Samuel L. Jackson is a very talented actor to be sure, but this is about how his political activism and his actions are exactly the opposite, as is the case with limousine liberals in general.
Jackson sticks up for the most extreme in the Democratic Party, their taxes, the excessive regulation, the union over reach and thuggery, right down the line. But when Jackson wants to make a movie does he make it in Los Angeles where he will pay the taxes, deal with the regulations and pay the union labor with all of their rules? Nope. He goes to Canada so he can make the movie cheaper up there and increase his already ridiculous profits and wealth; all while the working man in America is losing work.
If you have read the above you know that President Obama watched in live video feed from our drones as our embassy staff was slaughtered. The CIA, State Department FEST (Foreign Emergency Support Team), Military, and the Counterterrorism Security Group were all told to stand down. Even after our Benghazi Consulate was the fourth embassy to come under attack in 24 hours. There is no excuse.
The Veterans
Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS), a Marine veteran, says that every meeting he has held lately is filled with veterans who want to know more about the Benghazi massacre and cover-up. “The military no longer trusts that Obama has their back” Roberts said.
Senator John McCain (R-AZ) said that, veterans and the military “Have no confidence in this President as Commander in Chief” and he said that “the military is angry like I have never seen before”.
While the CBS, NBC and ABC evening news ignore this story (CBS did report on this on their web site) Fox News, some newspapers, blogs and talk radio are all over it and the word is getting out.
The Obama administration sat by doing nothing for seven hours that night, ignoring calls to dispatch help from our bases in Italy, less than two hours away. It has spent the past seven weeks stretching the story out, engaging in misdirection and deception involving supposed indigenous outrage over an obscure anti-Muslim video, confident that with the aid of a docile press corps this infamous climax to four years of misguided foreign policy can be swept under the rug, at least until after Tuesday’s election.
The Obama administration was warned. They received an embassy cable June 25 expressing concern over rising Islamic extremism in Benghazi, noting the black flag of al-Qaida “has been spotted several times flying over government buildings and training facilities.” The Obama administration removed a well-armed, 16-member security detail from Libya in August, The Wall Street Journal reported last month, replacing it with a couple of locals. Mr. Stevens sent a cable Aug. 2 requesting 11 additional body guards, noting “Host nation security support is lacking and cannot be depended on,” reports Peter Ferrara at Forbes.com. But these requests were denied, officials testified before the House Oversight Committee earlier this month.
Based on documents released by the committee, on the day of the attack the Pentagon dispatched a drone with a video camera so everyone in Washington could see what was happening in real time. The drone documented no crowds protesting any video. But around 4 p.m. Washington received an email from the Benghazi mission saying it was under a military-style attack. The White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and the CIA were able to watch the live video feed. An email sent later that day reported “Ansar al-Sharia claims responsibility for Benghazi attack.”
Not only did the White House do nothing, there are now reports that a counterterrorism team ready to launch a rescue mission was ordered to stand down.
The official explanation for the inadequate security? This administration didn’t want to “offend the sensibilities” of the new radical Islamic regime which American and British arms had so recently helped install in Libya.
The official explanation for why Obama administration officials watched the attack unfold for seven hours, refusing repeated requests to send the air support and relief forces that sat less than two hours away in Italy? Silence.
These behaviors go far beyond “spin.” They amount to a pack of lies. To return to office a narcissistic amateur who seeks to ride this nation’s economy and international esteem to oblivion, like Slim Pickens riding the nuclear bomb to its target at the end of the movie “Dr. Strangelove,” would be disastrous.
The Obama administration entered office with a theory of foreign policy that has failed the test of practice.
Candidate Obama promised a responsible end to the war in Iraq. But in 2008 the war was won and Iraq on a fragile path to stability and alignment with the United States. His administration declared that it wanted a continuing presence of thousands of American troops in Iraq; in fact, it appears, he did not believe in his own policy. President Obama’s policy has thus left us today with no presence, no leverage, and no credibility with the Iraqi leadership. Iran uses Iraqi air space and roads to resupply the Assad dictatorship.
Candidate Obama called Afghanistan a “war of necessity,” and promised to win it. But President Obama’s declaration of a date certain to end American combat operations discouraged our friends and heartened our enemies. Afghans, who know from bitter experience what abandonment can mean, are picking sides. In 2008 there were two “green on blue” attacks by Afghans against NATO forces. In the first nine months of 2012 there have been 33.
Candidate Obama defined our war with Islamist terrorists as being against the Al Qaeda organization that existed on September 10, 2001. But targeted killing is a tactic, not a strategy. The president and his advisers have crowed that the enemy is “on the verge of strategic defeat.” That complacency explains their bafflement at the precisely executed mortar barrage, the rocket propelled grenades and machine gun fire that demolished our consulate in Benghazi, killing four Americans, including the first American ambassador to die violently in over three decades.
The lapping of the Islamist tide through North Africa, Yemen, parts of South and Southeast Asia, and now in Syria suggests that they never really came to grips with who the enemy is. We have changed; so too has Al Qaeda, which has spread far beyond the Pakistan borderlands.
Candidate Obama believed that his life story would win over the Muslim world. He attempted to realize that notion in his Cairo speech, delivered on a trip to the Middle East that deliberately avoided Israel. But President Obama’s charisma and personal history failed him. In 2008, for example, 19 percent of Pakistanis had a favorable view of the United States. Today 12 percent do. And Pakistan is far from the only case.
The true audacity of the Obama administration lies less in its proclaimed foreign policy hopes, than in its insistence that its record is one of foreign policy success. It has, rather, been one of embarrassment, failure, and in some cases, disaster.
Because of the last four years, we face a world in which our enemies do not fear us, our friends do not believe they can trust us, and those who maneuver between the two camps feel that they will not get in trouble by crossing us. It is time, and more than time, to choose a different course.
The Wall Street Journal has more of the same, and even the “in the tank” for Obama Washington Post is stunned. They give Fox News credit for solid, aggressive reporting while insulting them later in the same sentence (to save face with liberal readers no doubt).
Perrysburg police today issued misdemeanor citations to four men for allegedly being in possession of stolen political signs.
Those charged with receiving stolen property included John Russell, 39, of Toledo, and Chris Monaghan 41, of Rossford, who are both listed on the Sheet Metal Workers Local 33 Web site as business agents for the union’s Toledo district.
The men were in a pickup truck registered to Local 33 in Parma, Ohio, police said.
Also cited were Corey J. Beaubien, 37, and Sean Bresler, 33, both of Toledo.
A Tea Party Web site reported Friday the truck was loaded with the campaign signs of GOP Presidential nominee Mitt Romney and running mate Paul Ryan. Perrysburg police did not confirm that, but a police incident report said that the summonses were issued about 12:30 a.m. in the 11100 block of Fremont Pike “after several reports were taken of political signs being stolen in the city of Perrysburg.”
Union members are told that they will be fined if they do not campaign for Massachusetts Senate Candidate Elizabeth Warren. All she has is this class envy nonsense she spews all while the big money interests and far left academics are the ones that are funding her.
Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton – I am just about ready to adopt the position of “separation of school & state” or at least that state and federal dollars in education should follow the student and the relationship should end there. That position may seem extreme, but as I have been doing research for my upcoming book on public education I can tell you with absolute certainty that the overwhelming majority of parents of public schoolers have no idea how bad the education is their child is getting, or the degree of indoctrination the children are subjected to.
When inner city minority students get in charter and public schools they do better.
Of course, in reality this is about putting the lower scoring kids with the worst teachers. Think about it. If a teacher isn’t very good and needs to only get a 74% student proficiency to meet goal those teachers will be with the black kids, and the most brilliant teachers will be put with the Asian kids. This may be a play to help the teacher’s union.
The Florida State Board of Education passed a plan that sets goals for students in math and reading based upon their race.
On Tuesday, the board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80 percent and blacks at 74 percent. It also measures by other groupings, such as poverty and disabilities, reported the Palm Beach Post.
The plan has infuriated many community activists in Palm Beach County and across the state.
Former Amalgamated Transit Union local 689 president Mike Golash, now an “Occupy” movement organizer, was caught on tape Sunday revealing his political goals: overthrowing capitalism in the United States and instituting a communist government.
“Progressive labor is a revolutionary communist organization,” Golash said during an Occupy DC “People’s Assembly” on August 19.
“Its objective,” he added, “is to make revolution in the United States, overthrow the capitalist system and build communism.”
Golash said he and his comrades are “trying to learn something from the historical revolutions of the past: the Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution, the revolutions in Cuba and Eastern Europe.”
“What can we learn from them so we can build a more successful movement to transform capitalist society?”
Welcome to Chicago….err I mean Detroit…..err I mean Washington; where if you don’t want to be punished you had better pay “the man”. This is unspeakable cruelty and where was the elite media?
Emails obtained by The Daily Caller show that the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 salaried retirees at the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company.
The move, made in 2009 while the Obama administration implemented its auto bailout plan, appears to have been made solely because those retirees were not members of labor unions.
The internal government emails contradict sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures. They also indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts about the sequence of events surrounding the termination of those non-union pensions, and that administration figures violated federal law.
Delphi, a 13-year old company that is independent of General Motors, is one of the world’s largest automotive parts manufacturers. Twenty thousand of its workers lost nearly their entire pensions when the government bailed out GM. At the same time, Delphi employees who were members of the United Auto Workers union saw their pensions topped off and made whole.
The White House and Treasury Department have consistently maintained that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) independently made the decision to terminate the 20,000 non-union Delphi workers’ pension plan. The PBGC is a federal government agency that handles private-sector pension benefits issues. Its charter calls for independent representation of pension beneficiaries’ interests.
Former Treasury official Matthew Feldman and former White House auto czar Ron Bloom, both key members of the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry during the GM bailout, have testified under oath that the PBGC, not the administration, led the effort to terminate the non-union Delphi workers’ pension plan.
“As a result of the Delphi Corporation bankruptcy, for example, Delphi and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation were forced to terminate Delphi’s pension plans, which means there are Delphi retirees who unfortunately will collect less than their full pension benefits,” Feldman testified on July 11, 2012.
The emails TheDC has obtained show that the Treasury Department, not the independent PBGC, was running the show.
Under 29 U.S.C. §1342, the PBGC is the only government entity that is legally empowered to initiate termination of a pension or make any official movements toward doing so.
Go to the mall at 4pm on a weekday and subject yourself to the product of our public schools… we have all seen this. It is one of those things that everyone knows and few talk about.
I recently finished a new degree and I was shocked at how ignorant and miseducated the public schoolers were. So are many professors.
PRINCETON, NJ — Americans’ confidence in public schools is down five percentage points from last year, with 29% expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in them. That establishes a new low in public school confidence from the 33% measured in Gallup’s 2007 and 2008 Confidence in Institutions polls. The high was 58% the first time Gallup included public schools, in 1973.
In addition to public schools, this year’s Confidence in Institutions survey finds record lows, all by one percentage point, in Americans’ confidence in the church or organized religion (44%), banks (21%), and television news (21%).
Gallup has asked Americans to say how much confidence they have in a variety of U.S. institutions since 1973, including annually since 1993.
None of this comes at a surprise, even the low numbers on organized religion as the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal has taken a very heavy toll the Vatican’s credibility.
However Wisconsin’s recall election turns out on Tuesday, teachers unions already appear to be losing a larger political fight—in public opinion. In our latest annual national survey, we found that the share of the public with a positive view of union impact on local schools has dropped by seven percentage points in the past year. Among teachers, the decline was an even more remarkable 16 points.
On behalf of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and the journal Education Next, we have asked the following question since 2009: “Some people say that teacher unions are a stumbling block to school reform. Others say that unions fight for better schools and better teachers. What do you think? Do you think teacher unions have a generally positive effect on schools, or do you think they have a generally negative effect?”
Respondents can choose among five options: very positive, somewhat positive, neither positive nor negative, somewhat negative, and very negative.
In our polls from 2009 to 2011, we saw little change in public opinion. Around 40% of respondents were neutral, saying that unions had neither a positive nor negative impact. The remainder divided almost evenly, with the negative share being barely greater than the positive.
But this year unions lost ground. While 41% of the public still takes the neutral position, those with a positive view of unions dropped to 22% in 2012 from 29% in 2011.
Political campaigns may already have noticed this shift. In a recent address on education, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney called teachers unions “the clearest example of a group that has lost its way.”
The survey’s most striking finding comes from its nationally representative sample of teachers. Whereas 58% of teachers took a positive view of unions in 2011, only 43% do in 2012. The number of teachers holding negative views of unions nearly doubled to 32% from 17% last year.
Perhaps this helps explain why, according to education journalist and union watchdog Mike Antonucci, top officials of the National Education Association are reporting a decline of 150,000 members over the past two years and project that they will lose 200,000 more members by 2014, as several states have recently passed laws ending the automatic deduction of union dues from teachers’ paychecks.
Not long after a New Jersey father filmed a number of teachers brutally mocking his autistic son, footage from South Carolina’s St. John’s Elementary is showing the school‘s behavioral manager and a teacher’s aide slapping, shoving, and demeaning a 10-year old special needs student on a school bus.
Seemingly trying to put on his safety harness, the first woman literally throws the device on top of the child’s face. Unable to speak, according to reports, he sits there calmly.
Next, the boy holds his arms out so the woman can put on the device properly, and she shoves his head forward so that his whole upper-body bends.
As her rough-handling continues, the child starts whimpering and crying.
“Hush! Hush!” the other woman can be heard saying, as she slaps him across the face.
Then the women, identified as Tomeka Self and Rosanna Dudley, both start shoving and rough-handling the student to get the harness, shoving him forward and to the side with excessive force as he cries.
Here is the clip:
According to reports, the bus driver found the incident so appalling that he turned the bus’s footage over to school authorities, who put the women on administrative leave without pay before notifying the police.
After the cops began investigating the matter, the women were arrested and charged with simple assault and battery. They are due to appear in court on May 9th.
“This behavior is unacceptable, especially coming from adults who have been entrusted with the care of our children,” Dr. Rainey Knight, superintendent of the district, said in a release. “We do not condone this behavior anywhere in our district for any child.” [After they got caught… – Editor]
Who didn’t see this one coming? Your Democrat Party union controlled schools at work….
Drew Zahn:
Who perpetrated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 – a group of men merely fighting “for a cause,” or a band of radical Muslims bent on violent jihad?
According to a new, comprehensive study of 6th-12th grade textbooks used by schools across the country, America’s children are being taught a very different answer to that question than many alive to witness 9/11 remember.
The non-profit organization ACT! for America Education studied 38 textbooks from popular publishers like McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin, for example, to determine whether American schoolchildren are being taught the truth about Islam and its role in 9/11.
“This report shines a bright light on a pattern of errors, omissions and bias in the textbooks reviewed,” explained ACT! for America Education founder Brigitte Gabriel in an email. “To give you just one example of the errors our research uncovered, in discussing the 9/11 attacks, the textbooks typically fail to mention the perpetrators were Muslims or that they acted in the cause of Islamic jihad. In one book the terrorists are portrayed as people fighting for a cause.
“In just a few years after Sept. 11,” she continues, “the history of what happened on that tragic day was rewritten in our school textbooks. Omitting this vital information, that jihad was the motivation for the attacks, makes it difficult, if not impossible, for today’s young teens, who don’t remember 9/11, to really understand what happened that day – and why.”
According to the executive summary of the report, “The full reportreveals a pattern of historical revisionism, omissions and bias in the presentation of all aspects devoted to Islam in these textbooks. These aspects include its theology and doctrines, its role as a world religion, its ongoing struggle with Western tradition and its intrinsic anti-Semitism.”
The summary continues, “Textbook errors identified in the report range from egregiously false historical statements to significant omissions and subtle half-truths. Some are blatant and obvious, others are subtle and deceptive. The errors in these textbooks are not grammatical or typographical. They are substantive, significant and often repetitive.”
For example, the report notes the textbook “World History: Patterns of Interaction,” published by McDougal Littell/Houghton Mifflin in 2007, glosses over the violent birth of Islam and paints its founder, Muhammad, in a glowing light.
“In Medina, Muhammad displayed impressive leadership skills,” the textbook asserts. “He fashioned an agreement that joined his own people with the Arabs and Jews of Medina as a single community. These groups accepted Muhammad as a political leader. As a religious leader, he drew many more converts, who found his message appealing.”
But did Muhammad win converts among and build a peace accord with the Jews? The study’s founders cite several sources and recorded histories in asserting this description is a bald-faced lie.
“This language is a gross falsification of the relationship between Muhammad and the Jews of Medina,” the report states. “Muhammad … expelled two of the Jewish tribes from Medina and destroyed the third, beheading the men and selling the women and children into slavery. This important and essential historical fact of the Medinan period is commonly omitted in the textbooks reviewed, and it is impossible for students to accurately understand the rise of Islam without it.”
Accordingly, the “investment in education” that Obama wants more (and more, and more) of is actually “federal-government-directed investment in education”. When considering whether we really want more of this, it is important to remember that it was “federal-government-directed investment in energy” that gave us Solyndra, Ener1, and Beacon Power, and that it was “federal-government-directed investment in housing” that has cost taxpayers more than $150 billion in losses (thus far) at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
So, how would we know if increased government “investment” in education was producing a return? We would see a steady rise in the ratio of GDP to “nonresidential produced assets” over time. Our GDP is produced by a combination of physical capital and human capital. Accordingly, if the economic value of our human capital were rising, the impact would show up in the numbers as increasing productivity of physical capital.
Now, here is the bad news. While total real ($2010) government spending on education increased almost 13-fold from 1951 to 2009, the measured GDP return on physical capital actually declined slightly, from 47.7% to 44.1%. This could not have happened if we were getting an appreciable economic return on our huge “investment” in education.
What follows is a “first approximation analysis”. The numbers could be done with more precision, but they are good enough to give us an idea of what the nation has been getting (actually, not getting) for its massive “investments” in education.
Assuming that about 25% of our total population is in school at any one time, average real (2010 dollars) government spending per student rose from $1,763 in 1951 to $12,209 in 2009. This is an increase of about 7 times. Assuming an average of 13 years of education per student (some go to college, some drop out of high school), this means that during this 58-year time period, we increased our real “investment” in the human capital represented by each student from $22,913 to $158,717.
More:
Also, imagine if, instead of being given a 2009 education for $158,717, an average student were given a 1967-style education for about $58,000, and $100,000 in capital with which to start his working life. This would be sufficient to start any number of small businesses. Alternatively, if put in an IRA earning a real return of 6%, the $100,000 would grow to about $1.8 million over 50 years.
The huge government “investments” made in education over the past 50 years have produced little more than “Solyndras in the classroom”. They have enriched teachers unions and other rent-seekers, but have added little or nothing to the economic prospects of students. America does not need more such “investment”.
In some failing unionized schools in New Jersey the kids have only a 17% proficiency rate in literature and math.
Via Real Clear Politics:
“An outrageous statement. I cannot express how disgusted I am by that statement by the head of the largest teachers union in our state. But I also have to tell you I’m not the least bit surprised, because I think it so succinctly captures what their real position is,” Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) said about a union boss who makes 500K a year telling the poor “life’s not fair.”
“It’s an immoral position, and it continues to prop up abject failure in districts across our state,” Christie also said.
So your teachers union asks you to donate the the children’s charity associated with the union. They do everything to hide the fact that the money does not go to help children at all. It goes to billionaire John Kerry and multimillionaire Barack Obama.
Here’s a quote from House Oversight Committee testimony re unions:
“Later that day, while in the restroom, I over heard two ladies from California discussing the Children’s Fund. I asked them if they were required to give and the ladies told me no. They did not give to it because it is a political contribution. I cannot tell you the rush that came over me at that time. It was a mixture of anger and stupidity. I felt as though I had been totally duped. To add insult to injury, later that afternoon, then NEA President, Reg Weaver announced the NEA would be endorsing John Kerry for President. President Weaver went on to announce the NEA Children’s Fund had raised a large amount of money; and that, too would go to our friend in education, John Kerry. I felt a wave of illness come over me like none I have ever felt before. These who were supposed to be my people; duped me into donating to a candidate I was voting against.
Although details are lacking, the above pic was e-mailed stating that the Southwest Regional Council of Carpenters has replaced its banner outside Hope Baptist Church (in Las Vegas) and is now being manned by non-union temp. labor. [Apparently, a church should not be using non-union labor, but a union can?] According to the e-mail, the union’s prior banner stated “Shame on God.”
[Those who are running on class warfare, eat the rich nonsense could be in for a rude awakening come 2012. It was just a few short months ago that the liberal Washington State had a referrendum and look at what they did. – Editor]
Even Microsoft opposed it. Gotta love the irony.
The mega rich guys who supported this are big time hypocrite. As 5% means nothing to them and since much of their income is not in the form of taxable wages they would have been exempted from most of it anyways. The producer class though would have gotten soaked.
The truth is we need wealth. Wealth goes where it is treated well and in case you haven’t noticed it is being treated well in China. We have lost 14,000 factories in the last 10 years. We want wealth to come to our communities, not drive them away.
The plan devised by the father of the Microsoft Corp co-founder to slap a 5 percent tax on earnings over $200,000 — Initiative Measure 1098 — was rejected by 65 percent of voters, with almost two-thirds of precincts reported.
The result is a boon for the anti-tax Tea Party movement and suggests Americans may be in the mood to extend tax cuts introduced by former President George W. Bush even for the wealthiest citizens. It also signals that Americans are unwilling to accept higher taxes as a way of balancing state budgets ravaged by the recession.
It is a stinging defeat for Bill Gates senior, who put $600,000 of his own money behind the campaign and also for his son, the world’s second richest person, who let it be known he would vote for the measure.
The vote is the fourth failure to introduce a state tax in Washington in the last 70 years and leaves the state as one of only seven without one.
Although the new tax would have affected fewer than 70,000 people out of the state’s 6.7 million residents, an opposition campaign run by an organization called Defeat 1098 persuaded voters that the tax on the wealthy would be extended to lower earners.
Major backers of Defeat 1098 include Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, who contributed $425,000 to the campaign, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.
Microsoft, Boeing and Alaska Airlines, all major employers in the state, also contributed to the opposition campaign, fearing that a tax on high-earners would hurt their ability to lure talented workers to the state.
Texas Governor Rick Perry recently seized on the issue to invite top businesses in Washington state to relocate to Texas, which does not have an income tax.
For those of you who do not know Michelle Rhee, she is one of the stars from the hit film “Waiting for Superman”. The film is a brilliant documentary about people who made a difference or who tried to make a difference in public schools.
Rhee was the Washington D.C. Schools Chancellor. While she was able to make positive changes, the key aspects of her reform plan were stopped by the teachers union who is desperate to maintain the failing status quo (if you think that what I just said is even a MILD exaggeration consider this your personal invitation to demonstrate otherwise).
Fiscally responsible states usually ran by Republicans and Conservative Democrats gained 10 House seats according to Census data.
People are voting with their feet. Over 150 businesses left California to move to Texas in just the last year. Missouri may now be changing to a “right to work state”. Union over reach and greed has sent jobs overseas. Ford Motor Company has a new high-tech plant that can make five cars on a single line at once. Union rules do not permit the advanced technology Ford needs so they have built these plants in Canada, Mexico and Brazil.
Union over reach in the public sector (government unions) is causing some states to go bankrupt. The states cannot afford the corruption and sweetheart deals that result from abusive public sector unions.
Keep in mind this is census data from late 2010, so one would imagine that the situation is more pronounced today.
[And as is so often the case, when there is a video that is popular with conservative bloggers YouTube makes it go poof. The video can be watched HERE]
You just gotta love public sector unions. To hear them talk one might think they are all underpaid victims, like missionaries working in the third world…. so sad…./sniff.
The truth is that public sector unions are usually paid more then there private sector counterparts. They also get Cadillac level benefits that they pay little or nothing for and get pensions that are so fat that states have no idea how they can possibly pay them. So far what are the results, snow that doesn’t get cleared in New York, a federal government that spent $2.08 trillion more than it took in and we have little to show for it, and public schools that range from sub-par to unsafe failures. [Even the best American public schoolers do not measure well against other top 30 industrialized nations. So if you think “our public schools are really good” you are deluding yourself – Editor]
American Federation of Teachers president Rhonda “Randi” Weingarten has issued a statement slamming proposed cuts from the congressional deficit commission for not pushing shared sacrifice among the wealthy, but an AFT spokesman has told The Examiner that Weingarten will not be taking a paycut from the total $428,284 she received in salary and benefits during fiscal year 2010.
Weingarten wrote of the proposed budget cuts from the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform:
While we’re grateful the commission’s chairmen understood the need to hold education investment sacrosanct, count on a vigorous fight from us over proposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare that would hurt an already-ailing middle class. Shared sacrifice means holding millionaires responsible for their fair share of taxes and ending truly wasteful spending, not sawing off essential lifelines for the middle class, who desperately are trying to keep their heads above water in these precarious economic times. We can help solve the financial future of Social Security and Medicare by investing in putting our people back to work, so they can pay into these programs. Nothing is more important to the future solvency of the country.
Filings from the Department of Labor reveal that the American Federation of Teachers has disbursed $428,284 to Weingarten. Her gross salary is $342,552, but benefits and other disbursements raise that number to almost half a million dollars. She also earned a six-figure salary when she was president of Local 2 in 2009, during which she received $202,319. Neither of these sums, by the way, include her expenses.
*Click to Enlarge
When The Examiner called the AFT to ask whether Weingarten was planning on taking a paycut to demonstrate her belief in shared sacrifice, the spokesman said no. “No, absolutely not. She works 24/7 on behalf of union members and the people we serve. Making sure that people get a great education in public schools in America. She works to the bottom of her soul. You can’t put a price tag on that.”
I joked that, well, there is a price tag on that, and it’s apparently $428,284, but got no response.
The spokesman also asked whether The Examiner was equally critical of Goldman Sachs “who has received taxpayer dollars” (wehavebeen), though it’s a bit odd that a spokesman for a teachers union that lobbies to funnel more taxpayer dollars toward its members would be so critical of Goldman Sachs for taking taxpayer dollars.
The lesson from the teachers union is clear: Shared sacrifice for thee and not for me.
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
Political Arena 