Some may remember the 1974 movie Blazing Saddles, rife with comedy which would never be acceptable by today’s PC standards.  In one of the scenes, the black sheriff played by Cleavon Little is surrounded by hostile white men in a bar.  Seeing no way out, the sheriff points the gun at his own head and commands, “stop, stay right there or the n—–r gets it.  This is exactly the same tactic the unions are threatening to employ against the Democrats for the  upcoming elections.  Apparently, the unions will snub the Democrats whom they helped elect  because there was no quid pro quo once the legislators took office. 

The worst kept political secret in the U.S. is the dependable support by the big labor unions of the Democratic party.  Despite the claims of the unions as representing the ‘working’ people, the reality is, the union movement has done more harm to the cause of ‘working’ Americans via their demands on employers than any imagined oppression by them.  What the union movement has become and there’s no attempt to even disguise it, is a political action group dedicated to the interests of those few in the union hierarchy.  The union movement and the Democrats are the Chucky siamese twins of politics.  Both are fans of submitting to a hierarchical power structure which regulates and dictates people’s activities and their incomes without regard to any economic reality. In the 2004 national elections, it was estimated that large labor unions spent $65 million dollars in order to try to defeat George Bush.  Maybe that money would have/should have been spent on the poor workers instead?  Oh and the bosses get paid pretty well too.  From the Human Events website comes this list of top salaried union bosses, http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=21533

This is interesting because the percentage of workers belonging to a union has fallen from about a third in 1950 to barely 12 percent today according to Fortune Magazine.  As a very crude measure, it’s difficult to say that the U.S. is worse off now than it was in 1950 despite this downtrend in union membership.   Actually, there is practically an inverse correlation, but that’s admittedly a tenuous link and perhaps an idea for someone’s PhD thesis.  You could however easily make a case for the obsolescence of the union movement entirely, certainly as a champion for the ‘people’.  If someone were to connect the dots on how many jobs and industries have been hampered, extinguished or moved overseas because of union intransigence, they’d be lucky to have any members.  The woes of the auto industry are just the most recent examples of this. 

As an aside, in a delicious piece of irony, the reverend Jesse Jackson had his big SUV stolen and stripped while he was in Detroit giving a speech promoting ’green’jobs.  http://www.detnews.com/article/20100903/MIVIEW/100903001/1467/opinion01/Payne–The-irony-of-Jesse-Jackson-s-stripped-SUV

 The green movement as we know, helped to kill the manufacture of big SUV’s, exactly like the one he was driving.  Oddly, he was not driving a Prius.  So the people who helped to kill an entire industry are now promoting their next big union idea.  Guess what, they’ll need government help to get it going. So getting back to the unions threatening to pull support from Democrats in the upcoming elections?  As if.

If you think about this sentiment, you will see the embedded racism within.  An organization that professes to be the party of the people transparently exposes itself to be essentially a union shop.  If you extrapolated Mr. Reid’s logic, you’d have to include numerous other groups in society that could not possibly be Republican.  If we make a list of the vocal groups that regularly protest any activity seen to be hostile to their way of life and which can be blamed on Republican policies, they would include: Entertainers, gays, women, union members, blacks, drug dealers, young people, the poor, immigrants legal and illegal, Muslims, Jews, Atheists, Asians, environmentalists, academics, animal rights activists, abortionists, non-gun owners and of course the aforementioned Hispanics. 

Crunching the numbers over the entire U.S. population, this leaves only Donald Trump and 5 other guys who could be Republican.  Truly amazing then that the GOP can ever get elected given this small fan base.  Of course there is a possibility that individual members of the listed demographic groups don’t subscribe to the policies of the Democratic party and instead choose to think for themselves and identify more with the principles of the GOP.  It’s possible that some may be insulted at being lumped into some amorphous group and then pandered to by Democratic “leaders” like Reid.  While there may be appeal to some groups to have their interests championed at first, the bigger consequence is the balkanization of the country which leads to the divisiveness that the Dems always accuse the GOP of promoting.  As we have discussed in previous comments, people are naturally tribal and will join a mob given the right circumstances. 

Politics in the U.S. has evolved into a game of identifying a unique demographic slice and then to claim discrimination  by the larger group of society. Weak minds fall for the political call to action and voila, a new oppressed subgroup is formed to be organized, plied for political donations and worked for influence.  Essentially a union local is created.

A guy like Reid would be far more useful leading the charge for a college football team where his rants can actually be useful and in fact encouraged.  The ‘Us’ and “Them” ideology works great in the sports arena;  there it’s healthy, in politics not so much.

Unless you happen to be paying attention, this news item would be just another of those boring finance stories.  If you whittle the story down to the basic elements, then an amusing scenario becomes more obvious. 

As some may recall, not too long ago, General Motors wound up in a bit of a financial pickle.  The short story is, they were not selling enough cars at  prices that people were willing  to pay for their products.  Not that they didn’t make good products, it was just that for a similar amount of  money, many other manufacturers offered arguably better products.  General Motors was saddled with a legacy of costs that eventually overwhelmed the company.  Principally, the main culprits were the very generous pay and benefits packages given to working and retired employees.   You would often hear the joke that GM was more of an extended care and benefits company than an automobile company.

So along with large debt payments to bondholders, GM was unable to pay it’s bills with the income from car sales.  Luckily, the federal government  decided that the fate of GM was tied to the fate of many workers and therefore America.  They would be bailed out of their financial woes.  The amount of money involved was so big that only governments had the might to write the big cheque.  Ultimately with all of the restructuring, the government OWNS GM.  So now, GM is now Government Motors, or the people’s car company.  This solved a short term debt problem, but the company still had to sell cars. 

Since the economy overall is still not as robust as the administration would have you believe with unemployment still ratcheting upwards, people didn’t have the capacity to finance car purchases.  Ironically, many of the unemployed became that way because GM and Chrysler were forced to close down hundreds of car dealers throwing those people out of work.  Todays’ news is that GM will spend $3.5 billion dollars to buy a company involved in the financing of cars.   Not just anybody, but particularly people with ‘subprime’ credit.  Hmm, this sounds oddly familiar.  In case anyone noticed, the money used to purchase AmeriCredit is actually government money, or public money.  So in essence, the public is subsidizing other people to buy cars that they otherwise couldn’t afford with their own money.  I think in real life, that’s called a circle jerk.  Nevertheless, the UAW union at GM, also a major stakeholder post restructuring, have managed to keep their members employed albeit at the expense of everyone else.  Bernie Madoff in his ponzi schemes at least bilked the rich.  In this latest government scheme, the people who can least afford to pay are getting roped in.

This is but the first of these types of ingenious rescue schemes to see the light of day.  In scenarios throughout the country, the same dilemna will surface again as public pensions for teachers,postal workers, firemen, police etc have to be funded.  An agency will have to be established in order to offer financing to people who cannot otherwise afford teachers, fire or police protection: some means of allowing people to pay money regularly in order to recieve these services…hmm how to do that…if only there was a way…