Barone - Unions Bleed Taxpayers

Michael Barone pens another superb piece on the economic hurdles imposed by unions on taxpayers, consumers, and business. Some very alarming trends are emerging. The article points out that private-sector union ranks are collapsing (a good thing), yet more than a third of public-sector employees are now unionized ( a scary factoid). Unions are no longer stewards of decent wages, improved workplace conditions, and agents of disenfranchised stakeholders. They are the new entitled fat-cats that have been very effective at eroding America's competitive advantage in key industrial and manufacturing sectors. From a sustainability and corporate responsibility perspective their needs to be an honest assessment of the costs they incur on all of us. Here are some well articulated highlights on impact of unions on the auto industry from Barone's article.

"Private-sector unionism is adversarial. Economic studies show that such unions do extract premium wages and benefits from employers. But that puts employers at a competitive disadvantage. Back in the 1950s, the Big Three auto companies dominated the industry and were at the top of the Fortune 500. Last year, General Motors and Chrysler went bankrupt and are now owned by the government and the UAW. Ford only barely escaped.

Adversarial unionism tends to produce rigid work rules that retard adaptation and innovation. We have had a three-decade experiment pitting UAW work rules against the flexible management of Japanese- and European-owned non-union auto firms.

The results are in. Yes, clueless management at the Detroit firms for years ignored problems with product quality and made bonehead investment mistakes. But adversarial unionism made it much, much harder for Detroit to produce high-quality vehicles than it was for non-unionized companies." 


With that kind of well documented legacy, do we really want to straddle our already obese and incompetent governmental infrastructure with a new bracket of unsustainable obligations? 

Barone: How Climate-Change Fanatics Corrupted Science.

Michael Barone has a great piece about the self-inflicted and fanatical wounds that gradually eroded the credibility of the climate change movement from within. The article itself is well-researched and meticulously cited, here are some brief excerpts: 

"Recently, there have been even more shocking revelations. The IPCC has claimed that warming will cause the Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035. It turns out that that claim was based solely on a pamphlet published by the World Wildlife Federation, based on no science at all. The head of the IPCC was informed that a 1996 report said those glaciers could melt significantly by 2350, not 2035, but he let the claim stand.

As Christopher Booker writes in the Telegraph of London, "A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC's report which cite similarly non-peer-reviews WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority." Similarly, the Times of London reports that a claim that warming could endanger "up to 40 percent" of the Amazon rainforest came from an anti-smoking activist and had no scientific basis whatever."

Does anyone else catch the irony in that last line?

Anyhow, the moral of the story is that transparency, accountability, and honesty are crucial to successfully pushing an effective issues campaign in this day and age. Information is readily available and easy to access. As the article suggests, the big question will be,  how did large swaths of society, especially governments and corporations become so enthralled with an idea driven by junk science at best and manipulative deceivers on a blind crusade at worst ? The werewolf thinks for governments it was about control and for corporations it was a short term play to try and find revenue opportunities. Not particularly flattering for either. Still, thank goodness for the vigilance of those who questioned the herd mentality on this issue.

Substance versus Style

Michael Barone, the political virtuoso and author of The Almanac of American Politics, has a interesting article contrasting substance versus style as it pertains to current state of American politics. It begs some interesting questions in light of recent revelations pursuant to Obama's governance style. His rhetorical talent and ability to leverage his lack of a record and experience clearly helped him clear the hurdles to victory in 2008. However, the great gamble on Obama was betting that his style would eventually translate into substance. Given the opaque and shady heath care reform process, the blatant buy-off by the unions, the punitive tax proposals, the abandonment of the gays, and the increasing government encroachment in the private sector, Obama's actions scream to the lack of substance being derive from his style. At his best, he's another empty suit parroting yesterday's failed liberalism, and the longer his style is adrift and doesn't jive with the substance it allegedly pimps, the quicker his brand will erode.

This brings us to a second point, the tea party movement. Barone hits the nail on his head with regard to the fact that the so called intelligentsia has long ceased to generate new ideas. It's as if they grew content with John Maynard Keynes and yesterday's failed notions of high liberalism, like LBJ's "great society." Throwing a new coat of paint on a rusty old jalopy, doesn't change the fact that the car in question is still archaic and out-dated. The werewolf doesn't like it when someone pisses on his leg and tells him that it is raining outside. This is the vibe he gets from the ideas that drive modern liberalism, and it scares him because of the monopoly they hold on political power at the moment. (This observation doesn't bestow automatic regard or credit to the Republicans, they to, have grown lazy and complacent) This is also what is fascinating about the tea parties. They are clearly a third rail that has formed in the modern political scene. They may have common cause with the Republicans in some elections, but they are hardly reflective of mainstream GOP thinking or establishment ideals. In fact, the werewolf's friends in the RNC are very concerned about the tea parties. However, the idea that average Americans, provincial to their very core, are the new leaders when it comes to forward-thinking and idea generation is worthy. The werewolf doesn't identify with the tea-parties that much, but he does identify with an anti-incumbency, anti-status quo, movement that prioritizes substance over style. That is what make the tea parties such an interesting phenomenon.