EFCA: Canada Rejects It, We Embrace It

It's funny--and illustrative--that Democrats in the U.S. have always ached for the liberalism of our northern neighbor, which is one reason why I've been warning on these pages that health care reform, Demo-style, is nothing but a Trojan Horse for socialized medicine a la Canada.

However, on one crucial issue, our U.S. liberals are not watching northern affairs closely enough. Canada once had card-check union authorization on the books in all ten of its provinces. After disastrous results, the law has been rescinded in six provinces, including Saskatchewan, birthplace of and home to Canada's communist party, and the most liberal province of all.

Jason Clemens explains this more fully in his article on the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

Meanwhile, the EFCA, as estimated by the Heritage Foundation, could end up unionizing more than 4 million small businesses since the exemption for small businesses has not been increased since 1959 and stands at gross receipts of $50,000 a year. There are very few small businesses today that could survive on that meager amount of revenue.

The AFL-CIO's Stewart Acuff denies unions will be targeting small businesses, but what's to stop any group of employees from unionizing once they see how easy it is?

Biden Reveals Administration's True Agenda

Talk about Gov Regs. Vice-President Joe Biden is now threatening to use his robots in the liberal media to embarrass states for "not doing what they're supposed to be doing."

He was referring to using the funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) stimulus package and specifically to those states whose governors are refusing to accept ARRA money to expand their unemployment programs to cover part-time workers and others not now eligible. Problem is, after the federal largesse runs out, the states are stuck paying for these programs themselves, as the dissenting governors have argued.

But Biden has a plan for these governors, which sounds similar to what the White House is already doing to Rush Limbaugh--shame, smear, scandalize and mock them using the captive media. (Nancy Pelosi has another plan to stop Limbaugh. She's working on a law requiring equality of viewpoints on public radio, meaning probably five liberal hosts to one conservative host, or better, five to none.)

Speaking to the AFL-CIO convention in Miami this past week, Biden also revealed that the stimulus money was earmarked for union jobs (gee, what a surprise, and how come no one in the media ever figured that out and reported on it?).

Here's how he explained it:

"The focus of this administration the first month has been to rebuild American roads, bridges, waterways -- jobs for the building trades union. Investing and getting more people access to broadband -- communication workers. Creating clean energy economy -- jobs that require electrical workers to modernize the grid, steel workers to go out and build the wind turbines, laborers to install the solar panels. Making our communities safer, jobs that require getting cops on the beat and keeping firefighters in firehouses. That's what we're trying to do."

Conveniently, no cameras were allowed into the meeting, but the Biden PR people were gracious enough to release a transcript to the media.

To sum up, if you were around during the Cold War, or bothered to study a little 1950s-1980s history, you'll see the parallel: Biden clearly wants to establish "captive states," just as the former Soviet Union had its "captive nations." (I should throw in "captive businesses" too, which will all fall to unionization once EFCA passes.)