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Also read below the following articles:
When bullies grow up, they can always run teachers unions
... and
Excerpt: This spring,
a Colorado
teacher emailed the state director of a nonunion teachers association,
explaining why she wouldn't publicly speak for a bill extending the state's
two-week window for ending union membership."They
[the state union] are a large and powerful organization," she wrote.
"I want to speak out against them, but I am afraid of the repercussions that
I will face as a result and the possibility of them doing something to make me
lose my job."
Rogue
Democrats Loot Detroit
As Nation Sleeps
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UNIONS HELP ELECT OFFICIALS WHO GRANT EXCESSIVE BENEFITS.
Many State
and Local Governments Are Run by and for Their Unions.
By Roger Hedgecock, a nationally syndicated talk-show host. Prior to his
broadcasting career, he worked as an attorney and political leader.
Hedgecock is a strong
supporter of the military and founded Homefront San
Diego, assisting thousands of military families obtain needed items.
For decades, public employee unions in state and local
government
negotiated with the politicians they helped elect to add layer after
layer of compensation, benefits and perks.
As a result, today the potholes don't get fixed, the library
hours
are curtailed, the parks are closed, but the gold-plated pension and
health benefits of our "public servants" get more costly every year.
The state of Illinois
spends 20 percent of its annual budget in
addition to the earnings of its state employee retirement system just to
keep up with employee retirement benefit costs. In a few years, Illinois
estimates that percentage will increase to 50 percent of state revenue.
The City of San
Diego paid just $48 million in pension contribution
in 2000. Last year it was $231 million. In 5 years, it will be $340
Million, or nearly 20 percent of the city budget.
This same trend afflicts every state and municipality in the
country.
You may be fortunate enough to have a private-sector pension
plan.
Does your pension plan allow you to use your top year of earnings
(rather than an average of the top three or five years) to calculate your
pension? Does it allow you to pad your top year earnings with unused
sick pay and vacation time?
Does it allow for higher retirement pay than the salary for
the job?
Does it provide for unlimited free health benefit in
retirement? Does it
allow you to "retire", then come right back
and be re-hired for the same
job, effectively getting paid twice for the same work?
These and other benefits have accrued to public workers to
the point
that state and local governments are now run largely of, by and for the
unions. These governments are going broke, and taxpayers have had
enough.
Republican Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin faces a recall election on
June 5 because he fought for reform. National public employee unions
have pledged over $12 million to defeat him.
Elected in 2010, Walker inherited a $3.6 billion budget
deficit (in a
state of just 5.7 million people), millions in unpaid bills to state
vendors and the expectation that tax increases were necessary to solve
the problem.
Walker supported
spending reduction and reform instead of tax
increases.
His reform proposal included requiring state workers to
contribute
5.8 percent of their salary toward their pension plan where no employee
contribution had been required since 1966.
Walker also supported
restricting collective bargaining only to
salary, not benefits, and supported an end to automatic union dues
collection by the state from employee paychecks.
Last year, public
employee unions noisily occupied the Wisconsin
statehouse, and State Senate Democrats fled the state to prevent a vote
on Walker's
reforms. The reforms passed anyway.
One year later, spending reductions and pension reform have
erased
the Wisconsin deficit without tax
increases. The unemployment rate has
dropped from near double digits to under 7 percent. The Wisconsin
school
districts are hiring teachers.
One of Walker's
opponents in the recall, Democratic Milwaukee Mayor
Tom Barrett, warned last year that the governor's reforms would
"explode"
the city's deficit. This year, the city is running an $11 million
surplus because of lowered city retirement costs.
The demand for reform is bipartisan. The movement is
nationwide.
In Rhode Island, a
comprehensive pension reform package similar to
Wisconsin's
passed the heavily Democratic Legislature and was signed by
the governor.
In Massachusetts,
Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick has asked the heavily
Democratic Legislature to adopt a pension reform package that will save
that state over $5 billion over 30 years by raising
the retirement age
and basing pensions on the average of the five highest years of earnings.
In San Diego,
Councilman Carl Demaio heads a reform movement that
placed a nationally important Comprehensive Pension Reform (CPR) on the
June 5 ballot by initiative petition.
CPR bans "pension spiking" by restricting the
pension calculations to
base salary, requires 401(k) pension plans for all new hires and for city
politicians, requires equal employee contributions to the pension plan
and caps employee compensation for five years.
The largest national public employee union, the American
Federation
of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), has just opened a
Super PAC to funnel millions of national union dollars into defeating CPR
on June 5 in San Diego.
For good measure, the AFSCME opened a second Super PAC to
defeat Carl
Demaio who is also on the June 5 ballot running for San Diego mayor on
his reform platform.
These June elections will determine whether state and local
governments are responsive to the taxpayers or to the unions, and could
set the stage for the presidential election in November.
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By Joy Pullmann on April
26, 2012 Washington
Examiner
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/05/05/rogue-democrats-loot-detroit-as-nation-sleeps/
Earlier this month, the presidents of America's two largest teachers
unions co-hosted a screening of the new documentary "Bully." The
movie, of course, aims to combat bullying of schoolchildren.
But even as they publicly eschew bullying, these unions and
their locals across the nation bully teachers and competing organizations to
maintain membership and power. I have published a new report on the details of
this ugly trend in School Reform News.
In February, a Utah
teacher named Cole Kelly testified in favor of a bill that would penalize
school districts for not granting all teacher organizations -- not just unions,
but also other professional organizations -- equal access to teachers. A week
later, he was released from his position as athletic director, which for school
districts is tantamount to firing. His principal admitted she approved of his
job performance but had released him because of pressure.
Subsequently, other teachers texted
Kelly to say they agreed with him but were afraid of being fired if they spoke
out or left their union. He is contesting his release.
This spring, a Colorado
teacher emailed the state director of a nonunion teachers association,
explaining why she wouldn't publicly speak for a bill extending the state's
two-week window for ending union membership.
"They [the state union] are a large and powerful
organization," she wrote. "I want to speak out against them, but I am
afraid of the repercussions that I will face as a result and the possibility of
them doing something to make me lose my job."
At a new teacher orientation in Jacksonville, Fla.,
a union representative heard a presentation by a nonunion group. She walked
onto the stage before 600 teachers, accused the presenter of being "a
desperate former teacher" and stalked about the room ripping up the
competition's fliers, said Tim Farmer, membership director for the Professional
Association of Colorado
Educators.
These are not isolated incidents. Teachers unions engage in
repeated, unashamed aggression against dissenting teachers and competitor
organizations. In regular legislation-tracking for School Reform News, I have
uncovered many examples of such behavior across the country. Some are as
outrageous as the ones above, while others are mere annoyances. They all,
however, represent a consistent effort to intimidate teachers and suppress
ideas that might threaten their agenda.
"This is everywhere," said Alexandra Schroeck, communications director for the American
Association of Educators, the largest nonunion teachers association. AAE offers
teachers liability insurance, professional development grants and legal
representation in employment disputes, but it does not engage in collective bargaining
or political activism. Its fees are approximately $15 per month, whereas union
dues are often $50 per month or more. Like other nonunion teachers
organizations, such as Educators4Excellence in New York
and the California
Teacher Empowerment Network, AAE has been growing, but it constantly runs up
against unethical and sometimes illegal union-influenced resistance.
In Utah,
for example, a refusal to allow all teachers associations
equal access to privileges like payroll deductions, teacher in-services and
orientation, and committees (often a union, but no other teachers association,
is guaranteed a seat or several) is illegal. Rather than granting access, many
principals and superintendents just ignore phone calls and emails requesting it
to avoid admitting they are breaking the law, said the state's AAE membership
director, Charity Smith.
This year, Smith said, a large male union representative met
her at her presentation to a group of teachers and demanded she reveal whom she
had talked to, where she was planning to visit next, and her home address.
Teachers have whispered to her they were interested in leaving the union but
couldn't talk about it openly at school, slipping her their email addresses for
later communication. All the states the report covers are right-to-work states,
but this is not preventing such persecution.
Teachers unions proclaim to the public that they represent
teachers. They also say they are against bullying. My research provides
important context for both claims.
Joy Pullmann is managing editor of
School Reform News and an
education research fellow at the Heartland Institute.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/2012/04/when-bullies-grow-they-can-always-run-teachers-unions/538746
**************************
Rogue Democrats Loot Detroit
As Nation Sleeps
Walter
Russell Mead May 5, 2012 Few readers
will be surprised to learn that decades of incompetence and entrenched
corruption in Detroit’s government have not only helped wreck the city; firms
linked to former Democratic mayor Kwame Kilpatrick also looted the pension fund.
The latest
scandal, which leaves even hardened observers of the abysmal Democratic machine
that has run the city into the ground bemused, involves a real estate firm
which gave the felonious mayor massages, golf outings, trips in chartered jets
and other perks as this enemy of the people went about his hypocritical
business of pretending to care about the poor while robbing them blind. The
firm, apparently run by a sleazy low class crook named by the reprehensible
Kilpatrick to be the Treasurer of what was left of Detroit’s finances, used
Detroit pension funds to buy a couple of California strip malls. Title to the
properties was never transferred to the pension funds, and they seem to be out
$3.1 million.
Kilpatrick’s
partner in slime is his ex-college frat brother Jeffrey Beasley, who is accused
of taking bribes and kickbacks as he made bad investments that cost pension
funds $84 million. Overall, a Detroit Free Press investigation
estimates that corrupt and incompetent trustees appointed by Democratic officials
over many years in Detroit are responsible for almost half a billion
dollars in investments gone wrong.
I honestly
don’t know why there is so little national outrage about this despicable crew
and the terrible damage they have done. The ultimate victims of the crime are Detroit’s poor and the
middle class and lower middle class, mostly African-American municipal workers
who may face serious financial losses in old age.
The 41 year
old Kwame Kilpatrick may well be the worst and most
destructive American of his generation; his two terms as Mayor of Detroit are
among the most sordid and stomach churning episodes in the storied history of
American municipal corruption. Now under federal indictment for, essentially,
running Detroit City Hall as a criminal enterprise,
Kilpatrick reportedly turned down a plea bargain that included a 15 year prison
term. Insiders say that since the maximum time for the charges he faces was 18
years, the offer from the prosecutors indicates strong confidence in their
case. Indicted with him was his father; it’s nice to think that father and son
will have some quality time in the can.
We must all
hope for mercy in this world and the next and VM doesn’t exactly wish the worst
on these people, but if between the civil penalties, fines and lawsuits from
those they have wronged Kilpatrick and company are picked so clean that they
have to depend on their prison earnings for snack money in jail, helping them
out won’t be at the top of our charitable giving list. And one thing Michigan legislators
should check is whether the state has a nice harsh pension forfeiture law.
These
judgments are always subjective, but it seems to me that there is not nearly
enough national publicity about and outrage over the crimes of Kwame Kilpatrick. If a white or Asian Republican pol had looted fire and police pension funds, blighted the
lives of a generation of minority kids and helped do more damage to a great
American city than Hurricane Katrina, I don’t think this would be primarily a
local news story. I would expect that the scandal would grip the nation, and
there would be wall to wall national media coverage.
As there should be.
As it is, an eerie silence envelopes the subject. Outside the Michigan area, only the
most dedicated news hounds and political junkies follow this story.
Three
factors seem to be at work. One is quite simply financial; falling newsroom
budgets in the MSM mean that it is harder for national papers and legacy
networks to cover the country.
The second
factor is more disturbing: there is a pervasive national sense of ennui and
despair about urban areas in which African Americans are the majority. ‘We’
expect decline, decay and corruption in these places, so the Kilpatrick story
strikes many editors and journalists as just another ‘dog bites man’ story: not
news. Cory Booker is news; Kwame Kilpatrick isn’t.
That ennui
and despair intensify when the subject is Detroit.
Frankly, while the genteel world hates the thought of being racist, in reality
there is a widespread belief in even the most liberal and well educated
portions of the white upper middle class that nothing much better can happen in
Detroit. I
don’t believe that, and this is one of the reasons the city’s decline makes me
angry as well as sad. Lax law enforcement and oversight from federal and state
authorities allowed a climate of unrestrained corruption to grow up in Detroit over many years.
Putting a
lot more people in jail much earlier in their careers, and instilling a healthy
fear of the law in Detroit’s
political class would have slowed the decline at least, and might well have
created openings for better politicians to emerge. The failure of Detroit’s political class
must also be seen as a dramatic failure of national and state law enforcement.
The horses had been out of this stable for a long time before the authorities
showed up with padlocks in hand. One hopes that the Department of Justice will
move aggressively to target big city machines for investigation before more Detroits pop up. Similarly, state governors might want to
suggest to their attorneys general that corruption bears watching. Michigan
taxpayers are going to be stuck with huge bills as the state struggles to cope
with the consequences of misrule in Detroit; smart governors might not want to
wait until their cities collapse.
Finally,
there is a disconnect between important local news and
our national news culture today. The New York Times does a lousy job
covering New York city
and New York State; in the rarefied world of Times
readers, local news is dull. Many of our national news editors and writers see
themselves as cosmopolitan citizens of the world, interested in much more
exciting and important things than the grubby realities of local and municipal
life.
In this, the
journalists faithfully reflect the thinking of many members of the genteel
upper middle class; it is a kind of weird Platonic vision of reality in which
the ‘lower’, grubby levels of politics and national life count for less than
the ‘higher’, ‘nobler’ levels. Call it the gentrification of news; before Ivy
Leaguers filled the newsrooms, American papers focused on the nuts and bolts of
life. Now, they are much too highfalutin and hoity-toity for crime and city
hall reporters to be the cocks of the walk.
Thus, even
as interest in and reporting on the economic and social meltdown of so many
once prosperous American cities and states ebbs, the ‘aristocracy’ of the press
corps intensifies its endless and endlessly overdone coverage of the national
election cycle. Very little that is said or done in either the Romney or Obama campaigns right now has much to do with what voters
will be thinking about and voting on six months from now. But that doesn’t stop
the legacy press from obsessing about it while ignoring far more consequential
developments taking place on every side.
Detroit
doesn’t matter all that much to the New York Times and many of its
readers for the same reasons that Albany, Queens, Buffalo
and Schenectady
don’t matter. The new American elite wants to live and think as if it
has transcended all that dreary provincial mess and lives on high in a
world of Big Ideas and Global Issues. Mrs. Jellyby is
much more interested in visionary programs to uplift the inhabitants of Borrio-Boola-Gha than on making sure her own children are
well dressed and well cared for.
(At the American
Interest we are trying to change this pattern. Go here to read a review of some recent books on Detroit by John G. Rodwan that appears in our May/June print issue.)
There is
something profoundly wrong with an American political culture that accepts
chronic misgovernment in major cities as OK. It is not OK; the people who do
these things may call themselves liberal Democrats and wear the mantle of
defenders of the poor, but over and over their actions place them among the
most cold blooded enemies and oppressors of the weak.
American
cities have been festering pits of graft and bad governance since at least the
early 19th century, but there is a difference between the “honest graft” of
Tammany Hall and the nihilistic destruction practiced by some of today’s urban
machines. Today’s situation, in which some city machines are so dysfunctional
that the parasite is literally killing the host (and not just in Detroit), is
new and, again, the most vulnerable in our society suffer the worst
consequences. Minority children are the greatest ultimate victims of this
loathsome corruption: they attend horrible schools and grow up in decaying,
unsafe urban landscapes where there is no growth, no jobs and no opportunity
for the young.
How is it
anything but racist not to care about that — and not to burn with the desire to
put the scabrous thugs who misgovern our cities and waste our social funds in
prison where they belong?
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