What makes Reich’s comments so bizarre is that they run counter to the modus operandi of the Democrat Party’s single largest political contributor, Big Labor. Unions, despite 100 years of opportunity to change their discriminatory ways are still a powerful special interest that tends to employ less minority workers than are represented in the communities they serve. Here in the City of Los Angeles for instance, staff and elected officials have struggled to get the local building trades to prove they can make good on promises of racial diversity and local hiring in return for a union-only Project Labor Agreement that would encompass all public works projects in the City of Los Angeles. You’d think that such a huge prize would drive the union to get the city the information it is requesting. The problem is they simply can’t produce the levels of participation the city is asking for.

And this is nothing new. When the City of Philadelphia approved the union-only Project Labor Agreement (PLA) for their new convention center, they inserted language into the document that required a certain level of minority and women participation. In the end, all but one of the 18 participating unions, failed to prove they could meet the race and gender requirements set forth in the PLA. 46% of the local population is black with 55% of the total population being minority. The union-only PLA has ensured that non-union contractors, the contractors whose participation would greatly increase minority participation, have almost no incentive to bid on this project. While the new convention center continues to be delayed as the unions stall for more time to come into compliance, the fact remains that they are not going to be able to meet these requirements on their own. If nothing changes and non-union contractors are not incentivized to participate in the work, the PLA could eventually be dumped altogether.

Nonetheless, late on Friday afternoon, February 6th, 2009, the Obama Administration quietly moved to require the use of union-only Project Labor Agreements on all federal or federally funded construction projects. President Bush enacted Executive Order 13202 in 2001, which prohibited federal agencies and recipients of federal financial assistance from requiring wasteful and discriminatory union-only PLAs on federal and federally funded construction projects. Obama’s rescission of Bush’s Executive Order will open the door for the Federal Government’s mandating of discrimination on public works construction.

It is just this kind of thick-headed bumbling and reality-free policy making that is going to insure that the legislation intended to stimulate the economy instead will stimulate graft and cronyism. Such political pandering is rife with risk for the new president and his prospects for holding Democratic majorities and his own job in subsequent elections. Barack Obama, by all realistic accounts must be able to point to an improving economy as we head into the mid-term elections in 2010. If he cannot, Americans might get it into their heads that perhaps one-party rule, regardless of which party is doing the ruling is just a bad idea.

Interestingly, if Robert Reich is serious about using “other than white” but nonetheless trained labor, the non-union building associations have been making serious progress in this area. Merit Shop trade associations such as The Associated Builders & Contractors, Inc. have struggled against herculean union political influence to grow non-union Apprentiship training across the country. It is those non-union training programs rather than the ones administered by unions that are the training centers for minority-owned construction firms and their employees. But union-friendly laws and the legislators beholden to them via Big Labor’s formidable political fund raising machine continue to stand in the way of sustained growth for these “Merit Shop” training programs.

Obama’s recent PLA decision will further erode the Merit Shop’s ability to train employees for, and bid competitively on federally funded construction projects. Among other things, PLA’s require non-union contractors that are interested in bidding on PLA projects to agree to recognize unions as the representatives of their employees on that job; use the union hiring hall to obtain workers; pay union wages and benefits; and obey the union’s restrictive work rules, job classifications and arbitration procedures. Since the majority of minority and women-owned businesses in the construction industry are non-union, this Executive Order goes farther than any single piece of legislation to insure that Mr. Reich’s vision of opening doors to ‘women, minorities, and the poor’ will never come to fruition.

The “Card Check” system (referred to by the Unions “The Employee Free Choice Act”) would allow union organizers to personally administer and collect union ballots. This would ostensibly remove the possibility that employers might attempt to coerce employees from voting for the effort. Of course that onus would then fall upon the union organizers. Furthermore, the legislation proposed in the House of Representatives would punish employers that attempted to make their work places better with improvements to benefits and working conditions.

“Card Checks” are not a new idea. Corporations of the 1920’s and 1930’s first developed the idea of forcing employees to cast their vote for or against Unionization in front of company management. Needless to say, unions of that era weren’t standing for that! But in the precipitous decline of unions across the country, in all areas of private sector business, organized labor has gone “outside the box” for solutions. One being the legalization of voter intimidation.

Why do you think Unions deserve the right to intimidate employees to vote in favor of unionization? It’s because they feel everything that is not unionized is just plain wrong. They, like the political Left in the country, feel that the wrongness of the opposition warrants any means necessary to defeat them.

Just so you know, even if Congress votes in “Card Check” legislation, President Bush is sworn to veto it. Keep that in mind as you ponder sitting out next election because no one representing your specific brand of conservative ideology is running.

While were on the subject of unionization, one might ask how already existing unions have faired in recent years. Anyone reading this is sure to remember the big California grocery strike of 2003. Well, guess what? The unions are back for more.

Instead of negotiating with the grocery companies, the unions have decided to play games. In response to a recent call for talks, one union sent their answer in the form of a singing telegram. Instead of trying to prevent a strike that will further erode the grocery industry’s market share, organized labor has all but insured the strike will happen. The last round of strikes resulted in no real benefit to the workers and when the smoke had cleared, less people were shopping at the chain grocery stores. You’ll find many of those refugees as the Super Wal-Mart. With fewer customers to service, the grocery chains have been hiring fewer workers.

Do the Unions really think they can blackmail the grocery chains into giving employees more than they deserve and more than the stores can justify? I think they do. And this is the best example I can think of for why Unions have no place in society today. Their way of doing business hearkens to an era, the 1940′s and 50′s, when the worker was at the mercy of the employer. Today employers must provide good wages and a decent working environment if they wish to attract and retain the best labor.

In a recent poll commissioned by the Coalition for a Democratic Work Place, of 1,000 general election voters polled, 87 percent agree every worker should continue to have the right to a federally supervised, private ballot election when deciding whether to join a union. These statistics are backed up by the historical record. In the 1950′s union labor made up 35% of private sector employment. Today that number has dropped to just 12%. It does not make sense for private sector employees to be unionized.

It is now known to most Americans that at the time we withdrew forces from Vietnam, South Vietnamese forces were built up to a level and successes built upon to the point that total victory was certain. But the American people lost their will to continue the fight. The Communists won the Vietnam War with the help of the American media. It was the media that proposed we run from victory and it was the American people that accepted that proposal.

Fast forward to the Iraq War, arguably the biggest military challenge the U.S. has faced since Vietnam. The voices of cut and run have returned and this time we have not just the rogue U.S. media involved. This time one major political party has signed onto defeat. Day after day we hear Democrats crying that we can’t win militarily in Iraq and must withdraw. They say that the Iraq war exasperates the anger that Muslims have against America. They say we must leave Iraq to its own devices so that the Arab World will like us again, as if they ever did. They ignore the fact that success is just on the horizon. Or perhaps they wish us to leave Iraq on the eve of victory simply because we are so close to winning. No single event could be more disastrous for Democrats’ chances of retaking control of Congress than sure signs that Democracy and Freedom had won over tyranny and intimidation in Iraq.

I used to think that Democrats were just afraid of upsetting Muslims. Democrats are afraid of our enemies but they fear America as a Super Power even more. I used to think that Democrats that opposed the war did so because they truly saw America’s power as a threat to their utopian fantasy for world order. This may be the original motivation for opposing the war but it has expanded to include an anti-Democracy bias. Democrats no longer believe that freedom and Democracy is the answer to tyranny and oppression. They prove this when they call supporters of the Iraq war terrorists. Only free people have indicated support for the liberation of Iraq. Democrats are now under the misguided assumption that fascists and socialists, despite 200 years of evidence to the contrary, can play nice in a world that is dominated by Democratic nations. Democrats so fear the power of America that they would rather see dangerous tyrants mass-murder their own citizens and invade their neighbors than swing the mighty ax of the U.S. military to remove the despots.

So some Democrats stood by helplessly while others joined in support as war was waged against Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s dictator. When it became evident that Hans Blix and the Democrat-controlled CIA were wrong about WMD in Iraq, all bets were off. A Republican had brought us to war and now the main rational for that war had been, according to the President’s opponents, disproven. It was about the time that Democrats began calling for the immediate withdrawal from Iraq that the foreign-ran insurgency there began to pick up steam. As the U.S. body count began to rise, so did the call for retreat. The U.S. media led the charge by pointing out only the bad in Iraq, so that instead of bearing witness to a national genesis, the American voter was fed a daily heaping of carnage the likes of which the most people had never experienced before.

But even as the terrorists were successful with their roadside bombs and running back in to the civilian population after each small arms and RPG attack, Iraq began the task of creating a Democracy for itself. Today nearly 75% of Iraq is peaceful and growing more prosperous by the day. Political wrangling that would have made our own founding fathers dizzy resulted in a fully implemented, democratically elected government that is now set to the task of uniting the country for the future. All signs point to success in Iraq. Even the media can’t hide the now evident discussions between sworn enemies on how to end the bloodshed in a way that will be acceptable to even the smallest minority group.

Democrats can see the writing on the wall. They know that success is eminent and they fear it just like Osama bin Laden fear success there. If the changes that are happening in Iraq today result in a historic agreement between warring groups in Iraq before the November U.S. elections, any hope that Democrats might have had to win back control of the Congress will have died right along with Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the terrorists’ now dead leader.

Kevin Korenthal is a Staff Writer for The New Media Alliance. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets. Columns by this author can be read regularly on TheRealityCheck.org.

It is a sad reality that Republicans best hope for holding onto control of Congress may be Democrats. Renewed by the idea that a never-before-used and little-known-rule in a supplemental House rules handbook will make impeachment of the President a reality, Democratic controlled state legislatures around the country are moving to bring charges against the President and in some cases the Vice-President. Americans were unimpressed by the attempts to impeach President Clinton and were even more turned off by Democrats attempts to do it to Bush heading into the 2004 elections. What makes them think Americans will support their attempts to circumvent the results of the Democratic elections that gave Bush another 4 years is a mystery to me.

The real miscalculation here is that without a majority of state legislatures in their pocket, Democrats attempts to impeach the President before November is impossible. If they go into the November elections with this plan and no other you can be sure that the structure in the House, Senate and even state government will remain the same as it is today. We know from the DNC leadership that no real solutions will be revealed to the American people until they are in a position to implement their plans. This is a veiled admission that Democrats have no plans at all or have plans that will be very unpopular with the people or are just the repackaged plans of the Bush Administration.

So I for one encourage Democrats to keep talking up impeachment. Americans just love it when political parties seek to make an end run around their collective will. Republicans may not be able to save themselves this November but they may not even need to. Democrats have been, are and will continue to be the Republicans best hope for winning elections.