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From Townhall
September 29, 2011
By John Ransom
The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) has submitted Freedom of Information requests to the Department of Labor and the Internal Revenue Service following an announcement that the administration is investigating homebuilders in an attempt to bolster union membership at the expense of housing sector jobs.
“In a letter [from the Labor Department] cited by The [Wall Street] Journal,” wrote Crain’s Detroit earlier this month “homebuilders were asked to immediately turn over the names, addresses, Social Security numbers, pay rates and hours worked for all employees over the past two years. The letter from the Labor Department asked for the names of all contractors hired in the past year. The letter didn’t allege any specific violations of law.”
No. It’s just the usual harassment that the Obama administration gives industry when they have a disagreement with a key Obama constituency such as unions that are all mobbed up. Re-write the rules, send investigators in, bury them in document discovery and government lawyers until they cave.
In the meantime, since January 2008 new housing starts have remained at their lowest sustained level from any similar time period since 1959, the last year records are available.
“Construction of homes and apartments last month decreased 5.0% from a month earlier to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 571,000, the Commerce Department said Tuesday,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “The month’s results were pulled down by a nearly 30% drop in the Northeastern states.”
The construction industry has shed 2.3 million jobs since its peak in 2006 and added only 46,000 jobs since then according to the Tacoma News Tribune.
This is what a trillion dollars of shovel-ready stimulus has bought the American people. By the mob, for the mob, of the mob.
And they wonder where the jobs have gone?
“The pay rates for construction workers and the subcontractors used by general contractors hired by PulteGroup,” says Crains “is part of a long-term conflict between the homebuilder and unions, in particular the Laborers International Union of North America.”
Oh, so now I get it:
The White House, with the cooperation of several state governments and the Department of Labor, will attempt to get the Internal Revenue Service to go after homebuilders. The IRS will use supposed violations of independent contractor rules that allow homebuilders to hire independent contractors at a straight hourly wage, without subjecting them to payroll taxes and union membership.
If this works out this will be bleepin’ golden scam for unions, as they say in Chicago.
That’s because the IRS rules governing independent contractors are unclear. Some would say that they are purposefully unclear. The IRS is pretty adept at making life difficult for companies targeted under the independent contractor rule. Let’s just say that they pull the rule out when they want to put pressure on someone.
“The Center wishes to review documents showing the role played by the federal government, some states and possibly other outside entities,” wrote NLPC in their Freedom of Information request to the Department of Labor, “to impose additional administrative costs on an industry in which few publicly traded companies are profitable, most have seen major cutbacks in work and many have had major layoffs.”
The outside entities referred to by the NLPC would be the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA). LIUNA locals still act as fronts for mob activity. In March, the New York Daily News reported that the Brooklyn District Attorney was “plotting strategies to break the Gambino crime family’s 50-year stranglehold on the Pavers and Road Builders District Council,” a LIUNA affiliate.
The Obama administration knows a lot about Chicago “pavers,” too.
Last week we wrote about Ray LaHood, the Republican secretary of transportation under Obama. You know the guy responsible for doling out much of the $787 billion stimulus package? LaHood’s patron is William Cellini, the former executive director of the Illinois Asphalt Pavement Association. Cellini is under indictment in Chicago for trying to extort $1.4 million from a Hollywood-type who wanted to manage teachers’ pension business in Illinois.
What does the Pavement Association have to do with teachers’ pensions? The same thing the IRS has to do with a dispute between unions and homebuilders. Let’s just call them “interested” parties or “known associates.”
Continue reading here……….
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Mob style politics the Alinsky way
Alinsky learned mob tactics years before actually beginning community organizing…….
Obama learned and taught Alinsky strategy in his community organizing days.
Alinsky Profile HERE.
Excerpt:
But it is not enough for the organizer to be in solidarity with the people. He must also, said Alinsky, cultivate unity against a clearly identifiable enemy; he must specifically name this foe, and “singl[e] out”[44] precisely who is to blame for the “particular evil” that is the source of the people’s angst.[45] In other words, there must be a face associated with the people’s discontent. That face, Alinsky taught, “must be a personification, not something general and abstract like a corporation or City Hall.”[46] Rather, it should be an individual such as a CEO, a mayor, or a president.
Alinsky summarized it this way: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it…. [T]here is no point to tactics unless one has a target upon which to center the attacks.”[47] He held that the organizer’s task was to cultivate in people’s hearts a negative, visceral emotional response to the face of the enemy. “The organizer who forgets the significance of personal identification,” said Alinsky, “will attempt to answer all objections on the basis of logic and merit. With few exceptions this is a futile procedure.”[48]
[snip]
Given that the enemy was to be portrayed as the very personification of evil, against whom any and all methods were fair game, Alinsky taught that an effective organizer should never give the appearance of being fully satisfied as a result of having resolved any particular conflict via compromise. Any compromise with the “devil” is, after all, by definition morally tainted and thus inadequate. Consequently, while the organizer may acknowledge that he is pleased by the compromise as a small step in the right direction, he must make it absolutely clear that there is still a long way to go, and that many grievances still remain unaddressed. The ultimate goal, said Alinsky, is not to arrive at compromise or peaceful coexistence, but rather to “crush the opposition,” bit by bit.[57] “A People’s Organization is dedicated to eternal war,” said Alinsky. “… A war is not an intellectual debate, and in the war against social evils there are no rules of fair play.… When you have war, it means that neither side can agree on anything…. In our war against the social menaces of mankind there can be no compromise. It is life or death.”[58]
[snip]
In his book Radical in Chief, Stanley Kurtz describes Alinsky as “a cross between a democratic socialist and a communist fellow traveler.” But Alinsky carefully avoiding drawing any attention to that fact. Writes Kurtz:
“He was smart enough to avoid Marxist language in public…. Instead of calling for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, Alinsky and his followers talk about ‘confronting power.’ Instead of advocating socialist revolution, they demand ‘radical social change.’ Instead of demanding attacks on capitalists, they go after ‘targets’ or ‘enemies.’”
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The following are WELL WORTH your time to read:
Playboy interview Saul Alinsky and his “inside study” of Capone’s mob:
Part #1: http://www.progress.org/2003/alinsky5.htm
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Part #2: “Worthwhile struggles”
http://www.progress.org/2003/alinsky6.htm
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Part #3: ”Radicals amid the Depression”
http://www.progress.org/2003/alinsky7.htm
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Part#4: Organizing the Back of the Yards
http://www.progress.org/2003/alinsky8.htm
Excerpt:
PLAYBOY: What tactics did you use?
ALINSKY: Everything at our disposal in those days — boycotts of stores, strikes against the meat packers, rent strikes against the slumlords, ***picketing of exploitive businesses, sit-downs in City Hall and the offices of the corrupt local machine bosses. We’d turn the politicians against each other, splitting them up and then taking them on one at a time.*** At first the establishment dismissed us with a sneer, but pretty soon we had them worried, because they saw how unified we were and that we were capable of exerting potent economic and political pressure. Finally the concessions began trickling in — reduced rents, public housing, more and better municipal services, school improvements, more equitable mortgages and bank loans, fairer food prices.
