The unemployment rate in Italy is 11.7%, a 20-year high. Yet according to news reports, the country is facing a shortage of pizza makers. What gives?

“Despite a long recession and high unemployment, Italians are shunning the job because of the long hours and modest pay,” says the Britain-based Telegraph newspaper. “But with a slice of pizza an increasingly popular lunch time option in times of economic hardship, the pizza sector is booming—and an estimated 6,000 new ‘pizzaioili’ are needed.”

Luckily for pizza-lovers in Italy, there are people who will happily do the job. They just happen to be immigrants. “Italians may be reluctant to get their hands dirty by stoking ovens and kneading dough, but foreign immigrants have no such qualms and are now filling the gap, producing an increasing share of the three billion pizzas that Italians eat each year,” says the Telegraph.

Here in the U.S., where we are in the middle of our own immigration debate, there are jobs that Americans are reluctant to take. Sure, more people might sign up to pick lettuce in Yuma in the afternoon sun if it paid $50,000 a year, but what would that do to the price of lettuce, or the cost of a meal at Olive Garden? And do we want people with high school and college degrees doing this type of work? Is it the most efficient use of their human capital?

Then there’s the hummus among us.

Long a staple of Middle Eastern cuisine, hummus is earning a growing following among Americans seeking more-healthful snacks. The chickpea dip is low in fat and high in protein. Sales of “refrigerated flavored spreads”—a segment dominated by hummus—totaled $530 million at U.S. food retailers last year, up 11% from a year earlier and a 25% jump over 2010, according to market-research firm Information Resources Inc.

Sabra, based in White Plains, N.Y., has helped introduce more Americans to hummus through huge sampling events in major cities in which it has handed out 10,000 2-ounce packages a day. Sabra began its first national television advertising campaign earlier this year.

“Most of the consumers out there still don’t know what hummus is,” said Adam Carr, chief executive of Tribe Mediterranean Foods Inc., a Sabra rival. “We think that there are going to be lots of new users coming to the category.”

Growing demand for hummus has pushed up prices for chickpeas, spurring farmers to increase production. The average price that farmers received for chickpeas was 35 cents a pound last year, a 10-cent increase over the mid-2000s, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

It used to be that if you wanted hummus in America, you made your own. My wife and I bought a Vitamix blender, which is still going strong 40 years on, for that very purpose.

Now you can go to Trader Joe’s and find 8 kinds of hummus.

That’s the name for an interactive graph the LA Times created to show who is donating how much to each of the LA mayoral candidates. Both are liberals.

It’s a nice use of the web.

What stands out to me is that most of the donors split their money evenly between candidates. In other words, they’re hedging their bets and paying tribute.

The big difference is union money. Greuel got $3.6 million versus $408,500 for Garcetti.

Three million turns out to be the gap in total money raised.

That also accounts for one-third of her total.

Special interest, thy name is organized labor.

WSJ:

…In the latest disdain for the Constitution’s checks and balances, the National Labor Relations Board has declared that it doesn’t like the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Friday ruling that three board members were illegally appointed so it plans to ignore it.

“The Board respectfully disagrees with today’s decision and believes that the President’s position in the matter will ultimately be upheld,” Chairman Mark Pearce said in a statement. “It should be noted that this order applies to only one specific case, Noel Canning, and that similar questions have been raised in more than a dozen cases pending in other courts of appeals.

“In the meantime, the Board has important work to do. The parties who come to us seek and expect careful consideration and resolution of their cases, and for that reason, we will continue to perform our statutory duties and issue decisions.”

In thug speak: f-you!

So, let’s see. First, President Obama bypasses the Senate’s advice and consent power by making “recess” appointments while the Senate was in pro-forma session specifically to prevent recess appointments. Then when a federal court rules the recess appointments illegal, the NLRB declares that it will keep doing business as if nothing happened.

Without Mr. Obama’s illegal appointments, the board would have been without a quorum and unable to decide a single case. That lawless behavior means more than 200 of the NLRB’s rulings in the past year are in limbo. It’s bad enough to force those 200 litigants to appeal rulings that are sure to be overturned. But the board wants to keep issuing new rulings though it now knows that a unanimous appeals court has declared them illegal, pending a Supreme Court review that may never happen.

Mr. Obama can legally reconstitute the NLRB by getting his appointees confirmed by the Senate. Meantime, Nebraska Senator Mike Johanns is right to call on the illegal members to resign. If they won’t, Congress should stop funding the NLRB as soon as the continuing spending resolution expires in March.

No, not Tea Partiers cleaning up after themselves. Note this bit at the beginning:

Thug: “They can suck all the parasitical benefits…” Is he admitting that labor unions are parasites?

Jim Gergahty rounds up the goon squad

The massive public tantrum of Wisconsin’s unions didn’t work in that state in 2011, but labor unions are willing to try the same in Michigan.

Conn Carroll:

“There will be blood,” State Representative Douglas Geiss threatened from the floor of the Michigan House of Representatives today as the body debated legislation that would make Michigan the nation’s 24th right to work state.

“I really wish we had not gone here,” Geiss continued. “It is the leadership in this house that has led us here. The same leadership that tried to throw a bomb right on election day, leading to a member switching parties, and came in at the 11th hour with a gotcha bill. For that, I do not see solace, I do not see peace.”

But wait, there’s more!

Jimmy Hoffa, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said Tuesday he expects Michigan unions and lawmakers to break out into “civil war” after the state’s legislature passed right-to-work bills that would weaken unions’ power.

“This is just the first round of a battle that’s going to divide this state. We’re going to have a civil war,” Hoffa said on CNN’s “Newsroom.”

The Republican-controlled state House passed two bills that had already been approved by the GOP-dominated state Senate. Gov. Rick Snyder, also a Republican, is poised to sign the bill, which would allow workers at union-represented employers to forgo paying dues.

“There will be blood!” “We’re going to have civil war!” Meanwhile, outside the state capitol:

Tempers flared Tuesday morning here at the state Capitol as police — some on horses — moved into to break up a mob scene as the Republican-controlled House approved a contentious right-to-work bill.

Thousands of union members and friends of organized labor gathered to show their opposition, at times heated, to the legislation that prohibits unions from forcing unionized employees to pay union dues or join labor groups.

Gov. Rick Snyder had not yet signed the bill into law, although he has signaled that he would.

By mid-morning, the Capitol was a scene of chaos as union members and organizers from pro-right-to-work Americans for Prosperity got into a shouting match. Wisconsin Reporter’s Ryan Ekvall, at the scene, said right-to-work opponents grew increasingly agitated over AFP’s signs.

“There was some pushing and shoving. At one point, I was in the middle of the crowd; it was like a mosh pit where you couldn’t control yourself. You were being moved with the crowd,” Ekvall said.

He saw two lines of police officers forming, “marching like military,” with four officers mounted on horses. They dispersed the crowd and restored peace to the section of the grounds. Before doing so, union members pulled up the tent stakes, and the tent collapsed with some AFP members inside, according to witnesses at the scene.

Our Christian Schneider spoke with David Fladeboe of Americans for Prosperity, who was working security outside the tent:

Fladeboe said the tent, for which AFP-Michigan had received a permit a week earlier, held between 30 and 40 people before protesters began stabbing at its straps with knives. He said that at first, protesters were targeting random straps to avoid being caught — then, finally, they focused on one corner of the tent in an effort to pull it down. Fladeboe said that even once several of the straps were cut, the local police on the scene did little to help the volunteers re-secure them.

Eventually, protesters were able to snap one of the tent stakes in half and pull it from beneath the tent, causing it to collapse. Fladeboe said that despite reports that the tent had been cleared of people before it went down, there were about a dozen people still trapped inside after it had fully collapsed. “You could see people inside of it trying to get up, and you could see the tent moving,” he said — a problem exacerbated by the fact that protesters began “stomping” on top of the collapsed canvas while volunteers tried to help those trapped inside.

Before it had collapsed, the tent was held up by two 20-foot poles, which had to have fallen for it to collapse; volunteers were worried that those poles could have landed on someone stuck inside the tent. There also was hot coffee and hot chocolate served inside the tent that could have burned people if tipped over.

Fladeboe said that once the tent was clear of people, the protesters began pushing and shoving them — it was only then that the police got involved.

Here’s what’s left of the tent. A sports-feature writer at the Detroit Free Press characterizes the union mob’s reaction to the AFP tent as “taking the bait.” I suppose that’s one way of looking at it; it says something about those union members that all it took to “bait” them into a frothing mass of violence was someone being present and expressing a different opinion than theirs.

And then poor Fox News contributor Steven Crowder, best known for making funny videos, got punched in the face repeatedly and chipped a tooth.

“Even if you hate me, nothing I could have done warranted being suckerpunched and threatened with murder,” Crowder said.

A voice for Michigan’s labor unions voiced this gripe:

“It would have been easy for the current political party to walk away and say it is done, but instead, during this lame duck session when they feel they have the votes, they’re pushing through a right-to-work law, allowing no debates.”

Oh, you mean like ObamaCare?

Except in Michigan, this was a straight-up vote. ObamaCare passed with parliamentary gimmickry.

They knew that when Scott Brown took office, the bill was doomed. And Scott Brown was elected on a promise to vote against ObamaCare. So it was a giant F-you to America.

And ObamaCare affected 1/8th of the American economy.

WSJ

With state and local governments struggling to balance budgets in a still sluggish economy, government employment has fallen by 562,000 jobs since September 2008, a decline of 2.6%. In response, the Obama administration has called for more federal aid—on top of the $250 billion doled out in the 2009 Recovery Act—to help keep state and local government payrolls near prer-ecession levels.

But supporters of more federal aid implicitly assume that the size of the public sector was optimal before the recession. On the contrary, overstaffing is a serious problem in government, and the best evidence is a simple empirical fact: Government employees don’t work as much as private employees. If public-sector employees just worked as many hours as their private counterparts, governments at all levels could save more than $100 billion in annual labor costs.

How do we know that? Are we just dredging up well-worn stereotypes of government employees enjoying shorter work days, prolonged sick leave and extended vacation breaks? In fact, new evidence from a comprehensive and objective data set confirms that the “underworked” government employee is more than a stereotype.

Read on. This is not always true. I have clients in local government who bust their fannies, working weekends and such because of the workload imposed on them.

Holman Jenkins in the WSJ:

…The real story is the story of two unions, the Teamsters and the Bakery union of the AFL-CIO. Here’s where things get interesting.

The Teamsters reluctantly agreed to givebacks to finance the company’s latest turnaround attempt. The bakers rejected any concessions and went out on strike, despite being informed that the result would be the liquidation of the parent company and the loss of 18,500 jobs.

Tsk tsk, went even the liberal media, assuming that union bloody-mindedness must be at work. Think again. As the bakers rightly saw it, they were being asked once more to prop up Teamster jobs that would likely guarantee that any Hostess resurrection would be short-lived.

Start with the fact that Hostess’s bakery operations are relatively efficient, and though the company planned to sell or close some of the plants anyway, the company had the power to do so already under its union contracts.

Under the latest turnaround plan, the sticking point was Hostess’s distribution operations, source of the Hostess horror stories filling the media. Union-imposed work rules stopped drivers from helping to load their trucks. A separate worker, arriving at the store in a separate vehicle, had to be employed to shift goods from a storage area to a retailer’s shelf. Wonder Bread and Twinkies couldn’t ride on the same truck.

Hostess has spent eight of the past 11 years in bankruptcy. As the company explained to its latest judge, the Hostess brands “have not been able to profit from many of their existing delivery stops and have been unable to enter potentially profitable markets, such as dollar stores, vending services and movie theaters.”

If Hostess were able to rationalize or outsource delivery to serve these customers, ready to go are “new products based on its best-selling cake items that have a longer shelf-life and can withstand freezing en route to customers over longer transportation hauls.”

Frankly, I won’t miss this. Or Twinkies.

Mike Rowe’s celebration of hard work. 20 minutes long, but worth the watch.

Daily Caller:

Emails obtained by The Daily Caller show that the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 salaried retirees at the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company.

The move, made in 2009 while the Obama administration implemented its auto bailout plan, appears to have been made solely because those retirees were not members of labor unions.

The internal government emails contradict sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures. They also indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts about the sequence of events surrounding the termination of those non-union pensions, and that administration figures violated federal law…

Black Americans vote in huge numbers for Democrats.

Labor union members funnel huge dollar sums to the Democrats.

Black kids get stuck in bad schools with bad teachers because of the unions.

Will black voters ever wise up?

WSJ

One of the modern civil-rights tragedies is the immutability of public education, especially at the lousiest schools run for the benefit of their employees rather than students. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s latest lesson in teachers union intransigence is a case in point.

The saga began this spring, when Mr. Bloomberg backed an ambitious plan to revamp 24 of the city’s worst performing schools. Under President Obama’s Race to the Top program, the dirty two dozen would officially close down and then reopen this fall with new missions, curricula, faculty and administrators. The point is to zero out failing institutional cultures and start over.

This reform strategy is known as the “turnaround” model, which emphasizes higher standards and accountability for tangible results, and it qualifies the city for $58 million in federal grants. Mr. Bloomberg’s original Race to the Top plan was a new teacher evaluation program in part to smoke out the lowest-performing educators. But the dominant United Federation of Teachers scotched that option, and the city switched to the turnaround replumbing as a second resort.

So at the end of the school year, 3,600 pink-slips went out to the teachers, administrators and principals of the bottom 24. Those laid off were told they could be rehired if they reapplied, but they’d be competing on merit against 26,000 fresh applicants.

The unions threatened to sue, claiming the move violated collective bargaining and in particular their first-in, last-out rules that protect the jobs of the longest serving teachers without regard to effectiveness. The city submitted to voluntary arbitration—given that it is legally allowed to close any school for cause, and its turnaround plan is straight out of the Obama school reform field guide.

Bad decision. Late last month sole arbitrator Scott Buchheit issued a decision siding with the unions, astonishingly enough, because “a wish to avoid undesirable teachers was the primary, if not exclusive, reason” for the plan…

Joel Kotkin in Forbes

When Jerry Brown was elected governor for a third time in 2010, there was widespread hope that he would repair the state’s crumbling and dysfunctional political edifice. But instead of becoming a Californian Mikhail Gorbachev, he has turned out to be something more resembling Konstantin Chernenko or Yuri Andropov, an aged hegemon desperately trying to save a dying system.

As with the old party bosses in Russia, Brown’s distinct lack of courage has only worsened California’s lurch toward fiscal and economic disaster. Yet as the budget woes worsen, other Californians, including some Democrats, are beginning to recognize the need for perestroika in the Golden State. This was most evident in the overwhelming vote last week in two key cities, San Diego and San Jose, to reform public employee pensions, a huge reversal after decades of ever more expansive public union power in the state.

California’s “progressive” approach has been enshrined in what is essentially a one-party state that is almost Soviet in its rigidity and inability to adapt to changing conditions. With conservatives, most businesses and taxpayer advocates marginalized, California politics has become the plaything of three powerful interest groups: public-sector unions, the Bay Area/Silicon Valley elite and the greens. Their agendas, largely unrestrained by serious opposition, have brought this great state to its knees.

California’s ruling troika has been melded by a combination of self-interest and a common ideology. Their ruling tenets center on support for an ever more intrusive, and expensive, state apparatus; the need to turn California into an Ecotopian green state; and a shared belief that the “genius” of Silicon Valley can pay for all of this.

Now this world view is foundering on the rocks of economic reality. The Soviet Union armed itself to the teeth and sent cosmonauts into space while the public waited on line for toothpaste and sausages. Similarly, Californians suffer from a combination of high taxes and intrusive regulation coupled with a miserable education system — the state’s students now rank 47^th in science achievement — and a rapidly deteriorating infrastructure.

The current recession has been particularly severe, continuing at a more acute level than in most states, including places like Florida and Arizona, which also suffered greatly from the housing bust. California now has the third highest unemployment rate in the U.S., beating out only its co-dependent evil twin Nevada and Rhode Island. At the same time, according to a recent Public Policy Institute of California study, inequality in the devoutly “progressive” state has been growing much faster than in the rest of the country.

The most auspicious sign of grassroots support for perestroika was last week’s smack down of public employee unions in San Jose and San Diego. For the first time in recent memory, the unions suffered a humiliating defeat — the measures passed by a margin greater than two to one — as voters endorsed deep reform of the pension burdens bringing these cities to the brink of bankruptcy. Backed by its Democratic mayor, (more…)

Jim Geraghty

…Wisconsin Democrats, who fled the state to avoid voting on Walker’s reforms, who let protesters take over the state capitol for several days, who compared the governor to Hitler,  and who forced recalls of state legislators and the governor (putting state voters through seven elections in one year), have coalesced behind one final closing argument: Scott Walker has divided the state.

Really.

About 50 students were suspended Thursday from the all-boys Frederick Douglass Academy in Detroit, Mich. for walking out of classes in protest, demanding “an education.”

Among their complaints: a lack of consistent teachers, the reassignment of the school principal, educators who abuse sick time and a shortage of textbooks.

“We’ve been wronged and disrespected and lied to and cheated,” senior Tevin Hill told the Detroit Free Press. “They didn’t listen to us when we complained to the administration. They didn’t listen to the parents when they complained to the administration, so I guess this is the only way to get things solved.”

One math teacher, parent Sharise Smith tells WJBK-TV, has been absent for more than 68 days.

The students marched outside the school and chanted, “We want… education! When do we want it? Now!”

This is far more significant than Trayvon Martin.

Then there’s this in the WaPo:

As a young labor organizer in Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa worked for the city’s teachers, honing his political skills in the fight for a good contract. The union loved him back, supporting the Democrat’s election to the State Assembly, City Council and, finally, the mayor’s office he occupies today.

But now, Villaraigosa, a rising star in the national Democratic party*, has a different view. He calls the teachers union “the one, unwavering roadblock” to improving public education in L.A.

Villaraigosa is one of several Democratic mayors in cities across the country — Chicago, Cleveland, Newark and Boston, among them — who are challenging teachers unions in ways that seemed inconceivable just a decade ago.

“This is a very, very interesting political situation that is way counterintuitive,” said Charles Taylor Kerchner, who has written two books about teachers unions.

At at time when most Americans believe that U.S. education is imperiled, and cities are especially struggling to improve schools, the tension between the mayors and the unions is causing a fundamental realignment of two powerful forces in urban politics.

And not a decade too soon!

The unions are bad in LAUSD, but they didn’t spend $572 million to build one high school, that was the dopes in charge. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right…

* Let’s hope not. If this idiot is the best the Democrats can do, heaven help us.

Progressives claim that poor people are fat because they lack access to healthful food.

“Food desert” is what they call places where supermarkets are scarce. (Given that supermarket chains go where the profits are, you might suspect lack of demand plays a role.)

So you’d think that a new supermarket would be welcomed in LA. But no, the special interests — labor unions and the stores under their thumb — think otherwise.

Four weeks after Wal-Mart announced plans to open a grocery store in Chinatown, Los Angeles City Council members have proposed a law that would block an array of chain businesses from opening in the neighborhood.

A temporary ordinance sought by Councilman Ed Reyes would prohibit building permits from being issued for new “formula retail” stores — those that have standardized facades, color schemes, decor, employee uniforms and merchandise.

Wal-Mart is seeking to open a 33,000-square-foot market and pharmacy in a vacant ground-floor commercial space at Cesar Chavez and Grand avenues. But the plan has come under fire from labor and advocacy groups that oppose the company’s wage scale, benefit plans and nonunion workforce.

Wal-Mart can save the average family 25% on their grocery bill, a free market anti-poverty program that functions without taxation or coercion.

Big government and big labor see that as the enemy.

GOP governor, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, promotes a radical redo of public education, working against the reactionary labor unions.

…Louisiana is already one of 12 states (including Washington, D.C.) that offer school vouchers, but its program benefits fewer than 2,000 students in New Orleans. Governor Jindal would extend eligibility to any low-income student whose school gets a C, D or F grade from state administrators. That’s almost 400,000 students—a bit more than half the statewide population—who could escape failing schools for private or virtual schools, career-based programs or institutions of higher education.

Funding for these vouchers (“scholarships” is the poll-tested term) would come not from a new fund, as in New Orleans, but from what the state already spends on public education per capita. So every student leaving a failing school would take about $8,500 (on average) with him, hitting the bureaucracy where it hurts. This is called competition, that crucial quality missing where monopolies reign.

Post-Katrina New Orleans is already the nation’s leading charter-school zone, with 80% of city students enrolled, academic performance improving dramatically, and plans to go all-charter by 2013. To spread the model statewide, the Governor would create new regional boards for authorizing charters and offer fast-track authorization to high-performing operators such as KIPP. He’d also give charters the same access to public facilities as traditional public schools.

As for tenure, Mr. Jindal would grant it only to teachers who are rated “highly effective” five years in a row, meaning the top 10% of performers. And tenure wouldn’t equal lifetime protection: A tenured teacher who rates in the bottom 10% (“ineffective”) in any year would return to probationary status. Ineffective teachers would receive no pay raise. Louisiana would also ban the “last in, first out” practice under which younger teachers are dismissed first, regardless of performance.

No points for guessing where the teachers unions stand on all this. The real problem is that “the revenue base is inadequate,” says Steve Monaghan of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers—though spending doesn’t correlate with academic improvement, and in any case Mr. Jindal has increased education spending by 10% since 2008.

At least Mr. Monaghan is guilty only of ignoring evidence. Louisiana Association of Educators leader Michael Walker Jones took to insulting Bayou State parents: “If I’m a parent in poverty I have no clue because I’m trying to struggle and live day to day,” said Mr. Jones of parental choice. How’s that for faith in self-government?

Louisiana used to be one of America’s most ill-governed states, but Mr. Jindal pushed major economic and ethics reforms in his first term and is now starting his second with his education moon shot. It would be one giant leap for Louisiana students.

Once upon a time government work paid less, but was steady.

Buoyed by generous benefit packages, federal workers earn significantly better compensation than similarly educated workers in the private sector, according to a report released Monday from Congress‘ chief scorekeeper that threatens to reignite at the national level last year’s state battles over public-employee rights.

Overall, federal workers earn 16 percent more in total compensation — including wages and benefits — than comparable private-sector employees, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Only private-sector workers with the highest levels of education, such as doctors and lawyers, earn more than their public counterparts

Patrick McGreevy, Los Angeles Times

Gilbert Robles retired as a state parole agent at age 53, able to collect a $101,195 annual pension — 94% of his final salary. Last year, six months after he retired, the Arcadia resident accepted a political appointment with the same agency that pays an additional six figures.

Scott Hallabrin took retirement as the top attorney for the state’s ethics agency on June 29, 2009. The next day, he went back to the same post, as he prepared to watch his pension checks roll in on top of a salary.

Los Angeles school administrator Norman Isaacs got a 35% raise in 2006, the year before he filed for his public pension. The increase sharply boosted his retirement benefits.

Robles, Hallabrin and Isaacs acted within their rights under California’s pension rules, which the Legislature’s independent budget analyst recently described as “among the most generous in the country.” That generosity comes with a price: The main pension system for public employees is expected to cost taxpayers $2.3 billion this year and has long-term obligations that it is $85 billion short of being able to fund…

Meanwhile, one of the engines of California’s postwar growth was its educational system. But budget misery has led to this:

Students and faculty at Cal State Northridge are protesting new budget-related restrictions that are aimed at reducing enrollment and are making it harder to register for classes at the San Fernando Valley campus.

In the fall semester, the school enrolled several thousand more students than the target set by the Cal State system’s central administration in response to cutbacks in state funding. Now the system is threatening to withhold $7 million from the 34,000-student campus if it doesn’t partly roll back enrollment for the current spring semester by the equivalent of 2,800 full-time students, officials said.

As a result, Cal State Northridge recently imposed a cap on the number of credits most students can carry and is enforcing it during the current add-drop period. Except for graduating seniors and a few other groups, that will mean no more than 15 credits. Also, the school has barred professors from enrolling extra students in their classes beyond a formal limit.

…is running it into the ground. All hail the lobbyist puppeteer, Scott Wetch.

California building contractors were thrilled when waterless urinals came on the market, thinking the devices would save them a fortune in plumbing costs.

The state building code would need to be changed, but that seemed an easy sell. The fixtures would prevent billions of gallons of water from being wasted, and California’s environmental lobby could be counted on as a powerful ally.

There was one hitch. His name was Scott Wetch.

Wetch is a Sacramento lobbyist for labor unions, and urinals without water pipes would not be good for his clients in the building trades. His campaign to derail the bill shows why he is considered one of the shrewdest operators in the Capitol.

First he played the health card, arguing that mens’ rooms would become breweries for pestilence and toxic vapors.

Then he took a more direct approach, reminding Democratic lawmakers that the bill threatened a key constituency — labor — and specifically his client, the California State Pipe Trades Council and its 30,000 plumbers and pipe fitters.

Finally, he splintered his opponents by crafting a compromise designed to appease environmentalists. The revised bill, signed into law in 2007, allowed developers to install waterless urinals. But they would still have to install the pipes, just in case something went wrong.

“It’s absurd,” said Kevin Dayton, an executive at the Associated Builders and Contractors of California. “Obviously, waterless urinals are a threat to plumbers getting jobs, and, therefore, he worked to make sure the jobs would continue even as the technology changed.”

Wetch doesn’t really argue the point.

“I do whatever I can,” he said, “to give a competitive advantage to unionized employees.”

Because that’s all that matters, the people of California be damned.

The labor movement is crying foul over a resignation threat from a member of the National Labor Relations Board that would effectively quash a long-sought change to union election rules.

Brian Hayes, a member of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), has threatened to resign because of a proposed rule that would speed up union elections, according to a Nov. 21 letter from his colleague, Mark Pearce, the labor board’s Democratic chairman.

If Hayes resigned, his absence would essentially shut down the NLRB and prevent a Nov. 30 vote on parts of the proposed rule.

The backlash to Hayes’s threat from unions has been intense, as a long-held goal of simplifying and speeding up union elections would be stopped in its tracks by the maneuver.

“We think it’s really terrible to shut down a government agency over ideology,” Peter Colavito, director of government relations for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), told The Hill. “I’m really struggling to find precedent for this. It’s really an outrage as an attack on workers’ rights.”

Nowhere does it say whether Colavito delivered his lines with a straight face.

We tend to think of corruption in terms of bribery, pay-to-play, insider trading and so on. But the outrages of some public sector unions are far worse for the taxpayer.

Philip K. Howard

The indictment of seven Long Island Rail Road workers for disability fraud last week cast a spotlight on a troubled government agency. Until recently, over 90% of LIRR workers retired with a disability—even those who worked desk jobs—adding about $36,000 to their annual pensions. The cost to New York taxpayers over the past decade was $300 million.

As one investigator put it, fraud of this kind “became a culture of sorts among the LIRR workers, who took to gathering in doctor’s waiting rooms bragging to each [other] about their disabilities while simultaneously talking about their golf game.” How could almost every employee think fraud was the right thing to do?

The LIRR disability epidemic is hardly unique—82% of senior California state troopers are “disabled” in their last year before retirement. Pension abuses are so common—for example, “spiking” pensions with excess overtime in the last year of employment—that they’re taken for granted.

Either that last year of work is a grind or they’re running a scam.

I’d put my money on the latter. But then, as a Californian, I don’t have to. They just deduct it from my check.

Governors in Wisconsin and Ohio this year have led well-publicized showdowns with public unions. Union leaders argue they are “decimat[ing] the collective bargaining rights of public employees.” What are these so-called “rights”? The dispute has focused on rich benefit packages that are drowning public budgets. Far more important is the lack of productivity.

“I’ve never seen anyone terminated for incompetence,” observed a long-time human relations official in New York City. In Cincinnati, police personnel records must be expunged every few years—making periodic misconduct essentially unaccountable. Over the past decade, Los Angeles succeeded in firing five teachers (out of 33,000), at a cost of $3.5 million.

Collective-bargaining rights have made government virtually unmanageable…

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

– Shakespeare, Macbeth

Yesterday Michael Medved interviewed a woman named Melissa, a participant in the Occupy Wall Street show now playing on Wall Street. Medved was trying to pin down her objectives.

“Complete this sentence for me,” he asked. “We will consider our protest a success when…”

Melissa cut in, “It’s already a success. We’ve created a movement that’s taking off all over the country.” [I've paraphrased the exchange.]

So there you have it: the objective is to add voices to the choir. The fact that her choir has no coherent song to sing is beside the point. They are the change they’ve been waiting for, I suppose.

In Sacramento, a group of protestors gathered without a clear reason.

Organizer Anthony Bondi said he has what he referred to as a “message team” working on the primary goals of the local protests, which he admitted “was kind of vague.”

“That message team will reveal that tomorrow [Friday] morning,” Bondi said.

“So you guys are in the process of forming the reasons why you are here?” asked CBS13 reporter Tony Lopez.

“Exactly correct,” Bondi said.

Other protesters gave clearer reasons for their attendance, saying that wealth disparity and corruption in the business world are causing harm to society.

Ah, yes, there’s “corporate greed” also known as the profit motive. No doubt many of the attendees found out about the event via their iPhones.

Does Apple count as a greedy corporation? They sure as heck gouged their customers for years with very high profit margins, all the while convincing their customers they were rebels in the mold of Albert Einstein and MLK for buying their brand.

Does anyone with an iPhone in his pocket have the right to feel aggrieved because there are billionaires afoot?

Medved asked Melissa if she thought the world would be better if the stock exchange closed down. She said that wouldn’t happen, at least not right away. But she implied she’d like it to.

Their real cause is anti-capitalism, the very system that made America a rich country, so rich that America’s poor have cell phones, microwaves, TVs and enough food to be fat.

Unlike China where the poor are still dirt poor. In the 1980s, “60 Minutes” did a story on China. They showed Chinese tourists having their photo taken inside an automobile — it was the closest they’d get to owning one.

Then the Chinese Communists got smart. They looked around to see what system generated wealth: aha, capitalism. So they scrapped their Marxist folly and went for the big bucks. And in doing so, allowed 300 million Chinese to lift themselves out of poverty.

That’s an amazing achievement. Perhaps America should borrow from the Chinese and institute reeducation camps to teach basic economics and common sense.

Obama, who praised the protestors yesterday, should be the first to matriculate.

…that parents are forced to take such drastic action for the sake of their children. Shame on the NEA and their captive politicians for the condition of public education.

Obama exhorted his Congressional Black Caucus members to put on their marching shoes. This is the same Obama that killed a popular voucher program in Washington DC that benefit black kids.

Michael Flattery

In case you needed further proof of the American education system’s failings, especially in poor and minority communities, consider the latest crime to spread across the country: educational theft. That’s the charge that has landed several parents, such as Ohio’s Kelley Williams-Bolar, in jail this year.

An African-American mother of two, Ms. Williams-Bolar last year used her father’s address to enroll her two daughters in a better public school outside of their neighborhood. After spending nine days behind bars charged with grand theft, the single mother was convicted of two felony counts. Not only did this stain her spotless record, but it threatened her ability to earn the teacher’s license she had been working on.

Ms. Williams-Bolar caught a break last month when Ohio Gov. John Kasich granted her clemency, reducing her charges to misdemeanors from felonies. His decision allows her to pursue her teacher’s license, and it may provide hope to parents beyond the Buckeye State. In the last year, parents in Connecticut, Kentucky and Missouri have all been arrested—and await sentencing—for enrolling their children in better public schools outside of their districts.

These arrests represent two major forms of exasperation. First is that of parents whose children are zoned into failing public schools—they can’t afford private schooling, they can’t access school vouchers, and they haven’t won or haven’t even been able to enter a lottery for a better charter school. Then there’s the exasperation of school officials finding it more and more difficult to deal with these boundary-hopping parents.

From California to Massachusetts, districts are hiring special investigators to follow children from school to their homes to determine their true residences and decide if they “belong” at high-achieving public schools. School districts in Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey all boasted recently about new address-verification programs designed to pull up their drawbridges and keep “illegal students” from entering their gates…

We both have a great climate. We also have absurd deficit spending and rapacious public sector.

Michael Lewis, author of MoneyBall, The Blind Side, The Great Short and more, has a lengthy piece in Vanity Fair. It’s uneven, particularly at the end, but worth printing out and reading.

What happens when a city promises most of its budget to cops and firefighters salaries, healthcare and pensions? It essentially goes out of business.

When conservatives promote small government, this ain’t it.

…In the third floor I find the offices of the new city manager, Phil Batchelor, but when I walk in, there is no one in sight. It’s just a collection of empty cubicles. At length a woman appears and leads me to Batchelor himself. He’s in his 60s and, oddly enough, a published author. He’s written one book on how to raise children and another on how to face death. Both deliver an overtly Christian message, but he doesn’t come across as Evangelical; he comes across as sensible, and a little weary. His day job, before he retired, was running cities with financial difficulties. He came out of retirement to take this job, but only after the city council had asked him a few times. “The more you say no, the more determined they are to get you,” he says. His chief demand was not financial but social: he’d take the job only if the people on the city council ceased being nasty to one another and behaved civilly. He actually got that in writing, and they’ve kept their end of the bargain. “I’ve been in a lot of places that have been in a lot of trouble, but I’ve never seen anything like this,” he says. He then lays out what he finds unusual, beginning with the staffing levels. He’s now running the city, and he has a staff of one: I just met her. “When she goes out to the bathroom, she has to lock the [office] door,” he says, “because I’m in meetings, and we have no one else.”

Back in 2008, unable to come to terms with its many creditors, Vallejo declared bankruptcy. Eighty percent of the city’s budget—and the lion’s share of the claims that had thrown it into bankruptcy—were wrapped up in the pay and benefits of public-safety workers. Relations between the police and the firefighters, on the one hand, and the citizens, on the other, were at historic lows. The public-safety workers thought that the city was out to screw them on their contracts; the citizenry thought that the public-safety workers were using fear as a tool to extort money from them. The local joke was that “P.D.” stands for “Pay or Die.” The city-council meetings had become exercises in outrage: at one, a citizen arrived with a severed pig’s head on a barbecue grill. “There’s no good reason why Vallejo is as fucked up as it is,” says longtime resident Marc Garman, who created a Web site to catalogue the civil war. “It’s a boat ride to San Francisco. You throw a stone and you hit Napa.” Since the bankruptcy, the police and fire departments have been cut in half; some number of the citizens who came to Phil Batchelor’s office did so to say they no longer felt safe in their own homes. All other city services had been reduced effectively to zero. “Do you know that some cities actually pave their streets?” says Batchelor. “That’s not here.”

Jimmy P. Hoffa, son of James Riddle Hoffa, the former teamsters union leader who was disappeared in 1975, threatens the Tea Partiers.

“Let’s take these sons of bitches out!”

Video here.

UPDATE: Our Veep weighs in.

Obama, ruler via decree, goes around Congress. Again. Where’s the hand-wringing about the Constitution being “shredded.”

IBD:

A departing Obama administration bureaucrat just made the forcible unionization of American workers a lot easier. When it comes to bullying, this president has a double standard.

To do something about kids in school getting shoved around, the White House sends the first lady onto the Ellen Show to bemoan the supposed “culture of bullying” in America.

But when it comes to those kids’ hard-working fathers and mothers struggling for a paycheck amid 9.1% unemployment, President Obama is only too happy to see them bullied at the hands of labor thugs.

Wilma Liebman, who has worked as a lawyer for big labor- and union-coddling government agencies unceasingly since 1974, left behind quite a present for her benefactors Sunday as she ended her chairmanship of the National Labor Relations Board. Included in a series of pro-union decisions was the bureaucratic enactment of “Card Check” over the heads of Congress.

Card Check means that if union forces can get most employees within a workplace to sign a card requesting a unionization election, the opposite happens: A secret ballot of workers is actually prohibited, and the union automatically comes into being — even if most workers oppose being unionized.

The need for privacy in workers expressing their wishes on the exercise of their right to organize must itself be protected as a fundamental right. It is, without question, the only way to stop union intimidation and thuggery of millions of Americans.

As the National Restaurant Association — whose members provide livelihoods to millions — has aptly stated: “An employee’s decision to join a union should be made in private, protected from any coercion by unions, employers or co-workers.”

In essence, the NLRB ruling undemocratically passes liberal Democrats’ deceitfully named “Employee Free Choice Act” into law. As Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, has said in opposition to that bill:

“It is beyond me how one can possibly claim that a system whereby everyone — your employer, your union organizer and your co-workers — knows exactly how you vote on the issue of unionization gives an employee ‘free choice.’”

No one would agree to ending voter privacy in elections for president, senators, congressmen, governors and mayors. In union organizing, the likelihood of threats and actual violence are far greater.

Kline now accuses the NLRB of “unloading a barrage of bureaucratic activism that will devastate employees and job creators.”

“With more than 14 million Americans unemployed,” he suggests, “it is past time the president denounce the job-destroying actions of the NLRB and begin working with Congress on responsible policies that will put our nation’s workers and job-creators first.”

But the president, who placed Liebman as NLRB chief within hours of his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009, has a different take. In 2007, then-Sen. Barack Obama said Card Check would let workers “bargain for their fair share of the wealth our country creates.”

Big labor’s thugs have shoved Card Check down America’s throat against the will of Congress. Just call it using the “bully puppet.”

Christian Schneider at The Corner

Wisconsin Teachers Head for the Exits

Pity Ginny Fleck. She is a 69-year-old German teacher in the Green Bay Public School District who has decided to retire as a result of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s requirement that teachers now pay in to their pension accounts.

According to the state Department of Public Instruction, Fleck’s total compensation package was $88,292 last year ($58,750 in salary, the rest in benefits.) She estimates Walker’s reforms will cost her $8,000 this year — so her compensation package would only be around $80,000 — an apparent slap in the face for a teacher nearing 70 years old. According to this Associated Press article, Fleck has decided a salary of zero would be preferable to taking eighty grand of Walker’s blood money.

In retiring, Fleck has joined with nearly 5,000 other public-school employees in hanging it up this year. That is nearly twice the number of retirements Wisconsin school districts traditionally see in any given school year — 2,527 called it quits in 2010. That’s 5,000 teachers who have decided, in the words of a famous Pearl Jam song, that they would rather starve than eat Scott Walker’s bread.

Predictably, some school-district superintendents are hyperventilating about the mass exodus, complaining about all the classroom experience they’re losing. Yet in most cases, they are able to fill those positions specifically because of Walker’s reforms. The increased pension and health contributions now required of teachers will help fund the new positions — so while Walker’s plan might be driving teachers out, it is also attracting fresh young teachers into the public education system.

Furthermore, many older teachers may simply see the writing on the wall. Teachers’ unions inordinately represent older (more…)

Some Democrats in Wisconsin need a trip to reeducation camp to learn about civics and civility.

Protesters crowded the street outside Messmer Preparatory School in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood as Governor Walker visited the school Friday to read to children. The protests came just hours after someone vandalized the school ahead of the Governor’s visit.

“Some of these folks super glued our front doors at the prep school,” said Br. Bob Smith, OFM, the president of Messmer Catholic Schools, about the school on the corner of North Fratney and East Burleigh Streets.

He told Newsradio 620 WTMJ that a woman was walking in front of the school Thursday, asking people to protest.

According to Br. Smith, one protester said ” ‘Get ready for a riot,’ because they were going to disrupt the visit.”

They’re still seething over their failure to upend the will of voters to curtail some union power. George Will writes

…During the recall tumult, unions barely mentioned either their supposed grievance about collective bargaining, or their real fears, which concern money, particularly political money. Teachers unions can no longer bargain to require school districts to purchase teachers’ health insurance from the union’s preferred provider, which is especially expensive. This is saving millions of dollars, and reducing teacher layoffs. Also, unions must hold annual recertification votes.

And teachers unions may no longer automatically deduct dues from members’ paychecks. After Colorado in 2001 required public employees unions to have annual votes reauthorizing collection of dues, membership in the Colorado Association of Public Employees declined 70 percent. In 2005, Indiana stopped collecting dues from unionized public employees; in 2011, there are 90 percent fewer dues-paying members. In Utah, the end of automatic dues deductions for political activities in 2001 caused teachers’ payments to fall 90 percent. After a similar law passed in 1992 in Washington state, the percentage of teachers making such contributions declined from 82 to 11.

Democrats furiously oppose Walker because public employees unions are transmission belts, conveying money to the Democratic Party. Last year, $11.2 million in union dues was withheld from paychecks of Wisconsin’s executive branch employees and $2.6 million from paychecks at the university across the lake. Having spent improvidently on the recall elections, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the teachers union, is firing 40 percent of its staff.

John Hinderaker at Powerline Blog looks at union sponsored violence.

…In fact, however, we do have a political or quasi-political movement in the United States that in recent years has often resorted to violence: the union movement. To cite just one example, one of the terrible, little-known outrages of our modern history was the 1990 Greyhound bus strike, when union snipers fired on Greyhound buses across the country. There were at least 21 such incidents, in some of which passengers were shot. Union leaders, to my knowledge, were never punished for the armed guerrilla attacks they organized.

Another outburst of union violence occurred last week in Lambertville, Michigan. John King, who lives in Lambertville, owns a construction company called King Electrical Services which has the temerity to hire men and women who–like 93% of America’s private sector workers–do not belong to unions. This outrages union bosses who want either to force King’s employees to join unions against their will, or else drive King’s company out of business. Their preferred tactic to achieve these ends is low-level violence:

King is the largest non-union electrical contractor company in the area of southeastern Michigan near the Ohio border.

He has a long history of being on the receiving end of union-related violence, and this case doesn’t appear to be any different. …

“Since he’s been in business, in addition to the legal battles and verbal abuse, King’s company has been vandalized and threatened on numerous occasions,” LaborUnionReport.com reports. “Unfortunately, the vandalism has never stopped. This year alone, he’s had to report three incidents of damage to police. This doesn’t include the incidents of stalking he and his men have to go through while they’re working.

“In one incident earlier this year, rocks were thrown through the front windows of his shop, one of which had the word ‘kill’ written on it.”

Imagine the hysteria if Tea Partiers did such a thing! But such violence is routine if you are a businessman who is willing to employ construction workers without making them pay tribute to corrupt union bosses…