Mike Antonucci
Green Room
HotAir
12/10/2012
The National Education Association is working more closely than ever before with its counterparts in organized labor. NEA, SEIU and AFSCME teamed up to fund a series of ads targeting key lawmakers in the fiscal cliff negotiations and they are the driving force behind today’s “day of action” rallies in a number of cities…
…The days when NEA stood far apart from the broader labor movement are gone. The AFL-CIO was once shunned by NEA delegates, but now more than one-quarter of NEA members are affiliated with the labor federation. This helps NEA in projecting political power, but could hurt its “professional association” image and embroil it in issues far removed from education.
Today’s union movement is almost entirely a public sector union movement. It only stands to reason that the largest public sector union would take a larger part.
Read the complete article at HotAir.com
Also at the site, Obama: This Michigan right-to-work nonsense has nothing to do with economics
Update: Obama’s Fiscal Cliff and the Chicago Way
A friend from Chicago, involved in Illinois politics who has known Obama since his early days in the Illinois State Senate, told me that two things that trump everything else in Obama’s mind: redistributing the wealth and empowering labor unions. Look at everything the President does, my friend says, and you will find one or the other lurking in the background.
My friend’s analysis may explain a lot about the current state of affairs concerning the standoff over the so-called fiscal cliff and Obama’s refusal to abandon the idea that he must raise taxes on the rich. The President and his henchmen certainly understand that raising taxes on the richest 2% of taxpayers (in reality these people are not the richest but those with the highest incomes) makes little economic sense – doing so would reduce the deficit for 2012 from $1.10 trillion to $1.02 trillion or, in these numbers, really not at all. So something else is going on…
Read the whole thing.
