Category Archives: morality

A Thought about Unions

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Perry Chiaramonte, of Fox News, noticed this bit a few days ago.

The International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) was carrying signs and chanting slogans in front of the future site of the United Food and Commercial Workers federal credit union in downtown Pittston.

Because UFCW is using non-union labor for the construction of this future site.  The reasons for both the picketing and the use of non-union labor is made clear by the IUPAT’s spokesperson:

Bob Griffiths said he never expected a fellow union to bypass organized labor to save a buck.

Doesn’t a business improve its chances of succeeding—and of keeping its employees employed—by holding down its costs?

Griffiths also said, without any irony,

It’s about the principal, not losing the work[.]

Never mind that those who got the work would be out of work if the union took the job.  Never mind that, as Griffiths has already bragged, that job would be done at higher cost, which can only be passed on to the credit unions’ customers.  Never mind that those customers include union members.

I have to ask: are unions for the working stiff, generally, or just the chosen few?  Are businesses just jobs welfare programs for unions?

First, the Official Denial

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…now comes a partial enumeration of the weasel words and evasion.  I wrote a bit ago about the official denial that the Blind Sheik, he of the first World Trade Center bombing, would be released/transferred to Egypt at Egypt’s behest.

Here’s what former Judge and US Attorney General Michael Mukasey has discovered in the way of that evasion and those weasel words.

Asked before Congress in July whether there is an intention “at any time to release the Blind Sheikh,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano responded: “Well, let me just say this.  I know of no such intention.”

And

The State Department’s spokesperson last week, after the ceremonial “let me be clear,” said that there had been no approach on this topic “recently” from any “senior” official of the Egyptian government….

I suppose Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi isn’t senior enough for this spokesperson.

And this:

All of this plays out in the context of an Obama administration that hasn’t hesitated to employ executive orders to get around Congress, led by a president who was caught on a “hot mike” assuring Russia’s leaders that if he wins re-election he will have more “flexibility” to accommodate Russian demands that the US curtail missile defense in Europe.

Since the guy who occasionally sits in our President’s chair refuses to say definitively that the Blind Sheik won’t be released/transferred anytime or under any conditions, all of this sounds pretty definitive to me.

This is Stupid

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Spiegel Online International is describing another European hare-brained scheme in the mill for “bailing out” Greece.

Greece’s lenders are reportedly considering further relief in the form of a partial debt haircut for the crisis-wracked country, the Financial Times Deutschland reported on Friday.

…

Martin Blessing, chairman of Germany’s second-largest bank, Commerzbank, has also said a second debt haircut is likely.  “In the end we will see another debt haircut for Greece, in which all creditors will take part,” he said on Thursday in Frankfurt.

And

And though a second debt haircut would be tantamount to bankruptcy for Greece, it would also enable Athens to tackle the extreme debt that has so far hindered economic recovery.

And in a blatant case of demanding this be done with OPM (at least from the IMF’s perspective; the IMF wholeheartedly approves this second bailout),

[T]he IMF is pushing for debt restructuring from public lenders, who currently hold over two-thirds of the country’s total debt of some €330 billion [$426 billion], according to the newspaper.  However, neither the IMF nor the ECB would take part in such a debt haircut, placing the burden on the euro-zone members, the paper added.

I have a couple of questions.  Wasn’t the first haircut, functionally, a Greek bankruptcy?

Second, if you’re not going to hold the Greeks accountable and responsible for their obligations and commitments, why bother at all?  Why not just forgive the entire debt, and let them resume their profligate ways?  You’ll only bail them outprop them up again, next time, anyway.

In the end, here’s the IMF (and ECB, but at least this organization has honorably committed its own creditors’ money) saying, “Debt.  Very dangerous.  You go first.”  Still, the burden, as the IMF and ECB suggest, should be wholly within the euro zone, or rather (say I) more particularly, it should rest entirely with the private investors who loaned their money to Greece—the private holders of Greek sovereign debt.  Europe’s taxpayers should not be—should not have been—put on the hook any further than they already were from the moment it became known that the Greek government was unable to repay its debt.  Indeed, those taxpayers should not have been put further onto the hook from the moment it became known that the Greek government had lied about its financials in order to gain admittance to the euro zone.

Here’s an alternative thought—work with me on this; it’s an idea of responsibility—how about not bailing them out, again?  Instead, let them go bankrupt, and thereby free them to start over.

Controlling Religion

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Last Sunday on CBS’s 60 Minutes, reports The Weekly Standard, the Democratic Party’s Presidential Candidate, Barack Obama, was asked this question by Steve Kroft:

Have the events that took place in the Middle East, the recent events in the Middle East given you any pause about your support for the governments that have come to power following the Arab Spring?

Obama gave this answer, in part [emphasis mine]:

…I was pretty certain and continue to be pretty certain that there are going to be bumps in the road because—you know, in a lot of these places—the one organizing principle—has been Islam. The one part of society that hasn’t been controlled completely by the government.

So, in this man’s eyes, Islam—and by extension, all religion?—must be under government control, and not left to the individual consciences of the men and women involved?

He seems to have implemented this view with his attacks on religion here at home—his HHS ruling on contraceptives and abortifacients, for instance; his VA’s attacks on prayer in our National Cemetery System; his Justice Department’s lack of support for (if not outright obstruction of) defending military memorials because some of the symbology looks like religious icons; his attempted omission of any reference to God from the Democratic Party platform, until public outcry forced him into a square-filler insertion of a passing referent; and so on.

Hmm….

Taxes

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Now we’re getting this, via Yahoo!News:

[Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt] Romney and his wife, Ann, donated roughly $4 million to charities last year, but they only claimed a deduction of $2.25 million on their tax return, filed with the Internal Revenue Service on Friday.

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Democrats quickly leaped on the documents, saying Romney had claimed fewer deductions than he was entitled to just to keep his rate at such a level.

Let me see if I understand this.  The Party of Tax the Evil Rich now is whining that one of those Evil Rich paid too much tax.

Hmm….

Leave it to Stephanie Cutter, the Obama advisor of questionable integrity, to put this spin on it:

[P]eople like Mitt Romney pay a lower tax rate than many middle-class families because of a set of complex loopholes and tax shelters only available to those at the top.

But reform our tax code so as to eliminate some or all of those loopholes?  Nope.  Can’t have that—that’s a Republican idea, so it can’t be any good.