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April 18, 2010 - Dan Bidondi Show
10:24
RI BLACKSTONE VALLEY TEA PARTY PART 3
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And the two teachers unions, everybody talks about corporate America buying these people.
GE, AT&T, Goldman Sachs, all these companies there, combined, didn't even give what the teachers unions gave.
And what do we see?
Obama just recently tried to appoint the ex-lawyer for SEIU to the National Labor Relations Board.
Even the Democrats in the Senate voted against it.
So what happened?
When the Congress went on recess two weeks ago, he made a recess appointment and appointed the guy in charge.
That's the SEI union that he headed.
He was one of the most frequent visitors to the White House.
So he has three people that are definitely have to go.
Frank Ciccone makes $174,000 working for the union.
He's on the Senate Labor Committee.
Dominic Ruggiero makes $181,000 employed by a union.
He's also on the Labor Committee.
So the leadership has this nice little driving going.
Anytime any bill has anything to do with unions, it goes to the Labor Committee, and it dies.
John Tassoni used to be on the Labor Committee.
Now they gave him a chairmanship of its own committee, the Municipal Government Committee.
So now the leadership has two separate committees.
If they want anything that's anti-union killed, it just goes to that committee and dies.
All of these guys, it's a blatant conflict of interest, because they're voting to increase pays, increase jobs, increase expansion of new departments.
They have a conflict of interest.
It's just so blatant, it's ridiculous.
Then I went through, I looked at the website in Rhode Island, the General Assembly's website, to see who was in Cumberland and Lincoln.
I have Elizabeth Crowley.
She's a retired Central Falls City Clerk, so she's collecting a pension.
Roger Picard, he's a union social worker in Cumberland.
Karen McBeth, a school superintendent, so you know she's going to vote for more school aid and taxes there.
You have Rene Menard, he's a retired fireman.
He's younger than I am, and he's collecting a pension.
So he's going to be collecting a pension, if he lives to the average age of 87, he's going to be collecting a pension for 30 years at least.
I don't even think he worked for 30 years.
We have child care consultants on the Labor Committee.
She's going to have a lot more expending.
We have a Central Falls Recycling Coordinator on the Labor Committee.
These are all people who have government jobs or are connected to unions in some way.
So, you know, why are they there?
Obviously they're not.
They're working for us.
Like I say, the whole problem with unions is the reason they're there in the General Assembly is to make government bigger and more expensive and take more of your money for their members.
The other problem, I mean, we've had a pro-union General Assembly for so long.
Do you think any new businesses want to come to Rhode Island?
It's a big contributor to why we've got the unemployment in Rhode Island so high.
Most states, if Rhode Island just took one step and made Rhode Island a right-to-work state, That would change everything with the business outlook for a mile.
A right to work state is nothing more than if you work for a company that has a union, you don't have to join, it's up to you.
You can either join the union or not.
You have a right to choose whether you want to be in the union or not.
Needless to say, unions wouldn't like that.
So, I think what we need really is we have to vote for people who are going to lower taxes, fees, fines, We're the highest in New England.
I mean, the governor's talking about being one of the lower, or compared to Massachusetts, lower compared to Massachusetts.
But why are we the lowest in the country?
Why do we have to settle for just being the lowest, lower than Massachusetts, or the lowest in New England?
The state capital gains taxes.
People with money, you might not like it, but people with money are moving out of the state.
In New York, they just did a study that said 500,000 people have moved out of the state of New York because of the taxes.
And I just heard last week that the number of American citizens who've given up their U.S.
citizenship and moved out of the country has doubled in the last year.
Because people that have that kind of money, they're not going to pay the taxes.
That's the law that basically says if the town council doesn't give the school committee every penny they want, the school committee can sue the town.
You pay for both lawyers, by the way.
They can sue the town and get what they want.
It's crazy that one department of a town is suing the other department to get more money.
The car tax.
Why are we even paying the car tax?
Unfunded mandates.
cities and towns definitely need to get up from under all these unfunded mandates.
And they can easily do that as a state, but the union representatives is that the state house don't want that, because the more complicated, the more bureaucratic you make it, the more people you need, and the more union jobs and more dues they collect.
And there again, the state pension system, just make it a defined contribution plan, like everybody else has.
Why not require proof of citizenship for all schools in the province?
Terry, you'd like that one, wouldn't you?
Can I just mention something?
Two states just passed a law requiring all schools to report how many illegal aliens are in their schools.
I believe it's Oklahoma and I think it's Utah.
I just got that news today.
Well, basically it wants to be a sanctuary city.
Well, if Providence residents want to have a sanctuary city, let them pay for it.
Why can't every student get a voucher from the state and then they can go to any school that they want?
Then you'd have early competition in the education process.
And if you have competition, everybody makes it up.
The only time you don't make it up is when there's no competition and the government has a monopoly on the school system.
And we all know what a good job they've been doing.
If you watch Jay Leno, he does those sidewalk interviews.
He had one, I never forget, he had a woman who just got her master's degree from Stanford in U.S.
history and didn't know who Betsy Ross was.
So that's our educational system.
Tenure.
Does anybody here have a job that they can never get fired from?
Short of sexually molesting the boss's wife or something, you cannot get fired from a union job.
Step increases.
Everybody was talking recently on the radio about, oh, the teacher's unions have given back, they've given back their raises.
They didn't give back the step raises.
And if you go on, uh... I would have liked to get a raise!
I know, some of the teachers last year, most of the teachers in Rhode Island got at least an 8% raise.
And they're scheduled to get even more this year.
They're the right-to-work state.
I think we should increase the state employee share of health insurance to 25%.
That's more like the private sector.
Not the 15% that they were just arguing over.
I mean, George Niko's right into the Speaker's office and decides that we're not even going to pay 15%.
So that gives you an idea of who's running the show up there.
And it's not, they're not representing you.
Welfare benefits.
We should have lower welfare benefits.
Before 1964 and Johnson's War on Poverty, there was no welfare programs.
Private charities took care of everything.
Whenever government gets involved with something, they make matters worse.
And this is a perfect example.
When was the last time you saw somebody investigated and convicted of welfare or response fraud?
They don't even bother doing that.
You could probably pay out welfare workers' comp in five different states and nobody would know.
Legislative grants.
This is the slush fund that the General Assembly, the leadership uses to keep people in line.
You know, you gotta keep pushing that green button.
You don't even have to listen to the debater arguments.
As long as you push the green button, at the end of the year you'll get the $20,000 in legislative grants to You have that big check for the Boy Scouts and all the local community organizations.
Gotta get rid of that.
Government functions.
Privatize as many as you can.
Communities have a vested interest in doing just the opposite of what taxpayers need.
So the only way to do it is to replace them.
I think it's totally useless to call.
I think they could kill us.
Demonstrations?
Sure, vote them up.
So what can you do?
Is anybody here interested in running?
If you ran and didn't show up, we would be better off.
Even if you don't want to run for the office, there's ways that you can do it to get the incumbents out.
Run if you have a Democratic incumbent that you want to get rid of.
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