If we changed our union laws just a little bit, groups like the arrogant, greedy Unison oiks at the Grangemouth refinery in Scotland wouldn’t be able to hold us to ransom, at almost no cost to themselves.

Think of the RMT union and the London underground, or the National Union of Teachers (NUT). Every so often the RMT decides to flex its muscles by calling a 24 hour or 36 hour strike which completely torpedoes the capital’s transport system. But it costs Bob Crowe’s “members” almost nothing because with overtime they can quickly make up any losses. In April, the aptly named NUT did the same, causing massive disruption, but at little personal cost.

In America the system is different, and would be as easy as pie to introduce here. In America the unions have contracts, just like here, but they can’t just break that contract when it suits them. If they walk off the job the law says they can’t come back until they’ve agreed a new one. So the American public can’t be held to ransom by unionists using guerrilla tactics to cause disruption and force us to concede over-the-top wage demands. 

---

Hillary Hanging On In There, Courtesy of Rush Limbaugh
Operation Chaos Succeeds in Dragging Out Democratic Race
Obama Will Prevail, Only To Be Zapped By McCain
Could Al Gore Be The Party Saviour? 

The British media was reluctant to tell you the truth about the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama Democratic Presidential primary contest in Pennsylvania and the impact of Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos.

I’m not sure if this is because it is too lazy, too dim, or too corrupt; last weekend’s newspapers started finally to report about this

As anyone who takes the trouble to do the maths knows, Hillary Clinton can’t win the nomination via the polling booth. Even if she wins big in all the remaining primaries she can’t overtake Obama. He has just too many delegates and under the Democrat’s crazy, proportional representation system, a big win doesn’t deliver all the votes and can’t deliver a knockout blow.

American Conservative Talk Show host Rush Limbaugh came up with this neat wheeze to prolong the Democrat’s agony.

Given that in Pennsylvania it is easy for Republicans to enrol as Democrats and vote in their primaries, Limbaugh suggested to his massive radio audience that they do just that, and vote for Hillary. Knowing Hillary and Bill Clinton would not concede defeat until hell freezes over, he reckoned that by voting for Hillary, the Republicans could drum up faux support for her and make sure the contest for the Democratic nomination could be strung out all the way to the convention. Of course the longer the contest takes, the more bitter it gets, the more over-the-top the arguments become, the more extreme the contenders become and the more likely they will alienate normal voters in November’s general election.

Ferrets in a sack
All the while, the Republican nominee John McCain can begin addressing the middle of the road voters with sensible arguments while the Dems fight like ferrets in a sack. (Don’t forget that at this stage of the campaign only party members vote. Democrat bedrock members are just like the Labour party’s – dim lefties who think socialism works, so to appeal to them you run the risk of alienating normal, intelligent swing voters). For some reason, the BBC and Britain’s mainstream media didn’t report on Operation Chaos at first, even though I generously phoned the BBC’s Information Unit to tell them about it. (The Wall Street Journal also failed to mention this, so possibly this self-censorship is because of media envy of the power of the Rush Limbaugh show. The Sunday Times last weekend belatedly started to catch up with this).

Meanwhile, the only possibility for Hillary to win the nomination is by manipulating the so-called super delegates into giving her the nod. (In nearly 50 years of studying the American political system, I’ve never heard of super-delegates. Can someone out there tell me where they came from?) If Hillary manages to grab the nomination at the convention with the help of super delegates, a couple of things are sure; the black vote will desert Hillary, guaranteeing a Republican victory. And there will be riots in Denver, the convention city.

Crazed communist
If Obama wins the nomination, he will also be zapped by McCain. He is just too far to the left to win over the crucial, middle of the road Reagan Democrats. His dalliance with crazed communist pastor Jeremiah Wright will haunt him all the way to election day. If that doesn’t spell defeat, there is always Obama’s wife, Michelle. She could lose the election for Barack all on her own. Remember her speech earlier this year when she said she’d finally found something good about America after Obama had apparently locked up the nomination? She comes from a poor family and despite this, and the lack of opportunity for black Americans, attended Princeton and Harvard Law School. Outrageous discrimination right!

So Obama will fight and lose to McCain in November. But there is one, very unlikely, possibility. What if the super delegates felt Obama was going to lose too. Couldn’t they nominate and unite behind patron saint of the environment Al Gore at the last moment?

---

Stuff You Haven’t Heard In The British Media (2)
Sub-Prime Crisis Democrat Induced
The Theory Of Unintended Consequences Strikes Again 

In all the talk about the banking crisis in America, I bet you’ve not heard the most important reason why it happened.

All we’ve heard about is greedy banks, and incompetent banks.

But in fact this whole crisis has been drummed up by Democrats in Congress who identified a problem called “red-lining” back in the 1980s, which purported to show that blacks were being discriminated against by big banks. They eventually acted to solve the “problem”, and gave us the sub-prime crisis.

   “Red-lining” was simply a map of a city which showed areas where it was all but impossible to raise credit, er coloured in red. This often coincided with two common denominators; poor and black. Even your bog-standard Democrat congressman can probably understand that one of the negatives about being poor is that is impossible to borrow money. If you don’t have the resources to pay it back, the bank won’t lend you any.  When this was coupled with the fact that many of these people were also black, Democrats wanted to do something about this, so they dreamt up the 1995 Community Reinvestment Act, which more or less forced banks to lend money to people who wouldn’t be able to pay it back.

Hopefully, Republicans would have been just as keen to help  minorities borrow money for businesses and homes, but they would have tried to cut personal taxes and business taxes to enable the poor to earn loans on their merits, not from charity.

Given that the left can’t stop itself doing things which sound good in theory, but will self-destruct on the pyre of unforeseen consequences, we gave ourselves the credit crunch, where hundreds of thousands of poor people were handed money which they were unlikely to ever to be able to pay back. Thanks Democrats (with a bit of help from Republicans too timid to tell the truth and say no).

 Neil Winton - May 1, 2008