When They Do This In New York

Its called extortion. Pay or lose.

A large man in a three-piece suit with two other large friends walks into your place of business and tells you that your building is in a very hazardous area. There have been several businesses that caught fire in recent weeks and they can protect yours. It will only cost you 50% of your weekly gross receipts. Kind of a benevolent association, if you will.

Nonsense you say. The fire department is only three blocks away and you have a good insurance policy. Well, the large gentlemen says, as he plays with his Zippo, the fire department and insurance company only comes out AFTER the fire. We're offering to prevent the fire from starting in the first place and now the cost has risen to 60% of your gross receipts, for the aggravation of having to tell you twice.

That's called extortion. Use of fear to extract money.

The government workers' unions have started employing similar tactics to get their way. Only when they do it, its called collective bargaining.

Lets go to Wisconsin where the Republican legislators trying to save the state's economy have asked the service unions to step up and lend a hand by contributing a small amount of their pay to their own retirement plans (I stuff 5% of my wages into mine, plus my profit-sharing) and be repsonsible citizens of the state by curtailing the act of bargaining for higher wages since they don't really produce anything marketable, nothing of value with a relative cost to worth ratio. They have no real dangers in the workplace, unless you count papercuts, the occasional gas flare-up from eating to much rich food, the asshat down the hall who keeps sending you explicit emails and the fat-ass you get from sitting on it all day long.

You'd think the legislators were asking for the firstborn child of every union member in Wisconsin. Wait, based on what I've seen so far, the unions would give their firstborn as long as they got their way with everything else.

Now they've reverted to the behavior of unions we've all come to know and loathe. Death threats have been sent via email. (How stupid is that in this day and age? What ever happened to the old style of sending death threats; letters cut out of newspapers/magazines and pasted onto posterboard? You know, REAL cut and paste? I swear the creativity and initiative in this country has just bottomed out.)

I know ya'll are tired of hearing this story being repeated over and over..what? You've never heard the LSM report this story? You say this is the first you've heard of it? How can that be? The LSM is always on top of any story where politicians are getting death threats from citizens exercising their government provided right of free speech, assembly and expression. Oh wait, thats only if the politician has a D behind their name. My bad.

Thanks to my favorite two-headed talk show hosts, Scott and Richard, for reminding me I needed to do a rant on this.