It seems that the shady people at ACORN in Oklahoma got sloppy when vacating a building to avoid rent and left behind some interesting documents, including this one detailing how they planned to take over and control Oklahoma for the Far Left:
Those of us who are fretting that the Democrats' public option (i.e., socialized medicine) will gobble up the private insurers and ultimately lead to rationing and denial of service are missing the forest for the trees.
Any health care reform coming out of the mouths of Democrats is sure to include a commissar of health care who, according to the bills before Congress, will possess the power to decree (without a vote and without court appeal or review) what must be included in any health insurance plan and then, after that decree, to reject any plan that costs too much.
In other words, by setting the standards for care high enough and then by rejecting the insurers' plans because the premiums rise too high (to cover all the mandates), the health czar can put all the private insurers out of business in nothing flat.
And that would leave us with what the Democrats have cherished all along, "Medicare for All"–another entitlement they can crow about during each election and spread fear by saying, "The Republicans will take away your health care."
Of course, the Dems won't bring up the ugly truth that there will be no health care available (except for them) since the system will by then be bankrupt (as Medicare already is), but you will be entitled to all nothing of it.
Cute trick.
Granted, most of the recent three-step increase in the minimum wage took place while the U.S. economy was plummeting into recession (or mired there, as now), but the graph below seems to indicate a connection between increases in the minimum wage and decreases in teen employment:
Of course, it could also be that the recession is at least partially a result of the federal minimum wage increases that capped at $7.25 an hour this past July 24.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), whose evil president, Andy Stern, has visited the White House more than any other person not working there, recently issued a set of talking points (picture below) to use in the battle to pass the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).
Notice how the points reject the use of "card check" entirely and substitute it with "majority sign-up," and then rather than refer to secret ballots at all, they use the phrase "company-dominated system."
George Orwell's DoubleSpeak is alive and well in the White House and its union cronies.
The last time I heard of people getting paid with debit cards, recipients were complaining that the issuing banks were charging fees everytime they used the cards–and even when they checked their balances!
The recipients in this case were people receiving unemployment "checks." Now Wal-Mart has announced it is moving to pay its 1.4 million employees nationwide with MasterCard debit cards if they don't sign up for direct deposit.
Wal-Mart claims the move will save both money and paper, 257,572 pounds of the latter each year.
Though the program is beginning this month, Wal-Mart says it will be phased in and many employees will continue to receive paper checks for a while.
Wal-Mart is the nation's largest employer. About half of its employees receive paper paychecks, the others direct deposit.
Senator John McCain has placed a hold on Craig Becker, one of Obama's three appointees to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which means that there will be no vote soon on the trio of nominees, leaving the NLRB with two functioning members, one a Republican and one a Democrat.
Under such deadlocked circumstances, the NLRB has been fairly quiet, but don't look for that to last. Once the stalemate in the Senate is resolved, the board will have a voting-in-lockstep majority of three Democrats with Big Business in their crosshairs.
First to go, according to a report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, will be the power of employers to influence unionization votes. This will be done through rulemaking (actually, rule changing) rather than through the legislative process (think EFCA) as the board flexes its unused-under-Bush considerable muscles.
Rules to be implemented include shortening the time-frame between vote announcements and the actual balloting, which is currently set at 42 days but usually comes in around the 39-day mark. Shortening the elapsed time between announcement and balloting will afford employers less time to "brainwash and intimidate" their employees, as labor organizers call it. The board also is weighing whether to move the vote from the company site to a neutral one and whether to bar employers' representatives from observing the vote.
With just these few changes, the odds of union votes succeeding would appear to rise exponentially–to say nothing of how easy it would be for organizers to game the whole vote absent employer observation. (Maybe Jimmy Carter will volunteer to be a–har de har har–impartial observer.)
So if the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is Armageddon, as the Chamber earlier labeled it, the new NLRB is nothing short of Godzilla on the horizon, so don't buy any real estate in Tokyo anytime soon.
