The following excerpts from Bloomberg Businessweek outlines what happens when unions are asked to take a cut in benefits:
Thousands of teachers, students and prison guards descended on the Wisconsin Capitol on Wednesday to fight a move to strip government workers of union rights in the first state to grant them more than a half-century ago, but Republican leaders said the changes they sought would not be made.
The Statehouse filled with as many as 10,000 demonstrators who chanted, sang the national anthem and beat drums for hours in demonstrations unlike any seen in Madison in decades. The noise in the rotunda rose to the level of a chainsaw, and many Madison teachers joined the protest by calling in sick in such numbers that the district — the state’s second-largest — had to cancel classes.
The large number of demonstrators in this liberal bastion of Socialism foreshadows the beginnings of civil unrest in our nation. Are you wondering if this will spread across the country in the same manner as the Jasmine Revolution in Northern Africa and the Middle East?
We do not have to speculate what Ronald Reagan would have done in this situation: he reacted with authority to put the air traffic controllers in place by firing them. How did our president react to this situation?
In an interview with Milwaukee television station WTMJ, President Barack Obama said he was monitoring the situation in Madison and acknowledged the need for budget cuts. But, he said, pushing public employees away from the bargaining table “seems like more of an assault on unions.”
We have to come to the realization that the labor unions and a Socialist regime have stolen our future through redistribution and intimidation. We have to look no further than the redistribution of GM bondholders’ property to the UAW by the government or the “exceptions” of union companies from Obamacare. An assault on unions in this president’s mind has become a last stand for fiscal responsibility in my mind.
David DeGerolamo
