Tag Archives: Regulation

News

Michigan DHS deducts union dues from home-based day care subsidies

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Story here from the Wall Street Journal. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Michelle Berry runs a private day-care service from her home on the outskirts of this city, the birthplace of General Motors. “The Berry Patch,” as she calls the service, features overstuffed purple gorillas, giant cartoon murals, and a playroom covered in Astroturf. Her clients are mostly low-income parents who need child care to keep their jobs in a city that now has a 26% unemployment rate.

Ms. Berry owns her own business—yet the Michigan Department of Human Services claims she is a government employee and union member. The agency thus withholds union dues from the child-care subsidies it sends to her on behalf of her low-income clients. Those dues are funneled to a public-employee union that claims to represent her. The situation is crazy—and it’s happening elsewhere in the country.

A year ago in December, Ms. Berry and more than 40,000 other home-based day care providers statewide were suddenly informed they were members of Child Care Providers Together Michigan—a union created in 2006 by the United Auto Workers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The union had won a certification election conducted by mail under the auspices of the Michigan Employment Relations Commission. In that election only 6,000 day-care providers voted. The pro-labor vote turned out.

Many of the state’s other 34,000 day-care providers never even realized what was going on. Ms. Berry tells us she was “shocked” to find out she was suddenly in a union.

This is why the state of Michigan is a dump – it’s not just Detroit, it’s Lansing, and Governor Jennifer Granholm.

Podcasts

MUST-LISTEN: Michele Bachmann issues conservative call to action

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Listen to the interview here.

Other media formats with the same interview:

I highly recommend listening to this 30-minute podcast. Very moving. At one point she is almost in tears as she pleads with people to call Washington and tell them not to spend any more taxpayer money. Never heard anything like this before from a legislator in all my life.

Commentary

Charles Krauthammer on how global warming alarmism is socialism

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Editorial from the Washington Post. (H/T Muddling Towards Maturity)

Excerpt:

[…]On the day Copenhagen opened, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency claimed jurisdiction over the regulation of carbon emissions by declaring them an “endangerment” to human health.

Since we operate an overwhelmingly carbon-based economy, the EPA will be regulating practically everything. No institution that emits more than 250 tons of CO2 a year will fall outside EPA control. This means more than a million building complexes, hospitals, plants, schools, businesses and similar enterprises. (The EPA proposes regulating emissions only above 25,000 tons, but it has no such authority.) Not since the creation of the Internal Revenue Service has a federal agency been given more intrusive power over every aspect of economic life.

[…]Socialism having failed so spectacularly, the left was adrift until it struck upon a brilliant gambit: metamorphosis from red to green. The cultural elites went straight from the memorial service for socialism to the altar of the environment. The objective is the same: highly centralized power given to the best and the brightest, the new class of experts, managers and technocrats. This time, however, the alleged justification is not abolishing oppression and inequality but saving the planet.

The EPA decision basically passes control of the economy to Washington while bypassing the legislature. Krauthammer calls it a “coup d’etat”.