Court Orders Calif. to Count Ballots in Union Decertification Vote

State labor board had blocked election tally for five years.

After five years California farm workers will finally see their votes to kick out their union counted after a state court unanimously ruled that a state agency had interfered with the election.

A three-judge panel from the California Fifth District Court of Appeals ruled that the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board improperly blocked a 2013 election to decertify the United Farm Workers from representing workers at Gerawan Farming, Inc. The ruling called the labor board's treatment of the workers as "either arbitrary or punitive (or both)." The Court found that the campaign to cut ties with the union was an organic "worker-initiated and worker led movement," rather than an employer-sponsored one.

"The drastic remedy of throwing out the election in a case such as this one would appear to be either arbitrary or punitive (or both)—i.e., unnecessarily disenfranchising the employees as a punishment for the employer's wrongdoing," the ruling says.

The court said the board took an adversarial approach to management at Gerawan Farming, but its course of action came at the expense of its employees, rather than the company itself. Refusing to count the ballots amounted to an attack on employees' rights, rather than company executives, according to the appeals court. The court said the agency is designed to safeguard farm workers, rather than organized labor.

"The Board so narrowly focused on punishing the employer that it effectively lost sight of the correlative statutory value of protecting the farmworkers' right to choose, which was and is a fundamental part of the Board's mission," the ruling says. "We believe the Board's one-sided approach constituted legal error."

The company celebrated the decision, calling it a victory for employees. Company co-owner Dan Gerawan said the labor board's actions deprived his employees of their voice in the workplace. He praised workers for fighting to have their election recognized despite bureaucratic interference from the state.

"This is a victory for our employees," he said in a statement. "They never gave up on their struggle to achieve the same rights that all other workers have, and we never wavered from our support of their right to choose."

United Farm Workers spokesman Armando Elenes said the decision was "disappointing," but hopes the ruling will be overturned on appeal. Elenes said the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has a track record of siding with management in decisions that are later overturned by higher courts.

"The decision from the Fresno Court of Appeals is disappointing, but not surprising. The Appeals Court's pro-grower rulings have been unanimously overturned three times in the past year by the California Supreme Court because they ignored well established rules of law," Elenes said in an email. "The United Farm Workers plans to seek review of this decision with the state Supreme Court and is confident it will also be overturned and that farm workers' rights will be respected."

Labor watchdogs also called the ruling an important victory for California workers. Patrick Semmens, spokesman at the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, said the move to block the tallying of the votes was "outrageous." It also reflected the impartiality of many labor arbiters who see their jobs as defending unions rather than workers.

"It is outrageous that after workers voted in 2013 seeking to remove the UFW union from their workplace, it has taken an Appeals Court ruling just to order the labor board to count the workers’ votes," Semmens said. "This entire case shows how labor law is stacked against the rights of individual workers, whose freedoms are regularly violated in the push to prop up union officials' power."

http:// freebeacon.com/issues/court-orders-ca-count-ballots-union-decertification-vote/

McCarthy Slams Google for Linking ‘Nazism’ Ideology to California Republican Party: ‘This Is a Disgrace’

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) on Thursday slammed Google after its search engine listed "Nazism" as one of the California Republican Party's ideologies.

McCarthy, who has long been seen as a Silicon Valley ally, expressed his anger on Twitter by calling the listing a "disgrace," Politico reported.

"Dear @Google, This is a disgrace," McCarthy tweeted, including an image of a Google search result including Nazism as part of the party's ideology. The information appears to be pulled from a Wikipedia page.

McCarthy, who is expected to succeed Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) as House Speaker, slammed other tech companies including Amazon, Twitter and Facebook earlier this week for alleged anti-conservative bias.

"If we get criticized for our speech or if they try to deny it, we should say it louder and more often," McCarthy said.

A Google spokesperson pushed back against claims the company is biased against the Republican party, stating the "Nazism" tag was from a source in the automated process that "occasionally" allows errors to pass through.

"This was not the result of any manual change by anyone at Google," the spokesperson said. "Sometimes people vandalize public information sources, like Wikipedia, which can impact the information that appears in search."

http://freebeacon.com/politics/mccarthy-slams-google-linking-nazism-ideology-california-republican-party-calls-disgrace/

Trump appoints Rear Adm. Fears as homeland security adviser

President Trump appointed Rear Adm. Douglas Fears Friday as his new homeland security adviser, the latest staff change at the White House National Security Council.

White House national security adviser John R. Bolton said Adm. Frears “brings more than three decades of experience across a range of vital homeland security areas including counterterrorism, cybersecurity, and disaster response, to the NSC.”

“Doug will serve as the president’s homeland security advisor and my point person on an array of vital tasks ranging from overseeing the NSC cybersecurity directorate to coordinating the interagency efforts during disaster response,” Mr. Bolton said.

Adm. Fears has extensive experience in government and is a graduate of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, the U.S. Naval War College, and Harvard.

The move comes after Tom Bossert was ousted as Mr. Trump’s White House homeland security adviser this spring, shortly after Mr. Bolton took over for Gen. H.R. McMaster.

Adm. Fears has spent more than 30 years in the U.S. Coast Guard and had been serving as an acting homeland security adviser in recent weeks. He has been serving as senior director for resilience policy on the NSC staff. He also served on eight ships around the world, and served as commanding officer on three of those ships.

https:// www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/1/donald-trump-appoints-rear-adm-fears-as-homeland-s/

'Natural ally': Hungary leads fight against anti-U.S. 'hysteria' in Europe

Prime Minister Viktor Orban has sounded similar themes that propelled Donald Trump to the White House.

NEWSMAKER INTERVIEW:

Hungary has no intention of joining the “U.S.-bashing chorus in Europe,” in part because Budapest and Washington now are singing from the same page on issues such as immigration, security and the right of sovereign nations to set their own policies, Hungary’s foreign minister said in an interview.

Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Peter Szijjarto said the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban is a “natural ally” of the Trump administration, one that is willing to challenge the liberal orthodoxy within the European Union that has been sharply critical of his government and the Trump administration. He spoke at the end of a Washington visit Wednesday that included a meeting with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — the first face-to-face bilateral meeting of U.S. and Hungarian foreign ministers in six years.

He noted that Hungary has often been a lonely voice in Brussels blocking EU measures critical of the Trump administration, such as Budapest’s recent stand against a resolution critical of Mr. Trump’s decision to relocate the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

“There is a hysteria in the European Union against the United States and especially against the current administration,” Mr. Szijjarto said. “With this visit, I wanted to stress that Hungary is not joining this hysteria.

“We always respect the decisions of other countries to set their foreign policies and internal developments, and we expect the same kind of respect toward our decisions, which we did not feel we always got from the [previous] Democratic administration,” he added.

An unapologetic nationalist, social conservative and a critic of unchecked immigration and open borders, Mr. Orban has long sounded many of the same themes that helped propel Mr. Trump to the White House in 2016. It has also made his government, which won a smashing victory and a parliamentary supermajority in elections in April, a target of particular criticism from some of the EU’s leading powers, including Germany and France.

https:// www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/31/hungary-natural-ally-trump-pompeo-peter-szijjarto-/

U.S. watching closely as India in balancing act with China

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has walked a careful line this week toward China, asserting that Delhi and Beijing must “work together” even as he announced a plan supported by the U.S. to develop a new Indian naval port in Indonesia aimed at countering China’s growing military and economic prowess.

With U.S. officials watching the developments closely, Mr. Modi said Friday that India and China must “rise above divisions and competition to work together” toward collective Asian prosperity.

The comments at the “Shangri-La Dialogue” in Singapore, which is being attended by U.S. Defense Secretary James N. Mattis, came a day after Mr. Modi said India will partner with Indonesia on the new naval port — a move likely to rankle Beijing at a moment when it is aggressively expanding its own regional maritime footprint.

Sources have told The Washington Times that U.S. officials have been working behind-the-scenes for months to urge India — a key U.S. security ally in the region — to take on a more bold naval posture and work with other American partners to signal to China that its expansionist activities won’t go unanswered.

With that as a backdrop, Mr. Modi is engaged in a kind of balancing act between the U.S. and China, who are in competition as India’s top international trading partners. The Indian prime minister and Chinese President Xi Jinping had a positive meeting in China in late-April, according to the Times of India, which said the two exchanged views on solidifying the Delhi-Beijing relationship.

But U.S. officials have expressed concern publicly about the need for India to play a more central role in responding to China’s fast-moving One Belt One Road initiative, through which Beijing has been pumping cash into infrastructure projects to buy access to resources around the region. The Trump administration has argued the initiative — laden with billions of dollars worth of China-funded projects in countries on every side of India, from Sri Lanka to Nepal to Pakistan — lacks transparency and is saddling those nations with “predatory debt.”

Beijing has also spent recent years building up bases in the disputed waters of the South China Sea and has been sending submarines and warships, in coordination with the One Belt One Road initiative, to far-flung China-financed ports in Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

The situation has concerned many in India’s national security sphere, who say the moment is ripe for the U.S. and India to get serious about expanding their current military-to-military naval alliance to make clear who controls the Indo-Pacific.

“China’s activities create a large amount of impetus for a more focused and more action-oriented India and U.S. navy-to-navy, maritime-to-maritime, country-to-country engagement,” former Indian Vice Adm. Pradeep Chauhan told The Times at a recent U.S.-India conference in Delhi.

U.S. officials say Mr. Mattis will seize on the Shangri-La Dialogue currently taking place in Singapore to push the message that the U.S. intends to challenge China on the high seas and will use its Navy to push back against Beijing’s maritime expansion.

Mr. Mattis told reporters this week that a “steady drumbeat” of American naval activity in and around the South China Sea will serve to push back against China’s efforts to claim territory in the region. He declared that China is “out of step” with international law and is failing to respect international waters.

“We are going out of our way to cooperate with Pacific nations. That’s the way we do business in the world,” Mr. Mattis said. “But we are also going to confront what we believe is out of step with international law, out of step with international tribunals that have spoken on the issue, and part of this is we maintain a very transparent military activity out in the Pacific.”

Mr. Modi, meanwhile, pushed a similar but notably more conciliatory message toward China on Friday.

“India stands for a free, open, inclusive Indo-Pacific region, which embraces us all in a common pursuit of progress and prosperity,” the Indian Prime Minister said, according to the Times of India, which also reported on Mr. Modi’s announcement of the joint naval port plan for Indonesia.

“We believe that our common prosperity and security require us to evolve, through dialogue, a common rules-based order for the region,” Mr. Modi said. “Competition is normal. But, contests must not turn into conflict; differences must not be allowed to become disputes.”

https:// www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/1/us-watching-closely-india-balancing-act-china/

Looking at that pic you posted, are you referring to Red Castle, Green Castle?

'Stop Soros Bill' puts spotlight on Budapest-born financier

With George Soros, it’s both personal and philosophical.

For many others, the fight for Hungary’s soul can be distilled down to the cage match between conservative, nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Mr. Soros, the Budapest-born 87-year-old investor who has used his hedge fund billions to underwrite liberal causes and pro-immigration civic groups and think tanks in the U.S., in his homeland and in countries across the old Soviet bloc.

Mr. Soros has become so prominent in the Hungarian domestic political debate that the crackdown on illegal immigration pushed by Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party in parliament this week is widely being described as the “Stop Soros Bill.”

Critics say the Orban government’s focus on shutting down Mr. Soros and his advocacy work reflects darker motives, including a demonization of immigrants and Muslims and even an attack of Mr. Soros’ Jewish roots. Mr. Soros’ image was ubiquitous in the campaign posters for Mr. Orban’s ruling party, which relied heavily on an anti-migration platform to win a massive electoral victory in April.

But Peter Szijjarto, Hungary’s minister of foreign affairs and trade, said in an interview that it is Mr. Soros who is out of step with what a clear majority of Hungarians say they want.

“With George Soros, we have an open debate, an open conflict,” Mr. Szijjarto said in an interview at the Hungarian Embassy near Dupont Circle on a Washington visit this week.

“We have two totally different positions on the future of Europe, two totally different positions on the future of nation-states and two totally different positions on how migration should be dealt with,” he said. “And George Soros and the organizations supporting and financed by him took part very actively in the election campaign with a clear and honest target: They wanted to throw out the government. They wanted us to be fired.”

Despite strong criticism from international rights and press freedom groups, Mr. Szijjarto said, any government would be justified in taking action against “those who carry out in our country activities which are against the national security interest.”

While people will still be free to criticize the government’s immigration and security policies, actively helping or encouraging others to break Hungary’s laws will not be tolerated, the minister said.

“Encouraging people to violate our border, encouraging people to ask for asylum regardless of whether they have a legal basis [to do so], helping people to cross the border in an illegal way — these are all activities against our national security interests,” Mr. Szijjarto said. “So it is no wonder that we have made regulations which basically seek to avoid that. So, yes, you could say we have an open and serious debate with George.”

Any debate will likely be long-distance. Officials of Mr. Soros’ Open Society Foundation in Budapest announced last month that they were shifting operations to Berlin, citing political pressure and the prospect of legal sanctions and higher fees and taxes.

“The government of Hungary has denigrated and misrepresented our work and repressed civil society for the sake of political gain,” Patrick Gaspard, president of the Soros foundations in Hungary, told reporters in Budapest last month. The foundations claim the Orban government has spent more than $100 million to denigrate its work and smear its founder, “invoking anti-Semitic imagery from World War II.”

But Mr. Szijjarto said the results of April’s election were a clear rebuke to Mr. Soros’ pro-immigration agenda.

“He didn’t succeed, so they’re obviously frustrated, you know?” he said.

https:// www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/may/31/george-soros-budapest-born-financier-shined-in-spo/