And The Beat Goes On…

 

The subject of ending a PLA (Project Labor Agreement) is not exactly tantalizing reading, but in the continued power of government unions the subject is IMPORTANT.

 

 

Basically, each city that has passed a PLA has made the city spending a Union Shop, and every city that has abandoned PLA has made their city a Right-to-Work city as to city spending on building projects.

 

 

The largest city in San Diego County, is, of course, San Diego and that city has always had a PLA. That means that any project the city pays for must use union labor, and any non-union contractor who wins a contract may not use his/her non-union laborers but must go out and hire union labor.

 

 

That is because the San Diego City Council, mostly Democrats, has always been in the pocket of unions, but that also includes the compliant Republicans on the Council.

 

 

Unions have COMPLETELY controlled the San Diego City Council, and that is why the pension mess is so bad in that city, and why, not incidentally, that city has a PLA.

 

 

But to say that government unions are losing political clout is obvious, and to guess that the City Council of San Diego is paying far less attention to the governmental unions would be right on target.

 

 

A petition to put the existence of the San Diego City PLA has gained enough signatures to get on a City ballot. That means it is now up to the San Diego City council either to pass a Council rule to end the City union shop – or to spend taxpayers money to put it on a ballot so the people can end it.

 

 

What will they do? Who knows?

 

 

Do they have the political will to get in front of the parade to rein in the outrageous political clout of government unions, or will they wimp out and. Pontius Pilot like, wash  their hands?

 

 

Unfortunately, it is not a binary decision. The State of California Legislature has seen too many California cities abandon their PLA agreements, and that Legislature – dominated by Labor-supported Democrats has passed bill to deny cities the right to end a PLA, and to overturn the actions of eight California cities that have done so.

 

 

Knowing they would run into a firestorm if they did this head-on, the unionists have tacked amendments onto unrelated bills, and gutted an existing bill on tuberculosis (SB 922) to insert language that stops cities from banning PLAs.

 

 

Three bills with this intent sit on Governor Brown’s desk, today. If the Governor signs the bill or bills, then neither the San Diego City Council nor the people will get to have a say.

 

 

Once again, the Democrats allied with the government unions will thwart the will of the people to keep the money flowing to the unions, which in turn will fund the election of Democrats, who will then feed the unions, who will fund the election of Democrats, who will….

 

 

Analyzing the Analysis

It appears from listening to the analysis of the debates that Rick Perry has stepped on his crank with the subject of illegal immigration.

I do not watch the “debates” for the same reason I do not play golf. I do not have time I wish to purposely waste.

But Perry’s back monkey of illegal immigration is larger than Romney’s back monkey of MassCare.

My Dream Team is still Romney and Mario Rubio.

The analysis is that Gingrich did well last night with his job training, and that there was some interest in Cain’s “9,9,9” tax plan.

Gingrich is quirky, but brilliant. Cain is interesting but lacks organization on the ground, as does Gingrich.

It is still pre-season, and as over-exposed, failing and flailing as Obama is, there is still a lot of power in the incumbency. Absent there being a high-level political component of Solyndra or Fast and Furious that has not yet surfaced, the organizational skills of Democrats make Obama hard to beat.

I Am Starting To Understand…

Ahmadinejad spoke to the United Nations today, causing the US delegation, and those delegations of 30 other nations to rise and leave the meeting. I wondered why everyone left, particularly the US delegation.

Now that I think I know, from reading the remarks in news reports, I am even more confused…I wonder why the US delegates even went to the Assembly. Just like Israel, I think the US delegation should have not gone to the speech to begin with, but the reason for leaving is not logical to me.

Ahmadinejad’s speech to the UN was interesting to me because he sounded just like the liberals I read in the Letters to the Editor of the North County Times, and every day in the NCT blog.

Ahmadinejad blamed the rich countries for the plight of the poor countries, just as the liberals blame the rich and corporations in the US for the plight of the poor.

Ahmadinejad blamed the US, as do liberals, for supporting dictators around the globe, not recognizing, as indeed liberals do not, that the alternative was to place those countries into the Soviet Bloc.

Additionally, Ahmadinejad blamed the US for taking slaves from Africa centuries ago, just as liberals do today, and he blamed for the US for dropping the atomic bomb on Japan to end WWII, just as liberals do every year on the anniversaries of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Further, just like liberals all day every day, Ahmadinejad accused the US of violating “the rights and sovereignty of nations.”

Using the Law of Algebra I learned in school (Quantities equal to the same quantity are equal to each other), I therefore must conclude that Ahmadinejad is a US liberal.

The Koch Brothers Are A Convenient Political Target

The Rachel Maddow show featured a great graph of the wealth of the libertarian-conservative Koch brothers, and it’s great growth over the past few years. She even had a good line, that their wealth has “swollen like a broken ankle.”

To demonstrate their combined wealth, Rachel scrolled the nations which have annual budgets less than Koch wealth, including Costa Rica, Guatemala, and the nation of Georgia.

(Somehow she neglected to do an analysis of a considerably wealthier man, Bill Gates, a good liberal who does employ MANY more people through subcontracts, but almost all of whom are in China, South Korea and Taiwan. I guess that doesn’t make her real point which is the Koch brothers are bad because they support conservative causes.)

Rachel then overlayed the Koch brothers’ wealth growth with a graph of the same time frame showing a dramatic decrease in employees of the Koch brothers oil business.

in the liberal mind, this indicates greed, but in reality what it indicates is productivity, doing more with less, a concept foreign to the liberal mind(sic).

The banks are sitting on one TRILLION in liquid assets, and great corporations are sitting on another one trillion dollars. To the liberal mind, again, this represents greed– as if it is the responsibility of a corporation to provide jobs, and not just jobs but jobs in excess to their needs.

I have been the CEO of what in today’s dollars would be a near half a billion dollar Los Angeles TV station, and of a startup computer dealership where my wife and I were the Saturday cleaning crew. In neither of those businesses would I consider hiring extra people jet because I had the excess funds to do so, but excess funds in a small business is more likely to portend expansion (and therefore more jobs) than excess funds in a large corporation, where competitive expansion is more constrained by labor law and restrictions. (Just ask Boeing!)

Small businesses are where most of the jobs are, and in this economy it is where most are lost. In the recovery, it is where most jobs will be gained.

It is the cumulative small business concerns that must be addressed, and while Rachel may concentrate her interest on the wealthy Koch brothers, they make public interest political targets but are immaterial in the effort to increase jobs.

They are simply political targets.