http://twulocal100.blogspot.com/

I am a local booking agent. Make commision on getting indie bands to gigs in various locals….

Here is the difference. I can CHOOSE to buy and Apple iPod and make Steve Jobs and Apple stock holders rich or any other business for that matter. From my local coffee shop owner to the big business. Steve Jobs getting rich is not affecting me.

Now PUBLIC employees who I pay hard earned taxes to pay their salary and retirement and pay to use the bus/transport each time, that is my issue!! They serve the public and should not demand more than what the “average man” gets. If no one in the private sector in the future has a pension NO one in the public sector should either. It is GREED and THEFT from pay pocket plain and simple. If they want to be greedy go work for Google but NOT my government.

I’m not a Republican by the way, I too don’t like Bush. Any distaste I have for Socialism is due to my obsession with economics.

One doesn’t have to be a Republican to hate socialism, but one cannot be a Democrat any more and hate socialism. The Democrats are a socialist party.

Those kinds of places - places like New Orleans and San Francisco - are a continual reminder that we should never, never allow the socialistic liberals to run the country.

“The huge mess they have made of San Francisco is a graphic testament to that premise. There is no segment of city governance that is not a total mess from education, property assessment, crime, cost of living, homelessness, developing Treasure Island, and on and on.”
- Jim Sparkman

Ditto for New Orleans - the poverty you saw there was a direct result of 40 years of the liberal socialistic class ruling there.

Tes writes: Or are all those people poor because they’re all lazy?

No, they are just not motivated to be capitalistic businessowners….taking on all the risks and headaches of employers dealing with workers. Listening, one would think some of us are under the impression that one cannot go from being a worker to an employer or vice versa.

I had many of the same corporate experiences as you Tess…no way was my corporate employer going to promote me to anything meaningful, so poor and uneducated, I started a firm I could be the President of…in a line of work I wasn’t particularly fond of but one I knew I could succeed in without a degree.

That’s the beauty of our capitalistic society….you get to choose no matter how humble your beginning…where you end up. Course, if you choose substance abuse, unwed motherhood etc. you sabotage that choice…but that is not the fault of capitalism ..but the fault of those who make those poor choices.

No one in our capitalistic society is owed a job created by someone else.

So transit workers making $65,000 are living in 3rd world conditions? Question early retirement for union members and you can guarantee a response like “You must not like feeding starving children”. Well I was just in NY on the subway and I can promise you they didn’t look hungry.

Socialism doesn’t benefit the poor it benefits the middle class and only at the expense of the poor and GDP. Look at the unemployment in France, German, Italy, etc. then compare it to the unemployment rate in the free markets of Ireland, the UK, and the USA. Coincidence? Double digit employment is good for the poor?

What you believe is intuitive, even Einstein was a Socialist. Unfortunately for democratic societies, economic reality happens to be counterintuitive. I’m not a Republican by the way, I too don’t like Bush. Any distaste I have for Socialism is due to my obsession with economics.

Some good may actually come of this strike. You can bet NY will be looking into smart systems to automate their transit in the near future. They’ll just need to encase the computers in bullet proof glass to withstand the attacks from pitchfork-weilding Neo-Luddite Socialists.

BTW what is your job?

As for the strike and the MTA budget, whatever surplus the agency has will disappear anyway in the next few years no matter what contract the TWU ends up with, because of the bond debt the agency has incurred over the past several years to buy thousands of new subway cars, along with the recently passed bond issue that includes preliminary work on the Second Avenue subway, which has never been built despite the first bond issue for it being approved in 1950.

Pushing the bond debt repayment back to 2010 or so was a way of kicking the financial can down the road by Pataki, so that Governor Spitzer and his future MTA chairman will have to deal with the consequences. And Roger Touusant and the union has to know about the sham surplus as well, but it’s in neither side’s interest to make a big deal about it — Pataki’s looking to run for president, and Republicans around the country already think New York is financially irresponsible, while Touusant was elected by the more radical element of the TWU who were mad at the former union leadership for wimping out three years ago and agreeing to a contract without sticking it to the man and callinga strike. The hard-liners already think Toussant is a little soft, so he’s got to keep them happy now that he’s pulled the trigger on the walkout.

Pataki also can’t let MTA chairman Peter Kaliko give in, at least if he wants to maintain any viability (at least in his own mind) as a 2008 GOP presidential candidate. So this figures to be a stalemate that’s going to last at least a couple of more days, though the nation Transport Worker’s Union action today criticizing the local TWU for the strike may give Toussant an out, if he’ll take it. Otherwise, it’s going to be Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa for Roger at Rikers.

The greed of these people not only in what they demand but they are TAKING money off of the table for millions on service workers who will have no tips and no commissons on sales because of those in the union.

You’re allowed to be cranky, but being factually incorrect only gives blogs a bad name.
But maybe you were still in your pajamas when you wrote this?

(Let’s point out part of the anti-management case, just for kicks…
The MTA board went on a spending spree to draw down their surplus in the weeks before contract expiration. Neither the MTA chair nor the Governor, who controls the Board, got involved in negotiations in any serious way. A little respect might have gone a long way.)

“Civil disobedience” is often used to soften or justify illegal acts such as looting, vandalism and arson. Armed robbery would be a stretch.

You have got to be kidding about Free Market and the break-up of AT&T. That was all smoke and mirrors. That was like dropping mercury on your desktop. Look how fast they are rejoining. This is fast becomming a two-corporation world, Pepsi vs Coca Cola. The mega-mergers are quickly going to leave us with two of everything, two banks, two oil companies, two pharmicuticals, etc, et al, ad nauseum.

And those that own the two mega-corporations will convince us through their two mega-media empires that it is in the name of competition and it is good for us.

Well, HA, no shit. Free market societies do have problems. That’s why there has to be checks on organizations like the MTA. (And, I think, unions like TWU).

The MTA is a governmet run monopoly for Christ’s sake! The problem here is that it the MTA is NOT subject to market forces. If it was, transit consumers could choose a competing transportation service.

The MTA should be broken up like AT&T was, and then the pieces should be sold off and privatized.

http://www.nysun.com/article/24744

I pointed out two benefits brought about by union activity.

And I’ll point out that those benefits accrued to union members, and ONLY union members. And the came at the expense of everybody else. Unions don’t create wealth. They steal it from other members of society.

Why can’t you union apologists grasp this simple and obvious fact?

The companies can pay that because there is so much competition for jobs, the ‘if you don’t like find something else’ attitude which is mentioned above, and rich middle class kids who are subsidised for years by their familes.

The people who are arguing against unions should go and spend a month working at Walmart.

Decades of ‘anti-commie’ propaganda have certainly worked over there. So, how low do you think wages should go, when you are competing in a global market against slave labour and sweatshops in other countries?

” great many things have been accomplished by deliberately violating unjust laws.”

Come on, Right of Center, surely you can do better than pulling someone’s quote completely out of context?

In example: the bus boycotts were illegal. By performing them, and then facing the consequences, MLK accomplished a great thing. Generalizing that out to all crimes is silly.

Did Bush do anything great by violating the law? That will be for Congress to decide.

Working Person, I don’t see how you get the above from this: “work week and benefits that we enjoy and expect today were not the rewards of hardwork, but of union actions and government intervention. ” I pointed out two benefits brought about by union activity. I do agree (ironically, completely) that unions do not breed (rather, stifle) innovation. At one point, about 100 years ago, they were innovative and useful. Now? Nope.