“People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.”

Brooks Atkinson

It is trite to say that things often are not what they seem, but sometimes they are so much “not what they seem” that discovery creates in the newly informed, initial disbelief.  This disbelief will sometimes be followed by shock and then outrage and then inertia resulting from a general disgust.   That is why it is so immensely encouraging to this activist, that so many patriots are rising up to “take responsibility for what they know.”  Hopefully, enough readers will latch onto this issue and take action both nationally and locally to head of a bad combination of injustices that hurt our neighbors individually and all of us in the end.  The issue is modern indentured servitude that supports a ponzi scheme to on the backs of young tradesmen that is doomed to collapse.

The Wall Street Journal opined Wednesday in an article entitled “Crony Contracts” that  “There’s almost a direct correlation these days between the Obama Administration’s complaints about “special interests” and its own fealty to such interests. Consider its latest decree that federal contractors must be union shops.”  While fealty to unions is a troubling issue to many, what underlies the fealty is much more sinister.

To the casual observer, Democrat attempts to steer all federal construction work to union contractors is the same as Republicans rewarding non-union contractors.  The Republican position is in fact, that all workers get a shot to work as long as their employer proffers the lowest, best bid without regard to union status.  Clinton first wrote the executive order to steer federal construction work to union contractors.  Bush reversed the policy, and Obama has reinstated it.  What most people never see is the true motive behind this policy of reserving public work for union members only using the union-only PLA.

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Ten minutes prior to the start of a December 15^th, 2009 board meeting of the Riverside Community College District in California, board members are handed a 52-page document filled with millions of dollars in projects to be funded by the district’s taxpayers, who themselves are struggling under the state’s 12.4% unemployment rate.  The document, a draft Project Labor Agreement (PLA), will commit long-term construction and ancillary projects for the next several years to labor unions.

At least twenty-three members of the public, many of them local private business owners who oppose the PLA, have attended to publicly comment on the proposal.  Two of the board members have never even seen the PLA prior to today, and have asked for a special session to review it.  Despite opposition from the public, and the concern voiced by those two board members, the remaining three board members have moved that the Board of Trustees authorize Chancellor Greg Gray to negotiate the final PLA with the Riverside and San Bernardino Building and Construction Trade Councils. Board Trustees Virginia Blumenthal and Janet Green dissented.

So, without adequate time for all to review the draft, without any backup analysis provided to justify the use of up to $350,000,000 in Measure C taxpayer funds, without giving the public reasonable time to voice their opinions, and with an unemployment rate of over 12% when non-union workers are in even greater need of jobs than union workers…why would three of Riverside’s five board members vote to move forward with a final negotiation anyway? Why the rush? Residents and business owners in Riverside are wondering the same thing, and hope to have the chance to weigh in before the PLA’s final draft is signed.

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