Happy Labor Day, Not Politics of Unions Day!

It feels like Monday's day off is needed more than most. It has been a nonstop year, full of challenges and hardship for virtually every American, and it is not over yet. We could all use a day to take a step back, get away from everything, and think about what matters most.

Labor Day is dedicated to the men and women who are the core of America; the goodhearted, hard-working folks who do not ask for much yet do more than what is asked of them. This year America’s workers deserve extra thanks.

We all know someone who fits this bill. The nurses and doctors and ambulance drivers. The grocery shelf stockers, the factory workers, the farm hands, the meat packers, the truck drivers. The police officers and firefighters. The teachers in the classroom and the home. And so many more.

We especially like how this small-town, southern newspaper editor put it in his Labor Day column: “On Monday, let’s pause to say ‘thank you’ to the American workers who keep this nation running — especially this year. They don’t hear it very often.”

On top of the thanks, Labor Day is a great day to put politics aside. Our culture already expects too much from politics. This year especially, we have seen how the constant back-and-forth can divide us at a time when the nation needs unity.

This conservative activist in Washington, D.C. has the right idea: “Imagine a single day when all the noise stops, when there is no back and forth between your uncle and cousin on Facebook, no CNN on airport televisions, no Fox News alert on your phone. Imagine candidates and pundits dropping politics for a full 24 hours.”

Even if politics does not stop for the day, Americans can still choose to tune it out, connect with old friends or make some new ones, and celebrate the best of our country. It would be good for the heart rate. And it would be great for America.

Theft plagues U.S. union offices: Millions of dollars stolen in hundreds of locations

Theft plagues U.S. union offices: Millions of dollars stolen in hundreds of locations

Phoebe Wall Howard, Detroit Free Press

As the UAW, Fiat Chrysler and federal investigators unravel a scandal over the misappropriation of millions of dollars meant for worker training, federal records show embezzling from union offices is endemic around the country.

U.S. Department of Labor documents obtained by the Detroit Free Press reveal embezzlement from hundreds of union offices nationwide over the past decade. In just the past two years, more than 300 union locations have discovered theft, often resulting in more than one person charged in each instance, the records show.

Two UAW incidents uncovered in 2017, one in Michigan and the other in New Jersey, exceed the $1 million mark, among the biggest labor theft cases in a decade.

Cases involved unions representing nurses, aerospace engineers, firefighters, teachers, film and TV artists, air traffic controllers,

musicians, bus inspectors, bakery workers, roofers, postal workers, machin-ists, ironworkers, steelworkers, dairy workers, plasterers, train operators, plumbers, stagehands, engineers, electricians, heat insulators, missile range workers and bricklayers.

For the UAW, its two biggest cases involved members working handin- hand with corrupt auto industry executives. The UAW says that illustrates its constitution provides the intended checks and balances that essentially require two keys and conspiracy to steal.

In the Fiat Chrysler case in Detroit, money provided by auto companies for worker training was embezzled from 2009 to 2015 by men who were supposed to be working together to negotiate a labor contract rather than divvying up hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal gifts. The case is working its way through the court system, so far resulting in charges against four people.

In the other multimillion-dollar case, charges were filed on Jan. 9, 2017, against a former UAW president in New Jersey accused of hatching a scheme with a health insurance broker to steal $1 million from the union’s self-insured health plan and defraud Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of about $5.5 million.

In addition to the UAW, federal records show the biggest embezzlement cases resulting in criminal charges over the past decade have unfolded in the courts over the past three years:

❚ Laborers Local 657 in Washington, D.C., saw its business manager sentenced to four years in prison in February 2017 for embezzlement and was ordered to pay $1,632,000 in restitution. Two contractors were sent to prison and ordered to pay restitution, too.

❚ The International Brotherhood of Boilermakers Local 154 in Pittsburgh saw its former business manager plead guilty in September to embezzling $1.5 million, plus tax evasion.

❚ A former financial secretary for the International Longshoremen’s Association Local 970 in Norfolk, Va., was sentenced in February 2017 to 41 months in prison after stealing $1,072,669 from the union by making cash withdrawals and using money to buy gas, food, clothing, shoes, toys,entertainment and home improvement supplies.

❚ A former executive director of the Hawaii Painting & Decorating Contractors Association pleaded guilty in May 2016 to embezzling approximately $1,483,800 from the Hawaii Painters Trade Promotion & Charity Fund, which comes out of the hourly wages of Painters District Council 50 in Honolulu.

❚ A former union business manager for Allied Novelty and Production Workers Local 223 in New York and former president of Teamsters Local 810 in August 2016 pleaded guilty to soliciting and receiving kickbacks to influence the operation of an employee benefit plan and commit theft of $1 million.

❚ The founder of Prim Capital Corp., who managed as much as $250 million for the National Basketball Players Association, was sentenced in June 2014 to 18 months in prison for trying to defraud the union of $3 million.

Embezzlement cases are often discovered by unions or during routine audits. The situation may be as simple as a bookkeeper going on vacation and leaving an attentive part-timer in charge who notices irregularity.

Income Fairness and justice are not easily determined

Fairness and justice are not easily determined

By Walter E. Williams

Oxfam reports that the richest 1 percent of people in the world own 48 percent of the world’s wealth. Many claim that we should be alarmed by income inequality because it hampers upward mobility. Others argue that because income is distributed so unevenly, justice and fairness require income redistribution.

Let’s look at fairness and justice.

What constitutes fairness and justice has been debated for centuries.

Widespread agreement has proved to be elusive at best. However, I think that an important part of an intelligent discussion about fairness and justice is the recognition that knowing results of a process cannot establish whether there is fairness or justice.

Take a simple example. Suppose Tom, Dick and Harry play a weekly game of poker. The game’s result is that Tom wins 75 percent of the time.

Dick and Harry, respectively, win 15 percent and 10 percent of the time.

Knowing the results of the game permits us to say absolutely nothing about whether there has been poker fairness or justice. Tom’s disproportionate winnings may be a result of his being an astute player or a clever cheater.

To determine whether there has been poker justice, we must ask process questions. Was there obedience to neutral game rules, such as those of Hoyle’s? Were the cards unmarked and dealt from the top of the deck?

Did the players play voluntarily? If the answers to these questions are affirmative, there was poker justice, regardless of the outcome, including Tom’s winning 75 percent of the time. Similarly, a person’s income is a result of something.

Knowing that one person’s yearly income is $500,000 and another’s is $12,000 tells us nothing about economic justice or fairness. To determine whether there has been economic justice, one has to ask process questions. Most people – including economists, much to their shame – who discuss income inequality fail to acknowledge or make explicit that income is a result of something. As such, a result cannot be used to determine fairness or justice.

To determine whether there has been economic justice or fairness, we must go beyond results and examine processes.

Let’s look at a couple of examples, among hundreds, of processes that cause economic unfairness. Taxi owner- operators can earn an annual income of $70,000 or more. Many people can manage to buy a car and the necessary items to become an owner operator for less than $30,000. Here’s the unfairness: In order for someone to operate a taxi legally, many cities require the owner to purchase a license, or medallion. In Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston and New York, medallions cost between $350,000 and $700,000. The effect of these licensing requirements is to close the market to most prospective entrants and thereby create economic injustice.

There have been instances in which managers of Housing and Urban Development low-income housing projects have wanted to repair dilapidated units by employing residents to perform some of the unskilled work, such as pulling out unsalvageable parts of the building and assisting skilled craftsmen. However, the Davis- Bacon Act, which covers federally financed or assisted construction, requires that the workers be paid union wages. If high union wages must be paid, the manager is forced to hire only skilled laborers, very few of whom are residents of the project.

That means these workers earn less.

It is economic injustice to deny a person who is ready, willing and able to work the opportunity to do so.

There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of examples in which the economic game is rigged. Instead of focusing on what’s claimed to be an unfair income distribution, we need to examine whether there is injustice in the rules of the economic game. But that’s whistlin’ “Dixie.” Politicians receive large financial contributions from vested interests to write laws that rig the economic game.

Myth Buster: you are really governed by Federal Bureaucrats!

Too Bad We Stopped Taking The Constitution Seriously: Delegation Of Powers

By George Leef

Do you think you would like living in a country where the ruler or his minions could declare what the law was, change it at will, and decide whether someone was guilty of a violation?

Certainly not. People risk their lives to escape from such places, North Korea and Cuba, for instance.

Long ago, Englishmen began to rebel against such government – rule by royal prerogative – beginning in 1215 with Magna Carta, which kept the King from arresting and punishing subjects except in accordance with established legal procedures. Later, English judges would rule that the King could not govern through royal proclamations, and in 1641 Parliament abolished King Charles’ Star Chamber and High Commission, key tools in his heavy-handed reign.

The rule of law – known, fair, and stable – was replacing royal prerogative and the people were far better off for it.

In America, the grievances of the colonists were grounded in the vestiges of royal prerogative. After winning independence, the people wanted to make sure that they would not suffer anything like it. As Columbia University law professor Philip Hamburger explains in a recent talk (available in the September 2014 Hillsdale College Imprimis), “Early Americans were very familiar with absolute power. They feared this extra-legal, supra-legal, and consolidated power because they knew from English history that such power could evade the law and override all legal rights.”

Those concerns gave rise to the Constitution’s separation of powers.

Article One, Section One provides that all legislative powers vest in Congress. Neither the executive nor the judicial branches are to create law. Each branch is to stay within its narrowly and precisely prescribed functions to guard against encroachments on the people’s liberty.

It worked – for a while.

During the so-called Progressive Era (better called the Big Government Must Solve All Our Problems Era), Congress began establishing administrative agencies charged with implementing statutes it passed, the Interstate Commerce Commission, for example. That was constitutionally permissible, but before long, Congress sought to give such agencies legislative powers – to make law through regulations. The Supreme Court ruled that unconstitutional because Congress was not empowered to delegate its legislative power to any other body.

Thus was born the non-delegation doctrine, and it held through 1936. Numerous New Deal statutes foundered upon it. But in 1937, the Supreme Court chose to ignore it in the pivotal case of NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel. In passing the National Labor Relations Act, Congress had put de facto legislative power over labor relations in the hands of a bureaucratic agency, the National Labor Relations Board. The Court did not overrule the earlier cases (such as Carter v. Carter Coal in 1936), but gave the NLRB the green light. Ever since, it has turned a blind eye to the increasing delegation of legislative power to unelected bureaucrats.

Along with most of America, the Court’s justices have blithely accepted the idea that Congress simply cannot write all the laws needed today because our problems have become “too complex.” Under that notion, the best (and constitutionally unobjectionable) course for Congress is to enact vague, general statutes that leave it to supposed experts in administrative agencies to figure out all the details and enforce them. Thus, our enormous body of administrative law is just a matter of necessity – or so the argument goes.

Professor Hamburger is not persuaded. “Administrative law is commonly defended as a new sort of power, a product of the 19th and 20th centuries that developed to deal with the problems of modern society in all its complexity. From this perspective, the Framers of the Constitution could not have anticipated it and the Constitution could not have barred it,“ he writes in the essay above.

He continues, “What I suggest, however, is that administrative power is actually very old. It revives prerogative or absolute power and thus it is something the Constitution centrally prohibited.” In his recent book, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? he fully presents his argument against the constitutionality of lawmaking through administrative edict.

I think Professor Hamburger is right on the constitutional question, but I’d also say that, quite apart from its constitutional defects, administrative law is a bad development for America. In many, many aspects of life, we now face thick piles of administrative regulations. Knowing and comprehending them is a virtual impossibility. We would be far better off without them, our conduct instead governed by the simplicity of common law.

Labor relations, for example, is covered by a heavy blanket of administrative rules and decisions of the National Labor Relations Board, but labor relations are no more “complex” now than they were prior to the creation of that agency in the NLRA. Common law rules of contract, property, and tort sufficed to regulate the field and would do so again if we could ever repeal the NLRA and eliminate the needless (and usually partisan) NLRB.

Where common law might not suffice (arguably that’s the case with respect to pollution, e.g.), Congress could and should take enough time to write the exact laws that need to be enforced. Instead of deferring to supposed experts in agencies, who are not elected (and often act in cahoots with lobbyists from special interest groups), Congress should listen to debate among actual experts, then draft bills open for public comment and debate the matter further before voting.

That would be infinitely better than enacting vague laws to be mostly filled out by functionaries in the bureaucracy.

It is probably too much to hope that the Supreme Court would reverse its almost 80 years of abject deference toward the delegation of legislative power to governmental entities, but not to hope that it will at least pull the plug on delegation to non-governmental bodies. That is the issue in a case the Court will hear in December, Department of Transportation v. Association of American Railroads.

Under the Passenger Rail Improvement and Investment Act of 2008, Congress gave Amtrak, a for-profit, quasi-public hybrid, a hand in writing regulations that will apply to its competitors. That’s an appalling idea.

In this Cato@Liberty post, attorney Ilya Shapiro explains what is at stake: “Many agencies are already dominated by the private interests they’re supposed to regulate (a dynamic known as ‘regulatory capture’), but allowing a private entity to secure a legislative role in governing its competitors not only exacerbates the problems that the administrative state already poses, it makes a mockery of the Constitution and erodes one more important structural protection for liberty.”

Absolutely right. While rule by federal bureaucrats appeals to the statist instincts of our “progressives” (exemplified by the book Philip Dru, Administrator by Woodrow Wilson’s top adviser, Colonel Edwin House), it is neither desirable nor permissible under the Constitution.

Rolling back our vast, often wasteful and authoritarian administrative state is a journey of a thousand miles, but if the Court stands firm against delegation in this case, at least we will have taken the first step.

Article originally published on Forbes.com.

Investigation a form of government intimidation

Investigation a form of government intimidation

By George Will

U.S. District Judge Rudolph T. Randa, revolted by the police-state arrogance of some elected prosecutors, has stopped a partisan abuse of law enforcement that was masquerading as political hygiene.

Last Tuesday, Randa halted the corruption being committed by persons pretending to administer campaign regulations – regulations ostensibly enacted to prevent corruption or the appearance thereof.

The prosecutors’ cynical manipulation of Wisconsin’s campaign laws is more than the mere appearance of corruption.

Eric O’Keefe’s refusal to be intimidated by lawless law enforcement officials produced Randa’s remarkably emphatic ruling against an especially egregious example of Democrats using government power to suppress conservatives’ political speech.

Wisconsin’s sordid episode began, appropriately, with a sound of tyranny – fists pounding on the doors of private citizens in pre-dawn raids. While sheriff’s deputies used floodlights to illuminate the citizens’ homes, armed raiders seized documents, computers, cellphones and other devices.

As a director of Wisconsin Club for Growth, which advocates limited government, O’Keefe had participated in his state’s 2012 debate surrounding attempts by Democrats and state and national government-employee unions to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker and some state senators.

The recalls were intended as punishment for legislation limiting the unions’ collective bargaining rights.

Walker prevailed. The Democratic prosecutors, however, seeking to cripple his 2014 re-election campaign and to damage him as a potential 2016 presidential aspirant, have resorted to a sinister Wisconsin process called a “John Doe investigation.”

It has focused on the activities of O’Keefe and 28 other conservative individuals or organizations.

In such investigations, prosecutors can promiscuously issue subpoenas and conduct searches.

The identities of the targets are kept secret, and the targets are silenced by gag orders, thereby preventing public discussion of the process.

Thus John Doe investigations are effective government instruments of disruption and intimidation.

Randa correctly concluded that the John Doe investigation had no reasonable expectation of obtaining a conviction.

But its aim, which had been achieved until Randa’s ruling, was utterly unrelated to law. It was abetted by selective leaks by the prosecutors and by subpoenas sent to conservative donors and organizations nationwide. The purpose of all this was to suppress conservative political advocacy by consuming the time and other resources of conservative leaders, and by making people wary of collaborating with those targeted by a secretive criminal investigation.

O’Keefe and the other harassed conservatives had engaged only in issue advocacy, not express advocacy. That is, they had not urged the election of specific candidates. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that government regulation of political speech is permissible only to prevent quid pro quo corruption – money purchasing political favors – resulting from express advocacy. Hence there is no

justification for the prosecutors’ punitive investigation of O’Keefe’s and others’ issue advocacy. As Randa said, this has no “taint of quid pro quo corruption” and thus “is not subject to regulation.”

The Democratic prosecutors must know this. Again, they ignore it because their aim is mayhem, not law enforcement. Their activity is entirely about suffocating conservative activity. Because the prosecutors know Wisconsin law, they are patently disingenuous in arguing that O’Keefe and others illegally “coordinated” their advocacy with Walker and other candidates or campaigns. Randa said “the record seems to validate” O’Keefe’s and the others’ denial of coordination.

Besides, and even more importantly, Randa said his court “need not make that type of factual finding.” Wisconsin law forbids coordination between third-party groups, such as O’Keefe’s, and candidates only for express advocacy, and Randa said “it is undisputed” that O’Keefe and his group engaged only in issue advocacy. The prosecutors’ indifference to this is their corruption.

Liberals inveighing against “dark money” in politics means money contributed anonymously to finance political advocacy. Donors’ anonymity thwarts liberals’ efforts to injure the livelihoods of identifiable conservatives by punishing them for their political participation and thereby deterring others from participating.

O’Keefe’s persecution illustrates the problem his lawyer David Rivkin calls “dark power” – government power wielded secretively for vengeance and intimidation. Judge Randa quoted the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision: The First Amendment is “premised on mistrust of governmental power.”

If Wisconsin is serious about eliminating political corruption, it can begin by eliminating corrupt prosecutors and processes, and the speech regulations that encourage both.

Your Security

"If it were to be asked, What is the most sacred duty and the greatest source of our security in a Republic? The answer would be, An inviolable respect for the Constitution and Laws -- the first growing out of the last. ... A sacred respect for the constitutional law is the vital principle, the sustaining energy of a free government." --Alexander Hamilton, Essay in the American Daily Advertiser, 1794

Wisonsin; a conservative success story

Wisconsin Success Story

Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker signed into law today a $541 million tax cut returning $406 million to state technical colleges to reduce their property taxes. Another $98 million will go to low-income taxpayers, reducing the state's lowest bracket from 4.4% to 4%. Walker first proposed the rate cuts in January, and the last procedural hurdle for passage was cleared this past week when the state Assembly passed the bill 61-35. That was fast.

The bill's passage barely rated 10 lines in The New York Times, which chose to bury the story deep inside the paper's A-section. Leftmedia outlets have done all they can to keep the Wisconsin success story out of the headlines as well. Walker, who survived a truly vicious recall effort after taking on the state's unions a couple years ago, has been behind a drive that has improved the state's economy, brought accountability to the school system, and pushed the unemployment rate down to 6.1%, its lowest since 2008. A recent poll reports that 95% of business owners in the state are optimistic about the future of the economy in Wisconsin.

The story of Wisconsin's recovery is one that Republicans around the country need to follow. Media outlets that care about reporting the facts should take heed as well. Walker's success has come despite the attempts of leftists to block his efforts at every turn with increasingly despicable methods. From shirking their legislative duties to preventing a vote on Walker's reforms to bussing in union thugs during the recall effort so as to shut down the capitol, Democrats have been merciless in their attempts to prevent the pro-business, small-government model from succeeding. They are particularly set on blocking it in the state that birthed the "progressive" movement a century ago.

Meanwhile, Walker's Democrat opponent, Mary Burke, is using her own underhanded tactics in an attempt to unseat the governor. She released an ad claiming that the state's unemployment rate is rising, and when she was called out on the blatant falsehood, she offered no regrets, saying in effect that the ends justify the lies. She will have a tough time convincing voters that Wisconsin is in need of new leadership, so expect the lies and mis-characterizations to keep on coming. That's the one tool that leftists know how to wield.