Monthly Notes

From the May 2013 issue of the Capital Research Center publication Labor Watch:

President Obama nominated Thomas Perez, head of the civil rights division of the Justice Department, to be Secretary of Labor. As we go to press, Perez’s nomination faces hurdles. Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) has put a “hold” on the nomination and demanded that Perez answer questions about his failure to enforce requirements in the 1993 “Motor Voter” law that keep dead persons and other ineligible people off states’ voter rolls.

Meanwhile, congressional Republicans have charged that Perez cut a “secret deal behind closed doors” with officials of St. Paul, Minnesota. Allegedly, Perez dropped cases involving bad paperwork on “stimulus” projects—cases that might have returned $200 million to the federal government—in return for the city’s dropping its appeal of a housing case.

Why was the housing case important? Because it could have given the Supreme Court an opportunity to overturn the doctrine of “disparate impact,” which allows the government to make false charges of racial discrimination based on racial bean-counting. (Among other things, Perez has used “disparate impact” to sue banks and force them to make loans to people who aren’t credit-worthy.) Leftists like Perez don’t want the Supreme Court to hear such a case—at least, not until President Obama gets a majority on the Court.

On March 28, Michigan officially became a right-to-work state, although it will take a while for everyone to benefit from the new law as union contracts expire and are re-negotiated. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy spearheaded the research that showed the advantages of right-to-work. Now the Center has created a new website on the issue: MIWorkerFreedom.org, which includes a feature that lets workers generate a letter invoking their right to stop paying union dues.

In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker and supporters of state-level union reforms chalked up another victory. Previously, unions targeted Walker, his lieutenant governor, pro-reform state legislators, and even state Supreme Court justices who voted not to strike down the reforms. But the reformers have won almost every contest, and the issue appears to have been settled for the near-future by the victory—with 57% of the vote—of Supreme Court Justice Patience Roggensack. That means the state’s highest court has a 4-3 majority in favor of respecting the reforms, a majority that’s likely to continue for some time.

Pro-reform forces also defeated unions in two local elections, including one in the union stronghold of Milwaukee County, where membership in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees fell from about 9,000 in 2011 to roughly 3,500 now. Statewide, public-sector union membership fell from 50% to 37% in just one year, 2011 to 2012. Nothing reveals more clearly how trapped workers have been by union bosses.

In Indiana, the state’s Supreme Court threw out by 5-0 a teachers’ union challenge to the state’s voucher program. In Colorado, the state Court of Appeals upheld that state’s only private school choice program, in Douglas County.

Many voucher programs across the country target students who attend failing schools, as determined by drop-out rates, test scores, etc. Meanwhile, in some jurisdictions, test scores now help determine teachers’ and administrators’ salaries. The result? In many places, manipulation of data or outright cheating.  As the Wall Street Journal noted, “When Florida passed voucher legislation in 1999, 78 schools received failing grades. The next year, miraculously, there were none and thus no one qualified for a voucher.” In Atlanta, an investigation caught teachers using X-Acto knives and lighters to open and reseal test booklets, or holding parties where students’ answers were corrected. Some 180 teachers and administrators are believed to have participated; 34 have been indicted. Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers blamed the tests, saying the Atlanta case “crystallizes the unintended consequences of our test-crazed policies.”

From the May 2013 issue of the Capital Research Center publication Green Watch:

The nominations of Gina McCarthy to run the Environmental Protection Agency and Ernest Moniz to run the Energy Department have brought cheer to “crony capitalists” hoping to make big bucks from “green energy” scams. As Tim Carney of The Examiner observes, the nominees would “increase government’s role in the energy sector with the cooperation of business.” Moniz is head of MIT’s Energy initiative, which has received funding from corporations seeking to make money off their ties to the Left, including BP, Chevron, Siemens, Duke Energy, and EDF. In the “partnerships” between such businesses and the government—including ethanol, solar, and wind projects, not to mention the “stimulus,” bailouts of too-big-to-fail corporations, and Obamacare—“government steers the ship, while business rows,” Carney complains. “Politicians and bureaucrats tell business what to do, and [some] business gets to make a profit doing it.”

Meanwhile, Chevron, EDF, Shell, CONSOL Energy, and other corporations have teamed with environmentalists at the Center for Sustainable Shale Development, an “independent organization” that will set performance standards and create a certification process for fracking in shale reserves in the Northeast. Among the participating organizations: the Environmental Defense Fund, the Clean Air Task Force, the Group against Smog and Pollution, the William Penn Foundation, and the Heinz Endowments (which have significantly funded fracking critics).

Dow Chemical, Nucor (the country’s largest steel producer), and the aluminum giant Alcoa have teamed in a group called America’s Energy Advantage, which hopes to block exports of liquefied natural gas. The companies want government to keep natural gas artificially cheap so they can benefit financially, but as the Wall Street Journal noted, they are playing into the hands of “the likes of the Sierra Club, whose real goal is to shut down all fracking in a way that would force Dow, Nucor, and Alcoa entirely overseas. Remember what Lenin said about businessmen [selling] the rope to hang themselves?”

In 2008, Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute attended a “green investments” conference where (in Ebell’s words) “leading crony capitalists” from such companies as General Electric, Duke Energy, Dow, and Kleiner Perkins (Al Gore’s firm) “smugly explain[ed] how they were going to strike it rich off the backs of consumers and taxpayers with green energy subsidies and mandates, federal loan guarantees, and the higher energy prices that would make renewable energy competitive with coal, oil, and natural gas once cap-and-trade was enacted.”

Now, however, “green energy” is losing money even with all the subsidies and mandates. For example, the chief investment officer of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (Calpers) noted recently that the organization’s fund for “clean energy and technology” has an annual rate of return of minus 9.7 percent since 2007.

The solar panel maker Suntech—a Chinese company heavily subsidized by its government—closed its U.S. plant, despite receiving $4.1 million from the U.S. government, the Arizona government, and the city of Goodyear, Arizona.

Fisker Automotive, which taxpayers lent $180 million to build electric cars for rich people, recently dismissed 150 of its remaining 200 employees. It hasn’t built a car since July of last year, when its battery maker, A123 Systems (itself a recipient of $249 million in tax dollars), filed for bankruptcy.

The April 3 “Today” show discussed a poll on “20 widespread conspiracy theories.” “Global warming is a hoax, 37% believe that,” said fill-in host Willie Geist. “Wow!” said weatherman Al Roker. After “Today” laughed at people’s belief in Bigfoot, the faking of the moon landing, and the conspiracy to kill JFK, Roker reiterated, “37% said, 37% of these people don’t believe in global warming! They think it’s a hoax!” Newsreader Natalie Morales: “All these weather events!” Roker: “Okay, two words: Superstorm Sandy!” Morales: “Sandy? Right. There you go.”

Warmist beliefs have spread even among military leaders. The Boston Globe reported that Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III, commander of the U.S. Pacific Command, listed “climate change” as the biggest long-term security threat in the Pacific region. He said “people are surprised sometimes” to hear him make that assessment and that, in order to deal with the problem, “the imperative” is to prepare for the effects of climate change on the “massive populations” of India and China. “If it goes bad, you could have hundreds of thousands or millions of people displaced and then security will start to crumble pretty quickly.”

Meanwhile, in the world of science, global warmers are frantic to keep gloom alive. Reuters reported on April 16 that “Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions. Often focused on century-long trends, most climate models failed to predict that the temperature rise would slow, starting around 2000. Scientists are now intent on figuring out the causes and determining whether the respite will be brief or a more lasting phenomenon.”

Contrary to the mainstream media’s reporting, Progress Kentucky, the left-wing super PAC that allegedly taped Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), has close ties to the Democratic Party. Although party officials have tried to distance themselves from the taping, which may have been illegal, the executive director of Progress Kentucky, Shawn Reilly, is a notable Democratic Party activist and veteran community organizer. As CRC discovered, Reilly was a delegate to the 2012 Democratic convention and was a past member of the state party’s executive committee. In 2007, he was a “field organizer” for Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, a group that reportedly silenced McConnell by heckling him at a public event that year. Progress Kentucky was also accused of racism after its tweets mocked the Chinese ethnicity of McConnell’s wife, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao.

Project Vote deputy director Amy Busefink is lobbying Texas lawmakers in an effort to prevent state officials from verifying if Texas voters are registered in multiple states, J. Christian Adams reports at PJMedia.com. Of course, Busefink shouldn’t be anywhere near electoral integrity issues: she was convicted two years ago of being a voter-fraud ringleader during an ACORN voter drive in Las Vegas. That wasn’t the first time Busefink was involved in shady electoral dealings. Even while under indictment in Nevada she ran the 2010 national voter drive for Project Vote, which was President Obama’s employer in 1992. Project Vote and ACORN, which went bankrupt in 2010, had long been indistinguishable.

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It appears author Steven J. Milloy of JunkScience.com was right when he quipped that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “owns” the American Lung Association (ALA). Taxpayer money may be indirectly financing lobbying campaigns aimed at banning smoking in public places. Since 2001, the EPA has given the ALA more than $20 million in grants, and the ALA, in turn, has been passing on grant money to local governments to encourage such bans. For example, smoking is now banned on the beaches of Fenwick Island, Delaware, after its town council accepted a grant from the ALA. Officials in nearby Dewey Beach are planning to ban smoking on their beaches, too, and are seeking money from the ALA to promote the ban.

“A blockbuster congressional investigation of campaign finance activities by corporations, trade associations, and high net worth individuals may be coming,” warns Covington & Burling, a law firm that focuses on election law. According to its latest report, not only 501(c)(4) groups and trade associations may be congressional targets, but also 501(c)(3) nonprofits. The chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Carl Levin (D-Mich.), has announced he will “tackle … the use of secret money to fund political campaigns.” Levin is notoriously tough, and his new ranking member on the other side of the aisle is Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who is famous for his willingness to have Congress restrict political speech.

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Organizing for Access? Critics from left to right say President Obama’s newly incorporated 501(c)(4) community organizing group, Organizing for Action, has been selling access to the president through the group, which accepts unlimited individual donations. The Daily Caller reports that access to the Obama White House can be purchased by donors for $500,000. At a press briefing, White House press secretary Jay Carney declined to deny the report. The group grew out of Organizing for America, an unincorporated project of the Democratic National Committee that whipped up popular support for Obama’s policies.

Finally! Weeks after left-wing activist Melowese Richardson boasted on television that she voted multiple times for president in November, authorities in Cincinnati, Ohio, charged her with voter fraud. The now-indicted 58-year-old veteran poll worker is facing eight counts of voter fraud in total, going all the way back to 2008. Richardson is a member of Communities United for Action, which is part of a larger Saul Alinsky-inspired organizing network called National People’s Action (NPA) that makes no bones about its desire to overthrow what remains of America’s free enterprise system.

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Influential House Ways and Means Committee member Rep. David Reichert (R-Wash.) told the Chronicle of Philanthropy he opposes putting a cap on the charitable deduction because doing so “would negatively affect giving.” President Obama has proposed placing a 28-percent ceiling on the deduction, but such a limit would have the effect of “raising taxes and therefore raise revenue to pay for government spending,” Reichert says. “I think that the money is better off in private hands.”

Rep. Tom Petri (R-Wisc.) introduced legislation that would give volunteers who drive their own cars to do charity work the same tax benefits for mileage reimbursements as people who drive as part of their paid jobs at a business. The proposed “Charitable Driving Tax Relief Act” would also scrap the rule that charities report mileage reimbursements to the Internal Revenue Service.

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President Obama has converted his campaign apparatus into a permanent in-your-face campaign aimed at furthering radical politics. Organizing for Action, a new 501(c)(4) advocacy group, will “play an active role” in “mobilizing around and speaking out in support of important legislation” during Obama’s second term, the president said. The group grew out of Organizing for America, an unincorporated project of the DNC that whipped up popular support for Obama’s policies. Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina, is the new group’s national chairman, but day to day affairs will be run by executive director Jon Carson. A former White House aide, Carson has ties to ACORN and Project Vote and was previously chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, serving under the now-disgraced Van Jones.

Student activists with the radical anti-war group Code Pink receive college credit for disrupting congressional hearings, Code Pink leader Jodie Evans acknowledges. Evans made the admission after Lachelle Roddy, an intern at the group, was ejected from Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent confirmation hearing for shouting “I’m tired of my friends in the Middle East dying.” Roddy is a political science major at Hollins University, a small, private women’s college in Roanoke, Virginia (current annual cost: $43,295.00). Kerry refused to criticize his detractor, fondly recalling his own protest antics. “I respect the woman who was voicing her concerns about the world,” he said.

The George Soros-funded Center for American Progress is outraged that the National Rifle Association spends money to elect judges and state attorneys general who support the Second Amendment. The nerve! CAP writer Billy Corriher mocks the 22-year-old good government group, Law Enforcement Alliance of America, to which he says the NRA has given $6 million-plus since 2004, and calls it a “front group” that helps to elect politicians who turn a blind eye to “violations of gun-violence prevention laws.”

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President Obama finally found a few groups that he doesn’t want to give tax dollars. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has refused to provide aid to more than 200 houses of worship in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions affected by “Superstorm” Sandy, which made landfall in late October. But “there’s no constitutional reason why houses of worship, which often are the first to provide timely disaster relief to hard-hit communities, should be categorically banned from receiving relief funds to repair buildings. In fact, continuing the practice of allowing zoos and museums to obtain the funds while shutting out churches expresses precisely the kind of hostility toward religion that the Establishment Clause rejects,” said Daniel Bloomberg, legal counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

Nonprofit leaders warned lawmakers at a congressional hearing last month that tinkering with charitable deductions could have serious consequences, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports. “Substantially limiting the charitable deduction at a time when people are still reeling from the recession, unemployment is high, and charities are facing government cutbacks simply makes no sense,” said David Wills, president of the National Christian Foundation, testifying on behalf of the Alliance for Charitable Reform. The House Ways and Means Committee heard that limiting the value of the charitable deduction would discourage giving and compel nonprofits to cut back on the services they provide to those in need. The committee created 11 working groups to prepare for the tax reform debate, including one focusing on charitable organizations.

Conservatives are still severely outgunned in the world of philanthropy, David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin write in their recent book, The New Leviathan (Random House). As of 2009, “the financial assets of the 115 major tax-exempt foundations of the Left identified by our researchers added up to $104.56 billion,” or 10 times greater than the financial assets of the 75 major foundations of the Right.

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From the March 2013 issue of the Capital Research Center publication Green Watch.

The Sierra Club, formerly seen as a mainstream environmental group, is showing more radical colors as controversy over the Keystone XL pipeline escalates. At a protest outside the White House February 13, various left-wing celebrities were arrested, including Robert Kennedy Jr., actress Daryl Hannah, former NAACP president Julian Bond, and, with the approval of his board, Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune, making him the first leader in the group’s 120-year history to be arrested at a protest.

Interviewed on the radical radio program “Democracy Now!” Brune insisted, “If we want to keep our temperature increases below three and a half degrees Fahrenheit, at least two-thirds of the oil, and coal, and gas that we know about all around the world has to stay in the ground.” Again: According to the head of the nation’s oldest environmentalist organization, two-thirds Read all »

From the March 2013 issue of CRC’s Labor Watch.

Over the long haul, unions and union-backed politicians tend to put employers out of business. But there’s another big reason for unions’ systematic decline: they’ve lost touch with their members’ interests and values. Fewer top union officials have backgrounds like those of the workers they are supposed to represent. A longtime national official of the Laborers’ International Union of North America told the Washington Times, “It’s becoming impossible to find anyone at [LIUNA] who has ever actually worked the trade beyond a summer or two while they attended the Harvard Labor College. How can you represent working men and women Read all »