January 2012

Washingtonian mag: Stern is “union boss number one”

by Ivan Osorio on March 31, 2010

in Economy, Employment, Healthcare, Labor, Regulation

The current issue of Washingtonian magazine features a long, fairly in-depth interview with Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Andrew Stern, whom author Chris Lehmann describes as an unlikely “Washington insider,” who “is very much in the thick of power politics today.” Lehmann describes the controversies for which Stern has become notorious, including his access to the White House and conflicts with other labor leaders.

What makes this interview especially worth reading, however, is its account of Stern’s and SEIU’s role in the recent policy fight over health care, which the Obama administration — and its labor allies, including SEIU — won. As Lehmann notes, “Perhaps more than any other influence broker in Washington, he has thrown the fortunes of his constituency in with the effort to revamp the nation’s health-care system.” So committed was he to this goal, that he approached with in grand strategic fashion.

A 2007 press appearance touting health-care reform with then–Walmart CEO Lee Scott—complete with a phone-in appearance by Republican California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger—sent Stern detractors into fulminations that would bewilder the Glenn Becks of the world. “The single biggest obstacle to single-payer health care in this country is Andy Stern,” Michael Lighty, policy director for the California Nurses Association—a union locked into one of the state’s organizing disputes with SEIU—told the Nation’s Liza Featherstone at the time.

The Walmart event was one in a series of Stern-backed conciliatory moves toward management that have jangled the nerves of the rank and file. Stern’s union has endorsed contracts with provisions that many rival leaders view contemptuously as giveaways to employers—securing minimal cost-of-living wage hikes in exchange for management pledges of noninterference with organizing drives. And at times Stern has come out in favor of key business-backed proposals—such as tort reform and charter schools—whose benefits to most wage workers are far from clear.

Building off the arguments he advanced in his 2006 book on globalization and the workplace, A Country That Works, Stern contends that labor leaders can’t simply shun strategic alliances with management.

“There’s a certain level of a relationship we need with employers besides just demonizing them,” he says. He cites the health-care fight as a case in point: “All I would say is that if today the pharmaceutical industry, the hospital industry, Walmart, and every big business was against health care, you could all go home and call this thing dead. But the truth is that people built coalitions with AARP and the Business Roundtable and Walmart, then kept an issue alive because it wasn’t completely politicized right from the beginning.”

Stern’s allies in the business world appreciate his more ecumenical approach to accommodating their interests. John Castellani, who heads the Business Roundtable, joined forces with Stern’s union as well as AARP and the National Federation of Independent Businesses in 2007 to spearhead the Divided We Fail coalition to keep the health-care issue in play before Congress.

As we now know, Stern’s strategy paid off. And while he and others on the left who wanted to see a “public option” health insurer directly run by government didn’t get everything they wanted, they still got plenty in the way of government expansion. That should be seen as part of an even bigger strategy of creating more opportunities for SEIU (and organized labor in general) to recruit new members, because government is the one sector of the American economy where unions’ organizing prospects look brightest. And they could look even brighter, if public sector unions bosses succeed in their efforts to expand the definition of “public” to include any service provider (such as for child care and home elder care) who receives any government assistance.

Just as troubling to those who value economic freedom should be business leaders’ readiness to meet leftists like Stern halfway in their government-expanding efforts, in the mistaken belief that the likes of SEIU will leave them alone well into the future. They will just eat them last.

For more on SEIU, see here, here, and here.

For more on public sector unions, see here and here.

“We’re twisting arms. We’re threatening people.”

by Ivan Osorio on March 31, 2010

in Economy, Employment, Labor, Regulation

So said United Teachers of Los Angeles President A.J. Duffy at a rally, which reason.tv now makes available in a new video on public sector unions. As host Nick Gillespie notes, “as unemployment hovers around 10 percent and any sort of recovery seems to be forever and a day away…the one part of the economy that is going gangbusters during the Great Recession is government work.” Now that the number of union members working for government has surpassed the number of union members working for businesses, and compensation for unionized government workers is straining public budgets to a crisis point, this issue needs all the attention it can get.

For more on public sector unions, see here and here.

“How a pit bull is like a Prius,” my Philly Inquirer article today

by Michael Fumento on March 31, 2010

in Nanny State, Odds & Ends, Regulation

What could pit bulls possibly have in common with Toyotas? Pit bulls, after all, tend to be smaller and furrier. And whatever you do, never try to wash and wax a pit bull.

Still, there is a connection. Both have been at the center of “misinformation cascades,” in which false “facts” roll downhill until they become avalanches, sweeping away everything in their path.

During the 1970s and early ’80s, pit bulls maimed about 80 people a year and killed about seven. That compares to about 58 lightning deaths a year. Then, as now, serious dog attacks made only the local papers. But in 1986, the national networks aired spectacular footage of a pit bull attacking an animal-control officer. Suddenly, pit bulls had their incisors in the national consciousness.

And less than a year ago, Toyotas were Consumer Reports readers most highly rated cars with a terrific safety record. And now, seemingly, they’re going nuts. Suddenly accelerating down freeways, into buildings, into walls. As you’ll see in my Philadelphia Inquirer piece, actually pit bulls have a lot in common with Toyotas.

But with a pit bull, don’t kick the tires!

$800 Billion Stimulus Package Doled Out Based on Politics; Districts with High Unemployment Were Shafted

by Hans Bader on March 31, 2010

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Employment, International, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony, Stimulus to Nowhere, Trade, Zeitgeist

“How is stimulus money allocated?  Unemployment isn’t a factor, but politics is,” found George Mason University researcher Veronique de Rugy in a recent study.

Districts where people are struggling and unemployment is high are not receiving any more money than those in which unemployment is low, even though a stated purpose of the $800 billion stimulus package was to help the unemployed.  But politics mattered in doling out federal funds.  And “Democratic districts also received two-and-a-half times more stimulus dollars than Republican districts.”

Not that the stimulus was very effective even in districts where it was spent.  The number of jobs the government claims to have created is actually going down as the spending continues to rise.

The president wants a new $267 billion stimulus package, on top of the $800 billion one that passed earlier.  Obama claimed that the $800 billion stimulus package was needed to avert “irreversible decline.” But the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the stimulus package will actually cut the size of the economy in the long run.

Unemployment has skyrocketed past European levels, as big-spending countries have fared worse than thrifty ones.  As the Examiner notes, “If his stimulus program was approved, Obama promised, unemployment would not go above 8 percent . . . The reality is that it passed 10.3 percent.”

The stimulus package destroyed thousands of real world jobs in America’s export sector.  Meanwhile, the administration claimed credit for creating thousands of imaginary jobs in non-existent congressional districts.  The stimulus is full of wasteful spending.

In the 2008 campaign, Obama promised a “net spending cut,” but as soon as he was elected, he proposed massive spending increases.

Climategate Whitewash

by Iain Murray on March 31, 2010 · 11 comments

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

The UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has issued its report into the so-called Climategate scandal.  As might be expected, it’s pretty much a whitewash, except as detailed below.  Only one MP dissented from its conclusions.  There seem to me to be some serious errors and omissions in the reports, but I’m not the only one.  For instance, Fred Pearce of New Scientist and The Guardian has some pretty serious things to say in his story, Hacked climate email inquiry cleared Jones but serious questions remain:

in their rush to judgment before parliament is dissolved for the general election, Phil Willis and his team avoided examining more complex charges, including those raised by the Guardian in its investigations in February.

Even so, they sometimes get confused. The MPs accept Jones’s claim that CRU’s habit of keeping secret much of its data, methodology and computer codes was “standard practice” among climate scientists. Yet they also note that Nasa scientists doing similar work are much more open. Not so standard, then.

And whatever standard practice may be, surely as one of climate science’s senior figures, Jones should take some responsibility for its misdemeanours? Jones has worked for the CRU for more than 20 years and been its director for six. The MPs found there a “culture of withholding information” in which “information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure.” It found this “unacceptable”. Doesn’t its director take responsibility?

The MPs kept their criticism for the university. Its “failure to grasp fully the potential damage [from] non-disclosure of FOIA requests was regrettable”.

Also possibly illegal, it might have added.

While Pearce is good on this point – essentially that Phil Jones fostered a culture of anti-scientific secrecy and collusion as head of the CRU – he is less good on the meaning of the “trick” by which jones aspired to “hide the decline” in one particular temperature series.  Bishop Hill is right on the money here:

Mike’s Nature Trick (66) – The committee’s
conclusions are eyewatering:

66. Critics of CRU have suggested that Professor Jones’s use of the
words “hide the decline” is evidence that he was part of a conspiracy to
hide evidence that did not fit his view that recent global warming is
predominantly caused by human activity. That he has published
papers—including a paper in Nature—dealing with this aspect of the
science clearly refutes this allegation. In our view, it was shorthand
for the practice of discarding data known to be erroneous. We expect
that this is a matter the Scientific Appraisal Panel will address.

I’m struggling to say something polite about this.  By way of an
illustration, can you imagine the reaction if a scientist reported in
the safety literature that there was a critical flaw in the design of a
nuclear power station, but told policymakers that everything was fine?
Do the committee really think it’s fine to hide important information
from policymakers so long as you report it in the literature?
Astonishing.

Indeed.  Did anything good come out of the report?  Well, as Roger Pielke Jr points out, a broad reading of the report reveals an indictment of the state of climate science:

Reputation does not, however, rest solely on the quality of work as it
should. It also depends on perception. It is self-evident that the
disclosure of the CRU e-mails has damaged the reputation of UK climate
science and, as views on global warming have become polarised, any
deviation from the highest scientific standards will be pounced on. As
we explained in chapter 2, the practices and methods of climate science
are a key issue. If the practices of CRU are found to be in line with
the rest of climate science, the question would arise whether climate
science methods of operation need to change. In this event we would
recommend that the scientific community should consider changing those
practices to ensure greater transparency. . .

. . . A great
responsibility rests on the shoulders of climate science: to provide the
planet’s decision makers with the knowledge they need to secure our
future. The challenge that this poses is extensive and some of these
decisions risk our standard of living. When the prices to pay are so
large, the knowledge on which these kinds of decisions are taken had
better be right. The science must be irreproachable.

And, as Climategate and the multiple subsequent revelations about the shoddiness of the IPCC’s science have shown, the science is in no way irreproachable as it stands.  Yet in the end, Prof. Frank Furedi is right about what the Committee meant in this segment:

In other words, the CRU’s real failing was to dent the authority of the
climate-change morality tale, with its idea that, with the end of the
world fast approaching, there is an urgent need to monitor people’s
behaviour and lower their horizons. A cynic might conclude that when
moral entrepreneurs say that the ‘prices to pay are so large’, their
investigations into public controversies will inevitably have a
perfunctory character, since there is allegedly a higher, more pressing
truth to be defended.

Which is exactly what happened here.

Myron Ebell on Offshore Drilling

by Richard Morrison on March 31, 2010

in Video, Zeitgeist

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCWvZotUOHE 285 234]

Republicans Will Lose Many Seats in Congress Due to Right-Wing Paranoia About the Census

by Hans Bader on March 31, 2010

in Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Privacy, Zeitgeist

Republicans will lose many seats in Congress due to right-wing paranoia about the census and refusal to fill out Census forms, gloats the liberal web site Daily Kos. The number of congressional districts a state gets is based on how many of its citizens return completed Census forms.  Because voters in conservative states are completing and returning Census forms at lower rates than voters in liberal states, conservative states will lose many seats in the House of Representatives that they would otherwise gain due to increases in their population.

Republican-leaning “Red States” will also lose out on billions of dollars in federal funds, which are apportioned based largely on population.

Unlike many things the federal government does, the Census is expressly authorized by the explicit language of the Constitution.  (As a believer in free markets, limited government, and the Constitution, I have criticized some of the legislation backed by the Obama administration as being unconstitutional and beyond Congress’s enumerated powers.  But the Census and the questions it asks are perfectly constitutional, even though some of those questions may seem unnecessary.)

A few white Census respondents are stupidly listing their race as “human” or “some other race” rather than white.  Many commenters at the conservative website Free Republic say they will just refuse to report their race on their Census forms, viewing it as irrelevant.

This inaccurate reporting of racial information may unintentionally prolong racial set-aside programs that are obsolete and no longer necessary.  By making the white percentage of the population appear smaller than it in fact is, such responses can make it easier for the federal government to get away with racial quotas, which are based on so-called disparity studies, which measure the supposed gap between racial percentages in the population and racial percentages in awards of government contracts.  Under Supreme Court rulings like the 1987 Paradise decision, quotas are supposed to be used only as a “last resort” and for no longer than absolutely necessary.  But faulty Census data can give them a new lease on life, even when they serve no valid purpose, and enforce, rather than remedy, discrimination.

How to Fix Immigration’s Black Market

by Ryan Young on March 31, 2010

in Features, International, Legal, Personal Liberty, Regulation, Zeitgeist

Alex Nowrasteh and I have a piece in today’s Detroit News arguing that liberalization, not regulation, is the way to shrink immigration’s massive black market. Our main points:

-New rules that came into effect this month, such as raising the minimum wage for H-2A visa holders (that’s the visa for low-skilled agricultural workers) makes cheaper undocumented workers look more attractive for employers. They actually harm legal workers.

-Other new regulations, including background checks, workplace inspections, and mountains of paperwork, cost thousands of dollars per employee. These regulations also make black market workers look more attractive.

-The way to reduce illegal immigration is liberalization. For agricultural workers, that means making their H-2A visas inexpensive, easy to obtain, and keeping the bureaucracy to a minimum.

-When legal channels cost too much in time and money, people will turn to illegal channels every time. That’s how the world works. Getting rid of immigration’s black market begins with admitting that fact.

Barack Obama and Liberal “Good” vs. Freedom

by Greg Conko on March 31, 2010 · 1 comment

in Culture, Health and Illness, Healthcare, Insurance, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation, Zeitgeist

There’s a great op-ed by Shelby Steele in today’s Wall Street Journal, called “Barack the Good”.  The primary theme of the piece is that “The old fashioned, big government liberalism that Mr. Obama uses to make himself history-making also alienates him in the center-right America of today.  It makes him the most divisive president in memory—a president who elicits narcissistic identification on the one hand and an enraged tea party movement on the other.”

But I find the more insightful passage to be this one:

For [President Obama] the great appeal of massive health-care reform—when jobs are a far more pressing problem—may have been its history-making potential.  Here was a chance for Mr. Obama not just to be a part of history but to make history.  …  He is likely to be the most liberal president in American history. And, oddly, he may be a more effective liberal precisely because his liberalism is something he uses more than he believes in. As the far left constantly reminds us, he is not really a true believer. Rather liberalism is his ticket to grandiosity and to historical significance.

Of the two great societal goals—freedom and “the good”—freedom requires a conservatism, a discipline of principles over the good, limited government, and so on. No way to grandiosity here. But today’s liberalism is focused on “the good” more than on freedom. And ideas of “the good” are often a license to transgress democratic principles in order to reach social justice or to achieve more equality or to lessen suffering. The great political advantage of modern liberalism is its offer of license on the one hand and moral innocence—if not superiority—on the other. Liberalism lets you force people to buy health insurance and feel morally superior as you do it. Power and innocence at the same time.

“Are some reporters lying in their Toyota coverage?” my Canadian Free Press article

by Michael Fumento on March 30, 2010

in Nanny State, Regulation

I’ve shown clearly that reporters are acting with reckless disregard for the truth in the Toyota sudden acceleration feeding frenzy since my Los Angeles Times article “Toyota Hysteria” on March 9. And no article showed that more than my Forbes.com expose, “The Toyota Hybrid Horror Hoax,” of March 12.

But are some reporters outright lying? One presumes so out of so large a number; but the charge is generally hard to prove because it requires showing a state of mind. You have to catch the reporter making clearly contradictory statements or show he clearly knew a set of facts and presented them otherwise – or failed to present them otherwise.

That the person “Should have known better” isn’t enough. With that, I present my letters exchange with the San Jose Mercury News and specifically its automobile writer, Gary Richards in this Canadian Free Press article. You can draw your own conclusions.

The inset image shows the 2008 Prius shift knob of which Richards claims,  “Some [of his emailers] say they are looking at the dash and there it appears you should shift the lever to go into neutral UP and not left (which is the correct way).” Really?

But the real problem is that Prius driver James Sikes stated repeatedly and explicitly that he never even tried to shift at all. Which makes everything Richards say about the alleged difficulty of shifting the Prius gears something of a red herring, doesn’t it?

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