Blackmail in OH: Don’t Call Union Firemen If House On Fire
Posted By drscoundrels On 07 Mar 2011. Under Corruption, Cuts, Feet To The Fire, Political Commentary, Property Rights, Spending Cuts, State Politics, Terrorism, Unions Tags: blackmail, bully, threats, unions, wrong
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What else do you call "Don't call us if your home is on fire because you disagree with us"?

I want everyone to understand – I believe teachers, police and firefighters should be paid and paid well. One teaches our future, the other two protect our safety.

I keep hearing about how much trouble the kids are today, and frankly that’s grist for another mill – one about parents, schools, school boards and political correctness. Teachers should be able to teach and thugs are thugs – whether school kids or union people threatening public officials who are responding to issues and problems that are real and must be dealt with.

First – collective bargaining. I had someone tell me that it wasn’t about collective bargaining and that wasn’t all they had lost.

No – but that was the main thrust of it – the ability to bargain every year or whenever they want no matter the cost to the state, the students or the people they are protecting.

When you look at the benefits and the cost to the state multiplied by 200-300 thousand people – there has to be a reckoning at some point. The pensions are overpromised and set up to fail like a ponzi scheme. The pay is good on average and not unreasonable – but there can’t honestly be increases when there is nothing left to pay them with in the first place.

The ability to strike is another big sticking point and one of the biggest issues in their hearts. But herein lies a perfect example of thuggishness and brutal lowbrowheadedness being shown. But we’ll come to that in a moment.

I would say – pay them well and abolish unions as a whole. Make the pay raises based on economic growth of the community and that the cuts during bad times can’t exceed the state cuts overall. Pay goes up during good times and neutral or drops a little during bad times. Reasonable pay and economic ties ins would be fair to the people giving up the unions, and fair to the community considering that there are two things that you need to take into account about unions:

1. Unions can’t be replaced if they go on strike in many cases on state levels. They can hold a town hostage to their kids not going to school and the parents having to miss work or costing more money for sitters to garbage not being picked up or even worse threats – we’ll get to those.

2. Not only can the taxpayers not get competitive bids due to the monopoly of state unions for, lets say, privitization of services – they don’t get a seat at the table. The politicians, before these brave leaders, weren’t even willing to tackle the manpower, money and votes that the unions represent – they would willingly court those votes and dollars by giving raises even when they were irresponsible – like now. The unions would go out and court tax hikes, fees, licensing increases or whatever, and the whole cycle would start over. New revenue would come in, raises would follow, more new taxes as the labor costs hit, and so on.

Now – the fact is we are broke. Most states are in negative numbers. A large part of the cost of doing government isn’t raw materials for building something. It isn’t shipping finished product. It isn’t assembly plants having to be modernized. It isn’t for something that returns value – it is mostly labor.

In some areas, the labor costs are over 60-80% of municipal budgets, and frankly, that is a huge burden to bear for millions who are barely holding on to their homes right now. This is a time to be reasonable and bring logic back into the mix.

Governor Walker is looking to slash the state education budget by 9% – just a hair over the entire budget being cut 7.8% statewide with almost every single budget getting hit – including some getting hit 100%.

This is a necessary thing – we don’t have the ability to pay more and more and more to keep raising benefits and pay for a few over the backs of the majority of the workers the unions claim to be fighting for.

We are seeing that all but a few states are in the red, and the nation can’t and has already said that D.C. won’t bail them out. With that and even though pension shortfalls might be 1.5 TRILLION underestimated nationwide – the unions are hardlining this argument.

No cop shopping instead of no stop shopping.

Here is the part that really burns me and most conservatives, and I believe independents up. Here is where your vote, your voice, your wallet, your struggles, your burdens don’t matter. Here is where some people who lead and are the voices of the unions well and away cross the line.

The Ohio politician who cast the deciding vote in the Ohio Senate has already come face to face with union supporters who accosted him and other Senators in a restaurant

- and on top of that, according to reports from the Daily Caller:

Newly-elected Ohio Republican State Sen. Frank LaRose has received several distasteful threats from his state’s union members, including a high-ranking official in the police officers’ union.

LaRose, a 31-year-old Iraq war veteran, was the tiebreaking vote in Ohio’s Senate, which just sent a bill similar to Wisconsin’s budget bill to the State’s House of Representatives. That caused Michael Piotrowski, the general counsel for the Ohio Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), to siege LaRose’s Facebook page.

“Funny thing about cops,â€