Tag Archives: Socialism

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: Jennifer Roback Morse explains how socialism undermines family

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Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

New podcast featuring Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse discussing marriage and family. You can skip through the first 5 minutes because it’s just introductory. This is a great interview – highly recommended! There is a fair amount of Catholic stuff in the interview, so be forewarned. The interviewer just goes through some of her essays and asks her about them.

When I hear a woman who has this much of an understanding about what marriage is about and what forces are arrayed against marriage, it just makes me want to run out and get married, because she makes it sound so interesting that I want to try it out and see if everything she says is really true. She has such a good understanding of who her opponents are and what they think and what they are trying to accomplish. A very serious woman.

The MP3 file is here. (54 minutes)

Topics:

Why are socialists so hostile to the natural family? (essay)

  • socialists oppose monogamy
  • socialists view marriage as a structure that oppressive because of gender roles
  • socialists favor “group marriage”
  • socialists believe that children should be raised by the collective, not by parents
  • socialists intend to achieve this by imposing their vision through government power

How does the welfare state discourage people from having children? (essay)

  • high taxes make having more children unaffordable
  • state regulation of marriage and parenting opens door to risk of legal trouble
  • welfare payments to individuals means that relationships can be exited easily
  • e.g. – women can divorce and substitute welfare for a husband/father

What is the sandwich generation? (essay)

  • boomers complained about having to take care of children and elderly parents
  • with the normal timing for having children, this doesn’t happen
  • but if child-bearing is delayed, then this problem occurs
  • also, there are fewer siblings available to help with aging parents
  • this opens up the need for government to take over care for dependents
  • women are encouraged to focus on education and career during fertile years

What is the effect of welfare states mandating high minimum wages? (essay)

  • minimum wage laws increase unemployment rates
  • if you require employers to pay high wages, then employers offer fewer jobs
  • young people are just not productive enough to get those jobs
  • so young people stay in school more and delay adulthood and child-bearing
  • welfare states also make it hard to fire people, causing more unemployment
  • when government raises minimum wages and benefits, it hurts young people
  • when young people finally get a job, they are already in their 30s

How do Catholics respond to the socialist emphasis on equality? (essay)

  • making everyone equal requires the abolition of differences between people
  • for example, feminists try to make men have the same careers as men
  • but this requires women to diminish the fact that they want children
  • Catholics don’t want to make everyone equal, but to defend the weak
  • Christianity supports private property (thou shalt not steal)
  • Christianity supports the family as being ordained by God
  • Rerum Novarum says that inequality and imperfection in society is OK

Who is excluded from socialism’s drive for equality? (essay)

  • children are excluded from equality because they are dependent
  • children impose obligations on people to take care of them
  • the same is true for the elderly
News

MUST-READ: The UK Daily Mail gives the best summary of Climategate

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This story at the UK Daily Mail has all the details in plain English, with graphs. (H/T Ace of Spades via ECM)

First, they got rid of the Medieval Warming Period by cherry-picking data:

Some tree-ring data eliminates the medieval warmth altogether, while others reflect it. In September 1999, Jones’s IPCC colleague Michael Mann of Penn State University in America – who is now also the subject of an official investigation –was working with Jones on the hockey stick. As they debated which data to use, they discussed a long tree-ring analysis carried out by Keith Briffa.

Briffa knew exactly why they wanted it, writing in an email on September 22: ‘I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.’ But his conscience was troubled. ‘In reality the situation is not quite so simple – I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.’

[…]Finally, Briffa changed the way he computed his data and submitted a revised version. This brought his work into line for earlier centuries, and ‘cooled’ them significantly.

Then, they hid the decline in temperature after 1960:

According to his tree rings, the period since 1960 had not seen a steep rise in temperature, as actual temperature readings showed – but a large and steady decline, so calling into question the accuracy of the earlier data derived from tree rings.

This is the context in which, seven weeks later, Jones presented his ‘trick’ – as simple as it was deceptive.

All he had to do was cut off Briffa’s inconvenient data at the point where the decline started, in 1961, and replace it with actual temperature readings, which showed an increase.

On the hockey stick graph, his line is abruptly terminated – but the end of the line is obscured by the other lines.

Ace is calling this a must-read. I agree. Drop everything you are doing and go read it. If you have a blog, blog about it. Submit the Daily Mail post to Stumble Upon, Digg and Reddit.