Turmoil:

Friday – February 18, 2011

Turmoil:

Just look around you. In this country, we have unions protesting Governors who were elected to clean up shop and bring failing budgets into fiscal order from fiscal disorder. Governor Walker (R) of Wisconsin has a multi billion dollar budget to reconcile and collective bargaining is the one reason why the state is drowning in debt. This has become the nation’s most aggressive anti union legislation to date.

If the Governor can get his vote to end collective bargaining then the tax payer gets the right to approve salary increases for union members. How un – American. I say this in jest, of course!

Wisconsin is the nation’s birthplace of the national union that represents all non federal employees. Since 1959, Wisconsin has been the leader in comprehensive collective bargaining laws. Now it might lead the nation in reform. Governor Walker is asking that union members pay for a bigger share of their healthcare and contribute a greater share to their pensions. The alternative is layoffs. Not to much to ask for seeing that regular citizens are being laid off by the thousands.

Yesterday, protestors were in Wisconsin protesting Governor Walker’s move to eliminate collective bargaining from state unions. The Democrats in the State House fled on a bus so that they could not vote on the measure. This is turmoil. If someone did that in the private sector they would be fired.

However, this is what unions do and this is the power they wield. This is also a reason they should not be permitted to contribute to political campaigns. Every Democratic State Senator that fled, were supported by the states public unions. So, when they are told to get out of town, so a vote can not occur, they get out of f town.

What is being lost in the discussion is that there is no more money. In many cases, the tax payer, who pays the salary of these state employees, make far less in salary than the union members do.

Public employee unions are a big problem. They are powerful and are supported by many in the federal government. Many union members retire with great benefits; far more than the tax payer who provides these benefits. Now it’s a matter of what can the tax payer afford and not what the unions want.

It is difficult to fire or reprimand any union member. For instance our education system has failed and our kids are not being taught. This is another reason to reconsider the value of what we, as tax payers, are getting for our dollar.

If you use the once powerful auto unions as an example, those who bankrupted Detroit, with demands that made our auto companies fail and made them uncompetitive the same is happening to the states. The states have one benefit the auto companies don’t have. They have a revenue stream, regardless if they produce good product or a bad product. There is a bad product being sold by these public unions and some governors are now in a position to do something about it, because the revenue stream has to be used more efficiently.

Unions and their members should be held accountable and collective bargaining must stop and be replaced with merit performance. The private sector will bring the country back if there citizens didn’t have to pay for bad products in the way of service and unaccountable employees that get paid with tax revenue.

Today is the second anniversary of the Obama stimulus program. Like the Unions who keep taking and taking where is the performance measurement. The President said if he got the stimulus money unemployment would not go past 8%, what is it today 9.6%. The president said that shovel ready jobs would be immediate, where are they? The president said the stimulus would create private sector jobs, where are they? The new job numbers were released yesterday. Another 410,000 new jobless claims were recorded. We need 325,000 jobs to be created per reporting period to get back to a normal economy.

For almost two years, the number of 400,000 jobless claims per reporting period has been a constant. American companies don’t like the new regulations that this administration has implemented so they don’t hire and they layoff. They don’t like Obamacare and they don’t like high taxes, so they don’t hire and they layoff. One other reason why the jobless numbers are so high is that America’s premiere companies are high tech companies and they don’t hire a lot of people. For the most part, American companies are now running lean and mean and are more productive as a result.

The President spent last night in San Francisco. He had a nice dinner in a private home and met with the creator of Facebook, and executives from a few more high tech companies. He met with them to huddle and to see what can be done to create jobs.

If the high tech industry traditionally doesn’t hire a lot of people then why is he meeting with them? Facebook is worth about 50 billion dollars and they employ only 2,000 people. Other high tech companies have the same hiring profiles. Maybe they have some ideas that they will share with him and maybe they don’t. But, if he asks them to hire, he might get an empty stare. He, for sure, will get a large campaign donation from them!

Turmoil is the word of the day. More demonstrations in the Mid East are occurring. Some of them were in Iraq, some in Bahrain, some in North Africa and some in Yemen. We had some demonstrations as well in this country. In each case, government was the target and the subject. In each case the status quo is being questioned. In each case, money and security be it civil or social is being questioned.

Turmoil is sometimes the cause for change and sometimes the reason for change. With poor economic numbers and powerful unions asking and demanding more from the tax payer we can make the argument to our government workers and our leaders in government that we as tax payers have not caused the turmoil you have and your ways must change?

I wrote in the FORUM on Wednesday, “You cannot win an argument if you are not willing to make the argument.” It is now time to make the argument!

As I end the week, think about this: “My God! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy! ~Thomas Jefferson

Gregory C. Dildilian
Founder and Executive Director
Pinecone Conservatives

A footnote: Turmoil is the biggest reason to argue about what needs to change. It can be about Unions and it can be about not being able to govern and make good on your promises. Either way turmoil will not go away soon.