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Dr. Ben Carson: This Is the Beginning of the Collapse of Obamacare (+video)

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Photo Credit: APBy Greg Richter. Delaying implementation of key parts of the healthcare law and losing the support of labor unions are just the beginning of trouble for Obamacare, says Dr. Ben Carson.

“It’s gonna be a lot worse than this. This is the beginning of the collapse,” the retired Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon said on Fox News Channel’s “Your World” on Tuesday.

“Usually when you roll out a big program, you roll it out bit by bit. You determine what’s working. You can change things,” Carson said. “But to try to roll out something this massive without really knowing what the intricacies are is quite foolish.” Read more from this story HERE.

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photo credit: azrainmanGOP-controlled House to vote Wednesday on delaying key parts of ObamaCare

By Fox News. The Republican-controlled House will vote Wednesday on delaying key parts of ObamaCare, the party’s latest effort to dismantle the law amid distress signals from inside the administration.

The lawmakers will vote on bills to delay the start of the law’s separate employer and individual mandates, which respectively require smaller businesses and Americans to purchase insurance next year or face penalties.

The Obama administration earlier this month delayed the start of the employer mandate, saying the decision was in response to business owners expressing concerns about the law’s complex reporting requirements.

Late Tuesday, the White House issued a threat to veto the Republican bills, saying their passage would help “further efforts to repeal a law that is already helping millions of Americans stay on their parents’ plans until age 26, millions more who are getting free preventive care that catches illness early on, and thousands of children with pre-existing conditions who are now covered.”

Political analysts said that delaying the start until 2015 was an attempt to slow Republicans during next year’s elections from pinning ObamaCare problems on Democratic candidates — particularly those in Congress who supported the 2010 law and are seeking re-election. Read more from this story HERE.

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74% of small businesses will fire workers, cut hours under Obamacare

By Paul Bedard. Despite the administration’s controversial decision to delay forcing companies to join Obamacare for a year, three-quarters of small businesses are still making plans to duck the costly law by firing workers, reducing hours of full-time staff, or shift many to part-time, according to a sobering survey released by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

“Small businesses expect the requirement to negatively impact their employees. Twenty-seven percent say they will cut hours to reduce full time employees, 24 percent will reduce hiring, and 23 percent plan to replace full time employees with part-time workers to avoid triggering the mandate,” said the Chamber business survey provided to Secrets.

Under Obamacare, just 30 hours — not the nationally recognized 40 hours — is considered full-time. Companies with 50 full-time workers or more are required to provide health care, or pay a fine.

The administration recently decided to wait a year before businesses had to comply, but many are trying to get ready anyway. The president did not delay the mandate that Americans must have health insurance or pay a fine, however.

The Chamber’s second quarter small business survey found that just 30 percent are ready for the law and even understand what is required. Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: APLooking to keep GOP out of health care decisions, Obama threatens to veto bill backing his own delay

By Tom Howell Jr. President Obama has threatened to veto a House bill that would put into law a decision he made two weeks ago.

In a statement, the White House said the Obama administration “strongly opposes” a pair of Republican-led bills to delay the employer mandate and individual mandate within the president’s signature health care law.

The administration quietly announced July 2 in a pair of blog posts that it would delay by one year, to 2015, penalties tied to a mandate requiring firms with the equivalent of 50 or more full-time workers to provide insurance or pay fines, citing the business community’s concerns about complex reporting requirements.

Eyeing an opportunity to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, House Republicans cued up votes for Wednesday on bills to codify the White House’s delay and match it with a delay of the provision requiring most Americans to obtain some form of health insurance.

The votes will force Democrats to align with the president or distance themselves from the overhaul in the wake of its recent stumbles. Read more from this story HERE.

Teamsters, Other Unions Now Protest the Obamacare Nightmare They Helped Create (+video)

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Photo Credit: WNDBy Drew Zahn. Some of America’s top labor unions – including the influential Teamsters – have suddenly realized Obamacare is bad deal, and they’re suffering some serious buyer’s remorse.

“In campaign after campaign we have put boots on the ground, gone door-to-door to get out the vote, run phone banks and raised money to secure [the Obamacare] vision,” wrote three leading labor unions in an open letter to Congressional Democrats last week. “Now this vision has come back to haunt us.”

The letter, signed by James Hoffa of the Teamsters, as well as the presidents of the UFCW and UNITE-HERE, demands Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., “fix” the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – also known as “Obamacare” – before it “destroy[s] the very health and well-being of our members along with millions of other hardworking Americans.”

“When you and the president sought our support for the Affordable Care Act, you pledged that if we liked the health plans we have now, we could keep them. Sadly, that promise is under threat,” the unions wrote to Reid and Pelosi. “Unless you and the Obama Administration enact an equitable fix, the ACA will shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40-hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class.”

According to the letter, Obamacare is laced with “perverse incentives” that create “unintended consequences” and “nightmare scenarios.” Read more from this story HERE.

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‘Unintended consequences’ causing ‘nightmare scenarios’

By Avik Roy. The union leaders are concerned that Obamacare’s employer mandate incentivizes smaller companies to shift their workers to part-time status, because employers are not required to provide health coverage to part-time workers. “We have a problem,” they write, and “you need to fix it.”

“The unintended consequences of the ACA are severe,” they continue. “Perverse incentives are causing nightmare scenarios. First, the law creates an incentive for employers to keep employees’ work hours below 30 hours a week. Numerous employers have begun to cut workers’ hours to avoid this obligation, and many of them are doing so openly. The impact is two-fold: fewer hours means less pay while also losing our current health benefits.”

What surprises me about this is that union leaders are pretty strategic when it comes to employee benefits. It was obvious in 2009 that Obamacare’s employer mandate would incentivize this shift. Why didn’t labor unions fight it back then? Read more from this story HERE.

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Obamacare Delay Has Serious Implications

Avik Roy appeared before the Health Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee to testify on the White House’s one-year delay in implementing the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. “Obamacare”), which requires firms to offer health coverage to their full-time workers:

Union Prevents Commissioner From Canceling IRS Bonuses as Promised

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerActing IRS commissioner Danny Werfel’s promise to suspend taxpayer-funded bonuses to IRS officials might not be fully realized because it will violate a contract between the scandal-plagued agency and a public-employee labor union.

“In this unprecedented budget situation, I do not believe the IRS should pay performance awards this year to employees, managers or executives,” Werfel wrote in an email to IRS employees this week.

“This is not a reflection of the quality or performance of the work done by you and your colleagues, but rather an unfortunate byproduct of the difficult budgetary situation we find ourselves in,” Werfel wrote. The IRS is currently under fire after revelations that it improperly targeted the tax-exempt nonprofit status of conservative groups.

But due to a union contract Werfel will not be able to successfully halt all bonuses this year. The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents IRS employees, said that bonuses already promised to unionized IRS workers must be paid, because the bonuses represent work done in 2012, before Werfel canceled bonuses.

Read more from this story HERE.

Wichita Teachers Union Refuses Agreement Including Lesson-Plan Requirements

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Representatives of United Teachers of Wichita reached a tentative one-year contract agreement on Friday, following a heated dispute in which the union balked at a proposed clause that would require teachers to keep well-crafted daily lessons plans. The Wichita Eagle reports that the agreement was reached late Friday, and it is not yet clear which side prevailed in the lesson-plan fight.

A deal proposed by the district would require teachers to prepare lesson plans containing various mandatory details such as learning objectives and pacing references, according to the Eagle.

The current labor contract requires teachers to make lesson plans “only in sufficient detail to provide guidance to the teacher,” which leaves room for a range of different planning methods. Teachers must also provide their lesson plans and other teaching materials to school principals if asked.

Leaders of United Teachers of Wichita, which represents some 4,000 currently vacationing teachers, call compulsory daily lesson plans “busy work.”

“That’s going to take away the art of teaching, and it almost becomes like they’re doing cookie-cutter lessons,” Randy Mousley, president of the teachers union, told the Eagle.

Read more from this story HERE.

FOIA: 201 IRS Agents Working Full Time on Union Work, Not Government Business

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

In a response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from Americans for Limited Government, the Internal Revenue Service revealed this month that 201 of its employees work full-time on union activities…

The redacted list of 201 IRS employees, whose names have been blacked out, features only those employees who are entirely engaged in union work. The list does not include employees who spend part of their time on government work and other portions on union work, according to ALG.

The list of 201 employees offers job titles, salary information, and some location information. The job titles appear innocuous and make the work appear to be focused on agency business rather than union business. Titles include “Internal Revenue Agent,” “Revenue Officer,” “Tax Specialist,” “Rev Officer,” “Clerk,” “Contact Representative,” “Case Advocate,” and the like. Some boast six-figure salaries, with the highest paid employee on the list earning $138,092.

[Americans for Limited Government President Nathan] Mehrens explained that in many cases employees are hired for a certain job classification but end up doing union work.

“This person was hired to file things,” Mehrens said of one of the employees listed on the documents under the job title “File Clerk.” ”But instead of filing things this person is doing union work. So somebody else presumably has to pick up the slack and handle that. There is not a job classification for ‘union steward’… so they are in these positions and instead of actually doing the work that would fit the job classification they are basically excused from doing that job in order to work on behalf of the union.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Penny Pritzker: Obama’s Worst Insult to His Left-Wing Base

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Photo Credit: breitbart In a crowded field, Chicago billionaire, bundler, sub-prime banker and union buster Penny Pritzker is clearly the worst nominee that President Barack Obama has chosen for his second term cabinet.

Though the position for which she has been nominated, Secretary of Commerce, often goes to a presidential crony or political insider, Pritzker would exceed all her predecessors and peers with her shocking record of cronyism and failure.

Pritzker ran Superior Bank into the ground by dealing in sub-prime mortgages. As Breitbart News noted recently, the bank’s depositors lost $6000, on average, and the taxpayers got fleeced–but the investors got paid out first. Pritzker recently served on the board of the Chicago Public Schools during a period of abject educational failure, and earned a bad reputation with labor unions both there and at her family’s Hyatt hotel chain.

Read more from this story HERE.

Sequester Madness: Obama Admin. Reportedly Spending Millions to Set Up Labor Unions in Foreign Countries

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Photo Credit: Reuters Senate Republicans say the Labor Department appears to be spending millions in taxpayer dollars to establish labor unions and promote collective bargaining in foreign countries and are asking top Obama administration officials for a full audit.

The request was sent by Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, the leading Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, and Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, the top Republican on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

“At a time when our federal budget is deteriorating rapidly … it is troubling to us that the department appears to be spending millions of dollars of taxpayer funds to establish labor unions and promote collective bargaining in foreign countries,” they said in a letter to acting Labor Secretary Seth Harris.

The purported activities were conducted by the agency’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs.

The bureau for the past several years has purportedly made numerous awards — worth millions of dollars — to the United Nations, the Solidarity Center and other similar groups, “whose stated objective is to help establish labor unions in foreign countries,” the senators said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Teamsters Pension Crisis Sapping Hoffa’s Support, Power

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Photo Credit: AP

International Brotherhood of Teamsters general president Jimmy Hoffa Jr.’s response to his union’s pension crisis is sapping Hoffa’s support among Teamsters members, according to insiders.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is one of the forces lobbying Congress for legislation based on the National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans’ report “Solutions, Not Bailouts.” The report urges new congressional legislation to allow “deeply troubled” funds to cut employees’ pensions.

The Central States Pension Fund, which serves Teamsters members across the country and which also happens to be “deeply troubled,” has joined the Teamsters in lobbying for the new legislation. Insiders believe that the Fund plans to make across-the-board pension cuts.

The Teamsters’ unwillingness to allow companies to move Teamsters members out of the fund and into more secure retirement plans has enraged Teamsters members and sparked backlash against Hoffa.

“In that they’re calling for pension cuts, they’re on the wrong track,” Ken Paff, national organizer of the reform group Teamsters for a Democratic Union, told The Daily Caller. Approximately 3,000 active and retired Teamsters converged on their Kansas City union hall Tuesday to voice their displeasure with Hoffa and the Central States Pension Fund.

Read more from this story HERE.

Union Boss Confronts AFL-CIO on Amnesty

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Photo Credit: The Washington TImes

The chief of the labor union that represents immigration agents on Friday accused the AFL-CIO, his parent organization, of “threatening” those who oppose legalizing illegal immigrants.

Chris Crane, president of the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Council, which represents ICE agents and which is part of the AFL-CIO, said he was worried about threats of “union retribution” against lawmakers who vote against legalization this year.

His criticism underscores a fascinating split within the labor community as Congress prepares to debate immigration. Most labor unions back the push to grant legal status and citizenship rights to illegal immigrants, but the unions representing immigration law enforcement are generally opposed to that policy.

Read more from this story HERE.

AFL-CIO: We Will 'Steamroller' any Lawmakers Who Oppose Amnesty

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Photo Credit: Breitbart

A principal official at the AFL-CIO, one of America’s biggest labor unions, said Wednesday the organization would politically demolish any politician who opposes mass amnesty for the country’s at least 11 million illegal immigrants.

“Politicians know that if they stand in the way of citizenship we will steamroller them,” AFL-CIO director of immigration Ana Avendaño said, according to the Financial Times. “That’s a fun evolution.”

Avendaño (pictured) has been involved in the immigration reform negotiations between the labor community, the business community, and the bipartisan Gang of Eight U.S. Senators.

Read more from this story HERE.