Hijacking the Private Sector, the SEIU and Blago Way

The current state of the economy has placed a large burden on private business, especially on small businesses and the self-employed. Subscribing to a Keynesian tenet of financing debt and increasing government spending to boost output, lawmakers are repeatedly giving themselves cover for splurging.  After the first bailouts came the massive $787 billion stimulus bill, an urgent remedy that Congress and the White House insisted was all about “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.”

And as spending has increased, so has the size of the public employment sector. Meanwhile, the private sector will soon be close to earning a coveted placement on the endangered species list.

As the union leaders’ plundering of the private sector has continued, this doesn’t mean that they have abandoned unionizing private sector workers altogether.  In fact, while the number of private sector jobs overall is down, the number of unionized private sector jobs is trending upward, right alongside the public sector growth.

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Tags: ACORN, AFSCME, Andy Stern, Anna Burger, Blagojevich
Posted Jan 2nd 2010 at 6:07 am in ACORN, Big Labor, Economics, Featured Story, News, Politics | 54326157 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/libertychick/2010/01/02/hijacking-the-private-sector-the-blago-way/Hijacking+the+Private+Sector%2C+the+SEIU+and+Blago+Way2010-01-02+14%3A07%3A12Liberty+Chick

ACORN Still Owes $2.3 Million in Overdue Taxes

ACORN and its affiliates are content to impose crippling big-government laws, regulations, and taxes on Americans, but when called upon to obey those same rules, ACORN’s network of scofflaws and deadbeats simply refuses to comply.

ACORN and its affiliates currently owe more than $2.3 million in long overdue back taxes to all levels of government.

It's deathly quiet at the former funeral home at 1024 Elysian Fields Avenue, New Orleans. (photo: Kevin Kane)

As of Nov. 11 the exact figure was $2,328,596.95.

ACORN owes money to the IRS, Arkansas, California, Delaware, District of Columbia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin, and to the cities of New York and Philadelphia.

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Tags: ACORN, Arkansas, Barack Obama, Buddy Caldwell, California
Posted Nov 16th 2009 at 1:03 pm in ACORN, Obama | 3160655 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/mvadum/2009/11/16/acorn-still-owes-2-3-million-in-overdue-taxes/ACORN+Still+Owes+%242.3+Million+in+Overdue+Taxes2009-11-16+20%3A03%3A59Matthew+Vadum

Turning Tea Party Patriots into Political Petitioners

As Americans rise up all across the country to challenge a political elite that many believe does not listen to them, it is important to consider the tools that people in many states have employed to directly affect change: the petition.

In Missouri, our Constitution includes the following passage:

The people reserve power to propose and enact or reject laws and amendments to the constitution by the initiative, independent of the general assembly, and also reserve power to approve or reject by referendum any act of the general assembly, except as hereinafter provided.  (Article 3, Section 49)

The document  clearly states that the people possess the right to initiate laws and constitutional amendments, even though they grant those same powers to their representatives in the legislature.  This is an important since it permits the people to enact laws directly and without going through the standard legislative process.

Unfortunately, in Missouri and other states where the people enjoy this right, the initiative process is continually under assault from state legislatures—Republican and Democrat alike—even to the point of adopting unconstitutional limitations to them.  Such efforts have included the following:

• A 1969 law in Oklahoma required that petition circulators be state residents.  In December 2008, the Tenth Circuit Court unanimously struck down that law as unconstitutional.  The Court did the same to a similar law in Colorado in 2002.

• A 2005 law in Ohio that restricted petition gatherers from being paid per signature was struck down by the Sixth Circuit Court struck in March 2008.  Ohio appealed the decision but the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear it.  Similar pay-per-signature regulations have been overruled by federal district courts in Idaho, Maine, Mississippi and Washington.

• A Colorado law that required petitioners to wear badges with their name and whether they were a volunteer or paid circulator was struck down as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1999.

A common argument for limiting the petition process is that it puts too much money into politics or that it invites fraud.  Yet courts have found this not to be the case.  In the 2005 ruling against Ohio, the Court concluded that prohibiting payment per signature would increase the costs and the time necessary to obtain the required signatures. The Court also rejected the evidence that this particular form of payment resulted in fraud.

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Tags: ballot initiative, Ballotpedia.org, Citizens in Charge, Colorado, constitutional amendments
Posted Oct 3rd 2009 at 7:00 am in Featured Story, News, State Politics, Tea Party | 1159045 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/ptuohe/2009/10/03/turning-tea-party-patriots-into-political-petitioners/Turning+Tea+Party+Patriots+into+Political+Petitioners+2009-10-03+14%3A00%3A49Patrick++Tuohey

We Will March on Washington

If there were a Death Panel empowered by legislative fiat to determine the political viability of legislative agendas in Washington, D.C., it would declare ObamaCare all but dead, not worth any further time and expense incurred by the American people.  “Do Not Resuscitate,” the tribunal would vote, citing the best comparative effectiveness research in its non-negotiable determination.

Unfortunately, that merciful committee does not exist, so we have been subjected to yet another clarifying speech from President Obama on his proposed hostile government takeover of our health care.  In just a few weeks, we have gone from “health care reform” to “insurance reform,” and now “health security.”  Is it just me, or does this White House simply repackage the very same bad ideas with more carefully chosen new words, confusing rhetorical elegance for good policy?  Ok, maybe less rhetorically elegant than once believed.

Regardless, the timing of last night’s hastily arranged speech before a joint session of Congress was weird.  Such special sessions are themselves weird, exceedingly rare forums usually reserved for dramatic effect, like when Presidents declare war.  The glaring exception, it seems, was Bill Clinton’s ill-fated, pen-wagging veto threat to Congress if they failed to pass his (Hillary’s) health care plan.  So why did Obama do it?  Why now?  According to USA Today before his speech, “the ever more noisy opposition to his health care objectives has had one result: It prompted Obama’s decision to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday in an effort to regain momentum on the issue.”

So the President wants to have another argument with the voters. He already has ridiculed publicly citizens who have the audacity to disagree, like the lady who asked him to keep government out of her Medicare. (Maybe she was referring to his proposed $500 billion in cuts from a system that is already $46 trillion in the red, to fund another government-run health care system for new populations?)

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Tags: Bill Clinton, DC, Dick Armey, Freedom Plaze, health insurance
Posted Sep 12th 2009 at 6:50 am in Economics, News, Politics, Tax Reform | 136683 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/mkibbe/2009/09/12/we-will-march-on-washington/We+Will+March+on+Washington2009-09-12+13%3A50%3A45Matt+Kibbe