Teachers union gets caught being sneaky. Perhaps we should institute corporal punishment for union punks.

American Federation of Teachers officials have disavowed an internal report after it was posted on the union’s website following its annual conference, embedded on each of its 19 pages with the union’s logo and signed by a union official.

The report, titled “How Connecticut Defused the Parent Trigger,” was replaced on AFT’s website with a note saying “we have received complaints about these materials and have removed them because they do not represent AFT’s position.”

Education activist RiShawn Biddle copied the report before it was removed from the AFT website. The report describes in detail AFT’s strategy for subverting school reform legislation in Connecticut, a strategy that relied greatly on deceiving legislators and interested parents.

The Parent Trigger proposal originated in California and was adopted by education reformers in Connecticut last year. The proposal empowers a majority of parents with children attending a persistently failing school to force education officials to either close it, convert it to a charter school or replace its staff.

The union was blindsided when thousands of minority parents thronged in the Connecticut capitol to support the measure. Many of them expressed concern that their state’s public schools posted the biggest gap in the country on standardized test scores between minority and Caucasian students.

But where California teachers unions lobbied to block the bill in their state legislature and state education department, AFT’s Connecticut affiliate began an offensive that ultimately neutered the bill.

And, according to the now-disavowed report, they succeeded because the proposal’s “name is a misnomer,” since school governance councils “are advisory and do not have true governing authority.”

John McCormack in the Weekly Standard:

Emily Koczela had been anxiously waiting for months for Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s controversial budget repair bill to take effect. Koczela, the finance director for the Brown Deer school district, had been negotiating with the local union, trying to get it to accept concessions in order to make up for a $1 million budget shortfall. But the union wouldn’t budge.

“We laid off 27 [teachers] as a precautionary measure,” Koczela told me. “They were crying. Some of these people are my friends.”

On June 29 at 12:01 a.m., Koczela could finally breathe a sigh of relief. The budget repair bill​—​delayed for months by protests, runaway state senators, and a legal challenge that made its way to the state’s supreme court​—​was law. The 27 teachers on the chopping block were spared.

With “collective bargaining rights” limited to wages, Koczela was able to change the teachers’ benefits package to fill the budget gap. Requiring teachers to contribute 5.8 percent of their salary toward pensions saved $600,000. Changes to their health care plan​—​such as a $10 office visit co-pay (up from nothing)​—​saved $200,000. Upping the workload from five classes, a study hall, and two prep periods to six classes and two prep periods saved another $200,000. The budget was balanced.

“Everything we changed didn’t touch the children,” Koczela said. Under a collective bargaining agreement, she continued, “We could never have negotiated that​—​never ever.” Koczela, a graduate of Smith College and Duke University Law School, is no Republican flack. She says she’s a “classic Wisconsin independent. I vote both parties. I voted for Senator [Russ] Feingold but I voted for [Republican state] Senator Alberta Darling too.”

Good news for Wisconsin schools.

“This is a disaster,” said Mark Miller, the Wisconsin Senate Democratic leader, in February after Republican Gov. Scott Walker proposed a budget bill that would curtail the collective bargaining powers of some public employees. Miller predicted catastrophe if the bill were to become law — a charge repeated thousands of times by his fellow Democrats, union officials, and protesters in the streets.

Now the bill is law, and we have some very early evidence of how it is working. And for one beleaguered Wisconsin school district, it’s a godsend, not a disaster.

The Kaukauna School District, in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin near Appleton, has about 4,200 students and about 400 employees. It has struggled in recent times and this year faced a deficit of $400,000. But after the law went into effect, at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, school officials put in place new policies they estimate will turn that $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. And it’s all because of the very provisions that union leaders predicted would be disastrous…

We need a few more Chris Christies to throw their weight around.

New Jersey lawmakers tonight voted to enact a sweeping plan to cut public worker benefits after a long day of high-pitched political drama in the streets of Trenton and behind closed doors.

Union members chanted outside the Statehouse and in the Assembly balcony, and dissident Democrats tried to stall with amendments and technicalities. Although they successfully convinced top lawmakers to remove a controversial provision restricting public workers’ access to out-of-state medical care, they failed to halt a historic defeat for New Jersey’s powerful unions and a political victory for Republican Gov. Chris Christie.

“Together, we’re showing New Jersey is serious about providing long-term fiscal stability for our children and grandchildren,” Christie said in a statement released after the vote. “We are putting the people first and daring to touch the third rail of politics in order to bring reform to an unsustainable system.”

Christie and Republicans banded together with Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) and Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver (D-Essex) to advance the bill despite opposition from the majority of Democrats who control the Legislature.

SF Gate:

Here’s some fun facts. OK, maybe not so fun, depending on your perspective.

The average retiree from San Francisco city government earns an annual pension of $46,272, according to the San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System. The average retiree who worked at least 30 years in city government earns an annual pension of $76,981.

The average pension for a retiree from the Fire Department is $108,552. From the Police Department? $95,016. And everybody else? $41,136.

The figures show most retirees aren’t getting anywhere near the fat packages that outrage many city residents – like the $264,000 pension paid to former Police Chief Heather Fong last year.

But city retirees are doing pretty well compared with working San Franciscans. Census data show the median family income in the city is $86,546. Per capita income is $44,373.

Public Defender Jeff Adachi is gathering signatures to place a measure on the November ballot that would require city workers to pay far more of their salaries toward pensions. Currently, most pay 7.5 percent of their paychecks, but some highly paid employees would pay double that in bad economic years under Adachi’s plan.

“I think it’s interesting that the average pension paid to a city employee is higher than the average earnings of most San Franciscans,” he said. “When you start looking at the total cost of these pensions, it’s through the roof.”

Is it any wonder that businesses in California are heading for the exits?

Newsbusters

ABC, CBS and NBC’s morning shows on Wednesday offered a scant 41 seconds to a major Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling permitting the state’s collective bargaining law to go into effect. These are the same networks that, just four months ago, praised the “people power” of the liberal protesters and ignored signs comparing conservatives to Nazis.

On February 20, This Week host Christiane Amanpour compared events in the Middle East to protests in the U.S.: “This week: people power making history…Populist frustration is boiling over this week, as we’ve said not just in the Middle East but in the middle of this country as well.” On Wednesday, ABC’s Good Morning America skipped the latest ruling entirely.

Also on February 20, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams sounded a similar theme, linking riots in Egypt against a dictatorial government to “the uprising at home.” He gushed, “From the Mideast to the American Midwest tonight, people are rising up. Citizens uprisings are changing the world.”

Instapundit wrote about the court ruling:

LOSERS: So I was briefly in Washington yesterday, and I walked by SEIU headquarters just minutes after hearing that the Wisconsin Supreme Court had upheld Gov. Scott Walker’s bill reining in public employee unions. (And, most painful to the unions, abolishing automatic withholding of dues from employee paychecks, which is what this was really all about.)

So to be clear: They lost in the legislature. They lost in a judicial special election, where union organization should have been decisive. And they lost in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. And in the meantime, they made themselves look like thugs — and, worse, not very scary ones, really, just kind of nasty and pathetic ones — even going so far as to disrupt an award ceremony for Special Olympics kids. So: Losers. If they can’t win in Wisconsin, where can they win?

To paraphrase Witless Joe (Biden): what happened in Wisconsin is “a big fracking deal.”

Marcus Winters in City Journal:

Last fall, I took my wife—a well-informed, intelligent professional who unintentionally married into the contentious world of education reform—to see Davis Guggenheim’s documentary about the plight of America’s public schools, Waiting for Superman. She left the theater convinced that our schools face clear problems that have some clear solutions. But she was puzzled about why reforming the system was so difficult. She knew that the teachers’ unions had something to do with what was wrong with the schools, but just how they wielded so much power baffled her. How is it that the unions manage to protect preposterous arrangements like lifetime job security and seniority-based layoffs while forcing students to attend schools that everyone knows are failing? I’d guess that many people emerge from Guggenheim’s film asking similar questions.

In his new book, Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, Stanford University political scientist Terry Moe provides the answers. Moe traces the sources of the unions’ power and explains why they behave as they do. In the process, he blows apart several pervasive myths that have been used for far too long to let teachers and their unions off the hook. The book is a must-read for anyone frustrated by the slow progress toward improving America’s public schools. Readers familiar with the education reform debate will not be surprised by the list of clearly harmful policies that the unions support and commonsense reforms that they work so hard to impede. But those new to the topic will be shocked at the lengths to which the unions will go to defend an indefensible system.

What separates Special Interest from other books is its sharp dissection of the union party line. Moe brings to the subject his skills as one of the nation’s leading political scientists (he’s better known in the academy for his work on the American presidency). What’s shocking and, frankly, embarrassing for those of us who write about schools, is that this is the first serious study of the most powerful force in education policy.

Education policy isn’t made in a vacuum. It is negotiated in the political system, where the unions enjoy several advantages and dominate the debate. The most important source of union influence is financial and human resources. Taken together, over the last two decades, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association have been by far the nation’s leading political donors in federal elections, contributing about 30 percent more money than the second highest contributor, AT&T. Teachers’ unions are either the Number One or Number Two political contributor in 60 percent of U.S. states. The unions further shape the political process by providing countless volunteers to operate phone banks and knock on doors. Using these resources, they have essentially taken over the Democratic Party, which receives 99 percent of their political contributions…

The California Correctional Peace Officers Assn — aka prison guards union, the same bunch that smuggles cell phones to inmates including Charles Manson — backed 107 candidates in the 2010 elections. 104 were elected.

So they’re gloating.

WATCH THE VIDEO HERE.

LAT columnist Steve Lopez writes about the new contract Governor Jerry Brown agreed to since taking the oath of office in January.

…And that new contract? As my colleague Jack Dolan reported, it has lots of goodies.

Would you like eight weeks of time off in a year?

Become a prison guard.

The contract also lifted the cap on unused vacation days guards can cash in when they retire — and use to sweeten the amount of their pensions. The current cost of that accumulated time, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office, is $600 million.

So yeah, the guards didn’t do so bad. When the ink on the preliminary document dried in April, Gov. Brown took a beating. Republican legislators and other critics said the deal with 32,000 correctional and parole officers was a nice fat thank you for the $2-million support of the union.

The truth is somewhat more complicated. Brown says he had little choice but to lift the vacation cap because of a furlough system imposed by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that makes it impossible for employees not to exceed the cap. He points out that he did negotiate a number of concessions, including increased employee contributions to pensions, and he notes that he won union support for his plan to eventually reduce the state inmate population by having low-risk offenders handled at the county level.

So the union is dictating state policy on how criminals are handled. Tail wags dog.

Which brings up an interesting juxtaposition. On the front page of today’s LAT, we learn counties have been emptying their jails because of budget cuts.

The North Facility of Pitchess Detention Center was once home to some 1,600 men. Now it holds just two.

The lucky pair can choose from any of a hundred open beds for a nap. There’s never a line to use the jailhouse pay phones. And come meal time, there’s always enough for seconds.

Amid steep budget cuts, L.A. County jails have been forced to shed inmates in droves, more than any other jail system in the nation. That drop is most striking at the Castaic facility, where the Sheriff’s Department has cut the inmate count to the bare minimum needed to keep the lockup from falling into disrepair.

Soon, however, facilities like this one might again be bustling, as the state considers moving inmates from its overcrowded prisons to county jails, a plan Sheriff Lee Baca is betting could be a boon for his cash-strapped department.

But in recent months, jail time has felt a lot like summer camp for the fortunate few who have served time at the nearly abandoned lockup.

On a recent morning, a pair of inmates — one black, the other Latino, members of rival gangs — lounged on adjacent bunks watching the movie “The Birdcage” on TV. At most jails, picking a channel is highly routinized to avoid fights. Here they can watch most anything they want.

J. Christian Adams at Pajamas Media tells how the GOP got the best of Tom Harkin’s hearing about the middle class.

…Tom Harkin (D-IA), called the hearing to discuss “The Endangered Middle Class: Is the American Dream Slipping Out of Reach for American Families?” Harkin called perfectly predictable witnesses who stuck to the party line, like former Clinton administration official Robert Reich. Reich couldn’t understand why we didn’t raise “taxes on the rich” so all citizens could share in the gains of our economy. We are in the terrible position we are today, according to Reich, because we “deregulated and privatized” and “slashed public goods and investment.” With record debt, Reich believes the government is still not spending enough!  Forgive him: his economics are stuck in 1937, looking up at the Commanding Heights.

Another witness, Heather Boushey, is a forgettable economist from the Center for American Progress who claimed the supposed “decline in our standard of living” is due to “the decline in union membership across our nation.” Her economics were stuck in 1956 — she spent most of her time attacking our “Wal-Mart” economy. Apparently having one of the most successful retailers in the world hurts the economy in her view. (Her testimony is hardly surprising, given her father is a retired Boeing union machinist in Washington state.)

A final witness was a union automaton from the AFL-CIO. Naturally this third witness agreed with the previous Wal-Mart antagonist: middle class problems are caused by the decline in union membership resulting from the “intense and protracted anti-union campaigns” of employers. She was stuck in 1917.

Harkin obviously wanted the hearing to be a forum for bloviating in favor of labor unions, the largest campaign contributors to Democrats. Additionally, no Senate hearing would be complete without the usual tactic of blaming George Bush and evil corporate America for a variety of economic ills, and this hearing didn’t disappoint.

But Senator Mike Enzi outfoxed Harkin. He called — as his sole witness — Michael Luttig, general counsel for the Boeing Company and former justice of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Luttig was there to talk about the outrageous complaint filed by the National Labor Relations Board against Boeing for opening up a second assembly line for the 787 Dreamliner aircraft in right-to-work South Carolina instead of closed shop Washington state. Like so many large manufacturers, such as Mercedes, BMW, Toyota, and Michelin, companies are realizing the American South provides a highly skilled workforce without the labor boss skim. Why do you think the rust belt is the rust belt?

Luttig emphasized that a union strike in 2008 in Washington shut down production of the 787, costing Boeing more than a billion dollars and “damaging Boeing’s reputation for reliability with its airline customers, suppliers, and investors.” Boeing took into account many different factors in making a major assembly investment decision, and the recurring strikes in Washington was just one of them…

And this is priceless:

Al Franken made a late appearance and demonstrated, once again, why Saturday Night Live suits him better than the United States Senate. Franken got angry and said it is untrue that anyone is ever forced to join a union. He obviously never worked in the produce section at Shop ‘n Save in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In a closed-shop state like Pennsylvania, the laws require employees to be members of a union if the employer is unionized. Enzi quipped, in response to Franken’s error, that you wouldn’t have to join a union unless “you wanted a job.”

Putz. He should know from showbiz you can’t work without being union.

Heck, when I was tour guide in Washington DC in college, I had to join the teamsters to get the job.

Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore:

The Obama administration’s National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint last month against Boeing to block production of the company’s 787 Dreamliner at a new assembly plant in South Carolina—a “right to-work” state with a law against compulsory union membership. If the NLRB has its way, Dreamliner assembly will return to Washington, a union-shop state, along with more than 1,000 jobs.

The NLRB’s action, which Boeing will challenge at a hearing next month, is a big deal. It’s the first time a federal agency has intervened to tell an American company where it can and cannot operate a plant within the U.S. It lays the foundation of a regulatory wall with one express purpose: to prevent the direct competition of right-to-work states with union-shop states. Why, as South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley recently asked on these pages, should Washington have any more right to these jobs than South Carolina?

A recent New York Times editorial justified the NLRB decision by arguing that unions are suffering from “the flight of companies to ‘Right-to-Work’ states where workers cannot be required to join a union.” That’s for sure, and quite an admission. We’ve been observing that migration pattern for years, but liberals have denied it’s actually happening—until now.

Every year we rank the states on their economic competitiveness in a report called “Rich States, Poor States” for the American Legislative Exchange Council. This ranking uses 15 fiscal, tax and regulatory variables to determine which states have policies that are most conducive to prosperity. Two of these 15 policies have consistently stood out as the most important in predicting where jobs will be created and incomes will rise. First, states with no income tax generally outperform high income tax states. Second, states that have right-to-work laws grow faster than states with forced unionism.

As of today there are 22 right-to-work states and 28 union-shop states. Over the past decade (2000-09) the right-to-work states grew faster in nearly every respect than their union-shop counterparts: 54.6% versus 41.1% in gross state product, 53.3% versus 40.6% in personal income, 11.9% versus 6.1% in population, and 4.1% versus -0.6% in payrolls…

John McCormack in the Weekly Standard:

Did you hear the news? Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, the architect of the House Republicans’ budget, was booed! By his own constituents!

The video of said town hall booing was clipped by the liberal blog ThinkProgress, zipped around the Internet, and then moved up the conveyor belt to CNN, MSNBC, NPR, NBC’s Nightly News, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, and other media outlets.

And so the “budget backlash” narrative began.

“Chairman Ryan, the people, including your constituents, are talking,” House minority leader Nancy Pelosi said in response to the video. “Are you listening?” (Yes, this is the same Nancy Pelosi who dismissed the opposition to the national health care bill at the 2009 town hall meetings as “astroturf” or “un-American” citizens who were “carrying Swastikas.”)

The only problem with the backlash narrative is that it is wildly misleading. Despite efforts by labor unions and a variety of liberal activist organizations—One Wisconsin Now, MoveOn.org, Citizens Action of Wisconsin, Community for Change, etc.—to pack Ryan’s events with detractors and hecklers, they were overwhelmingly outnumbered by his supporters.

At the 19 town hall meetings held over the course of two weeks, Ryan was praised much more frequently than he was heckled by attendees. Judging from applause versus boos this week, I didn’t witness a single event where Ryan had less than two-thirds of the crowd supporting him. Some constituents thanked Ryan for his “moral courage.” Others offered more effusive praise. “I want to thank you for having the cojones—and not the other word, which I hope you all know what it is—for standing up for us, the whole United States,” a small business owner named Maria told Ryan in Lake Geneva on April 26. “I love you. As a surrogate mother.”

His opponents were able muster up a crowd of 50 to 75 people to protest his event in Kenosha later that day—a vast sea of rage compared to the 3 protesters who showed up in Franklin on Thursday or the lone man holding a “TAX THE TOP” sign outside of the Oak Creek town hall.

One man protesting in Kenosha, who identified himself only as a Teamsters member (“I don’t have a name,” he told me) tried to pick a fight with a Ryan supporter and then a police officer outside the event. At times, he stood directly in front of Ryan’s car door as the meeting was about to conclude.

“I will go to jail for you, man,” the Teamsters member said as he got in the face of a Ryan supporter.

“Officer, arrest this man,” he then told a police officer. “He’s inciting a riot,” he continued before calling the Ryan supporter a “Nazi.”

He succeeded in forcing Ryan to leave with a police escort out of another exit.

“Chickenshit!” yelled Ned Harper, president of the local SEIU chapter, upon hearing the news that his Teamsters buddy had forced Ryan to leave out of a back door.

Michael Levenson in the Boston Globe:

House lawmakers voted overwhelmingly last night to strip police officers, teachers, and other municipal employees of most of their rights to bargain over health care, saying the change would save millions of dollars for financially strapped cities and towns.

The 111-to-42 vote followed tougher measures to broadly eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees in Ohio, Wisconsin, and other states. But unlike those efforts, the push in Massachusetts was led by Democrats who have traditionally stood with labor to oppose any reduction in workers’ rights.

Unions fought hard to stop the bill, launching a radio ad that assailed the plan and warning legislators that if they voted for the measure, they could lose their union backing in the next election. After the vote, labor leaders accused House Speaker Robert A. DeLeo and other Democrats of turning their backs on public employees.

“It’s pretty stunning,’’ said Robert J. Haynes, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO. “These are the same Democrats that all these labor unions elected. The same Democrats who we contributed to in their campaigns. The same Democrats who tell us over and over again that they’re with us, that they believe in collective bargaining, that they believe in unions. . . . It’s a done deal for our relationship with the people inside that chamber.’’

Apparently, these particular Democrats didn’t stay bought.

George Skelton in the LA Times yesterday:

When Gov. Jerry Brown proposed a new state budget in January, he projected saving $515 million in employees’ take-home pay through collective bargaining. He didn’t come close and is being ripped by critics.

He particularly is being slammed for a contract his representatives negotiated with the politically powerful prison guards union.

“Union puppet.” “Payoff.” That sort of thing.

After all, the guards union — the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn. — did spend nearly $2 million helping him get elected last year.

Brown naturally takes offense.

A public safety union that strongly supported Republican Meg Whitman — the California Statewide Law Enforcement Assn. — got basically the same contract deal as the prison guards, the governor’s aides point out.

As if that’s a standard to be followed.

Brown had projected reducing “take-home pay” for the affected employees by 10%. The legislative analyst says he actually saved only 3.6% in “employee compensation costs.” In the end, the Brown administration pegged “payroll savings” at 5% for the next fiscal year.

Whatever language is used, there’s no question that the governor missed his stated target. It’s the target that the Legislature had assumed he’d reach when they whittled the general fund deficit from roughly $26 billion to $15 billion in March, mostly by slashing healthcare and welfare.

If the proposed union contracts are ratified by workers and the Legislature, the deficit will be $200 million deeper.

Brown offered me an explanation for the $200-million budget miscalculation that I never would have imagined. It wasn’t a miscalculation at all, he said. He just didn’t want to place in the budget the real figure he was willing to settle for in collective bargaining. So he made up the projected savings targets.

“Here’s the deal: You can’t put your bottom line in the budget,” the governor said. “It’s a little awkward. Unions then figure out where you’re going. You have no chance of getting that number.”

OK, but what about the credibility of the governor’s budget proposal? What else is phony in there? How about those tax extensions? Are they all really necessary, or just an opening bid in negotiations with Republicans?

Fool us once…

The six union contracts essentially are patterned after 15 negotiated last year by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Brown said. He couldn’t get tougher with unions than Schwarzenegger did, the governor insisted, because that would have amounted to “discrimination” against some.

So if it’s rape for one, it’s rape for all.

And how does the left interpret this issue? Here’s a comment to Skelton’s comment that more or less summarizes their thinking.

It is time everyone (including you) stop attacking the Public Service workers and the Unions. They are not the problem. The pension bases were fine prior to the meltdown. You want to do some real reporting, then head on over to Wall Street and find who caused the problem(s) and while you are at it, get our money back.

And as you pass through DC, perhaps you can tell Obama to raise taxes on the RICH. That will help everyone

California faces terrible finances, much of it due to grotesque spending on pensions for public servants. Big Labor owns the state.

I had hoped Jerry Brown, in his last stint in public office, would do a Nixon-to-China and take the state back from the unions.

But no. He’s just a hack.

Deep in the 200-page contract that Gov. Jerry Brown recently approved for state prison guards is a provision that could generate a cash windfall to the officers when they retire.

The guards, who are among Brown’s largest political benefactors, would be able to save an unlimited number of vacation days under their new deal. When they leave state service, those days could be exchanged for cash at their final pay rate, which would probably be higher than when they earned the time off.

The governor is extending this benefit only to members of the California Correctional Peace Officers Assn., a union that spent nearly $2 million to help him win election last year.

Removing the decades-old limit on accrued vacation — now 80 days for most state employees — would be a “huge liability” for taxpayers, said Nick Schroeder of the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office. Schroeder said he had not determined the cost of lifting the cap, but his analysis of the deal showed the average corrections union member has accumulated nearly 19 weeks of leave time to date. All of that time off has “a current cash value of over $600 million,” he said.

The deal also would give the members 18 more days off over the life of the two-year contract, according to Schroeder, bringing the typical prison guard’s time off to more than eight weeks in the first year…

Read first, then scroll down for the answer. Remember, the Koch brothers are the left’s villains du jour.

A number of organizations are advocating a boycott of the products that come from companies owned by the Koch family. This is problematic for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it could potentially hurt the wrong people.

The Koch brothers own Georgia Pacific. It is an American consumer goods company that makes everyday products like facial tissue, napkins, paper towels, paper cups and the like. Their plants are great examples of American advanced manufacturing. Incidentally,

GP makes most of its products here in America. The company’s workforce is highly unionized. In fact, 80 percent of its mills are under contract with one or more labor union.  It is not inaccurate to say that these are among the best-paid manufacturing jobs in America.

This presents a dilemma and a paradox. While the Koch brothers are credited with advocating an agenda and groups that are clearly hostile to labor and labor’s agenda, the brothers’ company in practice and in general has positive and productive collective bargaining relationships with its unions.

While some companies are running from investment in American jobs, The Koch brothers’ Georgia Pacific just reached agreements with its primary union in the paper industry to invest more than a half a billion dollars in capital to essentially create two state-of-the-art machines that conserve fiber and energy at two separate union mills.

While certainly there are disagreements from time to time on what the right pension program is, or right wage increases and incentives, or the right formula for health care cost sharing, ultimately we end up with negotiated solutions.

So the problem for the advocates of a boycott against Koch is that it can only marginally hurt Koch, and the workers who are the epitome of what advanced manufacturing jobs in the United States ought to look like, would be the first casualties of a boycott. Of course, this will eventually drive a wedge between groups that are otherwise in political alignment.

If consumers pick alternate products (because people will still use toilet paper), in many cases, the substitute will be from a company with a track record that is much less friendly to the values of the workers who would, as a result of the boycott, become the collateral damage. The Koch brothers’ lifestyle will not dramatically change; there are no shareholders that will become concerned; the company is privately owned. The stock won’t plummet either — there is none.

The author is Jon Geenan, vice-president the United Steelworkers Union.

We Californians pay taxes so criminals can be found, prosecuted and locked up.

Meanwhile, some of the people we pay to keep them locked up smuggle cell phones into the prisons, thus allowing crime bosses to run their empires from behind bars.

Why not just screen the prison guards on their way to work? Because their union rules make it too expensive, as the LA Times explains.

A proposed law against taking cellphones into California prisons passed a key vote Tuesday, but the measure would exempt prison employees — considered a main source of phones used to arrange crimes from behind bars — from screening by metal detectors as they go to work.

Requiring prison guards to stand in line for airport-like security checks would cost the state millions, according to legislative analysts. That is because members of the politically powerful corrections officers union are paid for “walk time” — the minutes it takes to get from their cars, or the front gate, to their posts inside the prisons.

Amid the state’s budget crisis, any proposal that would cost money is a “dead end,” said Bill Mabie, spokesman for state Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima), sponsor of the cellphone bill.

HuffPo Lee Stranahan, who describes himself as “a pro-choice, pro-single payer, anti-war, pro-gay rights independent liberal” busts the media.

Three questions for you.

1. Do you think of Republicans and the Tea Party as dangerous, violent extremists?
2. Do you think the Wisconsin protests over GOP Governor Scott Walker’s move to strip public sector employees of collective bargaining were peaceful?
3. Do you scoff at the right wing notion that mainstream media like the New York Times, the TV networks and NPR have a liberal media bias against the conservatives?

If you answered ‘yes’ to all three of those questions, then let me ask you one more…

Why isn’t the mainstream media talking about the death threats against Republican politicians in Wisconsin?

Try to set aside whatever biases or preconceptions you might have for a moment and ask yourself why death threats against politicians aren’t considered national news, especially in the wake of the all too fresh shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and other bystanders. And there hasn’t just been one death threat, but a number of them.

Here’s an example and it’s real. According to Wisconsin State Department of Justice, authorities have found a suspect who admitted to sending the following email:

I want to make this perfectly clear. Because of your actions today and in the past couple of weeks I and the group of people that are working with me have decided that we’ve had enough. We feel that you and your republican dictators have to die. This is how it’s going to happen: I as well as many others know where you and your family live, it’s a matter of public records. We have all planned to assult you by arriving at your house and putting a nice little bullet in your head. However, this isn’t enough. We also have decided that this may not be enough to send the message. So we have built several bombs that we have placed in various locations around the areas in which we know that you frequent. This includes, your house, your car, the state capitol, and well I won’t tell you all of them because that’s just no fun. Since we know that you are not smart enough to figure out why this is happening to you we have decided to make it perfectly clear to you. If you and your goonies feel that it’s necessary to strip the rights of 300,000 people and ruin their lives, making them unable to feed, clothe, and provide the necessities to their families and themselves then We will “get rid of” (in which I mean kill) the 8 of you. Please understand that this does not include the heroic Senator that risked everything to go aganist what you and your goonies wanted him to do. The 8 includes the 7 senators and the dictator. We feel that it’s worth our lives becasue we would be saving the lives of 300,000 people. Please make your peace with God as soon as possible and say goodbye to your loved ones we will not wait any longer. Goodbye ASSHOLE!!!!

After the Giffords shooting, authorities have to take this sort of threat seriously. The media should too, even if the disturbed person who sent that email was motivated by exactly the kind of rhetoric that’s been used by many liberals against GOP officials over and over again during the Madison protests. And there are more threats floating around the internet, in varying degrees of scary and credible.

If you read liberal blogs, you might have heard of some of these threats. Indirectly, anyway. Sarah Palin said the rhetoric should be toned down. The threats themselves were ignored and Palin was mocked.

On the other hand, if you read conservative blogs or listen to conservative media, you know all about these threats because people like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and websites like Newsbusters and BigJournalism have not only been talking about the death threats for days now but they’ve been talking about the mainstream and liberal media ignoring the threats for days.

Read it all.

James Taranto:

Last week, as the Wisconsin stalemate was coming to an end, we worried about the potential threat that unionized policemen, in “solidarity” with other unionized government employees, might tolerate or even participate in lawless behavior in order to undermine the workings of republican governance and preserve union privileges. Milwaukee radio host Charlie Sykes reports that Wisconsin businessmen are now receiving letters importuning them to oppose Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts on behalf of Wisconsin’s taxpayers:

The undersigned groups would like your company to publicly oppose Governor Walker’s efforts to virtually eliminate collective bargaining for public employees in Wisconsin. While we appreciate that you may need some time to consider this request, we ask for your response by March 17. In the event that you do not respond to this request by that date, we will assume that you stand with Governor Walker and against the teachers, nurses, police officers, fire fighters, and other dedicated public employees who serve our communities.

In the event that you cannot support this effort to save collective bargaining, please be advised that the undersigned will publicly and formally boycott the goods and services provided by your company. However, if you join us, we will do everything in our power to publicly celebrate your partnership in the fight to preserve the right of public employees to be heard at the bargaining table. Wisconsin’s public employee unions serve to protect and promote equality and fairness in the workplace. We hope you will stand with us and publicly share that ideal.

In the event you would like to discuss this matter further, please contact the executive Director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, Jim Palmer, at [phone number redacted].

Palmer’s union is the first of the seven “undersigned groups”; the others are two more police unions, two firemen’s unions and two teachers unions. Although the new legislation excludes police and fire unions from its limits on so-called collective bargaining, one can understand why they would oppose it: Their own privileges become less secure if they are the only ones to enjoy them.

Remember when citizens showing up at town hall meetings in 2009 to complain about ObamaCare were depicted as dangerous mobs?

Here’s how the teacher’s union behaved at the Wisconsin capitol, banging on a bus with GOP legislators. Don’t look for this on the network news.

Peggy Noonan:

When union leaders negotiate with a politician, they’re negotiating with someone they can hire and fire. Public unions have numbers and money, and politicians need both.

And politicians fear strikes because the public hates them. When governors negotiate with unions, it’s not collective bargaining, it’s more like collusion.

Obama’s not very clever taking potshots. Incoming!

Governor Scott Walker:

“I’m sure the President knows that most federal employees do not have collective bargaining for wages and benefits while our plan allows it for base pay. And I’m sure the President knows that the average federal worker pays twice as much for health insurance as what we are asking for in Wisconsin. At least I would hope he knows these facts.

“Furthermore, I’m sure the President knows that we have repeatedly praised the more than 300,000 government workers who come to work every day in Wisconsin.

“I’m sure that President Obama simply misunderstands the issues in Wisconsin, and isn’t acting like the union bosses in saying one thing and doing another.”

Oh, you can feel the dripping sarcasm.

“All government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public-personnel management. The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people.”

– Franklin D.  Roosevelt

_______________________________________________

“Certain business leaders may consider “big government” or socialism more of an immediate threat to their interests than communism. Are they allowing themselves to be deluded by their own propaganda to the effect that organized labor in this country is in favor of big government or the nationalization of industry?

Nothing could be further from the truth. The main function of American trade unions is collective bargaining. It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government. Unions, as well as employers, would vastly prefer to have even Government regulation of labor-management relations reduced to a minimum consistent with the protection of the public welfare.”

– George Meany, leader of the AFL-CIO for 25 years

Matt Bai has a long profile of New Jersey governor Chris Christie in the NYT. It’s long, but an excellent read.

Like a stand-up comedian working out-of-the-way clubs, Chris Christie travels the townships and boroughs of New Jersey­, places like Hackettstown and Raritan and Scotch Plains, sharpening his riffs about the state’s public employees, whom he largely blames for plunging New Jersey into a fiscal death spiral. In one well-worn routine, for instance, the governor reminds his audiences that, until he passed a recent law that changed the system, most teachers in the state didn’t pay a dime for their health care coverage, the cost of which was borne by taxpayers.

And so, Christie goes on, forced to cut more than $1 billion in local aid in order to balance the budget, he asked the teachers not only to accept a pay freeze for a year but also to begin contributing 1.5 percent of their salaries toward health care. The dominant teachers’ union in the state responded by spending millions of dollars in television and radio ads to attack him.

“The argument you heard most vociferously from the teachers’ union,” Christie says, “was that this was the greatest assault on public education in the history of New Jersey.” Here the fleshy governor lumbers a few steps toward the audience and lowers his voice for effect. “Now, do you really think that your child is now stressed out and unable to learn because they know that their poor teacher has to pay 1½ percent of their salary for their health care benefits? Have any of your children come home — any of them — and said, ‘Mom.’ ” Pause. “ ‘Dad.’ ” Another pause. “ ‘Please. Stop the madness.’ ”

By this point the audience is starting to titter, but Christie remains steadfastly somber in his role as the beseeching student. “ ‘Just pay for my teacher’s health benefits,’ ” he pleads, “ ‘and I’ll get A’s, I swear. But I just cannot take the stress that’s being presented by a 1½ percent contribution to health benefits.’ ” As the crowd breaks into appreciative guffaws, Christie waits a theatrical moment, then slams his point home. “Now, you’re all laughing, right?” he says. “But this is the crap I have to hear.”

Keep reading.

A serious think piece, as usual, from Walter Russell Mead:

Is America in a race to the bottom, or are we going through what the Austrian born economist Joseph Schumpeter would call a process of “creative destruction”?

As readers over thirty will remember, Ronald Reagan used to tell the story of two boys: a pessimist and an optimist.  A psychologist put the pessimistic boy in a roomful of toys; he sat around morosely worried that if he played with the toys they would break and he would be blamed.  He put the optimist in a room with a big pile of horse manure; the boy started eagerly digging.  The psychologist asked why and the boy answered that with all that manure on the floor there had to be a pony in there somewhere.

Your attitude toward that story probably predicts what you think about the protests in Madison — and a lot else besides.  If you think America is in a race to the bottom as low wage labor in China and elsewhere puts more and more pressure on our middle class living standards here in the US, you probably believe that the Republican attack on public employee unions in Wisconsin is part of a general assault on working people in the United States — and you think this is something we need to fight.  You likely think that the decline of the American middle class will destroy our prosperity and stability and that the public unions are one of the last forces standing in the way of an all out corporate assault on what’s left of the American way of life.

…

The argument in Madison reflects both consensus and disagreement.  The consensus is that things in the United States are going in the wrong direction.  The argument is over what to do.  The Tea Party and other backers of Governor Scott Walker basically argue two things: that big government is the friend of the Davoisie rather than an effective regulator protecting the rest of us by keeping the fat cats in check, and that high government costs and inefficiencies are part of the problem driving down incomes and living standards rather than part of the solution.  The public unions and their supporters argue just the other way: a powerful government is our last ditch line of defense against an aggressive plutocracy and government spending on good living wages for employees is a bastion of what is left of the American middle class.

This is where the pony comes in.  If you think the changes in our economy since the 1970s are just a pointless race to the bottom, you want America to stop digging.  The world is going the wrong way — toward some kind of Blade Runner dystopian future of high tech and low living standards.  You want to stop this future in its tracks.  Governor Walker has created an artificial budget crisis by giving huge tax breaks to rich corporations; now he is using this as an excuse not just to cut the wages of middle class working people but to break them politically by destroying the union that stands between them and naked corporate power.  The systematic destruction of first private sector unions (down to only 7% of the workforce) and now public unions (a majority of American union members overall with more than a third of government workers enrolled) is part of an offensive that won’t stop until the American middle class is back in the third world.

Cure for the Blues

I see those arguments and have felt their force for thirty years.  I’m not, however, convinced that they ultimately make sense.  I’ve been thinking about globalization and the future of American prosperity and power since writing Mortal Splendor and in those thirty years I haven’t so much changed my mind about the problems we face as come to a better understanding of the roots of American prosperity — where the ponies are and how they grow.

I wrote in my first post on Madison that I don’t think that restructuring state government is about the race to the bottom: it’s the way to avoid a race to the bottom.  That answer needs a bit more elaboration.  The world is in a race: a race to be the most efficient and innovative.  Cheapness is one way to win this race: cheap labor can be an advantage.

But America shouldn’t compete on the basis of cheap labor: we are not nor should we try to be the Walmart of Work.  So the first question becomes how do we compete in ways that don’t involve endlessly ratcheting down wages and benefits?  And the second, related question is how can we generate enough demand for American workers so that market forces drive incomes up from year to year and decade to decade?

The key to success is obvious: we need to continue to raise productivity throughout the economy.  If productivity goes up quickly enough, wages can rise here even if they are falling elsewhere.  This is getting harder; productivity is both easier to measure and to raise in manufacturing than in services.  But substituting capital and technology for human sweat has to be a large part of what we do.

Jonah Goldberg on the critical difference between public- and private-sector unions.

…Do you recall the Great DMV cave-in of 1959? How about the travails of second-grade teachers recounted in Upton Sinclair’s famous schoolhouse sequel to “The Jungle”? No? Don’t feel bad, because no such horror stories exist.

Government workers were making good salaries in 1962 when President Kennedy lifted, by executive order (so much for democracy), the federal ban on government unions. Civil service regulations and similar laws had guaranteed good working conditions for generations.

The argument for public unionization wasn’t moral, economic or intellectual. It was rankly political.

Traditional organized labor, the backbone of the Democratic Party, was beginning to lose ground. As Daniel DiSalvo wrote in “The Trouble with Public Sector Unions,” in the fall issue of National Affairs, JFK saw how in states such as New York and Wisconsin, where public unions were already in place, local liberal pols benefited politically and financially. He took the idea national.

The plan worked. Public union membership skyrocketed and government union support for the party of government skyrocketed with it. From 1989 to 2004, AFSCME — the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — gave nearly $40 million to candidates in federal elections, with 98.5% going to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Why would local government unions give so much in federal elections? Because government workers have an inherent interest in boosting the amount of federal tax dollars their local governments get. Put simply, people in the government business support the party of government.

And this gets to the real insidiousness of government unions. Wisconsin labor officials fairly note that they’ve acceded to many of their governor’s specific demands — that workers contribute to their pensions and healthcare costs, for example. But they don’t want to lose the right to collective bargaining.

But that is exactly what they need to lose. (more…)

Doctors and teachers commiting fraud.

John Fund:

…Why are national liberal groups treating Wisconsin as if it were their last stand? Partly for reasons of symbolism. Historically, Wisconsin “embraced the organized labor movement more heartily than any other [state],” notes liberal activist Abe Sauer.

The Badger State became the first to pass a worker-compensation program in 1911, as well as the first to create unemployment compensation in 1932. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees—the chief national union representing non-federal public employees—was founded in Madison in 1936. And in 1959, Wisconsin became the first state to grant public employees collective-bargaining rights, which influenced President John F. Kennedy’s decision to grant federal employees the right to join unions three years later.

Labor historian Fred Siegel offers further reasons why unions are manning the barricades. Mr. Walker would require that public-employee unions be recertified annually by a majority vote of all their members, not merely by a majority of those that choose to cast ballots. In addition, he would end the government’s practice of automatically deducting union dues from employee paychecks. For Wisconsin teachers, union dues total between $700 and $1,000 a year.

“Ending dues deductions breaks the political cycle in which government collects dues, gives them to the unions, who then use the dues to back their favorite candidates and also lobby for bigger government and more pay and benefits,” Mr. Siegel told me. After New York City’s Transport Workers Union lost the right to automatic dues collection in 2007 following an illegal strike, its income fell by more than 35% as many members stopped ponying up. New York City ended the dues collection ban after 18 months.

Myron Lieberman, a former Minnesota public school teacher who became a contract negotiator for the American Federation of Teachers, says that since the 1960s collective bargaining has so “greatly increased the political influence of unions” that they block the sorts of necessary change that other elements of society have had to accept.