He hailed the breakaway union's leader, Sal Rosselli, as a lifelong friend and "one of the strongest labor leaders in this state."

One Socialist threatening another Socialist for supporting another Socialist...sounds like the Soviet Union all over again.

I'd put a $50 wager that the SEIU has it backwards...it is the SEIU that requires Democratic Party support in order for it to survive.

U.S. Labor Group Unveils Plan to Tackle Joblessness

The head of the largest U.S. labor federation urged President Barack Obama on Tuesday to use the $700 billion Wall Street bailout fund to help cash-starved small businesses as a way to stem rising joblessness.

In a preview of labor's contribution to Obama's December jobs summit, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program could be lent directly to small- and medium-sized businesses at commercial rates.

The AFL-CIO jobs plan also calls for extended unemployment benefits, food assistance and healthcare for the unemployed, more money for infrastructure projects and state and local governments, and job creation aimed at distressed communities.

Rising unemployment poses a political danger to Obama as his fellow Democrats in Congress approach the 2010 election with voters increasingly dissatisfied with incumbents.

"If small businesses can get credit, they will create jobs. And we need jobs now," Trumka said in a speech to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning Washington think tank.

Judith Miller and David Samuels contend that it is not Islam but Islamic heretic extremists who are our enemies. Are they really saying that they know Islam better than the millions of Muslims who follow the Koran's injunctions regarding the infidel? Can they cite any influential non-jihadi imams who have publicly condemned the "extremists"? Have they read the Koran?

When the George W. Bush administration decided to unilaterally invade Iraq based on a falsehood, we also acted as an extremist group, killing thousands of innocents.

Governments should pursue the common good so that public order prevails despite differing opinion, even on theological issues.

In the U.S., one such issue is availability of abortion, shaped by the religious views of a minority who dismiss factors that should guide public policy.

It seems to be of little concern to them that the number of abortion-related injuries would increase by making abortion less available.

On the contrary, we ought to base law on good public policy and shame those who would use religious coercion to try to get legislators to do otherwise.

Ah, the joys of the "let the marketplace take care of itself" school of government. About 22 million Americans are suffering with the H1N1 virus, and one-third of the nation's workers don't have paid sick days. In other words, the sick must come to work or lose pay and be disciplined.

A vomiting food and beverage concierge was docked and disciplined by the Disneyland Hotel for leaving her shift early. I will never, ever set foot in that place again. I hope thousands of other people feel the same after reading this.

That the Disneyland Hotel would deny sick days to its employees is not just morally reprehensible, it should also be criminal.

The former president of the union that represents Los Angeles County government workers has agreed to plead guilty to federal fraud and tax charges in connection with an alleged scheme to collect illicit consulting payments from a labor-related nonprofit, officials said Thursday.

Alejandro Stephens, a longtime leader of the Service Employees International Union local, signed an agreement to plead guilty to one count of filing a false income tax return and two counts of mail fraud, the U.S. attorney's office said.

Stephens lost his union presidency in 2007 when his SEIU chapter, Local 660, merged with several others.

The county later fired him from his job, alleging he had refused to return to work after a lengthy leave.

The governor's proposed legislation, to be considered during a special session that ends by Oct. 5, was met almost immediately by criticism from the powerful state teacher unions, which called Schwarzenegger's plans rushed and unnecessary.

In order to "solve" California's massive budget crisis, the tax-and-spend lobby and left-leaning academics are again suggesting that we revise Proposition 13, which changed the state's tax structure in 1978 by lowering property tax rates and limiting annual increases.

Ironically, these new efforts to change the highly popular initiative are based, not on the argument that Proposition 13 has failed California, but on the grounds that Proposition 13 is working precisely as intended.

California's budget problem is a result of unrestrained overspending coupled with unstable sources of revenue.

While income tax and sales tax revenue are way down by double digit percentages, property tax revenues have simply flattened out, notwithstanding dramatic drops in market value. True, some counties will see slightly larger drops in revenue than others, but some counties will actually see increases in property tax revenue. There are few places in all of America which can make that claim.

Here is the real irony. Our sales tax and income tax system has evolved over many years in ways dictated by our political elite and smartest policy advisors. Thus, the volatility that we now complain about has been brought to us by people who are oh so much smarter than the rest of us. Proposition 13, on the other hand, was sponsored by two relatively simple men, Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann, who were seeking, first and foremost, just to protect homeowners.

The state’s biggest labor union is launching a $1-million TV advertising campaign promoting new taxes on the oil, tobacco and liquor industries in hopes of dissuading lawmakers from adopting the deep social services cuts proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The governor wants to eliminate the state’s welfare-to-work program, health insurance for the working poor and student grants, among other programs.

How would you feel working at Ford, Honda, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz and BMW manufacturing plants in the United States, knowing that your government just gave your competitor $50 billion?

Deese will force GM to make smaller cars. How will he get people to buy the cars no one wants? That's easy. Don't fix the energy problem. Oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear resources won't be developed. The government will subsidize ethanol, which drives up food prices.

The trouble with the president buying GM for "us" is that now the company is owned by people who don't want it and who will never profit from it.

A better solution would have been to give these billions to the stockholders to buy the company for the autoworkers union. Let's see the union take on debt and turn a profit while saddled with the exorbitant salaries, pensions and restrictions it imposed upon the industry.

As a former employee of a General Motors subsidiary, I purchased a few General Motors bonds in 2002 to aid my retirement. I paid full price for senior bonds that had first claims on all the assets of GM, should GM go bankrupt. It was a gold-plated investment.

Then the U.S. government decided, senior though my bonds are, that the assets should be given to other people. The union workers were put first in line, then the government, and then me.

Two and a quarter cents on the dollar is what I can expect for my bonds. I wish the government would follow the bankruptcy laws. I hate playing poker with a government that makes my three aces lose to a pair of sevens.

"To solve the budget’s continuing structural deficit, we must reform the way the government spends its money. And to restore the trust of the people, we must reform the way the government operates.
...
My colleagues, I say to you, political courage is not political suicide. Ignore the lobbyists. Ignore the politics. Trust the people.
...
Do the math. Our revenue increases by more than 5 billion but our spending increases by over 10 billion. We don’t have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem.
...
A lot of people say, 'Arnold, why don’t you just raise taxes and be done with it?' Well, as I said earlier, we don’t have a revenue problem. We have a spending problem. We could raise taxes by billions but that would only further drive up spending by billions of dollars.
...
I can also announce that we intend to wipe out nearly 100 unnecessary boards and commissions, abolishing over 1000 political appointments in the process.

No one paid by the state should make $100,000 a year for only meeting twice a month.

I know the special interests will oppose all the reforms I have mentioned. Any time you try to remove one dollar from the budget, there are five special interests tugging on the other end. Anytime you try to make something more efficient, there are a half-dozen special interests trying to prevent it.

The result is that nothing changes in Sacramento. This place is in the grip of the special interests.

The people of California demand reform. That is what the recall election was all about."

Officials in the governor's office say a politically powerful union may have had inappropriate influence over the Obama administration's decision to withhold billions of dollars in federal stimulus money from California if the state does not reverse a scheduled wage cut for the labor group's workers.

The officials say they are particularly troubled that the Service Employees International Union, which lobbied the federal government to step in, was included in a conference call in which state and federal officials reviewed the wage cut and the terms of the stimulus package.

During the conference call, state officials say, they were asked to defend the $74-million cut scheduled to take effect July 1. The cut lowers the state's maximum contribution to home health workers' pay from $12.10 per hour to $10.10.

The wages go to some 300,000 people who care for the elderly and ill in their homes.

Those workers collectively pay millions of dollars in dues each month to SEIU and another union.

SEIU was among the biggest donors to President Obama's campaign, contributing $33 million.

The union is also consistently among the biggest donors to Democrats in Sacramento and had aggressively fought the wage cut during state budget negotiations.

The rapidly expanding program is intended to keep low-income elderly and disabled Californians out of nursing homes. People who qualify for the program can hire anyone they choose to take care of them, including relatives and friends.

The Obama administration has ruled that California must revoke the wage cut -- which would require a two-thirds vote of the Legislature and thus would need GOP support -- or lose $6.8 billion in federal stimulus funds.

A study released Tuesday by the Pew Hispanic Center has documented a change in trend: After years of rapid growth, illegal [alien invasion] is slowing down in California, with the state's share of the nation's estimated 11.9 million [illegal aliens] dropping to 22% from 42% in 1990, the study showed.

The state still has the largest concentration of illegal [aliens] in the nation, with 2.7 million -- a figure that has nearly doubled since 1990.

But, in a trend that began with California's recession in the 1990s, more migrants are bypassing the state for other areas of the country. The number of illegal [aliens] outside the nation's six traditional "first stop" states of California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey and New York has increased sevenfold, to nearly 5 million in 2008 from 700,000 in 1990, according to Jeffrey S. Passel, the study's coauthor and a Pew Center senior demographer.

Nearly half of the households headed by [illegal aliens] have young children, twice the rate of native-born households. And nearly three-fourths of their children were U.S.-born citizens.

The children of [illegal aliens] make up about 10% of California students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

The study, co-written by D'Vera Cohn, a Pew Research Center senior writer, found that three-quarters of illegal immigrants are Latino, mostly from Mexico. On average, they tend to work in low-skilled jobs such as farming and construction, earn markedly less than the median national income and have lower educational levels than U.S.-born residents.

For instance, 47% of illegal immigrant adults ages 25-64 have less than a high school education compared with 8% for U.S.-born residents. The immigrants' 2007 median household income was $36,000, compared with $50,000 for the U.S.-born, and they did not attain markedly higher incomes the longer they lived in the United States, unlike legal immigrants, the study found.

The nation's top two labor federations announced a framework Tuesday for comprehensive immigration reform, setting aside differences with the hope of pushing legislation through this year.

The agreement, supported by the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win federation, supports the legalization of the nation's 12 million [illegal aliens] and the formation of an independent commission to analyze the labor market's needs and assess shortages for the admission of future foreign workers. The unions oppose any new guest worker programs that would allow employers to bring foreigners in on a temporary basis.

[Illegal alien advocate] groups also plan to hold news conferences, town hall meetings and hearings across the nation to mobilize support for reform and to highlight what they say is the harm caused by a lack of legislation.

In addition, the unions included border security as a tenant of their plan but wrote in the agreement that enforcement should not be the responsibility of local law enforcement and should focus on "criminal elements."

In the civil complaint, brought in Los Angeles County Superior Court, the United Long-Term Care Workers accuses Freeman of misappropriating funds in a broad scheme to enrich himself and his relatives. Named as co-defendants are his wife, Pilar Planells; his mother-in-law, Carmen Planells; and the video and day-care companies they operated out of their homes.

Freeman, a onetime protege of SEIU President Andy Stern, had been a rising star in labor and political circles because of his stewardship of the local, California's largest.

Meanwhile, Freeman required employees of the training-center charity to work on partisan political campaigns, despite laws barring such activities, and then denied doing so to an Internal Revenue Service examiner, sources told The Times.

This change would correctly take away from management the power to pick employees' method of voting on whether to organize. But instead of returning that decision to the people who ought to have it -- the employees -- it would award it to a labor union, an outside third party that has the potential to become the employees' representative in bargaining but isn't yet, and shouldn't be before the vote.

First, a little background: By March 15, school districts in California were required to send out reduction-in-force notices (RIFs) to any employee whose job might be in jeopardy come fall.

The unions are referring to these notices as "pink slips." Now, everyone knows that a pink slip means "You're fired." But it is very clear that these RIFs are nothing more than an alert to a possible layoff -- sort of the difference between a bullet to the head and a warning shot.

Our state is in dire financial straits -- why should teachers be a protected class? This is especially true in light of the following inconvenient fact: In 2003-04, the LAUSD had 747,009 students in its system, and those students were taught by 36,180 teachers. By 2007-08, the student population had shrunk 7%, to 693,680, but the teaching force had decreased only about 1%, to 35,785. In 2003-04, the student/teacher ratio was 20.64 students per teacher. In 2007-08, it was 19.38 students per teacher. If we went back to the 20.64 ratio of 2003-04, we would need only 33,597 teachers -- 2,000 fewer teachers than we have now.

In Los Angeles, we have some of the highest-paid teachers in the U.S. -- most of whom have a world-class health plan in a state whose economy is falling apart, where the unemployment rate tops 10% and whose citizens are already among the most taxed in the country -- whining about the possibility that a few jobs may be lost.

A Bay Area officer of the scandal-clouded Service Employees International Union has collected double salaries, one as a city transit worker and the other from a charity that receives much of its funding from the labor organization and corporate interests, records show.

In addition, the nonprofit paid more than $16,000 in rent for the officer's home in 2007, the most recent year for which the charity's tax return is available, according to his son, who is also on the charity's payroll.

James Bryant, who earned just under $68,000 as a transit station agent in 2007, received about $117,000 that year as president of the San Francisco chapter of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, according to the tax return and the city's Municipal Transportation Agency. He was also paid or reimbursed about $10,000 as an executive board member for SEIU Local 1021, whose political committee he chairs, the union's financial statements show.

The nonprofit's tax-exempt purpose is to promote property rights, voter education and the interests of white business owners.

The nonprofit's tax-exempt purpose is to promote civil rights, voter education and the interests of black workers.

Its biggest contributors include Pacific Gas & Electric and other corporate benefactors that have enlisted it to campaign for or against ballot initiatives dealing with energy and land development.

The institute's corporate supporters say the nonprofit's campaign work helped preserve funding for social programs and supported the construction of affordable housing.

He said the charity's rent payments for the house amount to less than half of his father's monthly mortgage bills and are justified because more than 75% of the home is devoted to the nonprofit.

The charity paid $5,000 to use the house in 2006, he said. It has also rented office space at a San Francisco union hall at the same time it was paying rent on the house, he said. He said the payments for the house continued last year.

The local represents 58,000 city, county and other public-sector workers, as well as nonprofit and nursing industry employees.

The Service Employees International Union's highest-ranking California officer has resigned that position and two other leadership posts in the wake of an internal investigation of payments to her ex-boyfriend, it was announced today.

The union said Grajeda, who could not be reached for comment, had decided to become an assistant to the SEIU's secretary-treasurer in Washington, D.C.

SEIU spokeswoman Michelle Ringuette said the internal probe determined that Grajeda "never stood to benefit" from any money Stephens received.