case with government spending, we got Trabant quality at Lincoln prices.

But what is important is that the UAW got a billion of that… right?

Union thug

Obama ties union participation to a federal contract.

Critics say imposing the union-friendly rules on the New Hampshire job – the first federal construction contract with such stipulations since President Clinton was in office – will drive up costs, delay the project and force most of the workers to pay union dues and pension contributions for which they likely will never receive benefits.

Just another union bailout.  Maybe I should join an unproductive nation killing coalition?