JACK KELLY AND RUSH LIMBAUGH
Santiago, Chile. I am here on a business trip and I am really embarrassed.
As you know, TTP’s Jack Kelly is the national security editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. We always run his column earlier than his paper so TTPers get the first crack at it. But I goofed this week – big time.
I got so bollixed with my travel schedule that I missed his latest opus – and it was a masterpiece. So TTPers didn’t see it. But Rush Limbaugh did. Rush was so blown away he lauded it to the moon earlier this week (4/25), while I’m feeling like a schmuck for not getting it to TTPers first – and then Rush would be citing To The Point instead of the PP-G!
Better late than never. Here’s Jack Kelly’s original, followed by Rush’s comments. Congratulations, Jack!
UNIONS ON THE ROPES
Jack Kelly
Labor unions fight on in Wisconsin, as the Germans did during the bitter winter of 1944-45. But the war is lost.
To see how grim is the outlook for public employee unions, let’s go to Detroit, where Mayor Dave Bing proposed last week (4/19) a budget which would cut contributions to public employee health plans by 20 percent, and would skip a payment to city pension funds.
"If we do nothing, by 2015 fringe benefits are on pace to consume half of our entire general fund revenue," Mr. Bing said. "We cannot afford benefit packages so rich, nor can we afford to protect the interests of 30,000 people at the expense of 700,000."
Mayor Bing is a Democrat in a heavily Democratic city. Yet he has gone "all Scott Walker" on public employee unions, said Matt Continetti of the Weekly Standard.
Scott Walker is Wisconsin‘s Republican governor, and Wisconsin is to public employee unions what Stalingrad was to the Nazis: the site of their first major defeat.
Democrat state senators fled the state to try to prevent a vote on Gov. Walker’s bill to trim the power of public employee unions. But GOP lawmakers braved massive protests and death threats to pass it.
So Maryann Sumi, a circuit court judge in liberal Dane County (Madison), whose son is a labor organizer, issued an injunction to keep the law from going into effect.
Wisconsin‘s attorney general appealed. Courts can’t interfere with the legislative process before a bill becomes law, J.B. Van Hollen said. The case was sent to the state supreme court.
Two supreme court precedents supported his arguments, and conservatives held a 4-3 majority on the supreme court, so the attorney general felt confident.
But Justice David Prosser, a conservative, was up for re-election April 5. Unions poured millions of dollars into the campaign of his opponent, JoAnne Kloppenburg.
On election night, with an unofficial lead of just 204 votes, Ms. Kloppenburg claimed victory.
She was premature. The tally from the heavily Republican city of Brookfield was accidentally omitted when unofficial returns were reported to the Associated Press. Mr. Prosser won by 7,316 votes, according to a canvass of all of Wisconsin‘s counties completed April 15.
Because the election was so close, the state will pay for a recount if the loser requests it, as Ms. Kloppenburg did Wednesday. This keeps hope alive among liberal diehards, but likely will result only in a further waste of taxpayer money. The largest margin ever overturned by a recount in Wisconsin was less than 500 votes.
It isn’t the modest cuts in contributions to health and pension plans in Gov. Walker’s bill labor leaders object to most. It isn’t even the restriction of collective bargaining to wages only. It’s the provision which makes payment of union dues voluntary.
This is a body blow to Democrats, too. They depend heavily on unions to fill their campaign coffers.
Union bosses already have spent gobs of money in Wisconsin, to no avail. They’ll spend more trying to recall Republican state senators. If 20 percent of their members decide not to pay dues, they’ll be hurting in 2012.
As people learn how lavish their benefits are, support for public employee unions diminishes. A poll taken in March for Investors Business Daily indicated Americans supported the unions over Gov. Walker, 49 percent to 43 percent. This month, respondents to the IBD poll backed limits on collective bargaining rights, 45 percent to 42 percent.
If persuasion isn’t working, maybe threats will. Herb Sanders is president of a local in Michigan of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. At a protest at the state capitol April 13, he said:
"If necessary, we will use the valuable public service jobs that we perform as a weapon and shut this state down."
So public employee unions will try to win public support by attacking the public.
Though thuggery is unappealing to most Americans, union bosses will win some fights. But they’ll be rear guard actions like those fought by the Nazis during their retreats to the Rhine and the Elbe. We’re flat broke. This dooms them.
It may also doom the Democrat Party, which is a coalition of special interest groups with little more in common than their desire to feed from the public trough. Now that there is less loot for them to split, they may turn on each other.
Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Doomsday for Unions, Democrats?
Rush Limbaugh radio show, transcript from April 25, 2011
RUSH: Jack Kelly in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "Unions on the Ropes — Public employees are fighting back, but they seem almost sure to lose." Do you have that opinion? You don’t, Snerdley?
Yeah, I think a lot of people want that to be the case, "but they seem almost sure to lose"? It’s just like the smart money in the NFL work stoppage… the smart money there in the NFL strike is, at the end of the day, the owners are gonna win. They’ve got the money to hold out and go to the mat for what they want much easier and longer than the players can.
And the smart money is also saying the same thing about public unions. And again it’s predicated on what’s real. The money to sustain them as they’ve always existed just isn’t there. States cannot print money.
You know, this is the one thing that we sit here and we look at the Democrat Party union alignment as this all powerful monolith that nothing can be done to stop. But what is it that props it up? What is it that gives it power? It’s money, and there isn’t any. And states can’t just borrow. They can’t print like the federal government.
Jack Kelly has this story, "Public employees are fighting back but they seem almost sure to lose." They are losing! They are losing. Now, they happen to be making a lot of noise and scaring people and causing a lot of public unrest.
Some of the highlight’s of Mr. Kelly’s piece: "To see how grim is the outlook for public employee unions, let’s go to Detroit, where Mayor Dave Bing proposed Tuesday a budget which would cut contributions to public employee health plans by 20 percent and would skip a payment to city pension funds,"
This is labor union capital USA! Dave Bing said, "If we do nothing, by 2015 fringe benefits are on pace to consume half of our entire general fund revenue." Fringe benefits. Benefits. Man, that’s a word that’s starting to really grate on me, too.
Benefits. For what? What are you doing to deserve your benefits? I also realize this. There’s gonna be hell to pay when this spigot stops. We’re seeing it now. We’re seeing it now in Europe, seeing it in Greece, seeing it in Spain, Portugal up next. These are all products of liberal socialist utopian promises, and now their money is running out.
And they don’t know how to work. They don’t know how to go get a job. Their version of work is not work. Their version of work is a job, working for the government, and their primary interest is vacation and sick days and benefits. The work they do is for the most part the last part of the equation that they’re interested in.
But when there’s no money it’s gonna affect a lot of people. There are a lot of people. I’m not talking about the welfare rolls here. I’m talking about union people, state, city, township, whatever governments that are gonna have to start cutting back, laying off, reducing retirement packages, there’s gonna be hell to pay when the money’s not there.
Well, reacting to diminished services is another part of the equation. But that’s gonna happen later on down the line. Here’s the better question. This is gonna be the real test.
Let’s say that all this stuff actually happens. Let’s say every state goes the route of Wisconsin. Let’s say California does it. Let’s say that Michigan does it, and let’s say that the public sector unions all-in have to get by on 40 to 50% less than they’re used to now.
Who, or better yet, can the private sector make that up? Well, no, it can’t right away. No, Snerdley, where can they go to get work that will pay them enough to make up for what they’re going to lose? Will there be private sector jobs for these people to go get since Obama’s destroying that, too?
Will there be enough private sector jobs for public sector workers to go get as second or third jobs to make up for what they’re going to lose when the state and cities can’t pay ’em what they’re being paid?
And if the private sector doesn’t have the jobs, that’s when the hell’s gonna start. That’s when it’s gonna get dicey, if you ask me. The welfare state’s gonna collapse along with everything else.
There’s no money, folks. The only solution to this is going to be self-reliance. The only solution to this is going to be entrepreneurism and rugged individualism, and you know what this crowd thinks of that. We are here because rugged individualism and self-reliance are two naughty terms. Social Darwinism and all of that.
So it’s gonna be an interesting decade ahead of us, if all this stuff happens, if people like Jack Kelly, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, are accurate.
Let me read some more from his piece here: "It isn’t the modest cuts in contributions to health and pension plans in Gov. Walker’s bill labor leaders object to most. It isn’t even the restriction of collective bargaining to wages only. It’s the provision which makes payment of union dues voluntary."
Now, we’ve mentioned that in Wisconsin. That really is, at this point, because that’s the number one issue for leadership. Right now the union dues are an automatic deduction, just like your FICA or your tax — there nothing you can do — it gets automatically deducted.
Walker‘s bill, oh, no, it’s not anymore. The union employee is going to have to write that check. Then it becomes voluntary. And that’s when the union gets threatened because that busts up the money laundering train. That’s what bugs the leadership.
Now, the rank-and-file is going to be concerned about what happens to wages. The rank-and-file will be concerned about their contributions to health and pension plans. That’s their back pocket. The union leadership, the heck with that. They are worried about the provision which makes payment of union dues voluntary.
And that, writes Mr. Kelly, he’s very astute here, "This is a body blow to Democrats, too. They depend heavily on unions to fill their campaign coffers."
That’s an understatement. It’s a money laundering scheme. They don’t depend on it. They are one and the same. Democrat campaign coffers are the state public employee unions. They collect campaign donations in the form of union dues, which are paid for by the taxes of the average, ordinary John and Jane Doe, who have no clue what they’re doing. Their taxes are deducted.
You tell the average John and Jane Doe that, what is it, three, four percent of their taxes end up in the Democrat Party automatically? Okay, so you’ve got two factors here on the union side. You got the rank-and-file, and they will be concerned about what happens to their health and pension plans and their wages. Leadership don’t care about that. They care about the dues.
Now, you’ve got another potential nuclear blast waiting to go up there between the rank and file and the leadership over divergent, different interests or causes in all of this. Then you add this, in Wisconsin the union bosses, what did they spend, $3 million, and they lost that election?
They spent $3 million on the (Wisconsin) Supreme Court election and they lost, and up next they’re gonna try to recall a bunch of state senators and they’re gonna spend even more trying to do that. Now, imagine if 20% of their members decided not to pay dues. Well, they’d be in heap big trouble.
[after break]… Okay, here’s Jack… Jack… Jack Kelly. Right. (I’d-a remembered it if it was St. Patrick’s Day.) Jack Kelly is wrapping up his piece here:
"So, some public employee unions may try to win public support by attacking the public. Though thuggery is unappealing to most Americans, union bosses will win some fights. But they’ll be rear guard actions like those fought by the Nazis during their retreats to the Rhine and the Elbe. We’re flat broke. This dooms them."
We don’t have any money. "It may also doom the Democrat Party, which is a coalition of special interest groups with little more in common than their desire to feed from the public trough."
Boy, that is so true. That’s it: The Democrat Party "is a loose-knit bunch of coalitions" that have a couple or three things in common. One of them, the major one, is big government. That’s essentially it, and it requires a never-ending cycle of taxpayer money laundered through the federal and state governments back to the Democrats. That’s what it requires. But there’s no money. We are flat broke.