Daily Archives: June 29, 2017

Did you know that just telling union members about their rights under federal law can bring misery down on your head?

Just ask the Freedom Foundation, a state think tank based in Olympia, Wash., which has recently suffered outrageously aggressive legal harassment from the Service Employees International Union.

The SEIU has ginned up three separate lawsuits against the Freedom Foundation and also persuaded the state's attorney general to sue the think tank. At issue: the Freedom Foundation's effort to talk to more than 50,000 people dragooned into becoming SEIU members about their legal right to opt out.

These particular members ended up owing dues to the SEIU because of a dodgy scam the union pulled off with the help of friendly politicians to skim from the benefits paid out to indigent home care patients. The "members" in question didn't ask to join the SEIU; they're simply Washingtonians who receive state Medicaid payments to care for disabled loved ones an ailing parent, say, or a handicapped child, who would otherwise require more expensive institutional care.

As has happened in several other Democrat-controlled states, the union got the governor to invent a shell corporation that supposedly "employs" persons receiving such Medicaid payments. Then, the state had a mail-in "election" on unionization of these home care workers, in which very few benefit-recipients even realized what was happening.

Finally, even though very few people receiving mail-in ballots ever voted, the state declared that the union had won the election and made every payment-recipient an SEIU member. It also began automatically deducting union dues from their Medicaid benefits. Many unlucky "members" knew nothing about what was going on until they saw their payments shrink.

The Freedom Foundation estimates the state SEIU skims something like $25 million a year through this scheme. The same outrage occurs in other states, and the injustice led the U.S. Supreme Court (in its 2014 decision Harris v. Quinn) to hold that individual home care providers in this situation cannot be forced to join or pay a union. "The First Amendment," the court declared, "prohibits the collection of an agency fee from the plaintiffs in the case, home healthcare providers who do not wish to join or support a union."

Home care workers may have won in court, but not many of them were aware of their rights. So, the Freedom Foundation launched an outreach program that employed dozens of paid canvassers going door to door to inform Medicaid providers of their right to opt out of joining and paying the SEIU.

The SEIU hasn't taken kindly to this. Last September, the union and its affiliates filed three lawsuits against the Freedom Foundation. They even hired three separate law firms for the barrage of suits, inundating the foundation with intimidating subpoenas, depositions and discovery demands. The SEIU even convinced Washington State attorney general Bob Ferguson to file lawsuits against the Foundation.

In SEIU 775 v. Elbandagji, the union alleges the Freedom Foundation committed a "civil conspiracy" by inducing a former SEIU employee to give a partial list of SEIU-represented home healthcare workers to the Foundation.

The Freedom Foundation filed a counterclaim against the SEIU for "abuse of process" in the SEIU 775 v. Elbandagji case. A rare "special discovery master" has been appointed in the matter, which remains at a trial court in King County. As part of the discovery process, the Foundation requested documents showing how the SEIU handled information about its members, among other things.

The union refused, but on June 16, the discovery master retired state Judge George A. Finkle demanded that SEIU respond to the Foundation's requests by June 30.

In his order, Finkle declared, "I do not find that SEIU has demonstrated that the Freedom Foundation has wrongfully communicated with SEIU members or used SEIU's confidential information to harass SEIU members or employees. The Freedom Foundation is entitled to contact SEIU members, and prior restraint of its efforts to do so is impermissible." Finkle then cited the Supreme Court's Harris case.

Finkle's order is one small victory in the larger fight for workers' freedoms across America. But it's no small victory if you're one of the Washingtonians who provides in-home health care to a disabled loved one, and a union is trying to skim from that loved one's benefit payments without their permission or yours.

Finally, this decision just may yield some very interesting discoveries about how unions plot to deny their own members' rights.

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Workers' freedom scores a small victory in Washington state - Washington Examiner

An overwhelming majority of Americans view gun ownership as essential to their freedom. This is what a recent Pew Research poll discovered in a deep dive into the complex relationship Americans have with guns.

According to the poll, The nationally representative survey of 3,930 U.S. adults, including 1,269 gun owners, was conducted March 13 to 27 and April 4 to 18, 2017, using the Pew Research Centers American Trends Panel. In other words, the survey is pretty comprehensive. And its findings reflect the understanding of many clear-thinking Americans on the 2nd Amendment: for those who do own and use firearms, it is integral to who they are.

Guns are ubiquitous in our culture. Both the bad guys and the heroes utilize them in movies and books, which accurately reflects reality the bad guys will always have guns and good guys know that firearms are an effective tool for securing property and protecting loved ones. In other words, gun ownership is completely normal, and contrary to what the gun grabbers and security liberals would have you believe safe.

There is a direct correlation between higher levels of gun ownership and less crime. Urban areas have fewer lawfully obtained guns and higher levels of criminal activity. Socioeconomics are a driver, but the impact of burdensome laws on who can own and carry firearms in urban areas plays a distinct role in lowering safety levels for residents.

Only a third of Americans expressed that they do not nor would they ever consider owning a firearm. A healthy 66 percent of gun owners, a significant portion of whom own more than one, would never consider not owning one. These people exist in a culture where gun ownership is the norm. It would be interesting to see the minority of Americans who eschew guns react to the findings here.

The survey results show a clear relationship between the conscious choice to own a gun and the exercise of personal freedom. Other studies on crime and gun owners have found that gun owners commit fewer crimes as a population than the police. The civilizing factor of owning a firearm increases the level of responsibility that must be exercised. This positively impacts everyone in proximity to gun owners.

Of note: only 19 percent of those dwelling in urban environments, where crime is the highest, own guns. In rural areas where crime is exceedingly low, 46 percent of those surveyed reported owning a gun. Of suburban respondents, 28 percent own guns. To place a finer point on the data, in just one out of five homes in an urban environment will an intruder face the possibility of a homeowner defending his home and loved ones with a gun. In a rural area an invader faces a nearly 50/50 chance, hence the miniscule incidences of criminal activity.

Another point worth noting is that while most gun owners could never see themselves not owning a gun, they have no desire to force others to possess them. Conversely, many Americans who do not own firearms have an almost compulsive desire to disarm law-abiding gun owners even as proof mounts against the efficacy of confiscation and disarmament. When guns are regulated away from those who seek them lawfully, only the criminals are armed.

Americans broad exposure to guns includes an overwhelming number who have fired a gun or have lived in a home with a gun owner. Approximately seven out of ten Americans have fired a weapon at least once.

Again, guns are tools and Americans have experienced their use as normal. The research done by Pew exposes the lesser-known facts surrounding firearm ownership and Americas relationship with guns. One thing is patently clear: guns arent going anywhere because Americans who own guns associate them with liberty and self-reliance. And thats a good thing.

Stacy Washington is host of the "Stacy on the Right Show," broadcast on Urban Family Talk Monday through Friday from 2-3pm in St. Louis, Missouri. Click here for more.

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Most Americans know that owning a gun is an essential part of our freedom - Fox News

If the Trump administration and the Trumpist movement represent anything, it is the destruction of establishmentarian sacred cows. Already, the spirit of populist iconoclasm the President embodies has left globalist false idols scattered like tombstones up and down the Acela Corridor. Some of the casualties are obvious, such as the presumption that the administrative state is made up of disinterested experts, rather than ideologically motivated sleeper agents. Some of the losers from the Trumpist Zeitgeist are equally obvious: mainstream media outlets and the tech industry.

However, what seems to occur to few people is that the fall from grace that such ideas and institutions are suffering is not only of their own making, but all traceable back to the same cause. Namely, the shift of such institutions from attempting to promote freedom to attempting to constrict it. In other words, groups that were originally designed and trusted to make the world bigger have instead begun systematically trying to make it smaller. They have gone from battering rams to gatekeepers.

Take the mainstream media. While conservatives correctly bemoan the liberal bias that infects the landmark publications and TV networks, and has infected them all the way back to the Vietnam War, it is easy to forget a simple fact about that anti-Vietnam coverage: It was the first time the medias reporting was not subjected to official censure by the military. No doubt this led to anti-American bias that distorted the story, but for Americans watching, the idea of a media that was critical of the government line no doubt seemed like an advancement for freedom to access information and freedom to be skeptical of government policy.

Flash forward to today, though, and it is obvious that the media has gone from being uncensored truth-tellers to censors themselves. From the cyberbullying, SJW left morality policy approach of sites like the defunct Gawker and Vice, to the arrogant agonizing by media figures over their supposed ability to control what people think, to the overwhelming and unprecedented hostility toward the president that even the most seemingly respected media falls prey to, it is very clear that giving the public greater freedom to make informed decisions has ceased to be a media objective. Rather, out of fear that those informed decisions will not meet the partisan standards of the reporters themselves, they seek a full-on pre-Vietnam role reversal: now the political and military actions approved by the American people must pass muster with them to be legitimate. Americans, who have never much liked being told what they must believe or what they must do, have rightly rebelled.

But while the mainstream medias behavior is egregious, it is also fair to say that they are rapidly becoming a marginal player in the information marketplace. More sinister and influential is the rapidly growing tech industry, and in particular the social media wing of that industry. But here, too, we are observing a corruption of organizations that previously offered freedom. In its early days, Google gave Americans the extraordinary power to find new information and new perspectives, YouTube provided a fertile and untamed Wild West-style playground for creative minds to make a living, and sites like Facebook and Twitter offered the ability to connect and speak to both friends and strangers from all around the world.

To say that this is not the case anymore is a gross understatement. Now, Google openly admits to viewing conservative viewpoints as contrary to science, and acts as if its blatantly partisan policy preferences are somehow apolitical good sense because they can find a few pet Republicans to agree to them. This is reflected in their search results, which now exclude disfavored viewpoints, and their stewardship of YouTube, which now strips money and possibly even subscribers from its users, sometimes for such minor crimes as simply telling off-color jokes that offend the humorless sensibilities of corporate HR departments. Facebook and Twitter, meanwhile, liberally (pun intended) shadowban or outright shut down the accounts of users who do nothing but express distasteful opinions, or call them out on censorship. Facebook has even arrogated to itself the right to decide what does and does not count as fake news using standards insourced from left-wing donors, despite having previously landed in hot water for acting too much like a newsroom and less like a neutral platform.

In short, Silicon Valley fears the freedom that it created and seeks to curtail it, despite the fact that the only thing that gave their business models life was the perception that they were building a world where both people and information could be free.

So far, an emerging rebellion from consumers, in tandem with tougher scrutiny of their practices, is not working out for the mainstream media, or the tech companies. The first is shedding trust and likely will shed viewers in the future. The second is facing an emboldened raft of competitors that actively market their political neutrality and commitment to freedom of speech and information. The gatekeepers have had their gates blasted off their hinges and now are watching their Towers of Babble being sacked.

Good riddance.

Mytheos Holt is the Senior Fellow in Freedom to Innovate at the Institute for Liberty, and a former speechwriter for US Senator John Barrasso (R-WY).

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The Media and Silicon Valley Fear the Freedom They Created | The ... - The American Conservative

When: 5:30 to 10 p.m. Tuesday, July 4

Where: Santa Monica Boulevard and Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles

Admission: Free

Information: https://farhang.org.

While people gather at the inaugural L.A. Freedom Festival for a night of Persian pop, ethnic food, and Fourth of July fireworks, a new public artwork will be unveiled.

Dubbed The Freedom Sculpture, the stainless steel monument by internationally renowned Sri Lankan designer Cecil Balmond and modeled on the progressive Cyrus Cylinder of ancient Persia is a gift to the city. And like the original Cylinder, its a symbol of religious freedom, cultural diversity and inclusiveness.

Heres a message that has come down 2,500 years and landed itself on a busy thoroughfare in Los Angeles where people are going to pass it by the millions, says Balmond, speaking by phone from his home in London. Its like the message keeps on traveling.

That early declaration of human rights is represented in the large-scale contemporary artwork by a metallic gold cylinder within a silver cylinder and supported by two rings that ground it to the public transit median on historic Route 66, on Santa Monica Boulevard at Century Park East. It appears lacelike, echoing the original cuneiform script from a distance.

In the day, it shines silvery with glints of gold, and by night the golden inner cylinder is illuminated by LED lights.

To build form, you have to have a poetic sense of space, he says. I like to think that my work reflects that. Of course its subjective how you decide the visitor should see and engage with your work. If you see my artworks, go to my buildings or cross my bridges, youll see theyre never static.

The Freedom Sculpture began as an idea by the Farhang Foundation in late 2013. In 2014, it launched an art competition that attracted more than 300 submissions from around the world. The panel of jurors, which included curators from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, chose the winning design in late 2015.

Balmond is known for his large public displays.

They include the award-winning Snow Words, an abstract tower of light suspended between a skylight and a mirrored floor in the lobby of the Crime Detection Laboratory in Anchorage, Alaska, to commemorate fallen officers in 2012.

In the current divided political climate, the public artwork takes on greater meaning.

Angelenos, who comprise millions of people from different ethnicities, religions and lifestyles living together in peaceful harmony, are an embodiment of these noblest of American ideals, says Farhad Mohit, vice chairman of the Farhang Foundation, which commissioned Balmond to create the work as a gift to the city. For them, the Freedom Sculpture will become an iconic symbol of another of the unique attributes of this great city.

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LA Freedom Festival celebrates Fourth of July with symbolic new sculpture - LA Daily News

MUMBAI: Industrialist Anil Ambani today termed the Goods and Services Tax (GST), being rolled out from July 1, as India's "economic freedom" and said it would make the country the biggest free and democratic market in the history of humankind.

Speaking here at a mutual fund industry event, the Reliance Group chairman said there are many ways of counting the benefits of GST and as many of counting its costs.

"But there is just one way of describing its true promise. GST is not just another piece of reform or transform, however significant. GST is the liberation of our economic imagination. It is our economic freedom," he said.

Ambani said there are moments in the life of a nation when history is made not in small steps of incremental gain but in giant leaps of ambition.

"We, the people of India, are privileged to bear witness to one such moment in time," he said, referring to the proposed rollout of GST on midnight of June 30.

"Seventy years ago, at the stroke of the midnight hour, our first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, spoke movingly in the Central Hall of Parliament about India's tryst with destiny.

"At the same mid-night hour tomorrow, as our honourable Prime Minister Narendra Modi rises to address a waiting nation from the same august Central Hall, India will be set on course for another historic tryst with destiny," he said.

Ambani said the free market is perhaps the greatest force for economic good in the human history of all earthly inventions.

He said the free market is a force for generating wealth and transforming lives and the real promise of GST is the promise of economic liberation.

With the promise of 'One Nation, One Tax, One Market', it would create a borderless world of 1.3 billion people -- producers and consumers engaged in a seamless exchange of goods and services, skill sets and capital, labour and ideas.

Ambani said the world has seen nothing like this before and in less than 48 hours, India will emerge as the biggest free and democratic market in the history of humankind.

"In tandem with its policy precursor -- demonetisation -- GST will forever change the ground rules of doing any kind of trade, commerce or business in India.

"The leadership advantage is backed by strong macro- economic stability," he said while adding that the economy has moved from low inflation to high growth, from fiscal rectitude to prudential current account management, and from one of the highest savings rates in the world to one of the fastest rates of economic growth.

He said that from insolvency code to NPA resolution, the present government has undertaken a fundamental overhaul of India's financial infrastructure while consolidating and strengthening the banking sector.

"But the greatest achievement of the government lies in the area of financial inclusion, thus setting in motion a growth dynamic for financial intermediaries which is unprecedented in its scope and size," he added.

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GST will be India's 'economic freedom': Anil Ambani - Economic Times

By Jim Campbell By Jim Campbell June 28 at 1:05 PM

Jim Campbell is senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents Masterpiece Cakeshop in the Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

Should an artist who serves all people be able to decline to create art for an event that conflicts with his deepest convictions? That question much debated in recent years seemed destined to reach the Supreme Court. And on Monday, in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, it finally did.

The owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, Jack Phillips, is a cake artist who creates custom works of edible art for special occasions such as weddings and birthdays. He serves everyone, no matter their race, sex, religion or sexual orientation. But he cannot create art for events that conflict with his faith. For years, that practice caused no disturbances. But when a couple asked Phillips to create a cake for a same-sex wedding, things got dicey.

He told the requesting couple that he would gladly sell them anything in his store, but designing a custom cake to celebrate a same-sex marriage was not something he could do. Phillips was compelled to decline that request because of his religious conviction that marriage is a husband-wife union a belief that just two years ago the Supreme Court said is decent and honorable and held in good faith by reasonable and sincere people.

The Colorado Civil Rights Commission determined that Phillipss decision to live by his conscience was unlawful and ordered him to re-educate his staff on the states anti-discrimination law, meaning he must create wedding cakes for same-sex weddings if he creates wedding cakes at all. The commission did this while simultaneously concluding that three other bakers were within their rights when they declined to create cakes bearing biblical messages they found offensive. That anti-religious bias is reason enough for the Supreme Court to reverse the commissions decision to punish Phillips.

But there is far more on the line than one cake artists freedom. At stake is whether the government can conscript artists to ply their expressive talents for events or ideas that they do not support.

If Phillips loses, the rights of all artists will suffer. Under that scenario, the government could compel a lesbian artist to design fliers for a religious event opposing same-sex marriage or a black woodworker to craft a cross for a Ku Klux Klan rally. Almost no one wants to live in a world like that, and thanks to the First Amendment, we dont have to.

Those who oppose Phillips argue that the interests of same-sex couples seeking artists should outweigh his freedom. This argument, however, misperceives the competing interests.

On Phillipss side of the scale is the future of his wedding-cake business and his very livelihood. If Phillips cant create cakes to celebrate same-sex weddings, the government insists, he cant make wedding cakes at all. So a loss in his case means the loss of a fulfilling part of Phillipss work that accounts for roughly 40 percent of his income, a hit thatll risk sinking his business.

Of course, the same-sex couple has an interest in obtaining custom art from businesses. But there is no shortage of cake artists willing to help celebrate same-sex marriages in Denvers suburbs. That a same-sex couple must go to another shop cannot override Phillipss freedom.

Same-sex couples raise another interest: avoiding the frustration and dignity harm that they feel when an artist declines their request. But someones offense at anothers exercise of his artistic and religious freedom is not a reason to suppress it. On the contrary, as the Supreme Court has explained, the First Amendment exists to shield artistic, expressive and religious choices that in someones eyes are hurtful.

In addition, same-sex couples dont have the market cornered on dignity harms. If the law deems Phillipss beliefs odious and unfit for public life which is precisely what a ruling against him would do that would demean not only him but also millions of Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, Jews and Muslims who hold similar beliefs.

Some folks nevertheless insist that Phillips is like the racist business owners in the Jim Crow South and must suffer the same fate. This is simply not true. Jim Crow involved the systematic exclusion of black Americans from public life. Countless businesses flatly refused to serve a class of people. But that is not remotely true of Phillips or others like him. He will gladly serve people who identify as gay or lesbian; it is only custom orders for certain wedding cakes that he must decline. Phillips is not deserving of the social margins where racists now reside.

In this hotly contested struggle between artistic freedom and government coercion, it is impossible to predict the outcome. But because to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr. the arc of the universe bends toward human freedom, Phillips should feel pretty good about his chances.

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The Supreme Court puts a baker's business and artistic freedom on the line - Washington Post