As IF Times

link African-American lawmakers blast budget plan as step back for civil rights – The Hills Floor Action.

If I had a nickel for every time a white person complained that public policy laws were racist against them, I’d be two short of enough change for a dime.  According to the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, coincidentally all Democrats,  the proposals by the Republican members of Congress to curtail spending are destined to roll back civil rights advances. 

While this appeal may reasonate with a certain crowd, the logic and validity of the argument are as absent as the missing 14 Wisconsin Democratic lawmakers.  Actually, this notion is insulting to people of many constituencies.  At its root, the logic seems to be that only people of color, namely blacks would be adversely impacted by budget cuts.  It’s truly giving false credit to those lawmakers that apparently are able to  direct legislation to isolate only blacks and exclude other ethnic minorities.  Do these proposed budget cuts somehow not affect Latinos? Chinese? South Asians?  How are they able to do that?

If in fact this is the case, the racism claim is valid since that means only blacks have been specifically excluded from access to prosperity.  This implies that all other racial subgroups have somehow managed to exclude  blacks as well since they don’t seem to be lobbying against budget cuts.  It’s intriguing to me that there are not more vocal black groups complaining about how they are specifically kept out of the grocery store business, or the laundry business, or the gardening business, or the restaurant business.  Those damn ethnic cartels are likely running closed shops.  How are they able to monopolize this slice of American business?  It must be racism.

What’s truly remarkable is that these other visible minorities can hold such influence within the economy without the benefit of significant racial representation in the Federal government.  There is no Congressional Chinese Caucus, no Mexican, Cuban or Central American Caucus.  There is no South Asian Caucus. 

The real racism here is from the Black Caucus itself, which by virtue of its very existence influences policies that have been detrimental to that minority.  The usefulness of this subgroup of lawmakers is very questionable since the world has changed dramatically over the past 50 years.  It’s hard to believe a legislative body exists only to forward the cause of one racial subgroup in an ‘inclusive’ society.  In case anyone hadn’t noticed, the present President is a person of color.  It is the height of hypocrisy to claim that the success of many blacks are due to individual effort while attributing failures to systemic racism.  When failure is rewarded, it perpetuates the culture of dependency. Ask any parent who has a 30 year old living at home.

If anyone needs help, it’s the contingent of Americans who are willfully non productive.  We’ll call it the Congressional USELESS Caucus which stands for  Union of SEdentary,   Lazy, Entitled, Sanctimonious Slobs.  This would work only if you could convince anyone in this group to run for office.  And besides, there already is a Democratic Party.

link Unions Spurn Democrats Seen as Turncoats on Health, Organizing – Bloomberg.com.

Some may remember the 1974 movie Blazing Saddles, rife with comedy which would never be acceptable by today’s PC standards.  In one of the scenes, the black sheriff played by Cleavon Little is surrounded by hostile white men in a bar.  Seeing no way out, the sheriff points the gun at his own head and commands, “stop, stay right there or the n—–r gets it.  This is exactly the same tactic the unions are threatening to employ against the Democrats for the  upcoming elections.  Apparently, the unions will snub the Democrats whom they helped elect  because there was no quid pro quo once the legislators took office. 

The worst kept political secret in the U.S. is the dependable support by the big labor unions of the Democratic party.  Despite the claims of the unions as representing the ‘working’ people, the reality is, the union movement has done more harm to the cause of ‘working’ Americans via their demands on employers than any imagined oppression by them.  What the union movement has become and there’s no attempt to even disguise it, is a political action group dedicated to the interests of those few in the union hierarchy.  The union movement and the Democrats are the Chucky siamese twins of politics.  Both are fans of submitting to a hierarchical power structure which regulates and dictates people’s activities and their incomes without regard to any economic reality. In the 2004 national elections, it was estimated that large labor unions spent $65 million dollars in order to try to defeat George Bush.  Maybe that money would have/should have been spent on the poor workers instead?  Oh and the bosses get paid pretty well too.  From the Human Events website comes this list of top salaried union bosses, http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=21533

This is interesting because the percentage of workers belonging to a union has fallen from about a third in 1950 to barely 12 percent today according to Fortune Magazine.  As a very crude measure, it’s difficult to say that the U.S. is worse off now than it was in 1950 despite this downtrend in union membership.   Actually, there is practically an inverse correlation, but that’s admittedly a tenuous link and perhaps an idea for someone’s PhD thesis.  You could however easily make a case for the obsolescence of the union movement entirely, certainly as a champion for the ‘people’.  If someone were to connect the dots on how many jobs and industries have been hampered, extinguished or moved overseas because of union intransigence, they’d be lucky to have any members.  The woes of the auto industry are just the most recent examples of this. 

As an aside, in a delicious piece of irony, the reverend Jesse Jackson had his big SUV stolen and stripped while he was in Detroit giving a speech promoting ‘green’jobs.  http://www.detnews.com/article/20100903/MIVIEW/100903001/1467/opinion01/Payne–The-irony-of-Jesse-Jackson-s-stripped-SUV

 The green movement as we know, helped to kill the manufacture of big SUV’s, exactly like the one he was driving.  Oddly, he was not driving a Prius.  So the people who helped to kill an entire industry are now promoting their next big union idea.  Guess what, they’ll need government help to get it going. So getting back to the unions threatening to pull support from Democrats in the upcoming elections?  As if.