Democrats versus Republicans

[poopdeckpappy]

So I said to him, "Barack, I know Abe Lincoln, and you ain't Abe Lincoln."

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away people's initiative and independence.
You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.

[craigimass]

Abe Lincoln was no Abe Lincoln either until he had many years in the Presidency.

The question is one of whether a person is capable of learning and making decisions which are in the interest of the country. We will only be able to judge that by looking back after a number of years.

Unlike many here, I don't wish for failure.

As to all those talking points and unions, way too many to answer or debate. But I can assure you there are many falsehoods in those ideals....

Starting with the simplest.....I worked for years on carpentry crews framing houses. We would get paid a certain amount per house. The ONLY way to make any money would be for ONE guy to hire 5 or 6 others guys for as little as possible.....and then the ONE guy would make $12 an hour, while the other 5 made $5 per hour. The same goes for MANY industries and trades. So there you go - you CAN lift the wage earner up by not letting the CEO of United Health Care get a billion dollar pension. After all, where does that billion come from? Well, actually from both the employees and every person that the insurance company covers.

As far as class hatred, I won't even answer that one.....suffice it to say moat of the "haters" are right wing. GOP=Right wing.

Onto Unions - Trade Unions have had many functions since the beginning of civilization, most of them positive. They have assured living wages, health care, abolished child labor, made the workplace safer and MUCH more.

Are there vast excesses? Sure, as they say, people are great...it's just when you put two or more of them together the problems start! Unions have the same problems that any orgs with power have.

Just a few years ago I remember a situation where women on an assembly line were not allowed to go to the toilet. Without their unions, this would still be the case.

Without a union, people who dedicated their entire lives to a trade could be fired on a complete whim - not even heard out! That is wrong....and even moreso in the sphere of public positions such as police, fire, teachers, etc.

People will be people and you get a lot of bad ones in administration who decide, because they don't like your looks or your breasts are not big enough, that they will let you go.

The problem with Republigans are that they take every issue as a YES/NO one and don't understand that these things work on continuum. The Trade Union movement was built because the BOSSES were having children, women and men slaving their lives away in horrible conditions for too many hours...with little sharing of the profits. People today want a fair deal. They don't want to be used and abused.

That all said, there is probably a greatly diminished need for trade unions in our workforce these days because of the death of manufacturing in the USA. As a result, only a very small percentage of the work force is now union. We also have more enlightened companies, many of them foreign (car makers, etc.) who believe in paying a living wage and proper treatment of employees. But, then again, without certain rules (OSHA, etc.) those plants might not be as good of a place to work.

My Repub friends would be better off forgetting about the cutting and pasting and actually reading some history. There has always been a clash between the very wealthy (originally, the Yankees and WASPs here in New England) and the workers (the Irish and other immigrants). By sheer numbers, the working people have prevailed...to at least some degree. Shifts happen.

[Selkirk]

PoopDeck, that is one fine post.....

Thanx...

[sailhog]

It's a sad day in America when you can't get a little time away with your mistress without everybody screaming for you to get back to the office.

[ssneade]

Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that's what they want to do.

Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its "rubber rooms" — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.

The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues — pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year.

"You just basically sit there for eight hours," said Orlando Ramos, who spent seven months in a rubber room, officially known as a temporary reassignment center, in 2004-05. "I saw several near-fights. `This is my seat.' `I've been sitting here for six months.' That sort of thing."

Ramos was an assistant principal in East Harlem when he was accused of lying at a hearing on whether to suspend a student. Ramos denied the allegation but quit before his case was resolved and took a job in California.

Because the teachers collect their full salaries of $70,000 or more, the city Department of Education estimates the practice costs the taxpayers $65 million a year. The department blames union rules.

"It is extremely difficult to fire a tenured teacher because of the protections afforded to them in their contract," spokeswoman Ann Forte said.

City officials said that they make teachers report to a rubber room instead of sending they home because the union contract requires that they be allowed to continue in their jobs in some fashion while their cases are being heard. The contract does not permit them to be given other work.

Ron Davis, a spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers, said the union and the Department of Education reached an agreement last year to try to reduce the amount of time educators spend in reassignment centers, but progress has been slow.

"No one wants teachers who don't belong in the classroom. However, we cannot neglect the teachers' rights to due process," Davis said. The union represents more than 228,000 employees, including nearly 90,000 teachers.

Many teachers say they are being punished because they ran afoul of a vindictive boss or because they blew the whistle when somebody fudged test scores.

"The principal wants you out, you're gone," said Michael Thomas, a high school math teacher who has been in a reassignment center for 14 months after accusing an assistant principal of tinkering with test results.

City education officials deny teachers are unfairly targeted but say there has been an effort under Mayor Michael Bloomberg to get incompetents out of the classroom. "There's been a push to report anything that you see wrong," Forte said.

Some other school systems likewise pay teachers to do nothing.

The Los Angeles district, the nation's second-largest school system with 620,000 students, behind New York's 1.1 million, said it has 178 teachers and other staff members who are being "housed" while they wait for misconduct charges to be resolved.

Similarly, Mimi Shapiro, who is now retired, said she was assigned to sit in what Philadelphia calls a "cluster office." "They just sit you in a room in a hard chair," she said, "and you just sit."

Teacher advocates say New York's rubber rooms are more extensive than anything that exists elsewhere.

Teachers awaiting disciplinary hearings around the nation typically are sent home, with or without pay, Karen Horwitz, a former Chicago-area teacher who founded the National Association for the Prevention of Teacher Abuse. Some districts find non-classroom work — office duties, for example — for teachers accused of misconduct.

New York City's reassignment centers have existed since the late 1990s, Forte said. But the number of employees assigned to them has ballooned since Bloomberg won more control over the schools in 2002. Most of those sent to rubber rooms are teachers; others are assistant principals, social workers, psychologists and secretaries.

Once their hearings are over, they are either sent back to the classroom or fired. But because their cases are heard by 23 arbitrators who work only five days a month, stints of two or three years in a rubber room are common, and some teachers have been there for five or six.

The nickname refers to the padded cells of old insane asylums. Some teachers say that is fitting, since some of the inhabitants are unstable and don't belong in the classroom. They add that being in a rubber room itself is bad for your mental health.

"Most people in that room are depressed," said Jennifer Saunders, a high school teacher who was in a reassignment center from 2005 to 2008. Saunders said she was charged with petty infractions in an effort to get rid of her: "I was charged with having a student sit in my class with a hat on, singing."

The rubber rooms are monitored, some more strictly than others, teachers said.

"There was a bar across the street," Saunders said. "Teachers would sneak out and hang out there for hours."

Judith Cohen, an art teacher who has been in a rubber room near Madison Square Garden for three years, said she passes the time by painting watercolors of her fellow detainees.

"The day just seemed to crawl by until I started painting," Cohen said, adding that others read, play dominoes or sleep. Cohen said she was charged with using abusive language when a girl cut her with scissors.

Some sell real estate, earn graduate degrees or teach each other yoga and tai chi.

David Suker, who has been in a Brooklyn reassignment center for three months, said he has used the time to plan summer trips to Alaska, Cape Cod and Costa Rica. Suker said he was falsely accused of throwing a girl's test sign-up form in the garbage during an argument.

"It's sort of peaceful knowing that you're going to work to do nothing," he said.

Philip Nobile is a journalist who has written for New York Magazine and the Village Voice and is known for his scathing criticism of public figures. A teacher at Brooklyn's Cobble Hill School of American Studies, Nobile was assigned to a rubber room in 2007, "supposedly for pushing a boy while I was breaking up a fight." He contends the school system is retaliating against him for exposing wrongdoing.

He is spending his time working on his case and writing magazine articles and a novel.

"This is what happens to political prisoners throughout history," he said, alluding to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "They put us in prison and we write our `Letter From the Birmingham Jail.'"

I understand this sounds crazy, but some idiot actually signed a contract that would allow this.....

[ssneade]

Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others."

Ayn Rand
Nobody's listening.

[jackdale]

ssneade

Are you suggesting that Sanford be sent to his room?

[ssneade]

Here's a little story about unions flexing their muscles. We'll back into this one. Out in California, many companies are looking to set up solar power plants. So a company called Ausra files plans to build. Immediately it is inundated for demands from a union: "before you can build, you have to study the effects this will have on endangered species like the short-nosed kangaroo rat or the ferruginous hawk!" Studies like this could take years, and they are definitely costly.

Then, another company called BrightSource Energy comes along and wants to build a solar power plant. The same union has no complaints. In fact, it wants regulators to approve the project ASAP.

So I'm sure by now you've already figured out what is going on here. The first company, Ausra, rejected demands to only use union workers to build the solar farm. The other company, BrightSource, said that it would use labor-friendly contractors.

It's not like this is anything new. This is business as usual for unions. What is new is the field that unions have planned to use the green movement to achieve their goals of union expansion. Socialist and communists figured this out 20 years ago, don't know why it took the unions so long.

Barack Obama and the Democrats have ensured that wind and solar farms will be popping up all around the country and creating all sorts of new jobs. (So they say.) So the unions want to make sure that these "new jobs" are union jobs. They are going to use this movement to "regain relevance," as it says in the New York Times. So the unions have devised a plan: use these costly environmental studies to threaten any company that doesn't agree to use union workers or labor-friendly contractors. Obama's their pal. Maybe they'll get away with it.

[poopdeckpappy]

Originally Posted by craigimass

Abe Lincoln was no Abe Lincoln either until he had many years in the Presidency.

We will only be able to judge that by looking back after a number of years.

You mean like when we look back on the George W Bush Admin. or are we still on double std time ??

Unlike many here, I don't wish for failure.

Don't be a dipstick, nobody wants BHO to fail, though he's showing that we may have no choice in watching it happen

As far as class hatred, I won't even answer that one.....suffice it to say moat of the "haters" are right wing. GOP=Right wing.

You should have stuck with " I won't even answer that one "

My Repub friends would be better off forgetting about the cutting and pasting and actually reading some history.

Holly sh*t, I don't care who you are, that was classic comedy right there,

[craigimass]

If you read my post you would see that I 100% agree about excesses. That's the nature of power - in ANY case, whether it is in the hands of corporate boards and CEOs, or in the hands of Union negotiators. As ss alludes to, some stupid person signed off on all that stuff.

But much of that stuff is self-correcting, as we are seeing now. The gravy train has left the station, and many Unions have been "giving back" for a decade now.

Oh, another function of many trade unions over the centuries has been....to TEACH TRADES. This was very important, as having people who don't know what they are doing building your bridges or even plumbing you houses could be a bad move.

The lesson of history is that any group which obtains power tends to abuse it. Unions are guilty of that just like EVERY other group. At the same time, it would be foolish not to understand that vast improvements in working conditions and other factors which were pioneered....here and in other countries around the world....by organized labor.

A recent example might be Poland, where the revolution to democracy was formed in the cradle of trade unions.

I think it could be summed up this way. The very IDEA of trade unions is a great one. After all, how the heck is a corporation with 100,000 employees otherwise going to bargain with EACH employee? However, in the USA specifically, some Unions have become one more cabal of self interest and power. I certainly don't approve of that, but they will get their due - in fact they already have in many areas.

However, the ideas of workers rights, collective bargaining, 8 hour days and 40 hours weeks, ability to air grievances, etc. - those I see as very good things.