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David Siegel promised to fire people if Obama wins
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/1...cards-headline
Do you think it will attract voters to Obama or not?
If it takes voters from Obama, it means Americans fear would be so high that they may like to negotiate when extorted. If not, Americans would be saying they do not negotiate when threatened.
Its not a "I'll fire you if you vote in Obama" its "If Obama's policies continue I'll have no choice but to hang in the towel."Quote:
Originally Posted by ar81
I wonder how happy he'll be if Romney ends up closing any loopholes his company is in the habit of exploiting.
As the closing of loopholes is to come with the lowering of taxes, I'm sure he would be fine
What's the effective tax rate his company pays?Quote:
Originally Posted by Veldan Rath
But that's bull. He has more choices than downsizing, firing, or closing shop. So do Murray Energy and Lacks Enterprise CEO's.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewkowski
Siegel and his ilk will complain if closing "loopholes" means he can't deduct mortgage interest on his 90,000 sf house to reduce his taxable income. Even if he doesn't have a mortgage, state and local taxes would likely go up to fill gaps in federal tax cuts, and he'd complain about not being able to unload that grotesque McMansion and move. :bored:
He's a known asshat who runs one random company. He also wasn't threatening them with layoffs, at least not directly. Its only significance is in the Halls of Asshatdom.
There's a broader issue beyond this one asshat, though. When does it become unacceptable for employers to "politically educate" their employees this way?
When they demand workers take unpaid time off to appear in a political ad (like Murray Energy reportedly did?)
It's always unacceptable. It's almost as unacceptable as how government unions write into their contracts that government employees must be paid for doing unaccounted union work (likely political work).
It's called Official Time.
Note: opinion column below.
Quote:
Mallory Factor: How Public Unions Exploit the Ruse of 'Official Time'
Government employees get paid to spend time on the job working on union projects that they don't disclose to managers or the public.
By MALLORY FACTOR
Imagine thousands of government employees reporting to work each morning at their government offices and then doing no government work. They use government workspace, government telephones and government computers, all while working on projects unknown and unidentified to their government employers. They receive hefty taxpayer-funded salaries, promotions, bonuses and benefits, plus generous government pensions when they retire—all without doing any work on behalf of the taxpayer. Instead, they work as paid political operatives for powerful government unions.
Welcome to the common practice of "official time." Sometimes called "release time," it's a mechanism by which the government pays union officials to work on union matters during their government workdays. This mechanism—enshrined in law and contracts—is an enormous subsidy to public-employee unions, who defend it fiercely.
The Office of Personnel Management reports that federal employees spent over three million hours on official time in 2010, costing the taxpayers about $137 million in salary and benefits costs.
At the federal level, about 77% of official time (as reported to the OPM) is spent on "general labor-management," a broad catchall for union activity other than contract negotiations or dispute resolution, which are the activities most directly related to employee representation. But when more than three-quarters of all official time is used for unspecified activities, red flags should be raised.
Some union officials split their time between union work and government work. Others, amazingly enough, work exclusively on union business while getting paid for their government "jobs," and may not even show up at their government jobs for months at a time. The Department of Homeland Security alone had 62 employees on full-time official time as of July 2011, according to the department's disclosure. It's not clear how many other federal employees are on official time all the time, since the OPM doesn't require federal departments and agencies to report that figure. The less that is reported, the harder it is to discover abuse.
The only thorough report on official time at the federal level was released in 1998, when the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee required the OPM to do so. At that time, 946 federal employees were on full-time official time, with another 912 spending at least 75% of their days on official time. Today the overall number is a mystery, because no law requires the federal government to disclose it.
States and municipalities don't generally track official time for their employees, much less disclose it, so data on the subject are hard to come by. But based on the total number of unionized workers at all levels of government and the reported levels of official time in the federal government from 2010, we can estimate that American taxpayers are paying for some 23 million total hours of official time every year, at a cost of more than $1 billion. And that doesn't include free government office space, equipment and services used by union officials.
All this persists even though 47 states have "gift clauses" in their constitutions that prohibit government subsidies to private entities. In June, Arizona's Goldwater Institute successfully challenged official time for Phoenix police union officials. Arizona's Superior Court enjoined the practice, concluding that official time violated Arizona's gift clause because the union, not the city, "determines how the money is spent, by whom, and when."
Such challenges to official time are in their infancy—another is pending in Albuquerque, N.M.—but with time they should become more widespread. (In a sign of enduring union power, though, Phoenix signed a new contract with the police union in July that included official time; the Goldwater Institute has filed for a second injunction.)
Why should official time exist at all? Government-employee unions argue that because they represent many workers who don't become members, they should be subsidized by our government. But if workers don't value union representation enough to join the union, why should taxpayers pay for it?
Official time is a ruse for getting taxpayers to support union activities in the government workplace, including the lobbying of legislators for ever-more benefits. This effectively subsidizes unions so they can spend more dues income on political organizing. And it's all done without taxpayers' knowledge. It's a shadowy practice that must be stopped.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...764710060.html
It's amazing how Dread can take almost any topic, and blame public unions for all failures. I don't recall the same rigorous criticism for private unions....like the NFL.
Since employers can't know how their employees vote...Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
I mean seriously do you think the Democratic Party can't educate their employees on how they view the election?
I was wrong about his house.Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
Quote:
David Siegel is the man who, together with his wife, Jackie, built the largest new house in America, known as "Versailles." His story first appeared in my book, "The High-Beta Rich." It then made it to the big screen with the documentary film "The Queen of Versailles."
They became symbols of outsized spending, debt and real estate in America.
But when the company started buckling under $1 billion in debt during the crisis, the Siegels' home went into foreclosure and was put up for sale. They cut back on the jet, took the kids out of private school and gave up some of their staff. (Read more: Social Media's Billion-Dollar Rollercoaster)
So why is David Siegel — a man who defined excess and debt in the 2000s — now saying that debt and spending are ruining the country?
I asked David about his email during a phone interview last night, and he told me that this was about his workers, not himself. He said his own finances have vastly improved. He has paid off all of his major lenders. "I have enough money for the rest of my life and enough to leave a good inheritance for our kids." He said the loan for Versailles is paid off and he's resuming construction on the home.
"The elevators are going in and they're preparing to put in the marble."
The deal with Versailles' lenders, he went on, worked out "better than I imagined," since he was allowed to go nine months without making any interest payments on the loan. Jackie has several offers for a new reality TV show "which we're in the process of ranking and evaluating," Siegel said.
He has learned his own painful lesson from the debt crunch. "We cut back, we're lean and mean. That's what the rest of the country has to do."
:rolleyes:
You were discussing employers forcing political views onto their employees. I thought it was relevant to bring up forcing the government to pay for employees forced political activities.Quote:
Originally Posted by GGT
But I believe it's illegal to coerce a vote out of someone. Part of why the secret ballot is so important in our society (it wasn't always that way two centuries ago or so).
Which makes you wonder why unions want to eliminate secret ballots when workers vote to unionize...Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught
We were discussing when employee "education" becomes employer "coersion". Not so much forcing certain views, votes, or open ballots, but forcing an action that can't be refused by the worker.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dreadnaught