Wag the dog

I find it interesting that Barack Obama -- or whoever's running things -- is so biased in favor of unions and unionization. For example, the "Card Check" thing, which makes it very easy for anyone to sign up to join a union -- whether they want to or not -- and makes it very very difficult for them to opt-out. The Obama administration has been really promoting this legislation. Why? In a recent poll, 82% of Americans who are not in a union said they don't want to join a union. Why force them to?

And remember the AIG bonus protests? Mostly SEIU and Acorn members. The SEIU people were the ones in the yellow and purple clothes, carrying yellow and purple signs. They were the people on the news videos in front of AIG headquarters. Did Obama or Geithner or Rahm Emanual hire the SEIU for that or what? And did those union members get a day off of work to go protest? Or is the SEIU simply sucking up to ensure a place at the head of the line for government handouts? Acorn I'll discuss separately somewhere else. Acorn is just scum, corrupt and exploitive.

Then there's the shafting of Chrysler. Bond-holders traditionally have priority for getting their debts paid back when any corporation is on the skids, involved in a merger or acquisition, etc. But not in this deal. The bond-holders were offered $0.33 on the dollar for the debt they held in Chrysler. They held out for more -- and apparently should have gotten more, given their priority status and Chrysler's assets. But the last I heard, the feds have ordered the bond-holders to take $0.29 on the dollar. The UAW gets the rest.

(As far as this deal goes, the UAW may be getting the short end of the stick here. The union was a large factor in the auto-makers insolvency. Let's see if the union as shareholders can figure out a way to fund their promises to retirees and remain afloat. It should be interesting. 'Course, when this proves to be impossible, they'll just saunter back to Obama, hat in hand, and Obama, who apparently loves the unions, will once again screw the rest of the nation in order to fund the UAW's plushy retirement packages. Union members whine, "I worked all my life for those benefits..." Hey, pal -- so did all the rest of us work all our lives. You did not earn my money, OK?)

Anyway, so I looked up unions, just general information. Here are some key points from a news release issued by the US Dept. of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics:

In 2008, union members accounted for 12.4% of employed wage and salary workers, up from 12.1% a year earlier, the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of workers belonging to a union rose by 428,000 to 16.1 million. In 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1%, and there were 17.7 million union workers.

• Government workers were nearly five times more likely to belong to a union than were private sector employees.
  

  Workers in education, training, and library occupations had the highest unionization rate at 38.7%.
  

  Black workers were more likely to be union members than were white, Asian, or Hispanic workers.
  

  Among states, New York had the highest union membership rate (24.9%) and North Carolina had the lowest rate (3.5%).

The Bureau of Labor Statistics continues:

The union membership rate for public sector workers (36.8%) was substantially higher than the rate for private industry workers (7.6%). Within the public sector, local government workers had the highest union membership rate, 42.2%. This group includes many workers in several heavily unionized occupations, such as teachers, police officers, and fire fighters. Private sector industries with high unionization rates include transportation and utilities (22.2%), telecommunications (19.3%), and construction (15.6%). In 2008, unionization rates were relatively low in financial activities (1.8%) and professional and business services (2.1%).

I found out from the individual unions' web sites some more specific numbers. Like, the APWU and NALC -- both of which represent postal workers -- have pretty close to 700,000 members combined. AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, has 1.6 million members. These are "public sector," that is, government jobs. They also have that squawking goose or whatever it is in their TV commercials. They've been working hard the last couple years to organize, organize, organize!!

So, Obama's bias in favor of unions translates into a bias in favor of government workers primarily, blacks perhaps coincidentally, and the more urbanized areas of the US.

Is that fair? That is, 12.4% of salaried and/or wage workers in the US are calling all the shots for the nation's economic policies?

You might want to consider, too, who pays these people. To paraphrase Pogo: "I have seen the payors, and they are us." We, citizens and taxpayers, fund all the various levels of government in the US.

Also, as far as Obama loving government workers and putting them before anyone else in the entire universe, the government is one of few large organizations in the country that's actually growing and hiring. Every item in the so-called "Stimulus Package" was funding for one or another government project. The states that accept those funds can't even use the money to pay down their debt -- which would certainly be helpful in California and also in Illinois. But no-o-o-o, they've got to spend more money and hire more people.As Obama himself has recently noted, this is unsustainable.

Actually, I think paying down their debt would be more productive in the long run and solve more economic problems than this manic spending spree. But then I'm not a Democrat. I don't quite "get" Obamanomics: Borrow $2.00, spend $4.00, and somehow you end up saving $1.00. Can someone explain this to me, please? Sounds like some kind of screwy hedge fund deal. Perhaps Obama has put too much weight on George Soros' opinions.

And just about everything else this administration has done -- like nationalizing the banks and bullying executives into towing the line on pie-in-the-sky credit lending policies, elbowing private borrowers out of the credit market, and the forthcoming-but-inevitable humongous tax increase and double-digit inflation, do nothing but discourage private enterprise. Kill it, actually. These policies will prolong any economic downturn and prevent recovery.

I think Obama wants to see us all on a government payroll. But he hasn't quite figured out yet who will fund this if there is no one producing anything that the government can tax. Good luck with that.

See, I'm beginning to believe that Obama is a really pure marxist. I really think so. The collapse of capitalism isn't working quite on Marx's schedule (note in the above, union membership has declined significantly over the last 25 years), so Obama's giving it a few healthy nudges and no doubt he and others of his stripe will call that "historical inevitability."

I call it bullshit, but that's just me. The net result of all this will be an even worse economic catastrophe. However, I'm also counting on the fact that most Americans are not going to just lie down and suck their thumbs and hope for some kind of government check. I think most Americans have brains enough to launch their own black market, cash-only businesses or something like that. (Anything below the IRS's radar is "black market." I'm not talking about selling dope.) We aren't going to curl up and die because our president knows nothing and refuses to learn anything about economics in the real world.

My own take on this: I prefer personal freedom to government dependency, and you can't separate personal freedom from capitalism, no matter how hard you try. And God knows, people like Obama have been trying and trying and trying.... Eventually, they come back to capitalism as a last resort, to fend off revolution if for no other reason.