Big Fat Useless Worthless Trade Unions

Here is yet another reason that all trade unions should be abolished.  They do far more harm — and in many cases, evil — than they ever do good.  This is outrageous!


USELESS IMMORAL EVIL TRADE UNIONS SHOULD BE ABOLISHED

I'm 63 And I'm Tired

I'm 63 and I'm Tired

by Robert A. Hall

Robert A. Hall is an actor. He plays the coroner on CSI if you watch that show. He also is a Marine Vietnam War veteran, but does not mention that he had his legs blown off in that war. 

This should be required reading for every man, woman and child in the United States of America.

I'm 63. Except for one semester in college when jobs were scarce and a six-month period when I was between jobs, but job-hunting every day, I've worked hard since I was 18. Despite some health challenges, I still put in 50-hour weeks, and haven't called in sick in seven or eight years. I make a good salary, but I didn't inherit my job or my income, and I worked to get where I am. Given the economy, there's no retirement in sight, and I'm tired. Very tired.

I'm tired of being told that I have to "spread the wealth" to people who don't have my work ethic. I'm tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy to earn it. 

I'm tired of being told that I have to pay more taxes to "keep people in their homes." Sure, if they lost their jobs or got sick, I'm willing to help. But if they bought Mc Mansions at three times the price of our paid-off, $250,000 condo, on one-third of my salary, then let the left-wing Congress-critters who passed Fannie and Freddie and the Community Reinvestment Act that created the bubble use their own money to help them.

I'm tired of being told how bad America is by left-wing millionaires like Michael Moore, George Soros and Hollywood Entertainers who live in luxury because of the opportunities America provided to them. In thirty years, if they get their way, the United States will have:

1. the economy of Zimbabwe,

2. the freedom of the press of China

3. the crime and violence of Mexico,

4. the tolerance for Christian people of Iran

5. the freedom of speech of Venezuela ...

I'm tired of being told that Islam is a "Religion of Peace," when every day I can read stories of Muslim men killing their sisters, wives and daughters for their family "honor"; of Muslims rioting over some slight offense; of Muslims murdering Christian and Jews because they aren't "believers"; of Muslims burning schools for girls; of Muslims stoning teenage rape victims to death for "adultery"; of Muslims mutilating the genitals of little girls; all in the name of Allah, because the Qur'an and Sharia’s law tells them to. 

I'm tired of being told that "race doesn't matter" in the post-racial world of Obama, when it's all that matters in affirmative action jobs, lower college admission and graduation standards for minorities (harming them the most), government contract set-asides, tolerance for the ghetto culture of violence and fatherless children that hurts minorities more than anyone, and in the appointment of U.S. Senators from Illinois. 

I'm tired of being told that out of "tolerance for other cultures" we must not complain when Saudi Arabia uses the money we pay for their oil to fund mosques and madras Islamic schools to preach hate in America, while no American group is allowed to fund a church, synagogue or religious school in Saudi Arabia to teach love and tolerance. 

I'm tired of being told I must lower my living standard to fight global warming, which no one is allowed to debate. My wife and I live in a two-bedroom apartment and carpool together five miles to our jobs. We also own a three-bedroom condo where our daughter and granddaughter live. Our carbon footprint is about 5% of Al Gore's, and if you're greener than Gore, you're green enough. 

I'm tired of being told that drug addicts have a disease, and I must help support and treat them, and pay for the damage they do. Did a giant germ rush out of a dark alley, grab them, and stuff white powder up their noses while they tried to fight it off? I don't think gay people choose to be gay, but I #@*# sure think druggies chose to take drugs. And I'm tired of harassment from "cool" people treating me like a freak when I tell them I never tried marijuana. 

I'm tired of illegal aliens being called "undocumented workers," especially those who aren't working, but living on welfare or crime. What's next? Calling drug dealers, "Undocumented Pharmacists"? And, no, I'm not against Hispanics. Most of them are Catholic, and it's been a few hundred years since Catholics wanted to kill me for my religion. I'm willing to fast track citizenship for any Hispanic who can speak English, doesn't have a criminal record and who is self-supporting without family on welfare, or who serves honorably for three years in our military. Those are the kind of citizens we need. 

I'm tired of the trashing of our military by latte liberals and journalists, who would never wear the uniform of the Republic themselves, or let their entitlement-handicapped kids near a recruiting station. They and their kids can sit at home, never having to make split-second decisions under life and death circumstances, and bad mouth better people than themselves. Do bad things happen in war? You bet. Do our troops sometimes misbehave? Sure. Does this compare with the atrocities that were the policy of our enemies for the last fifty years and still are? Not even close. So here's a deal for those folks. I'll let myself be subjected to all the humiliation and abuse that was heaped on terrorists at Abu Ghraib or Gitmo, while the critics of our military can be subject to captivity by the Muslims, who tortured and beheaded Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, or the Muslims who tortured and murdered Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins in Lebanon, or the Muslims who ran the blood-spattered Al Qaeda torture rooms our troops found in Iraq, or the Muslims who cut off the heads of schoolgirls in Indonesia because the girls were Christian -- then we'll compare notes. British and American soldiers are the only troops in history that civilians came to for help and handouts, instead of hiding from in fear. 

I'm tired of people telling me that their party has a corner on virtue and the other party has a corner on corruption. Read the papers; bums are bipartisan. And I'm tired of people telling me we need bipartisanship. I live in Illinois, where the "Illinois Combine" of Democrats has looted the public treasury for years. Not to mention the tax cheats in Obama's cabinet. 

I'm tired of hearing wealthy athletes, entertainers and politicians of both parties talking about "innocent" mistakes, "stupid" mistakes or "youthful" mistakes, when all of us know they think their only mistake was getting caught.

Speaking of poor, I'm tired of people with a sense of entitlement who have air-conditioned homes, color TVs and two cars called poor. The majority of Americans didn't have that in 1970, but we didn't know we were "poor." The poverty pimps have to keep changing the definition of poor to keep the dollars flowing. 

I'm real tired of people, rich or poor, who don't take responsibility for their lives and actions. I'm tired of hearing them blame the government, or discrimination or big-whatever for their problems. 

Yes, I'm tired, but I'm also glad to be 63, mostly because I'm not going to have to see the world these people are making. I'm just sorry for my granddaughter. 

Robert A. Hall is a Marine Vietnam veteran who served five terms in the Massachusetts State Senate.

Obama: The Radical Marxist

Figures. Chicago Teacher’s Union President Linked to Former Communist Party Chief and Barack Obama

Posted by Jim Hoft
September 10, 2012

More Hope and Change…


Mike Klonsky, an Obama supporter and former associate of the radicals who formed the terrorist group the Weatherman, received a $175,000 grant from the William Ayers/Barack Obama-led Annenberg Challenge to run the Small Schools Workshop.

Klonsky belonged to the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and was best friends with friends William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn who later became famous for their acts of terrorism.


Later he started a blog on the Obama website:

 Between 1979 and 1981, Communist Party chairman and Obama supporter Mike Klonsky was repeatedly feted with state-dinner-level visits to Beijing.

And get this… Klonsky reportedly shared offices on the same floor with Barack Obama and Bill Ayers at the University of Illinois, Chicago campus.

So it should come as no surprise that Mike Klonsky, the former Communist Party leader, is a huge supporter of Karen Lewis, head of the Chicago Teachers’ Union. Chicago teachers went on strike today for the first time in 25 years despite the fact that the average teacher salary in Chicago is $74,839 a year.

Obama served with Weather Underground terrorist and neighbor Bill Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge education initiative. Downplaying academic achievement in favor of left-wing radical activism in the public schools is rooted in Bill Ayers’ pedagogical philosophy. Obama served as the program’s first chairman of the board, while Ayers steered its curricular policy. The two oversaw grants to welfare rights enterprise ACORN and to avowed communist Michael Klonsky – a close pal of Ayers and member of the militant Students for a Democratic Society. SDS served as a precursor to the violent Weather Underground organization.

As investigative journalist Stanley Kurtz reported, Klonsky and Ayers teamed up on the so-called “small schools movement” to steer schoolchildren away from core academics to left-wing politicking on issues of “inequity, war, and violence.”

Government By And For "Crony Capitalism"

On energy, Obama rewards friends and punishes enemies

The Washington Examiner

Editorial

2012 August 23

On the eve of the 2010 midterm elections, President Obama accidentally summed up his governing philosophy in an interview with Univision: "[W]e're gonna punish our enemies, and we're gonna reward our friends ..."

This is the cornerstone of politics in Obama's adopted hometown of Chicago. It is also one of the few promises Obama has actually kept.

Just look at the Obama administration's treatment of utility giant Exelon Corp., which has had Illinois' legislature (and especially Obama's old state Senate mentor, Emil Jones) wrapped around its finger for years. An Exelon lobbyist once referred to the company as "the president's utility." One of Obama's top fundraisers sits on Exelon's board. Obama's top political adviser, David Axelrod, worked as an Exelon consultant. Obama's former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel helped create the company through a merger when he was an investment banker. Exelon is one of Obama's oldest "friends."

As such, Obama has rewarded Exelon with a $200 million stimulus grant from the Energy Department, a $646 million loan from the Treasury Department and favorable regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Obama gave similar friendly treatment to the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm whose board members have received U.S. ambassadorships from Obama. When the United Steelworkers union needed more than $200 million to save a Philadelphia oil refinery, Obama worked with Carlyle to waive EPA emissions requirements for the plant. Without the special regulatory treatment, Carlyle never would have invested the money.

Meanwhile, in Texas, Obama was busy trying to punish his enemies. His EPA's Cross-State Air Pollution Rule would have inflicted $2.7 billion in economic costs on the 28 states that produce the vast majority of electricity in the United States. Thankfully, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has intervened. In their opinion throwing out the new rule this week, the judges said Obama's EPA was "reluctant to acknowledge any textual limits on its authority."

Obama wants Americans to believe the foundation of America's economic success comes from all the roads and bridges that government builds. He's wrong. America's economic miracle came from our 200-plus-year commitment to economic fairness and the rule of law. Obama's energy agenda is a testament to how his administration is undermining the foundation of America's economic growth.

At every turn, Obama has favored some firms (Solyndra, Exelon, Carlyle, Duke Energy, etc.) while simultaneously punishing others (coal plants, oil companies, the natural gas extraction industry, transportation firms, etc.). There is a phrase for Obama's economic policies: "crony capitalism."

Warning America not to go down the same path his native Italy has chosen, economist Luigi Zingales recently advised: "For the U.S., the moment to act is now, before the cancer of crony capitalism metastasizes. ... [W]e must curb the political power that large industry incumbents have over legislation. 

Not only does it distort legislation, it also forces new entrants to compete on lobbying instead of concentrating on making more innovative and cheaper products."

As a candidate, Obama promised to change how business was done in Washington. In office, he has done so by making it worse.

Open Letter To President Obama - An Update

AN OPEN LETTER TO PRESIDENT OBAMA FROM A PROCTER AND GAMBLE EXECUTIVE - AN UPDATE

DATE: 2012 April 15

FROM: Lou Pritchett

In April 2009, I sent President Obama and the New York Times a letter titled "You Scare Me" because, as a candidate, he promised to "fundamentally transform America." Now, after observing his performance for over three years, he no longer scares me --- he terrifies me for the following reasons:

 

FIRST: He has done more to damage America 's standing in the world, to lower the standard of living in America , to impoverish future generations and to shake our faith in the country's future than any other American president in history.

 

SECOND: With a compliant Democrat congress, a lapdog media and a weak, almost nonexistent Republican opposition, he has shattered the American dream of job security, home ownership and rugged individualism for millions of Americans and has poisoned and divided our civil society with his politics of envy, class warfare, race warfare, and religious warfare which he is using as fundamental building blocks for his 'socialist' agenda.

 

THIRD: Culturally, he remains totally out of touch with traditional American values. This has absolutely nothing to do with race or where he was born, rather it has everything to do with where, how and with whom he was raised, schooled, educated, trained and associates with still today.

 

FOURTH: He has surrounded himself with naive academicians, lawyers, politicians, bureaucrats and socialist leaning czars who arrogantly think and behave exactly as he does. People who offer no balanced suggestions or devil’s advocate positions and think in lock step with him that big government is the answer to all our problems.

 

FIFTH: He not only encourages but aids and abets the unionization of all American industry, the albatross around the neck of the free market. In turn, they provide the money and muscle to intimidate his opponents.

 

SIXTH: He has increased the national debt by over 30% in just three years. If re-elected and this rate of increase continues, America will be burdened with an unsustainable 20 trillion dollar debt which will result in the country's financial death. Recovery will be 
impossible --- America will be the Greece of 2016.

 

SEVENTH: Given his fanatical beholding to the 'environmental' and 'man-caused global warming' fringe, he has deliberately discouraged U.S. fossil fuel exploration and production while wasting millions of tax payer dollars on solar, wind and algae experiments. He refuses to accept that oil, gas and coal are not America 's enemies, they are America 's assets, which, properly managed, could make us energy independent within a generation.

 

EIGHTH: He views the U.S. as a power in retreat which abused its World dominance. Therefore he systematically apologizes round the world. Last March he whispered to Russian President Medvedev "--this is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility". Just what is the secret that Obama and Putin are concealing from the American people until after the election? With what other leaders has he made similar secret agreements?

 

NINTH: And finally, after all his mis-steps, bad decision making, poor management, and zero leadership, the fact that he has the audacity to seek re-election should terrify every American.

 

I predict that if re-elected, future historians and political interpreters will look back at the eight year period 2008-2016, and conclude "the 44th President of the U.S. allowed the takers to overpower the payers which resulted in the greatest economy in history vanishing from the face of the Earth." 

Farewell America, the World will really miss you!"

 

Lou Pritchett
April 15, 2012

Obama and Government Motors

Obama’s Car Bailout: A $25 Billion Lemon

Investors Business Daily
2012 August 15

As the Obama campaign continues to tout the GM bailout as an industrial policy success, the Treasury Department continues to revise upward the staggering losses inflicted on U.S. taxpayers.

On the day Government Motors, aka GM, announced it was recalling at least 38,000 of its vehicles — Impalas used by police nationwide and in Canada — due to a crash risk, a new Treasury report said it now expects to lose $25 billion on the bailout, $3.3 billion more than forecast earlier.

As the Detroit News reported, this loss was based on GM’s stock price at the time of the report, which was 15% higher than the previous report. Because the stock price has fallen since then, the latest report likely understates taxpayers’ real losses.

The monthly report sent to Congress last Friday covers predicted losses through May 31, when GM’s stock price was $22.20 a share.

On Tuesday, GM fell $0.26, or 1.3%, to $20.21.

At that price, the government would lose another $995 million on its GM bailout. The report notes the government still has 500 million shares of GM and needs to sell those shares at $53 each for the government to break even on the bailout.

Worse yet, the entire financial loss suffered by taxpayers is the result of a massive and planned redistribution of wealth from them to the auto unions that form a key part of Obama’s base and re-election drive.

In its analysis, the Heritage Foundation says all the taxpayer losses occurred because the administration manipulated bankruptcy law to shelter the United Auto Workers’ compensation.

“We estimate that the administration redistributed $26.5 billion more to the UAW than it would have received had it been treated as it usually would in bankruptcy proceedings. . . . Thus, the entire loss to the taxpayers from the auto bailout comes from the funds diverted to the UAW,” Heritage reckons.

On the jobs front, the auto bailout did less than nothing. Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for the $787 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, reported to Congress that the forced closure of auto dealers, which hurt parts suppliers, was unnecessary and political.

“Treasury made a series of decisions that may have substantially contributed to the accelerated shuttering of thousands of small businesses and thereby potentially adding tens of thousands of workers to the already lengthy unemployment rolls,” Barofsky said in a 45-page report.

Deciding which dealers were closed was determined by political, not business, reasons, with race and gender a key factor, the Barofsky report said. Some GM “dealerships were retained because they were recently appointed, were key wholesale parts dealers or were minority-or woman-owned dealerships.”

Not even the push to force consumers into heavily subsidized electric cars like the Chevy Volt has helped.

As political consultant Karl Rove noted, GM employed roughly 252,000 workers in 2008. Now it has 207,000, with 131,000 working in foreign plants. Yet GM has not been accused of outsourcing jobs.

GM takes its place next to the Obama administration’s Solyndras, another rotten fruit of an industrial policy where wealth is redistributed, not created, and where government picks winners and losers in an economy in which we all ultimately lose.

Think about this government-sponsored train wreck before you vote in November!

Just How Bad Is Obama?

You need to read the following before you vote in November, 2012!

Dr. Thomas Sowell writes the following:

The current Occupy Wall Street movement is the best illustration to date of what President Barack Obama's America looks like. It is an America where the lawless, unaccomplished, ignorant and incompetent rule.  It is an America where those who have sacrificed nothing pillage and destroy the lives of those who have sacrificed greatly.

It is an America where history is rewritten to honor dictators, murderers and thieves. 

It is an America where violence, racism, hatred, class warfare and murder are all promoted as acceptable means of overturning the American civil society.

It is an America where humans have been degraded to the level of animals: defecating in public, having sex in public, devoid of basic hygiene. 

It is an America where the basic tenets of a civil society, including faith, family, a free press and individual rights, have been rejected. 


It is an America where our founding documents have been shredded and, with them, every person's guaranteed liberties.

It is an America where, ultimately, great suffering will come to the American people, but the rulers like Obama, Michelle Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, liberal college professors, union bosses and other loyal liberal/Communist Party members will live in opulent splendor.

It is the America that Obama and the Democrat Party have created with the willing assistance of the American media, Hollywood, unions, universities, the Communist Party of America, the Black Panthers and numerous anti-American foreign entities.

Barack Obama has brought more destruction upon this country in four years than any other event in the history of our nation, but it is just the beginning of what he and his comrades are capable of.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is just another step in their plan for the annihilation of America.

Socialism, in general, has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.

Thomas Sowell


And just who is Thomas Sowell: Thomas Sowell (born June 30, 1930) is an American economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author. A National Humanities Medal winner, he advocates laissez-faire economics and writes from a libertarian perspective. 

He is currently a Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. 

Sowell was born in North Carolina, but grew up in Harlem, New York. He dropped out of high school, and served in the United States Marine Corps during the Korean War. 

He received a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1958 and a master's degree from Columbia University in 1959. In 1968, he earned his doctorate degree in economics from the University of Chicago. 

Dr. Sowell has served on the faculties of several universities, including Cornell and University of California, Los Angeles, and worked for "think tanks" such as the Urban Institute. Since 1980 he has worked at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of more than 30 books.

The Government: As Bad As It Gets!

The Occupation Should Be On White House Grounds

 Posted 11/18/2011 06:05 PM ET

Crony Capitalism: As the president embraces Occupy Wall Street, his favorite corporation paid no taxes in 2010 on $14 billion in profits, much of it overseas. Meanwhile, 20,000 jobs for the 99% go unfilled.

At a recent town hall meeting, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., chairman of the House Budget Committee, reminded constituents of a story that broke earlier in the year — that General Electric paid no taxes on profit of $14 billion, $9 billion of which was earned overseas.

Ryan related how he had asked a GE tax officer the length of GE's tax filing. The tax guy said it was filed electronically but if it had been printed out he reckoned about 57,000 pages. This speaks both to the complexity and unfairness of the tax code.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, with an incoherent agenda that rails against income inequality and the evils of capitalism, ignores the fact that what we are practicing is not true capitalism, the version where businesses and entrepreneurs are allowed to compete on a truly level playing field to reap the rewards or be allowed to fail.

Instead, businesses large and small are encumbered by regulations and a byzantine tax code designed not to raise money for the needed functions of government but to reward or punish the behavior of corporations and individuals as the government sees fit.

General Electric, a "good" and "green" company that makes wind turbines instead of drilling for oil, is rewarded for successfully jumping through government hoops and gaming the system.

TransCanada, which wants to build a pipeline to bring oil from Alberta's tar sands to American refineries, is deemed a "bad" company that wants to rape the earth and give us bad air and water. It, and the 20,000 jobs it would create for the 99% by building the Keystone XL pipeline, is told to cool its heels.

President Obama embraced the OWS movement when he told ABC News: "The most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side, and that we want to set up a system in which hard work, responsibility, doing what you're supposed to do, is rewarded."

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Yet his administration does exactly the opposite with policies designed to redistribute wealth rather than create it. Its industrial policy picks winners and losers based on ideology and backs firms with unworkable business plans, like failed solar panel maker Solyndra.

General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt serves as the head of Obama's jobs council, even as GE moves jobs overseas. The General Electric light-bulb factory in Winchester, Va., closed recently — a victim, along with its 200 employees, of a green energy policy that Immelt and Obama support.

As the Solyndra scandal unfolded and many questioned the government's policy, Immelt told CNBC that "anytime you get into venture capital investing you're going to have some losses." But he didn't condemn the government acting as the venture capitalist or criticize the fact that the taxpayers are taking the losses.

Capitalism is not unfair. It rewards the inspiration and perspiration of a Steve Jobs who dropped out of college to create a company that would change the way we live and communicate, providing jobs for the 99%.

No one became homeless or poor or defaulted on their student loans because a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates made billions.

Instead of railing against Wall Street, OWS participants should gather up their pointless signs and drug paraphernalia and head over to the GE parking lot or White House lawn.

Obama --- It's the Economy, Stupid!

Editorial: Want More Jobs? The Ideas Are Out There

 Posted 06/06/2011 07:03 PM ET

Employment: The latest talking points from the Democrats on the slumping economy and jobs recession go like this: Gee, we've tried everything, but nothing works — and Republicans haven't put forward any ideas at all.

This was on full display Monday when former White House aide David Axelrod, carrying water for the administration, said Republicans should stop "yammering" about President Obama's pathetic jobs record and come up with their own plan.

"Yammering"? The GOP has two good, workable plans already put forward — Rep. Paul Ryan's plan to restore fiscal balance to our nation, and another by House Speaker John Boehner to revive jobs growth.

Clearly, Democrats in the White House and Congress haven't tried everything, contrary to their assertions. They've focused on old Keynesian tricks like more spending, higher debt and higher taxes on entrepreneurs. Things that have never worked and never will.

To help Axelrod and other economically benighted left-wing pundits, we've made a list of things to do right now — virtually overnight — to get jobs growing again.

• U.S. businesses face the highest tax rates in the industrial world. The corporate rate today is 34%, well above the 27% average for other rich nations. Meanwhile, Obama threatens to raise taxes on the "rich" to as high as 40% — a de facto tax on entrepreneurs. As the House GOP suggests, cut the top business tax rate to 25% and they'll grow, hire and compete again.

• Keep capital gains tax rates low. Democrats threatened to raise the tax on capital gains by a third — from 15% to 20%. Bad idea. This would kill investment and millions of jobs. Making the cap-gains rate permanent — or better yet, zeroing it out — would create a flood of new investment and millions of jobs to go with it. We've been this way before — Presidents Kennedy, Reagan and even Clinton signed cap-gains cuts during their time in office. Two were Democrats. And each time the economy boomed.

• Stop harassing U.S. champions, like Boeing. The National Labor Relations Board wants to stop Boeing, the world's most successful plane maker, from building planes in South Carolina. Why? It wouldn't use union workers there.

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But unions have become an albatross for many former industrial states, which is why there are already 22 right-to-work states, where workers can't be forced to join a union or pay dues to one. From 1999 to 2009, those states added 1.5 million private-sector jobs for an increase of 3.7%; states without right-to-work lost 1.8 million, a decrease of 2.3%.

• Pass free-trade deals with Colombia, Panama and South Korea, which have already been negotiated and await votes in Congress. This would create at least 250,000 jobs, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

• End senseless regulation. The Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates that federal regulations impose $1.75 trillion in costs on the economy — or about 12% of GDP. Today there are 4,225 regulations "in the pipeline." Overall, these cost U.S. companies $8,086 per employee. At a minimum, those regulations that cost more than their real benefit should be ended — saving hundreds of billions for U.S. businesses.

• Keep defense strong. Cranking up the U.S. arsenal of democracy — we face real threats from China, Russia, North Korea, Iran — will have economic benefits, too. A 2007 study by University of Massachusetts researchers Heidi Garrett-Peltier and Robert Pollin found that each $1 billion invested in defense spending created 8,555 jobs. That's real shovel-ready stimulus.

• Drill, baby, drill. Yes, it's a cliche. But massive new shale oil and gas finds in Texas, the Northeast's Marcellus formation and the Far West's Bakken field would cut energy prices, create hundreds of thousands of new jobs and boost our energy independence.

In the Marcellus shale region alone, some 48,000 new jobs were created over the last 18 months, mostly in hard-pressed Pennsylvania. Ending the drilling ban on offshore oil would likewise unlock at least 180 billion barrels of oil, creating hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs — the kind now missing from our "green" economy.

• Stop harmful climate change initiatives. Measures such as cap-and-trade and onerous new burdens on the coal industry will have an enormous impact on the economy and jobs.

The White House wants to slash output of CO2 emissions. But according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration's own forecast, a proposed 70% cut in CO2 will cause gasoline prices to soar 77% above current forecasts, kill more than 3 million jobs and slice average household income by more than $4,000 a year over 10 years.

• End ObamaCare. Its estimated cost of $1 trillion is bad enough, but it will create a shortage of doctors and nurses and destroy medical and drug innovation, decimating employment in the device and pharmaceutical industries. Worse, it will discourage small businesses from hiring or offering health coverage at all.

• Enact tort reform. Texas, already on a job-creation roll, has just passed a "loser pays" provision as part of the 2011 Omnibus Tort Reform Act signed by Gov. Rick Perry on May 30. According to Towers Watson, tort costs in 2009 cost the economy $248.1 billion, or $808 per person. The impact is particularly severe in health care, where lawsuits add $30 billion to health care costs each year.

• Cut spending. This year, the federal government will spend about $3.8 trillion, with a $1.5 trillion deficit. It will spend an estimated $46 trillion over the next decade — up 77% from the last decade. Cutting spending, reducing our deficit and putting capital back to work in the private sector would be the best stimulus plan of all, creating millions of new jobs.

These are just a few things that would create jobs immediately. Maybe Axelrod and his pals, who have presided over the worst recovery in more than a generation, should stop "yammering" themselves and listen.

Impact of Unions on the Economy and Country

Unions and the Economy

1. Unions function as labor cartels, restricting the number of workers in a company or industry to drive up the remaining workers’ wages just as OPEC attempts to cut the supply of oil to raise its price.

2. Unions benefit their members but hurt consumers generally, and especially workers who are denied job opportunities.

3. Unions decrease the number of jobs available in the economy. The vast majority of manufacturing jobs lost over the past three decades have been among union members; nonunion manufacturing employment has risen.

4. On balance, unionizing raises wages between 0 percent and 10 percent, but at a steep economic cost. Unions have the same effect on business investment as does a 33 percentage point corporate income tax increase.

5. Congress should remember that union cartels retard economic growth and delay recovery when considering legislation, such as EFCA, that would force workers to join unions.

6. See following link for details: Union Impact on the Economy