I'm a Democrat and most of my neighbors and all of my family are Democrats. We are Pro-Life and Pro - Real Trades Union. We are middle class - for now.
SEIU make ACORN look like an Altar and Rosary Society.
Any union that has anything to do with SEIU ends up screwed;blued; and tattooed. Ask Denny Gannon. SEIU uses Leftist Causes and Smears the name of Labor - Gay Marriage, Abortion, Reversing the flow of the Chicago River, and killing American Labor by murdering the middle class is what and all SEIU is all about.
A retired Police Officer on the north side presents some genuine perspective on the SEIU Ordered rally that too place in Springfield. SEIU Cheerleader Keith Keliher was only L-Sized Purple T-Shirt in the crowd. It is odd that most SEIU members seem to sport the XXX -Sized Purple T's. Teachers Unions and the Shriver Center for Poverty Law - whatever the Hell that means - AFSCME and all the other sheep were heared by Andy Stern's BS in SocialWork degreed organizers to Springfield where the shout of "RAISE MY TAXES" deflated any semblance of seriousness. The Trough is dry. Read the Middle Class Guy!
Government employment is not a right. It is public service. Serving the public is a privilege. There is no entitlement to a government job. There is no right to government employment. They serve.
If there is no money, their service is no longer needed. There is no money. The well has run dry. Illinois is now a deadbeat state.
The state is going bankrupt. This is due to egregious, wanton, and reckless spending. It is due to excessive padding of the payroll with union patronage jobs. Quinn's response has been to cut education, health and human services, and emergency services as a threat. Either he gets tax increases or the most vulnerable people in the state suffer.
. . .
SEIU bought Quinn for 1.7 million dollars. When they buy a politician, they expect him to stay bought. The same holds true for AFSCME and the other employee unions. Buying politicians is what they do. In return, they expect ever growing government payrolls to keep those union coffers filled. It is not about good governance. It is all about the money. Quinn knows this. It would not be surprising if he did not advocate this mass rally with his union owners.
There is only one way out of this financial mess. Cutting the budget by one third. Starting with the least essential services and moving upward. It is a good bet this can be done with no loss of essential services, including education. Departments with overlapping or similar responsibilities must be consolidated or merged. Some must be eliminated.
It takes political will and courage to cut the fat out of a budget. It takes a corrupt spineless bought and paid for coward to cave in to special interests and raise taxes.
Thanks Middle Class Guy! Too bad our corporate media only prints what SEIU allows.
2 comments:
You are welcome. Thanks for reading it.
I would not suggest a unilateral programme of government reduction like that right now. It seems pretty clear that currently our most eggregious problems are due to just such a lacksadasical attitude towards governance.
Power, they say, abhors a vacuum, and where no influence is exercised by a popularly elected government, power is waged by an unaccountable corporate tyranny. Goldman Sachs, Lehman brothers, Bernie Madoff, Magnetar--these types of scams become possible where there is no effective government policing them.
www.propublica.org/feature/all-the-magnetar-trade-how-one-hedge-fund-helped-keep-the-housing-bubble
And if you're out looking for a culprit, I'd say unions come pretty far down the list of suspects. Take a careful look at the biggest changes in the U.S. since our 1960's heyday, and it's the decline of the unions, not their growth that is most striking. Membership has been hacked away by nearly two-thirds since America's glory days. In 1965, when the U.S. was the undisputed leader of the Free World, membership was about 33% --slashed by nearly two-thirds to 12.3% by 2009. 1 And there has never been a union leader in the Forbes billionaires list. 2
But I agree that thee HAS been a radical distribution of wealth going on since the Good Old Days. It's just the silk-suit corporate guy, not the union line worker, who's gotten (by far) the best out of that deal.
In 1965 individuals comprising the top 5% of individual incomes had a top marginal rate of 70%, compared to 35% in 2009. Whereas the top 5% paid nearly 39% of all individual income tax in 1965, they jived and shimmied their way down to under 33% in 2007. 3
In 1965, even after Kennedy's historic tax cuts, corporate taxes represented 21.8% of all federal receipts, and individual taxes represented 41.2%. By 2007 corporate taxes had plummeted to 14.4% but individuals increased their contribution to 45.3%. 4
And think about how much more significant investment income is to the wealthiest 5% than to the rest of us. I'm sure I don't have to go one about the record earnings at J.P. Morgan or Goldman Sachs. If you read the news at all I'm sure you're bombarded with such things constantly. 5
I'm sure the Manhattan penthouse-types would just love to have an anaemic government incapable of stopping their rip-offs. But most people would not be happy with such a state of affiars.
1 www.publicpurpose.com/lm-unn2000.html table data from US Department of Labor Burea of Labor Statistics for 1965 data and www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.html for 2009 data.
2 www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_list_of_billionaires_(2009)
3 www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States for marginal tax rates,
www.irs.gov/taxstats/indtaxstats/article/0,,id=96981,00.html Table 1.2 for % of total individual income tax by AGI in 2007 www.libecon.org/enc1/supplysideeconomics.html for 1965
4 www.whitehouse.gov/omb/Budget/historicals , Office of Management and Budget Table 2.2
5 www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/22golman.html?partner=rss&emc=rss; www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/14/jpmorgan-profit-wall-street-bank
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