Poll: 64 Percent Favor Candidates Who Would Remove Judicial Powers from NLRB

Poll: 64 Percent Favor Candidates Who Would
Remove Judicial Powers from NLRB

September 20th, 2011, Fairfax, VA—Americans for Limited Government (ALG) today released a poll conducted by the polling company™, inc./WomanTrend showing 64 percent of registered voters favor candidates that support removing the quasi-judicial powers from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

"The results show that the more voters find out about the NLRB, and its powers to act as prosecutor, judge, and jury against private companies at the behest of big labor, the more they oppose it," ALG President Bill Wilson said.

Substantial majorities believe that the agency, founded in 1935, is antiquated (62 percent), has too much power "to officiate legal proceedings over private U.S. companies in its own court system" (66 percent) and to play "the roles of investigator, prosecutor, and judge in each of the cases that come before it" (63 percent), and opposed the Board's "power to dictate where, that is in which states, companies can locate their places of work or production facilities" (72 percent).

The NLRB has come under increasing scrutiny due to its decision barring Boeing from setting up a manufacturing facility in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, but Wilson said the agency's history of abuses went back to its inception.

Those include the controversial NLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corp. (1939) decision that a company could not fire workers that staged sit-down strikes, and the BE & K Construction Co. v. NLRB (2002) decision that a company could not sue a union that was attempting to organize its employees, as noted in a recent Investor's Business Daily oped by Rep. Austin Scott (R-SC).

Both decisions had to be overturned by the Supreme Court.

Rep. Scott is expected to unveil legislation today that will rein in the agency's quasi-judicial powers, a bill that Wilson called "the most comprehensive effort in 75 years to rein in the one-sided decisions of an agency singularly designed to issue rulings in favor of labor unions."

Attachments:

the polling company™, inc./WomanTrend poll on behalf of Americans for Limited Government regarding National Labor Relations Board, Aug. 19-23, 2011 at www.getliberty.org/files/NLRBPoll8-19to8-23-11.pdf .

DELAURO ON CONFIRMATION OF CANTALOUPE LISTERIA OUTBREAK

Washington, DC — Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (CT-3), Ranking Member on the Labor, Education, Health, and Human Services Appropriations Subcommittee, issued the following statement today in response to the Food and Drug Administration’s confirmation of cantaloupes as the source of a Listeria monocytogenes outbreak.

35 people 10 states have been sickened, and four people have died in this outbreak of Listeria, the first associated with cantaloupe. Jensen Farms of Colorado recalled all cantaloupes shipped between July 29 and September 10 to at least 17 states.

“This tragic outbreak is yet another example of how important it is to fully fund the FDA and support the Food Safety Modernization Act— we have charged them with the responsibility to protect the American public, and we must give them the tools to do so. House Republicans have made it clear that funding for food safety is not a priority, and have slashed funding for the FDA by millions of dollars. This is unacceptable.

“We know that it is possible to prevent these kinds of outbreaks, and to better protect American consumers. We should not be cutting funding for the FDA, and effectively tying their hands when it comes to food safety. This is a matter of life and death, and I urge my Republican colleagues to make the safety of American families a priority, and to fully fund the FDA.”

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NSAC Releases Letter to the Super Committee and Farm Bill Budget Views

 NSAC Releases Letter to the Super Committee and Farm Bill Budget Views;
Comments on Obama Farm Budget Proposals

Washington, D.C. September 20, 2011 -- The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition urged the congressional deficit reduction or super committee today to take a policy and reform-oriented approach to reducing total farm bill spending while renewing investments in underfunded areas including new farmers, rural development, conservation, renewable energy, agricultural research, and new market development.

The NSAC letter to the Committee urged them to resist further cuts to farm conservation beyond the $2 billion Congress has already cut since the 2008 Farm Bill, to place hard caps on farm commodity and crop and revenue insurance subsidies, to end subsidies for the conversion of prime grasslands, to renew funding for critical mandatory farm bill programs that have no secured baselines after the end of the current farm bill cycle in 2012, and to protect anti-hunger programs from cuts.

A more detailed nine page document accompanies the letter and includes the full scope of the NSAC farm bill budget proposal. 

NSAC Policy Director Ferd Hoefner contrasted the NSAC view with the farm bill cuts proposed by President Obama yesterday:
The Obama proposal holds promise, especially in the call for the end of direct payments.  The farm bill cuts the President offered, however, are disproportionate to the size of the farm bill budget relative to total federal mandatory spending.  In addition to the unfair size of the cut, the Administration proposal has three other problems. 

First, the Administration would cut direct payments without offering a new alternative safety net proposal, even while proposing to leave a largely failed disaster program in place at a very substantial total cost equaling roughly half of the total savings.  Disaster assistance should be built into the new safety net at a significantly lower cost, and eliminated as a free-standing program.

Second, all of the subsidies they do propose to leave in place are available without any effective limit on the size of the subsidy any one farm can receive.  As such, they would focus the cuts on small and mid-sized farms, while allowing the largest farms continued access to the loopholes currently written into law to largely avoid the cuts that apply to everyone else. 

Third, they do not take account of the dire need to put money into farm, food, and rural programs that create jobs, new business opportunities, and new healthy food options but that have shrinking or soon to be non-existent budgets.

The NSAC proposals by contrast would keep farm bill cuts at more equitable levels, target cuts so that the largest and wealthiest farms would actually have to contribute to deficit reduction, and align spending policies with widely supported public values with respect to increasing farm and rural economic opportunity, conserving natural resources and protecting the environment, and improving access to healthy food.
NSAC members from around the country will be contacting the Joint Select Committee and the House and Senate Agricultural Committees over the coming weeks to push for smarter budget cuts and real reform.

Lucas & Roberts Respond to the President's Debt Plan

Lucas & Roberts Respond to the President's Debt Plan
WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Representative Frank Lucas (R-OK), Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, and U.S. Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS), Ranking Member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, issued the following statement in response to President Obama's debt plan.

"The agriculture community remains willing to do its part in getting our fiscal house in order, but, in essence, President Obama’s plan for economic growth and deficit reduction is not credible. 
"The President’s policy priorities reveal a lack of knowledge of production agriculture and fail to recognize how wholesale changes to farm policy would impact the people who feed us.  For example, cutting $8 billion from the crop insurance program puts the entire program at risk. We have heard again and again from producers that crop insurance is the best risk management tool available. In jeopardizing this program, the President turns a deaf ear to America’s farmers.  Meanwhile, SURE has not worked as intended for most crops, but the President proposes extending it.  The President only proposes a $2 billion cut, roughly three percent, to conservation despite his claim that conservation spending has increased 500 percent through the years.  And, the President does nothing to address waste, fraud, abuse, and other integrity issues within nutrition programs, which account for 80 percent of USDA spending.
"Ultimately, cuts to agriculture must reflect its diversity across the country, respect the challenges producers face, and preserve the tools necessary for food production."