I'm going to hurt myself. Does anyone want to watch?

Once when spending a leisurely afternoon on the waterfront in Savannah, Georgia - a wonderful place, by the way, to spend a leisurely afternoon - I saw a street entertainer, a guy who rode a very tall unicycle and juggled, start his efforts to draw a crowd by yelling, "I'm going to hurt myself. Does anyone want to watch?"

I feel very much the same way about the way labor unions are determined to punish Democratic Members of Congress, even their most loyal friends, if they voted against Obama's health care reform monstrosity. The case in point is the decision of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO to withhold its endorsement of Representative Tim Holden in Pennsylvania's 17th Congressional District.

I have a strong feeling that Holden will win the Democratic Primary rather handily. He is, after all, up against a little known and poorly funded opponent who the unions didn't endorse either. After that he has an altogether different election race. The 17th is a majority Republican district. Holden captured the seat and has held on to it as a "conservative" Blue Dog Democrat.

Considering poll results showing increasing public discontent with incumbents and the recent Pew Research Center survey findings that a plurality of the public opposes labor unions, a union endorsement in November will remind the public of Holden's pro union voting record and might be the political equivalent of the Ancient Mariner's albatross around his neck.

So, how smart is this? You alienate a guy who votes with you 90 percent of the time by withholding an endorsement that he doesn't need but might appreciate, but then set yourself up to need to deliver the endorsement of the same guy when it might actually hurt his chances of getting reelected.

Are the unions shouting, "I'm going to hurt myself. Does anybody care?"

It's Never Been Easy

In his "Rules for Radicals" Saul Alinsky said to admit that your "enemy" had any redeeming qualities was idiocy. Saul believed that “Before men can act, an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced that their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil.”

It is no secret that I'm no fan of labor unions, but I have frequently enjoyed the honest writing of a fellow who is a strong advocate of unions. David Macaray, a former labor union representative whose work usually appears in "Counterpunch" writes persuasively about unions. Unlike some union apologists he is not afraid to deal with problems when he finds them. I found a recent Macaray column, "What does $400 Million Buy You These Days?" particularly insightful.

He recently published a collection of his writings under the title of "It's Never Been Easy." I commend it to all those who are interested in labor unions, pro or con. If you find that he has been too persuasive, send me a note and I'll write an anti-union diatribe or two for you.

I must be careful. Admitting that someone who disagrees with you isn't "100 percent on the side of the devil" might be contagious. Well, as I said, I am too soon old and too late wise.

Obama/Labor Bid Rigging Scheme Unravels

One of President Barack Obama's first acts in office was to rescind an Executive Order barring union-only Project Labor Agreements (PLA) on federal public works construction projects. This was a huge boon to Obama's Union Boss friends.

PLA's are bid rigging and protection racket schemes under which the construction owner agrees to use only union labor, thus driving up the cost of the project at the public's expense, while the unions guarantee "labor peace."

To put this in perspective, picture a thug at a candy store in Chicago telling the store's owner that for a weekly payoff his windows won't be broken and his customers will not be molested. The cost of the weekly payoff is, of course, passed along in higher prices to the purchasers of candy. The thug has the additional economic responsibility to impose the same terms on all other candy stores in the area so that his client won't be at a disadvantage.

Now comes the U.S. Department of Labor with plans to build a Jobs Corp Center in New Hampshire and advertises the bid specifying a PLA.

And, to the public's rescue comes North Branch Construction which protests to the Government Accountability Office with the assistance of the Associated Builders and Contractors. According to The Truth About PLA's "the Department of Labor cancelled its unlawful PLA mandate the day before the agency was required to file a response to our bid protest."

Read all about it in the ABC's "The Truth About Project Labor Agreements."

The Rooster and the Sun Rise

Thank God for roosters! Were it not for these little creatures we would live in a world of perpetual darkness for the sun wouldn't rise. Well, at least that's the impression you'd get if you listen to the roosters.

The very same applies to labor union political influence. In the 1994 elections, Republicans captured control of the U.S. House of Representatives. In October of 1995 when he was elected President of the AFL-CIO John Sweeney promised to spend $35 million in the 1996 elections to recapture control of Congress for those beholden to union special interests. It didn't happen. The AFL-CIO then pledged to spend $28 million to accomplish the task in the 1998 elections. The money was spent but Congress remained in Republican hands. The sad tale goes on election year after election year, tens of millions of union dues dollars after tens of millions of union dues dollars, 2000 - $46 million; 2002 - $35 million; 2004 - $44 million.

These are, of course, minuscule amounts compared to what the unions actually spend but they are for some reason the ones that grab the headlines.

Then, cock-a-doodle-do, in 2006 with an unpopular Republican President half way through his second term in the White House, a less than popular war half a world away that few understood, an uncertain economy and a Republican majority in Congress that had abandoned all pretense of fiscal restrain, the Democrats recaptured control of Congress and the Union Bosses dislocated their shoulders patting themselves on the back with congratulations.

Then comes 2008 with the economy in dire straights, the war, if the word "war" is really a good description of the mess in Iraq, seeming to be endless, a lackluster candidate at the top of the Republican ticket and the Democrats increase their majority.

Cock-a-doodle-do again. To listen to the Union Bosses you would get the impression that the sun will not rise on the Democratic Party's candidates if they don't strut and crow.

The fascinating thing about this is that there are a great many members of Congress who are acting as if they believe them.

Now here's a strange thing. On November 3, 2009 the voters in New Jersey went to the polls and elected a Republican governor. No less a personage as the Vice President of the United States visited the New Jersey AFL-CIO convention to exhort them to support Jon Corzine's reelection.

The state AFL-CIO chief pledged that there would be an army of volunteers working for Corzine every week until the election. President Obama himself visited the state to plug for Corzine, yet when it came to election day all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't, well you know the story.

In Virginia the picture is even more stark. One of the focuses of Bob McDonnell's winning campaign for governor was his opposition to federal legislation like the perversely named "Employee Free Choice Act," which would strengthen unions by taking away workers choice. Ken Cuccinelli, the successful Republican candidate for attorney general also made opposition to the EFCA a central argument in his campaign.

And, say what you will about poor little Dierdre Scozzafava up in New York's 23rd Congressional District, two of the bad raps against her were that her husband was a union boss and that she was endorsed by the Working Families Party, an organization heavily supported by labor unions, including a $1,000,000 donation in 2008 from the New York State affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO.

The Democrats took a traditionally Republican seat, but the ripe odor, dare I say "stench," of union interests undoubtedly had a lot to do with the fact that the Republicans couldn't stomach the nominee hand picked by their party's leaders.

So, are the union roosters still crowing? As Sarah Palin might say, "You betcha!" But do the politicians really believe that the sun rises on them as a result? Well, they still have to pretend to, at least until the checks clear.

What vanishing middle class?

There is a constant refrain from union officials and their allies in the media, academia and politics about the need to strengthen unions to restore the vanishing middle class.

Being unencumbered by too much formal education, such complaints seem very strange to me.

In our relatively classless society, terms like "middle class" are usually defined by household income and household income is analyzed by quintiles, or fifths. The third quintile is considered to be the middle class, the second the lower middle class and the fourth the upper middle class, the first the poor and the fifth the wealthy.

It is impossible for quintiles to disappear, vanish or even shrink. After all, a fifth is a fifth. (This analysis does not, of course, apply to fifths of good whiskey. They have been known to vanish, sometimes rapidly. I have witnessed this myself.)

Perhaps then, those who complain about a vanishing middle class believe that the purchasing power of the middle quintiles is diminishing. That, for example, the average household income of the third quintile is falling.

The U.S. Census Bureau has information about this on their web site covering 1967 to 2008.

This information is expressed in both current and constant dollars. There's good news for those who fear a shrinking middle class. In constant 2008 dollars, average household income is up in every quintile. The growth isn't steady and it isn't uniform from quintile to quintile, but it is up across the board.

The alarmists can do some cherry picking to get numbers they want. For example, if one were to compare 1998 to 2008 it would show a decline, but if you compare 1997 to 2007 it shows and increase. Over the long haul the movement is upwards in all quintiles.

There are, of course, other dimensions to this issue. I'll discuss them in a future blog.