CEI Weekly is a compilation of articles and blog posts from CEI’s fellows and associates sent out via e-mail every Friday. Also included in the weekly newsletter is a brief description of CEI’s weekly podcast and a feature on a major CEI breakthrough made during the week. To sign up for CEI Weekly, go to http://cei.org/newsletters.
CEI Weekly
July 22, 2011
>>Featured Story
The Service Employees International Union has an organizing tactics manual for members, and the manual instructs members to dig up dirt on employers, harass employers’ families, and break the law when necessary. CEI Labor Policy Counsel Vincent Vernuccio was on Fox Business and Fox News this week to expose the SEIU manual for what it is—a playbook on intimidation. Vernuccio also penned an op-ed in The Washington Times and was featured in a Washington Examiner editorial on the SEIU’s controversial tactics.
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Audaciously, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on July 28 proclaimed the “Cut, Cap, & Balance” legislation, which requires the federal government to live within its means, not only “a bad piece of legislation,” but “perhaps some of the worst legislation in the history of this country.”
Whoa, hold on there, Senator! The worst legislation in the history of the country? Surely there are plenty other bills that top the historical trash heap of terrible and downright evil bills! National Review editor Jonah Goldberg aptly pointed to the Fugitive Slave Act and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. Think of all the many other pieces of bad legislation we have to scorn and/or ridicule. In fact, let us know — what is your nomination for the worst piece of federal legislation ever?
It’s time to give Harry Reid an important history lesson. Post your submissions in the comment section below. A winner will be selected on the basis of the worst, the most absurd, the most offensive bill to ever be seriously considered (or even passed) by the U.S. Congress.
-> The prize will be a free “Enjoy Capitalism” t-shirt, courtesy of Bureaucrash.
-> Submit your answer between now and Thursday, July 28. We will notify the winner via email the following day.
Please tell your friends to help us send some historical context and wisdom to Harry Reid by submitting their answers, too.
I listened to the NPR segment about The Nation magazine and Center for Media and Democracy’s (CMD’s) alleged exposé on the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a national association of conservative state legislators. Calling their project “ALEC Exposed,” The Nation and CMD try to make hay out of the well-known fact that ALEC’s task forces, which include both public- and private-sector members, draft model legislation “behind closed doors.” As if any lawmaker ever places in the public record his deliberative discussions with staff and lobbyists on legislation he is drafting!
The Nation and CMD also neglect to mention that although private-sector members have a “voice and a vote” in the task forces that develop model legislation, only the public-sector (state-legislator) members of ALEC’s board of directors decide which proposals become ALEC model bills.
More importantly, ALEC model bills only become law if they go through the same process of hearings and debate that other bills introduced in state legislatures do.
I checked out The Nation‘s landing page, then “Business Domination, Inc.” (the first of five articles posted on the site), then the CMD site and its archive of 800-plus ALEC model bills. There’s no there there. What The Nation and CMD are waging is just another lefty campaign to drive the marketplace out of the marketplace of ideas.
In “Business Domination, Inc.,” the authors claim that ALEC believes that “Any force in civil society, especially labor, that contests the right of business to grab all social surplus for itself, and to treat people like road kill and the earth like a sewer, should be crushed.” Didn’t Karl Marx say stuff like that about all capitalists?
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President Obama just wants to grow government. He said it himself in a press conference on the debt ceiling negotiations. As I point out in The Daily Caller, this spendthrift attitude is dangerously out of touch with the American people and illuminates how we got into this fiscal disaster to boot.
The trouble for the president is that Americans want less government spending, not more. A June 2011 CNN poll reported that 63 percent of those surveyed thought that government was too involved in our economy. In other words, nearly two-thirds of the American people want government to leave individuals and businesses to make their own decisions
…
But the costs of government spending are not just about dollars and cents lost through waste and opportunity costs. Government consistently rewards itself with more money and resources every time it fails, turning incentives on their head. To a businessman, failure means liquidation. To a bureaucrat, failure means a bigger budget and an expanded mission.
Read the whole article here.
Tech:
Showbiz Sandbox 112: Why Netflix Had To Raise Its Prices:
“You would have thought the world was coming to an end last week after popular movie streaming service Netflix raised its prices by 60%. The company’s customers took to blogs and social networks in revolt, threatening to cancel their subscriptions. However, between the cost of mailing DVDs and paying increased licensing fees for content, a Netflix rate hike was inevitable. Is Netflix still one of the best movie bargains available today, and if not, are there any alternatives?”
Global Warming / Environment / Energy:
U.S. Urges U.N. Security Council to Make ‘Climate Change’ A Priority:
“For the first time in four years, the U.N. Security Council debated Wednesday whether climate change should be considered a priority worthy of the council’s attention, but it failed to reach agreement on the politically charged issue.”
Insurance / Gambling:
Colorado gaming regulators to review tax loophole for casinos:
“Newly appointed gaming regulators will review a loophole in the state’s casino-licensing regulation that operators are using to trim their tax bills.”
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Want to get to Vegas from Ely, Nevada? How about a $5,223 plane ticket? Don’t worry. Its price tag is only $149 – the taxpayer covers the rest. Suddenly, flying seems like a much more attractive option to the four-hour drive to “Sin City.”
Short flights like these foster “economic development” that maintain rural towns all over America, according to Democratic members of Congress and local officials. But even some beneficiaries disagree with the premise of the $200 million “Essential Air Service” (EAS) program. Mike Olson is the executive director of the Central Nebraska Regional Airport, which receives $2.2 million every year in subsidies to run flights from Grand Island, Nebraska, to Denver, Colorado — and he cannot see the merit in these politicians’ backward economic logic:
I’m shaking my head saying ‘This is ridiculous. This is absolutely ludicrous that we’re spending that kind of money…[I'm] an airport director at an EAS airport, but I’m a taxpayer too and I’m saying this is not good. … It’s a waste of fuel, a waste of a lot of taxpayer dollars to fly one or two people, or three people, at most a handful a day.
Olson isn’t alone in his common sense judgment. The House passed a measure along party lines on Wednesday to cut $16.6 million dollars from EAS airports in sparsely populated states like Nevada, Montana, West Virginia, and New Mexico. Despite its important-sounding moniker, the program is anything but essential. Created in 1978 when the government deregulated airlines, the EAS was a means to maintain unprofitable flights in rural areas. Proof that the subsidies amount to nothing more than squandered dollars is in the program’s rationale to prop up economically inefficient businesses.
The cuts to EAS reside within a “routine” funding reauthorization for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). As a result, the Democratic-controlled Senate will almost certainly reject the entire bill and blame Republicans for an FAA shutdown. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) will undoubtedly espouse specious rhetoric about rural economic development, but the real truth is that they want to protect precious pork rolling back to their electorates. Republicans ought to dismiss their poor economics and ignore their self-interested cries for taxpayer dollars.
On Thursday, Russia boasted that the world was now moving into the “Era of the Soyuz.” With the landing of the last U.S. shuttle, the Russian craft stands alone as a means of transportation between the Earth and the International Space Station.
This shows a lack of forethought by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to not prepare for the inevitable retirement of the shuttle program. It also demonstrates deep-seeded fears within the bureaucracy to relinquish the stars. The years leading up to the retiring of the shuttle program could have been the long-waited for opportunity to privatize U.S. space travel, or at least to permit meaningful private competition, but that launch window has closed. This could have been the dawn of an era of private interstellar innovation, but the Sun has yet to rise on that day.
Better late than never, many private aeronautics companies are finally moving forward with their efforts to reach the stars. In a recent op-ed in The Washington Times, Robert Zurbin, president of Pioneer Astronautics, described the many options of privately-developed launch vehicles:
Right now, the choice of most cost-effective launcher is a horse race between the Boeing Delta IV, the Lockheed Atlas V and the Spacex Falcon 9. However, starting in 2013, Spacex will field the Falcon Heavy, which, with a lift capacity of 53 metric tons and a price tag of $80 million, will offer three times the amount of goods delivered for the price as any of its competitors.
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Add another name to the list of the dead as a result of actions taken by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). I certainly feel a lot safer now that the government agency has made sure the evil entrepreneur is out of a job and we zombie-like consumers can’t get our hands on her dangerous product: light beer!
Sarcasm aside, this sad news broke at the end of last month; Rhonda Kallman, the co-founder of Sam Adams Brewery, was officially shutting down for good her newest outfit, New Century Brewing. All thanks to regulations.
Kallman shut down her small brewery after months of the FDA hounding her to reformulate her flagship product, Moonshot, a light beer that also happened to contain a small amount of caffeine.
I’ve followed Kallman’s tragic story since last December — the maverick beer maven who you might have seen in the movie Beer Wars. After leaving Boston Beer Co., Rhonda took the major financial risk of forming craft beer company New Century Brewing to peddle the idea she was sure would be a hit: a caffeinated light beer. While her brew, Moonshot, didn’t take off with the oomph of a rocket ship, it was slowly gaining a following, that is until the FDA decided to step in and kill it.
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Paige Johnson, 17, has been missing since September. Her grandmother, Jenny Roderick of Covington, Kentucky, spends most of her spare time putting up missing person posters with Paige’s picture all over the area. Maybe somebody saw her on the street. Maybe somebody knows something. Anything to get her granddaughter back.
Covington police promptly ordered Roderick to stop putting up fliers on city property.
City regulations prohibit putting fliers on utility poles. The Daily Mail reports that “While insisting that the city has ‘no intention of being insensitive to her family,’ the city manager said that regardless of what the posters say, they have to come down because they break city ordinances.”
Here’s hoping that Paige turns up safe and sound. Until then, Covington police might want to let this code violation slide.
Even Democratic businessmen are getting disenchanted with the Obama administration and its knee-jerk hostility to anything that creates jobs or wealth. Las Vegas mogul Steve Wynn, a “Harry Reid-supporting Democrat,” lambasted the Obama administration “for destroying the U.S. business climate despite all of his talk about creating jobs,” noting that:
the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody’s going to be sitting on their thumbs.
“Wynn said he could very quickly create 10,000 new jobs himself and with the multiplier effect help create another 20,000 hires in Las Vegas. But like many other business people in both parties, he’s holding back under the current Democratic Obama administration:
I’m afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States. You watch television and see what’s going on, on this debt ceiling issue. And what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President and nothing’s going to get fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress…I’m saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime…
Those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President. And a lot of people don’t want to say that. They’ll say, “Oh God, don’t be attacking Obama.” Well, this is Obama’s deal, and it’s Obama that’s responsible for this fear in America.
The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution, and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest or holding too much money. We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody’s afraid of the government, and there’s no need to soft peddling it, it’s the truth.”
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