I am already $38,375 in debt and I only own a dollhouse!Is The Lisbon Treaty in our future and if so how bleak will be the prospects become? You decide.
Wilkie died a long time ago but his "One World" concept never did and it is gathering momentum.(See 1 below.)
Mitchell has always been a hard ball player, some say ruthless. Will he convince the administration to carry out his implied threat? (See 2 below.)
Class Warfare pays well for a classy few. (See 3 below.)
Now that Obama has spent everything in the till and then some, it is time to raise taxes without signalling he is doing so. One way is to tax banks while simultaneously blaming them for our economic troubles. That way, you energize the public who willingly succumb to the 'blame game'
charade.
Moreover, you can't tax government because taxes flow only in one direction, ie. from taxpayers into The Treasury.
Of course, taxing banks might cause them to be reluctant to make loans and, of course, many banks are going to be made to pay for the sins committed by Congress and many of their competitors. But scapegoating is seldom an egalitarian undertaking. (See 4 below.)
Haiti has always been a south of the border basket case and now another tragedy has befallen that poverty stricken and politically corrupt nation and therefore us. Why? Because we always respond to disasters but seldom gain much by way of thanks. Should we stand aside and let Chavez and the Castro brothers come to Haiti's aid? No, because that would be immoral but it did cross by mind. (See 5 below.)
An investment group that I have great confidence in and have been a client of theirs for many years agrees with my own view that this administration has tried to buy us out of this recession and have disregarded the consequential prospect of long term pain. They too suggest we could still be in the '...eye of a hurricane.'
Only a great magician can make the government disappear. (See 6 below.)
My son attended an intelligence briefing this evening and told me several things as follows:
1 a) America came up with the Atom Bomb in 5 years and that Iran is still at it suggests they may have the know how but still technically have not been able to do it and that it is a good bet their efforts are being thwarted by a variety of subversive activities.
b) Legislation that has passed the House should pass the Senate by Summer and be signed by Obama. This legislation calls for, among other things, the following:
a) any supplier of processed fuel oil selling to Iran will not be allowed to sell here.
b) Any freight company shipping said products into Iran will not be allowed port entry here.
c) Any bank transacting with Iran will not be allowed to clear in the U.S.
2) China's reluctance to support our sanction effort against Iran is seen as a desire to exercise leverage to get our attention on matters of keen interest to them, ie. our weapons supply to Taiwan, China's desire to be embraced into the world community, particularly as relates to trading status and though they have committed to many projects in Iran no money has been allocated or transferred.
3) Sometime this summer economic sanctions should be approved and implemented and could result in a swift crippling of Iran's economy, and, hopefully, the overthrow of their current regime.
Sanctions are preferable to an attack which would result in rallying the dissidents around the Iranian flag - our State Department's continued expressed fear.
4) Obama is not, by nature, a unilateralist and if China climbs aboard he will implement sanctions.
In terms of the November elections, he was told, at this juncture, a rout is forming and even if Mass. should return a Democrat, the fact that the national party has to commit significant funds, Obama has to campaign the message should be clear to all Democrats - they are in serious trouble
The consequence of even a narrow loss in Mass. by the Republican candidate, who virtually came out of nowhere, will send a message to reluctant Republican supporters to start writing checks. Money remains the lifeblood of politics.
The final message is that Americans refuse to be governed by extreme fringes.
Dick
1)The Breaking of Nations
By John Griffing
Americans should pay attention to the Lisbon Treaty and the corresponding events in Europe. We're on the same road, and we're fast approaching a point of no return.
Europe -- the Europe of free and independent nations -- is no more. Sovereignty is all but dead there, and a collective behemoth, tellingly referred to as the "European soviet" by Mikhail Gorbachev, now straddles the continent, ushering in a new tyranny for the 21st century. With the unanimous (and highly undemocratic) ratification of the infamous Lisbon Treaty on November 3, 2009, the European Union has achieved a transfer of authority that even the most aggressive military conquests could not. Even the German Anschluss can't compare to this unified surrender of freedom by stargazing Europeans.
Europe is now lost to history. In the Lisbon treaty are calls for E.U. treaty-making power (immediately "binding" on member states -- national parliamentary ratification not optional) [1], a common immigration and asylum policy (i.e., no more national control of illegal immigration flows) [2], and the most damning proposal, a requirement that individual nations receive permission from fellow member-states before military action can be taken in the self-interest of the nation concerned [3].
The agreement says, "The Union's competence in matters of common foreign and security policy shall cover all areas of foreign policy and all questions relating to the Union's security, including the progressive framing of a common defense policy that might lead to a common defense" [4]. The new pan-European High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy now commands the largest collective military force in the region.
Borders are no longer an issue, because Lisbon solves immigration problems by "ensuring the absence of any controls on persons, whatever their nationality, when crossing internal borders" [5].
Even voting rights have been circumvented. Lisbon contains provisions granting foreigners the right to vote and stand in elections in nations not their own, so long as they are European s[6]. Should Germans represent British citizens? With no authentic collective interest, this development promises to sever citizens from their leaders and neutralize political accountability. Even U.S. states don't allow non-residents to stand in local elections.
Also in the Lisbon Treaty is one of the most destructive documents in European history, counterintuitively called the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Long resisted by some member nations due to the large seizures of individual liberty inherent in the document, the charter contains a provision that reads: "Limitations [on individual liberty] may be made ... if they are necessary and genuinely meet objectives of general interest recognized by the union or the need to protect the rights and freedoms of others"[7].
The degradation of liberty has already begun. Lisbon comes complete with a European justice system, replacing centuries of Anglo-Saxon common law with the Code Napoleon -- i.e., guilty until proven innocent. European courts can now kidnap innocent British citizens to stand trial in foreign lands by way of the new European Arrest Warrant (EAW). So far, over two hundred Britons have been arrested under the EAW, and 101 have been extradited.
The unelected European Commission can revise, edit, or even remake the laws passed by the people's duly elected representatives. The "primacy of EU law," which has been compared to the American supremacy clause, has been used to overturn historic liberties in the 25 E.U. nations. In fact, significant elements of the Magna Carta were recently overturned with a simple majority vote in the European Parliament, and British leaders were obliged to conform. The exercise of British sovereignty today is a mere formality, as all European law and regulation is "binding in its entirety," leaving to the national authorities only "the choice of form and methods" [8].
The all-powerful European Court of Justice, which began as a trade court very similar to arrangements within NAFTA, has now become a virtual Supreme Court, striking down national laws and changing local cultures and identities artificially to conform to E.U. guidelines [9].
How did this happen? How did independent nations with separate identities and divergent cultures allow themselves to be bullied into submission by a gaggle of European bureaucrats in Brussels? The answer is that the attack on European nationhood was implemented brick by brick, piece by piece, bite by bite. Europe lost its sovereignty fifty years ago with the establishment of an incremental framework designed to feed Europeans an elephant one bite at a time. As the father of the European project Jean Monnet once said:
Europe's nations should be guided toward their super-state without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.
Those responsible for these destructive steps knew what they were doing. A recently declassified Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) document reveals startling knowledge of the potential damage to British sovereignty prior to British entry into the European Common Market. FCO analysts concluded that "[t]he loss of external sovereignty will ... increase as the Community develops, according to the intention of the preamble to the Treaty of Rome 'to establish the foundations of an even closer union among the European peoples.'"
The end of nationhood in Europe offers a stern warning for the United States, because many of the same individuals involved in the creation of "Europe" are active in the U.S. And here, they won't need fifty years.
We can't comfort ourselves with the common American self-delusion of "that could never happen here," because it is happening here, and on a crash timetable. NAFTA, which was sold as a trade arrangement, has grown into something else, wielding actual power over the United States.
In 2001, a NAFTA panel required America to open its borders to Mexican trucks.
More recently, a NAFTA panel ordered America to rescind a defensive tariff on softwood lumber initiated in response to Canadian softwood subsidies. Americans are to feel comforted, since NAFTA panels have said they will "consider" the rulings of federal circuit courts when deciding cases.
Through international agreements like NAFTA and the World Trade Organization (WTO), panels can overturn unique U.S. laws and privileges. Our elected leaders have shown a willingness to comply, making indirect world government a reality. The WTO requires all present, past, and future laws to be in agreement with WTO rules governing trade. This means that when writing laws, America must bind future generations and implement policies that meet WTO requirements, regardless of whether or not these requirements serve the interests of the United States, or are even constitutional.
Since the beginning of history, national governments have provided the best means of securing people's liberty. Government's limited power is legitimized by the "consent of the governed" within an arrangement called the social contract, usually implemented through elections. National governments, when founded on the Anglo-American tradition, are repositories of liberty. Therefore, the preservation of national sovereignty must be a prime goal of those seeking to preserve liberty.
Sovereignty is a one-way street. It can be regained only through enormous bloodshed. At some point, the loss of our national sovereignty will give unelected foreign authorities the unholy power of deciding the fate of American liberty. This is not a power our government should be allowed to give away. It's time to speak up. We must not follow Europe down the path of destruction.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Jens Peter-Bonde, ed., Consolidated Lisbon Treaty, Title V, Art. 216, International Agreements, (Notat Grafisk: Foundation for EU Democracy, 2008), 142.
[2] Jens Peter-Bonde, ed., Consolidated Lisbon Treaty, Chapter 2, Art. 77, Polices on Border Checks, Asylum and Immigration, (Notat Grafisk: Foundation for EU Democracy, 2008), 74.
[3] Jens Peter-Bonde, ed., Consolidated Lisbon Treaty, Chapter 2, Art. 24, Specific Provisions on the Common Foreign and Security Policy, (Notat Grafisk: Foundation for EU Democracy, 2008), 31-32.
[4] Ibid., 31.
[5] Jens Peter-Bonde, ed., Consolidated Lisbon Treaty, Chapter 2, Art. 77, Polices on Border Checks, Asylum and Immigration, (Notat Grafisk: Foundation for EU Democracy, 2008), 74.
[6] Jens Peter-Bonde, ed., "The Charter of Fundamental Rights," in the Consolidated Lisbon Treaty, Title V, Art. 39, Citizens' Rights, (Notat Grafisk: Foundation for EU Democracy, 2008), 204.
[7] Jens Peter-Bonde, ed., "The Charter of Fundamental Rights," in the Consolidated Lisbon Treaty, Title VII, Art. 52, Scope and Interpretation of Rights and Principles, (Notat Grafisk: Foundation for EU Democracy, 2008), 207.
[8] The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, 9 May 2008, Chapter 2, Section 1, Art. 288, par. 3.
[9] See also, Open Door Counselling v. Ireland, 1992, A-246, par. 78-79, 14 Aug. 2009.
2)Mitchell’s wake-up call: Israeli leadership must end ongoing retreat in face of Obama pressure
By Yoram Ettinger
The threat issued by Special Presidential Envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, to withhold US loan guarantees, in order to extract excessive concessions from Israel, constitutes a wake-up call for wishful-thinkers.
Senator Mitchell's January 7, 2010 interview with PBS' Charlie Rose refutes the notion that the Obama Administration will accept anything but full Israeli compliance with Washington's terms.
Obama's confidant, George Mitchell, known for his deliberate style, made clear that submission to pressure is not rewarded but punishable by further pressure. That is certainly the case with a White House run by Rahm Emanuel, who is "the meanest shark in town."
Emanuel and President Obama, his Chicago-politics pal, were elated when Prime Minister Netanyahu rushed on June 14, 2009 to Bar Ilan University, as soon as he returned from a "cold shower" at Obama's White House, to enunciate a major transformation of his worldview: The acceptance of the Two States Solution. They realized that their pressure was effective following Netanyahu's September 24, 2009 speech at the UN – which reaffirmed his newly found worldview – and the full freeze of construction in east Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.
Leveraging their initial success, they now employ the threat of withholding loan guarantees and intensify the pressure on Israel to accelerate the timetable of concessions, to exclude the Jordan Valley from Israel's map of defensible borders, to release more Palestinian terrorists, to make more concessions to Mahmoud Abbas, to refrain from construction even in Jerusalem's Gilo neighborhood, etc.
Israel's retreat in the face of Obama's pressure is a rarity in a world that has not been kind to the newly-installed president. His precipitous drop in the polls is the sharpest in recent decades, other than President Ford's. A growing number of Democratic legislators distance themselves from him, lest they be defeated in November, 2010. Furthermore, President Obama is increasingly identified with a 10% unemployment rate, a 17% under-employment rate, a budget deficit which is the highest since 1945, a bigger government, a failed war in Afghanistan and rapidly destabilizing Iraq.
Obama's Liberal power-base is unhappy with legislative compromises concluded with Blue Dog Democrats. Republicans are energized by Obama's difficulties and the 30% bloc of Independents, which accorded Obama the 2008 victory, is turning its back on Obama in 2010. Since assuming power in January, 2009, Obama has received slaps in the face from Iran, North Korea, Russia, China, Venezuela, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has also been targeted by French and West European cynicism. However, Jerusalem is acting as if it is facing an Imperial President.
Israel still doesn’t get it
In 1992, at the height of the Shamir-Bush battle over loan guarantees, I was told by then Majority Leader, Senator George Mitchell: "Doesn't Israel know that the US is not a monarchy, that the president is not omnipotent and that the Legislature is equal in power to the Executive?!"
In 2010, Israel still does not get it. Instead of leveraging critical public and Congressional platforms of support – which will determine the success or oblivion of Obama's policy – Israel approaches Congress as the best supporting-actor in Washington, DC. Jerusalem is intimidated by Emanuel's warning to "avoid bypassing the Administration via Congress." Jerusalem fails to realize that kowtowing to Emanuel's warning amounts to a slap in the face for US democracy, the US public and its representatives on Capitol Hill, while severely undermining Israel's own cardinal interests.
Senator Mitchell's PBS interview reflects Obama's determination to dictate to the Jewish State a full withdrawal to the 1949 and 1967 ceasefire lines, the uprooting of Jewish communities in the Golan Heights, Judea and Samaria, the repartitioning of Jerusalem, the negotiation of the "claim of return" by 1948 Arab refugees and the exchange of land.
Such an approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict is a derivative of Obama’s worldview, which highlights the UN as a quarterback of international relations, considers Europe as a role model and Foggy Bottom bureaucracy as luminaries on international relations, burdens the West with partial-blame for international terrorism, regards the Jewish State as part of the exploiting West and the Arabs part of the exploited Third World.
In facing Obama's pressure, Israel should follow in the footsteps of all Prime Ministers from Ben Gurion to Yitzhak Shamir (1948-1992): Advancing Israel's national security while fending off US presidential pressure. For instance, Ben Gurion declared independence in 1948 and constructed Israel's nuclear reactor in defiance of brutal pressure by Secretary of State George Marshall and President Kennedy respectively. Levy Eshkol and Golda Meir built the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Ramot, Neve Ya'akov and Gilo in response to presidential pressure. And, Menachem Begin destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor irrespective of painful US, European, global and domestic pressure. He initialed the Israel-Egypt peace process by overcoming opposition by President Carter, who preferred an international conference over direct negotiations.
Such steadfastness yielded short-term US-Israel tension. However, it was rapidly transformed into long-term enhanced strategic respect, by American and Middle Eastern leaders, toward the Jewish State.
In 2010, Israeli leaders are endowed with a critical mass – which was not enjoyed by the 1948-1992 leaders - demographically (6 million Jews!), economically, technologically and militarily, bolstered by a formidable infrastructure of support in the US. Are the current leaders also endowed with the vision, faith, wisdom and backbone, which are the prerequisite to leverage this critical mass and advance key Israeli interests, while deflecting the Obama Administration’s pressure?
3) Class War: How public servants became our masters
By Steven Greenhut
In April 2008, The Orange County Register published a bombshell of an investigation about a license plate program for California government workers and their families. Drivers of nearly 1 million cars and light trucks—out of a total 22 million vehicles registered statewide—were protected by a “shield” in the state records system between their license plate numbers and their home addresses. There were, the newspaper found, great practical benefits to this secrecy.
“Vehicles with protected license plates can run through dozens of intersections controlled by red light cameras with impunity,” the Register’s Jennifer Muir reported. “Parking citations issued to vehicles with protected plates are often dismissed because the process necessary to pierce the shield is too cumbersome. Some patrol officers let drivers with protected plates off with a warning because the plates signal that drivers are ‘one of their own’ or related to someone who is.”
The plate program started in 1978 with the seemingly unobjectionable purpose of protecting the personal addresses of officials who deal directly with criminals. Police argued that the bad guys could call the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), get addresses for officers, and use the information to harm them or their family members. There was no rash of such incidents, only the possibility that they could take place.
So police and their families were granted confidentiality. Then the program expanded from one set of government workers to another. Eventually parole officers, retired parking enforcers, DMV desk clerks, county supervisors, social workers, and other categories of employees from 1,800 state agencies were given the special protections too. Meanwhile, the original intent of the shield had become obsolete: The DMV long ago abandoned the practice of giving out personal information about any driver. What was left was not a protection but a perk.
Yes, rank has its privileges, and it’s clear that government workers have a rank above the rest of us. Ordinarily, if one out of every 22 California drivers had a license to drive any way he chose, there would be demands for more police power to protect Californians from the potential carnage. But until the newspaper series, law enforcement officials and legislators had remained mum. The reason, of course, is that the scofflaws are law enforcement officials and legislators.
Here is how brazen they’ve become: A few days after the newspaper investigation caused a buzz in Sacramento, lawmakers voted to expand the driver record protections to even more government employees. An Assembly committee, on a bipartisan 13-to-0 vote, agreed to extend the program to veterinarians, firefighters, and code officers. “I don’t want to say no to the firefighters and veterinarians that are doing these things that need to be protected,” Assemblyman Mike Duvall (R-Yorba Linda) explained.
Exempting themselves from traffic laws in the name of a threat that no longer exists is bad enough, but what government workers do to the rest of us on a daily basis makes ticket dodging look like child’s play. Often under veils of illegal secrecy, public-sector unions and their political allies are systematically looting the public treasury with gold-plated pensions, jeopardizing the finances of state and local governments around the country, removing themselves from legal accountability, and doing it all in the name of humble working men and women just looking for their fair share. Government employees have turned themselves into a coddled class that lives better than its private-sector counterpart, and with more impunity. The public’s servants have become our masters.
Good Enough for Government Work
There was a time when government work offered lower salaries than comparable jobs in the private sector but more security and somewhat better benefits. These days, government workers fare better than private-sector workers in almost every area—pay, benefits, time off, and job security. And not just in California.
According to a 2007 analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics by the Asbury Park Press, “the average federal worker made $59,864 in 2005, compared with the average salary of $40,505 in the private sector.” Across comparable jobs, the federal government paid higher salaries than the private sector three times out of four, the paper found. As Heritage Foundation legal analyst James Sherk explained to the Press, “The government doesn’t have to worry about going bankrupt, and there isn’t much competition.”
In February 2008, before the recession made the disparity much worse, The New York Times reported that “George W. Bush is in line to be the first president since World War II to preside over an economy in which federal government employment rose more rapidly than employment in the private sector.” The Obama administration has extended the hiring binge, with executive branch employment (excluding the Postal Service and the Defense Department) slated to grow by 2 percent in 2010—and more than 15 percent if you count temporary Census workers.
The average federal salary (including benefits) is set to grow from $72,800 in 2008 to $75,419 in 2010, CBS reported. But the real action isn’t in what government employees are being paid today; it’s in what they’re being promised for tomorrow. Public pensions have swollen to unrecognizable proportions during the last decade. In June 2005, BusinessWeek reported that “more than 14 million public servants and 6 million retirees are owed $2.37 trillion by more than 2,000 different states, cities and agencies,” numbers that have risen since then. State and local pension payouts, the magazine found, had increased 50 percent in just five years.
These huge pension increases have eaten away at public finances, most spectacularly in California, where a bipartisan bill that passed virtually without debate unleashed the odious “3 percent at 50” retirement plan in 1999. Under this plan, at age 50 many categories of public employees are eligible for 3 percent of their final year’s pay multiplied by the number of years they’ve worked. So if a police officer starts working at age 20, he can retire at 50 with 90 percent of his final salary until he dies, and then his spouse receives that money for the rest of her life. Even during the economic crisis, “3 percent at 50” and the forces behind it have only become more entrenched.
In the midst of California’s 2008–09 fiscal meltdown, with the impact of deluxe public pensions making daily headlines, the city of Fullerton nevertheless sought to retroactively increase the defined-benefit retirement plan for its city employees by a jaw-dropping 25 percent. What’s more, the Fullerton City Council negotiated the increase in closed session, outside public view. Under California’s open meetings law, known as the Brown Act, even legitimate closed-session items such as contract negotiations are supposed to be advertised so that the public has a clear idea of what’s being discussed. But the Fullerton agenda for that night only vaguely referred to labor negotiations.
Four of the five council members—two Republicans and two Democrats—seemed to support the deal. But Republican Shawn Nelson, a principled advocate for limited government, didn’t appreciate the way the council was obscuring not only the legitimately secret details of the negotiations but the basic subject matter. He called me at the Register (where I worked at the time) and, without revealing details of the closed session, shared his concerns about the way the public had not been alerted. After I wrote about the secret, fiscally reckless deal, the recriminations came down in a hurry: on Shawn Nelson.
Not surprisingly, the liberal council members were furious that the public had been informed about what was going on. But some conservative Republicans, including a prominent state senator, Dick Ackerman of Irvine, were angry as well, because Nelson’s willingness to talk embarrassed a Republican councilman whom the GOP was backing for re-election. When I later bumped into Ackerman at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, he laid into me about Nelson’s supposed violation of the Brown Act. Some officials and bloggers actually called for Nelson to be prosecuted. Local union mouthpieces and fellow council members portrayed the whistleblower as a common criminal, even though he was merely acting in the spirit of the open meetings law and showing the kind of fiscal responsibility you would hope to see in public officials.
In its embarrassment, the city council voted against the deal at the last minute, but only after council members publicly chastised Nelson, accused me of libel, and vowed to come back for more when the timing was right. One Republican councilman couldn’t figure out what the fuss was all about, given that the council enhances public employee pay and pensions all the time.
Pension Tsunami
Although Americans may have a vague sense that the nation has run up a great deal of debt, the public employee benefit problem is not well known. Yet the wave of benefit promises is poised to wash away state and local government budgets and large portions of the incomes of most Americans. Most of these benefits are vested, meaning that they have the standing of a legal contract. They cannot be reduced. And the government employees’ allies, such as California’s legislative Democrats, are cleverly blocking some of the more obvious exit strategies.
For instance, when the city of Vallejo went bankrupt after coughing up 75 percent of its budget to police and firefighters, the state Assembly introduced legislation that would allow cities to go bankrupt only if they get approval from a commission. Such a commission would of course be dominated by union-friendly members. The result: Cities would be stuck making good on contracts they cannot afford to fulfill.
When the economy was booming, these structural problems could be hidden. But not now. As debt loads become unsustainable, you can expect cuts in services, tax increases, pension-obligation bonds, or some combination of the three.
In California unfunded pension and health care liabilities for state workers top $100 billion, and the annual pension contribution has shot up from $320 million to $7.3 billion in less than a decade. In New York state, local governments may have to triple their annual pension contributions during the next six years, from $2.6 billion to $8 billion, according to the state comptroller.
That money will come from taxpayers. The average private-sector worker, who enjoys a lower salary and far lower retirement benefits than New York or California government workers, will have to work longer, retire later, and pay more so that his public-employee neighbors can enjoy the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. The taxpayers will also have to deal with worsening public services, since there will be less money to pay for things that might actually benefit the public.
In July 2009, Orange County, California, Sheriff Sandra Hutchens proposed more than $20 million in budget cuts to close the gap caused by falling tax revenue. Her department slashed 40 percent of its command staff, cut a total of about 30 positions, and made changes that affected about 200 positions through reassignments, demotions, new overtime rules, and other maneuvers. “These are services that we believe are quite important to maintaining public safety, that we’re just not going to be able to continue,” department spokesman John MacDonald told the Los Angeles Times.
The sheriff failed to identify another reason for the tight budget: In 2001 the Orange County Board of Supervisors had passed a retroactive pension increase for sheriff’s deputies. That policy nearly doubled pension costs from 2000 to 2009, when pension contributions totaled nearly $95 million—20 percent of the sheriff’s budget. So the sheriff decries an economic downturn that is costing her department about $20 million, but she doesn’t mention that a previous pension increase is costing her department more than double that amount. It’s safe to say that had the pension increase not passed, the department would have money to keep officers on the streets and to avoid the cuts the sheriff claims are threatening public safety.
Chief’s Disease
One would think that a “3 percent at 50” retirement would be a good enough deal for most people. Most workers in the private sector would probably jump at such an opportunity. But many public safety officials aren’t satisfied with a system that allows them to retire with 90 percent or more of their final year’s pay at young ages. They feel compelled to game the system in ways that stretch or break the law.
A large percentage of public safety officials —more than two-thirds of management-level officials at the California Highway Patrol, for instance—come down with something widely known as “Chief’s Disease” about a year before their scheduled retirement. “High-ranking [CHP] officers, nearing the end of their careers, routinely pursued disability claims that awarded them workers’ comp settlements,” John Hill and Dorothy Korber of the Sacramento Bee reported in 2004. “That, in turn, led in many cases to disability retirements. As they collected their disability pensions, some of these former CHP chiefs embarked on rigorous second careers—one as assistant sheriff of Yolo County, for example, another as the security director for San Francisco International Airport.”
When Mike Clesceri was mayor of Fullerton (a part-time position filled by a city council member), he also worked as an investigator for the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. As his retirement approached, Clesceri claimed to have an extreme case of acid reflux, which would help him net a tax-free pension of $58,000 a year, plus cost-of-living increases. Even while retired with that alleged disability, Clesceri pursued a local police chief’s job, retained his mayorship, and ran a tough re-election campaign. He even had the time to have his brother-in-law, an attorney, send threatening letters to members of the community who commented on the absurdity of his disability pension. As Clesceri explained in a newspaper column, the disability only applied to his job at the D.A.’s office.
The exposure of this abuse ultimately galvanized the public to boot Clesceri off the Fullerton City Council. The problem is most of these situations never get aired publicly.
Other state employees go to great lengths to find the highest-paying job they can in their final year, thereby locking in their permanent retirement benefit based on a salary they made only once. Bee reporters Hill and Korber told the story of Sharon McGraw, a Sacramento-area accounting manager for the state who moved from her suburban home to a tiny apartment in the San Francisco Bay area so she could temporarily take a high-paying job that would increase her pension benefit by $18,000 a year.
Then there’s the bizarre story of Armando Ruiz, a part-time trustee for the Coast Community College District in Southern California. Ruiz also worked full time as an administrator with the South Orange County Community College District. Ruiz wanted to run for re-election as a trustee and use the “incumbent” label on his ballot, but he also wanted to take advantage of a strange California law that dramatically increases an employee’s pension payout if he retires from two jobs on the same day.
“Ruiz ‘retired,’ effective Oct. 31, as a part-time trustee of the Coast district and as a full-time counselor at Irvine Valley College,” Register columnist Frank Mickadeit reported in 2008. “Even though the trustee gig pays just a $9,800 annual stipend, he was able to calculate his state pension as if he had been paid $106K a year for that ‘job’ plus the $106K a year he got for his real job at Irvine. So, based on a $212K salary he never really made, his pension will work out to about $108K a year for life. Otherwise, the pension would have been $59K—$54K for the real job; $5K for the trustee job. Even though Ruiz was officially retired from the Coast district board, he was still listed on Tuesday’s ballot as an incumbent. A cynical person might say that by waiting to ‘retire,’ just days before the election Ruiz knew it would be too late to change the ballots. And incumbents rarely lose such elections.”
The only good news from that scam: After Ruiz’s maneuver was exposed, the state legislature repealed the incomprehensible pension-spiking rule. But the pending pension crisis, with its thousands of abuses undetected by outside scrutiny, continues to loom over our heads.
The Public Sector Menace
In the summer of 2009, various Democratic candidates for California attorney general came before the Police Officers Research Association of California, a union lobbying organization, to ask for its support. According to one attendee (who asked to remain anonymous, given the obvious repercussions for his career), the organization had two basic questions for Assemblymen Ted Lieu (D-Torrance), Alberto Torrico (D-Newark), and Pedro Nava (D–Santa Barbara), each a candidate in the 2010 attorney general race. The first: Did they support the death penalty for cop killers? The second: Would each candidate, as attorney general, make sure the official summary of a state pension reform proposal would be slanted to destroy its chances of passing?
In California crafting ballot language is one of the most important jobs of the state’s attorney general. The police union officials reminded the candidates that 90 percent of voters read nothing more than the ballot title and summary, and they emphasized the importance of putting the kibosh to the measure. My source was appalled, not just by the directness of the question but by the eagerness with which the candidates, especially Torrico, answered it. They all promised they would help kill the measure.
Public-sector unions have a growing influence in state and federal governments, and in the overall labor movement, but they are a relatively recent phenomenon. Civil service unionization in the federal government wasn’t allowed until President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order legalizing it in 1962. In California it didn’t become legal until 1968. Yet now California may be spearheading the re-unionization of the country.
In a 2003 study of union membership rates, the sociologists Ruth Milkman and Daisy Rooks explained that “California stands out as an exception to the general pattern of the past decade. Against all odds, union density has inched upward in the nation’s most populous state, from 16.1 percent of all wage and salary workers in 1998 to 17.8 percent in 2002.”
The study was produced by the University of California Institute for Labor and Employment, itself a testament to union power in the Golden State. Critics call the institute Union University, arguing that the state is funding a left-wing advocacy and research organization that advances union causes. As the Los Angeles Times explained in a 2004 article about the controversy, “For years these programs received the majority of their funding from the budgets of the universities where they are housed. Then in the 2000–01 budget, former Gov. Gray Davis approved $6 million to create the institute encompassing the two centers and charged with carrying out ‘research, education and service involving the world of work, and the public and private policies that govern it.’ ”
In the 2003 study, Milkman and Rooks found that union growth in California’s public sector has far outpaced such growth in other states, for an obvious reason: “Organized labor has more political influence in California than in most other states.” In more-recent studies, the Institute for Labor and Employment found that for the first time in five decades, U.S. unionization rates actually increased in 2008. The reason: increases in California, mainly in the government sector.
At all levels, state and local government employment grew by 13 percent across the United States from 1994 to 2004. The number of judicial and legal employees increased by 28 percent. The number of public safety workers increased by 21 percent. The number of teachers increased by 22 percent.
Michael Hodges’ invaluable Grandfather Economic Report uses the Bureau of Labor Statistics to chart the growth in state and local government employees since 1946. Their number has increased from 3.3 million then to 19.8 million today—a 492 percent increase as the country’s population increased by 115 percent. Since 1999 the number of state and local government employees has increased by 13 percent, compared to a 9 percent increase in the population.
The United States had 2.3 state and local government employees per 100 citizens in 1946 and has 6.5 state and local government employees per 100 citizens now. In 1947, Hodges writes, 78 percent of the national income went to the private sector, 16 percent to the federal sector, and 6 percent to the state and local government sector. Now 54 percent of the economy is private, 28 percent goes to the feds, and 18 percent goes to state and local governments. The trend lines are ominous.
Bigger government means more government employees. Those employees then become a permanent lobby for continual government growth. The nation may have reached critical mass; the number of government employees at every level may have gotten so high that it is politically impossible to roll back the bureaucracy, rein in the costs, and restore lost freedoms.
People who are supposed to serve the public have become a privileged elite that exploits political power for financial gain and special perks. Because of its political power, this interest group has rigged the game so there are few meaningful checks on its demands. Government employees now receive far higher pay, benefits, and pensions than the vast majority of Americans working in the private sector. Even when they are incompetent or abusive, they can be fired only after a long process and only for the most grievous offenses.
It’s a two-tier system in which the rulers are making steady gains at the expense of the ruled. The predictable results: Higher taxes, eroded public services, unsustainable levels of debt, and massive roadblocks to reforming even the poorest performing agencies and school systems. If this system is left to grow unchecked, we will end up with a pale imitation of the free society envisioned by the Founders.
Steven Greenhut (stevengreenhut@gmail.com), the director of the Pacific Research Institute's Journalism Center, was a columnist for The Orange County Register for 11 years.
4)Impose new bank fees to protect taxpayers: Popular sentiment to hit financial institutions with fees to help cover the cost of federal bailouts must be respected by the White House and Congress.
PRESIDENT Obama and Congress are asking for trouble if they ignore popular sentiment to impose fees on financial institutions.
American taxpayers, on the hook for tens of billions of dollars in rescue funds, want it done.
Policymakers leaning in that direction have not settled on a choice, but the specifics are likely less important to the public than having a fee that conveys a flick of the lash.
Taxpayers want to be held harmless from the overhead of saving commercial and investment banks from their own avarice and arrogance. They are also deeply offended that even after the greediest virtually swamped the global financial system, layers of employees received fat salaries and — most improbably — even fatter bonuses.
The options for redress vary. One choice is a hefty, one-time fee linked to the amount of bailout dollars received from the government. A variation is a steep tax on bonuses, which Great Britain and others embraced.
Another direction would reinstate a transaction fee on investment activity. A similar fee applied globally has been endorsed by the European Union.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is looking at its role and ledger, and considering fees weighted to risk taken on by banks the FDIC insures.
Structure the charges to protect customers — taxpayers — from indirectly covering the fees of spendthrifts and gamblers they already rescued.
None of the changes are done in isolation. Congress should also be reimposing rules that separate commercial banking from investment banking. This is a change that gets to the heart of the problem. Fees are meant to tweak the corporate conscience.
The president and lawmakers are playing with fire if they ignore the outcries of consumers and taxpayers who have already been burned.
5)'Catastrophe of Major Proportions': Haiti Devastated by Massive Earthquake
By Marc Pitzke
The impoverished Caribbean country of Haiti was struck by a major earthquake on Tuesday night. There are no precise figures on the number of victims yet, but initial estimates indicate that hundreds of people have died. The capital city Port-au-Prince was hit hard and the presidential palace has collapsed.
The first eyewitness reports were confused and sporadic but they already gave a sense that this is a major disaster. "The sky is just gray with dust," Henry Bahn, a US Department of Agriculture official who is in Haiti, told the Associated Press. "Everybody is just totally, totally freaked out and shaken."
Gradually the nightmare that befell the poorest country in the western hemisphere late on Tuesday afternoon became evident. Raymond Joseph, Haiti's ambassador to the United States who managed to briefly contact the office of the Haitian president, told CNN that Haiti had suffered a "catastrophe of major proportions."
The US Geological Survey said on its Web site that a magnitude 7.0 earthquake had struck in the Haiti region at 4:53 p.m. local time (10:52 p.m. CET) and that it was the worst quake to hit the area since 1770. The epicenter was around 15 kilometers west of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and just 10 kilometers below ground, from where the tremors raced unhindered to the surface.
There were more than a dozen aftershocks, and experts said there could be further tremors in the coming days, putting the population at continued risk. For two hours after the quake there was an official tsunami warning for parts of the Caribbean.
"There Must be Thousands of People Dead"
It's still virtually impossible to get an exact picture of the situation. The power supply collapsed as did the telephone system. The only connection to the outside world is via the Internet. American TV networks interviewed survivors via Webcams and Skype.
As night descended on the destroyed capital city there still weren't any reliable figures for the number of victims. News agencies said hundreds of people are believed to have died in Port-au-Prince alone. "It is impossible to say how many deaths there have been, but the damage is tremendous," the Haiti Press Network (HPN) reported.
"Many buildings have collapsed including hospitals, schools and a big supermarket," a spokesman for the charity Humanitarian Aid Germany said. The spokesman added that hundreds were likely to have been killed. Eyewitnesses said the number of deaths could be far greater than early reports suggest.
Karel Zelenka, ther head of the aid group Catholic Relief Services in Port-au-Prince, said that "there must be thousands of people dead," a spokeswoman for the aid group told the Associated Press.
"Total Chaos"
"People were screaming 'Jesus, Jesus' and running in all directions," said Reuters reporter Joseph Guyler Delva from Port-au-Prince. "It's total chaos."
Michael Bazile, a Haitian in Port-au-Prince, told CNN: "Many houses are down. We really don't know what's going on and every 30 minutes we feel (tremors) again. Everybody is yelling, they are praying, they are crying. We are worried because we think it's not over. I pray it's over but we don't know.
Zelenka told the Washington Post that many buildings in his district had collapsed. "This will be a major, major disaster," he said. Zelenka said that poorly constructed shantytowns and other buildings had crumbled in huge clouds of dust. Among the worst-hit areas was the run-down Carrefour district of Port-au-Prince near the sea.
Video footage broadcast on CNN and reported to have been recorded immediately after the quake showed dense, heavy dust clouds hanging over Port-au-Prince. Some 2 million people live squashed together in this impoverished, overpopulated city -- many live in huts, poorly constructed houses or in slums without electricity or a working infrastructure.
The first photos that reached the outside world via the social networks Facebook and Twitter showed collapsed walls, buried cars, human corpses and crying survivors waving helplessly, their faces covered in white dust. Haiti's capital is surrounded by hills which had been subjected to deforestation for years, and had therefore been prone to landslides even before the earthquake.
Poor Construction
"This is an area that is particularly vulnerable in terms of construction practice, and with a high population density. There could be a high number of casualties," David Wald, a Geological Survey seismologist, told the New York Times.
President Rene Preval's chief of staff, Fritz Longchamp, reported that "buildings were crumbling right and left" near the National Palace. Even the palace failed to withstand the quake. Photos showed its collapsed facades and cupola. "Those are very robust buildings," said Joseph, Haiti's ambassador to the US. "If they're damaged, one can only imagine what has happened to the shaky little houses in the hills around Port-au-Prince."
President Preval and First Lady Elisabeth Debrosse Delatour survived the disaster and weren't hurt, the ambassador said. They are reported to have been in their own house and not in the palace when the quake struck.
UN Workers Missing
According to reports, a university, parliamentary offices, at least one government ministry, the city's cathedral and the headquarters of the UN peacekeeping force on the edge of the city were hard hit. "For the moment, a large number of personnel remain unaccounted for," UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Alain Le Roy said in New York. The UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) was set up in 2004 and there are currently 9,000 military and police as well as close to 2,000 civilian staff.
A hospital and a five-story apartment building also collapsed, burying many. A worker for the aid organization Food for the Poor said that on one main street, there were more buildings destroyed than left standing. US government official Bahn says he saw numerous collapsed buildings in a canyon and that all one could do is pray.
Richard Morse, a well known-musician and the owner of the famous Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, kept people up to date via his Twitter feed. "Just about all the lights are out in Port au Prince," he wrote. "People are still screaming but the noise is dying as darkness sets. Lots of rumors about which buildings are toppled. The Castel Haiti behind the Oloffson is a pile of rubble. It was eight stories high."
US photographer Teuila Minsky who was also staying in the Oloffson, told the New York Times that a wall at the front of the Hotel Oloffson had fallen, killing a passer-by, and that several neighboring buildings had collapsed.
There are conflicting reports on conditions at the international airport at Port-au-Prince. An eyewitness told CNN that the runway was still open and that a plane even managed to take off after the earthquake.
According to a report in the Palm Beach Post, the last plane to depart was an American Airlines flight. Passengers reportedly panicked after the earthquake hit the airport. "It felt like a plane had hit the building, that's how strong it was," passenger Jocelyn Valcin told the newspaper after landing in Miami. "The airport itself was badly damaged, cracked." When the flight took off, he added, he could see "buildings that fell down."
American Airlines then cancelled all further flights to and from Haiti. Port-au-Prince is currently only reachable by land, via the neighboring Dominican Republic and mountains.
Relief Efforts Begin
For years, seismologists have been warning of the possibility of a major earthquake in Haiti. The Caribbean island nation is located directly in a geological fault zone. But plagued as it is with civil wars, poor governance and poverty, the country has had other problems to deal with. The country has also been afflicted with frequent hurricanes like the "Jeanne" catastrophe in 2004 that claimed 3,000 lives. But Haiti has also had trouble dealing with even relatively minor storms and has become highly reliant on international relief aid.
External aid is expected to come quickly this time. US President Barack Obama was informed of the earthquake within an hour and called together a staff meeting to start preparations for humanitarian aid. "My thoughts and prayers go out to those who have been affected by this earthquake," Obama said. "We are closely monitoring the situation and we stand ready to assist the people of Haiti."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the United States would provide "both civilian and military disaster relief and humanitarian assistance." Her spokesman, P.J. Crowley, told journalists in Washington on Tuesday night that the US Embassy was having trouble reaching Americans living in Port-au-Prince as well as officials with the Haitian government. " Crowley said the devastation was considerable and "there's going to be a serious loss of life."
The American Red Cross provided a first aid payment of $200,000. "We do have staff on the ground," Red Cross spokesperson Abbi Weaver said on Tuesday night, "but we have not been able to reach them."
France Sends Aid Planes
On Wednesday, France is dispatching two planes with relief goods and around 60 rescue workers to Haiti. One will depart from Marseille and the other from Fort de France in Martinique. Around 1,400 French citizens live in Haiti, including 1,200 in the capital city, French Development Minister Alain Joyandet told the radio station Europe 1.
The Haitian ambassador in Berlin, Jean Robert Saget, asked for swift aid from Germany after the earthquake. He told the German news agency DPA that medical aid, tents and food were needed. "Any help is welcome at the moment."
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle said Wednesday that his country had pledged aid to Haiti and called together a crisis management team to deal with the disaster. Westerwelle said the Foreign Ministry was seeking information on German nationals in Haiti and ways to provide relief to the catastrophe-stricken country. "Our sympathy and our entire solidarity is there for the victims of the catastrophe and their families," he said. He ensured that Germany would provide Haiti with any aid possible.
The earthquake could also be felt in the neighboring Dominican Republic, which like Haiti is part of the island of Hispaniola. The tremor could also be felt as far away as Cuba, some 800 kilometers away. "We felt it very strongly and I would say for a long time," Monsignor Dionisio Garcia, the archbishop of Santiago, told the Associated Press.
On Tuesday evening, countless Haitian families waited in Miami in the hopes that friends and relatives would soon arrive from Port-au-Prince. But for now, there have been no flights. The last thing 43-year-old Odiana Medacier heard from an acquaintance, was a mobile phone message just after the quake, according to the Palm Beach Post: "Earthquake, 7.0. Pray for Haiti."
6)Feds drop rape investigation against Copperfield
By Mike Carter
Seattle Times staff reporter
Federal prosecutors in Seattle have dropped their rape investigation of magician David Copperfield after learning the young model who claimed she was assaulted on his private island in the Bahamas two years ago is being investigated by Bellevue police for alleged prostitution and making a false statement.
The woman, 22, a former contestant in the Miss Washington pageant, was questioned last month by Bellevue police after a businessman accused her of trying to extort $2,000 from him for sex, according to police reports.
Federal prosecutors are not saying there is a link between its decision not to charge Copperfield and the Bellevue investigation. The U.S. Attorney's Office declined to make further comment.
A civil suit filed by the woman against Copperfield is pending.
The Seattle Times is not naming the woman because she has not been charged in the Bellevue case, but detectives say they believe there is evidence to support charges of prostitution and giving false statements to officers, according to police documents obtained by The Times.
"There is evidence to support that [the woman] made false or misleading material statements to [police] after she reported being assaulted," Bellevue Police Detective Jerry Johnson wrote in a Dec. 21 case summary.
The King County Prosecutor's Office reviewed the case but determined no felony was committed by the woman. Spokesman Dan Donohoe said the case will be sent to the Bellevue City Attorney's Office to determine if misdemeanor charges are warranted.
A spokeswoman at the City Attorney's Office said no referral had been logged as of Tuesday afternoon.
The victim of the alleged extortion, a 31-year-old single man, told police he knew the woman as a waitress at a Bellevue club he frequents. On Dec. 2, he said, he met her and a friend at another club where they were drinking. He said the woman was sexually aggressive and agreed to go to a hotel with him.
They ended up at the Bellevue Club, where he rented a $370 room and bought a $100 bottle of Champagne . Inside the room, the two engaged in a sex act until the woman allegedly told him, "put $2,000 in my purse and you can have it all," according to the man's statement to police.
When he refused, he said, she left the room, leaving behind her panties and tights. The man said he went to the lobby and found the woman claiming to hotel staff that she had been "taken advantage of."
The man said he called police to report that he believed he was about to be extorted.
The woman called police minutes later to report she had been assaulted. She told officers that she could not recall going to the hotel and woke up to find the man on top of her, pinning her arms to the hotel bed.
The woman was taken to Overlake Hospital Medical Center for a rape examination. However, she later said she was reluctant to release the results to police, according to reports.
Her reason, she said, was the then-pending FBI investigation into her allegations that Copperfield had lured her to his private $50 million island in the Bahamas after meeting her at a performance in Kennewick in 2007. There, according to her claim in the civil lawsuit she filed against Copperfield last year, the magician held her against her will and raped her at least twice.
"[She] stated she was not sure she wanted to assist any further in the investigation or potential prosecution" of the businessman, according to a police report. "She was worried this case would tarnish her other case."
The woman refused to sign over the medical documents to police, who obtained them after filing a search warrant. The reports showed no physical injuries nor the presence of any "date rape" drugs in her system. The reports note the woman had a blood-alcohol level of 0.14 percent, nearly twice the legal limit for intoxication.
"Her recorded statement ... was very vague and her statements to police of being in a blackout state are not supported by the hotel security videos, hotel staff statements" or the statements of the alleged victim, Johnson, the Bellevue detective, wrote in a referral for charges dated Dec. 12.
The man provided police with a 74-page statement and turned over his cellphone, which contained text messages that officers believe supported his story.
After a two-week investigation, Bellevue detectives concluded the woman's statements were inconsistent with numerous witness statements and surveillance videotapes from two downtown Bellevue hotels where the couple tried to get a room.
"She doesn't remember because she was intoxicated," responded Becky Roe, a Seattle lawyer who is representing the woman in her civil case against Copperfield. "She has been under incredible scrutiny. Copperfield has tremendous resources. I think in the end you're going to find out that this case is completely overblown."
Roe said the civil case against Copperfield will continue and that the decision by federal prosecutors not to seek charges means that additional information from the FBI's investigation into what happened in the Bahamas will now be available.
Efforts to reach the woman Tuesday were unsuccessful.
Copperfield's Seattle lawyers, Angelo Calfo and Patty Eakes, said they would have no comment on the case at this point.
Copperfield, 53, a multimillionaire entertainer and popular Las Vegas performer, became the subject of numerous tabloid stories after the allegations became public in 2007, when the FBI raided his Las Vegas warehouse and it was reported that a grand jury in Seattle was investigating the alleged assault.
No comments:
Post a Comment