Catastrophe (16 page)

Everyone expects Obama to try to manipulate the census to increase Democratic representation. But the administration showed its hand prematurely when the president nominated New Hampshire Republican Senator Judd Gregg to be his secretary of commerce. Gregg withdrew his name when he realized that he couldn’t let himself become a bipartisan fig leaf to camouflage Obama’s ultra-left program.

Before Gregg pulled out, though, minority groups around the nation protested his selection. Why? Because the Census Bureau is part of the De
partment of Commerce. The Georgia talk-show host Martha Zoller, writing in
Human Events
, describes how even “before the ink was dry on the announcement of Sen. Judd Gregg as Commerce Secretary, the Congressional Black Caucus and Latino groups were complaining that a Republican could not be in control of the census.”
¹⁸⁶

Gregg, who is opposed to sampling, had voted against funding increases for the Census Bureau. As chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, which oversees the Commerce Department, Gregg had opposed a 1999 Clinton administration request for emergency funds for the 2000 census; in 1995, he had voted to abolish the Department of Commerce.
¹⁸⁷

These past positions made liberals suspect that Gregg couldn’t be counted on to cook the books and give them a biased census. So the Obama administration let it be known that its chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, would be in charge of the census and would have the power of oversight. The appointment of Emanuel—the former head of the House Democratic campaign committee—to oversee the census signaled Obama’s intention to do all he can to manipulate the figures to give the Democrats a good, even if inaccurate, count.

Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, puts it well. “The last thing the census needs,” he says, “is for any hard-bitten partisan (either a Karl Rove or a Rahm Emanuel) to manipulate these critical numbers. Many federal funding formulas depend on them, as well as the whole fabric of federal and state representation.”
¹⁸⁸

Sabato adds, “I’ve always remembered what Joseph Stalin said: ‘Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.’”
¹⁸⁹

On April 2, 2009, Obama nominated Robert M. Groves to be the census director. Groves is a long time advocate of the use of sampling in the census counts. The Associated Press noted that “when he was the [census] bureau’s associate director, Goves recommended that the 1990 census be statistically adjusted to make up for an undercount of roughly 5 million people, many of them minorities in dense urban ares who tend to vote for Democrats.”
¹⁹⁰

At the time, Bush’s commerce secretary, Robert Mosbacher, overruled Groves and called the proposed statistical adjustment “political tampering.”

But now, when Groves tries his political tricks, there won’t be anyone there to stop him.

ACTION AGENDA

There is no doubt that Obama will attempt to manipulate the 2010 census for partisan advantage. The question is: What can we do about it?

In this case, plenty. The Supreme Court has already established its jurisdiction over the census, citing the fact that it is a constitutional, not a legislative, requirement. In the past, the Court has resisted efforts to use “sampling” in making the final count. But each census poses its own particular issues—and we can’t stand by and trust that Obama will adjudicate them fairly.

So it’s almost inevitable that any attempt he makes to manipulate the census will be challenged in court. But that will require a lot of funding—and support for collecting evidence and for preparing the challenges. Through www.dickmorris.com, we’ll keep you posted on where and when you can help this process along.

We can’t let Obama steal the census.

PUSHING UNIONIZATION

Labor unions, long diminishing as an industrial force, have resurrected their political punch in the past decade. Their donations and manpower are vital to the Democratic Party and have made up a large part of the offensive that returned their party to power last year.

Now it’s time for payback.

From its high point in the 1940s, when 30 percent of all American workers belonged to a labor union, the percentage of the workforce that’s unionized has dropped to only 12 percent. And union membership has shifted away from blue-collar industrial unions and toward government workers’ organizations, such as those representing teachers, police, firefighters, and hospital workers. Labor representation of private-sector workers has fallen dramatically.

With the growth of foreign competition, particularly in manufacturing, union membership is likely to decline further—unless labor leaders can induce more workers to organize and vote to be represented by a union.

Thus far, despite years of trying, they have largely failed to expand the union base. Now they’re trying to change the rules to do so.

What makes this a political issue, not just a business problem, is the tendency of union members to follow their leadership into the Democratic camp. If, by slanting the election procedures, Obama can increase the proportion of the workforce in labor unions, he can do a great deal to assure himself of the decade of political supremacy he covets.

And since labor unions donate huge sums to the Democratic Party and its candidates, anything that swells union coffers—as an expanding membership would do—would be a big financial help to Obama’s allies.

So Obama isn’t just pushing unionization as a way to pay labor back for its political and financial support; his deeper plan is to increase the number of union workers so that he can add them to his political machine and be able to count on their votes and their union’s contributions.

On April 2, 2008, during his campaign for president, Obama told an AFL-CIO convention that “we’re ready to play offense for organized labor. It’s time we had a president who didn’t choke saying the word ‘union.’ A president who strengthens our unions by letting them do what they do best: organize our workers.”
¹⁹¹

Of course, there’s a problem with all this: Most workers don’t
want
to join unions. So the labor bigwigs have figured out a way to coerce them into doing so—the union card-check system.

Under current law, workers in a company can sign cards asking the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to hold an election to decide whether or not to unionize. If a majority of the workers sign the cards, the NLRB holds an election, by secret ballot, to determine the answer.

And, most often, the union winds up losing the election, even though a majority of the workforce signed cards asking for the election. Why would workers who oppose a union sign the cards? Normally they wouldn’t. But the labor organizers bring incredible pressure on them to sign, often visiting them at home, harassing them on the job, and pestering them for signatures. So obviously the union must be getting some of those who actually oppose unionization to sign cards calling for a vote.

Brian Wilson of Fox News reported on one small auto parts plant in Fort Wayne, Indiana, that “got a first hand lesson on card-check. The employer acquiesced on card-check and the union got the votes it needed. Afterward, the truth came out as employees complained about the aggressive harassing
and coercive tactics used by union organizers. The company appealed and a secret vote was held, and the workers voted
not
to unionize.”
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Under the card-check bill, labor organizers wouldn’t have to put up with the inconvenience of an election—certainly not one by secret ballot. The law provides that unionization will be decided not by secret ballot but by whether they can get a majority of workers to sign pledge cards—even those signed by twisted arms. (The law would allow an election only if 30 percent of the workers explicitly ask for one.)

Obama has specifically pledged to back the card-check bill, saying “I will make it the law of the land when I’m president of the United States.”
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But the potential for forcing employees to sign the cards to request a union is enormous.

Of course, coercion is a two-way street. Plenty of employers threaten their workers in order to deter them from supporting a union. John T. Palter, writing in the
Dallas Morning News
, points out that “some employers abuse the current system. It is, for example, notoriously easy, and relatively inexpensive, for an organization to terminate anyone they suspect of starting a union.”
¹⁹⁴
One good aspect of the card-check bill is that it strengthens worker protections, a badly needed step.

But employer coercion can go only so far with a secret ballot. When the boss doesn’t know who voted for a union, he can’t retaliate easily. But to eliminate the secret ballot—indeed to eliminate the ballot at all—would invite coercion from both sides.

In any event, as Palter notes, employer coercion isn’t “why unions are on the decline. The globalization of business operations, the decline of traditionally unionized industries, the increase in workplace safety and rising standards of living have all taken much bigger tolls on union membership than employer abuses.”
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And many of the traditional goals of unions—safe workplaces and limitations on hours—are now policed by the government, making unions less necessary. But the unions are using the excuse that there is coercion by employers to pass the card check bill so they can do their own coercing. The poor workers in the middle!

The card-check bill would also require that, once a union is formed, the company negotiate a contract with it. In the event that the two parties can’t come to an agreement, it provides for a government-appointed arbitrator
to establish one by fiat. Since most of these arbitrators would probably be prounion (appointed by the Obama administration), the unions won’t negotiate in good faith but will just sit back and wait for the arbitrator to make the decision in their favor.

The arbitration provision essentially puts the government right in the middle of the formulation of the contract—an inappropriate position. After all, it’s not the government, but the company and the workers, who will have to live with the outcome.

The obituaries of failed American businesses attest to how often union demands have forced companies to close their doors, laying off all their workers. With low-cost foreign labor so readily available and few barriers standing in the way of foreign trade, American workers need to remember that moving labor offshore is an increasingly attractive alternative for many businesses. For an arbitrator to impose a deal, without giving the boss a chance to tell the union that he’ll shut down if the terms aren’t altered, is self-defeating for the workers involved.

ACTION AGENDA

When he was a Republican, Pennsylvania’s senator Arlen Specter announced he was going to vote against card-check, saying that “the problems of the recession make this a particularly bad time to enact” the bill.
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His statement seemed to doom the legislation since it would give the Republicans (who are united in opposition) enough votes to sustain a filibuster. But now that Specter is a Democrat, there’s no way of knowing if he will succumb to pressure from Obama and Senate majority leader Harry Reid.

The
Wall Street Journal
reported that “Senator Specter said he would reconsider the bill if other efforts to amend the National Labor Relations Act to increase labor’s clout are unsuccessful.”
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The
Journal
noted that “one change [Specter] supports is shortening the time frame in which union elections are held.”
¹⁹⁸
There is also speculation that Specter would back the requirement that an arbitrator be named if collective bargaining should fail to produce a union contract.

And, of course, now that Specter is serving a new master, all bets may be off.

The unions, of course, won’t take the legislation’s defeat lying down.
This bill is their top priority for the Obama administration—the key to their future success—and they won’t take no for an answer.

And labor has the clout to make its feelings known in the Democratic Party—because Democrats are increasingly dependent on union donations to support their campaigns.

We need to put maximum pressure on the moderate Democratic senators to kill this dangerous bill.

MUZZLING TALK RADIO

In our book
Fleeced
, published in June 2008, we warned that “there may be a more devilish and fiendish plot afoot to cripple talk radio than the simple reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine.”
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Unfortunately, we were right. The liberals, led by Obama, are intent on killing talk radio. But they are too clever to use the Fairness Doctrine to do so. Instead, as we predicted, they’re using the basic Federal Communications Commission (FCC) law to demand “diversity,” “localism,” and “public interest” programming in radio.

“
Diversity
” comes in through an amendment to the FCC statute introduced by assistant Senate majority leader Dick Durbin (D-IL), which passed the Senate on a party-line vote and is pending in the House. Durbin’s amendment would require the FCC to “take actions to encourage and promote diversity in communication media ownership and to ensure that broadcast station licenses are used in the public interest.”
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Durbin defines “diversity” as relating “primarily to gender, race, and other characteristics…in media ownership.”
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But Republican senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma may have a more accurate description: “I certainly can’t tell you what ‘diversity in communication media ownership’ means. Federal agencies love this kind of language [in a statute] because it gives them greater leeway to interpret it however they like and impose their will upon the industry they regulate.”
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In the hands of an FCC whose majority is Democratic, it could well give the agency a lever to oust conservative owners and reissue the broadcast license to a more “diverse” set. (There are two members of the FCC from each party—required by statute—and a fifth appointed by the president. So Obama now controls the FCC.)