The City of Detroit is all but a ghost town.\u00a0 To stand atop the Renaissance Center on the Detroit River is to look out over sheer desolation, the by-product of years of Democratic Party rule.\u00a0 It is a stark reminder that Democratic politicians are to urban development what Little Boy and Fat man were to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.\u00a0 The only difference is that Democrats take two generations or more to accomplish what an A-bomb can do in the bat of an eye.<\/p>\n
But Detroit is not alone.\u00a0 Because its descent into oblivion was so rapid, and because it was one of the first major cities to succumb to the cancer of liberal political and economic policies, the name \u201cDetroit\u201d has come to be synonymous with urban decay and the long-predicted bankruptcy of urban America is upon us.\u00a0 With each passing day we hear of more and more cities, large and small, where a long succession of Democratic politicians have turned once-beautiful and one-prosperous cities into economic disaster areas.<\/p>\n
On August 16, 1937, the 20th<\/sup> anniversary of the founding of the National Federation of Federal Employees, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, \u201cAll Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.\u00a0 It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management\u2026<\/p>\n \u201cParticularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant (union) tactics have no place<\/em> in the functions of any organization of government employees.\u00a0 Upon employees in the federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare requires orderliness and continuity in the conduct of government activities\u2026 Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied.\u00a0 Such action, looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n The sentiments expressed by FDR prevailed until 1958 when a senior aide to New York Mayor Robert F. Wagner, a liberal Democrat, suggested that city workers represented a large enough voting bloc to insure Wagner\u2019s reelection.\u00a0 Wagner signed an executive order allowing city employees to unionize and bargain collectively.\u00a0 The rest is history.<\/p>\n All across the country, Democratic politicians recognized the political potential of unionized public employees, and in 1962 the fate of self-governance in the United States was sealed when John F. Kennedy signed an order allowing federal government employees to unionize.<\/p>\n What Roosevelt saw as the ultimate danger<\/em> of unionized public employees, Democrats of more recent vintage have seen as the ultimate political weapon<\/em>.\u00a0 Roosevelt cared about \u201cthe obligation to serve the whole people.\u201d\u00a0 Democratic politicians of today care only about the need to elect more Democrats to public office, by any means possible.\u00a0 The decline in the quality of life in our major cities is a direct result of that treachery.<\/p>\n The final outcome of a system in which public employee unions are allowed to use the threat of a work stoppage to extract ever-more generous contracts with outlandish salaries and benefits\u2026 part of which ultimately find their way into the campaign coffers of Democrat politicians willing to negotiate even more generous salaries and benefits\u2026 was entirely predictable.\u00a0 It is a rigged poker game in which all of the players are gambling with someone else\u2019s money.<\/p>\n During the 2012 public employee battle in Wisconsin, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) appeared on NBC\u201fs Meet the Press.\u00a0 <\/em>Host David Gregory asked his opinion of the possibility that most public employees in Wisconsin will lose a major portion of their collective bargaining \u201crights.\u201d\u00a0 Durbin, the Assistant Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate, replied, \u201cLet me tell you why what\u2019s happening in Wisconsin… goes way beyond the discussion of the Wisconsin budget.\u00a0 For over 80 years in America, we have recognized the rights of our workers to freely gather together, collectively bargain, so that they could have fairness in the workplace and fairness in compensation\u2026 \u201c<\/p>\n Yes, the Assistant Majority Leader of the United States Senate actually said with a straight face, in a nationally televised interview, that what the public employee unions have been working toward for decades is \u201cfairness in the workplace and fairness in compensation\u201d and to \u201cestablish the rights of workers to speak for themselves.\u201d\u00a0 To understand what Durbin said would require, to paraphrase Hillary Clinton, a \u201cwilling suspension of reason.\u201d<\/p>\n The truth is, Wisconsin public employees have worked for decades to establish unfairness<\/em> in the workplace and to establish the right of workers not<\/em> to speak for themselves.\u00a0 Through collective bargaining they have worked tirelessly to establish a system in which the most unproductive workers are compensated at exactly the same rate as the very best workers, and where union leaders, who have no concern for the relative value of individual workers, do all of their speaking for them.\u00a0 It is a system in which the only \u201cvalue\u201d is the possession of a union card, and nothing more.\u00a0 It is a system that rewards sloth and incompetence, while unfairly penalizing hard work and dedication.\u00a0 It rewards the unworthy and punishes the worthy.<\/p>\n Being a liberal Democrat, a believer in the redistribution of wealth, it has apparently escaped Durbin\u2019s attention that, when numbers of people conspire to take the assets of the owners of business through coercion\u2026 i.e. collective bargaining\u2026 they are engaging in theft.\u00a0 If Durbin were asked to show where in the U.S. Constitution workers have a right to hold hostage the property and the invested capital of the owners of business, or the taxpayers of a city or town, he would be unable to do so.\u00a0 That right simply does not exist.<\/p>\n Union leaders and Democrat politicians would have the American people believe that the public employees in Wisconsin were \u201cfighting for the middle class.\u201d\u00a0 Again, nothing could be further from the truth.\u00a0 What they fail to acknowledge is that 86% of workers who do not belong to unions… who take responsibility for their own economic advancement in their jobs… are the same middle class people who pay the taxes that pay the inflated wages of public employees.\u00a0 They are the same middle class taxpayers who send their children to the Wisconsin public schools where only 34% of 8th<\/sup> grade students are able to read at an 8th<\/sup> grade level.<\/p>\n Employers, whether in the public sector or the private sector, are interested in hiring only the best, most capable and productive workers.\u00a0 It is the obligation of the individual worker to insure that he\/she is one of those whose continued services the employer wishes to retain.\u00a0 That contract between the employer and the worker is what John L. Lewis spoke of as \u201cthe sale of the worker\u2019s only material possession \u2013 his labor.\u201d\u00a0 But it is an individual<\/em> right, not a collective<\/em> right.\u00a0 When it is consummated through collective bargaining (coercion), it is indistinguishable from extortion.<\/p>\n In the months and years ahead, public employees all across the country will be receiving some really bad news as their former employers face bankruptcy and state and local governments will be forced to abrogate their contracts with unionized employees.\u00a0 Pensions and other benefits, such as healthcare, will be slashed, if not eliminated.<\/p>\n San Bernardino, California is facing a budget shortfall of $45 million and annual deficits over the next five years. That\u2019s after the city slashed the workforce by 20 percent over the last four years and negotiated $10 million in annual concessions from employees in each of the last three years.<\/p>\n In San Jose, California, over the past decade, city administrators have seen the cost of providing employee retirement benefits triple, from $73 million in FY 2001-02 to $245 million in FY 2011-12.\u00a0 Expenditures for sick leave payouts, alone, cost the taxpayers $14.6 million in FY 2010-11.\u00a0 As a result, the mayor and city council have eliminated sick leave payouts for new employees, and have frozen the amount of sick leave that current employees can cash out upon retirement.\u00a0 Retiree benefits in San Jose now consume more than 20% of the General Fund.<\/p>\n In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a mid-sized city with a population of less than 50,000, the city has accrued public debt of some $1.5 billion, a sum that the city will never be able to repay.<\/p>\n It is a story that is repeated in city after city, large and small, all across the nation.\u00a0 In essentially every case the decline has come at the hands of Democratic elected officials who took more and more campaign cash from public employee unions, including teachers unions, and who, to show their appreciation, signed ever more lucrative wage and benefit packages for those who are paid out of the public treasury.<\/p>\n But now it appears that taxpayers are beginning to catch on to the Democrats\u2019 game.\u00a0 All that is necessary to identify America\u2019s dying cities is to study the red and blue electoral map of the United States.\u00a0 The urban areas colored in blue that twice elected Barack Obama, along with majorities in the United States Senate, are the principal source of our big city bankruptcies.<\/p>\n If we are to save our major cities from complete chaos, we cannot do it so long as the teachers unions and the public employee unions maintain a stranglehold over the Democratic Party and Democrat politicians yield to their every demand.\u00a0 The voters and the taxpayers are about to figure out who\u2019s been doing it to them.\u00a0 Let\u2019s hope their education has not come too late.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The City of Detroit is all but a ghost town.\u00a0 To stand atop the Renaissance Center on the Detroit River is to look out over sheer desolation, the by-product of years of Democratic Party rule.\u00a0 It is a stark reminder … Continue reading