This column originally appeared in the Rocky Mountain News on April 30, 2008.

Civil rights initiative under constant fire

© Rocky Mountain News

This column originally appeared at www.HumanEvents.com on April 18, 2008.

The Left’s Gender Wage Lies
by Jessica Peck Corry

Next Tuesday — the same day Pennsylvania holds its Democratic primary — feminists will stomp to state capitols across the nation to proclaim the falsehood of the so-called gender wage gap. But if women really only make 77 cents on every dollar men earn, why is the well-oiled protest machine behind Equal Pay Day encouraging women to take the day off?

Since 1996, the National Committee on Pay Equity has organized Equal Pay Day. According to the organization’s Web site, “Because women earn less, on average, than men, they must work longer for the same amount of pay.” On this year’s day of protest, we are all encouraged to “wear RED on Equal Pay Day to symbolize how far women and minorities are ‘in the red’ with their pay!”

I won’t be wearing red that day. I won’t be joining in the chants for equality. And while I’ll be busy working, I might just put on green — the color of money and a nod to the equality that the vast majority of women have achieved in the workplace.

We should also mark this annual liberal holiday by spreading the truth. By using basic government statistics — readily available but consciously neglected by every known feminist activist — we calmly demonstrate that while the average woman does indeed earn less than the average man, the gap has very little, if anything, to do with discrimination. It has everything to do with choice.

According to the NCPE, women’s earnings in 2006 were 76.9 percent of men’s, with the median full-time, year-round female employee earning just $32,515, compared to a median male earning of $42,261. But should we be outraged? No. And here’s why.

Women earn less largely because we have the luxury of decisions that men generally can only dream of. We work less hours in the average work week, we are more likely to take time off to have kids or care for aging parents, and we choose lower paying fields requiring less formal education. Oh, and we’re less far less likely to be killed at work, a little detail often neglected at the NCPE.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, men are much more likely to suffer fatal workplace injuries than women. According to 2006 BLS statistics, the most recent year available, 428 American women were killed on the job. Compare this with the 5,275 men who lost their lives.

The reason: Men take more dangerous, laborious, and physically demanding jobs, and they are compensated heavily for taking such positions. According to the BLS, the most deadly fields for 2006 were those heavily dominated by men, including logging, mining, waste management, law enforcement, construction, and transportation projects.

Conversely, as the BLS statistics demonstrated, the fields with the lowest death rates, including education and social services, are female-dominated. Ultimately, the average man is more willing than the average woman to spend his days inside dark mines to extract coal.

Act like a man and you’ll be compensated as one. According to a 2002 analysis published by the National Center for Policy Analysis, “among people ages 27 to 33 who have never had a child, women’s earnings approach 98 percent of men’s.”

In addition, as the NCPA notes, “data from the National Longitudinal Survey reveal that women between the ages of 18 and 34 have been out of the labor force 27 percent of the time, in contrast to 11 percent for men.”

But the bottom line is that most women don’t want to act like men. And that is why they continue to ignore Equal Pay Day. Year after year, government statistics repeatedly demonstrate that we sacrifice higher salaries in favor of more time with our kids and our aging parents. We choose more satisfying, but lower-grossing fields. We even spend less hours per week in the car commuting to work than our male co-workers. If only men could be so lucky.

When I’ve spoken out on the gender wage lie in the past, I’ve been confronted by angry name calling and allegations that I don’t know what it’s like to live hour-to-hour or paycheck-to-paycheck. In fact, I lived just such a life as a young adult, knowing what it’s like to survive off little more than ramen noodles and the generosity of friends.

For women living such an existence today, self-pity based on a contrived notion of discrimination will get them nowhere. Hard work, including longer hours, more aggressive salary negotiations, and a better education are their hope out. And even tonight, after I put my kids to bed in a home that my husband and I bought together, I will head back to my computer. I will be studying toward the law degree that I hope will one day help increase my annual salary.

But the Left doesn’t want women to believe in the American Dream. If we listen to Hillary Clinton, we just can’t make it without government help. She has long bragged of championing the “Paycheck Fairness Act,” legislation that according to the NCPE, “seeks to end wage discrimination against those who work in female-dominated or minority-dominated jobs by establishing equal pay for equivalent work.” NCPE gives the following example: “Within individual companies, employers could not pay jobs that are held predominately by women less than jobs held predominately by men if those jobs are equivalent in value to the employer.”

So, what about hospitals? Certainly, a smart hospital administrator seeking quality patient care should value a good nurse as much — or even more — than a good doctor. But should the doctor and the nurse make the same amount?

Oh, but as NCPE notes, there is a loophole to the legislation, allowing “exceptions for different wage rates based on seniority, merit, or quantity or quality of work. It also contains a small business exemption.” Just imagine the endless litigation if the bill were to ever pass.

I believe that Clinton is right when she writes that “women are eight times less likely to negotiate their starting salaries then (sic) men and if a woman with a starting salary of $25,000 fails to negotiate for $5,000 more a year, she stands to lose more than $568,000 by age 60.”

Her response is to advocate, also as part of the PFA, taxpayer-funded counseling that would teach women how to negotiate better salaries.

Clinton has so little faith in women that she believes we need special help from bureaucrats to learn the value of negotiation. A little free market education should suffice just fine.

But Clinton doesn’t just stop with market meddling and mandatory counseling. She also brags on her Web site that she has “introduced a Senate Resolution honoring women in the trades,” and worked to improve the federal vocational educational program “by providing incentives for states to help girls and women enter and succeed in non-traditional fields.” In Clinton’s world, government-initiated social engineering would encourage women to become welders over pre-school teachers. Would she also advocate that women work longer hours, take more dangerous jobs, and spend more time away from their kids while commuting to work?

Next Tuesday, don’t wear red. Wear green. Wear it because women are succeeding in the free market more than ever before,doing so in spite of loud, government-backed paternalistic campaign that continues to insist we can’t make it on our own.

On April Fool’s Day, reporters from near and far eagerly covered a Denver press conference where organizers alleged voter fraud against a conservative civil rights ballot initiative. Two weeks later, however, when such claims are proven to be—at best—extremely questionable, the media remains silent.

The New York Times, in its April 2 edition, carried a report titled “Colorado Petition Draws Charges of Deception.” The piece included the story of Dara Burwell, a 25-year-old black Denver woman alleging that she was tricked into signing a petition in support of the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative, a proposed state constitutional amendment (which I have publicly supported) that asks voters to approve the following language: “The state shall not discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any group or individual on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public contracting, or public education.”

Under current Colorado law, backers of any statewide ballot initiative must submit more than 76,000 valid voter signatures to secure a spot on the November ballot. CCRI supporters turned in nearly 130,000 to Secretary of State Mike Coffman in March. Coffman approved the validity of the signatures just days before Burwell and her friends took to the pulpit.

According to the Times, “The realization that [Burwell] had inadvertently lent her support to the measure was ‘horrifying.’ Burwell said she was ‘angry, because this is so deceptive. I’ve contributed to get a measure on the ballot that stands for everything I don’t believe in.’”

But how did Burwell get tricked? After all, as it turns out, she works for a firm that gets paid to lead businesses through diversity training. She’s a former student activist who dedicated much of her time at the University of Colorado to perpetuating race and gender preference programs.

But let’s just assume for a moment that she did get tricked. I won’t be so cynical to suggest that Burwell knowingly signed the petition after having heard about it from various media accounts with the ultimate intent to allege that she was wrongfully induced into signing it. No, that would be too cynical. I will assert, however, that she must not be very good at her job. She doesn’t know how to interpret basic ballot language relating to diversity.

According to a Rocky Mountain News April 2 report, which was a much more objective account than the one carried in the Times (and one in which I offered my concerns about the claims being made), Burwell maintained that she was approached by a young black man [a signature gatherer] “who talked about the importance of minorities and why the ballot measure should pass.”

To Burwell, the man’s race was an important part of her story. “Given what he said, the language of the petition and also our shared experience as black people in this country, I believed myself to be signing a pro-affirmative action measure,” she told the Rocky’s David Montero. “I signed the petition, handed it back to him and in turn he gave me a flier to a hip-hop event - which I felt was further confirmation of that recognition of shared experience.”

Burwell told the Times that she signed the petition thinking it was “a standard nondiscrimination clause.” Well, maybe that’s because it is. And if Burwell couldn’t figure this out after reading the initiative’s language, she shouldn’t have signed on in support. It is not the signature gatherer’s obligation to ensure that she knew what she was reading.

The CCRI is designed not to abolish valid affirmative action programs, which I will define as non-discriminatory outreach efforts targeting traditionally economically disadvantaged communities. Instead, as it explicitly states, the proposed amendment will only prohibit programs that “discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to any group or individual on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”

So, in practical terms, government would not be allowed to use an applicant’s race, sex, or national origin as a factor in college admissions, public contracts, or hiring. Race-and-gender neutral outreach programs, however, would survive and thrive.

Despite standing up at a press conference to allege that she was a victim of fraud, Burwell never bothered to file a formal complaint with Coffman’s staff. In fact, while the Times maintains that “dozens” of people alleging fraud attended the press conference, just three people actually filed complaints. With each passing day, their complaints continue to crumble.

One of them, Chloe Johnson, a legislative aide to state Rep. Morgan Carroll, D-Aurora, also alleged that she had been tricked. But while Johnson claims fraud, it turns out that she may have committed perjury. Her complaint has been dismissed by a Colorado administrative law judge because she is not a registered voter. At this point, it is unclear if Johnson even signed the petition. But according to Coffman’s staff, if she did, she has broken a state law that prohibits non-voters from signing petitions.

At this point, just two complaints remain under investigation by the State. One of these, filed by Candace Frie, was stalled due to the fact that she initially failed to follow proper procedures for submission. In her complaint, she claims she was tricked in part because the person asking for support was “a person of color.” Like Burwell, Frie assumes that our ideology should be tied to our race.

The last complaint comes from voter Tracy Sear, who alleges that she saw a signature gatherer who was not wearing proper identification as required under state law. So, ultimately, it is a technical, non-substantive allegation that has yet to be proven. Unlike the three other women, Sear did not sign the petition.

Despite these developments, not a single reporter—and certainly not the New York Times—has reported on the fact that Burwell is a paid diversity activist, that Johnson never registered to vote, that Frie’s complaints were based on racist assumptions about the skin color of a signature gatherer, or that Sear’s complaint was of a technical nature.

But perhaps we cannot expect more from the Times. While its April 2 report was presented as an objective news story, the man who reported it, Dan Frosh, is an openly liberal activist writer who also frequently contributes to Alternet, a news site dedicated to taking on “The right-wing media machine.”

With those like Frosh at the wheel, the questionable and likely false accusations made by Burwell, Johnson, and Frie linger out there, doing what they were designed to do—mislead voters.

The ethical response from the media outlets that covered the initial accusations is to now tell the truth. Or in the end, it will be newspaper readers across the nation who will have gotten duped on April Fool’s Day.

Perhaps you’ve never thought much about property rights. Maybe you think Eminent Domain is the name of a new rap group. Well, now is the time to get educated.

As RTD’s FasTracks light rail project expands westward, many property owners are facing the threat of losing their homes. As the director of the Independence Institute’s Property Rights Project, I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes eminent domain is unavoidable. A growing number of homeowners, however, are alleging that they face condemnation not for tracks, parking, or stations, but rather because RTD wants to turn their homes or businesses into massive private retail or residential projects. You can hear their stories (or watch their interviews) at our Web site, www.PropertyRightsProject.org.

In the meantime, please visit our newest technological creation–a short film featuring the story of a Denver man who saw his family lose its businesses to RTD intimidation and greed when the transit authority first brought light rail to the Five Points neighborhood. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhwESnqZAc4 This five minute piece was produced by II’s Joe Weaver, Justin Longo and Kate Melvin. I couldn’t be prouder of their innovation and commitment.

We must protect the rights of all or none of us will be free.

This column originally appeared at www.HumanEvents.com on April 10, 2008.

The Feminists Who Forgot To Laugh

By Jessica Peck Corry

One of the most pressing problems in higher education today: No one in power knows how to laugh. Especially women, and particularly the radical, man-hating sort.

Just ask Chris Robinson, a student at Colorado College, a small private liberal arts school located in picturesque Colorado Springs. Robinson, originally from Maine, has been found guilty of violating the school’s anti-violence conduct code.

His crime? Daring to mock “The Monthly Rag,” a leaflet produced by the school’s Feminist and Gender Studies program, and one in which references to male castration, instructions on “packing,” defined as the act of “creating the appearance of a phallus under clothing,” and an advertisement for the book “Dr. Sprinkle’s Spectacular Sex” were all included.

Robinson, together with a friend who has asked that his name not be used, produced a leaflet titled “The Monthly Bag,” a clearly satirical response to the aforementioned publication.

Published under the pseudonym of “The Coalition of Some Dudes,” Robinson’s leaflet used a similar format, but included statistics dispelling the gender wage gap, a quotation about a sexual position (a play on one referenced in The Monthly Bag), and information about female violence and abuse against men. Most notably — at least to the college’s leftists, the leaflet jokingly referenced “chainsaw etiquette.”

The satire was, apparently, too sophisticated for the school’s liberals. President Richard Celeste wasn’t laughing. In fact, he sent out a campus-wide email condemning the work. “The flyers include threatening and demeaning content, which is categorically unacceptable in this community. . . .Anonymous acts mean to demean and intimidate others are not [welcome].” Celeste then asked the authors to come forward, which they did less than an hour later.

To reward their honesty, the college charged the two male students with violating the college’s anti-violence code. Both were put on trial, a terrifying two-week process where their accusers were allowed to question them about everything from whether they’d ever taken a gender studies course to how they saw their roles in society as white men. “I was terrified,” said Robinson, a 3.9 student who will spend next semester in Syria studying Arabic and who plans to apply to Yale for law school after graduating next year. “These people had the power to sanction me for something roughly equivalent to hate speech. That’s very serious.”

After waiting 17 days “in a Kafkaesque waiting room,” a verdict was given. Last month, Dean of Students Mike Edmonds found both men guilty of “violating the student code of conduct policy on violence.”

For their punishment, Robinson and his friend will now have to wear the metaphorical scarlet letter, with the administration insisting that they initiate a campus dialogue on the issues brought up by their actions. Although Edmonds acknowledged that the intent of the publication was to satirize “The Monthly Rag,” he wrote to the students that “in the climate in which we find ourselves today, violence — implied violence — of any kind cannot be tolerated on a college campus.”

Edmonds feebly tried to justify his censorship by telling the students that “the juxtaposition of weaponry and sexuality” in an anonymous parody made students subjectively feel threatened by chainsaws or rifles.

In other words, Edmonds believes college students are too weak and too impressionable to handle a good politically-incorrect laugh at the expense of liberals who take themselves way too seriously.

Political satire — even when intended to provoke an active discussion on diversity-related issues, is too scary for insecure leftists who have been coddled their entire lives. Never mind the college’s own “diversity and anti-discrimination policy” that mandates that “no idea can be banned or forbidden. No viewpoint or message may be deemed so hateful that it may not be expressed.”

Colorado College, like schools across the country, has built an entire industry around perpetuating the self-victimization of minorities and women, believing both groups are weaklings in need of special protection and isolation.

The college boasts of its “Glass House,” a “nurturing living environment for ethnic minority and supportive majority students.” The college also maintains its active Diversity Task Force, a 22-person diversity police working to establish “processes for voicing and addressing complaints, and monitoring the effectiveness of these processes.”

In a response to Inside Higher Ed, an online education site, Celeste defended the verdict against the students. “The students involved in creating this publication were found to have violated the college community’s standards, but they were not sanctioned or punished,” he said.

Apparently, being forced to “engage the college community in more inclusive dialogue, debate and discussion on freedom of speech” isn’t meant as punishment. Sounds like fun. Maybe the campus feminists can even reenact the Salem Witch Trials while they are at it.

According to Colorado College’s Web site, a year at the school costs more than $44,000.

I pity the parents paying for their daughters to major in Feminist Studies. These young women must be so busy “packing” that they don’t have time to study the great works of Western Civilization. And why would they want to study Plato or Socrates? After all, according to radical feminists, the West has only perpetuated the oppression of women.

At least Robinson has kept his sense of humor. I asked him if the case has helped him get dates. While he is in a committed relationship, he says it has helped his co-author-in-crime tremendously. “Women flock to him like wild game,” he said. “They say they like him because he’s a real man.”

All of this would be funny if it weren’t quite so sad. While the feminist rhetoric polluting our colleges is laughable, its effect on ordinary students — and especially young men — is something we can no longer ignore.

This column originally appeared at the Denver Post’s www.politicswest.com on April 10, 2008.

By Jessica Peck Corry

These days, it seems almost cruel to write about Hillary Clinton’s floundering campaign. But not everyone has given up. In fact, I’m joining the nation’s most radical feminists to pledge my support for her continued Democratic presidential bid. Run, Hillary, run.

Clinton’s loyal supporters are mad. Blinded by their desire to see America’s first woman president elected this year, they fail to see what smart Democrats and Republicans already know. Hillary can’t win in November. If only we could find a way to keep her candidacy alive that long.

And now, as well known national liberals, including America’s highest ranking congressional female, Nancy Pelosi, sound their fevered-pitch rallying cry for Hillary’s departure, desperate feminists are resorting to an old playbook designed in the era of Hillary’s student days at Wellesley College. They are pulling out the gender card, claiming sexism as the culprit behind the requests for Hillary to exit her contested race against Barack Obama.

Such requests for Hillary’s departure are representative of a “psychological gang bang” [1] of women, according to Marcia Pappas, president of the New York State chapter of the National Organization of Women. Earlier this year, she penned a column titled “Psychological Gang Bang of Hillary is Proof We Need a Woman President,” where she objected to a “patriarchal system that has persisted for millennia.”

Pappas specifically questioned the decision by now-former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards to “side with” Obama. “It seems John’s recent alliance with Barak (sic) sent a clear message to women everywhere,” she wrote. “The message is that if a woman gets too powerful, she can count on the good ole boys ganging up on her. Hillary is a powerful, strong and intelligent woman and she deserves our support. Let us remember what we as women’s rights supporters, are charged to do: SUPPORT WOMEN!”

Support them, Pappas implies, regardless of their talent, abilities, or viability.

But the non-Pelosi feminists — those still deeply committed to burning their bras at the Democratic National Convention this August in Denver — are right that Hillary should keep her campaign running.

While the media and Washington’s power elite are driving themselves into a tizzy over the prospects of a contested convention, the vast majority of Democrats don’t mind Hillary staying in the race. According to a recent national survey [2], an equal number of Clinton and Obama supporters — 22 percent — say that the opposing candidate should drop out of the race. It’s just plain un-American to push a candidate out of the race when masses of ordinary voters still support that person.

In addition, pushing Hillary out of the race at this point would run contrary to recent history, where male Democratic presidential candidates have been allowed — and encouraged — to take their contested races all the way to the convention.

Since 1980, the Democratic Party has seen two contested races remain unresolved until late summer. In 1988, Jesse Jackson took his throngs of supporters — coupled with tireless media adoration — with him to the convention in Atlanta, where he was promptly trounced by Michael Dukakis. Likewise, in 1980, Ted Kennedy — apparently believing in the power of a last name — took his run all the way to the convention, even after delegate support clearly indicated that he would get trounced by Jimmy Carter.

While both of the surviving candidates, Dukakis and Carter, suffered embarrassing general election defeats at the hands of Republicans, this year is different. We have no vice president or sitting president vying for either party’s nomination. Carter had a significant and volatile one-term presidential record to run against, while Dukakis was just a horrible candidate running against a popular vice president.

The other difference: this year’s race is much closer.

Why call for Hillary’s departure [3] when she still has a statistical chance of winning the necessary delegate count essential to taking the nomination? Neither Jackson nor Kennedy had such a luxury.

Nor do any of the aforementioned Democratic candidates have the emotional, evangelical, and just plain fanatical support behind Obama. Of course, this advantage assumes he is the last candidate left standing.

Then there are those Democratic strategists who are concerned about party unity, saying that Hillary’s continued run will only further splinter important coalitions, including one between women and minorities. Such a viewpoint only indicates the party’s own lack of faith in the ability of two of the party’s most important constituencies to come together after a bruising political battle. Maybe such politicos are right.

Even if they are, however, they only risk further isolation, anger, and frustration if one candidate is artificially eliminated from consideration.

National polls show her only slightly trailing [4] in the popular vote against Republican candidate John McCain. And, when it comes to an Electoral College match up against McCain, she’s mostly neck-and-neck with Obama. Yet, Hillary’s biggest problem is that she just can’t shake her label as a liberal.

[4]Jessica Peck Corry is a public policy analyst with the Independence Institute in Golden, Colo.

But this, of course, shouldn’t prompt Democrats to deter Hillary’s candidacy. After all, should Democrats pick Obama, Republicans will have several months to beat up on him, exposing his desire to significantly raise taxes on America’s small business owners. In other words, the Democratic Party’s hard turn to the left on everything from health care to the economy isn’t just a candidate problem, it’s a party problem (just as McCain will have to shake the GOP image of big spender George W. Bush).

Assuming that Hillary doesn’t get trounced in this month’s Pennsylvania primary — thus effectively ending her candidacy — the Democratic Party, ever the crusader against institutional sexism, needs to stop crusading against her candidacy.

I love Hillary as the Democratic Party’s general election candidate. I’d burn my own bra if it meant I could help keep her effort alive until November. There. I said it. Now I must get back to filling out my application to join Pappas in NOW. Think I’ll be accepted?

This column originally appeared at HumanEvents.com on April 3, 2008

The Clinton Credit Crisis

By Jessica Peck Corry

It must be nice to live in Hillary Clinton’s world. Someone else always pays the bills. But as campaign vendors — including health insurance companies — now complain that she is stiffing them, we are left to wonder how she will handle an American economy increasingly troubled by unpaid public and private debts.

In the aftermath of a North Carolina campaign stop last week where Clinton bemoaned the gap in health insurance access between wealthy elected officials like herself and ordinary Americans, it appears that her struggling campaign has failed to pay nearly $300,000 in health insurance premiums for her campaign staff.

Telling the story of a young Ohio woman who died because of lack of access to a nearby hospital, Clinton preached that “it is morally wrong in America that a young woman and her baby would lose their lives because they couldn’t get health care.”
Fortunately for Clinton campaign staffers, their coverage wasn’t cancelled after her failure to pay monthly premiums. But while a campaign spokesman claims that the bills will soon be paid, the misstep serves as a reminder of Clinton’s hypocrisy when it comes to the fiscal sanity of her proposed economic policies. The bills — owed to Blue Cross and Aetna — pale in comparison to Clinton’s overall campaign debt — listed at nearly $9 million by the end of February.

As reported by Kenneth P. Vogel at Politico.com, the debt is crushing compared to that of her competitors. At the end of the February reporting period, Vogel writes, fellow Democrat Barack Obama owed $625,000 and Republican nominee John McCain owed $4.3 million — most coming in the form of a bank loan.

Also of note, many of those stiffed by the Clinton camp are small business owners. As Vogel reports, a New Hampshire landlord, an Iowa house cleaner, and a New York caterer also report that Clinton has failed to pay up for services rendered.

But we should not be surprised by Clinton’s behavior. Time and again during her presidential bid, she has looked into the eyes of voters, making promises she can’t keep. In the last week alone, she has promised billions in new federal spending, including a renewed pledges of mass mortgage buyouts, an expansion of socialized health care, millions of new government-funded jobs, and an improved transportation infrastructure.

After moving on from North Carolina, Clinton is now in Pennsylvania, where she and Obama are eagerly vying for union votes on the eve of the state’s presidential primary vote later this month. At the state’s AFL-CIO convention in Philadelphia Tuesday, Clinton kicked off the fifth day of her lethargic “Solutions for the American Economy” tour, where she announced her plan to create three-million American jobs through expanded socialized and centralized planning. “I’ll fight for every single job in America — and create millions of new, high paying jobs that can’t be outsourced,” she told convention-goers while also reinforcing her pro-union and “fair trade” positions.

The cost to America’s taxpayers? She says she will release $1.5 billion per year to increase federal funding for public transit, $1 billion to intercity passenger rail systems, and $10 billion in new spending for an “Emergency Repair Fund” to address transportation repair needs. This is all on top of her previously announced commitment to a $60 billion National Infrastructure Bank, “a federally-backed independent entity that will evaluate and finance large infrastructure projects that are of regional or national significance.”

Under a Clinton presidency, she tells us, everyone will have a meaningful job, complete with government-subsidized health insurance. Many of us will also get to keep homes we couldn’t afford to buy in the first place as she now proposes the creation of a $30 billion fund — a sharp increase from Obama’s proposed $10 billion effort — to assist distressed homeowners meet the rising costs of their adjustable rate mortgages.

Under Clinton’s plan, state and local governments could use the fund to buy foreclosed or distressed properties, and in turn, sell or rent them to low-income families. Local agencies would also get their own chunk of change to provide consumer counseling or refinancing services. According to Clinton, under her presidency, the Federal Housing Administration would “stand ready to be a temporary buyer” of certain mortgages.

And while Clinton eagerly condemns the sub-prime lenders who sold homeowners loans they couldn’t afford, she just couldn’t resist taking campaign contributors from many of the nation’s leading lending companies. According to an article posted on her own Web site, she accepted nearly $400,000 in campaign contributions from sub-prime lenders.

As economic analysts eagerly proclaim that a recession has struck the U.S. economy, Clinton just doesn’t seem to get it. She’s angry about the fact that the U.S. economy has lost more than 140,000 private sector jobs in the last three months alone, and in response, she advocates driving up the cost of labor.

Over her multi-state tour this past week, Clinton has repeatedly proclaimed that corporations have made too much money while average Americans have seen their wages remain stagnant. She condemns corporations for sending jobs overseas, but instead of making it easier to hire American workers, she plans to drive up the cost of doing business on our shores.

To union delegates, she pledged to sign the Employee Free Choice Act and improve enforcement of the Davis Bacon Act. Together, the two pieces of legislation would significantly raise the costs of hiring new employees while also requiring contractors on federal projects to pay workers no less than the wage rates prevailing in the local area. Clinton also wants to expand the government workforce by cutting back the number of contractors working for the federal government by 500,000 over the next ten years. She’d use an executive order to “roll back outsourcing our government to private companies that are too often less qualified — and less accountable — than government employees.” And yet, after all of this, we are supposed to believe that she will expand the U.S. economy by three million jobs?

In Clinton’s world, you’ll get it all. Health insurance, a good job, a roof over your head, and even a nice paved road to drive on. At the end of the day, however, don’t count on being able to cash in on such promises. The check, as it turns out, isn’t in the mail.

Ritter’s call for unity misguided
By Jessia Peck Corry

This column originally appeared on the Denver Post’s politicswest.com on April 3, 2008.

Governor Bill Ritter wants you to believe that he’s working to end a duel between Colorado’s union bosses and business leaders. He says he wants to prevent a November ballot battle that could see their competing initiatives put before voters. The only problem: Ritter is the source of the rift.

On Tuesday, Ritter called on the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 7 to withdraw five ballot initiatives it filed Monday that would impose significant constraints on Colorado employers. Likewise, Ritter also called on business leaders to deny support to a “Right to Work” initiative that would prohibit unions from mandating that employees join a union or pay dues for union representation.

To The Denver Post, Ritter’s spokesman Evan Dryer said Tuesday: “The governor believes the best thing for all of Colorado would be if none of these measures were on the ballot in November. [Ritter] has had conversations with both sides and will continue trying to bring everyone together and find common ground to get to a place that’s good for the entire state.”

Of course he does. A battle over labor issues could cost Ritter and the Democratic Party serious political capital. And with national Democrats coming to Denver this August for their national convention, the last thing Ritter needs is an extremist union agenda to impede his party’s effort to appeal to moderate small- and medium-sized business owners.

Of the five ballot measures the union filed with the Secretary of State Monday, the most egregious is one that would require employers to give workers cost-of-living raises regardless of outside economic factors. Another one-size-fits-all measure would require businesses with 20 or more employees to provide health insurance—regardless of whether the employee wants it or could get it elsewhere, such as from a parent or spouse’s plan.

The measures come as the U.S. economy continues to shed jobs, with more than 100,000 jobs lost in the last quarter alone. And as too many Colorado employers stand on the brink of bankruptcy, doing everything possible to avoid more layoffs, Local 7’s efforts will only help ensure their demise by considerably raising the costs of doing business.

Ritter is stepping in now, before any of the union’s five initiatives or the right-to-work effort has successfully navigated the approval process, including gathering the more than 76,000 voter signatures required.
Jessica Peck Corry is a public policy analyst with the Independence Institute in Golden, Colo.
My, how times have changed. It’s hard to believe that just five months ago, it was Ritter who secretly met with union bosses to design an executive order that could now impose collective bargaining, conveniently called “employee partnerships,” on unwilling state employees. His tactics were enough for the Denver Post to opine on its front page in an editorial comparing Ritter to famed mobster Jimmy Hoffa. As the Post concluded, “His promise to usher in a new era of collaborative government — where business and labor, Democrats and Republicans, would all be at the table — was nothing more than a sham.” It remains a sham.

If Ritter has his way, his November executive order—and the political damage resulting from it—will all just be a distant memory. He’s a uniter—not a divider. But his goal of having business and labor leaders drop their initiatives will remain a fantasy—especially as long as he remains at the helm of state government. There simply is no fair middle ground, especially given the questionable intentions of Local 7’s latest efforts.

Local 7’s ballot initiatives—grossly out of touch with the basic market realities of the 21st Century and the less than 8 percent of workers who are unionized in Colorado—are indicative of a larger labor movement out of touch with ways to create sustainable job growth in a global economy.

Assuming Ritter fails in his effort to have the dueling initiatives withdrawn, I look forward to a Democratic National Convention this summer where voters from around the country can hear loud and clear the extremist agenda of unions out of touch with the increasingly innovative economies of the Western U.S. Maybe then, Ritter will become embarrassed enough to start acting like the business-friendly governor he once pledged to be.