Don't Forget Your Union Label

The Obama administration on (last) Monday released a new regulation setting rules for who can keep their current health insurance plans under the law. The regulation gave special consideration to plans negotiated by unions, quickly drawing criticism from conservatives and others, who argue the rules will put small businesses at a competitive disadvantage.

But the new rule is only one of numerous ways the health-care law boosts unions. And since vast portions of the law remain undefined – until bureaucrats fill in the details – further breaks for organized labor are widely expected.
For the rule regarding whether people can keep their health plans – known as “grandfathering” in bureacratise – the Department of Health and Human Services ruled that for union-negotiated health plans, companies can change insurance providers but keep their essential plan  details intact, or grandfathered. For non-union-negotiated plans, companies can’t change providers – they must stay with their same insurance provider.
Without the ability to choose another company, small businesses would have little leverage to negotiate their rates, probably leading to higher costs, critics say. The alternative is to get a new plan which meets the strict new regulations of the Obama health-care law, which will probably cost more, too.
It also hits at a core pledge President Obama made repeatedly in pushing for the law – that people happy with their current health plans could keep them. In fact, the Obama administration now estimates that as many as 51 percent of businesses (and 66 percent of small businesses) will need new health-care plans by 2013 because of the law.
A second way Obama’s health-care law helps unions is in the so-called “Cadillac” tax that applies to more expensive health-care plans.
For most of America, that tax begins when an employee’s health-care plan costs at least $10,200. After that, the plan will be taxed at 40 percent. For union-negotiated plans, the tax starts at $27,500 instead. Some estimates say this will save union members $60 billion over 10 years.
Organized labor has argued that workers who negotiated better health-care plans in exchange for lower pay could be hurt – plus they negotiated the plans without knowing the tax could hit them later.
A third way the law boosts unions is with a $5 billion subsidy for health insurance for early retirees. The health-care law’s critics note that the vast majority of employers who have early retiree programs are unionized employers, especially in the public sector.
Under the program, HHS will reimburse certain claims between $15,000 and $90,000.
A fourth way the law benefits unions is that it gives union members entry into the health insurance exchange markets earlier than everyone else.
A fifth way the law benefits unions is that certain very large group plans are exempt from many of the regulations in the health-care law. This category of large group plans is not limited to unions – for instance, large employers such as Wal-Mart may be eligible – but it will also benefit key union-negotiated plans.
Because the health-care law is so vast and complicated – and since many of its details are yet to be determined – this list is not exhaustive.
Notably, organized labor, far from pleased with Obama, is instead involved in a bitter feud with the White House.
Recently, labor (and environmentalists and other liberal factions within the Democratic party) threw millions of dollars into a Democratic primary race in Arkansas in their attempt to defeat Sen. Blanche Lincoln. Lincoln has posed a key impediment both to the union-backed Employee Free Choice Act as well as a range of environmentalist priorities.
Following Lincoln’s win, a senior White House aide remarked to Politico that the unions had “flushed” $10 million down the toilet in trying to defeat Lincoln. A top labor official responded that unions are not a “arm of the Democratic party.”

The DISCLOSE ACT
Aka, muzzle anyone but Unions.
The untold story is that Democrats assuaged organized labor’s early opposition to the bill by tailoring its provisions to eke out space for unions.
For example, restrictions on companies that received government bailouts during the financial crisis apply to businesses, but not unions: Under the DISCLOSE Act, General Motors can’t tell you who to vote for, but the United Auto Workers union can.
And consider the bill’s laborious record-keeping rules for certain types of donations. Corporations, unions, non-profits and 527 groups will, for the first time, be required to report donors who give more than $600 if they engage in “express” advocacy — urging voters to support one candidate or another by name.
Conveniently, as Republican staff on the House Administration Committee point out, average union dues in 2004 were $377 – below the $600 threshold. Since unions get the vast majority of their funds from member dues, “the new threshold for reporting is likely to have little effect on unions … but a huge effect on associations and advocacy groups,” a GOP summary of the bill says.
Government contractors with contracts of more than $7 million are not permitted to engage in express advocacy. Unions that receive their dues from the taxpayer-funded salaries of public sector employees face no such restriction. Neither do recipients of grants.
The bill includes strict rules on foreign-owned businesses engaging in express advocacy. The rules are so strict, critics fear, they will ensnare American companies with American employees and revenue. For instance, if a foreign entity owns, directly or indirectly, 20 percent or more of a company’s shares, that company isn’t allowed to urge citizens to vote for candidates, even if it’s based in the U.S.
No such restrictions are placed on unions.
The Funny part:
Unions are also subject to the new “stand by your ad” requirements. Under a 2002 campaign spending law, political candidates must state in television and radio advertisements they approved the message of their advertisements. Commonly, this statement reads, for example, “I’m Barack Obama and I approved this message.”
The DISCLOSE Act takes this idea and runs with it.
A hypothetical television ad would read, “I’m Eli Pariser, the executive director of Moveon.org Political Action and George Soros approves this message.” Soros, in this case, would be a “significant funder” for the ad, or would have given money for the ad to run. Then, Soros would appear on screen himself.
If he were the only funder of the ad, Soros would say, “I’m George Soros. I helped pay for this message, and I approve it.”
If Soros was part of a group that helped fund the ad, he would say, “I’m George Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management. Soros Fund Management helped pay for this message and Soros Fund Management approves it.”
The longest version of this hypothetical “stand by your ad statement” takes about 15 seconds to read. Many political spots are 15 seconds. For the most common, 30-second spot, the statement would eat up 50 percent of the ad time.
So you could get campaign ads that are longer and cost more and bore people even more, but end up sounding like the drug commercial where the lawyer speak is longer than the commercial was and blows past thinks like “small risk of death has been reported in some cases”.
I didn’t say it was funny, ha ha.
But Obama and the democrats have to protect their peeps in the Unions against those evil corporate goons!

Freedom of Liberal Speech

1st Amendment

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
The Liberal Progressive Rewrite (my version):
Congress shall make no law respecting any religion, and will do it’s best to prohibit the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of Liberal speech, or of the Liberal press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble (except for those who disagree with Liberals, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, but they will be ignored if they are not “deemed” worthy by Liberals.
An effort by Democrats to close down speech critical of their actions before it can impact the November elections is running into a rocky road in the U.S. House, where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delayed action on the proposal while the party regroups and tries to assemble support.
The DISCLOSE Act, pending as HR 5175 in the U.S House and as S. 3295 in the Senate, targets the freedom of speech of companies and groups acknowledged by the U.S. Supreme Court in its “Citizens United” ruling last winter.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Chris Van Hollen in the House and Sen. Charles Schumer in the Senate, has 114 co-sponsors with Van Hollden and 49 with Schumer.
Pelosi, however, pulled the proposal from a floor vote and sent members home for the weekend because of turbulence over the plan to impose a new set of reporting and other requirements on a long list of organizations, according to a report in Human Events.
According to the Connie’s Congress column, “Democrats have been scrambling to shut down conservative political speech before the November elections this year since the January U.S. Supreme Court decision in ‘Citizens United v. FEC’ that found freedom of speech applies to everyone: individuals, corporations and unions.
“Discontented with a more level playing field, Democrats threw together the DISCLOSE Act, a very lengthy and complicated piece of legislation designed solely to undo the court’s decision.”
While moving forward, it still needed additional support, and in recent days a “carve-out” was created that would have exempted the National Rifle Association from its demands, allegedly in exchange for the NRA dropping its opposition.
But analysts say the move backfired, since the Internet ignited with criticism of the organization’s “deal with the devil” and other less-complimentary descriptions.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.com said, “Congress’ attempt to repair their attack on the First Amendment, overturned in the ‘Citizens United’ decision earlier this year, has run off the rails thanks to the machination of its Democratic backers.
“Nancy Pelosi pulled the DISCLOSE Act from the House floor last night after the news of sleazy deals to exempt powerful organizations from the law started leaking to the media. Ironically, it was a rare partnership between the NRA and the Democrats that sealed the bill’s fate.”(WND)
And this Congress is not known for backroom slezy deals, after all, as Pelosi herself said in 2007, it was “going to be the most ethical Congress” in history. And she wouldn’t lie, now would see…
Cleta Mitchell, a member of the board of directors for NRA, which would have fallen into the bill’s exempting language, wrote in a newspaper column the true purpose of the DISCLOSE Act is to “silence congressional critics in the 2010 elections.”
“Since the court’s January decision in ‘Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission’ that corporations cannot be constitutionally prohibited from making independent candidate-related expenditures, Democrats have been hyperventilating at the notion that corporations might spend millions of dollars criticizing them,” she wrote. “To foreclose that possibility, the DISCLOSE Act would impose onerous and complicated ‘disclosure’ restrictions on organizations that dare to engage in constitutionally protected political speech and on corporations that dare to contribute to such organizations.
“The DISCLOSE Act isn’t really intended to elicit information not currently required by law. The act serves notice on certain speakers that their involvement in the political process will exact a high price of regulation, penalty and notoriety, using disclosure and reporting as a subterfuge to chill their political speech and association,” she wrote.
“It is only disclosure, say the authors. And box-cutters are only handy household tools . . . until they are used by terrorists to crash airplanes,” she wrote.
The dirty little secret that the Democrats don’t want discussed is that Unions were the #1 user and abuser of campaign ads until this ruling, they had a virtual monopoly because of the money they could raise from their members.
And as if that weren’t enough…
WASHINGTON — Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation’s homeland security chief said Friday.
As terrorists increasingly recruit U.S. citizens, the government needs to constantly balance Americans’ civil rights and privacy with the need to keep people safe, said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.
But finding that balance has become more complex as homegrown terrorists have used the Internet to reach out to extremists abroad for inspiration and training. Those contacts have spurred a recent rash of U.S.-based terror plots and incidents.
“The First Amendment protects radical opinions, but we need the legal tools to do things like monitor the recruitment of terrorists via the Internet,” Napolitano told a gathering of the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.
Napolitano’s comments suggest an effort by the Obama administration to reach out to its more liberal, Democratic constituencies to assuage fears that terrorist worries will lead to the erosion of civil rights.
Mind you, last year, this is the same person who called “right wingers” and returning military personnel “terrorists” and this are the same people who have called the Tea Party movement “terrorists” on occasion.
And with “net neutrality” still out there (aka censorship) you can always trust Big Sis to do what’s best for you.
Napolitano said it is wrong to believe that if security is embraced, liberty is sacrificed.
Too Bad she doesn’t believe that about the Border!!
She added, “We can significantly advance security without having a deleterious impact on individual rights in most instances. At the same time, there are situations where trade-offs are inevitable.”
You trade your freedom for our Security. What could be wrong with that.
The Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act would allow the President to disconnect Internet networks and force private websites to comply with broad cybersecurity measures.
Future US presidents would have their Internet “kill switch” powers renewed indefinitely.
The bill would give a newly-formed National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications the authority to monitor the “security status” of private websites, ISPs and other net-related business within the U.S. as well as critical internet components in other countries. Companies would be required to take part in “information sharing” with the government and certify to the NCCC that they have implemented approved security measures. Furthermore, any company that “relies on” the internet, telephone system or any other part of the U.S. “information infrastructure” would also be “subject to command” by the NCCC under the proposed new law.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY!
Millard (IA) Public Schools will stop using a children’s book about global warming — but only until the district can obtain copies with a factual error corrected.
A review committee, convened after parents complained, concluded that author Laurie David’s book, “The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming,” contained “a major factual error” in a graphic about rising temperatures and carbon dioxide levels.
However, the district will cease to use a companion video about global warming, narrated by actor Leonardo DiCaprio, he wrote.
The committee found the video “without merit” and recommended that it not be used.
In the video, DiCaprio attributes global warming to mankind’s “destructive addiction” to oil. He says “big corporations” and politicians gained too much money and power “on our addiction,” making them “dangerously resistant to change.”
So how many school district did do this?
After all, it’s just education….
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH!