Keep The Secret Ballot for Employees

This whole card check thing they want to do now with putting unions in companies where they aren't now unionized is an issue that needs to be addressed. This is a bad bill that people like Thom Hartman are for. They call it the "employee free choice" act but in reality it denies free choice of the workers in any company to freely choose or not to choose a union. The way it works is that you are pressured by union bosses that come into a place of work to "sign off" on the idea of a union. Employees who sign these cards may think they are signing some sort of petetion or that the cards are so that they can have some subsequent election. Workers may well be cajoled and pressured by their fellow workers to sign the cards. But if 51% of the cards come back in the affirmative then a Union has been established. If the 51% figure is not achieved, then they can hold an election but no Union wants to go on record as having been voted down by a popular vote so that this will never happen. It so happens that neither people already in a union or those vast majorities that have not been unionized are in favor of this bill. Some have even said that this bill will dangerously skew the ballance that has existed for seventy years in favor of unions. This bill will take away collective bargaining rules that have existed since the days of Roosevelt and Justice Frankfurter, who ruled on all these issues way back when. Normally if the unions and the company can't reach an agreement then you invoke the Taft Hartley law "ninety day cooling off period" and they try again. This bill forces government arbitration on any agreement that hasn't been arrived at within 120 days, and they are throwing out the traditional rules of arbitration and putting arbitrary new ones. Some say this bill could lead either to rampent inflation, or else unemployment. Let's keep things as they are. This is what Oren Hatch and all those witnesses say from yesterday. Market forces are a wonderful thing. If unions are declining perhaps of people think real hard they will come up with a logical explanation for this. Unions as a rule are intrusive anyhow and inherently interfer with the relation of trust between a corporation and their workers.

Many people say that barring corporations from campaign contributions is a good idea. I dislike the whole idea of bills like Mc Cain - Feingold, that restrict campaign contributions. They say that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Now there is a movie about Hillary Clinton that the courts stepped in and barred from ever being shown. The reasoning was that it was a "campaign propaganda" piece. People should be free to produce whatever campaign pieces they want to on either the democratic or republican sides of the aisle. You've heard the expression. If campaigns are regulated, then who shall regulate the regulators. We can't have these sort of intrusions into our sacred freedom of speech.

Some people say that Obama is not all that liberal anyhow. In general and in keeping with my libertarian leanings, I believe Obama is too far to the left when it comes to regulation and government spending, and he's too far to the right when it comes to properly safeguarding our civil liberties. Sean Hannity alledgedly said recently that Christianity as a religion is inherently NOT opposed to torture. Perhaps if we roll back the clock five hundred years this is true. Does Hannity really want to do that? Anne Coulter and Hannity have both said that really Obama is "one of us" when it comes to things like "safeguarding our national security". Meaning that Obama has not stopped the "rendering" of terror suspects. This means that anybody can be picked up and shipped by the CIA off to some prison camp in a third world nation and be tortured indefinitely. I think we need to prosecute war crimes of the Bush Administration. I think President Obama needs to expressly state what he does and does not believe about Civil Liberties. There are apparently new supreme court rulings that hold up the idea of "Presidential perogatives". This is a buzz-word for freedom to torture and hold indefinitely. We need to be vigellent in searching out cases like they do on Sixty Minutes, where abuses of civil liberties have occurred. Of course some conservatives like Tammy Bruce just lash out in general against this president and the first lady. Though Obama has been in office two months, the media treats him still with a highly adverse, combative stance as though Obama were just some nobody candidate, and not the President. The media still treats obama like an outsider and is skeptical tword almost anything he says, in a way they never were with Bush. Talk radio even now is still dominated with right wingers. Some people like David Horowitz and Tammy Bruce are right-winders now when they never used to be. Others like Rush Limbaugh are far more strident to the point of irraticness, than they ever were twenty years ago.

One area where I believe spending always pays off it in research, be it medical research with embryonic stem cells, or else researching new, efficient energy sources. But I'd like to clarify something I said earlier. I am not for at this time any "carbon tax" or any other tax that could be dreamed up like hiking bridge tolls, or perhaps a water tax or hikes in gasoline taxes. I think that mandating "alternative energy sources" at this time is a bad idea. Republicans have vivid imaginations and it's easy to envision a world where there are all sorts of new "consumption taxes" that would raise the price of everything we buy and use. Let's not do that.

Tonight Obama has his press conference. Sure he has gotten his stimulus budget passed and closed down Guantanamo and accomplished a lot of other things. But the president is still "on trial" as far as the media is concerned. And in some cases, rightly so. Obama believes that somehow you have to "lay a foundation" for the future and jobs growth by spending and more spending in areas like education, energy, and health care. If it were me in the office I'd look at what the stock market has done and say, "You know- - maybe things will turn around after all before all these massive spending bills take effect". And yet there are simple things that Obama is not doing such as modifying these trade treaties like NAFTA and mandating the buying of American goods. Obama is still too concerned about offending nations like China, just as the Bush Adminestration was. In terms of the economy I don't entirely like the influence of Wall Streeters like Timothy Geitner in this adminestration. Obama is turning into a "Bush Lite". As I have said before Obama needs to set a bolder more decisive "pro American" economic direction. I'd like to hear more talk about controling immigration and cracking down on employers who hire them, and less talk about "what our trading partners will think if we raise terrifs". It's not a matter of how much is spent but how intelligently, and in this many republican critics have an excellent point. We need targeted measures that actually produce jobs. It was David Stockman who came up with a "starve the beast" approach for government. The idea is that if we bankrupt the country we won't have funding for things we actually need. But the theory behind this statement is "When the Democrats get into power they will be forced to be fiscally responsable" (like Clinton was) Obama is kind of between the devil and the deep blue sea. He wants "stimulation" but he is like Bush in his belief that deficets don't matter, and we are concerned about these mounting deficets. The dollar is strengthened now and this is a good thing. Housing sales are up and confidence is returning. But let's not blow it by instituting a lot of new programs that won't produce jobs but will produce a new layer of beaurocracy.