Month: March 2019

The Mackinac Center, a free-market think tank, is stepping up efforts to promote right-to-work policies and regulations nearly a year after the Supreme Court banned union agency fees in the public sector.

Mackinac is expanding its operations from informing public sector union workers and fee payers of their rights secured by the June 2018 decision in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The free-market think tank launched a new campaign Tuesday, called Workers for Opportunity, to lobby state governors, lawmakers and regulators to adopt further right-to-work laws and protections.

The Supreme Court ruling in Janus found that agency fees – union fees paid by employees as a prerequisite to holding a certain job – violated public sector workers’ free speech rights.

The ruling initiated a furious struggle by right-to-work groups to inform union members and fee-payers of their right to drop union representation. Union bosses began fighting to keep employees on their membership rolls and limit the loss of revenue.

Just informing workers of their newly secured rights is a “shortsighted view,” Mackinac Center vice president of communications Lindsay Killen told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Mackinac and other conservative groups, such as the Freedom Foundation operating on the West Coast, have made substantial gains in messaging to union members and fee-payers. Tens of thousands have stopped paying union dues. The Freedom Foundation estimates its efforts in California, Oregon and Washington have cost unions roughly $36 million.

“Absolutely, we should be focused on informing public employees of their rights across the country … but we need a place for these people to go afterward. A lot of these people are disenfranchised,” Killen said. “They left their unions for a reason. They left because they didn’t agree with the policies the unions were pushing or the environment that the unions forced upon them.”

Mackinac is operating in more than a dozen states, five of which involve direct operations with legislators or executive officials, to build out from the Janus victory against union power.

The Workers for Opportunity campaign has four aims: expand transparency and access to public union membership rolls, implement more right-to-work laws, ensure union members are able to vote periodically to re-certify or cut off their unions and codify the right of union members to positively affirm that they want to be in a union.

Unions are using their own strategies to maintain union membership and dues. Some unions have taken greater care to work for their members to convince them to stay. Others are using more devious methods, such as instituting “window periods” controlling when members can opt out of a union or not.

“Just recently we heard of legislation in Kansas that would require public employees to contribute to their union as a charitable organization whether or not they choose to be a member of the union,” Killen told TheDCNF. “The unions are getting creative.”

In the aftermath of Greek voters’ overwhelming rejection of a deal with the European Central Bank, many options are being discussed to prevent the much discussed Grexit.

Demonstrating that nothing is absolute in politics, especially when money is concerned, approximately a month will transpire before the actual repercussions of the vote are known, as European leaders must meet and discuss what they will do.

Lost in the global politicking is any sense of respect for private property, which money embodies.

Currency is a material expression of ownership. By standardizing worth, money helps protect private property. It engenders respect for personal liberty. For, if one person owns something, their own rights are more likely to inspire considerate treatment for others.

But the prevailing societal attitudes, both by private citizens, bankers and politicians, has ignored the philosophy at the root of currency valuation.

The possibility that Greece may institute a “haircut”- a government seizure of a percentage of deposits over a certain amount- in order to finance a new currency shows a blatant disregard for money. Greek’s collective tantrum over austerity measures shows they also do not value the currency they borrowed. And the banking officials whose easy money policies have contributed to the debt crisis sweeping the world certainly also lack this basic respect.

But this attitude also transcends the eurozone. The United States has engaged in reckless control of its markets through virtually limitless quantitative easing and by forcing irresponsible lending practices upon banks. As a result, prices have necessarily skyrocketed.

And this means people’s purchasing power shrinks. Exponentially increasing government expenditures are accompanied by endless taxation, which draws down the amount of resources individuals can use for their own needs. Their purchasing power—and unlimited ability to pursue business or creative enterprises—is directly impeded in proportion to the percentage of assets appropriated.

This is an exponential cycle, for the more taxes government takes, the more programs it creates and the more revenue it needs from its citizens and from foreign banking powers.

The only end to this is a reaffirmation of money’s root. Too often it is seen as either a bogeyman for the duplicitous oligarchs of finance and politics, or merely as a means to an end, which can be manipulated without regard to consequence.

But, money is neither good nor evil. It is a tool by which property can be traded. It is the material expression of property. And, as such, it is the fountainhead of personal liberty.

It must be safeguarded, like any other liberty, against public and private institutions that would seek to appropriate it for their own power.

Greece is the inevitable end result of complacency in the face of such machinations. The scrambling to prevent the collapse is as much self-interest as empathy. The consequence-free easy money policies all Western nations engage in stand threatened by a Grexit. This means the livelihoods of more than the Greek people are at stake.

Whether the people of America will see the writing on the wall before the United States’ creditors come knocking remains to be seen.

 

Republicans, conservatives and even some environmentalists are criticizing the final version of New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal as not yet ready for prime time. One major Democratic lawmaker even downplayed the idea’s importance going forward.

The resolution calls for “10-year national mobilizations” toward a series of goals aimed at fighting global warming, according to a copy of the bill obtained by NPR. A separate fact sheet claims the plan would “mobilize every aspect of American society on a scale not seen since World War 2.” Not everyone feels the same.

“Who knew? ‘Green New Deal’ is a resolution, not a bill, which means it’s a ‘statement,’” Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas wrote in a tweet Thursday morning after Ocasio-Cortez and Democratic Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts released the plan. Other GOP lawmakers likewise dinged the Green New Deal for lacking seriousness.

Republican Rep. Doug Lamborn of Colorado, for instance, criticized what he believes is a tendency of Democrats to embark on unrealistic agenda.

“I guess I can understand if someone who has not a lot of life experience and they’re proposing something that’s extremely unrealistic,” he said at a House Natural Resources Committee hearing Wednesday. “Impossible. But what I don’t understand is adults, grown-ups who are older and more mature are also advocating something that is impossible.”

University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke Jr. echoed both Lamborn’s and Cornyn’s positions. “Almost no policy substance and that which is there is pretty weak tea: ‘reduce emissions … as much as technologically possible,’” Pielke Jr. wrote in a tweet Thursday. “Not yet worth debating here as there is not much to debate.”

Other conservatives called the plan a socialistic ploy. “Wealth transfer schemes suggested in the radical policies like the Green New Deal may not be the best path to community prosperity,” Illinois Rep. John Shimkus, the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on climate change and other environmental issues, said in a statement.

The plan removed a call to eradicate fossil fuels, which is causing heartburn for some environmentalists.

Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica, for instance, was dour in her assessment of the final copy. “The failure to mention and explicitly state that we have to end the era of fossil fuels is just a huge missed opportunity to be real about where we are and where we need to go,” she said in a press statement Thursday.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi downplayed Ocasio-Cortez’s plan and even poked fun at the idea. “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” the California Democrat told reporters Wednesday. “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it right?”

• The media smelled blood when a video seemingly showed a group of teenage boys bullying an older Native American protester.
• Newer videos showed that the protester had actually approached the students, who were also receiving slurs shouted by a group of radical activists.
• The media’s misleading reports happened at a time when the students were facing death threats.

Just mere days after BuzzFeed News dropped its hotly disputed report accusing President Donald Trump of obstruction of justice, the media decided to pick a new target: a group of teenage Catholic high school boys.

On Friday, a group of male students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky found themselves in the middle of a media firestorm after an initial video gave the impression that they had mobbed a Native American protester. Media figures, still reeling from the wave of criticism following the BuzzFeed News fiasco, smelled blood. Sure, the initial video didn’t show the students assaulting anyone, but that didn’t stop reporters, commentators and Hollywood celebrities from focusing on the smirk of a student in the video, which somehow triggered painful memories of lonely prom nights and failed junior varsity sport tryouts.

Of course, newer videos showed that the students were completely innocent. They were first taunted by a group of radical activists and the Native American protester approached them.

Even with this new information, CNN decided to report the story with the following headline:

Facts first, of course.

BuzzFeed News Reporter, Anne Helen Petersen, made her colleagues proud by smearing one of the kids in the video and implied he had a future in sexually assaulting women. Petersen even acknowledged that other videos showed a completely different story, but that didn’t stop her diatribe about why a teenage boy’s face “caused a visceral reaction.”

Three Washington Post reporters, as National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty neatly explained, framed their story on how “a throng of young, mostly white teenage boys, several wearing “Make America Great Again” caps,” surrounded the Native American protestor Nathan Phillips and reported that he “felt threatened.”

Even The New York Times seemingly contradicted itself halfway through its own report:

The Atlantic’s James Fallows, just hours after the first video was released, wrote a bizarre column comparing the young boys to pro-segregation activists. Fallows seemed to even recognize that other footage might give a more complete picture of the incident, but he chose to brush this off as just “whatever happened.”

Even by Monday morning, MSNBC was still tweeting out clips from shows expressing sympathy for Fallows. One women, who purports to have been there, said she “witnessed something that was very aggressive and something that was very frightening.”

WATCH:

Other reporters, like The New York Times’ Jonathan Capehart, stood in solidarity with Phillips, while others like esteemed tech journalists Kara Swisher said this is exactly why Americans needed that insipid Gillette ad.

In fairness, a number of individuals apologized and shared the newer videos demonstrating the students’ innocence (which you can find in this piece by The Daily Caller’s Scott Morefield).

Despite these efforts, it’s important to keep in mind that the media’s efforts to tarnish the reputations of these innocent kids was being done while other social media users were encouraging violence and sending death threats.

One would think that following the fallout from the disputed BuzzFeed report, the media would take a minute before trying to ruin any more innocent lives, particularly when we’re talking about kids. Yet this whole episode makes one thing clear: Journalists aren’t willing to learn a thing.

LAREDO, Texas — U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Office of Field Operations (OFO) continues to prepare for the potential arrival of thousands of people migrating in a caravan to the United States through the Southwest border.  The eight ports of entry extending from Brownsville to Del Rio that comprise the Laredo Field Office (LFO) will soon begin Mobile Field Force (MFF) training to secure our nation’s borders.

CBP will be conducting Mobile Field Force (MFF) operational readiness exercises at Laredo Field Office ports of entry in the very near future.

“The MFF training consists of practical exercises designed to train officers on CBP’s special response tactics,” said Director of Field Operations, David P. Higgerson, Laredo Field Office.  “As they train to respond to any incident that may occur at the ports of entry, our priority is still the safety and security of the American people, international travelers, and our communities while facilitating legitimate trade and travel.”

As the men and women of CBP conduct these drills, it is important for the traveling public to be aware of high visibility operations.

CBP is continually assessing the capabilities of our facilities and has been making — and will continue to make — necessary preparations.  Preparations include participating in operational readiness exercises and the mobilization of resources, as needed, to ensure the facilitation of lawful trade and travel.

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) today announced the results of a nationwide survey of small businesses and manufacturers. The results cast a harsh light on the state of the U.S. economy six weeks before Election Day.

The poll, conducted by Public Opinion Strategies (POS), surveyed 800 small business owners, manufacturers and decision-makers at small and medium-sized companies, with a majority (55 percent) saying the national economy is in a worse position compared to three years ago. Among the chief factors survey respondents cited were federal regulations, taxes, government spending and the cost of health insurance and energy.

Key survey findings include the following:

• 67 percent say there is too much uncertainty in the market today to expand, grow or hire new workers.
• 69 percent of small business owners and manufacturers say President Obama’s Executive Branch and regulatory policies have hurt American small businesses and manufacturers.
• 55 percent say they would not start a business today given what they know now and in the current environment.
• 54 percent say other countries like China and India are more supportive of their small businesses and manufacturers than the United States.

“Manufacturers have told policymakers in Washington time and again that uncertainty and a negative business environment is turning the American Dream into a nightmare,” said NAM President and CEO Jay Timmons. “The findings of this survey show that manufacturers and other small businesses have a starkly negative outlook for their future—with good reason. There is far too much uncertainty, too many burdensome regulations and too few policymakers willing to put aside their egos and fulfill their responsibilities to the American people. To fix this problem, we need immediate action on pro-growth tax and regulatory policies that put manufacturers in the United States in a position to compete and succeed in an ever-more competitive global economy.”

NFIB President and CEO Dan Danner said, “The small businesses who are the engine of our economy are clamoring for their elected representatives to stand up and lead so they can focus on the business of getting America back on its feet. Yet, instead of smoothing the way, our government continues to erect more barriers to growth through burdensome regulations that increase costs for small businesses and all Americans. It’s time Washington started listening to America’s job creators and offered real solutions to help us back to prosperity.”

Bill McInturff of POS said, “The data in this survey offer a striking picture of how American businesses view the current state of the U.S. economy. It’s clear that small business owners and manufacturers are becoming increasingly more frustrated by the federal government’s inability to solve America’s economic problems. Manufacturers place most of the blame squarely on policies coming out of Washington.”

The Pentagon revealed just how President Donald Trump’s national emergency declaration enables the Department of Defense to secure our borders and illustrates just how little the restrictions in the funding bill actually mean.

“The president has declared a national emergency on the southern border,” the Defense Department said Friday in a statement. “The president invoked sections 12302, 284(b)(7), and 2808 of Title 10, U.S. Code, and requires the use of the armed forces to respond to this emergency through support to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in its efforts to secure the southern border.”

Each of the listed sections brings DoD resources to bear on the crisis at the southern border:

10 U.S.C., Section 12302 (Activation of the Ready Reserve) authorizes involuntary activation of the Ready Reserve, which includes members who, when mobilized, perform a federal mission at the direction of the secretary of defense. This allows the Secretary of Defense to activate military members currently on inactive duty in the Ready Reserve (Inactive Ready Reserve) to be activated should he see fit.

10 U.S.C., Section 284(b)(7) (Counterdrug Support) authorizes DOD to support the counterdrug activities of other federal agencies, including DHS, with the construction of roads, fences, and lighting to block drug smuggling corridors across international boundaries.  DOD will review and respond appropriately to any request for assistance received from DHS. “Fences” are not defined in section 284(b)(7) and courts would likely agree that any physical barrier would meet the description.

Per 10 U.S.C., Section 2808 (Military Construction (MILCON)), this declaration of a national emergency at the southern border requiring the use of the armed forces authorizes the secretary of defense to determine whether border barriers are necessary to support the use of the armed forces and to re-direct unobligated DOD MILCON funding to construct border barriers if required. Section 2808 is less ambiguous. It authorizes border barriers as the Secretary of Defense sees fit.

When President Trump said he had a plan to get $8 billion for border barriers, he meant it. And these provisions don’t come with the handcuffs included in the funding bill signed by the president today.

Barack Obama, who has stayed in continuous campaign mode since birth, persists in insisting House Republicans submit to his demands to hike tax rates on “the rich.”  If Republicans do note cede to his decrees, Obama will let everyone’s tax rates go up and cut one trillion dollars from the budget, half of which will come from defense spending.

If he were truly interested in solving America’s fiscal troubles, this would not be his position.

Most definitely not…

Obama carries on with his nonstop campaign-style appearances, claiming that higher tax rates will reduce the U.S. deficit and cut the national debt.

That is categorically complete, total, absolute, utter fantasy.

The amount collected by the IRS from Obama’s long lusted for tax hikes would fund U.S. federal spending for fewer than nine days.

For members of the self-imagined, self-appointed “progressive” intellectual elite: That is less than two weeks.

At current spending levels the U.S. federal government borrows forty six cents of every dollar it spends.  Despite the fact that 2013 has not yet begun, through the first two months of fiscal year 2013 the U.S. is already approximately $300 billion in debt.

The biggest drivers of U.S. deficit spending are Medicare, Social Security, “safety net” programs and interest on the debt.  The looming short and long term costs of Obamacare have yet to fully reveal themselves, but given the U.S. federal government’s track record one can safely predict that it will be far more than what taxpayers were told and will rape their wallets for billions every year.

In other words, under the White House’s current “progressive” policies, it is only going to get worse, not better.

The Oval Office occupier and his “progressive” Party Pravda press secretaries willfully ignore and refuse to mention that under the current tax rates, revenues are up by thirty billion dollars over last year.

Obama keeps claiming that raising tax rates on America’s highest earners, those who already pay forty percent of the revenue to the IRS, will be the silver bullet that solves America’s financial woes.  He continues blaming today’s deficits on his predecessor.

During his time in office, George W. Bush’s highest deficit was $438 billion.  Obama’s government has posted a $1 trillion plus deficit for four straight years.  2013 will make five.  America’s fiscal gloom and the looming “fiscal cliff” “crisis” are the result of “progressive” spending on wasteful big government socialist programs.

That is the reason.  Any other claim is pure unadulterated political snake oil.

America’s debt and deficit problems can only be resolved by cuts in spending.  When the United States receives another credit downgrade, it will be because of “progressives”, not Conservatives.  America needs to cut spending, not increase taxes.

Anyone who says differently should be in organic fertilizer distribution…or is that redistribution?

Two male runners are continuing to dominate high school girls’ track in Connecticut.

High school juniors Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood took first and second place in the state open indoor track championships on Feb. 16, the Associated Press noted in a report on Sunday. Both Miller and Yearwood are biological males who identify as transgender girls.

One of their competitors, high school junior Selina Soule, told the AP that it was unfair to force female runners to compete against male runners.

“We all know the outcome of the race before it even starts; it’s demoralizing,” said Soule. “I fully support and am happy for these athletes for being true to themselves. They should have the right to express themselves in school, but athletics have always had extra rules to keep the competition fair.”

Miller is currently the third-fastest runner in the country in the girls’ 55-meter dash. Yearwood is close behind, tied for seventh nationally.

Miller and Yearwood’s success is just the latest instance of male athletes, who identify as transgender, excelling in women’s sports.

Miller and Yearwood easily outpaced female runners in the state last year as well, when both were sophomores.

A sympathetic segment on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in June 2018 described the two runners as “dominating the competition” at the outdoor state championships earlier that month.

In that interview, Miller argued that female runners should work harder – rather than complaining about unfairness – when forced to compete against male athletes who identify as transgender.

Yearwood acknowledged being stronger than female runners to the AP, but compared it to advantages that other athletes might have from perfecting their form or doing extra training sessions.

“One high jumper could be taller and have longer legs than another, but the other could have perfect form, and then do better,” Yearwood told the AP. “One sprinter could have parents who spend so much money on personal training for their child, which in turn, would cause that child to run faster.”

The sequester’s $85 billion dollar slowing of federal spending isn’t what’s going to stall the economy this year – that will come from the President’s healthcare reform.

The White House and congressional Democrats have been hard at-work spinning the March jobs slowdown as an effect of sequestration even though the details of the report show no slowdown in government hiring. As sequestration would first impact government jobs, the correlation is non-existent.

The true culprit in the coming recession is not George Bush, Republican filibusters or slightly slower government spending – its Obamacare.

The President’s marquee healthcare reform law is taking its toll on business owners and families as it is directly causing premiums to skyrocket – some by more than double – and the toll on the economy is just beginning.

An exhaustive study by three congressional committees delivers startling news about the dire effects of Obamacare: President Barack Obama’s signature legislation could increase health insurance premiums by over 200 percent and render insurance coverage unaffordable for millions of Americans.

Insurance companies, states and the federal government have been frantically trying to implement the complicated and costly healthcare law.

Insurance companies have spent millions of dollars installing new software, designing integration with state/federal exchanges and changing their processes to deal with the concept of premium subsidies and premium cost-sharing – two major components of Obamacare. That money has to come from somewhere and its coming in the form of skyrocketing premiums.

States that chose to either implement their own exchanges or work in a state-federal partnership to form exchanges are seeing their costs balloon as well. State taxpayers will bear the brunt of those expenses.

The federal government, realizing that the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is too complex, is planning to hire Obamacare Insurance Navigators at a cost of $29-$49.00 per hour. When the government hires, the costs come from taxpayers. Increasing costs mean increasing taxes – just as the President has proposed in his budget plan.

The revenue needed to fund the expense is coming out of the pockets of consumers and going to a massively-expanding federal bureaucracy. More taxpayer money is going to fund Department of Health and Human Services regulation, State and Federal exchanges and now more federal employees – expensive ones.

Consumers are getting hit from another side as premiums affect their paychecks and their employers.

As employers are forced to pay increasing premiums, more revenue must be directed away from pay and hours. Many employers are converting full-time positions to part-time or eliminating them altogether to avoid the overwhelming costs associated with healthcare reform.

Skyrocketing premiums mean less money for workers. As employer-provided health insurance usually splits the cost between the employee and employer, the worker will see a shrinking paycheck as premiums increase.

According to a Milliman Consulting Group study on insurance rates, the pain will be substantial for the middle-class:

the poor are likely to pay significantly less than they do now while middle-class families dig deeper into pocketbooks.

President Obama told the American people that this law would bend the healthcare cost curve down. In just its first few years of implementation it has done the opposite.

Even Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted that “there may be a higher cost associated with getting into that market.” When asked about rapidly-increasing premiums.

Some proponents of the healthcare law have made the case that premiums are rising due to increasing healthcare costs. White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest countered that claim saying that “I would actually point to the results that we’re already seeing from the Affordable Care Act, which is a savings of $2.1 billion.”

So if healthcare costs are not causing insurance premiums to rise – there’s only one culprit left and the drain on the economy will likely push the country back into recession.