by Dick Morris
* * *
U.S. COAL EXPORTS TO CHINA
Year: 2009
Tons of Coal Exported to China: 2,714 tons
Year: 2010 (first six months)
Tons of Coal Exported to China: 2,900,000 tons
Source: International Herald Tribune 129
* * *
No, this is not a typo. The exports of U.S. coal to China have actually increased one thousandfold between all of 2009 and the first six months of 2010!
No student of global warming could maintain that there is any difference to the globe’s climate if the coal is burned here or in China. It’s the same planet and the same atmosphere. So Obama’s EPA regulations are having a wonderful effect—sending our coal to China to burn!!!
Some states are suing the EPA to block the new regulations. Specifically, Texas, the most heavily affected state, has advised the agency that it will not cooperate or comply with the new regulations until a court orders it to do so.
EPA assistant administrator Gina McCarthy “rejected claims that the first-ever nationwide U.S. limits on carbon pollution will hurt business. ‘The Clean Air Act for 40 years has found a way to issue permits in a way that allows the economy to grow,’ she said. ‘We aren’t going to stop that with the greenhouse-gas’ best-available process.’”130
But forty years ago (when the Clean Air Act was passed), the U.S. did not have to compete in a global economy like we do today. It did not matter that much if China or India limited pollution or let their people breathe poison and die young. Whereas, with today’s porous international borders and prolific foreign trade, it would be economic suicide to force American business to meet standards their competitors don’t.
And remember that the Clean Air Act was passed amid a clear national consensus that it was more important to preserve health than to allow polluting industries to operate in populated communities. But there is no such unanimity on the need to control carbon dioxide emissions, which have no health consequence other than their supposed contribution to global climate change.
Finally, Ms. McCarthy ignores the fact that the Clean Air Act was phased in over decades. First it applied to particulates, sulfur, and lead. Then it was expanded to nitrous oxides. Each new regulation affected specific industries, but none had the potential to cripple our whole economy. But curtailing carbon dioxide emissions can do just that. It is a federal regulation that impacts all industries, all manufacturers, all producers, all energy generators. All at once. To impose regulations over this ubiquitous gas will cause massive disruption.
Patriots must work to make sure that the Republican House passes a law to stop all regulation of greenhouse gases, using existing legal authority. If the EPA wants to expand its regulatory umbrella to include carbon dioxide, let them convince the people’s elected representatives in Congress.
It is very possible that we will be able to pass such legislation in the Senate, and there is an outside chance that we will win by such a margin as to be able to override a presidential veto. Some liberal Democratic senators from coal-producing states—such as Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)—have already backed such legislation.
In an e-mail, the senator said, “Such an unstable regulatory environment prevents companies from making long range investment decisions.”131
If we cannot pass a delay or a ban on EPA regulation as a regular bill, the issue of carbon dioxide regulation will have to be wrapped up in the debt limit expansion debate or the battle over the FY2012 budget. In either case, it will become a key point of contention in the deadlock between the White House and the House of Representatives.
Welcome to the budget battle! If the same fight that pits big taxes versus big spending cuts also pits ObamaCare versus defunding and EPA regulation versus lower electric bills and manufacturing jobs, so much the better! It makes the fight a lot easier to win.
KEEPING THE SECRET BALLOT IN UNION ELECTIONS
The key goal of big labor—and a major fear of most American private sector businesses—is the end of the secret ballot in union elections. It is the secret ballot that stops union thugs from intimidating their fellow workers into supporting unions they would otherwise oppose. Unions are determined to end secret balloting so they can coerce workers into approving unions.
Card check legislation, which would eliminate the secret ballot, was the key legislative priority of the AFL-CIO when the Democrats took sixty seats in the Senate and full control of the House. President Obama pushed for the new law. But it still didn’t pass.
No worries! The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), like the EPA, is planning to do by fiat what the Congress has rejected doing democratically.
To get a union now, a majority of workers must check off on cards indicating that they want one at their workplace. When 50% plus one have checked the cards, the NLRB orders an election—with a secret ballot—to determine if the workers really want the union. In many cases, a majority of workers sign and check cards saying they want a union, only to have a majority of the same workforce vote it down when the ballot is private, proving that the secret ballot is the only way to stop the coercion of workers to back unionization.
That’s why Congress refused to pass card check legislation. After it passed the House, it died in the Senate.
But that hasn’t deterred the Obama administration. That which it has sought and failed to get passed in Congress, it is now seeking to do by administrative rule.
To pave the way for this end run around Congress, Obama appointed Craig Becker, the top lawyer for the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) as head of the NLRB. It was like inviting the fox to watch the chicken coop. SEIU is the most radical of unions and has been instrumental in Obama’s political machine.
Given his record, the Senate refused to confirm Becker, even with an overwhelming Democratic majority, so Obama gave him a recess appointment in March 2010 that did not require Senate approval.
Then Becker, who was appointed without Congressional approval, began to attempt to eliminate the secret ballot requirement, again bypassing Congress.
The requirement of a secret ballot stems from the NLRB decision in the 2007 Dana Corp. case (351 NLRB No. 28), which, as the Wall Street Journal reported, ruled that “card check was an inferior substitute to secret ballots.” The NLRB held “that when a company recognized a union via card check, workers had the right to force an immediate secret vote on whether they really wanted to join that union.”132
Now Craig Becker is trying to reverse the Dana decision. At the end of August 2010, the NLRB, by a 3–2 party-line vote, decided to “revisit” Dana. It requested briefs from all parties by November 1, 2010, and will, likely, shortly reverse it. If so, it will invite massive coercive unionization to proceed.
In our minds, for Becker there is a clear appearance of a conflict of interest on the question. The Journal points out that “the labor lawyer has already refused to recuse himself from cases involving the SEIU, his former employer.” The newspaper adds that “now it turns out that he had filed a brief for the AFL-CIO in the original Dana case arguing that there is no essential difference between card check and secret ballots.”133
The voters in Arizona, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah quite clearly saw a big difference between card checks and secret ballots. In the 2010 election, all four approved ballot measures to require secret ballots in union elections. In Arizona and Utah, the measures passed with 60% of the vote. In South Dakota, it got 79%, and in South Carolina, 86%.134 Citizens’ groups in four other states—California, Florida, Mississippi, and Florida—are planning to seek similar votes in the 2012 elections.
These states are, of course, trying to blunt the possible impact within their borders of an NLRB decision reversing the Dana ruling. At stake is more than justice for their workers. Their ability to create jobs is on the line.
Why do these states worry that private sector unionization will cost jobs? They need look no further than the auto industry. For decades, the United
Auto Workers (UAW) played industrial hardball, routinely striking unless their demands were met. By the time the U.S. auto industry collapsed under the strain, wages and benefits had risen to $70 per hour. Health benefits for retirees and workers added $1,200 to the cost of each vehicle General Motors made in 2007. The UAW ended up destroying itself. Membership crashed as employment cratered. After peaking in 1979 at 1.5 million members, the union’s ranks dropped to 355,000 in 2009.135
The impact of unionization on job loss is most evident in the manufacturing sector. While unionized manufacturing jobs decreased by 75% between 1977 and 2008, nonunion manufacturing jobs actually rose by 6% over the same time period. While unions tend to raise wages—most studies show they are about 15% higher in unionized companies—they definitely cost jobs, too.136
Good deal: higher wages but no job!
Part of the reason unions so adversely affect job retention and creation is that they slow investment. The Heritage Foundation reports that “one study found that unions directly reduce capital investment by 6% and indirectly reduce capital investment through lower profits by another 7%. The same study also found that unions reduce R&D activity by 15 to 20%.”137
In the construction industry as well, unionization has cost jobs. Since the late 1970s, unionized construction jobs fell by 17%, while nonunion employment in the industry rose by 159%. The union percentage in the construction industry fell from 38% to 16% of all building jobs since 1977.138
A consulting firm modeled what would happen if union membership expanded as a result of the repeal of the secret ballot. It found that for each 1% increase in the proportion of the labor force in unions, there would be a 1.5 million increase in unemployment!139
Whether by legislative action or administrative fiat, the repeal of the secret ballot in union elections represents a threat to the norms of democracy, the rights of workers, and our economy’s ability to create jobs. But President Obama is deeply beholden to labor unions for their political support, manpower, and funding. His failure to pass card check when Democrats held overwhelming power sharply disappointed his union allies. Now, through the autocratic proceedings of the NLRB, he hopes to make things right with his labor friends.
The Republican House must push for legislation barring the NLRB from abolishing the secret ballot in union elections. Such legislation would have a good chance of passing even in the Democratic Senate. Becker’s confirmation as NLRB director got only 52 votes in the Senate (falling short of the 60 needed for cloture), and some of those voting yes have been replaced by Republicans who would vote against abolishing secret ballots.
Obama would veto the bill, of course, and there is no reasonable chance that we could override his veto.
So card check must also go into the debt ceiling and budget battles of 2011. Patriots must demand that the appropriations bill for the NLRB ban the use of any funds to reverse the Dana decision and to ratify any union election in which a secret ballot was not offered to the workers.
Adding this provision—along with that defunding ObamaCare and blocking the EPA from regulating carbon dioxide—will make the battle over the budget even more important for the preservation of our liberty.
So all three of the trifecta of highly controversial Obama policy proposals—health care, cap and trade, and card check—will end up in the debt limit and budget debates. Republican efforts to rein them in will stand or fall based on the game of chicken that will ensue as the GOP refuses to raise the debt limit or to pass a federal budget without these key defunding provisions.
That’s great! The more important legislation is crammed into this debate, the better able we will be to mobilize patriots to battle against Obama’s budget and program.
KILLING EARMARKS
The House and Senate Republicans have voted to eschew earmarking in this Congress. A few Republicans, like Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), have said they will continue earmarking anyway, but most senators and congressmen have foresworn the practice.
In the House, of course, with a majority, the Republicans will be able to stop any earmarks from reaching the budget. But in the Senate, they will be outvoted by the Democrats, and the odd stray Republican, and earmarks will find their way into the budget.
It is very important that the Republican House demand that the budget be totally free of earmarks and that it defeat all the Senate earmarks, whether Democrat or Republican. By holding the line, the Republican House can end this terrible practice.
Earmarks cost us $15.9 billion in 2010.140 If we freeze discretionary nondefense spending at 2008 levels, as noted, we will save $126 billion. Stopping earmarks will put us one-eighth of the way toward our goal.
Earmarks are bad because they invite corruption. The practice of trading earmarks for campaign donations has become so widespread that it is corrupting our entire political process.
Incumbent senators and congressmen are raising large portions of their campaign war chests from lobbyists who give money in return for seeing their clients’ earmarks inserted into the budget. See Part IV of this book, where we discuss the individual Democratic senators who are up for reelection in 2012, to see how pervasive the practice has become.
We must stop it here and now!
PROTECTING FREE SPEECH
It is customary for a party that has lost an election decisively to scapegoat its leaders and campaign strategists. But the Democrats, in the aftermath of their drubbing in 2010, chose to attack the free speech rights of their opponents.
As soon as the results came in, one of Obama’s appointees to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Michael J. Copps, proposed that a “public value test” should replace the current licensing system for television and radio stations.141
Speaking at the Columbia School of Journalism thirty days after the election of 2010, he said that he wanted to require “a renewed commitment to serious news and journalism.”142 His kind of news.
He wraps his desire to squelch conservative radio in the language of “localism.” The goal, he says “is more localism in our program diet, more local news and information, and a lot less streamed-in homogenization and monotonous nationalized music at the expense of local and regional talent.” The New York Times reports that he “suggested that 25% of prime-time programming should be locally or independently produced.”143
Of course, by “local” he means not national. Not Rush Limbaugh. Not Sean Hannity. Not Neal Boortz. Not Michael Savage. Not Dennis Prager. Not Mike Gallaher. Not Laura Ingraham. Not Mancow. And certainly not Glenn Beck.
Using localism, he wants to drive stations off the air if they do not comply. The Times reported that “Mr. Copps said the public value test should occur every four years. Currently, stations have to renew their licenses every eight years. If a station were to fail the public value test and did not improve a year later, he added, the agency should ‘give the license to someone who will use it to serve the public interest.’”144
Every four years. Hmm. What happens every four years in the United States? Could there be a connection here?
Not content with controlling content, he also wants to restrict political advertising and called on the FCC to “determine the extent of its current authority” to compel stations to disclose the interest groups behind political ads.145
Copps masks his desire to interfere with free speech by complaining, “It’s a pretty serious situation that we’re in. We are not producing the body of news and information that democracy needs to conduct its civic dialogue, we’re not producing as much news as we did five, ten, fifteen years ago and we have to reverse that trend or I think we are going to be pretty close to denying our citizens the essential news and information that they need to have in order to make intelligent decisions about the full direction of their country.”146
Is he kidding? We now have three full-time, 24-hours-a-day cable news networks and hundreds of talk radio shows where once we had only sitcoms and top forty music! Our air waves are choked with news and informat
ion. And what about the Internet? Can Copps seriously argue that we have less access to news today when we have every piece of national or local news available with the click of a mouse?
Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX) immediately took Copps to task. “I hope,” he wrote in a letter to the FCC commissioner, “that you do not mean to suggest that it is the job of the federal government, through the Federal Communications Commission, to determine the content that is available for Americans to consume.147
“Although your concern for providing American citizens information they need to ‘make intelligent decisions about the full direction of their country’ may stem from the very best of intentions, increasing the federal government’s role in the composition of the information Americans have at their disposal—in an information marketplace that is bigger and more easily accessible than ever before—is unwise policy and raises serious questions of constitutionality,” Barton wrote.148
Of course, that’s just what Copps and the liberals who now rule the FCC have in mind. In our book Fleeced (written in 2008), we warned that “liberals are planning a far more insidious and destructive attack on conservative talk radio—one that would go much further than the Fairness Doctrine, not just regulating the content of talk radio programming but also forcing basic changes in [station] management and ownership.”149
Arguing that we need to increase local control, community input, and minority ownership, the FCC is planning to try to eliminate talk radio as we know it.
They also want to use the argument that we need “net neutrality” to pave the way for federal regulation of the Internet.
The Washington Times explains that the controversy stems from the complaints of consumer groups and Internet-based businesses like Netflix that the “big telecommunications firms have slowed or blocked access for heavy users from competitive sites to give their own movie and entertainment sites a competitive advantage.”150