From the diaries . . . Just in case all the early primary fun hasn’t put you in a fetal position next to the liquor cabinet, maybe this will finish the job: After his aborted press tour/election tease, Donald Trump nearly immediately went back to hinting at an independent run for President. Speculation has been driven through the last few months by surrogates, media interviews and a rising frustration with the field of Republican candidates. We even had a few moments earlier this month when it looked like some of the GOP presidential candidates would actually take part in a debate that Trump moderated. Thankfully, that moment of insanity passed. This afternoon I was forwarded an email that originated with Everett Wilkinson ( @TEApartyCzar ) of South Florida. Everett describes himself as, “a rising local and national star in the tea party movement and the founder & chairman of South Florida Tea Party as well as the Florida Tea Party and Tea Party Chamber of Commerce .” The email is copied below in its entirety: ———- Forwarded message ———- From: Everett Wilkinson Date: Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 11:18 AM Subject: Confidential TX Issue Dear Patriot Leader, My name is Everett Wilkinson and I am a tea party leader in Florida and friend of Donald Trump. I am sure you have heard on the news that Mr. Trump is considering a run as an independent. He has asked me to find a “tea party” Texas Chairman for a potential third party by next week. The role requires a Texas voter registration and is due to the voting laws in Texas. The person would not have to change their party affiliation or anything. Would you or do you know of any Texan that would be interested? Sincerely, – Everett Wilkinson (561) 880-x xxx http://www.SouthFloridaTeaParty.org http://www.FloridaTeaParty.com After receipt of the email I called Mr. Wilkinson and had a brief conversation. He confirmed that he is working at the request of Mr. Trump, whom he describes as a personal friend, to find and register state campaign chairmen across the country. He declined to give any indication of progress other than to say that he was able to find a “well known, solid TEA Party leader” so serve as the Texas campaign chairman. It was unclear from our conversation why he was using what appeared to be a TEA party affiliated email or whether the effort had been sanctioned by other members of the group. Everett said that Trump hasn’t made a final decision on the campaign but that due to election law in some states they need to secure campaign chairmen and begin collecting signatures in case Trump pulls the trigger. The Donald has apparently put Everett in charge of this effort. All in all it’s just another big face-palm moment to add to the long list. If you really want Obama to get a 2nd term then by all means, throw your support behind a Trump run. There’s a lot to be frustrated about with the state of the Republican party but cutting off your nose to spite your face isn’t exactly an optimal strategy.
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TEA Party Leader Recruiting Campaign Chairmen for Trump
For more than five years, Left-wing union bosses have tried to ram union representation down the throats of America’s union-free workforce. They first tried, through their bought-and-paid-for stooges within the Democratic party, to enact the delusionally-dubbed Employee Free Choice Act . After that scheme failed, they opted for Plan B : Using Obama’s appointments of union extremists at the National Labor Relations Board to issue a slew of pro-union decisions and usher in changes that make it easier for unions to pick off job creators and their employees. On Wednesday, the union attorneys at the NLRB adopted a final rule on their controversial proposal that paves the way for unions to conduct ambush elections on America’s union-free workplace. While the rule will not go into effect immediately (it takes effect April 30, 2012), the substance of the rule goes to the stripping of due process from the minority of employers who challenge the validity of a union’s petitioned-for voting unit. As the result of removing an employer’s right to object to the petitioned-for unit through a regional NLRB hearing and request for review by the NLRB in Washington, not only does it enable the NLRB to conduct “quickie” elections (in as little as 17 days from petition filing), but it will also likely cause more employers to use the federal courts as a means of redress against a blatantly pro-union NLRB. As union organizers are legally allowed to manipulate and mislead workers into unionizing, at the heart of the issue is the amount of time union organizers can spend attacking a company in stealth, picking out a small section of the workforce to unionize into “micro-units,” and leaving employers virtually no time to counter the misinformation. Currently, most union elections occur within 42 days of petition filing. Under the new rules, they may occur in as little as 17 days. Even before the NLRB formally issued its final rule on Wednesday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace sued the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to challenge the rule. Coalition for a Democratic Workplace’s Chairman Geoffrey Burr stated : “Instead of putting fairness first, the NLRB bowed to special interests by abandoning longstanding rules governing union-representation elections for this new rigged system where employees have less information and employers have fewer legal rights and a diminished due process.” He continued, “Big Labor’s paid union organizers seeking more dues-paying members spend months making their pitch. Employees deserve to hear from employers too – employees deserve the full story.” Burr concluded, “Unfortunately, taking legal action was the only way to block the rogue agency’s unfair rule.” With the NLRB’s Wednesday move, there will likely be a push by many employers to begin planning for the ambush elections. Unfortunately, for those that do not plan in advance—most typically, small employers—there will be many caught wholly unprepared for the attack. As with the Boeing case and numerous other examples, Wednesday’s action by Obama’s union appointees at the NLRB is just another reminder of how tilted the playing field has become against America’s job creators. ______________ “Socialism has no place in the hearts of those who would secure the fight for freedom and preserve democracy.” Samuel Gompers, 1918
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Union Bosses’ NLRB Rams Through Ambush Election Rule
Unions have been disappointed by the Obama administration’s inability to move their agenda forward. But they finally won a victory last week. This is bad news for America’s transport sector, not to mention travelers and businesses of all sizes that rely on rail and air shipping, because it could cause major disruptions to travel and commerce. Last year, the National Mediation Board (NMB), the government agency charged with overseeing labor relations in the railroad and airlines industries, changed voting rules to favor unionization. On Friday, December 16, 2011, the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia upheld the rule change as consistent with the Railway Labor Act (RLA). However, as dissenting Circuit Judge Karen Henderson explained, the NMB failed to provide any justification for changing a rule that had stood for 75 years. The Act clearly states: “The majority of any craft or class of employees shall have the right to determine who shall be the representative of the craft or class.” A craft or class is any job classification that may be organized as a bargaining unit of like workers — for example, railroad engineers or airline pilots. The new rule makes it possible for a minority of the employees of a craft or class to vote in a union. The rule change predictably met with strong objections from most of railroad and airline companies. The Air Transport Association of America and U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit challenging it. But this is no simple labor versus management dispute. Several Delta Airlines employees also filed suit on the grounds that the rule change violated their rights of freedom of association. Congress passed the RLA to govern railway unions in 1926 and expanded it to include airlines in 1936. In order to avoid disruptions to America’s transport network through strikes and other kinds of work stoppages, the Act imposed mandatory mediation and gave the president the ability to order workers back to work. The RLA allows unions to organize workers for the purpose of negotiating a collective bargaining agreement as the workers’ exclusive representative. However, unlike the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which regulates labor relations in other industries and allows unions to organize on a location-by-location basis, the RLA requires a bargaining unit to include all the workers of the same classification throughout an entire company. By requiring unions to organize on a company-wide basis, the RLA helps to avoid the creation of a patchwork of work rules that would result from piecemeal unionization at various facilities. It also prevents localized issues from disrupting nationwide transport networks. Balkanized work rules detract from the standardization and economies of scale upon which network industries rely. In addition, the RLA requires a union to gain votes from a majority of all workers it would represent in a bargaining unit in order to be certified. This ensures that a union truly enjoys the support of the majority of workers in a given craft or class. The rule change now requires merely a majority of votes cast. Thus, under the new rule, a bargaining unit of 100 employees could be unionized with only 41 employees voting for the union in an election in which only 80 votes are cast. The court also failed to address the fact that the NMB made no effort to educate workers about the rule change. It issued no postings, memos, letters, or public service announcements to that effect. The original rule had been in place for 75 years, so to say that the employees would find a rule change surprising and disruptive is an understatement. Employees who once could simply abstain to express their desire not to join a union would be in for a rude shock. That’s not all. Under the NMB’s rule change, there is more than one way for a union to receive “yes” votes. First, the new ballot includes a “write in” section where any vote cast automatically counts as a vote for the union, because “no union” votes may only be entered in the section so labeled. Second, if there is a runoff election, it may only include the top two union vote getters, with the “no union” option left out. Reforming the Railway Labor Act is a job for Congress, not an unaccountable agency. This case deserves to be either reheard by the full circuit or taken up by the Supreme Court. For its part, Congress should consider reforming the Act in a way that protects employees’ right to decide for themselves whether to join or refrain from joining a union. Specifically, it should change the voting procedures back to 50 percent-plus-one of the craft or class and allow runoff elections to include the “no union” option. It should also hold the National Mediation Board accountable, and make it clear that it is not a mechanism to grant favors to the president’s union allies.
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Obama’s Big Labor Wins a Big One
So let me set the background, here. Crossroads GPS is a 501(c)(4) associated with American Crossroads (a 527 advocacy group which has Karl Rove advising it; this will be important later), and it put out this ad on Massachusetts Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren (who is running, of course, against Republican Senator Scott Brown ). Said ad helpfully points out that Warren was up to her eyeballs assisting the 2008 TARP bailout – yes, the same bailout that she’s now trying to be a class warrior against : Summation of the video: Elizabeth Warren talks a good game, but she was involved in TARP, in a supervisory role – so if people don’t like the way that TARP unfolded, blame her . The ad alludes to the way that Warren sucked up to the Chamber of Commerce in order to try to get support to be made the formal head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Moving away from the ad: Warren also tried that with the 2010 crop of freshmen House Republicans , with about the same amount of success. On the other hand, Warren did manage to put into place the man who would eventually succeed her as chief CFPB bureaucrat… one Raj Date , former executive at Capital One and Deutsche Bank. All in all, this is all pretty standard, somewhat interchangeable Washington insider (Democratic edition) stuff from Warren. Nothing special, alas. Now, at this point somebody’s going to complain that Warren was critical of the TARP program when she was (honestly, not very effectively) overseeing it. To which the only necessary response is a shrug and the observation that Lefty radicals typically break down into two types: those who believe that the system is damaged, and needs repair; and those who believe that the system is broken, and needs replacement. Elizabeth Warren was fine when she was timidly taking the first position on TARP; but now that she’s brassily taking the second… well, it’s not Crossroads GPS’s fault that the woman voluntarily became part of the System and now wants to pretend that she wasn’t. Revolution isn’t a part-time business, Elizabeth. Anyway, all of this apparently upset Ms. Warren in that special way that is reserved for academic lefties who suddenly discover that the real world actually scores your performance , not your intentions – so she lashed back out at Karl Rove . No, not because Karl Rove’s a standard, if somewhat dated, devil figure among the American academic left… well, not just because of that. It’s also because Elizabeth Warren apparently thinks that “Karl Rove was part of the inner circle when President Bush pushed for TARP bailouts.” ” Inner circle.” Oh, my. In point of fact, by the time that the financial crisis/TARP bailouts rolled around – which is to say, the late summer of 2008 – Karl Rove had been out of the Bush administration for over a year and was acting as a political commentator. In fact, I have been looking around for a couple of days, and I am not finding any real indication that Karl Rove was involved in the TARP bailout at all – or, at least, not involved from the inside. Which is of course not something that you can say about Warren. Now, I get that Elizabeth Warren would very much like people to hear the word ‘TARP’ and not immediately associate it with her drawing a six figure salary off of… well, I’m sure that she did something while she was there, although I couldn’t begin to tell you what it was. And I’m equally sure that Warren would like the radicals sullenly buzzing around her cronies in the Democratic Establishment to become happy little worker bees for her campaign – and never mind that the woman’s annual salary lately easily puts her in 1% territory. So I understand the need to distance Elizabeth Warren v. 2011 from Elizabeth Warren v. 2008. But… can we have a little basic accuracy, here? Not checking to see when Karl Rove resigned from the White House is not quite at Martha Coakley-levels of basic campaign idiocy, but you can see her house from there. Moe Lane ( crosspost )
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Elizabeth Warren’s inaccurate Karl Rove whining.
[Posted by Karl] In his latest column, David Brooks argues that Obama’s regulations aren’t crushing jobs and the economy. However, to reach that conclusion, he has to engage in a lot of single-entry accounting. Brooks relies on a report from the Center for Progressive Reforms (gee, I wonder what ideology might be at work here) to note that “Obama has certainly not shut corporate-types out of the regulatory process.” Incidentally, the thrust of the CPR report is to claim that regulatory policy is driven more by raw politics under Obama than it was under George W. Bush — a conclusion Brooks prefers to overlook. But the big flaw is the subtext that regulatory capture somehow means that the resulting regulations do not hurt businesses or the economy. I would suggest the prior regulatory regime for the financial and housing sectors ultimately proved disastrous to the economy and employment (lefties and righties would have some different culprits for this, of course). More generally, the entire history of progressivism is marked by regulatory capture in which big businesses extract competitive advantage over small business. That Brooks does not understand the effect of regulations on small business is evident here, too: The Bureau of Labor Statistics asks companies why they have laid off workers. Only 13 percent said regulations were a major factor. That number has not increased in the past few years. According to the bureau, roughly 0.18 percent of the mass layoffs in the first half of 2011 were attributable to regulations. There are a number of flaws with this argument: The first problem is that economic hardship does not come with labels. Employers know if their costs are rising, but not necessarily whether it is due to new burdens imposed on their suppliers or other factors. They may know that they did not obtain the capital they needed, but not whether it was because investors had better opportunities or because of government financial rules. They will know if demand has slumped, but it is not so clear whether it was because their product is valued less by the marketplace or because government rules choked off demand from customers. Despite the orderly and specific categories provided by the BLS, the real-world causes are likely to be mixed, rather than fit neatly into one column or another. *** The BLS figures are also incomplete, including only mass layoffs of 50 workers or more at a time. Those are the layoffs that make headlines, but such mass layoffs are only a small part of the job-loss picture. Many, if not most, layoffs affect fewer than 50 workers at a time. Most small businesses, in fact, do not even have 50 employees in total. In contrast, according to Gallup , small business owners are most likely to say complying with government regulations is the most important problem facing them today. On top of that 22%, another 5% cite “new healthcare policy” and another 9% cite “poor leadership/government/president.” Similarly, a Chamber of Commerce survey found small business owners still find economic uncertainty to be their most-pressing concern (53%), but also worry about uncertainty from what Washington will do next (39%), and the healthcare law (33%). Nor does Brooks take into account the degree to which policy uncertainty creates a drag on small business hiring, particularly during the Obama administration. Brooks also claims that “industries that are the subject of the new rules, like energy and health care, have actually been doing the most hiring.” Here again, Brooks seems ignorant of the product of regulatory capture and government that believes in the broken windows theory of economics. Promoting the hiring of paper-shufflers to meet regulations that depress the creation of more productive jobs is no way to help the economy. And yet Brooks, being Brooks, buries this mid-column: Over all, the Obama administration has significantly increased the regulatory costs imposed on the economy. But this is a difference of degree, not of kind. I’m sure that’s very encouraging to the unemployed, including those who have completely dropped out of the labor pool. Maybe they can get through the winter by insulating their homes with copies of the Federal Register. –Karl
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David Brooks: Wrong on Regulations
