Another ObamaCare Back Room Deal For the SEIU: Payoffs and Tax Exemption

Hat Tip to Michelle Malkin.

http://michellemalkin.com/2010/01/14/demcares-big-labor-buyoff/

More “transparent” corruption from Obama’s merry band of autocratic thugs.

Yesterday, President Barack Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and nine other lawmakers met face-to-face for seven hours to resolve differences between the House and Senate health care bills. At the same time these talks were going on, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern and United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger met with other Obama administration officials in a separate room in the White House. This all comes after these same labor leaders met personally with Speaker Pelosi yesterday, and after they met face-to-face with President Obama in the White House on Monday. Despite then-candidate Barack Obama’s explicit promises to the American people, absolutely none of these meetings were open to the public or televised on C-SPAN. In fact, Politico reports: “Those involved in the talks sought to keep details of their progress under wraps.”

And just what deals were Big Labor, the leftist majorities in Congress and the Obama administration making behind closed doors? How to pay for President Obama’s likely $1 trillion health care plan without raising taxes on one of the President’s most loyal constituencies: labor unions. Specifically, Big Labor reportedly has struck a deal with health care negotiators to exempt union members from the 40% excise tax on high-priced health insurance premiums. By some estimates, the tax would hit one in four union members. Now Big Labor will get all of the big government health care spending they always wanted, but they will not have to pay for it.
And Obamacare’s Big Labor handouts don’t end there. The legislation also sets aside $5 billion to subsidize the costs of employer health benefits for early retirees. As Heritage fellow James Sherk notes, few nonunion employers, of course, pay pension and health benefits for workers to retire at 55. And then there’s the small business exemption from the employer mandate for businesses with less than 50 employees. At first this applied to all small businesses, but after aggressive lobbying by Big Labor, non-unionized construction businesses were unexempted. Big Labor lobbyists explicitly admitted they wanted to use Obamacare’s job-killing employer mandates as a competitive advantage to drive non-unionized firms out of business.
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/01/14/morning-bell-behind-closed-doors-unions-win-you-lose/

Hey you 52%ers:
If this is the kind of “change” you wanted, you just fucked this country into an abyss of national debt far surpassing that of any previous administration.

This has nothing to do with health care and everything to do with a union-Obama merged power base.  The Democrats are wiping their asses with the Constitution and thumbing their noses at American citizens who object to this abuse of power.

They won’t listen to the electorate, but we can do something about this. THROW THEM OUT THIS YEAR.  And if they are able to pass this tyrannical edict, we need to grab it by the short and curlies and heave it as far away from our Constitutional rights as possible. The Republican Party should pledge to repeal ObamaCare as soon as they have the power to do so.