Right to Yacht Goes Wild

Inspired by the recent expansion of the Right to Work movement, Right to Yacht groups have been springing up across the nation, especially in the Right to Work states where yacht clubs are common.

Florida has seen the most Right to Yacht actions so far, but there have been also been Right to Yacht actions in Texas and Virginia, and preliminary Internet organizing and discussion in several other states, including Michigan. [See Limits on Unions Pass in Michigan].

In one Florida incident a yacht owned by a Miami area hedge fund owner was illicitly used for a party. Right to Yachters simply snuck by yacht club guards and had a party in the boat, emptying its liquor cabinet and "generally making a mess of it." The party goers snuck out before police or security guards became aware of the situation.

An Anonymous Right to Yacht person explained. "If you don't have to pay union dues to work in a unionized work place, why should you have to pay dues to get any privilege? Why should I have to pay yacht club fees to enjoy a yacht? Next time I'm taking a crew out into the bay."

According to postings on Internet bulletin boards, there are already two trends in the Right To Yacht movement. Some believe that only politicians who vote Right to Work laws, and their financial backers, should have their yachts targeted. These yachting excursions would take on the air of political protests against a specific law.

But the Eat the Rich trend seems to be more popular, at least in rhetoric. This trend seems to have a total disregard for the private property rights of the rich in general. They believe the rich deserve nothing they have grabbed. They talk of not just having floating parties, but of the right to take whatever they need from any rich person any time, from mansions to limousines to wallets. One online diatribe called for crowds to swoop into fancy restaurants and eat the food off the plates of the diners, calling it the Right to Eat.

Others talk of refusing to pay all forms of dues, rather than just union dues. Dues are a form of payment for a service. They want services without payment, just like workers who take advantage of the Right to Work laws to live like parasites. They even talk of creating homes for people without paying for permits or following building codes.

But the real purpose of the Right to Work laws is to keep wages and benefits unfairly low. In turn, this keeps profits high, and enables the business class to keep their yachts, mansions, and club memberships. What the people of America really need a way to Share the Wealth, and not just with the welfare class. It is the ordinary workers who get up in the morning and staff the stores, build the yachts, mansions, and malls, and do all the sundry things that allow us all to live who deserve better. They need more than the right to unionize. They need to get their share from what is owed to them for past labor, one way or another.

Check out the Internet for a Right to Yacht party near you, or Occupy a Michigan politician's home and see how they like it.

GOP Ready to Implode?

As I listened to former President Bill Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention I agreed with almost everything he said. I had to remind myself that this was the guy whose corrupt regime gutted the old banking laws (like Glass-Steagall). That act led directly to the financial markets implosion of 2007-2008.

Sure, if Clinton had not done it, President W. Bush would have anyway, but the point is that for all his rhetoric, it was Clinton who deregulated the banks, not a Republican president.

Still, I am an it-takes-a-village guy more than an I-created-myself-out-of-nothing guy. I'll vote for the Green Party candidate, Doctor Jill Stein, in November. I will be voting in California, which the Romney-Ryan (RR) team is not even contesting. The only way President Obama won't win California is if it (or at least the coastal cities) sinks into the sea before election day.

I think there is a good chance the GOP (Grand Old Party) of Lincoln will implode in November despite polls showing RR still in the race. I base that on talking to business people, the usual Republican Party leaders, and observing their comments in the media.

Business people, like wage workers and even like welfare bums, come in a vast array of flavors. Some work on their own without employees, some manage vast global organizations. In addition to owners, many managers consider themselves business people, not just employees. Many are Democrats, some are apolitical, but a majority are Republicans. The question I have to raise here is, what type of Republican are they?

The national Chamber of Commerce seems to have been sipping too much Tea lately, resulting in numerous news stories quoting businessmen quoting the Chamber party line with the fervor of a Stalinist tarred by a rival as a Trotskyite being walked to the bloody wall. They aren't hiring, and it's because of President Obama. They don't like ObamaCare with its provisions for employee healthcare. They don't like regulations. They actually could hire people, may even need to hire people, but not unless the nation has the good sense to elect RR. They are not using the term, but they are on an employer strike. They are not kidding. It is one of the main reasons hiring has been slow this year.

On the other hand, many businesses have been hiring. Which means a lot of businessmen are not participating in this (illegal conspiracy of a) strike. It is not just Democrats who run businesses who are hiring.
Some business people actually put profits above partisan politics. If hiring someone before November is going to enable them to serve more customers, and make more money, they are going to do it. They are not against RR. They might even think they will do better under an RR regime. But they are not going to pass up a dollar in the meanwhile.

Then there are the smarter, more complex business people. They know that not everyone can run their business serving the rich and famous. Most business in America serves the middle class of better-paid wage workers, lower-level management, and smaller, marginal business owners. Given the vast numbers of minimum-wage, part-time, and unemployed workers as well as the seniors living on Social Security and, yes, about 4 million welfare bums (more if you include SSI), there are even a lot of businesses that get most or a substantial part of their revenues and profits from serving the lower class.

These business people know through experience that the world is a complex place. They are often moderate Republicans, and they know that destroying the safety net means a hard landing for their businesses. They see the food stamps come into there stores every day. They are landlords who see rent from seniors and welfare mothers and the unemployed. They may even be government contractors.

They are scared of RR and the faction of ideological Republicans RR represents, but they do not want to talk about it, at least not at Chamber of Commerce meetings. They just went through a recession, and they understand all too well how Wall Street screwed them. They may not like regulations, but ask them and you will find that federal regulations don't affect many of them very much, it is local regulations like building codes and health and safety codes that drive them crazy.

Many of them are politically astute, too. They have seen the Tea Party ravage the older, willing to compromise to get things done Republican politicians. They suspect this ultra-ideological victory within the Republican Party could just be setting up a big Democratic Party victory in November. If there is a Republican Party victory, they are worried, really worried, that it could be: BAD FOR BUSINESS.
The fact is that while the Republicans had a good run in the 1920's, the world has changed. Dialing back the clock will probably be an economic disaster. The Democrats have done a much better job handling the economy for the last century. Republicans are the party of microeconomics, but they (the ideological free market, Ayn Rand guys) fail to see that macroeconomics is a whole different game, as different as checkers and chess. Bill Clinton, for all his faults, is a macroeconomics type of guy. RR are microeconomics guys.

If I were hiring someone to manage my scant investments, I'd hire RR. But to run a national, indeed a global economy, the Clinton-Obama team is the clear choice. Not just for me, but for all of us business people. We could do better, but only by stepping outside the current two-party system.

Hopefully, after an Obama victory in 2012, moderates will fight to regain control of the Republican Party by 2014. If they don't, the Republican Party will just get smaller and purer. When it gets too small and too pure it will lose its gravy train, and then it will disappear like the Whig Party before it.

Disclaimer: William P. Meyers is a self-employed consultant and analyst.

Herman Cain's Twisted Politics

In the Republican presidential hopeful field, in which candidates rise and fall like so many prairie dogs, Herman Cain has recently risen to number two status. A business guy with no prior experience in political office (though he ran for Senator of Georgia in 2004), it is impressive that he has done so well. In fact, his entire life is impressive, if you don't think about it too much.

Mr. Cain can genuinely claim to be a rags to riches story. In contrast to President Obama, he came from a working class black family, growing up when being black was a serious disadvantage (he was born in 1945). Also unlike Obama, he was good at math, and so he received a B.A. in mathematics in 1967 and a M.S. in computer science in 1971. Thus he somehow avoided the typical fate of men of his age bracket: killing or being killed in the jungles and cities of Vietnam. He did work a bit for the Navy as a civilian before going to work as an analyst for Coca Cola.

So Mr. Cain is a smart guy, he dodged the draft and used his smarts to get ahead in business. Nothing wrong with that in so far as it goes. Any prol doing well in business is alright with me. He was no entrepreneur, to be sure; he was a corporate man. He was given increasing levels of responsibility at Pillsbury. They eventually made him President of their Godfather's Pizza subsidiary.

That is when Herman learned the lesson that he'd like to teach the entire nation. He took the over 900 stores of the money losing division and he made the division profitable. Did he do that by improving employee spirit, a clever advertising campaign, or inventing a better pizza? No. He made two lists: profitable stores and unprofitable stores. He closed almost 500 unprofitable stores. All the employees had to find new jobs. Herman's economic conservatism in largely colored by that success. He bought Godfather's from Pillsbury, using borrowed money. He was a king, the head of his own 400 store empire. The paupers who were his ex-employees should have taken more time with their math lessons; they deserved whatever fate awaited them.

Meet Herman Cain, the man who proved that hard work and business acumen and permission to swing an ax can make anyone a CEO multi-millionaire. The man who believes welfare and the laziness it inspires are what is keeping poor people down. The man who does not like government handouts, except when they are military jobs and contracts.

Get ready for a caining, or a caning, if you are among the irresponsibly unemployed. Herman Cain is the True Conservative who will cut, cut, cut government programs the way he cut Godfather's Pizza. He'll cut taxes too, those terrible taxes that slow the rise of bright fellows like himself up the social ladder.

Strangely, Herman Cain served on the board of the Federal reserve Bank of Kansas City from 1992 until 1996. How did he, with no banking experience, get appointed to a such a post? I suppose we'll have to read his new book, "Magical Me," to find out.

You would think that at least a slight understanding of macroeconomics would be required to be a Federal Reserve board member. Things that seem to work out on a small scale, say for an individual business, can become a disaster if done on a large scale. You may have noticed this in 2008, during the CEO panic. CEO's began laying off workers, even before demand dropped, even at corporations that were very profitable. Surprise, when enough CEO's had fired enough workers, we were in a severe recession.

While each individual termite benefits from eating the house, and the whole colony benefits for a while, eventually the house falls down.

When Herman takes away people's food stamps, he may think that will force them to go out and earn a living. Instead the corporate supermarket chains and mom & pop corner stores alike will go under. When he cuts back on funding for education, he thinks parents will pay for private schooling, but instead the streets will fill up with delinquents. When he takes away Medicare Social Security, he thinks seniors will quietly curl up in the streets and die. They might, but most of the nations doctors and nurses and biotechnology CEO's will be joining them in the streets.

After 4 years with Herman Cain, he'll probably just close up America, because the entire nation will be unprofitable.

I wish I could endorse a math guy for President, but it isn't how good you are with math, it's what you do with it. If you close your mind to the bigger realities of the world, and just use it to count and hoard beans as Herman Cain has, then math has been wasted on you.

Still interested? Herman Cain for President

Rainy Day Wisconsin: Union Busting

Arnold Schwarzenegger, former actor and Governor of California, looks a lot better after a few months out of office. Partly that is because California does not look so bad, now that the problems of states like Texas, Wisconsin, and Illinois are more in the limelight. Mostly it is because the new fearless leader of California, and its same-old Democratic Party, Jerry Brown, is having to tell his party constituency pretty much the same thing Arnold did: there is no money. We have sucked the blood of the golden geese, the working taxpayers and productive businesses, to the point where we have to wait for a bit of recovery before we can throw more poly ticks into the mix

My heart bleeds for the public service workers of Wisconsin. Public service is a fine thing. I believe in the right of working people to form unions, too. But while Governor Scott Walker, is hell-bent on destroying every union, public and private (except ones that support the Republican Party, hint, hint), that does not mean I feel I need to defend every union, and every union action, no matter what the details.

If the United States, or the individual constituent states, were really based on democratic (rule by the people) principles, what would be the relationship of government to public employees? In a democracy should the public make decisions through its elected representatives, or should public employees be the real decision makers? Should public employees decide their own pay, working hours, and pensions?

What can be good in a private sector union can have negative consequences with public employee unions. Private sector unions provide a balance for ordinary workers against the power of corporations. That does not mean that corporations would always be wrong if they set pay scales without employee input; it does not mean that unions don't sometimes have their own problems, like internal corruption. But a union that asks too much of a business will destroy the business, and hence hurt its own members interests. Smart unions and smart corporations cooperate so that everyone is reasonably happy: stockholders, management, employees, and yes, even customers.

Public service unions can have some good effects. My own take (and I have served on a public school board, and have been observing these matters for decades now) is that some government employees are overpaid, and some underpaid, just like in private industry. Some are workhorses, and some are shirkers, just like in private industry.

The reason anti-union ideologues like Scott Walker make government worker unions the scapegoat for all unions, and for that matter all employees (seen by Walker as an inferior class of people who don't have the initiative to start a business or claw their way into management), is that our political system does sometimes allow particular unions of government employees to get out of control. The unions use campaign contributions and their ability to mobilize members to work on political campaigns to influence state legislatures. In return state budgets get distorted in two ways. Powerful unions (in California that would be police and prison guard unions) get a disproportionate share of the state budget allocated to them. And since each time a budget is done there is not enough money to go around (and that includes tax loopholes for the rich, and make work for well-connected corporations), the future gets mortgaged, usually in the form of promises of higher pensions.

What we need to fix the system is less ideology and more attention to detail. The every-man-for-himself Republican Party needs to stop acting as if every union (and every employee wanting a living wage) is bad and every government employee is an overpaid shirker. Liberal Democratic Party politicians need to stop acting as if every public employee demand for pay and benefit increases is legitimate. Some group of politicians needs to start working for the preservation of the bulk of employees whose only old-age pension is Social Security.

The job of a representative in a democracy is not just to pimp for powerful businessmen and powerful unions. The rest of us, the non-union workers and small business people, would like some representation too. We should all want good schools and good police and some sort of a safety net. None of us need a bloated military establishment or taxpayer subsidies to the rich or a pension system for highly-paid bureaucrats that no amount of taxation can sustain.

Public employee unions should retain their right to collective bargaining. Our elected officials, and the administrators who actually set salaries, need to be tough and fair negotiators. Unless you think the People they are stand-ins for are soft but unfair. Which might be right.