Unions – Page 2 – The Burning Platform

BEST POLITICAL AD I’VE SEEN

I’m a sarcastic son of a bitch, so I really appreciate some good sarcasm. This is the most sarcastic dead on political commercial you will ever see. Tom Corbett is the Republican governor of PA. He tried to fix the bankrupt government pension system and tried to sell off the state liquor stores during his first term. Therefore, he will not have a second term. If you do anything that will take away power, control and money from government unions, you are finished as a politician. Tom Wolf is a multi-millionaire tax and spend Democrat who will win the upcoming election in a landslide. He promises to tax the “rich”. Of course, his definition of rich is anyone making over $70,000 per year. And considering everyone pays sales tax, even people making $25,000 will be considered rich come January.

native advertising

Tom Wolf will never attempt to fix the government pension system that will ultimately bankrupt every municipality in PA within the next ten years. He will just raise taxes on people whose real household income is lower than it was in 1999. Yeah. That’s the ticket. Do you sense my sarcasm?

WHY SAN BERNARDINO IS BANKRUPT

Nothing like spending 99% of your career siting around a firehouse playing cards and eating lobster and steak on the taxpayer, while getting paid $190,000 per year, retiring at 50 years old at full salary, and acting like you deserve it. This is the kind of shit that will not continue. There will be no tears shed when greedy government union drones lose their sweet salaries, benefits and pensions. The unsustainable will not be sustainable.

Via Public Sector Inc.

Firefighter pay shows why San Bernardino is bankrupt

Steven Greenhut June 24, 2014 Pensions

San Bernardino is a poor city about 50 miles east of Los Angeles in the Inland Empire — a place where a $50,000 salary would be typical and where home prices are nowhere near what they are in fancier areas of coastal Southern California. Yet the bankrupt city is trying desperately to unload some of its outlandish contracts with public employees, especially with the firefighters’ union. “San Bernardino, California, said that to exit bankruptcy it must terminate a union contract that pays an average annual salary of $190,000 to each of its top 40 firefighters,” according to an article in Bloomberg. That’s just salary. Firefighters receive the generous “3 percent at 50″ retirement package that allows them to retire with 90 percent of their final years’ pay at age 50. And there are lots of pension-spiking gimmicks and other benefits on top of that.

As the article notes, because of a voter initiative it may not be legal to dump those contracts. And I’ve looked at a city salary schedule, and the salaries are almost unbelievable throughout the city. City officials blame the economic downturn and the popping real-estate bubble for their financial plight. But that’s like saying that a salary cutback is the cause of an individual’s personal bankruptcy — never mind the Maserati in the garage, the trips to Hawaii, the diamond rings and the $200 nightly bottles of wine.

San Bernardino is in a financial fix that other California cities have mostly avoided, but the level of public-employee enrichment there is typical. These cities are run for the benefit of those who work there. Public services are a side matter at best. Two-thirds of the nation’s firefighters do this job for free, as volunteers. In what world is making them millionaires (when you add in their retirement benefits) a sensible idea? As usual, the city’s residents will pay the price in the form of reduced services. In Stockton and Vallejo, where similar salaries are common, residents also got hit with increased taxes. There’s something vulgar about hitting poor residents with higher taxes to pay for the city’s wealthy elite. And I hear no progressive voices complaining.

About Steven Greenhut

Steven Greenhut is the California columnist for U-T San Diego. Greenhut formerly was vice president of journalism at the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, where he managed a team of 35 investigative reporters and editors who covered state capitols across the country. He founded CalWatchdog in 2009, which provided Sacramento-based investigative news coverage and he writes regularly for publications including Reason, Human Events, Bloomberg and City Journal. He is author of the 2009 book, “Plunder! How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives And Bankrupting the Nation” and the 2005 book, “Abuse of Power: How the Government Misuses Eminent Domain.” View all posts by Steven Greenhut →

“IF I HAD A CITY, IT WOULD LOOK LIKE DETROIT”

If you think Obama and his government flunkies have done miracles with Government Motors since they saved this piece of shit union company with your tax dollars while ignoring bankruptcy law, wait until they are in complete control of your rectal exams. Obama loves to tout his saving of this awful company and the thousands of union drone jobs he was able to keep on the Democrat voting rolls. Who wouldn’t want to buy one of their death traps?

Of course, GM keeps reporting strong sales as they stuff their shitty inventory down the throats of dealers, use the government run ALLY Financial to dole out subprime 7 year 0% auto loans to the Free Shit Army Obama voters, and offer huge money losing discounts that guarantee losses for the company. They are using the tried and true method of selling each car at a loss, but promising to make it up on volume.

This is a joke of a company, reflecting a joke of a president.

The old saying “As GM goes, so goes the country” is truer today than it ever was in the 1950s.

GM Flunks Derek Zoolander School For Bailed Out Companies Who Can’t Build Cars Good, Recalls All New Camaros

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/13/2014 09:31 -0400

Another week, another massive GM recall, this time the bailed out company, which clearly is unable to build cars on the “first” attempt, announcing moments ago that it is recalling all current generation Chevvy Camaros “because a driver’s knee can bump the key FOB and cause the key to inadvertently move out of the “run” position, with a corresponding reduction or loss of power.” Supposedly, the issue, which may primarily affect drivers sitting close to the steering column (as opposed to?), was discovered by GM during internal testing following the ignition switch recall earlier this year.

Some truly divine comedy from GM:

“Discovering and acting on this issue quickly is an example of the new norm for product safety at GM,” said Jeff Boyer, vice president of GM Global Safety.

One wonders how many wrongful death lawsuits are piling into the GM inbox as a result of GM “acting quickly” on what are now over 16 million recalls in 2014 alone! According to the release, GM is aware of three crashes that resulted in four minor injuries that it believes may be attributed to this condition. Is death considered a minor injury by the product safety team at GM one wonders?

Separately, GM also announced two safety recalls and one non-compliance recall involving a total of 65,121 cars in the U.S. all three of which were reported to the NHTSA on Wednesday, June 11, 2014. Including Canada, Mexico and exports, the total recall population is 69,839.

Here is the full and updated list of cars recalled by GM in 2014 alone:

And here is what happens to GM when month after month it confirms it has flunked the Derek Zoolander school for bailed out companies who can’t build cars good: GM has now recalled 70% more cares than it sold in all of 2013, and has recalled 83% more cars in the first 6 months of 2014 than it did in the entire 2008-2013 period!

At least all those votes Obama bought when he bailed out GM were certainly put to good use… just not for building quality cars.

CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS “OUR” DOING GREAT

Now this is some really funny shit. This is what Obama, Rahm, teacher’s unions, and decades of Democrat run urban welfare kill zones have wrought. Nothing like a Chicago public school named after a famous black person, where the kids can’t read, write, add or subtract. At least they spelled Robeson correctly. I bet they have some really cool murals in this neighborhood showing black people doing great things.

Here are some more amusing facts about Paul Robeson high and the Chicago public school system:

The percent of freshmen who graduate from Paul Robeson high school within five years is 39.9%.
The ACT test is the best measure of how ready students are for college. A score of 21.3 or higher is “college ready.” “College ready” means that a student has about a 50 percent chance of getting a “B” or better in his or her college courses.The average score of the students that take the exam at Paul Robeson high is 13.4. These are the brightest and best at good old Robeson high.
Now for the real kicker. Thank Obama for those student loans doled out to anyone with the ability to breath. 53% of the graduates from Robeson high are “enrolled” in college. That is simply hysterical. No data on how many graduate. Do you think the American taxpayer will be getting paid back on those loans?
91% have to take remediation courses in college because of their basic math and school-work shortcomings.
If you think the City of Chicago school system is bad, check out Robeson’s scores versus everyone else. Then remember that 53% of the graduates enroll in college:

The 50% level of meeting minimum standards for Illinois is pitiful to begin with. 30% for the city of Chicago schools is pathetic. 5% for Paul Robeson high is about the most atrocious result possible. You could probably guess on every question and achieve that result.
So doing some basic math, we know that 40% of their students graduate and 53% of them enroll in college. That means that 21% of graduates go onto college. How can this be if only 5% of them can meet minimum standards for math, reading, and science? Could Obama’s student loan program be the cause of rising tuition? If students who should not be in college enroll with taxpayer funded loans, the demand stays high. Price is a function of supply and demand. Creating artificial demand through debt causes prices to rise. I’m sure Al Sharpton will be doing a story about this on MSNBC tonight.
The student diversity is 99% black.
The school district spends over $13,000 per student per year and achieves this result. But, the libs and the unions contend that if you hire more worthless teachers and spend $16,000 per student, all will be well. The student to teacher ratio is 15 to 1. Does that sound overwhelming? The ratio in my Catholic high school was at least 25 to 1.
The average Chicago Public School teacher salary is $76,000. That is the average. They work 9 months per year, produce this kind of result, and get paid 150% more than the average worker in America. And this doesn’t include their gold plated pension and health benefits.

This is the end result of LBJ’s Great Society. In the Englewood neighborhood, where Robeson is located, the average per capita income is a paltry $12,255 and the unemployment rate is running at almost 24%. You can bet the majority of these kids have never met their daddy. The welfare mentality breeds this type of person and leads to this result.

THIS IS ARE STORY should be the title of Obama’s autobiography.

THANK GOD OBAMA SAVED GENERAL MOTORS WITH OUR TAX DOLLARS

Obama and his minions have touted the huge success story of saving this murdering union controlled abortion of a company. They used your tax dollars, ignored bankruptcy law, and kept this piece of shit alive in order to keep their union constituents happy. Even though auto sales are supposedly booming, this company manages to lose money. They jam millions of vehicles onto overflowing dealer lots and call it sales. They have their government financing arm ALLY FINANCIAL dole out 0% seven year loans to deadbeats in the inner cities so the free shit army can drive Escalades.The bad debt loses will fall on the taxpayer.

In the meantime, the management of this fucked up company do presentations to employees about what not to put into emails. Every week we get a new revelation of defects, cover-ups and deaths of innocent people. Where is Obama now? Where is MSNBC and the union loving press? After reading the documents below, how can top executives of this company not be in jail?

Via Doug Ross

2008 GM document warned engineers to avoid “widow-maker”, “deathtrap”, “decapitate”, “Hindenburg” and other inflammatory words

You may recall that GM has suffered from a series of embarrassing product defects and recalls including one that the company “didn’t fix until 13 people had died.”

Patrick George at Jalopnik discovered a GM Powerpoint that illustrates how the automobile manufacturer went so far off the rails related to a whole host of catastrophic product defects.

George calls the presentation a “smoking gun” intended to dissuade employees from candidly discussing safety issues. In fact, one panel goes so far as to request that engineers avoid the use of the words “defect” or “safety” and instead focus on “issue, condition or matter.”

One panel offers a laundry list of words to avoid including “disemboweling”, “impaling”, “maiming”, and “mangling” even if, presumably, victims were in fact disemboweled, impaled, maimed and mangled by said vehicles.

So Toyota committed no such crimes and was forced to pay billions in fines (after laughably being accused by Eric Holder of a “cover up”) while GM really does cover up a “death trap” and will pay $35 million?

Sounds fair.

Hat tip: BadBlue Car News

WTF CHARTS OF THE DAY – WHERE THERE’S NOT SMOKE, THERE’S FIRE

I was watching some new sitcom last night that takes place in a NYC bar. A bunch of NYFD dudes came into the bar and women swarmed around these heroes. One of the skeptical characters in the show walked up to them and pointed out the number of fires in this country were 85% lower than 50 years ago. He told them he had likely put out as many fires as they had in the last year. They got bent out of shape by him using facts to pop their hero balloon. Later in the show he told them rain could do their job.

The episode made me curious and lo and behold checkout this chart. Thirty five years ago we needed 225,000 career fire fighters to handle 2.4 million fires. Today, with much better equipment and technology, we somehow need 340,000 career fire fighters to handle 1.37 million fires. That’s 50% more firefighters for 40% less fires. I smell something and it’s not smoke. It’s the stench of another government union scam.

The government and the firefighters’ unions know these drones sit around the firehouse 99.8% of the time collecting high pay, gold plated benefits and retirement with full pay at 50 years old. They get more false alarms than actual fire calls. There was only one way to pretend they are useful and needed. Whenever an ambulance call comes in they send a fire truck just for shits and giggles. You’ve all seen fire trucks at the scenes of minor car accidents or other medical emergencies. Whenever you see six firefighters standing around at a fender bender accident scene remember that it costs you the taxpayer approximately $3,500 every time a fire engine leaves the station.

Who could possibly question the gold plated pension of a firefighter who has never fought an actual fire? This entire country is a scam.

“PROGRESSIVE” NYC MAYOR TELLS BEST PERFORMING CHARTER SCHOOLS IN THE STATE TO DROP DEAD

Let’s cut through all of the crap. The charter schools run by Eva Moskowitz are hugely successful – meaning they produce far better educated children than the disgraceful NYC public schools. Her schools got 13,000 applications from parents for 2,000 spots. Parents desperately want their kids in these schools. They cost the NYC taxpayers 30% less per child and one of the schools produced the highest average math scores in the entire state of New York. All of the kids in this school were minorities from poor households.The mayor of NYC is closing them down.

De Blasio doesn’t give a flying fuck about the kids. The NYC teacher’s union doesn’t give a flying fuck about the kids. They care about power, votes, bloated pensions, no accountability for results, and their own warped liberal agenda. Moskowitz pays her teachers 35% more than the drones in the public school system, but holds them accountable for results – highly educated and motivated children. What a concept.

The liberal progressive union scum show their true colors when they pull this shit. Obama and his minions are willing to destroy this country in order to inflict their failed ideology on the masses.

Via The Daily Beast

Why Is Progressive Hero Bill de Blasio Throwing Charter Schools Out of New York City?

Success Academy shares space with public schools in the same building, and New York’s mayor is willing to fight his own party to kick them out.

When does a local education fight become a national bellwether? When it touches a policy lightning rod, scrambles partisan allegiances, and involves political actors who stand in for whole political ideologies.And, sure, it helps when the locale staging the fight is New York City.New mayor Bill de Blasio made waves last Thursday when his administration withdrew three agreements that would have allowed public charter schools to share space with district schools in public school buildings. The affected schools are all part of the Success Academy network of schools, which was founded by Eva Moskowitz, a former New York City councilmember. These “co-location” agreements were approved last October, under previous mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration.While some of the city’s public charter schools operate out of privately owned buildings, all Success Academy schools are co-located with district schools. According to Ann Powell, communications director for Success Academy, the network sees this as a “civil rights issue…[our] parents shouldn’t have to pay rent. Our students are public school kids.” Indeed, while public charter schools are free from some of the regulations that district schools must follow they are still publicly funded.

But de Blasio—and others—have argued that this “abhorrent” arrangement amounts to giving public charters a free ride. Leo Casey, Executive Director of the Albert Shanker Institute and a former vice president of New York’s teachers union, suggested that it’s about more than just rent: “Eva Moskowitz’s schools are a particularly egregious case…every school is co-located and as a co-location, what they get for free is not only the building, the facilities itself, not only the space that’s up to code, etc. They get the food [and] janitorial services.”

When asked about these costs, Powell noted that public charter schools receive $13,527 in public funds for each student. Traditional district schools receive just over $19,076 in public funds for each student.

In response, Casey noted that the city’s Independent Budget Office has calculated that the gap in public funding may be somewhat narrower in recent years—and may slightly favor public charters housed in public buildings. They also found that public charters paying for private facilities receive significantly less per student funding than district public schools. Charter advocates have disputed the IBO’s analysis (PDF), arguing that they don’t take district schools’ large pension costs into account.

Unsurprisingly, the fight was big news in the New York metro area.

But since the national media has anointed de Blasio as one of the spokesmen for a resurgent Democratic Party progressivism, his moves attracted much broader attention. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor accused him of waging a “war against kids” and House Republicans promptly announced a committee hearing on “The Role of Charter Schools in K-12 Education.”

While there’s nothing particularly surprising about Republican opposition to a progressive mayor’s approach to urban education policy, their attention actually has more to do with intra-party Democratic politics. After all, De Blasio and Moskowitz are both Democrats—though their personal and ideological differences are vast. Some Republicans, following Cantor’s lead, have been probing at public charter schools—and school choice programs more broadly—as a wedge issue with potential for causing dissension amongst Democrats. The current battle in New York City provides some evidence supporting their approach.

There is no love lost between Moskowitz and the mayor. De Blasio singled her out for criticism while campaigning, arguing that she had “to stop being tolerated, enabled, [and] supported” by the city’s Department of Education. As Casey sees it, de Blasio revoked the co-location agreements to “lay down a marker” that would send a signal to all New York City public charter operators.

But it’s a mistake to see last week’s public charter school fight as simply the latest twist in a personal grudge match. Nor is the faceoff as simple as a battle between public charters and teachers unions. The union in New York City—the United Federation of Teachers—actually runs its own public charter school in Brooklyn.

The rancor between de Blasio and Moskowitz has at least some roots in substantive education policy disagreements. During his campaign, de Blasio promised to roll back Bloomberg Administration policies on public charter schools. He began fulfilling that pledge one month into his term when his administration reallocated $210 million from a public charter school expansion fund. This—among other moves—has put him at odds with many New York Democrats, most notably Governor Andrew Cuomo (who responded Monday with a promise to provide state funding for the displaced schools).

Indeed, interviews for this story turned up a wide range of responses to the de Blasio administration’s move. Success Academy’s Powell touted its benefits for kids: one of the schools the mayor is evicting had the highest-performing 5th graders in New York’s state math assessment in 2013. There weren’t just the highest performing in the city, she repeated. They were first in the entire state. “It’s just a little odd that we can’t find some space for a few hundred minority kids…80% of them are on free or reduced lunch, and nearly all are high-performing. You’d think that New York could use more schools like that.”

A New York Democratic Party consultant, who asked to remain anonymous because of the intra-party nature of the debate, called de Blasio’s revocation of “both personal and ideological.” The consultant went on: “de Blasio is deeply hostile to the idea of charter schools. He is deeply hostile to the education reform movement as a whole…There’s a spectrum in the Democratic Party, where you have people like Barack Obama and [Colorado Governor] John Hickenlooper and even Cuomo…who believe that education reform and charter schools can be a positive force in public education.”

Asked to elaborate, the consultant added, “[De Blasio] is someone who just subscribes to the traditional teachers union based belief that anything outside the old school public education, any innovation, any reform, is a bad idea.”

Meanwhile, Casey, who serves on the board of a New York public charter school, cheered the mayor’s decision: “What’s happened in NYC now is that [Success Academy] is reaping what they sowed.” He argued that Success Academy and other similar public charters had provided cover for the Bloomberg administration’s efforts to undermine collective bargaining and close struggling district schools. In Casey’s eyes, “no-excuses charters” like Moskowitz’s take an approach “that is indistinguishable from Walmart’s” when it comes to employee bargaining rights.

Sam Chaltain, author of the forthcoming book, Our School: Searching for Community in the Era of Choice, suggested that co-location might sometimes be effective, but noted that it could invite uncomfortable comparisons between schools: “in the worst case, it could make one school feel inferior.”

When I asked him if this sort of division could cause trouble for Democrats on a national level, Bellwether Education co-founder and partner Andrew Rotherham, a prominent education writer and former Clinton Administration official, laughed and channeled Will Rogers: “That’s the 64 thousand dollar question. Look, this is the Democratic Party, so if you’re looking for unity or coherence, you’ve got to look somewhere else.”

Maybe this is just another manifestation of Democratic disorganization. it spread beyond the five boroughs—and into national partisan politics?

I asked Chaltain if he thought public charters could be a productive wedge issue for Republicans. He demurred: “The overall climate of what people think about charters and school choice varies so much from city to city.” This is certainly true. State charter laws vary widely across the country—and eight states have no public charter schools at all.

What’s more, public charter schools are a very small slice of the American education system. Out of the nearly 50 million K-12 students in American public schools, less than 2 million attend public charters. There are more students in Catholic schools. Indeed, there are nearly three times as many K-12 students in private schools than in public charters. The upshot: it’s hard to see how this very small population could drive enough controversy to sustain a national political discussion.

But focusing on the size of the American public charter sector might be missing the point. Problematic ideological splits are usually rooted in principle—not pragmatism. Chaltain cautioned, “I do think it’s a big intra-Democratic Party battle, and I think it’s a split in the value proposition about public education.”

This gets at why education inhabits a unique space in American politics. Because it is deeply implicated in American democratic and meritocratic ideals, it is permanently controversial (consider, for instance, the persistent, rumbling fights over implementation of the Common Core State Standards).

Nonetheless, education rarely grabs headlines or news cycles the way that other, more dramatic topics regularly command. Check cable news: for every one segment covering ongoing education fights, you’ll see dozens covering the situation in Ukraine. In part, this is because the education system is just too large for a targeted national discussion. Attempts at comprehensive education reform usually span federal, state, and local governing institutions, as well as myriad union contracts and funding sources. Which makes them complicated. And nothing kills political controversy like complexity, so most education politics flareups happen at the state or local level—where the arguments don’t need to be as broad.

In other words, education politics has a unique dynamic; it has permanent political potency, but can’t usually hold national attention for long. Public charter schools may be locally controversial, but it’s hard to imagine them driving a national campaign to Democrats’ detriment.

What’s more, education politics can be a double-edged sword. Educational ideology cuts across party lines—a rarity in twenty-first century American politics. For instance, the fight over the Common Core has made allies out of Jeb Bush and Barack Obama. And while public charter schools challenge Democrats’ unity, Republicans education factions may be more consequential.

Consider the other plank in de Blasio’s mayoral campaign: universal pre-K. De Blasio promised to fund universal pre-K in New York City with a tax hike of about 0.5 percentage points on incomes of over half a million dollars each year, but hasn’t been able to push that through the legislature in Albany (which must sign off on all NYC tax increases). The program remains in a holding pattern as the mayor fences with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose counterproposal offers a slower path to universal access and relies on existing state revenues.

Republicans are in a tough position on pre-K. While the American public, nearly all elected Democrats, and a majority of Republican voters (PDF) support expanded access to high-quality early education, Republican officials are split. Last summer, the reliably conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce co-hosted an event with the Center for American Progress to call for increased American pre-K investment. A few months ago, the House and Senate introduced bills aiming to make pre-K universally available for families living at or below 200 percent of the poverty line. The House bill has two Republican co-sponsors and widespread Democratic support. And while Republican governors like Michigan’s Rick Snyder have fought hard for larger investments in early education, many in the party remain opposed.

In other words, high-quality pre-K is a much more powerful political issue than public charter schools. While American early education policy is heavily shaped by a number of federal laws, charter policy is almost entirely determined at the state level. This, by the way, is why public charter schools’ quality varies widely from state to state. A recent Stanford study (PDF) found that public charters in Washington, D.C. and New York substantially outperformed similar district schools, while public charters in Nevada and Texas lagged far behind their district peers.

So while it’s tempting to frame the fight in New York as a perilous fight between Democratic education reformers and “the de Blasio wing” of the party, public charter schools are just too local to drive a national political conversation—let alone a serious civil war within the Democratic party.

Of course, even though public charter schools aren’t a promising plank for national political leverage, they’re still plenty controversial. The lightning rod isn’t going away, cautioned Chaltain. “The school choice genie is out of the bottle…To me, the only question is how can school choice unleash a virtuous cycle that raises the tide of educational opportunity?” And while that’s a conversation that’s both less exciting and more uncomfortable than the current debate in New York, it’s almost assuredly a more productive one.

CULTURE OF IGNORANCE – PART ONE

“Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.”
– Thomas Edison

The kabuki theater that passes for governance in Washington D.C. reveals the profound level of ignorance shrouding this Empire of Debt in its prolonged death throes. Ignorance of facts; ignorance of math; ignorance of history; ignorance of reality; and ignorance of how ignorant we’ve become as a nation, have set us up for an epic fall. It’s almost as if we relish wallowing in our ignorance like a fat lazy sow in a mud hole. The lords of the manor are able to retain their power, control and huge ill-gotten riches because the government educated serfs are too ignorant to recognize the self-evident contradictions in the propaganda they are inundated with by state controlled media on a daily basis.

“Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession – their ignorance.” – Hendrik Willem van Loon

The levels of ignorance are multi-dimensional and diverse, crossing all educational, income, and professional ranks. The stench of ignorance has settled like Chinese toxic smog over our country, as various constituents have chosen comforting ignorance over disconcerting knowledge. The highly educated members, who constitute the ruling class in this country, purposefully ignore facts and truth because the retention and enhancement of their wealth and power are dependent upon them not understanding what they clearly have the knowledge to understand. The underclass wallow in their ignorance as their life choices, absence of concern for marriage or parenting, lack of interest in educating themselves, and hiding behind the cross of victimhood and blaming others for their own failings. Everyone is born ignorant and the path to awareness and knowledge is found in reading books. Rich and poor alike are free to read and educate themselves. The government, union teachers, and a village are not necessary to attain knowledge. It requires hard work and clinging to your willful ignorance to remain stupid.

The youth of the country consume themselves in techno-narcissistic triviality, barely looking up from their iGadgets long enough to make eye contact with other human beings. The toxic combination of government delivered public education, dumbed down socially engineered curriculum, taught by uninspired intellectually average union controlled teachers, to distracted, unmotivated, latchkey kids, has produced a generation of young people ignorant about history, basic mathematical concepts, and the ability or interest to read and write. They have been taught to feel rather than think critically. They have been programmed to believe rather than question and explore. Slogans and memes have replaced knowledge and understanding. They have been lured into inescapable student loan debt serfdom by the very same government that is handing them a $200 trillion entitlement bill and an economy built upon low paying service jobs that don’t require a college education, because the most highly educated members of society realized that outsourcing the higher paying production jobs to slave labor factories in Asia was great for the bottom line, their stock options and bonus pools.

Instead of being outraged and lashing out against this injustice, the medicated, daycare reared youth passively lose themselves in the inconsequentiality and shallowness of social media, reality TV, and the internet, while living in their parents’ basement. They have chosen the ignorance inflicted upon their brains by thousands of hours spent twittering, texting, facebooking, seeking out adorable cat videos on the internet, viewing racist rap singer imbeciles rent out sports stadiums to propose to vacuous big breasted sluts on reality cable TV shows, and sitting zombie-like for days with a controller in hand blowing up cities, killing whores, and murdering policemen using their new PS4 on their 65 inch HDTV, rather than gaining a true understanding of the world by reading Steinbeck, Huxley, and Orwell. Technology has reduced our ability to think and increased our ignorance.

“During my eighty-seven years, I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.” – Bernard M. Baruch

The youth have one thing going for them. They are still young and can awaken from their self-imposed stupor of ignorance. There are over 80 million millenials between the ages of 8 and 30 years old who need to start questioning the paradigm they are inheriting and critically examining the mendacious actions of their elders. The future of the country is in their hands, so I hope they put down those iGadgets and open their eyes before it is too late. We need many more patriots like Edward Snowden and far fewer twerking sluts like Miley Cyrus if we are to overcome the smog of apathy and ignorance blanketing our once sentient nation.

The ignorance of youth can be chalked up to inexperience, lack of wisdom, and immaturity. There is no excuse for the epic level of ignorance displayed by older generations over the last thirty years. Boomers and Generation X have charted the course of this ship of state for decades. Ship of fools is a more fitting description, as they have stimulated the entitlement mentality that has overwhelmed the fiscal resources of the country. Our welfare/warfare empire, built upon a Himalayan mountain of debt, enabled by a central bank owned by Wall Street, and perpetuated by swarms of corrupt bought off spineless politicians, is the ultimate testament to the seemingly limitless level of ignorance engulfing our civilization. The entitlement mindset permeates our culture from the richest to the poorest. Mega-corporations use their undue influence (bribes disguised as campaign contributions) to elect pliable candidates to office, hire lobbyists to write the laws and tax regulations governing their industries, and collude with the bankers and other titans of industry to harvest maximum profits from the increasingly barren fields of a formerly thriving land of milk and honey. By unleashing a torrent of unbridled greed, ransacking the countryside, and burning down the villages, the ruling class has planted the seeds of their own destruction.

When the underclass observes Wall Street bankers committing the crime of the century with no consequences for their actions, they learn a lesson. When billionaire banker/politicians like Jon Corzine can steal $1.2 billion directly from the accounts of farmers and ranchers and continue to live a life of luxury in one of his six mansions, they get the message. Wall Street bankers are allowed to commit fraud, reaping profits of $25 billion, and when they are caught red handed pay a $5 billion fine while admitting no guilt. No connected bankers have gone to jail for crashing the worldwide financial system, but teenage marijuana dealers are incarcerated for ten years in our corporate prison system. The message has been received loud and clear by the unwashed masses. Committing fraud and gaming the system is OK. Only suckers play by the rules anymore. A culture of lawlessness, greed, fraud, deceit, swindles and scams was fashioned by those in power. Reckless disregard for honesty, truthfulness, fair dealing, and treating others as you would like to be treated, has permeated the beliefs and behavior of our society.

The ever increasing number of people in the SNAP program along with abuses committed by retailers and recipients, the skyrocketing number of people faking their way into the SSDI program, billions of taxpayer dollars lost to Medicare fraud, billions more lost paying out earned income tax credit refunds based on non-existent children, public schools falsifying test scores, students cheating on SAT tests, credit card fraud on a grand scale, failure to report income and falsifying tax returns, and a myriad of other dodges and scams are just a reflection of a moral and cultural collapse. The dog eat dog mentality glorified by the media, with such despicable men as Dimon, Greenspan, Corzine, Clinton, Trump, Rubin, Bernanke and Bloomberg honored as pillars of society, has displaced honesty, compassion, humanity, shared sacrifice, and caring about our descendants. Self-interest, self-indulgence, and a narcissistic focus on what is in it for me today has led to an implosion of trust and an attitude of “who cares” about our fellow man, morality, right or wrong, and the fate of future generations. We ignored the warnings of our last President who displayed courageousness and truthfulness when speaking to the American people.

“As we peer into society’s future, we — you and I, and our government — must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Me Generation has devolved into the Me Culture. While the masses have been mesmerized by their iGadgets, zombified by the boob tube, programmed to consume by the Madison Avenue propaganda machines, enslaved in chains of debt by the Wall Street plantation owners, and convinced by their fascist government keepers that phantom terrorists are hiding behind every bush, they surrendered their freedoms, liberties and sense of self-responsibility. There will always be evil men seeking to control and manipulate the ignorant and oblivious. A citizenry armed with knowledge, critical thinking skills, and moral integrity would not passively submit to the will of a corporate fascist oligarchy. Well educated, well informed citizens, capable of critical thinking are dangerous to rich men of evil intent. Obedient, universally ignorant, distracted, fearful, morally depraved slaves are what the owners of this country want. As the light of knowledge flickers and dies, we sink into the darkness of ignorance.

“No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.” – Samuel Adams

Cult of Ignorance

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” – Isaac Asimov

“While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible.

In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of man to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.” – Henry Hazlitt

America’s cult of ignorance, combined with the selfish interests of various constituencies, the character weakness of the people elected to office, a lack of understanding or interest in basic mathematical concepts, and inability to comprehend the long term and unintended consequences of every piece of legislation, have brought the country to the brink of fiscal disaster. But still, the vast majority of Americans, including the supposed intellectuals and economic “experts”, are basking in their ignorance, as the stock market reaches a new high, the local GM dealer just gave them a 7 year $40,000 auto loan at 0% on that brand new Cadillac Escalade, Bank of America still hasn’t foreclosed on their McMansion two years after making their last mortgage payment, and they just received three pre-approved credit card notices from Capital One, American Express and Citicorp. As long as Bennie has our back printing $1 trillion new greenbacks per year, nothing can possibly go wrong. Our best and brightest economic minds are always right:

“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” – Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929

“Many of the new financial products that have been created, with financial derivatives being the most notable, contribute economic value by unbundling risks and shifting them in a highly calibrated manner. Although these instruments cannot reduce the risk inherent in real assets, they can redistribute it in a way that induces more investment in real assets and, hence, engenders higher productivity and standards of living.” – Alan Greenspan – March 6, 2000

“We’ve never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis. So, what I think what is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize, might slow consumption spending a bit. I don’t think it’s gonna drive the economy too far from its full employment path, though.” – Ben Bernanke – July 2005

The profound level of ignorance displayed by economists, politicians, business leaders, media personalities, and the average American, regarding the mathematically unsustainable path of our fiscal ship is perplexing to me on so many levels. If the Federal government was a family, the budget ceiling debate would be put into the following terms. Our household earns $28,000 per year, but we spend $38,000 per year and add $10,000 to our credit card balance, which stands at the limit of $170,000. In addition, we owe our neighbors $2 million we don’t have because we promised to pay if they voted for us as Treasurer of our homeowners association. We celebrate our good fortune of getting approved for another credit card with a $30,000 limit by increasing our spending to $39,000 per year. Intellectuals scorn such simplistic analogies by glibly pointing out that the family has a crazy uncle with a printing press in the basement and can pay-off the debt with his freshly printed dollars. And this is where the deliberate and calculated ignorance by the highly educated Ivy Leaguers regarding long term and unintended consequences is revealed. They ignore, manipulate, cover-up and obscure the facts because their wealth, power and influence depend upon them doing so. But ignorance doesn’t change the facts.

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” – Aldous Huxley

Nothing exposes the ignorance of various factions within our society better than a debate about budgets, spending, and unfunded liabilities. This is where every party, group, special interest, and voting bloc ignore any and all facts that are contrary to their selfish interest. They only see what they want to see. The fallacies, errors, omissions and mistruths of their positions are inconsequential to people who only care about their short-term self-seeking interests. When I question the out of control spending on entitlements and our impossible to honor level of unfunded liabilities, those of a liberal persuasion lash out with accusations of hating the poor, starving children and throwing granny under the bus. Anyone suggesting we should slow our spending is branded a terrorist by the overwhelmingly liberal legacy media.

When I accuse Wall Street bankers of criminal fraud and ongoing manipulation of the financial markets, the CNBC loving apologists for these felons bellow about the market always being right. When I rail about the military industrial complex and our un-Constitutional invasions of other countries, the neo-cons come out in force blathering about the war on terror and imminent threats. When I point out the horrific results of our government run educational system and how mediocre union teachers are bankrupting our states and municipalities with their gold plated health and pension plans, I’m met with howls of outrage about the poor children. The common thread is that facts are ignored because each of their agendas requires ignorance on the part of their team’s fans.

The following chart of truth portrays an unsustainable path. Ignoring the facts will not change them. This isn’t a Republican problem or a Democrat problem. It’s an American problem.

“There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: “In the long run we are all dead.” And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.” – Henry Hazlitt

Henry Hazlitt may have written these words six decades ago, but they aptly describe Paul Krugman and the legions of Keynesian apostles whose bastardized interpretation of Keynes’ theory has led us to this fiscal cliff. How anyone can truly believe that borrowing to consume foreign produced goods versus saving and making job creating capital investments is a rational and sustainable economic policy is the height of ignorance. One look at this chart exposes the political party system as a sham. When it comes to the fiscal train wreck, set in motion thirty years ago, the ignorant media pundits peddle a narrative about politicians failing to compromise as the culprit in this derailment. Nothing could be further from the truth. Compromise is what has gotten us to this point. The Republicans compromised and allowed the Democrats to create a welfare state. The Democrats compromised and allowed the Republicans to create a warfare state. The Federal Reserve compromised their mandate of stable prices and preventing financial calamities by inflating away 95% of the dollar’s purchasing power in 100 years, while creating bubbles every five or so years, like clockwork. There are a myriad of facts related to the chart above that cannot be ignored:

It took 192 years for the country to accumulate $1 trillion in debt. It has taken us 30 years to accumulate the next $16 trillion of debt. We now add $1 trillion of debt per year.
If the Federal government was required to use GAAP accounting, the annual deficit would amount to $6.7 trillion per year.
The fiscal gap of unfunded future liabilities for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and government pensions is $200 trillion.
Using realistic growth assumptions adds another $6 trillion of state and local government unfunded pension benefits to the equation.
The Federal government has increased their annual spending from $1.8 trillion during Bill Clinton’s last year in office to $3.8 trillion today, a 110% increase. The population has increased by 12% over that same time frame, and real GDP has advanced by 25% since 2000.
Defense spending has increased from $358 billion in 2000 to $831 billion today, despite the fact that no country on earth can challenge us militarily.
The average Baby Boomer will receive $300,000 more than they contributed to Social Security and Medicare over their lifetime. Over 10,000 Boomers per day will turn 65 for the next 17 years.
The Social Security lockbox is filled with IOUs. The funds collected from paychecks over the last 80 years were spent by Congress on wars of choice, bridges to nowhere, and thousands of other vote buying ventures.
A normalization of interest rates to long-term averages would double or triple the interest on the national debt and increase our annual deficits by at least 30%.
Obamacare and the unintended consequences of Obamacare will add tens of trillions to our national debt. The initial budget projections for Medicare and Medicaid showed only a modest financial impact on the financial situation of the country. How did that work out?
Entitlement spending in 2003 was $1.3 trillion. Entitlement spending in 2008 was $1.7 trillion. Entitlement spending in 2013 was $2.2 trillion. Entitlement spending in 2018 will be $2.8 trillion, as these programs are on automatic pilot.

When you consider the facts in a rational manner, without vitriolic denials, bitter accusations, acrimonious blame, and rejection of the entire premise, you come to the conclusion that we’ve passed the point of no return. Decades of bad choices, bad leadership, bad men in important positions, bad education, bad governance, and bad citizenship have led to bad times. But very few people, across all socio-economic classes, have any interest in understanding the facts or making the tough choices required to save future generations from a life of squalor. We willfully choose to ignore the facts.

“Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.” – Aldous Huxley

Our degraded and ignorant society is incapable of comprehending their dire circumstances or acting for the common good of the country. We are a nation on the take. Greed really is good. Everyone needs to play the game. From the top floor corporate CEO suite to the decaying urban wastelands, we have chosen comforting ignorance to uncomfortable knowledge. Our warped form of democracy enriches the few at the top, while dispensing enough subsistence payments to the lower classes to keep them from revolting, while enslaving the middle class in debt and convincing them it’s really wealth. Mencken understood the pathetic impulses of the American populace decades before we reached our point of no return.

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” – H.L. Mencken

The only way a democracy can survive is if the population is knowledgeable, vigilant, skeptical, educated, individually responsible, self-reliant, moral, capable of critical thinking and willing to accept the consequences of their actions. A nation of takers, fakers and blamers will not last long. We’ve degenerated into a nation of knowledge hating book burners. Our culture of ignorance will lead to the destruction of our culture and the ignorant masses will wonder what happened.

“But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can’t last.” – Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451

In Part Two of this examination about our culture of ignorance I’ll explore the roles of technology, family breakdown, government, and propaganda in creating the ignorance that is consuming our system like a mutant parasite. If you are seeking a happy ending, I suggest looking elsewhere.

PENNSYLVANIA – KING OF UNFUNDED GOVERNMENT DRONE PENSION PLANS

The Wall Street shysters and their mouthpieces on CNBC have gleefully ripped Meredith Whitney and her prediction of thousands on municipal bankruptcies. Her timing was early. She didn’t realize that Bernanke would bow down to his masters and produce a 100% stock market gain by pumping $2.5 trillion of free money into the veins of the Wall Street addicts. His actions have solved nothing. Municipalities across the land have unfunded pension and health benefits in excess of $4.5 trillion. And this calculation is based upon annual investment gains of 8%. That’s hysterical when long term bonds yield 2.5% to 3.5% and stocks are priced to deliver 3% over the next ten years. Using a true investment rate of 3% to 4% reveals a true unfunded liability in excess of $6 trillion.

It seems Pennsylvania is ground zero for unfunded pensions and my Township is one of the worst examples of governmental incompetence in the state. How could one state account for 25% of ALL the public pension plans in the entire country? I guess we’ve cornered the market on dumbass public officials, greedy government union drones, and a delusional populace that can’t understand basic math. The Governor and the legislature know that government pension obligations are a looming fiscal disaster. What actions did they take when they passed the 2014 budget last week? NOTHING!!! There are elections coming up in November. You can’t get re-elected by telling voters the truth or getting government union employees mad. This is why we’re doomed. No politician has courage. Greedy government drones will never willingly give up what was promised them by slimy politicians. The average voter thinks money grows on trees. When the next financial crisis hits and wipes 30% to 40% out of these pension plans, accounting fraud and underfunding of these pensions will come home to roost. Meredith’s predictions will come true as municipalities declare bankruptcy and government workers end up with 20% of what they were promised.

My township of Towamencin is singled out in this article as an example of a municipality that has screwed its 17,600 residents by promising its police, firemen and other government workers more than they can ever deliver, without jacking up taxes significantly on the citizens. I pulled up the details of the Towamencin pension plan and annual budget at these links:

http://www.auditorgen.state.pa.us/Reports/Pension/munTowamencinTwpPPP071012.pdf

http://www.towamencin.org/documents/finance/2013_Proposed%20Budget.pdf

According to these reports the Towamencin pension plan is only 61% funded. A township with a $16 million annual budget owes $9.5 million to its workers. It’s assets have an actuarial value of $5.8 million. Of course, all of these figures are complete bullshit because they are based on an 8% annual return on the invested assets. Using the 3% they will actually achieve, the plan is underfunded by $5 to $6 million. That is $800 per household in the township. What is it with politicians and promising public employees gold plated benefits that far exceed what people in the real world receive? In the early 2000’s the annual pension payments for Towamencin were in the $100k per year range. Then Tom “code red” Ridge and the idiots in Harrisburg passed the “No Government Drone Left Behind” law and set in motion a future fiscal disaster of epic proportions.

The population of Towamencin has not budged since 2000. The annual pension payment has gone from less than $100k per year to over $900k per year. It now accounts for 6% of the annual budget and 11.5% of the general fund budget. It is on automatic pilot and will exceed $1.2 million in three years. This is before the inevitable stock market implosion. After the 30% to 40% losses, the annual required contribution will ramp up to $1.5 million as their tax revenues contract. The politicians that run this township have a history of delusional fantasies. They borrowed millions and used eminent domain to build a $500,000 bridge to nowhere. They wiped out five baseball fields and a quaint antique mall with the delusion of a retail paradise. The bridge is beautiful. It leads from one massive vacant weed infested parcel to another vacant parcel. They did build a massive brand new municipal building for the government drones. They poured millions into a pool that losses patrons every year and operates at a loss. These brilliant financial moves have led to annual debt service of $1.7 million, or 11% of their budget. By 2015 the pension and debt service costs will account for over 20% of the annual budget.

Math is hard. Politicians are toadies. Government union employees are greedy. The taxpayers are on the hook for the promises made by toadies to greedy government drones. Reality will smack all of these delusional morons. The obligations cannot be honored because it’s mathematically impossible. Taxes would need to double in order to honor the unfunded liabilities. If the government drones don’t accept large cuts in their pension and health benefits, municipalities will go bankrupt and the drones will be screwed even worse. The parable of the scorpion and the frog will play out because unions NEVER accept reductions in their benefits. It’s their nature.

IGNORANCE IS A CHOICE WITH CONSEQUENCES

Not only are there 165 million members of the free shit army out there, but they are also the most ignorant mass of humanity in U.S. history. When you examine the statistics and see the results achieved by our government run union public school system at an annual cost of $10,600 per student, you have to wonder whether this was done on purpose. Did our owners purposely create an educational system designed to keep the masses ignorant, stupid and unable to think critically? Did they set out to keep us so stupid we wouldn’t be able to figure out how badly they were screwing us? Or is the mass ignorance in this country the result of individuals and families just not caring about learning, questioning, and having a desire to better themselves? Why study hard, work hard, and read books for fun, when the government provides the minimal level of subsistence to those who do nothing?

I believe it’s a combination of factors. Our owners and their politician puppets prefer an ignorant apathetic public who don’t understand math. It allows them to pillage the wealth of the nation and pass the bill to future generations. The selfishness and inherent laziness of a vast swath of the American populace is a perfect fit for the owners’ master plan. All is going swimmingly. It seems Fat, Drunk and Stupid is the way to go through life.

The kids are not alright

By Jack Kelly

The kids are in peril. The unemployment rate among Americans aged 18-29 is 50 percent higher than the national average. More than 43 percent of recent college graduates who have jobs do work which does not require a college education.

If the Obama administration policies which keep unemployment high are reversed, for most of us, the recession will end. But the kids will still be screwed, because they don’t know what they need to know to survive in the global economy.

The key is STEM education — Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics. The United States used to be the world’s leader. Today, we’re one of just three of the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development where the kids know no more about these subjects than their parents did.

The kids don’t know much of anything else, either. More than half of high school seniors scored “below basic” in their knowledge of history, according to the National Assessment of Education Progress.

In a National Geographic survey, half of Americans aged 18-24 couldn’t find New York state on a map. Only 3 percent of high school students could pass the citizenship test foreigners take to become Americans, a survey in Oklahoma found. Only a handful of the roughly 6,000 students who’ve passed through his classroom know how to form a sentence or write an intelligible paragraph, a retiring high school teacher told Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle.

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance,” said Harvard University president Derek Bok (1971-1991).

Boy, was he right! For the monumental ignorance described above, we spend, on average, $10,615 per pupil in the public schools. That’s almost 250 percent more, in real terms, than we spent in 1970, when students were learning.

Kids today don’t even know how little they know. “Many students tell me that they are the most well-informed generation in history,” said George Mason University professor Rick Shenkman.

If we had more teachers, and paid them more, the problem would be solved, teacher unions say. Since 1970, the number of teachers and administrators in public schools has risen 11 times faster than enrollment. This has meant more union dues, more campaign contributions for Democrats. But students learn less.

Not because teachers are underpaid. Their compensation is 150 percent more than for private sector workers with similar skills, according to a study last year by the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. On an hourly basis, teachers earn more than most accountants, architects and nurses.

There are many good teachers. It isn’t they who teacher unions represent. If we got rid of the worst 5 to 7 percent of teachers, that alone would lift our schools back among the world’s best, said the Hoover Institution’s Eric Hanushek. But it’s for that 5 to 7 percent that teacher unions go to bat.

About 30 percent of high school students studying math, 60 percent studying the physical sciences, are taught by teachers who did not major in the subject in college, or are not certified to teach it.

“How in the world can we expect our students to master science and technology when their teachers may not have mastered it?” asked U.S. News publisher Mortimer Zuckerman.

The retired or layed-off professionals who could close the gap are kept out of the classroom because they haven’t taken the dreck education courses the cartel has made prerequisites.

Schools of education are by no means the only reason why things are as bad — or worse — at the next level. Students are more likely to leave college with massive debt than with marketable skills.

For Democrats, support for “education” means giving teacher unions whatever they want. More Americans disagree. In Gallup’s annual poll in June, only 29 percent expressed confidence in public schools, the lowest level ever recorded. That’s down from 58 percent when Gallup first asked the question in 1973.

“How much ignorance can a country stand?” Mr. Shenkman asked. “There have to be terrible consequences when it reaches a certain level.”

We’ll find out soon what those consequences are, Mr. Morford’s teacher friend thinks. To “escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years,” he’s considering moving out of the country.

JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration.

$100,000 UNION METER MAIDS – WONDERING WHY CALIFORNIA IS BANKRUPT?

Government union employees should enjoy the remaining time in their fantasyland of high salaries, tremendous health benefits and glorious pensions. It will all end because the promises are un-payable. It’s simple math. The taxpayers will not pay. The localities will declare bankruptcy because they have no choice. The money isn’t there. All the promises will not be fulfilled. So Solly.

Hermosa Beach meter maids making nearly $100K?

August 10th, 2012, 9:01 pm · · posted by Brian Calle

When contemplating the many reasons cities in California and elsewhere are venturing closer to bankruptcy, look no further than the relatively lucrative and often-unjustifiable salaries bestowed on municipal employees – and the lofty pension benefits attached to the high pay.

One of the latest examples comes from the California coastal city of Hermosa Beach, where some community service staffers who collect money from parking meters and manage their operations – positions once widely known as “meter maids” – are making nearly $100,000 a year in total compensation, according to city documents.

Article Tab: Newport Beach outsourced parking meter collection and enforcement to a private firm last year.

There are 10 parking enforcement employees for the 1.3-square-mile beach city southwest of downtown Los Angeles, and they pull down some disproportionate compensation, considering their job functions. In fact, the two highest-earning employees for fiscal year 2011-12 are estimated to have made more than $92,000 and $93,000, respectively, according to city documents provided by Patrick “Kit” Bobko, one of five council members and who also serves as mayor pro tem. Those two have supervisory roles. The other eight parking-enforcement employees make from $67,367 to $84,267 in total compensation.

There are four qualifications for being a city “community service officer,” Bobko told me: “You have to be able to drive a standard transmission; you have to able to handle large animals; you have to read and interpret statutes and regulations; and you have a high school diploma or equivalent.”

According to the city’s job description, these community service officers are supposed “to enforce meter and other regulations governing the parking of vehicles on streets and municipal parking lots; to enforce animal regulations; may drive city buses; collect meters and perform minor meter repairs; perform related work as required.”

The section of the job description that gives examples of job duties reads as follows: “Patrols streets and municipal parking lots and checks vehicles for parking violations; issues citations for parking violations; impound vehicles in certain cases; collects and transports stray dogs to designated holding facilities; investigates complaints for animal control violations; may drive city buses; meter collection and minor meter repair.”

Bobko also wrote in a memo that the retirement costs for these 10 employees “from [fiscal year 2011-12] through their retirement age at 62 was nearly $1.6 million, and the medical costs for these employees from this fiscal year to their retirement at age 62 would be $1,353,827.” Excluding salaries, the [retirement] contributions and medical costs for the 10 employees performing parking enforcement will cost, on average, nearly $300,000 apiece.”

Aside from the personnel costs, there has been criticism from Hermosa Beach Treasurer David Cohn that parking meter operations have been mismanaged. Cohn cited nonfunctioning parking meters, a backlog in disputed parking tickets and problems with the accounting for revenue.

Bobko told me that his concern is that, when taxpayers learn that city employees “are making high wages for low-skilled jobs, they are not OK with it.” That’s especially true when considering these jobs easily could be at least partially automated or even outsourced, for less money.

Bobko is pushing a plan to outsource the city’s parking enforcement operations, which he says will save money, reduce maintenance costs, relieve the city of accounting functions related to parking enforcement, increase efficiency and, perhaps most importantly, increase revenue and “reduce the city’s pension and salary obligations.”

There has been opposition to the outsourcing proposal from Hermosa Beach’s Police Chief Steve Johnson and Councilman Howard Fishman. Both expressed concerns about letting go full-time city staff. Bobko accurately characterized the resistance: “When you outsource, you take away union jobs.”

In this case, outsourcing parking-enforcement duties would benefit the taxpayers among Hermosa Beach’s population of slightly less than 20,000. For an example of how such a switch might work, Hermosa officials could travel about 45 miles south along the coast to Newport Beach, where the city successfully moved to outsource parking enforcement last year.

“We have seen increased revenues with the private company operating the meter program,” Newport Councilwoman Leslie Daigle said.

Since Newport made the move, the city “has seen a 24.4 percent increase in parking-meter revenues over last year and salary savings of approximately $500,000 from outsourcing parking meter operations,” according to Tara Finnigan, a spokeswoman for the city.

Privatizing parking meter duties also is a national trend, as detailed in a recent study by the libertarian Reason Foundation. Chicago and Indianapolis have had success with outsourcing parking enforcement, and other cities including New York, Pittsburgh, Sacramento, Memphis, Tenn., and Harrisburg, Pa., are considering privatization proposals.

Indianapolis City Councilman Ben Hunter told me, “The privatization of the parking meter system in Indianapolis allowed for an immediate upgrade of a poor system.”

Back in Hermosa Beach, “We can’t keep making promises with money we don’t have to people we are paying well above what the market would pay them,” Bobko said.

Public employee compensation and retirement costs are proving unsustainable. More cities in the Golden State and elsewhere need to accept that reality and act on it to avoid fiscal calamity, perhaps starting with the meter maids.

THE AUTO RECOVERY IS A TAXPAYER FINANCED SCAM

The two stories below tell me all I need to know about the great auto recovery. I bet you didn’t know that GM and the rest of the automakers record their sales when the vehicles are shipped to their dealers. Zero Hedge has been all over the channel stuffing being done by Government Motors for the last two years as they now have 60% more vehicles sitting on dealer lots than two years ago, even though sales are up less than 20%. And now we see that Obama is doing his union bretheren a favor and buying GM cars like they’re going out of style. You the American taxpayer are subsidizing GM, just as you took the $50 billion hit when Obama screwed bondholders using your money.

Lastly, we know for a fact that Ally Financial (aka GMAC) is still 85% owned by you. It is dishing out subprime auto loans like SNAP cards in West Philly. Moody’s is already warning about the coming disastrous losses that will be experienced by YOU the taxpayer when all these crap loans go bad. But that doesn’t matter to Obama. There is an election to be won. The losses to the American taxpayer will come in 2013 and 2014. Don’t expect the MSM to fill you in on the government scam. They are part of the scam, as their ad revenue is dependent on car ads. What a great country.

GM Finds Creative New Ways To “Stuff Channels”, Get Backdoor Taxpayer Bailouts

Submitted by Tyler Durdenon 07/06/2012 12:53 -0400

Zero Hedge readers know that we have long followed channel stuffing trends at GM, whose month-end dealer inventory hit a record (for the post-reorg company which is completely different from the pre-bankruptcy entity) of 713K cars stuck in various dealer “channels” at the end of March 2012, and since then has been stagnant at just about 700K, with the most recent June number coming at 701K, an increase of 6K over May. It would be great to assume that the company has given up on cheap ways to cheat investors and the taxpaying public into believing it is doing better. It would also be wrong. As it turns out, GM has merely turned to more backdoor methods of stuffing channels, and getting money from its biggest shareholders, which still happens to be Joe Sixpack (and “superpriority” labor unions of course) by way of the US Treasury, with 32% of the common stock.

The NLPC explains:

It looks like General Motors will be throwing everything in but the kitchen sink to help fluff its second quarter earnings numbers. Taxpayers continue to help with the cause as President Obama campaigns on the “success” of GM following the manipulated bankruptcy process that cost taxpayers $50 billion and another $45 billion of tax credits gifted to GM to help protect powerful UAW interests. We now learn that government purchases of GM vehicles rose a whopping 79% in June.

As a reminder, this is how GM’s general channel stuffing looked like for all its vehicles:

However there is a rather important data subset here:

According to a Bloomberg report, “GM said inventory of its full-size pickups, which will be refreshed next year, climbed to 238,194 at the end of June, a 135 days supply, up from 116 days at the end of May.” 135 days supply is huge, the accepted norm is a 60 day supply. The trick here is that GM records revenue when vehicles go into dealership inventories, not when actually sold to consumers.

This is how pickup truck channel stuffing looked in the period that the company has released the data, or since December 2011. Not pretty.

And while we all know by now that the tried and true mechanism to channel stuff is a staple when it comes to fooling the buyside as to its business efficacy, the fact that its biggest shareholder has become a key marginal client of GM should make one’s head spin at the Ponziness of the transaction:

The government’s increased spending on GM vehicle purchases presents yet another conflict of interest as Treasury refuses to sell taxpayers’ stake in GM and Obama campaigns on the auto bailouts. It does not appear that any members of Congress (from either party) are questioning the increased spending. Also ignored was the Department of Energy’s gifting of $2.7 million of taxpayer money to GM to reduce energy consumption in its door manufacturing process by 50%. The DOE seems to be one of the main conduits to funnel taxpayer funds to cronies of the Administration. The $2.7 million contribution to GM comes after additional millions of dollars were spent by the DOE on advisory fees paid to legal firms that helped smooth the way for the GM bankruptcy process (as reported here); another move that went unquestioned.

And there is more:

GM claimed that sales increases did not rely on incentive spending, which appeared to remain in check, but one analyst during GM’s sales conference call questioned whether the company’s “stair step” incentive spending was accurately depicted. This incentive spending kicks in after dealerships report final sales figures for the month and may be yet another deceptive way for GM to fudge its numbers. Not mentioned was GM card rewards programs that do not get counted as incentive spending.

Why is GM forced to succumb to such increasingly more deceptive practices? Why simple presidential election politics of course: when a failed company like GM is destined to symbolize the “success” of one’s administration, there aren’t many straws one can latch on to.

The upcoming earnings announcement by GM is, politically, the most important to date. The pressure is on Government Motors to appear financially strong as this may be the last earnings report before November elections and sets the stage for how “successful” GM is. One of GM’s past tricks to help fudge earnings numbers has been to stuff truck inventory channels. Old habits die hard at GM.

The article goes on to quote Kelley Blue Book’s Alec Gutierrez who stated “They’re (GM) likely going to have a relatively high days supply of trucks moving forward and they’re already placing some pretty aggressive cash incentives on the hood. It’s going to eat into their profit margins…”

GM’s earnings announcement comes on August 2nd. The main headwinds will be weak European operations and growing pension liabilities. The headline number for earnings should be viewed skeptically and an eye kept on the share price reaction after the conference call. Expect Government Motors to put a positive spin on its financial health as the stakes are now at their highest. The long-term health of GM remains in question and the true financial picture may not surface until well after voters decide who will be running our country. Eventually we will see just how successful GM really is.

At the end of the day, all of this is noise. If China retaliates in kind to the recen escalation by Obama vis-a-vis alleged Chinese deceptive trade practices, the GM will soon be able to kiss half of its top line, and who knows how much of its margin and bottom line goodbye. Because when half of your sales go to the one country which America’s non-existent (and unionized) manufacturing base loves to hate, the last thing you want is to bite the hand the pays the bills. Yet this is precisely what is going on as the politics of this country become so misguided that in the pursuit of a few extra votes, the administration is willing to sacrifice what little clout and momentum the recently bankrupted automaker may have generated.

In the meantime, looks for channel stuffing and direct government purchases to soar to unseen levels in the weeks and months heading into the presidential election as GM (and its 40% stock price drop since the IPO) will certainly be a key debate point between the Democrats and the GOP.

Moody’s: Hot US subprime auto lending market has parallels to the 1990s

Global Credit Research – 28 Jun 2012

New York, June 28, 2012 — The subprime auto lending market in the US is developing a resemblance to its condition in the early- and mid-1990s, when overheated competition among lenders led to poor underwriting that drove up losses, says Moody’s Investors Service in a new report. As in that earlier period, capital is pouring into the sector and the issuance of subprime auto asset-backed securities (ABS) is booming.

“It is too early to predict whether today’s subprime lending market will deteriorate as it did in the 1990s, but the early similarities between then and now suggest that losses will climb if competition intensifies,” says Moody’s Vice President Peter McNally, author of the report “US Subprime Auto Lending Market Harkens Back to 1990s.”

Over the last two years, because of the sector’s profitability, a large amount of private equity investment has gone into the subprime auto lenders, many of which are relatively small, specialty finance companies, says Moody’s.

Moody’s says the interest of investors from outside the subprime auto market niche and the potential for increased competition carry the risk that losses could increase if a race for profits and market share lowers underwriting standards. The growth in the market can lead to capacity issues, says Moody’s McNally. “When losses rise quickly, inexperienced lenders have trouble servicing a loan portfolio that requires more attention.”

In the 1990s, the number of small lenders boomed, leading to intense competition for loans that in turn led to weak underwriting and high losses on securitized loans. Net losses in subprime auto ABS, according to Moody’s, jumped from under 3% in early 1995 to over 10% in December 1997.

For the past several years subprime auto loan performance has been strong, with the net loss rate currently below 4%. However, the credit quality of pools securitized in 2011 and 2012 indicate that credit has loosened since 2010, says Moody’s.

Issuance of subprime auto ABS is on pace this year to exceed the robust issuance of 2011, which comprised 24 deals, totaling $14.3 billion.

Moody’s notes several differences between today’ s market and the overheated market of the 1990s.

One credit positive for today’s market is that most lenders no longer practice gain on sale accounting, whereby lenders capitalized securitization gains and credited them to equity, which made their balance sheets look stronger than they were.

Another is that the market is not yet overcrowded with new lenders. Moody’s counts 13 active securitizers at the moment, compared with 34 issuers in 1997.

An important credit negative is that transactions are no longer backed by monoline guarantors. These bond insurers absorbed losses on transactions that would have otherwise defaulted in the 1990s and took over transaction servicing from failing lenders.

IT’S NOT FAIR – TOUGH SH%T!!!

One of my Dad’s favorite phrases was “Tough Shit”. If you told him he was being unfair or unreasonable, his answer was usually “Tough Shit”. It’s tough to argue with that logic. The phrase came to mind as I read the Op-Ed in my local paper yesterday from a teacher in the North Penn School District. He seems like a decent fellow who cares about the students he teaches. His arguments in favor of reasonable pay and reasonable workloads have validity. I’d also agree that the demotions of 36 young teachers is unfair. But at the end of the day, I’d have to tell the guy TOUGH SHIT!!!

You see, life isn’t fair. The school district asked the teachers union to accept a one year salary freeze in order to balance the budget. The union said NO. So, the school district demoted the 36 teachers to make up for the budget shortfall. There are two sides to the issue. The union contracts for teachers are too rich. The administrators who run the school district were delusional fools.

When housing was booming 5 years ago and real estate taxes were rolling in at a tremendous rate, the administrators decided to build a beautiful new football stadium and an Olympic size pool, while signing gold plated contracts with the teachers union. They added more teachers and more administrators. It was a glorious future. Well guess what? The tax revenue plunged as home prices and real estate transactions cratered. You can’t undo a new football stadium and new Olympic sized pool. You can’t renege on a five year teacher contract with guaranteed 4% salary hikes, huge pension promises, and gold plated healthcare guarantees.

You see, we’ve elected people who promised us lots of free shit in order to get themselves elected. This is true at the local, state and federal level. We have lived our lives depending upon those promises to be kept. We didn’t need to save for a rainy day. We could retire on the huge equity in our houses. The stock market would always go up. And life would be full of unicorns and rainbows. Well it was all a lie. The money is gone. It wasn’t real. The promises can’t be kept. You can’t borrow your way to prosperity. Your standard of living has been about 40% too high for the last two decades and it is coming to an end. And you know what?

TOUGH SHIT!!!

It is what it is. It isn’t fair, but that doesn’t matter. Get over it. You are going to get screwed, one way or the other. Below is a picture of a beautiful bridge in my township. My town spent millions to build this bridge. They borrowed the money. The used eminent domain to get rid of ten houses so they could build the bridge five years ago. They knocked down and flattened an old antique shop and wiped out 5 little league baseball fields where my kids played baseball for this bridge. They assured us that there would be a huge retail complex on one side of the bridge and hotels, condos and townhouses on the other side of the bridge. We call it the bridge to nowhere. Nothing has been built on either side of that beautiful bridge. NADA!!! There is no hint of a retail complex. No condos. No townhouses. Just debt and a bridge too far.

Towamencin can’t sell the bridge. The money is gone. Wasted. Pissed down the drain. The clueless morons we elected have moved on to greener pastures and left us a bridge to nowhere. It’s not fair. But guess what?

TOUGH SHIT!!!

This has gone on at every level of government for decades. Social Security isn’t solvent. It isn’t in a lockbox. The thieves in Congress spent the money on wars and tax breaks for hedge fund managers and for public housing in West Philly. The major cost saving part of the Gang of Six debt ceiling plan is to change the CPI calculation so that they can pay you less money in your retirement. They already understate the CPI by about 5%, so what’s another 2% or 3% among friends. This isn’t fair to senior citizens or people who will retire over the next 20 years. But guess what?

TOUGH SHIT!!!

Look at the chart below. We have spent tens of trillions on our war industry over the decades and what has it achieved? Did it keep us from being invaded by a foreign enemy? Have we ever been at risk of being attacked? NO!!! We have spent trillions meddling in other people’s business and creating enemies so the military industrial complex could enrich itself and their captured politicians. The trillions are gone. Wasted. Pissed away for no good reason. You can’t sell off the aircraft carriers and thousands of fighter planes. The money is long gone.

We are $14.4 trillion in debt. We will be $20 trillion in debt by 2015. Our unfunded promises exceed $100 trillion. The promises won’t be kept. The country will undergo a once in a lifetime purge over the next ten years. Since 90% of the people in the country are delusional, the purge will be forced upon the country by outside forces. We won’t willingly reduce our standard of living by 40%, but it will happen. It’s not fair, but guess what?

TOUGH SHIT!!!

YOUR SAY: Teacher speaks out about North Penn

By Jonathan Alba
Conshohocken resident

Is it not beautiful that we have the right to free speech in this country? I hope so.

I am concerned. I am concerned about the current direction in which the North Penn School District may be headed. Surely nothing too bad can happen anytime soon; I mean, we just did get a national ranking.

But a drastic change is now on the horizon, at least from my perspective. Also, this drastic change, as I have chosen to put it, is exactly where my aforementioned concern resides.

In fact, the school board has chosen to demote 36 teachers at the secondary level. Please don’t be mistaken. The demotion carries with it a remarkable advantage. Doubtless, the board has found a simple solution to its financial consternation.

Unfortunately, the disadvantage in my mind must be brought to the attention of the public, just in the event that it has not quite been made clear.

What is the disadvantage? Well, in my department, a youthful teacher who is absolutely relentless in his attempts to improve his craft has been given a difficult decision. Stay, and make 40 percent of his salary, or leave and learn to manage another school system (they’re all different, you know … just like snowflakes).

Additionally, two of my colleagues will be asked to teach six classes. I did that in the beginning of my career, and I suppose you could say that it’s surprising that I’m still here in some respect. I stayed and kids … thank you so much as so very many of you have rewarded me, and each of you in a unique way.

In truth, I witnessed bright and capable young teachers leave North Penn in search of greener pastures. Translation: teaching six classes is hard. Additionally, I found out that at other districts they compensate for the extra workload.

As an example, at the time I was in my initial years of teaching, in Abington High School a high school teacher instructing six classes rather than five were given a fifth of their salary as extra pay. I believe in the business world they call that motivating your employees.

Though our school board appears to treat these demotions as just business, I am not certain that the demotions are good business. Actually, increasing class size and worsening work conditions, in my mind, can likely lead to a decline in the quality of our education at North Penn. Wait, what is our business? It is quality, right?

I understand that the decisions to cut the budget were not easy. Nor could they have been. However, can there not be another way? I plead, and understand that I wish it to be the most humble of pleas, that we as a community reconsider all of our options before casting your next vote for the school board. I do not mean to take advantage of rhetoric, but nonetheless, I say it is our children’s education at stake.

Kids don’t always learn from our words; but I do think they do learn from our actions more often than not. Should we be concerned about what the action of demoting the teachers conveys to the kids? I cannot answer that question; quite literally, I am not capable. But I am concerned.

I like my job. I am looking forward to my teaching schedule next year and it is one that I am greatly anticipating. Might all of that be in jeopardy with my comments? I suppose. However, I would sacrifice that in order to promote awareness.

Jonathan Alba is a resident of Conshohocken.

THE YEAR THEY BROKE MY DAD’S UNION

With all the Union stories in the last week, my mind was jogged to a strike that occurred 39 years ago when I was 8 years old. I guess it is odd that I would remember particular incidents about that strike even though I was only 8. I wasn’t a normal kid. I still remember sitting on the floor in my living room by myself watching the Watergate Hearings on PBS. I actually used my little tape recorder to record Nixon’s resignation speech on a cassette tape.

My Dad worked for Atlantic Richfield from the day he graduated high school until the day he retired 43 years later in 1986. The Atlantic refinery was in South Phila on Passyunk Avenue. It is still there under the banner of Sunoco. He was a member of the Atlantic Independent Union. It’s membership was 6,000 workers. The union was formed in 1937. National union membership peaked in the 1950’s and was in rapid decline by the early 1970s.

The strike occurred between January 3, 1972 and February 1, 1972. Truck drivers, mechanics, and even secretaries manned the picket lines. This wasn’t a strike about wages or benefits. It was a strike about fairness. Atlantic merged with Richfield of California in 1966. They then merged with Sinclair Oil in 1969. The company decided that employees of all three companies would receive the same pension benefits. The Atlantic Employees Union claimed that Atlantic employees had contributed more to the plan over the years, so they deserved higher benefits. If that was true, it sounded like a reasonable demand. This was not a union that caused trouble. They had never declared a strike in their 35 years of existence. But this one was a doozy.

This was the 1st time I had ever heard the term “Scab”. My Dad would do his daily stint on the picket line in front of the refinery gate. Management and “scabs” continued to deliver gasoline to the gas stations during the strike. My understanding was that a few “scabs” may have met the wrong side of a baseball bat after their shifts. While stopped at red lights in the City, somehow the valves were opened on trucks allowing gasoline to pour all over the highway. Windshields were smashed and cops had to protect the “scabs”.

This strike went on for one month. We certainly were not a well off family. The Union paid a small amount to each worker from their funds. I think we used food stamps for the 1st and only time in our lives. I remember many meals of Hamburger Helper and the always tasty Spam and eggs. My mom would buy one gallon of milk and mix it with powdered milk and water to get two gallons of milk. The highlight for an 8 year old was when the strikers and families marched on the company headquarters in downtown Phila. It was South Philly, so our march was accompanied by a String Band.

Being a small union, with limited resources, they eventually cracked. After one month, they threw in the towel. The union lost badly. They drained their resources and didn’t win better benefits for their workers. I truly don’t know which side was right, but I know which side won. Eventually, ARCO was swallowed up by BP. I do know for a fact that BP has methodically thrown its retirees under the bus as they reduced promised benefits and increased the healthcare costs for its retirees. Their goal was to make retiree benefits so expensive that the retirees would would just switch to Medicare. Brilliant financial corporate move by the most respected corporation in the world. Stick the taxpayers with your overpromising of benefits.

When it comes to unions and mega-corporations, it is tough to distinguish between the villians and the goods guys.