Obama And The Unions Haven’t Been Very Good To Detroit (Largest Bankruptcy In American History), Have They?

How do you kill a major American city – particularly one where three of the biggest manufacturers in the WORLD are located?

Ask a Democrat.  Because they’re the ones who just succeeded in doing it.

Detroit just went belly up.  And I can smell the rotting carcass of a city that had everything until idiotic liberalism killed the golden goose.

Has Obama been good for Detroit?  Not so much.

Detroit is a city that literally did everything – absolutely EVERYTHING – Obama and the radical leftists demoniacs said we need to do everywhere.  And it was the kind of cancer in Detroit that it will be spreading throughout the rest of America.

That said, we can’t lay all this at Obama’s feet.  Because in spite of the fact that it had the big three auto manufacturers located there, the unions and the union mentality have been poisoning the city for going on sixty years.

Detroit files for bankruptcy protection
Nancy Kaffer, Stephen Henderson and Matt Helms, Detroit Free Press 5:22 p.m. EDT July 18, 2013

DETROIT — The city of Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection in federal court Thursday, laying the groundwork for a historic effort to bail out a city that is sinking under billions of dollars in debt and decades of mismanagement, population flight and loss of tax revenue.

The bankruptcy filing makes Detroit the largest city in U.S. history to do so.

The filing begins a 30- to 90-day period that will determine whether the city is eligible for Chapter 9 protection and define how many claimants might compete for the limited settlement resources that Detroit has to offer. The bankruptcy petition would seek protection from creditors and unions who are renegotiating $18.5 billion in debt and other liabilities.

FULL COVERAGE: Detroit’s financial crisis STORY: Financial manager: Detroit ‘dysfunctional, wasteful’

“The fiscal realities confronting Detroit have been ignored for too long. I’m making this tough decision so the people of Detroit will have the basic services they deserve and so we can start to put Detroit on a solid financial footing that will allow it to grow and prosper in the future,” said Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder. “This is a difficult step, but the only viable option to address a problem that has been six decades in the making.”

Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr, who in June released a plan to restructure the city’s debt and obligations that would leave many creditors with much less than they are owed, has warned consistently that if negotiations hit an impasse, he would move quickly to seek bankruptcy protection.

Snyder signed off on the filing in a letter attached to court documents filed Thursday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Eastern District of Michigan. A spokeswoman for Snyder did not immediately return telephone calls Thursday.

“It is clear that the financial emergency in Detroit cannot be successfully addressed outside of such a filing, and it is the only reasonable alternative that is available,” Snyder said in the letter granting his state-required approval. “In other words, the City’s financial emergency cannot be satisfactorily rectified in a reasonable period of time absent this filing.”

Snyder continued: “I have reached the conclusion that this step is necessary after a thorough review of all the available alternatives, and I authorize this necessary step as a last resort to return this great City to financial and civic health for its residents and taxpayers. This decision comes in the wake of 60 years of decline for the city, a period in which reality was often ignored.”

Orr’s spokesman Bill Nowling said, “Pension boards, insurers, it’s clear that if you’re suing us, your response is ‘no.’ We still have other creditors we continue to have meetings with, other stakeholders who are trying to find a solution here, because they recognize that, at the end of the day, we have to have a city that can provide basic services to its 700,000 residents.”

This week, the city’s two pension funds (which have claims to $9.2 billion in unfunded pension and retiree health care liabilities) filed suit in state court to prevent Orr from slashing retiree benefits as part of a bankruptcy restructuring.

Ambac Assurance Guaranty, which insures some of the city’s general obligation bonds, has also objected to Orr’s plan to treat those bonds as “unsecured,” meaning they’re not tied directly to a revenue stream and would receive pennies on the dollar of their value. Ambac, and other creditors, have threatened to file suit.

Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr, shown during a news conference Thursday, March 14, 2013, hopes his report helps residents better understand the city’s problems.(Photo: Romain Blanquart/ Detroit Free Press)

Sources agree that Orr’s deal with creditors, widely reported to be Bank of America Corp. and UBS AG, to pay a $344-million swap with a $255-million debtor-in-possession loan, is instrumental in the timing of the bankruptcy filing.

The deal gives the city access to $11 million a month in casino tax revenues that Orr has said is key to maintaining city services while negotiations, in or out of bankruptcy court, take their course with other creditors and unions.

Plunkett Cooney bankruptcy lawyer Doug Bernstein, who is not involved in the bankruptcy and is not representing any parties related to it, said Thursday that the filing was critical for the city, given a growing number of legal challenges.

On Monday, an Ingham County Circuit Court judge was scheduled to hold a hearing on the city workers’ and retirees’ challenge to stop the city from filing for bankruptcy protection. The employee groups, and separately the city’s two pension funds in another lawsuit, argue that the governor — who must and has authorized the bankruptcy filing — cannot do so if the filings include plans to reduce pension benefits, because the state’s constitution explicitly protects public pensions. If the state has such plans, it wasn’t immediately presented in the court filing.

Bernstein said preventing the court hearing Monday is probably a key part of the strategy behind a Chapter 9 petition by the city, because a ruling in favor of the employees could put a halt, at least temporarily, to any moves by Orr and Snyder to proceed with a bankruptcy petition. A bankruptcy filing immediately stays all such court proceedings.

STORY: Detroit manager pitches debt recovery plan to creditors

“The stay kicks in as soon as the filing, whether it’s Friday or Monday,” Bernstein said before Thursday’s filing. “The key is taking advantage of the automatic stay. Because of the lawsuit filed by the pension funds and the hearings coming up Monday, it became a factor, so to the extent that (Orr) wanted to continue negotiations with creditors, now the city is forced to” file a Chapter 9 petition.

The 30- to 90-day eligibility fight could be prolonged beyond that time frame if creditors mount a significant challenge to Detroit’s eligibility for bankruptcy. In other communities that have filed for Chapter 9 protection, such fights have extended the process a year or more, including Jefferson County, Ala., and Stockton, Calif., two of the largest municipal bankruptcy filings so far in the United States.

Detroit’s bankruptcy is by far the largest of its kind in U.S. history, in terms of the city’s population of about 700,000 and the amount of its debts and liabilities, which Orr has said could be as high as $20 billion. Because of the stakes involved, and the impact on residents statewide, as well as 30,000 current and retired city workers and Detroit’s ability to stay in business, the case could be precedent setting in the federal judiciary. It also could set an important trajectory for the way troubled cities nationwide settle their financial difficulties.

Bernstein noted that Orr has said repeatedly his office would “negotiate with creditors until and unless we find that the negotiations won’t bear fruit, with the understanding that the city has a limited amount of time” for those talks.

City Council President Pro Tem Andre Spivey said he understood that negotiations Orr was having with creditors weren’t as fruitful has he’d hoped they be, and that he hopes the bankruptcy process will be relatively quick. But he stressed to residents that they needn’t worry about the impact of the filing immediately.

“City services we provide will not be shut down,” Spivey said. “We’ll still be providing services, but the challenge is where we’re going to get to as we go through the bankruptcy process.”

The city has lost more than half of its population over the last 60 years. In 1950, the city was the fifth-largest city in the country with a population of around 1.8 million. Today its population is estimated at just under 700,000.

Who is to blame for this mega-disaster? Is it the United Auto Workers labor union, which has been completely owned by the Democrat Party machine and which funds that machine? Is it the municipal government labor unions, which have been completely owned by the Democrat Party machine and which have funded that machine? Or is it all the Democrat politicians who have rubber stamped the liberal labor union agenda for decades by giving them money and benefits vastly beyond what they were “entitled” to at the expense of the taxpayers???

Detroit was the FOURTH LARGEST CITY IN AMERICA.  It was a city that had everything.

And Barack Obama is determined to impose the fate of Detroit on the rest of America.  And he is succeeding.

Get This: The CHEAPEST ObamaCare Plan Will Cost $20,000 A Year Per Family, Says The IRS

Conservatives tried to tell you what a demonic pile of incredibly expensive lies ObamaCare would be, but you didn’t believe it.

IRS: Cheapest Obamacare Plan Will Be $20,000 Per Family
January 31, 2013
By Matt Cover

(CNSNews.com) – In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year.

Under Obamacare, Americans will be required to buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the IRS.

The IRS’s assumption that the cheapest plan for a family will cost $20,000 per year is found in examples the IRS gives to help people understand how to calculate the penalty they will need to pay the government if they do not buy a mandated health plan.

The examples point to families of four and families of five, both of which the IRS expects in its assumptions to pay a minimum of $20,000 per year for a bronze plan.

“The annual national average bronze plan premium for a family of 5 (2 adults, 3 children) is $20,000,” the regulation says.

Bronze will be the lowest tier health-insurance plan available under Obamacare–after Silver, Gold, and Platinum. Under the law, the penalty for not buying health insurance is supposed to be capped at either the annual average Bronze premium, 2.5 percent of taxable income, or $2,085.00 per family in 2016.

In the new final rules published Wednesday, IRS set in law the rules for implementing the penalty Americans must pay if they fail to obey Obamacare’s mandate to buy insurance.

To help illustrate these rules, the IRS presented examples of different situations families might find themselves in.

In the examples, the IRS assumes that families of five who are uninsured would need to pay an average of $20,000 per year to purchase a Bronze plan in 2016.

Using the conditions laid out in the regulations, the IRS calculates that a family earning $120,000 per year that did not buy insurance would need to pay a “penalty” (a word the IRS still uses despite the Supreme Court ruling that it is in fact a “tax”) of $2,400 in 2016.

For those wondering how clear the IRS’s clarifications of this new “penalty” rule are, here is one of the actual examples the IRS gives:

“Example 3. Family without minimum essential coverage.

“(i) In 2016, Taxpayers H and J are married and file a joint return. H and J have three children: K, age 21, L, age 15, and M, age 10. No member of the family has minimum essential coverage for any month in 2016. H and J’s household income is $120,000. H and J’s applicable filing threshold is $24,000. The annual national average bronze plan premium for a family of 5 (2 adults, 3 children) is $20,000.

“(ii) For each month in 2016, under paragraphs (b)(2)(ii) and (b)(2)(iii) of this section, the applicable dollar amount is $2,780 (($695 x 3 adults) + (($695/2) x 2 children)). Under paragraph (b)(2)(i) of this section, the flat dollar amount is $2,085 (the lesser of $2,780 and $2,085 ($695 x 3)). Under paragraph (b)(3) of this section, the excess income amount is $2,400 (($120,000 – $24,000) x 0.025). Therefore, under paragraph (b)(1) of this section, the monthly penalty amount is $200 (the greater of $173.75 ($2,085/12) or $200 ($2,400/12)).

“(iii) The sum of the monthly penalty amounts is $2,400 ($200 x 12). The sum of the monthly national average bronze plan premiums is $20,000 ($20,000/12 x 12). Therefore, under paragraph (a) of this section, the shared responsibility payment imposed on H and J for 2016 is $2,400 (the lesser of $2,400 or $20,000).”

Is that what you wanted, ye nation of dumbasses?  Because you voted for it.  And then you were beyond-idiot enough to actually vote for it AGAIN.

Obama promised you a bunch of lies that turned out to be complete crap.  He is without question the most dishonest and most cynical demagogue this nation has ever been cursed with.

Now the selfsame liberal labor unions that worked so hard to pimp ObamaCare say they don’t want to have to bear the burden of the burden that they demanded that everybody ELSE bear.

From Anarchist (and I like his forehead-slapping-with-surrendering-disgust Michelangelo avatar):

Posted 31 January 2013 – 04:52 PM
Tip o’ the hat to Nancy “We have to pass the billl to find out what’s in it” Pelosi.

It is a well-known fact that nobody in Congress ever reads, or even skims, any law, and especially not the fine print, it passes until long after it has been enacted into law. It appears the same is just as true for the biggest pillar of support for the Obama administration: America’s labor unions, whose liberal vote every election is instrumental to preserving the outflow side of America’s welfare state. As it turns out, it was the same labor unions who enthusiastically supported the primary accomplishment of the Obama administration in the past 4 years, Obamacare, only to realize, long after it has become reality that, surprise, their healthcare plan costs are about to go up. And, as the WSJ colorfully summarizes, they are now “turning sour.” From WSJ:

Union leaders say many of the law’s requirements will drive up the costs for their health-care plans and make unionized workers less competitive. Among other things, the law eliminates the caps on medical benefits and prescription drugs used as cost-containment measures in many health-care plans. It also allows children to stay on their parents’ plans until they turn 26.

So what are the Unions’ demands to offset what they only now realize will push their overall costs higher? What else: Moar!

To offset that, the nation’s largest labor groups want their lower-paid members to be able to get federal insurance subsidies while remaining on their plans. In the law, these subsidies were designed only for low-income workers without employer coverage as a way to help them buy private insurance.
Top officers at the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the AFL-CIO and other large labor groups plan to keep pressing the Obama administration to expand the federal subsidies to these jointly run plans, warning that unionized employers may otherwise drop coverage.

But, but, they can’t – that’s the whole point, or didn’t they read that part too? Doesn’t matter – to them it is now unfair, nay “unacceptable”:

“We are going back to the administration to say that this is not acceptable,” said Ken Hall, general secretary-treasurer for the Teamsters, which has 1.6 million members and dependents in health-care plans. Other unions involved in the push include the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union and Unite Here, which represents service and other workers.

So now that even the unions have understood that Obamacare is one big tax, maybe it is time to reevaluate its arrival at a time when the already strapped US consumer sees taxes rising, and has their savings extinguished.

After working so hard with their slush funds to push ObamaCare, labor unions became THE number one recipients of ObamaCare waivers as these collectivists collectively said, “Someone ELSE should pay for this, not us.”

Kind of makes you want to grab a giant, stinking ObamaCare turd and then grab every union thug one at a time and just shove it right down his pig face.  You gave this piece of stinking garbage to us; now you EAT it.

But the thing about liberalism is that these weasels always have  a way of making somebody ELSE responsible for the result of their evil programs.  Just as they invariably make somebody ELSE pay for it to begin with.

‘Separation Of Church And State’:The Theory That Government Should Grow Larger And More Powerful And Religion Should Grow Smaller And More Marginalized

Those who claim that the doctrine of the separation of church and state is in the Constitution are frauds.  It is NOT.  The concept existed in a private letter written by a man who did not write so much as a single word of the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights which followed the Constitution.  Oh, and Jefferson’s intent in using the phrase “wall of separation between church and state” was wildly taken out of context and applied in a manner in which Jefferson is even now rolling in his grave (and see here).

What is the clear result of this doctrine?  It is one thing: that government should have absolutely no limit on its growing power and influence while religion should be marginalized and forbidden from increasing areas of discourse.

Now the government of “God damn America” can impose abortion and the radical homosexual agenda on the church and the church is immoral for publicly decrying the impositions.

Another great authority, one Franklin Delano Roosevelt, said that there ought to be a wall of separation between LABOR UNIONS and the state:

“Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.”

Not that that mattered.  I mean, FDR didn’t have much more to do with the Constitution than Jefferson did, but somehow you don’t see liberal Supreme Court Justices dictating that all government unions be immediately abolished citing FDR the way they so gleefully cite Jefferson to undermine and replace religion in America.

But wouldn’t it be nice if FDR phrases such as “a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government” and that government labor unions represent “the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it” the way they exploited Jefferson’s phraseology???

But lets just stick with the words of the founding fathers.  Because we can stick with them all the livelong day and make our point.  In fact, let’s just stick with the words of Thomas Jefferson for a while.  Because it’s rather easy to demonstrate that the liberal justices who decreed that Jefferson’s words were the soul of the Constitution even though they had nothing whatsoever to do with the Constitution dishonestly and blatantly ignored pretty much absolutely everything else that Jefferson ever said.

It’s a shame that the liberals on the Supreme Court fixated on Jefferson’s words that could be twisted and distorted to attack religion in America rather than focus on OTHER words of Jefferson that would have shaped a better society such as:

“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have.”

And:

“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”

And:

“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”

And:

“If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.”

And:

“To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”

And:

“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government”

Why hasn’t Ruth Bader Ginsburg changed America with these words by Jefferson the way her ideological liberal judicial forerunners changed America with words by Jefferson???

A nation in which there was a rigid separation of labor unions from government would be a far better and stronger one than the one that we have now which wars against and undermines the influence of religion.  And I say that conclusively based on the clear words of our founding fathers that the liberal justices of the Supreme Court chose to deliberately and studiously ignore while instead choosing a few words radically out of context to hamstring the free exercise of religion.

“Of all the habits and dispositions which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.  In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars.” — George Washington

“We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams

“…And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion…reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” –- George Washington, Farewell Address, Sept 17, 1796

“Religion and good morals are the only solid foundations of public liberty and happiness.” –- Samuel Adams, Letter to John Trumbull, October 16, 1778

“The great pillars of all government and of social life [are] virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor…and this alone, that renders us invincible.” –- Patrick Henry, Letter to Archibald Blair, January 8, 1789

I would argue it’s a damn shame that liberal justices seized Jefferson’s “wall of separation” line while refusing to acknowledge what Thomas Jefferson said about THEM and their fascist abuse of judical-tyrant power:

“This member of the Government was at first considered as the most harmless and helpless of all its organs. But it has proved that the power of declaring what the law is, ad libitum, by sapping and mining slyly and without alarm the foundations of the Constitution, can do what open force would not dare to attempt.” —Thomas Jefferson to Edward Livingston, 1825. ME 16:114

“The Constitution . . . meant that its coordinate branches should be checks on each other. But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.” —Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, 1804. ME 11:51

“To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem [good justice is broad jurisdiction], and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.” —Thomas Jefferson to William C. Jarvis, 1820. ME 15:277

I hope you see the hypocrisy by now.

Liberals are people who want to destroy the last vestige of true religion in America while imposing the union agenda in the church’s place.  And if they can literally read a phrase such as “wall of separation between church and state” while specifically omitting the rest of the context of the letter those words are found in, and then blatantly ignore the very clear intent of the founding fathers that America needed to be what Lincoln described as “one nation under God,” well, they’re liberal ideologues and that’s what liberal ideologues do.

Which is why the beast is coming.

Statistics About Vile Labor Unions That The Left Doesn’t Want You To Know About

Wherever unions have gone industries have died.  As much as the left complains about companies relocating offshore, unions and their vile tactics have been more responsible for the movement of US jobs offshore than anything or anyone else.

Whole industries have abandoned America because that was the only way they could survive and compete given that they were otherwise crippled with American labor unions.  But it’s those industries that can’t be shipped overseas – like teaching our kids – that the unions are at their most dangerous to America.  They have a stranglehold on public education even as they have proven that they could frankly care less about teaching our kids, our next generation of workers.

Check out these stats.  I put the ones I found most egregious in red font:

Union Statistics: What You May Not Know
September 15th 2011

The folks at UnionFacts.com have a ‘vital statistics‘ page that provides some good information about unions that many Americans may not know. Here is just some of the information:

Financial Information

Annual Dues Paid to Unions: $8,217,838,676
Total Union Assets: $8,804,794,935
Total Spending
Representational Activities: $4,081,097,858
Political Activities: $579,624,489
External Contributions: $321,121,214
Overhead: $3,905,927,269
Unions that fail to pass Department of Labor audits: 92%

Percentage of Employees that Voted for their union: Less than 10%

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Labor Relations Board indicates that less than 10 percent of currently unionized employees voted for the union in their workplace.

Union Officials

Total union officers and staff members: 173,503 people
Total compensation paid to union officials and officers: $1,141,540,980
Total compensation paid to union employees: $2,562,757,481

Diversity

Major Unions with White Presidents: 94%
Major Unions with Male Presidents: 89%

Labor Law Violations

Unfair Labor Practices filed against unions in the last 10 years: 65,529
Duty of Fair Representation 32,235
Hiring Halls 2,236
Actions of Picketers 1,742
Union Security Related (including Beck) 1,636
Coercive Statements 1,376

Source: National Labor Relations Board Case Activity Tracking System database.

Union Membership as a percentage of total U.S. Labor Force

Total Union Members: 14.7 Million
Percentage of Workforce that is Unionized: 11.9%
Private Sector Employees: 7.0 million (6.9%)
Public Sector Employees: 7.6 million (36.2%)

Source: UnionStats.com analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics ‘ Current Population Survey.

For more, check out UnionFacts.com

It’s kind of funny – in an ironic, pathetic sort of way – how unions constantly demagogue many of the things that they are in fact the worst offenders at committing, isn’t it?  Unions started out as racist organizations that were geared around keeping black and minority workers out:

Economist Ray Marshall, although a prounion secretary of labor under President Jimmy Carter, made his academic reputation by documenting how unions excluded blacks from membership in the 1930s and 1940s. Marshall also wrote of incidents in which union members assaulted black workers hired to replace them during strikes. During the 1911 strike against the Illinois Central, noted Marshall, whites killed two black strikebreakers and wounded three others at McComb, Mississippi. He also noted that white strikers killed ten black firemen in 1911 because the New Orleans and Texas Pacific Railroad had granted them equal seniority. Not surprisingly, therefore, black leader Booker T. Washington opposed unions all his life, and W. E. B. DuBois called unions the greatest enemy of the black working class. Another interesting fact: the “union label” was started in the 1880s to proclaim that a product was made by white rather than yellow (Chinese) hands.

And nothing’s changed.  And they aren’t much better toward women, are they?

Meanwhile, these hypocrites have a massive war chest of money stockpiled from previous generations that they give almost entirely to Democrats while they simultaneously whine about corporations being allowed to do the same thing that THEY’VE been doing for decades.

As bad as these statistics are, the worst ones of all aren’t included.  Start searching for “unfunded liabilities” particularly of unionized “public sector employees,” and you’ll find a black hole of debt that America will never be able to crawl its way out of.  California alone has a $500 billion unfunded pension bomb waiting to explode:

California’s $500-billion pension time bomb
April 06, 2010|By David Crane

The staggering amount of unfunded debt stands to crowd out funding for many popular programs. Reform will take something sadly lacking in the Legislature: political courage.

The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported.

That’s the finding from a study released Monday by Stanford University’s public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

Another Democrat blue state, Illinois, is in even worse shape on a per capita basis: with one-third the population of fellow Democrat blue state California, Illinois has nearly half the unfunded union pension liabilities that California does ($210 billion).

Unlike Obama’s God damn America, which can add more zeros to the money supply in the Federal Reserve computers to “make” more money, states have to actually pay their debts.  Which really sucks for them, given the way the unions have sucked the states dry.

And of course labor unions scream at every state or federal budget cut because they are utterly dependent on taxpayer handouts for survival.

So union workers are only less than 7% of the private American workforce, but they’re a massive pain in America’s collective ass.

Obama Causes Official End Of The Nation Of Makers

This is something that conservatives saw coming from the very fist days of the Obama administration.  From Cato, February 26, 2009:

Cato begins that article with a quote from Obama from a couple of days previous: “As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President’s Day… Not because I believe in bigger government — I don’t. Not because I’m not mindful of the massive debt we’ve inherited — I am.”

But like virtually everything else, it was a lie.  Obama’s own proposed massive increase in federal spending proved that.  And since Obama took office, he has spent as no government has ever spent in the history of the human race.

And thus is it utterly no surprise at all to anyone but ignorant fools that we are now here:

APRIL 1, 2011
We’ve Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers
More Americans work for the government than in manufacturing, farming, fishing, forestry, mining and utilities combined.

By STEPHEN MOORE
If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.

It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?

Every state in America today except for two—Indiana and Wisconsin—has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees—twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida’s ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York’s.

Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital, have more government bureaucrats than people making things. The leaders in government hiring are Wyoming and New Mexico, which have hired more than six government workers for every manufacturing worker.

Now it is certainly true that many states have not typically been home to traditional manufacturing operations. Iowa and Nebraska are farm states, for example. But in those states, there are at least five times more government workers than farmers. West Virginia is the mining capital of the world, yet it has at least three times more government workers than miners. New York is the financial capital of the world—at least for now. That sector employs roughly 670,000 New Yorkers. That’s less than half of the state’s 1.48 million government employees.

Don’t expect a reversal of this trend anytime soon. Surveys of college graduates are finding that more and more of our top minds want to work for the government. Why? Because in recent years only government agencies have been hiring, and because the offer of near lifetime security is highly valued in these times of economic turbulence. When 23-year-olds aren’t willing to take career risks, we have a real problem on our hands. Sadly, we could end up with a generation of Americans who want to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

The employment trends described here are explained in part by hugely beneficial productivity improvements in such traditional industries as farming, manufacturing, financial services and telecommunications. These produce far more output per worker than in the past. The typical farmer, for example, is today at least three times more productive than in 1950.

Where are the productivity gains in government? Consider a core function of state and local governments: schools. Over the period 1970-2005, school spending per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized achievement test scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period, public-school employment doubled per student, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington. That is what economists call negative productivity.

But education is an industry where we measure performance backwards: We gauge school performance not by outputs, but by inputs. If quality falls, we say we didn’t pay teachers enough or we need smaller class sizes or newer schools. If education had undergone the same productivity revolution that manufacturing has, we would have half as many educators, smaller school budgets, and higher graduation rates and test scores.

The same is true of almost all other government services. Mass transit spends more and more every year and yet a much smaller share of Americans use trains and buses today than in past decades. One way that private companies spur productivity is by firing underperforming employees and rewarding excellence. In government employment, tenure for teachers and near lifetime employment for other civil servants shields workers from this basic system of reward and punishment. It is a system that breeds mediocrity, which is what we’ve gotten.

Most reasonable steps to restrain public-sector employment costs are smothered by the unions. Study after study has shown that states and cities could shave 20% to 40% off the cost of many services—fire fighting, public transportation, garbage collection, administrative functions, even prison operations—through competitive contracting to private providers. But unions have blocked many of those efforts. Public employees maintain that they are underpaid relative to equally qualified private-sector workers, yet they are deathly afraid of competitive bidding for government services.

President Obama says we have to retool our economy to “win the future.” The only way to do that is to grow the economy that makes things, not the sector that takes things.

Mr. Moore is senior economics writer for The Wall Street Journal editorial page.

California?  Unions?  Consider this from the Los Angeles Times:

California’s $500-billion pension time bomb
The staggering amount of unfunded debt stands to crowd out funding for many popular programs. Reform will take something sadly lacking in the Legislature: political courage.
April 06, 2010|By David Crane

The state of California’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported.

That’s the finding from a study released Monday by Stanford University’s public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

The People’s Republic of Kalifornia was cursed with a R.I.N.O. governor who championed abortion, a $6 porker giveway for stem cell research, gay marriage, and a whole bunch of other liberal crap.  And the legislature is one of the most overwhelmingly Democrat in the country.  And the only things that have changed is that the People’s Republic is now officially under a Democrat Governor (Jerry Brown) and they actually added a Democrat seat in the legislature.

Illinois was described by NBC as having the worst unfunded pension crisis in the country.  Maybe they didn’t know how bad California’s really was when they reported that.  But more likely, they probably had no idea how bad Illinois’ problem truly was and is, either.

The United States is so screwed it is absolutely unreal.  And that is largely due to unions and the Democrats who support those unions in exchange for votes.  It’s an unAmerican scheme that works like this: labor unions give Democrats big campaign donations and provide the muscle and infrastructure for the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote campaign.  And in exchange, Democrats give unions other peoples’ money to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.  They don’t give a damn about the 88% of Americans who AREN’T in unions.

Unions are parasites that have sucked the blood out of every industry they have ever seized their vile little talons onto.  Autos, airlines, manufacturing, education government at every possible level – you name it; they’ve ruined it.  And the rest of America is the host that the parasites feed off of.  And Democrats care about the parasites, and not one damn about the rapidly dying host.

And Barack Obama is far and away the most pro-union president ever.  And that was true BEFORE he signed three new hard-core union-agenda executive orders into law.

Obama has just gotten caught red-handed using his ObamaCare to give huge payouts to unions and corporations that advanced his agenda (fascism alert).  Remember that G.E. – one of the corporate beneficiaries of ObamaCare, not only paid zero taxes but actually got money from the taxpayers.

Do you remember Obama’s preacher for over twenty years said, “No, no, no, not God bless America.  God DAMN America.”  And then said that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost”???

You need to understand our actual situation and look at our real debt to understand that AMERICA is the chicken – and Obama has cut its head off and thrown it into a pot of boiling water:

News from globeandmail.com
The scary real U.S. government debt
Wednesday, October 27, 2010

NEIL REYNOLDS

Ottawa — reynolds.globe@gmail.com

Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”

Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”

This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling. […]

Without drastic reform, Prof. Kotlikoff says, the only alternative would be a massive printing of money by the U.S. Treasury – and hyperinflation.

As former president Bill Clinton once prematurely said, the era of big government is over. In the coming years, the U.S. will almost certainly be compelled to deconstruct its welfare state.

Prof. Kotlikoff doesn’t trust government accounting, or government regulation. The official vocabulary (deficit, debt, transfer payment, tax, borrowing), he says, is vulnerable to official manipulation and off-the-books deceit. He calls it “Enron accounting.” He also calls it a lie.

Every single one of these massive entitlements that is poisoning America they way Japan’s tsunami has poisoned her nuclear reactors with toxic meltdowns came from the vile minds of DEMOCRATS.  And it is DEMOCRATS who will cause the once mighty America to shortly go the way of the Dodo bird.

Social Security was a ponzi scheme from the outset.  And the only thing that has kept it going was that it is a really, really BIG ponzi scheme.  We find out that FDR – who wanted a massive takeover of the private sector by the federal government – worked hard to kill an amendment offered by a Democrat (Senator Bennett Champ Clark): ” It would have allowed workers to go with the new government system or, if they wished, to have their money put into a private-insurance plan. Either way, the contributions would be mandatory.”  Had that amendment been allowed to pass, it would have forced the government’s filfthy paws off the “trust fund” that they subsequently ripped off for the next seventy years and beyond:

We wouldn’t be saddled with today’s fiscal disaster. Hundreds of billions of dollars that politicians have “borrowed” from the Social Security trust fund for all sorts of pork spending would not have disappeared. Instead, all that capital would have been invested in the economy, leaving us a lot more prosperous. Moreover, the Clark Amendment would have been a model for state pension plans, which are now bankrupting local governments, as well as for other nations.

There was a much better idea from the private sector – but in the end Democrats wouldn’t have it.  They wanted their government fascist control instead.  They didn’t care about the American people; they wanted to be able to raid those retirement funds for their own partisan ideological ends.

Then there was the much more colossal failure known as Medicare.  Ronald Reagan famously warned America about that fraud in 1961:

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.

Medicare now represents the largest share of our unfunded liabilities today.  The private market could have done a much better job at a much lower cost, but again, Democrats wanted socialism, and they were hell bent upon getting their socialism.

Now we face collectivist bankruptcy.  We were previously told that if current trends held, Medicare would go broke by 2017.  But current trends didn’t hold, because Obama robbed Medicare of $500 billion to fund the ObamaCare boondobble that bears his name.

As the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher famously said, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”  And voilà, here we are.

When it comes to how John F. Kennedy viewed the socialist redistribution of wealth via “progressive taxation policies,” you will find that Kennedy was solidly on the side of fiscal conservatives today.  As it stands, today’s vile Democrats are fundamentally at odds with the man widely recognized to be the greatest Democrat president.

As we speak, Republicans are trying to cut a tiny fraction of the bloated, totally-out-of-control federal budget.  And Democrats are demonizing them at every turn for it.  Because Democrats have been using government spending to massively pad the coffers of the government-sector unions who make their elections possible.  And to be a Democrat means you don’t give a damn about America’s future; you only selfishly want – to put it in John F. Kennedy’s famous words – “what your country can do for you.”

God HAS damned America in the person of Jeremiah Wright’s parishoner for 23 years.  And the most ignorant generation in America’s history voted for it.

Need Proof Democrats Are Un-American? Just Look At Wisconsin And Count The Ways

You should be calling them “fascists”; but you probably always hear them described as “Democrats.”

These Democrats and the big unions that dwarf any other special interests (most definitely including the “evil” Republican special interests you always hear about in the news) are as un-American as Marxist pie.  But you won’t ever hear how or why unless you go outside the mainstream media propaganda.

Let’s count the ways.  Just in Wisconsin, and just over the last few days:

1) Even liberal FDR said that the public-sector labor unions that now dominate the Democrat Party are essentially un-American.  Why?  Because – and this according to FDR – the very actions that unionized public employees are right now performing in Wisconsin are “unthinkable and intolerable.”

Government unions should not exist.  It is immoral and un-American.  When someone takes government employment, they have – and this again according to FDR – “the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities.”  What are these liberal Democrat public sector union employees doing instead?  Again, allow me to quote FDR:  they seek ” to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied.”  Which FDR said, again, was “unthinkable and intolerable.”

The employer of the government employee, again according to FDR, is “the whole people.”

But liberals don’t give a damn about the whole people.  They have split America apart one racial group at another’s throats, one income level at another’s throats, and privileged union employees at the throats of fed-up taxpayers.  Unions have been feeding off taxpayers – who get a fraction of the wages and benefits the privileged union pigs get – for decades.  Government employees earn TWICE the wages and benefits of their counterparts in the private sector.  But Democrats don’t care: they view the private sector and everyone who works in it as evil cash cows who are to be exploited and impoverished.

The eyeball-deep-in-red-ink state of Wisconsin is trying to get public union pigs to accept a benefit system that is still TWICE as good as virtually any privat sector employee.  And at the same time begin to brind under control the out-of-control collective bargaining agreement to bring it more in line with other state government and federal government workers’ bargaining powers.

Labor unions are an inherently socialist project.  Consider the words of the Marxist author who makes the one identical to the other:

“The object of the labor movement is to increase the strength of the proletariat to the point at which it can conquer the organized force of the bourgeoisie and thus establish its own supremacy.”

And, of course, that is EXACTLY the object of the labor movement.  Which is EXACTLY un-American.

Obama has come out and made a statement about how wonderful government unionized workers are.  But he’s a liberal ideologue and an evil man.  If you asked Democrats like FDR or John F. Kennedy – who famously said the opposite of what these rabid government unions are doing: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” – and you learn the truth.

The Democrat Party of today is a depraved and un-American entity.  And if you support it and/or vote for it, you are un-American.

2) Consider the people who are out on the streets rioting against the representatives of the people instead of at their jobs serving the people:

February 17, 2011
Thousands of Union Protesters Storm WI State Capitol; Target Homes of GOP Lawmakers

As four game wardens awkwardly stood guard, protesters, scores deep, crushed into a corridor leading to the governor’s office here on Wednesday, their screams echoing through the Capitol: “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

Behind closed doors, Scott Walker, the Republican who has been governor for about six weeks, calmly described his intent to forge ahead with the plans that had set off the uprising: He wants to require public workers to pay more for their health insurance and pensions, effectively cutting the take-home pay of many by around 7 percent.

“Target homes”???  How would you like it if me and a few thousand of my thuggish rightwing friends “targeted” your home?  You know, while the people who were supposed to protect you stood by and did nothing because they happened to be rightwingers too?

This kind of vile crap happens more often than you’d think, and it is nearly always vile leftwing slime doing it.  Here’s the story of 14 busloads of “AstroTurf” SEIU mobsters screaming around the home of a bank officer while his terrorized son locks himself in a bathroom and calls his helpless father in tears of terror.  Good old unions.

Don’t forget this fact for a nanosecond: there is a century of genuine evil in the labor union movement.  These are truly bad people with a truly bad agenda.

I’m looking at the screaming mobs of liberal Democrats in Wisconsin and it is impossible to tell them apart from the screaming mobs in Egypt and Yemen and Tunisia.  You know, the “peaceful,” “democracy-loving” Muslims who have repeatedly beaten reporters and in fact gang-raped a CBS correspondent while shouting “Jew!  Jew!”

Oh, are you a liberal who wants to argue with me that there’s no connection between this gang rape and liberals?  Think again.  And don’t tell me that nothing would make you happier than hearing that Sarah Palin got the same treatment.  Because that’s just the kind of moral filth you people are.

3) Consider the activities of elected Democrats.  Suffice it to say by way of introduction that Democrats are fine with the Amerian political process, as long as they can win by any means possible:

Wis. lawmakers flee state to block anti-union bill
By SCOTT BAUER Associated Press © 2011 The Associated Press
Feb. 17, 2011, 9:48PM

MADISON, Wis. — Faced with a near-certain Republican victory that would end a half-century of collective bargaining for public workers, Wisconsin Democrats retaliated with the only weapon they had left: They fled.

Fourteen Democratic lawmakers disappeared from the Capitol on Thursday, just as the Senate was about to begin debating the measure aimed at easing the state’s budget crunch.

By refusing to show up for a vote, the group brought the debate to a swift halt and hoped to pressure Republicans to the negotiating table.

“The plan is to try and slow this down because it’s an extreme piece of legislation that’s tearing this state apart,” Sen. Jon Erpenbach said.

[…]

With 19 seats, Republicans hold a majority in the 33-member Senate, but they are one vote short of the number necessary to conduct business. So the GOP needs at least one Democrat to be present before any voting can take place. Once the measure is brought to the floor, it needs 17 votes to pass.

[…]

The sergeant-at-arms immediately began looking for the missing lawmakers. If authorized, he can seek help from police.

Senate rules and the state constitution say absent members can be compelled to appear, but it does not say how.

“Today they checked out, and I’m not sure where they’re at,” Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald said. “This is the ultimate shutdown, what we’re seeing today.”

And, yes, the police are looking for these criminals – which is an excellent way to describe “Democrats.”  But these un-American cowards who want to warp the democratic process are likely in another state.  Because they don’t give a damn about the state they were foolishly elected to serve.

There may have been a time when one could have been an honorable Democrat.  But those days are just long gone.

There was an election in November.  The citizens of Wisconsin voted for a Republican governor and a Republican legislature precisely to protect them against vile union pigs.  Unions have despicably taken advantage of their “collective bargaining” to give themselves wages and benefits that are bankrupting most of the states in the union.  There is a democratic process; it involves showing up, saying your piece and voting.  Democrats – like the Nazi fascists of the past and the Islamofascists of today – love democracy as long as they win.  Islamists who want to impose a big-government sharia state say of democracy, “You ride it to your destination, and then you step off.”  And that’s exactly what Democrats have done here.  There’s no place in American democracy for elected officials to flee the state so that the state can’t pass legislation that the people elected them to at least vote on.  There’s no place in American democracy for employees of the government, the public teachers and the state prison guards as just a couple of examples, to refuse to show up for work.  Democrats have jumped off the democracy bus and now they are riding on the fascist train.

If you are a Democrat, you are on the wrong side.  It’s a failure of moral reasoning that you can reverse at any time.

Dare I say it?  Please start thinking right.

Liberal Unions Are Profoundly UnAmerican. Just Ask FDR.

Public sector unions love putting themselves first and the people they are supposed to serve dead last.

And yes, I DO mean “dead” last.  Unions have an interesting history of violence and murder.

Here’s the latest example of public sector unions acting like swine:

The state’s largest teachers union Wednesday night called on all 98,000 of its members to attend rallies in Madison on Thursday and Friday, which led school districts — including Madison — to cancel classes for Thursday.

“This is not about protecting our pay and our benefits,” Wisconsin Education Association Council President Mary Bell said at a press conference on the Capitol Square. “It is about protecting our right to collectively bargain.”

In an interview, Bell said her message stopped short of endorsing the kind of coordinated action that closed Madison schools Wednesday. She asked teachers who “could” come to the rally to come.

And, of course, it’s not about their bennies and their perks.  Because these dear government teachers would walk neck deep in snow uphill both ways to teach your darling children.  It’s about a sacred principle.

Yeah, right.  Just how stupid are we supposed to be?

Those wonderful public school teachers.  They don’t care if the children they’ve been misteaching for thirty years can’t read.  What’s important is their swollen pensions that are bankrupting America one city, one county, one state and one country at a time.

If they actually give a fig about the children they constantly claim they give the slightest damn about, maybe they could, oh I don’t know, TEACH THEM.

But I’m afraid that the right to collective bargaining is far more important than your little dears, good people of Wisconsin.

Among the rioting government-sector union emloyees are prison guards.  Newly elected Republican Governor Scott Walker was forced to call in the National Guard because these dedicated prison guards cared so much about the sacred right to collective bargaining for even MORE cushy government benefits that DOUBLE workers in the private sector that they abandoned their posts and put the people at risk of inmates escaping.  And, of course, being dishonest demonizers right down to the pits of their tiny shriveled little cockroach souls, the left accused Governor Walker of creating a Nazi police state for calling in the Guard.  Because, apparently, keeping murderers and rapists from escaping prison is a “Nazi” thing to do.  And letting murderers and rapists go is the virtuous thing to do, according to this despicable mindset.

Public unions and the Democrats who support them are profoundly unAmerican.

But don’t believe me.  Just ask former Democrat President Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

February 10, 2010
Even FDR Was Wary of Public Employee Unions
Marc Comtois

This article by Rich Lowry and this piece in the Wall Street Journal both alluded to Franklin Roosevelt’s wariness towards public employee unions. I was surprised. So I dug around and found one source that supports this claim. In a letter to a public employee union, Roosevelt explains that, yes, they do have a right to organize, but there are some restrictions:

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.

Well, that hasn’t really come to pass now, has it?

Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that “under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government.”

Interesting that he viewed strikes by Federal employees in such a way.

Public unions bargain and organize against the American people, and against their country.   Who employs them?  Who do they “collectively bargain” against?  The people, and the well-being of the people.  They seek to undermine the efforts of the government to serve the people, and instead of serving the people advance their own interests ahead of the people’s.  They make a mockery of John F. Kennedy’s famous words, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

And public school unions are even worse; because not only do they bargain against the American people and against their country as they strive to screw taxpayers for still more totally unsustainable benefits while doing a truly suck job at their jobs, but they stab our children right in their minds.

New York Snow Cleanup: Unions Once Again Prove They Are Un-American

This is just another shocking addendum to my previous article, “Labor Unions: A Century Of Genuine Evil.”

In New York City, people are dead and unknown tens of thousands suffered because union workers were in a snit over reductions in the workforce.

Sanitation Department’s slow snow cleanup was a budget protest
By SALLY GOLDENBERG, LARRY CELONA and JOSH MARGOLIN
Posted: 2:34 AM, December 30, 2010

These garbage men really stink.

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts — a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.

Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.

“They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important,” said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.

Halloran said he met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department — and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan — at his office after he was flooded with irate calls from constituents.

The snitches “didn’t want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation,” Halloran said. “They were told [by supervisors] to take off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file.”

New York’s Strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process — and pad overtime checks — which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes, the sources said.

The snow-removal snitches said they were told to keep their plows off most streets and to wait for orders before attacking the accumulating piles of snow.

They said crews normally would have been more aggressive in combating a fierce, fast-moving blizzard like the one that barreled in on Sunday and blew out the next morning.

The workers said the work slowdown was the result of growing hostility between the mayor and the workers responsible for clearing the snow.

In the last two years, the agency’s workforce has been slashed by 400 trash haulers and supervisors — down from 6,300 — because of the city’s budget crisis. And, effective tomorrow, 100 department supervisors are to be demoted and their salaries slashed as an added cost-saving move.

[Snip]

Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser said only: “We would hope this is not the case.”

But multiple Sanitation Department sources told The Post yesterday that angry plow drivers have only been clearing streets assigned to them even if that means they have to drive through snowed-in roads with their plows raised.

And they are keeping their plow blades unusually high, making it necessary for them to have to run extra passes, adding time and extra pay.

One mechanic said some drivers are purposely smashing plows and salt spreaders to further stall the cleanup effort.

“That is a disgrace. I had to walk three miles because the buses can’t move,” said salesman Yuri Vesslin, 38, of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

The article fails to mention that at least two people are DEAD because of this disgrace.  They were murdered by union greed.  It also fails to mention that in addition to the workers who showed up deliberately sabotaging the cleanup effort, more than 10% of the union employees simply called in sick.

As I point out, it is anything but the first time labor unions have demonstrated that they were despicable, un-American, or murderers.  It isn’t even the first time that top union leaders TODAY have participated in the murder of American citizens.

Now, when I point out the fact that labor unions are fundamentally un-American, I’m not making anything up.

From my aforementioned article about labor unions being genuinely evil:

Let’s also point out that while labor unions were being violent racists in America, they were in the process of being the source of the greatest evil in human history in Europe.  It was the labor unions that formed the core of Lenin’s violent communist movement.  The Marxists started out in 1898 by forming the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.  Just as labor unions formed the core of Hitler’s National Socialist German WORKERS Party.

From a 1935 German magazine:

“A Socialist Workers’ Government has achieved a workers revolution in Germany without resorting to, though in some respects it approximates, Communism.  Adolf Hitler has done it by wiping out all class privileges and class distinction, but the economics foundation of property rights and private capital has been left almost intact – for the present time.”

“The Third Reich, under Hitler, has wiped out corporate trade-unionism by forcing all workers to join one great government union, the National Socialist Union of Employers and Workers…”

While American labor unions were basking in the light of FDR’s pork barrel political favoritism and doing everything they could to keep poor blacks down, their European counterparts were at work preparing to set the world on fire.

So far, I can’t say I’d be proud to be a member of a labor union.

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka recently appeared before an audience of fellow socialist travelers and said:

“…we need to fundamentally restructure our economy and re-establish popular control over the private corporations which have distorted our economy and hijacked our government. That’s a long-term job, but one we should start now.

I Hate the Media points out the scary parallels to the ugly history of the past:

“Re-establish”? Wouldn’t that imply that there had once been popular control over private corporations?

Richard. Mr. Trumka. Sir. Pardon our impertinence, but we believe that what you’re talking about here is National Socialism.

As in Adolf Trumka.

Meanwhile, while AFL-CIO head Trumka was flirting with National Socialism, recently retired SEIU president Andy Stern was kissing up to socialism’s more famous sister, communism, saying:

“Workers of the world unite – it’s not just a slogan anymore.  It’s the way we’re gonna have to do our work.”

Whose slogan was that “workers of the world unite” thing, Andy Stern?

The political slogan Workers of the world, unite!, is one of the most famous rallying cries of communism, found in The Communist Manifesto (1848), by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A variation (“Workers of all lands, unite”) is also inscribed on Marx’s tombstone.

Ah, yes, the vile, vindictive, vicious and vehemently anti-American Marxists.  And labor unions, which are nothing more than the Communist Party in America today.

Labor unions were spawned by evil and continue to have a history of evil.

But don’t ask me about the particular evil of public unions; ask a former hero of the Democrat Party (which proves that Democrats are far more despicable today than they even were before), Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

February 10, 2010
Even FDR Was Wary of Public Employee Unions
Marc Comtois

This article by Rich Lowry and this piece in the Wall Street Journal both alluded to Franklin Roosevelt’s wariness towards public employee unions. I was surprised. So I dug around and found one source that supports this claim. In a letter to a public employee union, Roosevelt explains that, yes, they do have a right to organize, but there are some restrictions:

All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.

Well, that hasn’t really come to pass now, has it?

Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that “under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government.”

Interesting that he viewed strikes by Federal employees in such a way.

Not just “Federal employees.”  “All government employees.”  Public-sector unions in general.

Labor unions are un-American in every way, as are the Democrat-passed laws that make it impossible for private businesses to resist their impossible demands that are now breaking the back of our economy and our society; and public labor unions are even more so.

FDR’s argument was that public-sector labor unions would entail government workers literally organizing AGAINST AMERICA and AGAINST AMERICANS.

And in that one thing, FDR was entirely right.

Meanwhile, such flagrantly un-American organizations own the Democrat Party, and own President Barack Obama.

SEIU boss Any Stern, “Mister Marxist” himself, was the number one visitor at the White House.  And Mister Marxist bragged that “we spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama — $60.7 million, to be exact — and we’re proud of it.”  You know, when he wasn’t saying stuff like, “We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn’t work, we try the persuasion of power.”

And, of course, letting American citizens suffer and even die while unions refused to do the jobs they were hired to do was most certainly “the persuasion of power.”

And the very same public sector unions that FDR condemned as profoundly anti-American blatantly OWN Barack Obama, who once famously said:

“Your agenda has been my agenda in the United States Senate.  Before debating health care, I talked to Andy Stern and SEIU members.”

“We are going to paint the nation purple with SEIU.”

For the record, SEIU is the very sort of public labor union FDR never wanted to see.  It was a giant step downward into the death-spiral of the American eagle-as-Dodo-bird.

Obama swore that he was a loyal minion of the union agenda.  He also swore he was a loyal minion of the despicable anti-American treason organization aka ACORN.

And just what is that agenda that Obama shares with unions?  How about – in addition to “the persuasion of power” – passing on $3 TRILLION in unfunded pension liabilities onto the American people???

If you’re for public union workers literally allowing you to freeze to death as a means of forcing local governments to continue to impose the union agenda – which includes destroying American families to pad their pensions – then by all means, just keep voting for Obama and the Democrat Party.

But I hope you don’t mind if people who know the truth call you out for what you are: as un-American as Marxist pie (which taste just like a shit sandwich, for what it’s worth).

Labor Unions: A Century Of Genuine Evil

If you’re like me, you never heard of this evil event that was reported in an Los Angeles Times editorial below.  It has been hidden from you, just as the truth about so much history has been hidden by the teachers and historians who were supposed to teach the truth, but instead have fed us on propaganda and lies.

As terrible, and as evil, as the following event was, which has been deliberately omitted from virtually everyone’s history books, it represents only one of many evil and ugly incidents in the history of labor unions.

The blast that rocked labor: The bombing of the Times Building 100 years ago set off a chain of events that devastated America’s unions.
by Lew Irwin
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Page A27, Los Angeles Times

Shortly after 1 A.M. on Oct. 1, 1910, 100 years ago Friday, a time bomb constructed of 16 sticks of 80% dynamite connected to a cheap windup alarm clock exploded in an alley next to the Los Angeles Times.  It detonated with such violence that for blocks around, people ran panic-stricken into the streets, believing that an intense earthquake had hit the city.

The explosion destroyed the Times building, taking the lives of 20 employees, including the night editor and the principle telegraph operator, and maiming dozens of others.  Two other time bombs – intended to kill Gen. Harrison Gray Otis, the publisher of the newspaper, and Felix J. Zeehandelaar, the head of a Los Angeles business organization – were discovered later that morning hidden in the bushes next to their homes.  Their mechanisms had jammed.

Eventually two brothers, J.B. McNamara, who planted the bombs, and J.J. McNamara, an official of the International Assn. of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers union who ordered the attacks, were arrested, convicted, and imprisoned.

In it’s day, The Times bombing was equivalent to the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center.  It was called “the crime of the century,” and it remains the deadliest crime to go to trial in California history.  It would lead to investigations, arrests and trials of union leaders across the country who, it turned out, funded hundreds of terrorist bombings at mostly nonunion construction projects between 1907 and 1911.  They included officials of the California Building Trades Council in San Fransisco, the ironworkers union and the United Brotherhood of Carpenters in Indianapolis, the Machinists Union in Syracuse, N.Y., and the Building Trades Council in Detroit.  Hirelings of the union involved in executing the bombings were also brought to trial – 46 members of the ironworkers union alone.  In addition to the McNamaras, who were sentenced in 1911, 39 men were convicted and sent to prison in 1912; five others received suspended sentences.

The testimony during their trials and their convictions devastated the American labor movement, virtually paralyzing it until the New Deal. […]

The terrorism that gripped America 100 years ago is barely mentioned in California history books today…. The bombing is now regarded as an embarrassment to organized labor, which has never gotten around to an unequivocal denunciation of it.

A 1996 history of the Ironworkers Union says that … “The international officers stretched the limits of zeal in a righteous cause.” […]

Former President Theodore Roosevelt reacted against those “foolish sentimentalists” who urged that the McNamaras be regarded with sympathy because they were struggling in a war on behalf of their class, pointed out that all of their victims had been “laboring people.”  “Murder,” Roosevelt said succinctly, “is murder.”

“Bomb.”  “Violence.”  “Murder.”  “The equivalent to the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center.”  The “the crime of the century.”  “The deadliest crime to go to trial in California history” to this very day.  Labor unions.  All of those words and phrases go hand in hand together.

A century of evil.  That’s the legacy of labor unions.

Interestingly, the article points out that the American labor movement was virtually paralyzed until the New Deal.  So let’s pick up with the New Deal.  From “Why Did FDR’s New Deal Harm Blacks?“:

By giving labor unions the monopoly power to exclusively represent employees in a workplace, the Wagner Act had the effect of excluding blacks, since the dominant unions discriminated against blacks. The Wagner Act had originally been drafted with a provision prohibiting racial discrimination. But the American Federation of Labor successfully lobbied against it, and it was dropped. AFL unions used their new power, granted by the Wagner Act, to exclude blacks on a large scale. Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and Marcus Garvey were all critical of compulsory unionism.

From violent terrorist bomber murders who committed the crime of the century equivalent of the 9/11 terrorist attack to racists who hurt poor blacks.

Thirty years later, the unions got a second chance.  And they were still genuinely evil.

Let’s also point out that while labor unions were being violent racists in America, they were in the process of being the source of the greatest evil in human history in Europe.  It was the labor unions that formed the core of Lenin’s violent communist movement.  The Marxists started out in 1898 by forming the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.  Just as labor unions formed the core of Hitler’s National Socialist German WORKERS Party.

From a 1935 German magazine:

“A Socialist Workers’ Government has achieved a workers revolution in Germany without resorting to, tho in some respects it approximates, Communism.  Adolf Hitler has done it by wiping out all class privileges and class distinction, but the economics foundation of property rights and private capital has been left almost intact – for the present time.”

“The Third Reich, under Hitler, has wiped out corporate trade-unionism by forcing all workers to join one great government union, the National Socialist Union of Employers and Workers…”

While American labor unions were basking in the light of FDR’s pork barrel political favoritism and doing everything they could to keep poor blacks down, their European counterparts were at work preparing to set the world on fire.

So far, I can’t say I’d be proud to be a member of a labor union.

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka recently appeared before an audience of fellow socialist travelers and said:

“…we need to fundamentally restructure our economy and re-establish popular control over the private corporations which have distorted our economy and hijacked our government. That’s a long-term job, but one we should start now.

I Hate the Media points out the scary parallels to the ugly history of the past:

“Re-establish”? Wouldn’t that imply that there had once been popular control over private corporations?

Richard. Mr. Trumka. Sir. Pardon our impertinence, but we believe that what you’re talking about here is National Socialism.

As in Adolf Trumka.

Meanwhile, while AFL-CIO head Trumka was flirting with National Socialism, recently retired SEIU president Andy Stern was kissing up to socialism’s more famous sister, communism, saying:

“Workers of the world unite – it’s not just a slogan anymore.  It’s the way we’re gonna have to do our work.”

But let’s get back to Richard Trumka.

Of course, Richard Trumka isn’t just our next budding fuhrer; he’s an incredibly violent and evil man.  Here’s the short version of one story about Trumka:

On the orders of the United Mine Workers (UMW), 16,000 miners went on strike in 1993. One subcontractor, Eddie York (who was not a UMW member), decided it was important to support his wife and three children and crossed picket lines to get to his job. He was shot in the head as he left the job site to go home. UMW President Richard Trumka (now Secretary-Treasurer at the AFL-CIO) told The Washington Times that “if you strike a match and put your finger in, common sense tells you you’re going to burn your finger.” UMW strike captain Jerry Dale Lowe was found guilty of weapons charges and conspiracy in York’s death, and York’s widow Wanda sued the union for her husband’s wrongful death. The UMW fought the lawsuit for four years, but settled with Wanda York only two days after federal prosecutors announced that they would share evidence from the criminal trial with York’s attorneys.

The short version doesn’t include the fact that Richad Trumka’s union thugs – in addition to shooting a good family man in the head and murdering him – threw rocks at the rescue workers who showed up to try to save Eddie York’s life as he lay dying.

As head of the United Mine Workers, Trumka ordered a nationwide strike against Peabody Coal in 1993. On July 22, a non-union worker, Eddie York, was shot in the back of the head and killed as he attempted to pass striking coal workers. Picketers continued to throw rocks after York was shot, preventing his would be rescuers from assisting him.^[14]. Trumka and other United Mine Workers officials settled a wrongful death lawsuit with Mr. York’s widow out of court in 1997.

And it was following that vicious display of supremely ugly violence that Richard Trumka delivered his “he got just what he deserved” remark.

The executive summary of a 31-page report titled, “Freedom From Union Violence” states that:

The National Institute for Labor Relations Research (NILRR) has recorded 8,799 incidents of violence from news reports since 1975.

And that report was dated 1998, meaning that we’ve very likely witnessed a lot of violence since.

That report is filled with separate accounts of violence.

I could go on and on and on reporting incidents of union violence.  But I want an article, not a 10-part collection of books.

So let’s move on to the newest form of labor union violence: economic violence.

How does an unfunded gap of $3.23 TRILLION in public sector union pensions sound to you?

From The Hill:

Businesses and unions planning to meet on possible $3 trillion pension disaster
By Jay Heflin – 09/05/10 09:04 PM ET

Labor groups will be invited to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to talk about an alarming shortfall in state employee pension plans that some believe could lead to a new government bailout.

Randy Johnson, the Chamber’s senior vice president for Labor, Immigration and Employee Benefits, told The Hill the total shortfall for state pension funds could run as high as $3 trillion.

That doesn’t count the private sector unions, which are so deep in unfunded pension debt it’s unreal.  SEIU’s unfunded liabilities represent more than 80% of the union’s total assets, for just one example.  And that is just part of a bailout movement that could – gulp – top $100 trillion.

And when the system can’t pay the unions, there will be blood.  We’ll see the kind of violence and outright anarchy that has been gripping Europe in recent months.  Only we’ve got a lot more guns in America.

Labor unions have destroyed every single industry they have ever been allowed to contaminate.  From manufacturing (airline, auto, steel, textile, etc.) to teaching.  And Superman aint coming, because labor unions are the strength-sapping, lethal Kryptonite.

Labor unions have represented genuine evil for more than a century.  And if we don’t vote out the Democrats who use public money to keep their voter-turnout apparatus going in a sick game of political patronage, they will murder this country.

Harry Reid Continues Race-Baiting Racist Democrat Tradition

Harry Reid was speaking before a group of liberal Hispanics when he said the following:

“I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, OK? Do I need to say more?”

Why did Harry Reid say that?  Well, as a progressive Democrat, Harry Reid understands the “white man’s burden.”

Harry Reid understands that blacks and Hispanics are little more than animals – millions of years’ worth of Darwinism from attaining the humanity of the white man.  And therefore it is the duty of the white man to guide his less evolved evolutionary cousins toward a course  that will enable them to survive.  I mean, we have programs to protect turtles and frogs; it is the least we can do to protect blacks and Hispanics, too.

Most every progressive Democrat knows all that.

Second, Harry Reid, again as a progressive Democrat, understands the equivalent of “they all look alike”; namely that “those kind of people all think the same.”  I mean, blacks’ and Hispanics’ minds are clearly far too feeble to enable them to think for themselves, right?  I mean, that’s a big part of why we’ve got the “white man’s burden thing” above.

One day, millions of years from now if we’re lucky (you know how Darwinism takes eons of time), blacks and Hispanics will finally be fully human, and then we’ll be able to hold them responsible as human beings just like the white man.  But Harry Reid knows that we’re far from that day in the here-and-now.

Now, of course, I put both ideas in over-the-top language.  But they nevertheless do accurately reflect the incredibly racists underlying assumptions on the part of progressive Democrats today.

First, they lump people into groups on the basis of race and gender.  And then they essentially point out that some of these groups are not able to take care of themselves, and therefore we must redistribute the wealth of the more successful groups in order to help the racial categories who are unable to help themselves (and of course to punish the successful groups, who are assumed to have acquired everything they obtained illegitimately or through greed).

Interestingly, in spite of my being white – or according to progressive Democrats BECAUSE of my white race – I am able to think for my self.  I don’t “vote my race”; I vote my values.  I vote my ideas.  I vote my conscience.  It is beyond a shame that blacks and Hispanics – according to the Democrat Senate Majority Leader – either don’t have or shouldn’t have that capacity.

Stop and think, liberals.  What if a Republican had met a group of white people and said:

“I don’t know how anyone of Caucasian heritage could vote Democrat, OK?  Do I  need to say more?”

That Republican would have been hounded out of office in shame.  And he would be gone.

But if the Democrat Party exists to advance the cause of blacks and Hispanics, then wouldn’t it be just as true that the Grand Old Party exists to advance the cause of some other racial group?  And what group would that be if not whites?

Hey, every single one of you white, dirty cracker whores (at least, that’s what the New Black Panthers consider white women) out there: vote Republican, or be branded a traitor to your own race.

Now, of course, you run into the irony that it was that Grand Old Party that freed the slaves, and fought a bitter war to free the slaves against the Democrat Party that was fighting just as bitterly to keep black people in the chains of human bondage.  But that’s beside the point in the Democrat narrative.

Harry Reid is also on the record admiring Obama as a:

‘light-skinned’ African American ‘with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.’

Maybe it’s because Obama was half white, but Harry Reid nevertheless praises Obama for overcoming that stupid negro dialect.  And being light-skinned is a huge bonus for Harry Reid.  “Whiter is better” when you’re in the party of “the White Man’s Burden.”

Bill Clinton wasn’t quite as happy with the man who was stealing his white wife’s rightful place as leader of the free world.

Bill snidely told Ted Kennedy,

“A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee.”

I know, William Jefferson.  That’s back when southern Democrats like you had a different way of keeping black boys in their proper place.

Senator Robert Byrd, a distinguished “Exalted Cyclops” and “Kleagle” of the famous Democrat-created Ku Klux Klan, was on the record as once saying:

“I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side … Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.”

Ah.  There’s that depiction of blacks as being in that long-way-from-being-human I earlier mentioned.

And:

“The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia and in every state in the nation.”

When Bill Clinton honored fellow Democrat Robert “Exalted Cyclops” Byrd, Clinton said:

“He was a country boy from the hills and hollows of West Virginia. He was trying to get elected. And maybe he did something he shouldn’t have done…”

Well, as long as he was just a Democrat trying to get elected, then ANY racism or racism is fine, isn’t it, Hill Billy?

Maybe he did something he shouldn’t have done.  And then again, maybe he didn’t.  After all, Byrd was a Democrat, and therefore can get away with the most shocking acts of racist filth imaginable, right, Hill Billy?

Democrats love to call Republicans “racist.”  And what a racist thing of them to say (if not being “race traitorous,” if the Democrats are white – to throw Harry Reid’s standard back at them).

I pointed this out once before (and we could also point out that the Confederacy voted exclusively Democrat, and that the KKK was created by Democrats as a terrorist arm to target black people and white Republicans).

The first Klan was founded in 1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee by veterans of the Confederate Army. Although it never had an organizational structure above the local level, similar groups across the South adopted the name and methods. Klan groups spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement after the war. As a secret vigilante group, the Klan reacted against Radical Republican control of Reconstruction by attempting to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including murder, against black and white Republicans.  In 1870 and 1871 the federal government passed the Force Acts, which were used to prosecute Klan crimes. Prosecution of Klan crimes and enforcement of the Force Acts suppressed Klan activity. In 1874 and later, however, newly organized and openly active paramilitary organizations, such as the White League and the Red Shirts, started a fresh round of violence aimed at suppressing Republican voting and running Republicans out of office. These contributed to white conservative Democrats‘ regaining political power in all the Southern states by 1877.

But let me quote myself regarding other parts of the despicable record of the Democrat Party as the party of official racism in America:

I mean, maybe you can go back to President Andrew Jackson and his vicious genocidal Trail of Tears.  But Andrew Jackson was a Democrat, too.  Or you could go back to President Woodrow Wilson who literally fired all the blacks in federal government and RE-segregated the military.  But you guessed it – Democrat.  We can go back to January 26, 1922, when Democrat Senators filibustered a Republican bill that had passed in the GOP-controlled House to make lynching a federal crime.  Or we could mention the vile and evil political party that had a national convention in 1924 that was so dominated by the Ku Klux Klan that it is today known as “Klanbake.”  But, oops.  That was the 1924 DEMOCRAT PARTY CONVENTION.  Or we could consider that President Franklin Delanor Roosevelt was a bigger racist for put American Japanese citizens in camps for nothing beyond racism.  Or for allowing the infamous Tuskegee experiment to begin under his presidency.  Or allowing his New Deal program to be used to help Democrat-supporting labor unions hurt black people and shut them out of economic success.  But, well, you know…So when you hear Democrats today like Patrick Kennedy comparing the Arizona with the Trail of Tears, note that they’re merely trying to pass the buck for their own Democrat historic racism to innocent Republicans.  I mean, what Patrick Kennedy did was analogous to Osama bin Laden saying, “You Americans are the terrorists, just like the murderers who attacked and destroyed the World Trade Center!”  But wait a minute, Osama – YOU’RE THE ONE WHO DID THAT!!!

The Democrat Party is the historic proponent of racism in this country (see also my comment here).  Oh, they changed their tactics from threats to bribes, but they never abandoned their racist “progressive” values.

The Democrats that once deliberately targeted racial minorities for exclusion and even violence as a means of advancing their political power ultimately realized that their strategy wasn’t working beginning in the 1960s.  That was when they realized, “If you can’t beat ’em, co-opt them.”  And they began to buy the votes of the very racial minorities they used to savagely oppress by offering racial quotas (opposed by great civil rights leaders such as Frederic Douglas and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.) and welfare benefits for life.

So why was it that Democrat Senator Robert Byrd was “MAYBE” wrong for being a member of the Klan? The answer is as simple as it is frightening: because it’s always been okay for the Democrat Party to use racism and race-baiting and racial segregation in order to drive their agenda home.  And that is just as true today when the Democrats buy off blacks through welfare so they will act as the human shields of the Democrat Party as it was when the Democrat-created Ku Klux Klan was riding around with torches.

Let us not forget that both the famous Martin Luther King, Sr. and his even more famous son were both registered Republicans. It’s a shame that the pseudo civil rights leaders of today – and particularly one Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid – frankly aren’t fit to carry Martin Luther King’s shoes, much less criticize his party affiliation.

Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frederick Douglas BOTH fundamentally opposed the quotas and preferential treatment that Democrats have employed to create the equivalent of the “house negro.” Jack Greenberg of the NAACP said in the 1950s that “The chief problem with quotas is that they introduce a potentially retrogressive concept into the cherished notion of individual equality.”

Let’s listen to Frederick Douglas, escaped slave and greatest of all champions of civil rights, has to say:

Frederick Douglass ridiculed the idea of racial quotas, as suggested by Martin Delany, as “absurd as a matter of practice,” noting that it implied blacks “should constitute one-eighth of the poets, statesmen, scholars, authors and philosophers.” Douglass emphasized that “natural equality is a very different thing from practical equality; and…though men may be potentially equal, circumstances may for a time cause the most striking inequalities.”  On another occasion, in opposing “special efforts” for the black freedmen, Douglass argued that they “might ‘serve to keep up very prejudices, which it is so desirable to banish’ by promoting an image of blacks as privileged wards of the state.”

So now conservatives are suddenly racists for agreeing with Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, Jr. and against liberals and the vile pseudo values that the greatest civil rights leaders in history condemned?

Richard Nixon, whom Democrats love to make the poster boy for Republican racism, was the first president to introduce the racial quotas that Democrats have been trying to implement and expand ever since.  To whatever extent Nixon was a racist, Democrats have been swimming in Nixon’s racism ever since.

Harry Reid should have resigned in disgrace two vile comments ago.  He should certainly resign now.