After all, as the largest single owner of the company, that would appear to present a serious conflict of interest – and would probably require the breach of the union’s fiduciary duty to its employees and retirees AND/OR the management teams breach of its fiduciary duty to all stockholders.

The United Automobile Workers union has agreed to accept company stock for 50 percent of what Chrysler owes its retiree health care fund.

Now the union has an obligation to look out for the best interests of the employees. But management has an obligation to look out for the profitability of the company and maximizing shareholder return. Since the UAW will be in the driver’s seat with regard to management, it there fore has two mutually exclusive obligations. If it chooses higher wages for workers, it harms the pension fund and the interest of the owners of the other shareholders. If it honors those obligations, then it must adopt a less aggressive stance in negotiating wages and benefits for the workers. Indeed, this sets up the situation that would have existed if Henry Ford had insisted that he would be the exclusive bargaining representative of workers at Ford Motor Company in their negotiations with management – AKA Henry Ford.

And while union leadership tries to downplay the conflict of interest, it is impossible to ignore the very real problem that exists in having an arm of the union control over half of the company.

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One would think that people were dying in the streets of swine flu. Now it turns out that the numbers are somewhat less dire.

The number of confirmed cases of the H1N1 virus stands at 331 people, the World Health Organization said Friday.

Confirmed cases of swine flu worldwide were 257 Thursday.

The virus, commonly known as swine flu, has spread to 11 countries, but the hardest hit areas were in the western hemisphere, the organization said.

"We have not seen sustained human-to-human transmission anywhere outside the Americas region," said WHO spokesman Thomas Abraham.

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it had confirmed 109 cases of the flu with one death.

The largest outbreak was in Mexico, which had 156 confirmed cases, according to the WHO. It added that Mexico had nine deaths attributed to the virus.

However, Mexican officials said the death toll had risen to 12 and they suspect more than 150 deaths in the country are linked to the virus.

And friends, let’s remember that over 36,000 people die in the United States of regular influenza – which breaks down to about 700 a week. There are not even that many confirmed cases worldwide. So would someone explain the hysteria to me?

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It isn’t a cut – and you may yet end up having to pay some or all of it back.

Millions of Americans enjoying their small windfall from President Barack Obama's "Making Work Pay" tax credit are in for an unpleasant surprise next spring.

The government is going to want some of that money back.

The tax credit is supposed to provide up to $400 to individuals and $800 to married couples as part of the massive economic recovery package enacted in February. Most workers started receiving the credit through small increases in their paychecks in the past month.

But new tax withholding tables issued by the IRS could cause millions of taxpayers to get hundreds of dollars more than they are entitled to under the credit, money that will have to be repaid at tax time.

At-risk taxpayers include a broad swath of the public: married couples in which both spouses work; workers with more than one job; retirees who have federal income taxes withheld from their pension payments and Social Security recipients with jobs that provide taxable income.

The Internal Revenue Service acknowledges problems with the withholding tables but has done little to warn average taxpayers.

So that claim that 95% of us are getting a tax cut from Barry Hussein is nothing but a lie – and you should be expecting a hefty tax bill next year if you are one of those Americans who is legitimately classified as “productive”.

Posted by: Greg at 01:51 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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A rather interesting dichotomy – perhaps based upon the notion that malefactors should suffer the consequences of their misdeeds,

The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.

More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.

Gee, I wonder what they would make of my position – that the jihadis should be subject to any and all interrogation methods until we wring the last shred of information from their brains and then summarily executed with a single shot to the back of the head, using a bullet that has been dipped in bacon grease.

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I remember, a couple of decades back, when William F. Buckley effectively expelled Joseph Sobran from the Conservative mainstream for his flirtations with anti-Semitism. It was a courageous move, and one that to this day should be applauded. When will we see leading conservatives step forward and do the same with Pat Buchanan – especially after this explicit appeal to the notion of Jews as “Christ-killers” in his current column on concentration camp guard and illegal immigrant John Demjanuk

The spirit behind this un-American persecution has never been that of justice tempered by mercy. It is the same satanic brew of hate and revenge that drove another innocent Man up Calvary that first Good Friday 2,000 years ago.

Excuse me? Trying this participant in one of the greatest crimes of world history with the Son of God? Not only is this anti-Semitic, it is explicitly anti-Christian. There is, dare I say it, no longer any legitimate place for this bigot on the right today, and has not been for a long time. He has had no serious constituency in the mainstream of conservatism for at least a decade.

Indeed, as pointed out by the guys at GayPatriot, it is the liberals at MSNBC that give him his largest media outlet – sort of fitting, given the type of hate we have seen regularly spewed by hosts like Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow and others on that network. So maybe his presence is part of a policy of “all hate, all the time”.

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