From Politico:

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg suggested Friday that unions took over the Occupy Wall Street protest yesterday.

“A vast percentage of the people were union members protesting — some private unions and then some municipal unions — and they had, you know, organized signs and leadership and that sort of thing,” Bloomberg said on WOR radio station Friday. “So it really wasn’t the protesters that have been in Zuccotti Park or that you see around the country.”

Bloomberg added, “It was just an opportunity for a bunch of unions to complain or to protest or whatever they want to do.”

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Congressman Tom McClintock (R-CA) made the following statement to the House Chamber on October 26, 2011:

Mr. Speaker:  The government’s continuing failure to address our nation’s gut-wrenching unemployment stems from a fundamental disagreement over how jobs are created in the first place.  We are now in the third year of policies predicated on the assumption that government spending creates jobs. We have squandered three years and trillions of dollars of the nation’s wealth on such policies, and they have not worked because they cannot work.

Government cannot inject a single dollar into the economy until it has first taken that same dollar OUT of the economy. True, we can SEE the job that is saved or created when the government puts that dollar back into the economy.  What we can’t see as clearly are the jobs that are destroyed or prevented from forming because government has first taken that dollar OUT of the economy.  We see those millions of lost jobs in a chronic unemployment rate and a stagnating economy.

Government can transfer jobs from the productive sector to the government sector by taking money from one and giving it to the other.  That’s at the heart of the President’s plan to spend billions of dollars to hire more teachers and firefighters and police officers.  But these temporary government jobs come at a steep price: every dollar spent sustaining one of these jobs is a dollar taken from the same capital pool that would otherwise have been available to productive businesses to invest in creating permanent jobs.

Government can also transfer jobs from one business to another by taking capital from one and giving it the other. That’s how we got Solyndra.  We put a half-billion dollars at risk to create 1,100 jobs (that’s $450,000 per job).  Now that half-billion dollars are gone and so are the jobs.  And who pays for these losses?  Other businesses and their employees – meaning fewer jobs created.

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Last month, the Chicago Tribune broke the story of a union leader who was re-hired for one day at the City of Chicago and then retired with a $158,000 city pension. Yesterday, the Tribune broke the story of the union leader accruing three pensions off of the same work credit: a city pension, a local union pension and a national union pension.  Combined, his annual pension income exceeds $400,000-  with anticipated lifetime benefit of $9 million.

There is debate as to whether these rotten scams could even be legal in Illinois!  But, we’ve discovered that sweetheart union leader access into our Illinois state pension system is an even larger scam.

On September 29^th, we broke this story nationally on the third largest conservative talk radio program: 34 union leaders who are not government employees are draining nearly $340 thousand per month from the state teachers’ pension system.

Last Sunday, the Illinois Statehouse News was the first Illinois newspaper to investigate.  No other newspaper has covered the statewide angle.

Former employees of the National Education Association (NEA), Illinois Education Association (IEA), Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT), and Illinois Association of School Boards (IASB), drawing pensions have collected more than $47 million from the Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System (TRS), to date.

It’s an on-going $47 million pension scam.  Union leaders who are not government employees are draining millions in teacher retirement pensions.

How did we unearth this pension abuse?

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From The Chicago Tribune:

At least eight Chicago labor leaders who are eligible for inflated city pensions also stand to receive union pensions covering the same work period, thanks to a charitable interpretation of state law by officials representing two city pension funds, a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation has found.

By double and even triple dipping on pensions, these union officials stand to reap millions more in retirement while thousands of rank-and-file union members face hard times and city pension funds stagger toward insolvency.

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With the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests starting the catch on in the media after the arrests at the Brooklyn Bridge and protests in Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Occupy Whatever meme is coming to a city near you. Occupy Dallas! is coming to my town October 6th and I’ll head down there to interview  people because that’s what I do. While I was looking up info about the event, I came across a Facebook page that really sums up what is really going on here.

This isn’t a protest against the government.

Not really. The is the guise that it’s under. It’s using the iconography of protest to actually SUPPORT the government status quo – specifically public employees. See, they can’t get a lot of support if they come out and say “Protest to keep out cushy pensions!” because who is going to show up for THAT, right?

Look who is holding the event on civil disobedience.. it’s the North Texas Association of Public Employees – -a group connected to the Steelworkers.

Public Employees are going to be showing people how to protest effectively against other public employees, like the police? This is a puppet show Play a little Rage Against The Machine for a soundtrack and the kids won’t notice that they are actually protesting to support the government bureaucrats.

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Taxpayers across the nation are spending millions of dollars to pay the salaries and benefits of government employees to work exclusively for labor unions, an investigation by the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute has found.

The practice is called “official time” in federal law, or “release” time in local labor agreements reviewed by the Institute. At the federal level, it cost taxpayers more than $129 million in 2009, the last year for which figures are available, according to a report from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Similar provisions have become standard in labor agreements between unions and governments at the state and local level. Finding the total cost would require analyzing every government union contract in every state, county, city and school district in the country, a monumental task that those who have studied the issue say has not been done.

But one example exposed by the Goldwater Institute’s investigation shows the City of Phoenix spent about $3.7 million to pay its employees to do union work last fiscal year, which ended in June. Phoenix has agreements with seven unions that represent city employees, allowing them a total of more than 73,000 city-paid hours annually to do union work.

Other cities in the area have similar provisions in their contracts with labor organizations that represent municipal employees.

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From the Chicago Tribune:

All it took to give nearly two dozen labor leaders from Chicago a windfall worth millions was a few tweaks to a handful of sentences in the state’s lengthy pension code.

The changes became law with no public debate among state legislators and, more importantly, no cost analysis.

Twenty years later, 23 retired union officials from Chicago stand to collect about $56 million from two ailing city pension funds thanks to the changes, a Tribune/WGN-TV investigation found.

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For Wisconsin, it seemed that the 2012 election had come a summer early. Until August 16th the airwaves were full of ads by campaigns and outside groups urging voters to turnout and support a candidate of choice in one of the nine recall elections around the state. What would have otherwise been a tranquil summer was brushed aside when a torrent of money, activists and professionals swept the state in a prolonged battle that started in the late winter and early spring over the issue of collective bargaining reform.

The political landscape of Wisconsin didn’t change much as a result of the costly and noisy recall elections. But that doesn’t mean some important lessons weren’t learned. Elections this historic always yield important information and raise intriguing possibilities about how future political battles will play out. In a state historically split nearly 50-50 along ideological, if not partisan, lines with independents often progressively minded, the summer campaign offers some lessons that conservatives can take heart from.

Even though Democrats are touting their ability to knock off two incumbent state senators as a major success in the face of failed GOP attempts to go after three Democratic senators, Democratic gains are shallow. Every incumbent senator who faced a recall challenge (regardless of party) survived except when a massive personal scandal or political earthquake hit. Sen. Randy Hopper’s ill-timed affair with a staffer exploded early in the recall cycle and irreparably damaged him politically. Sen. Dan Kapanke’s district had for years been trending Democrat, and his personal connection to voters was not enough to outweigh the long-developing party shift that finally flipped the seat’s party affiliation.

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Government unions are suing the State of Illinois for not issuing what would have been their third round of raises in just seven months. Last week, members of AFSCME took to the street to demand “fair pay.”

Do Illinois state workers suffer from unfair treatment? My group, the Illinois Policy Institute took a closer look at the issue, and found that government workers enjoy generous pay and perks – often far beyond what many outside of the public sector could ever hope to receive. Consider the findings:

• The average compensation for an Illinois state government worker was $69,500 in 2008. The average private sector compensation? Just $56,500.
• In real terms, private sector compensation (wages plus benefits) in Illinois declined 2 percent over the past 15 years, while state worker compensation increased by 17 percent.
• Over a 40-year career, the average Illinois state worker will receive about 510 more paid vacation days than the average private sector worker.

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In honor of the Fourth of July holiday, Broadside Books hosted an on-line symposium asking the question, “Where and How Should Conservatives Attack Liberalism Next?” An excerpt of my answer follows:

The famous philosopher Pogo once observed, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Reviewing the greatest threat to liberty today, I offer a corollary; “We have met the enemy and we are paying for him.” Our liberty is challenged not so much by political forces as institutional ones. Until we begin dismantling the racket that is Public Sector, Inc., we will never again enjoy the liberties and freedoms our grandparents took for granted.

The current budget crisis has shined a light on the out-sized pay and benefits earned by public sector employees in state and local government. The traditional implicit bargain where government workers accepted slightly lower pay in exchange for job security and decent benefits has been up-ended, with government workers now enjoying high pay and platinum benefits in addition to life-time employment.

The showdowns in Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey and other states have shown how difficult it will be to reverse course on this. But even getting public sector pay and benefits back to historic averages is just the tip of the iceberg, or, rather, treatment of a minor symptom of a virulent disease. Balancing government employee pay with resources is a fiscal challenge; balancing our liberties against ever-expanding government is a herculean fight against a massive institutional infrastructure.

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Steven Malanga in City Journal:

Pensions are an enormous part of the problem. New Haven’s $475 million budget, for instance, is projected to grow by just $4 million this fiscal year, but the city’s pension and health-care costs will rise $12 million, forcing cuts elsewhere. In San Francisco, pensions consume about 14 percent of the budget, and rising retirement bills for city workers accounted for one-third of this year’s $306 million deficit. Pension and health benefits account for 20 percent of the $500 billion that the nation’s nearly 14,000 public school districts spend annually. In a recent National League of Cities survey, nearly 80 percent of municipal finance officers listed rising pension payments as one of their most significant budgetary problems.

Here again, the problem is disproportionately local. Yes, state-sponsored pension funds have accumulated anywhere from $750 billion to $3 trillion in unfunded pension and retiree health-care liabilities, depending on how the calculations are made. A huge portion of those liabilities, however, is actually owed by cities, towns, and school districts. States employ just 5.2 million of the 13 million active workers participating in state-sponsored pension funds; the rest are local employees, often teachers, who work for districts too small to manage their own pensions. Experts agree that pension costs for both states and localities are going to skyrocket. But states currently spend just 4 percent of their budgets on pensions, while many municipalities already spend 15 to 20 percent.

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From the Associated Press:

Riot police fired tear gas at youths hurling rocks near the Greek finance ministry Tuesday, trying to quell the anger unleashed by a general strike as parliament debated new cost-cutting measures.

The latest austerity measures must pass in two parliamentary votes Wednesday and Thursday if Greece is to receive bailout funds from the EU and the IMF to stave off a possible default in July. If the votes don’t pass, Greece could become the first eurozone nation to default on its debts, sending shock waves through the global economy.

The clashes with police came at the start of a two-day strike called by unions furious that the new euro28 billion ($40 billion) austerity program will slap taxes on minimum wage earners and other struggling Greeks. The measures come on top of other spending cuts and tax hikes that have sent Greek unemployment soaring to over 16 percent.

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From The New York Times:

New Jersey lawmakers on Thursday approved a broad rollback of benefits for 750,000 government workers and retirees, the deepest cut in state and local costs in memory, in a major victory for Gov. Chris Christie and a once-unthinkable setback for the state’s powerful public employee unions.

The Assembly passed the bill 46 to 32, as Republicans and a few Democrats defied raucous protests by thousands of people whose chants, vowing electoral revenge, shook the State House. Leaders in the State Senate said their chamber, which had already passed a slightly different version of the bill, would approve the Assembly version on Monday. Mr. Christie, a Republican, was expected to sign the measure into law quickly.

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I am a successful small businessman and a patriot who loves America and always sees its greatness. I am also an optimistic, positive thinker who always sees the glass half full.

But not this time.

I predicted doom if Obama was elected. Sadly the results are far worse than imagined. The economy is in shambles. America is staring at economic disaster — Armageddon. Even me, the eternal optimist is scared at what the future holds. We are the Titanic, headed straight for the iceberg.

America has always been a land of boom and bust. It’s just part of business cycle. But Obama and his socialist cabal have channeled Hoover and FDR, who turned an ordinary bust into The Great Depression with a toxic strategy of more government, more spending, more debt, more rules and regulations strangling business, higher minimum wages, more power to unions, more entitlements, higher taxes, more printing of money by Fed, and trade tariffs. This is the Obama blueprint squared.

The question this time is, is Obama doing it because he understands nothing about business? Or does he understand exactly what he’s doing? Is Obama’s goal to overwhelm the system, incite crisis, sow doubt about capitalism, and force the citizens to beg for government to save them, thereby opening the door to Socialism? Is Obama’s plan to redistribute the wealth, and at the same time to bankrupt the people with wealth and power, thereby crippling his political opposition?

Does it really matter?

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Even the most avid circus goers tire of the big top, apparently.

Saturday, various labor and left wing organizations attempted to hold another massive protest at the Wisconsin State Capitol.

The lackluster May Day rallies in Milwaukee and Madison were filled with pleas to head to Madison on May 14th to show Scott Walker that the fight isn’t over. Liberal radio hosts plugged the event. Lefty bloggers posted about it. Labor unions sent out emails and robo calls to their members. Madison coffehouses, bookstores and telephone poles were littered with brochures about the rally. People were bused in from across the state.

Yawn.

It appears “We’re not going away!” isn’t as catchy as “We skipped out of work, to show we deserve our pay.”

When the allure of shutting down schools or shutting down the legislature are missing, so are a hundred thousand protesters it seems. Now, 7-10,000 is still a crowd, but in Madison, Wisconsin the left can get that many out to protest an appearance by the rare conservative speaker on campus.

The changes to the public employee union’s collective bargaining power remain held up in court. But Act 10 has been signed into law. It’s done. It is just going to take some time to get past the liberal judges in Dane County.

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Public outrage over lavish government employee compensation and pensions is becoming more heated as new revelations about excesses seem to crop up every week.  The latest: Newport Beach, California, where some lifeguards have compensation packages that exceed $200,000 and where these “civil servants” can retire with lucrative government pensions at age 50.

Newport Beach has two groups of lifeguards. Seasonal tower lifeguards cover Newport’s seven miles of beach during the busy summer months. Part-time seasonal guards make $16 to $22 per hour with no benefits.  They are the young people who man the towers and do the lion’s share of the rescues.  Another group of highly compensated full-time staff work year-round and seldom, if ever, climb into a tower.  According to the City Manager, the typical Daily Deployment Model in the winter for these lifeguards is 10 hours per day for four days each week, mainly spent driving trucks around, painting towers, ordering uniforms and doing basic office work—none are actually manning lifeguard towers.

Like many communities across California, the city of Newport Beach is facing the harsh realities of budgeting with less revenue after housing values and the stock market plummeted.  Now the city’s full-time lifeguard force has finally come under scrutiny.  Next week the city council will decide if cuts are needed to the full-time lifeguard force where last year the top earner received $211,000 in pay and benefits, including a $400 sun protection allowance.  In 2010 all but one of the city’s full-time lifeguard staff had annual compensation packages worth over $120,000.

Not bad pay for a lifeguard – but what makes these jobs most attractive is the generous retirements.

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It seems Gov. Scott Walker’s ideas are catching on, even in Massachusetts. From Boston.com:

House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly last night to strip police officers, teachers, and other municipal employees of most of their rights to bargain over health care, saying the change would save millions of dollars for financially strapped cities and towns.

The 111-to-42 vote followed tougher measures to broadly eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees in Ohio, Wisconsin, and other states. But unlike those efforts, the push in Massachusetts was led by Democrats who have traditionally stood with labor to oppose any reduction in workers’ rights.

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Politicians, being what they are, tend to have an inflated view of what they can do. Some claim to create jobs while others claim to raise taxes. In truth, they are limited to passing political laws. Once enacted, those laws run into the laws of economics – which have never been repealed and have been largely the same since the beginning of time. The results are often different than those intended – and so it is for Jerry Brown, whose policies fly in the face of economics and Californians are paying the price.

Few can doubt the magnitude of the economic problems facing our once Golden State. Unemployment is above 12% and underemployment is above 20%. Over 1.3 million less people are employed today than a decade ago. California homeowners have lost over $1.7 trillion in equity in the last 4 years – an amount nearly equal to the entire state economy. That combination has resulted in California suffering the worst of the nation’s foreclosure crisis including startling figures such as in Fresno, where 46.7% of the mortgages are under water, i.e. the mortgage is larger than the home value.

California businesses face taxes among the highest in the nation, even higher regulatory burdens and, just around the corner, potentially large workers’ compensation rate increases. It’s no wonder CEO Magazine ranks California 51st in the nation (behind Puerto Rico) as a place to do business.

All combined, these economic problems have resulted in revenue problems for California governments because people without jobs don’t pay taxes; homeowners without equity spend and borrow less; and businesses with mounting costs have lower profits. That’s economics – not politics.

For Jerry Brown, however, economics remains a mystery to say the least.

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There’s seriously nothing more you can say about unions given everything that happened in Wisconsin and Ohio- that speaks for itself, and volumes at that.

Now, in Washington, a mob of SEIU protesters were arrested for bringing their thuggish demeanor to the House of Representatives. Notice how they always play the outdated ‘victim’ card time and time again. Committing actions such as these then crying foul is not going to win over sympathy from anyone.

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Yesterday, we at the Media Research Center went to the MoveOn.org “We Are One” union rally in Washington, D.C. held outside of the Treasury building to ask the people why they were there protesting.

All of the groups taking part of the rally included: the AFL-CIO, American Federation of Teachers, CommonCause, Communication Workers of America, Greenpeace, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, MoveOn, NAACP, National Education Association, SEIU, United Food and Commercial Workers, and USAction.

Given it was blatantly obvious beforehand they were rallying against the Koch brothers despite marketing it as standing up for MLK’s dream, I figured I’d ask them what that exactly was all about. Many people literally could not answer, some refused to answer, and some essentially repeated talking points liberal websites churn out- which shall remain nameless. Including Medea Benjamin of Code Pink.

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