The Advantages of Having Friends in High Places

The Advantages of Having Friends in High Places

Call them friends in high places or connections or contacts, knowing people with influence in positions to grease the skids for jobs, perks, or to just plain help you out is an inestimable advantage in America. In turn, when political friends come through, it translates into votes for the politicians.

Forget qualifications, education, merit, or need. Nothing is more beneficial than knowing someone with some pull to get you what you want. And, who has more pull than the current resident of the White House?

Unions have been calling in their chits ever since they blindly–or not so blindly, considering the benefits they reaped– supported the passage of the Obamacare abomination. They have been reaping ever since in the form of wholesale waivers from the onerous burdens of the Democrat-sponsored 2009 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the law VP Biden called “a big f*cking deal.”

Over the last six months alone, 543,812 union members have joined federal employees, Congress, and the president in being exempted from Obamacare, a number dwarfed by the millions of unionistas granted exemptions prior to last June when Obamians allegedly turned off the exemption spigot after it came under public scrutiny.

See “Obama’s Selective Waivers and Exemption’s."

Reliable friends in high places may retreat but, if they’re truly dependable and know where their bread is buttered and with an election approaching, they continue their friendship.

Other deep-dyed Friends of Obama are his huge cadre of federal employees.

Their president saw fit to cut tens of thousands from the ranks of America’s military, forces missioned to defend and protect the nation, yet found it within his generous heart in the midst of the Great Recession to propose a salary increase for federal workers.

Albeit a modest raise of 0.5%, it’s far more than America’s millions of unemployed and underemployed will receive. Before their raise, the average civilian federal worker was raking in $75,296 plus benefits valued at $28,323 versus average $46,326 salaries and vanishing bennies in the private sector.

Now the people who don’t answer their phones in Washington will be getting a few thou extra to not answer their phones.

The 1939 Hatch Act prohibited federal employees from engaging in partisan political activities, a restriction lifted in 1993 after three union leaders were accused of violations. The result? Federal employes are no longer precluded from contributing to political campaigns or from working on behalf of their favorite politicians.

Who was it called them civil servants? They’re more like a civilian army under the command of the man who pays them.

In addition to that army of 2.1 worker bees and his union armies of millions more, a third contingent of those owing a deep debt of gratitude to their executive friend in the Oval Office is the Gay Lobby.

Homosexuals owe Obama Big Time . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=12050.)

Labor Unions and the People Who Love, and Hate, Them

Labor Unions and the People Who Love, and Hate, Them

. . . Admittedly and initially, the creation of united workers’ organizations may have served a critical function during the era when industries repressively and unconscionably dictated piddling wages and atrocious working conditions. I would like to agree with claims that the union movement in the United States established the foundations for America’s vast middle class, the indomitable engine for our progress.

I would concur with all that providing major labor union leaders and workers, Big Labor, concede the worm has turned 180 degrees and that over the past 50 years they have developed into the oppressive, greedy equals of nineteenth century businessmen and banker ”robber barons,” and worse.

Union excesses today are legion–think Wisconsin last winter–and many public unions are leading the pack, demanding and getting pay raises far beyond the inflation rate while 26 million Americans are under-employed, foreclosures are skyrocketing, and poverty is spreading wildly.

Still, the United Auto Workers, UAW, at Ford Motor Corporation take the greed cake even if the bigwigs at FoMoCo provided the incentive.

In July, Ford–the only Big 3 automaker that had the integrity to reject the 2009 Obamian bailouts which GM and Chrysler gladly accepted and have yet to pay back in full–announced it was giving tens of millions in executive bonuses while advising workers they were lucky to have jobs. In retaliation, UAW Ford authorized a strike.

Perspective is desperately needed here.

As with most major industry executives, Ford’s President and CEO Alan Mulally is grossly over-compensated for his efforts; Mulally’s July stock bonus of $56.5 million only added to the grossness level.

However, at the risk of seeming an industry shill, Mulally runs a $165 billion business, his company employs 164,000 people worldwide, and Ford earned a taxable $6.6 billion profit on $128 billion total revenue for 2010.

On the other hand, the average Ford UAW worker with perhaps a high school education earns approximately $58. per hour, almost $2400. a week, $124,000. a year, just for showing up and maybe watching robots affix rear view mirrors to Fusions. Also, in January, Ford’s hourly employees were awarded $5,000. in profit-sharing, the highest payouts in 10 years, on top of extremely generous employee and layoff benefits.

In brief, Mulally and company are rapacious SOB’s but Joe Average Ford is doing pretty damned well for himself too, . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5494.)