Category Archives: politics

No Fair

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The United Auto Workers lost another attempt to “organize” Volkswagen’s Chattanooga, TN, factory; its latest move was voted down last Friday 833-776.  Tennessee is a right-to-work State, and those factory workers rudely exercised their right to work free of union interference.

Naturally, the UAW has its collective panties in a collective twist.  The loss is unfair, you see, because it’s always unfair when a union (or any faction of the Left, come to that) loses a contest. Brian Rothenberg, a UAW spokesman, made this nonsense plain:

Our labor laws are broken[.]

Well, they must be—they don’t guarantee a union victory.

Rothenberg went on:

Workers should not have to endure threats and intimidation in order to obtain the right to collectively bargain[.]

Certainly.  And they are, for the most part, free of threats and intimidation in Tennessee, as they are in every right-to-work State.  Workers also, though, should not have to endure threats and intimidation in order to maintain their right not to have a union “represent” them.

These workers have spoken, quite clearly, twice on this matter, now, and similarly situated workers throughout right-to-work States have been loud and clear with the same message to unions trying to interfere with their work environment: “Go away, and leave us alone.  Quit bothering us.”

Will the unions listen to the workers?  Do they ever?

“Radical-Right” and the Left

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The Washington Post ran a panic-mongering op-ed about the Supreme Court last week.

Last month, the new conservative majority—being driven by Justices Neil M Gorsuch and Brett M Kavanaugh—signaled that this change is coming. In overruling a 40-year-old precedent governing how state governments can be sued, the new court majority, all of whom pledged reverence for precedent during their Senate confirmation hearings—sang a different song: “stare decisis is ‘not an inexorable command,’ … and is ‘at its weakest’ when interpreting the Constitution.” This was the second time in less than a year that the conservative majority has tossed aside decades-old precedent.

Thus screamed the WaPo in its terror.  Never mind that reverence for precedent is not blind adherence to it, no matter how wrong the precedent.  The Brown example the paper so piously cited elsewhere in its op-ed was itself an overturning of an 80-year-old precedent, that of Plessy.  Never mind, more importantly, that as Justice Clarence Thomas has said on many occasions, the primary precedent in all of American jurisprudence is the text of our Constitution.

And this “fear:”

….race-conscious programs in employment and admissions that are now pervasive could be forbidden.

The op-ed’s author wrote that with no trace of irony.

“Race-conscious” programs are by definition racist; that they’re pervasive just means that the evil is far too ubiquitous.  They should be forbidden, and the sooner and louder the better.

And this:

The past decade has seen a conservative court slow further social progress….

That’s entirely appropriate, it’s regrettable that this was even necessary, and it’s further regrettable that court-imposed “social progress” was only slowed and not halted altogether.  Social progress—whatever that is—is a political matter, to be furthered or opposed only by the political arms of our government.  Courts have no legitimate role in political matters; this is made clear in that primary precedent’s Article I, Section 1.

The paper headlined its op-ed thusly:

We need to prepare for a complete reversal of the role the Supreme Court plays in our lives

I certainly hope the Court reverses course; I certainly hope the Court goes back to applying the Constitution and the laws as they’re written, instead of in accordance with the “philosophies” of the likes of Thurgood Marshall—”I make my ruling and expect the law to catch up”—and Ruth Bader Ginsburg of living Constitution, amend it from the bench according to a judge’s personal view of society, ideology.  I certainly hope the Court reverses its role in our political lives and absents itself from it.

It’s illustrative of how dangerously far left the Left has gone when simple adherence to the Constitution is radical-right.

Socialism

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It seems Amazon has teamed with another company to create and issue a credit card that would be issuable to Amazon’s Prime members. It doesn’t matter what the purpose and parameters of the card are—they’re legal under existing law.

But none of that matters.  Senator and Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and his trophy BFF, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY), object to the card because it doesn’t suit their requirements.  And since they object, they’ve vowed to destroy the card, should Sanders be elected President.

It doesn’t matter what their objections are; Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez intend to use Government power to destroy a private enterprise’s product because that product wouldn’t fit their government’s purpose for private enterprise products.

Sanders pretends his ideology, his policy, is democratic socialism.  No, this example of his is straight up socialism.  In particular, it’s the fascism subset of socialism, since Sanders would presume to have government impose its production policy on a private enterprise.

The sad—and dangerous—thing is, Sanders knows this distinction full well, even if Ocasio-Cortez might not.

Appeals to Courts Vice Voters Vice….

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Wisconsin’s Progressive-Democrats failed at the polls, for all that they won the Governor’s and Attorney General’s chairs in 2018, so they tried to get the courts to impose their policies by judicial fiat.  That failed, too, so now what?  How can these Know Betters get their plans imposed on the unwashed citizenry?

It seems that the duly elected State legislature and duly elected State governor had passed a number of laws that limited the power of the Governor and the State Attorney General.  The fact that these laws were enacted after those 2018 elections and before the new Governor and Attorney General took office was somehow supposed to delegitimize those laws.  Or so the Progressive-Democrat Governor and AG insisted.  The people were still speaking, but they should not be listened to.

Therefore, these Progressive-Democrats went into court to get the people’s will, as expressed through their elected representatives, tossed out.  The people’s will, after all, is only and precisely what their Know Betters tell them it is.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court said, no, duly enacted law is still law, no matter how inconvenient that might be for this or that political party.

Here’s Ben Wikler, Progressive-Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s chairman, on that outcome:

Power grabs set a dangerous precedent, and anyone concerned about the health of a democracy should be working to fight against it[.]

No trace of irony there.

Wisconsin’s Democratic leaders are pondering their next steps…. Here’s a thought: accept the politically expressed will of your employers, even though you think yourselves better than they.  Leave the courts out of political matters.

It’s a Start

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Germany has shown, with its welching on its commitment to spend 2% of its GDP on bolstering NATO, that it has no interest in Europe’s mutual defense.  That, though, does not alter the threat to European security represented by Russia other than to increase it.

I’m reminded of a remark President Abraham Lincoln made about General George McClellan and the army the latter commanded: If McClellan does not want to use the army, I should like to borrow it a while.  Since Germany isn’t interested in Europe’s defense, isn’t even interested in getting up a serious defense establishment of any sort (McClellan was strongly interested in this much), our forces are better placed elsewhere.

Enter Poland, which sits on the front line of the threat and has only just gotten out from under the Russian jackboot.

President Trump signed an agreement to send 1,000 additional US troops to Poland while treating his visiting Polish counterpart to a military flyover at the White House as thanks for a commitment to buy F-35 jet fighters.

Trump also suggested that those soldiers could come from the contingent—52,000 of them—currently based in Germany.  After all, Germany isn’t using them.

This should only be a start, though.  We need to be working toward a NATO-like mutual defense treaty that involves the eastern European nations, Great Britain, and us to work in parallel with, and perhaps eventually to supplant, NATO.