What the (Bleep) Just Happened?

by Monica Crowley

  So while the Republican governor was trying to fix the state’s fiscal mess, the state’s Democrats were running around like Charlie Sheen, complete with the hookers, being AWOL from their jobs and the manic profanity. The only thing missing for the Wisconsin Democrats? The briefcase full of blow.

  Ultimately, the Democratic fugitives returned, the bill passed, and the government unions went on another rampage. They tried to overturn the law through the courts, but the state supreme court upheld it. They then tried to defeat a conservative state supreme court judge, but he survived the challenge. Then they launched recall elections against six GOP state senators, four of whom survived to retain the GOP majority. Union spending on the legislative recalls rang in at about $28 million, not exactly a good return on investment. Not ones to accept defeat gracefully (or at all), the government unions also moved to recall Walker himself. Organizing for America, Obama’s state-level campaign operation, helped to coordinate the senate and Walker recall efforts by connecting the unions, local Democrats, and recall volunteers. This is how the leftists roll: what they cannot win at the ballot box they’ll try to score through liberal judges and short-circuiting recalls.

  But any Republican too noodle-kneed to take on the government unions should pay close attention to what happened in the Badger State: when the Wisconsin Republicans held the line on economic and government union reform, Wisconsin voters then held the line for them. In Ohio, however, where Governor John Kasich went even further and moved to eliminate collective bargaining privileges for most government-sector employees, including police and firefighters, the unions were ready. They poured big money into a repeal effort, which succeeded. But the lesson of both Wisconsin and Ohio ought to be that national and state Republicans must be fearless like Governor Walker—and New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, and others who have taken on, to varying extents, the powerful government unions in their states. In a necessary effort to deal with its underfunded or flat-out broke pension funds, Rhode Island’s Democratic state legislature passed and Independent governor Lincoln Chafee signed a sweeping pension overhaul. Of course, the government unions called it a “betrayal” and threatened to sue, as they did when Democratic New York governor Andrew Cuomo moved to renegotiate some state benefits and pensions.

  Many cities are also drowning in debt thanks to government unions. Former Obama chief of staff and current Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel took on the powerful Chicago teachers’ unions and laid off hundreds of city workers. The unions went bananas, but you can’t get blood from a stone—and even the most hardened Chicago union thug is afraid of Rahm, especially when he’s standing right in front of you, naked in the shower, angrily poking you (with God knows what) in the chest. But what the Republican and Democratic efforts to rein in the government-sector unions in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, Rhode Island, and Chicago have shown is that where there is a political will, there is a way.

  Most tellingly, when reform is carried out, it’s effective. Despite the hysterical union and Democratic warnings of an imminent apocalypse, disaster has not befallen Wisconsin. To the contrary, Walker’s reforms have truly begun to bring order to the state’s finances. Local school districts obtained the ability to renegotiate union contracts, saving money and teachers’ jobs. In many communities across the state, local officials were able to ditch the union-affiliated health insurance plans and go with less expensive competitors, in most cases saving hundreds of thousands (even millions) of dollars that could then be put back into the schools (and, as the leftists always say, it is all about the “children,” isn’t it?). As of January 2012, Walker’s reforms had already saved Wisconsin’s taxpayers $476 million.

  Furthermore, after Walker halted the state-run dues collection, the unions’ coffers began to dwindle, along with their power and monopoly. The state’s budget is being brought into line, and job creation is occurring. And at long last, the Wisconsin taxpayers are being protected. Evidently, once the burly, knuckle-dragging shakedown enforcer stops showing up to rob you, most Americans don’t feel they need to continue giving him money out of charity.

  Because of Walker’s reforms, state and local governments are forced, like private businesses, to operate efficiently. It’s a concept so unheard of in the annals of government that time almost stopped and Lady Gaga almost put on sweatpants.

  During the Wisconsin tumult, Obama complained of Walker’s “assault” on the unions while his allied thugs pushed the protests to the edge of violence.

  Walker wasn’t having it. He responded, “I’m sure the President knows that most federal employees do not have collective bargaining for wages and benefits, while our plan allows it for base pay. And I’m sure the President knows that the average federal worker pays twice as much for health insurance as what we are asking for in Wisconsin.... Furthermore, I’m sure the President knows that we have repeatedly praised the more than 300,000 government workers who come to work every day in Wisconsin. I’m sure that President Obama simply misunderstands the issues in Wisconsin, and isn’t acting like the union bosses in saying one thing and doing another.”

  And … checkmate.

  Obama’s constant moves to support the unions at any cost, as well as to support hard leftists like those in Occupy Wall Street, may be smart politically. After all, unions of all stripes poured $500 million into Obama’s and other Democrats’ 2008 campaigns, and those Democrats in turn kept the unsustainable deals to the unions flowing. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), the main non-teacher government employee union in the nation, was the biggest spender in the 2010 election. Its political director gave the group a shout-out, “We’re the big dog.” (The original Big Dog, Bill Clinton, would like a word....)

  At the state level, the National Institute on Money in State Politics reported that the government-sector unions are the number one spenders in state politics. In Wisconsin, the teachers’ unions are in first and third place, with trial lawyers fourth. The Democrats themselves are in second place.

  Union leaders are still masters of the ground game. Obama needs their dirty resources and underhanded tactics to advance his kook agenda. That’s why in May 2008, the then candidate Obama told the Teamsters that if elected president, he’d end the strict federal over-sight imposed to investigate and expose corruption in the union. Citing the “drastic decline” in organized crime’s influence, Obama indicated that he believed the federal role in rooting out Teamsters corruption had come to an end. He then scored the Teamsters’ endorsement. And from that point on, Jimmy Hoffa and his Teamsters have had Obama’s back. Meanwhile, the campaign donations rolled in like the opening scene of Goodfellas.

  But while getting deeper into bed with the unions may be smart for Obama in terms of ideology and tactics, it is devastating for him in terms of his brand. In 2008 he positioned himself as the man of the future, and he made the Democrats the party of the future. Now, with governors such as Walker, Christie, Daniels, Kasich, and Cuomo taking on the government unions and Washington reformers like House Budget chairman Paul Ryan proposing bold new initiatives to save America from insolvency, Obama’s super-glued connection to the unions makes him look like yesterday’s newspaper.

  At the end of World War II, union membership in the private sector was 34 percent. Today, it’s 7 percent. But 71 percent of government workers are now unionized. Interestingly, only 10 percent of union-represented workers ever voted for unionization. At the same time, public support for unions has fallen off a cliff. In 2009, Gallup released its Work and Education Survey, which found that for the first time since the Great Depression, a majority of Americans believe that unions hurt the economy. Gallup also reported that just 48 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, even though this poll was taken during the height of the recession when union support should have been at its strongest. Furthermore, Gallup showed that 62 percent of those polled thought that unions hurt workers who aren’t unionized. That ref
lects the growing public sentiment that government union workers live in a pampered world increasingly subsidized by taxpayers. Furthermore, numerous studies have substantiated the commonsense conclusion that unions kill jobs. If a union drives a company out of business, the jobs are gone. Obama’s own former chief economic adviser, Larry Summers, wrote, “Another cause of long-term unemployment is unionization. High union wages that exceed the competitive market rate are likely to cause job losses in the unionized sector of the economy.”

  In late 2002, in a study published by the National Legal and Policy Center and the John M. Olin Institute for Employment Practice and Policy, economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway of Ohio University calculated that labor unions have cost the American economy a whopping $50 trillion over the past fifty years alone. The study did find that unionized labor earned wages 15 percent higher than those of nonunion workers, but it also found that wages in general suffered dramatically as a result of an economy that is 30 to 40 percent smaller than it would have been in the absence of labor unionism.

  Despite the evidence of the enormous cost burdens the government unions place on the private sector as well as on the taxpayer, Obama and the leftists continue to support them because they all seek the same redistributive goals. Obama has championed the “stimulus,” which was a massive federal bailout of government union payrolls, and card check (the hilariously named Employee Free Choice Act, which killed the worker’s ability to freely choose to keep his ballot secret and which would’ve made unionization much easier). He also supported measures to stop union disclosure of how workers’ dues are spent, and mandates that private-sector employers must post notices advising employees of their right to unionize. He backed down from an early commitment to a union-driven “buy American” provision in the “stimulus” only after the European Union and Canada threatened to retaliate and set off a trade war. He agreed to free trade agreements with Colombia, South Korea, and Panama, which had languished in the Senate, only after he secured offsets for the unions. Whenever Obama deals with labor issues, it’s always government unions first, the rest of the American people.... wait, who are they again?

  “Hope and change” have left the station without Barack Obama, but on the bright side, at least he can seek comfort in the burly arms of Richard Trumka. And he has—repeatedly. The head of the AFL-CIO, Trumka smugly bragged in February 2011 that he talked to the White House “every day” and suggested that he was actually there “two to three” times per week. Before he stepped down as the president of the Service Employees International Union in mid-2010, Andy Stern had been the most frequent visitor to the White House. Without a hint of irony, Obama had appointed him to sit on his bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, also known as the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission. Stern was appointed not to find spending to cut and entitlements to reform but to block any such moves in order to protect the unions. This is the same Andy Stern who wrote an op-ed on December 1, 2011, in the Wall Street Journal urging us to become more like the “superior” communist China and to “rethink” our “demonization of government” and “worship of the free market.”

  Stern’s union, SEIU, also produced a “contract campaign manual” that suggests a variety of delightful tactics to be used against employers who resist unionization efforts, including how to intimidate a business financially and the art of political pressure to drive up the costs to the business. More important, the SEIU manual encourages workers to “disobey laws which are used to enforce injustice against working people.” It points out helpfully, “Certain acts which might technically be illegal might be seen by the public, news media, customers, or other potential worker allies as justifiable and not something the employer should be challenging.” In other words, screw the law. Perception is everything. Break the law if you have to and sell it as striking out at the injustice of “the man.”

  This is how the public unions have always rolled: strong-arm tactics and brute force through card check, angry mobs storming homes of business leaders, organized strikes, and leftist protests such as in Wisconsin and Occupy Wall Street. Andy Stern has said, “We watched how they voted and we know where they live.”

  The list of violent and inflammatory rhetoric from the hirsute Richard Trumka is long. Some of his greatest goon hits: In September 2010, Trumka praised Nancy Pelosi for taking ObamaCare and “driving it down the Republicans’ throats and out their backsides.” He also said, “We prefer the power of persuasion but will settle for the persuasion of power.”

  Right before the Occupy Wall Street protests got under way, Trumka announced that he was heading up a get-out-the-vote movement of leftists to “energize an army of tens of thousands who will return to their neighborhoods, churches, schools and voting booths to prevent a Republican takeover of Congress in November and begin building a new permanent coalition to fight for a progressive agenda.” (Emphasis added.)

  This new Trumka project was publicized in the Marxist People’s World, an enchanting revolutionary communist publication. Note the ultimate objective of “building a new permanent coalition.” This is the endgame of their ginned-up chaos.

  The fire of the Left always needs more fuel. Shortly before Occupy Wall Street hit the streets in September 2011, SEIU labor activist Stephen Lerner made it clear that the unions were going to help create and drive the protests. Speaking at the kook extravaganza, the Take Back the American Dream conference (whose star speaker was Obama’s favorite commie, Tony “Van” Jones), Lerner warned that the SEIU was getting ready to “terrify” Washington and other power centers in America by mobilizing mass demonstrations, strikes, and acts of civil disobedience to “create a crisis.” And so they did.

  Without union muscle, the redistributionists’ agenda would simply plod along. But with that muscle constantly provoking upheaval, the redistributionists have the way paved for them. One set of kooks serve as bodyguards for the others, all of them busily “fundamentally transforming” America to resemble a cross between Reds and On the Waterfront.

  The country is going to Hades in a handbasket, and while many Democrats have been fleeing the scene of the accident, Obama and his minions are encouraging and embracing the chaos of high unemployment, anemic economic growth, record home foreclosures, union-led upheaval, multiple years of record-breaking spending and $1 trillion-plus deficits, and $5 trillion added to the national debt in just three years.

  Size matters. And most of the American people are now convinced that the United States government is not a porn actor and that smaller is, in fact, better.

  To Team Obama, however, that opinion is like the fly he killed single-handedly during an interview in the Oval Office: a minor annoyance with which he must dispense. Obama is a true believer who sacrifices as little as possible ideologically. But it’s more than insects he wants to squash. He wants to pulverize our liberty. And given the robotic precision with which Obama was able to squeeze the life out of that defenseless housefly, we should all be on guard and aware of his diabolical intentions to terminate all that he’s programmed to despise. Economic chaos is the fertile breeding ground on which he seeds his radical policies.

  Obama knows he needs to win in 2012 to fully effectuate his most critical plans. This is why much of the destructiveness of his policies, such as the higher taxes and costs of ObamaCare and the hike in the top marginal federal income tax rate, have been designed to hit in 2013 so as not to negatively affect his reelection chances. Businesses are holding off on hiring and expanding until they know if many of these policies will stand. All sides are waiting for the outcome of 2012 to know if recovery can begin.

  While normal Americans view his economic record as an abysmal failure, Obama and the kooks see it as a wild success. In a few short years, Obama has deeply embedded radical redistributionism in a nation built on individual and economic liberty. He also made certain that the tentacles of the redistributionism would be difficult, if not impossible, to unwrap. Obama and the kooks hav
e given us their version of a “more perfect union.” The country has been turned upside down, not because they don’t know what they’re doing, but because they do.

  PART IV

  DR. STRANGELEADER

  Or: How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love American Decline

  GENERAL “BUCK” TURGIDSON: Perhaps it might be better, Mr. President, if you were more concerned with the American people than with your image in the history books.

  —From Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

  Our Enemies Are People Too

  * * *

  September 19, 2001, dawned cloudy and cool in New York. Eight days after the most lethal Islamic terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil, the city of New York remained in a stunned near-silence. People passed on the street, nodding quietly to one another and blinking back tears for loved ones lost and the pain of the survivors. Ground zero—where the tall, proud towers of the World Trade Center stood just days before, full of life, ambition, friendship, and love—smoldered with the burning, twisted wreckage of the attack. Emergency personnel made their way through the smoking steel, hoping they could rescue someone—anyone—still alive. Family members and friends posted photos of their missing loved ones. The distinct smell of deadly destruction wafted over the city. A dark cloud of grief hung over New York, as well as the two other locations where the terrorists had struck, Washington, DC, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The country was paralyzed by the surreal terror of the surprise attack, the nature of its execution, and the growing awareness that our national reality was now far more dangerous and uncertain. Fear, anger, dread, and mourning gripped the nation, but so did a sense of pride in the heroism shown by so many and a deep-seated faith that America would smash the enemy and emerge stronger.