America Rising Squared, a conservative media and research organization, posted two videos Monday featuring
Service Employees International Union members protesting in solidarity with the “Fight for 15” movement’s
“Day of Action.”
“Fight for 15” protests to increase the federal minimum wage to $15
per hour took place across the country last week.
In an effort to find out who these protesters are and how
much they know about the organization that employs them, America Rising Squared teams took to the sidewalks of Cleveland,
Ohio, and Charlotte, North Carolina, to conduct interviews.
The first video shows a “Fight for 15”
protest against a Cleveland McDonald’s restaurant. When America Rising Squared staff ask the protesters if they are
employed, they confirm that they actually work for SEIU, not the McDonald’s where the they were holding the Thursday
demonstration.
When asked if they know how much SEIU President Mary Kay Henry makes, the protesters flatly
refused to answer:
The media outlet reported that Henry makes $296,549
per year — about $143 an hour assuming a 40-hour work week — according to the union’s latest financial disclosure.
The top national organizer for the “Fight for 15” movement, Kendall Fells, makes $150,214, or about $72 an hour. Fells is paid by SEIU.
The second video shows a “Fight for 15”
protest at another McDonald’s in Charlotte. The protester in this video confesses that she doesn’t know how much
SEIU’s president makes:
America Rising Squared, a project launched by the conservative
America Rising PAC, explained on their website that their purpose in recording the protest was to expose “big labor-funded protests manned
by union members who don’t even work at the fast food establishments they claim to speak for.”
Last
week, the organization posted a video of an Austin, Texas, Taco Bell employee telling “Fight for 15” protesters to leave her store so she can do her
job. The clip quickly went viral.
"In a little over one hundred days, this Recovery Act has worked as intended," President Obama
recently said during one of his radio addresses.
Liberals have turned the ‘shuck and jive’ into a fine
art form through the years and this administration has made it a line item on their daily itinerary, but this push towards
socialism has gone further than even many Democrats can continue to stomach.
The President was apparently affirming
what many pundits opposing his policies have been trying to get through the liberal media elitist pro-Obama cacophony since
this administration took control of the reins.
Stimulating the economy is not what’s necessarily first and foremost
on the agenda… transforming America into a socialist society is the predominant motivator, which is why he believes
the Recovery Act is working just as he had planned.
Republican House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (Vir.) recently charged
in a Republican radio address response, "Remember the promises? They promised you if you paid for their stimulus, jobs would
be created immediately. In fact, they said that unemployment would stay under eight percent. Yet just months later, they are
telling us to brace for unemployment to climb over ten percent," he said.
Ah, remember when it was so easy for liberals
to assert things that would be simply touted as fact by the liberal media, such as when the President asserted, "This plan
will save or create 3.5 million jobs. More than 90 percent of these jobs will be in the private sector,” he said.
Now
the unemployment rate is over ten percent in at least 15 states and the District of Columbia. No jobs are being saved or created
in those areas of the country, but then for socialism to truly have its effect, the government needs folks who are dependent
on it.
The Recovery Act is working as the President intended, remember?
Then the information starts flowing
about how the process is being directed. The Washington Times recently reported that little of the stimulus money is actually
going to the areas of the country that have been the hardest hit by the recession.
Why?
It could be postulated
that many of those areas are red states. As a Democrat strategist would say, you turn red states blue by forcing those people
to need government intervention, then during the next election campaign either promise money for their financially strapped
area, threaten that the Republican candidate or representative is against that, and/or deny funding to that Republican representative.
The
third thing listed has already started.
As Ben Smith of Politico reported, “ Relentless criticism of the stimulus
package from a House Republican leader, Eric Cantor of Virginia, drew a furious barrage from the Democratic National Committee
and a visit from no smaller figure than the Vice President of the United States. Rank and file Republicans who criticize the
stimulus have also suddenly found themselves under a concerted DNC assault that asks if they’d prefer the federal funding
left their districts out. And criticism from Sen Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) drew letters from no fewer than four Cabinet secretaries
to his state’s governor, asking if she would prefer they withheld stimulus money.”
Talk about reaching
across the aisle and working with your opponents! Apparently, that’s only in play if the opposing side AGREES with the
socialist agenda this administration is fast-tracking for the hard working American families who they’ll start claiming
they are trying to help because ‘it’s for their own good’!
Which is something the President did touch
on during the election, “But what we haven’t yet seen is a rescue package for the middle class. So I’ve
proposed four specific things that I think can help. #1, let’s focus on jobs. #2, let’s help families right away
by providing them a middle-class tax cut. #3, Sen. McCain and I agree that we’ve got to help homeowners. #4, We’ve
got some long-term challenges: We’ve got to fix our energy policy; our health care system; and invest in our education
system.”
#1. So far the administration has only attacked the businesses that create and produce job growth, which
has led to job losses… their answer is government to the rescue.
#2. Have you seen a ‘tax cut’? The
only thing that has happened so far has been an increase in taxation on those who smoke and policies that will lead directly
to tax increases… this is so they can provide that government rescue.
#3. They are proposing to help homeowners…
by allowing the government to become their property keeper, regulator, and landlord.
#4. The administration’s
plan for energy is to turn away from fossil fuels, not utilize nuclear, and regulate business through carbon taxes while promising
’green jobs’ that can’t even begin to materialize for a decade if ever…
But they are moving
towards the government controlling your energy production… Government is moving to take over and control your health
care… and government is going to put more wasted dollars into the government-run education system controlling your families
even more.
The President’s policies are working just as he intended: Socialism is about government control, not
as an economic stimulus.
Columns I've produced that made recent Quill Pen Ten Lists
History Lesson: Why the Republican Party was Formed
Excerpted from the 1998 Encarta Digital Encyclopedia
In addition to adopting a new and harsh fugitive slave law, the Compromise of 1850 brought California
into the Union as a free state, but allowed slavery in the rest of the territories. In 1854 Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This law partially repealed the Missouri Compromise by
allowing the settlers of the Kansas and Nebraska territories (which included most of the present day states of Kansas, Nebraska,
Montana, South Dakota, and North Dakota) to decide for themselves if they wanted slavery. This was known as popular
sovereignty. Those hostile to this law and other opponents of slavery responded by forming the Republican Party. Popular sovereignty soon degenerated into a
civil war in Kansas-known as the Border War, or "Bleeding Kansas"-as
Southerners and Northerners battled over the status of slavery.
Dred Scott Case, landmark case of the 1850s in which the Supreme Court of the United States declared that African
Americans were not U.S. citizens. The court also determined that the portion of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that banned slavery in U.S. territories north and west of the state
of Missouri was unconstitutional. The Dred Scott case intensified ongoing debates over slavery that further polarized
the American North and South and eventually gave rise to the American Civil War in 1861.
In 1846 Dred Scott, a slave living in St. Louis, Missouri, sued to prove that he, his wife Harriet, and their two daughters were legally entitled to their freedom.
After being tried in Missouri state courts and in a federal circuit court, the case went before the U.S. Supreme Court in
1856. The following year, the court rejected Scott’s claim. Speaking for the court, Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney concluded that blacks, even when free, could never become citizens of the
United States and thus did not have a right to sue in federal courts. Taney also declared that Congress lacked the power to
prohibit slavery in federal territories, a ruling that invalidated the part of the Missouri Compromise that banned slavery
in the western territories.
The Dissents Justices John McLean of Ohio and Benjamin R. Curtis of Massachusetts issued dissenting opinions.
Curtis attacked Taney’s historical arguments, showing that blacks had voted in five states at the founding of the United
States. Thus, they were citizens of the nation from the beginning and could not now be denied citizenship.
Republicans also opposed the court’s decision. In speeches and throughout his famous debates
with Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln alleged a conspiracy
to nationalize slavery that had been hatched by Taney, Douglas, former U.S. president Franklin
Pierce, and James Buchanan, then the president
of the United States (see Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln-Douglas Debates).
On May 26, 1857, shortly after Taney’s decision, Scott gained his freedom when the sons of his first owner, Peter
Blow, purchased and freed Scott and his family. Scott remained a free man until his death a few months later, on February
17, 1858.
His case, however, remained a key issue in American politics and law until the outbreak of the Civil
War. Taney’s controversial decision in the case widened the breach between the North and South and further aggravated
debates over slavery. It also played a decisive role in the emergence of Lincoln as the Republican Party’s presidential
candidate in 1860 and his election later that year. Despite the decision in the case, Dred Scott and the Civil War
ultimately helped to usher in the Emancipation Proclamation on
January 1, 1863 and what Lincoln called "a new birth of freedom" for African Americans. In 1865 the nation adopted
the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which ended slavery. In 1868 it adopted the 14th Amendment, which declared that all
persons born in the United States are citizens of the nation and of the state in which they live. These two amendments effectively
reversed Taney’s assertions that the U.S. Constitution protected slavery and that African Americans could never be citizens
of the United States.
This is a history lesson that is factually accurate and proves that the Republican
Party is the party of civil rights. This history lesson has been purposely excluded from the class rooms of our children for
too many decades.
