Obama '08?

Condi Rice in terrorist colors...

I didn't say you were infantile TKO. It was your post. You should learn to read. It's a sign of an inferiority complex to jump to those sorts of conclusions. All assertions are infantile. It is just as easy for me to say them about you as it is for you to say them about me. Your's don't have special powers because others don't answer in kind. You'll ruin all your relationships with that sort of thing. And you will always be in the right.

But as you carry on blurting assertions, which are obviously meaningless and, as I had said, part of the kindergarten genre, I might have to revise my view.

And I never use a barstool. My pub has none.

But your remark suggests you are one of those twee, puritanical, undercover prohibitionists either because you have been conditioned that way or you can't afford to booze.

Unions have no motives. They are things. The people who manage unions have all sorts of motives. I daresay some of them have the sort of motive okie was suggesting. I have known a few union organisers, shop stewards we call them, and they mostly seek to be excused production work and to sit in offices stirring the ****. But some of them do try to represent their member's interests. Some are even working for the management. Some, it is said, for foreign interests.

It is a much more complex problem than you seem to think.

Why are my posts a cry for attention and not your's? Are you projecting? Do you normally conduct discussions with that sort of fatuity. Your friends, assuming you have any, must find it pretty tiresome. It means, when decoded, that you don't want to be argued with and seek to push your own views unhindered. It is a form of aggressive shouting down.

Still- that's much to simple for you.

Did she go to great lengths to choose the object in her hands Bernie? I think we should be told.

We can be pretty sure Mrs Obama did.

I think it was Chicago Bulls colors. I wore red and black a lot for a while for that reason.

(I'm kidding. Mostly.)

(Loved this quote from the New Yorker:



http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/17/081117fa_fact_lizza?currentPage=4

emphasis added.

The whole "some people say" angle is a hollow claim. It's either your claim here, or it's worthless. Either you believe it enough to put your name on it and are willing to argue the point or you are just wasting my time.

Let us speak plainly sir, what do you assert these ulterior motives are? None of this vague and paranoid claims. If you believe it at all, you'll say you believe it and why.

T
K
O

For those A2Kers whose intellectual acumen, like mine, is cellular in comparison to TKO's, it might be worth pointing out that it was estimated that the productivity of workers, who were approximately 1/3 rd of the population in 1900, had increased by a factor of ten, due to the harnessing of steam power and its derivatives, from the position in 1800. The steam slave some called it.

What the increase is now I don't know but it will be far in excess of ten.

As this bountiful increase was impossible to consume by that class which had consumed the worker's surplus in 1800 it is self evident that some sort of sharing was inevitable. This is particularly the case when a consequence of sharing would reduce revolutionary fervour in the lower orders which the upper classes feared greatly after the French revolution. Other consequences were that the population presented fewer unsightly problems and were physically fitter for both military purposes and to help accelerate industrial efficiency even further.

All enlightened conservative opinion by 1900 had realised that sharing this bonanza was not only morally justified in a Christian world but was in its own interests. They enacted such things as the Factory Acts and the Employer's Liability Act and other such legislation to bring about this sharing. Providing enough of the surplus was given over to maintaining the dignity of their class the enlightened conservative were happy, eager even, to raise the standards of the workers.

Unions arose with a fair wind at their backs. Without the steam slave to help them they would have been crushed.

Mrs Thatcher did not close most of the coal mines. Destiny was closing them and she just rode the wave claiming the credit.

One could even argue that union leaders, being unproductive and seeking dignity significations themselves as leaders, were an additional and unnecessary cost on the workers and thus slowed down the process of sharing out the wealth.

In fact union leaders do not intend to share the wealth with everybody. Only with those who are members of the union providing, of course, differentials are maintained to set them apart from the rank and file.

Like Mrs Thatcher they claim credit where no credit is due.

Before I close may I apologise to TKO for boring him with matters that are too simple, cellular even, to fall within his intellectual compass.

So you don't care to say in plain language what these ulterior motives are?

Like I said to okie, even if we assume you are correct about unions hurting business, it's absurd to conclude that the business failing is a part of their wishes or some grand ulterior motive which you have claimed by proxy to be some foreign interest.

Direct question Spendi: What is the ulterior motive you claim they have?

T
K
O

I don't know what any ulterior motives are or even whether they exist. Ulterior I presume means a secret agenda. I would need to be inside the heads of those involved. Their public utterances would obviously not betray such motives because then they wouldn't be ulterior.

We did have a Communist takeover of the Electrical Trades Union at one point by a process known as "Entryism". It was eventually defeated. There were rumours of funding from outside. The process used such techniques as arranging meetings when a big match was on TV and in cold rooms with hard seating and with speeches and notices being couched in language it was difficult for ordinary non-activists to follow without nodding off. When the key votes were taken only the hard-core activists were present.

It is a very long time since I read Last Exit to Brooklyn but I seem to remember that Mr Selby makes some similar points about American unions.

We look now to be in a position where a Republican president is about to hand out large dollops of cash to workers with the intention of getting them to spend it. I'm not too sure that socialist regimes around the world have gone in for much of that sort of thing.

Your understanding of politics TKO is self-evidently on a level which I cannot hope to reach. You said it. And what you say is automatically true as far as I can tell.

Perhaps you will be good enough to clue us all in to the celestial spheres you inhabit. Able us to know. That's why we are here.

I do know that unions paralysed the management of a world famous truck manufacturer and help cause its liquidation.

The basic motive of all union organisers is power. Is that clear enough?

And many routes are available to such an end. And all covered over by virtuous sounding and high-flown rhetoric or bullshit as it is sometimes known. Like "Change has come."

Crystal. Employees deserve some power, so I don't have a problem with this. I'm not there to say every union is on the right track, but I think your broad and sweeping generalizations about them are ridiculous.

As for ulterior motives, you said yourself you can't see into other's minds. Perhaps okie should take a page from your book before claiming otherwise. I guess you can hush your ideas of foreign interest too.

T
K
O

Employees are not generally educated to deal with power psychologically. It goes to their heads. It is not a criticism of someone to recognise that he or she has not had an education to fit them for power positions. That is in the nature of the case. The most cliched expression in the pubs and clubs where the truck manufacturer went bust was "too many chiefs and not enough indians."

Whenever an employee buy-out has taken place the new management either immediately become capitalists, often of the worst sort, or go bust.

Employees have some power and it derives from two sources. The success of mechanisation and the Christian ethic. And routes to the top are self-evidently available to those who do educate themselves to be fit to be at the top rather than chasing broads round the drinking dens. Those, like me, who chose the latter option ought not to complain so much. And I don't.

I would give you all a $20,000 Christmas bonus and if it looked like ruining the country I would seek asylum somewhere.

To return to the topic, if nobody minds, it has been announced on our TV that the rules of the Presidency say that Mr Obama will have to give up his BlackBerry once he assumes office. All his communications have to be monitored and approved it seems.

The most powerful man in the world can't have his favourite toy. Sheesh!!

That's nearly as bad as Prince Charles not being able to go in a pub and pull a roly-poly dimpled divorcee.

excellent return to topic... good form.

I'm sure he'll get lots of new techno toys to use once in office.

T
K
O

I noticed you and spendius had a good conversation on this point. Now since you do not seem to have much ability to visualize motives, I will try to help you through this in a step by step process.

If unions bargain for such high wages and benefits that their employers are no longer able to compete in the marketplace, and their company goes broke, thus leaving them without a job, what would be the possible answers as to why the union would do that? I see a couple of possibilities. One possibility, A - is that they do not want the employers to go broke but are too stupid to realize that their high wages and benefits will cause that to happen, or B - they actually want the employers to go broke. The reason I think B might be worthy of consideration is the fact that I find A to be somewhat unbelievable, I think union bosses are, or at least should be smarter than just being plain stupid.

Your thoughts, Diest? Remember, when you try to reason this out in your head based upon market principles, and try to figure out why companies that have much higher overhead to produce products usually go broke eventually. If you have trouble with this concept, then I don't know how to help you to ever figure it out.

P.S. The basic problem with unions is that they can cause labor costs and benefits to be somewhat immune to normal market forces, and anytime any factor within a market is not subject to the market, unintended consequences can and will happen.

By the way, is anyone else noticing all the old Clinton hacks, retreads, and has beens that are seemingly going to be populating the Obama administration? For somebody shouting change for the last two years, he isn't showing much innovation or initiatives so far in terms of what we are led to expect come inauguration day. Might as well have elected Hillary Clinton and we could have the same old tired faces to look at.

Oh and we still have the born in Kenya thing floating around out there, to add spice to the next administration. How fun! Obama can't even seem to prove he was born in Hawaii yet, beyond a reasonable doubt, with a birth certificate beyond question, or Certificate of Live Birth, according to what the following website discusses. He may have been, but I would like to see more information. I will continue to follow this, because I find it fascinating, and intriguing. What if he was born in Kenya? Some of his relatives claim he was. Are they all lying?

http://open.salon.com/content.php?cid=44227

Not quite.

First of all BlackBerrys are not all that tough to hack.

Secondly, and more to the point, there is a thing here called the Presidential Records Act which holds that all of his office related correspondence is part of the public record.

Maybe they will let him keep his BlackBerry to send love notes to his wife and kids, but I doubt it. Once a CrackBerry addict always a CrackBerry addict, and if he has one he will not be able to resist the temptation to use it for more that "Go Sox!" e-mails.

okie

I don't think it is necessary to suggest motives for union organizers and officials that are any more sinister then we can surmise on the basis of face value.

You give them too much credit if you believe they are too smart to unintentionally kill their hosts.

Besides, they are counting on Democrats to prop up their moribund hosts so that they can continue to suck the blood of not only companies (and ultimately consumers), but the taxpayers as well.

Given the almost universal corruption of major unions, it is amazing that anyone still sees them as a force for equality, let alone goodness.

You probably are aware that the Teamsters have been under special scrutiny by the Justice Department for years; thanks to their infamous past (and present?) racketeering. You are probably also aware than Obama and Clinton were required to make veiled promises to their Board that they would, once in office, turn down the heat in exchange for Teamster support (MONEY) during the elections.

The notion that the political support of Unions and the Trial Bar is any less tainted than that of Halliburton or Exxon Mobile is ludicrous. The latter may be predators, but the former are parasites.

A roaring lion may terrify me, but a fluke worm makes my skin crawl.

Untrue Okie.

Go take a stroll through southern Cali and go to any of the numerous grocery stores. Plenty of union there. They thrive in REAL competition amongst each other, unlike with giants like Wal-mart coming in, demanding money, treating its employees like trash, and creating costly creating eco-hazards then acting butthurt about the employees wanting better benefits or the fact that they benefit from horrible labor methods from China.

Take a trip to a grocery store in SoCal okie.
K
O

You are going to insist on being an idiot about this aren't you. The birth certificate HAS been released and is a matter of public record.

T
K
O

Here's one. They force the politicians to either face up to the unpopularity of having large companies laying off thousands of workers in a key electoral location or to bring in import restrictions on foreign competitors. If the union leaders call for import restrictions it is possibly what their plan was all along having sensed that the politicians would be forced to choose them. Not unlike playing poker.

That then requires some kind of subsidy and subsidies to one industry automatically damage all other industries. Thus the auto industry, say, ends up top dog in the industrial status league and has more power in political circles.