Friday, May 07, 2010

Friday Mashup (5/7/10)

(I also posted here – I know the times of these posts have been really screwed up, but I’m not able to do anything about that at the moment…sorry.)

  • Again, not a lot to highlight from last Sunday’s congressional writeup in the Inquirer here, except to point out that, in addition to every member of our local U.S. House delegation voting against a congressional pay raise, I give you the following…

    Puerto Rico status. Voting 223-169, the House passed a bill (HR 2499) authorizing Puerto Rico to hold a plebiscite on whether it wishes to remain a U.S. territory or seek independence or statehood. If the mandate is for change, a second vote would be held to determine the new status. However, only Congress could grant statehood.

    A yes vote was to pass the bill.

    Voting yes: Adler, Andrews, Brady, Castle, Dent, Fattah, Murphy, Schwartz, and Sestak.

    Voting no: Gerlach, Holden, LoBiondo, Pitts, and Smith.

    English as official language. Voting 194-198, the House refused to stipulate English as Puerto Rico's official language if it were to choose statehood under HR 2499 (above). The motion also sought to affirm residents' Second Amendment rights if Puerto Rico becomes a state.

    A yes vote backed the motion.

    Voting yes: Adler, Castle, Dent, Gerlach, Holden, LoBiondo, Pitts, and Smith.

    Voting no: Andrews, Brady, Fattah, Murphy, Schwartz, and Sestak.
    Adler and Holden should be ashamed of themselves (and as of last week, the Senate still hadn’t reached 60 votes to begin debate on financial reform...this is a positive development, though).


  • Also (on a local note), the Bucks County Courier Times granted column space to Simon Campbell (here), recently-elected member of the Pennsbury School Board, from which Campbell could spew his invective towards his favorite targets (teachers and their pensions, individuals who actually dare to question him at meetings, and “liberal(s) whose head(s) cannot compute what their heart(s) (are) bleeding”)…

    …Suppose a teacher earns $80,000 today. For the 2009-2010 school year taxpayers, via school taxes and state taxes, are paying 4.78 percent of that $80,000 into the teacher's pension fund. By 2012-2013 state mandates will require taxpayers to contribute 29.22 percent of that $80,000 into the pension fund. In other words, it's a coming financial tsunami.

    But suppose the teacher's salary was not $80,000 in 2012. Suppose it was $100,000 because the Pennsbury school board agrees to salary increases, instead of freezing salaries. In this scenario, taxpayers would have to pay 29.22 percent of $100,000. In other words, raising a teacher's salary WORSENS the effects of an already pending pension disaster across an entire class of public employees.

    All of this multimillion-dollar defined-benefit pension funding is money that cannot be spent on children's educational programs. Not one nickel of this taxpayer-funded pension bailout will get spent inside a classroom. Meanwhile the Act 1 tax cap ensures that other labor costs compete with children's programs underneath an index.
    OK, I get it. Raising teacher salaries plus contributing to their pension obligations means that Pennsbury students will have to do without books and libraries (to say nothing of computers) while those baad liberal Democrats continue to inconvenience Campbell at school board meetings with their petty whining.

    (See what happens with people blow off local and mid-term elections? Individuals such as Campbell can sneak in and try to enforce their agendas.)

    And what exactly would that agenda be? Why, to force a strike, of course (and working with his teabagger pal “Self” Ciervo to eliminate publicly-funded teacher pensions altogether, as noted here).

    It should be stated at the outset that, as noted here, Campbell rose to notoriety in these parts by founding StopTeacherStrikes.org and engaging in his own particularly awful brand of confrontational behavior (funny to now hear him whine when parents of Pennsbury students ask him questions he doesn’t like given his own checkered history…also, the prior linked post points out the infrequency of teacher strikes in this state and their negligible impact on academic performance).

    And as Jim Sando wrote in a February Guest Opinion here…

    People in the private sector usually don't contribute anything to their pensions. Teachers, on average, contribute about 7.3 percent of their salaries into the pension fund. In other words, much of the money in the funds comes from the school employees.

    Public sector pension funds were designed to be funded by both the beneficiaries (like the educators who pay 7.3 percent of their salaries) and also by the employers. Yet, many local school boards have, for several years in the last decade, deposited very little (including a year where they contributed zero), into the funds. Yes, school boards and the state made a promise to school employees -"Together, we'll fund your pensions" -and then many of them sat back as employees continued to fund the system, only to renege on their own promise.

    Three states have already tried plans like the one proposed by the state school boards association or Mr. Campbell. They have found them to be more expensive than traditional pension funds. In fact, the National Institute on Retirement Security found in a 2008 study that "the cost (to employers) to deliver the same retirement income to a group of employees is 46 percent less in a defined benefit plan than in a defined contribution plan." In West Virginia, which changed to a defined contribution plan in 1991, the state has already realized their mistake and begun the very expensive process of re-converting to a traditional defined benefit plan to SAVE money.

    Public pension funds are a crucial source of investment capital for start-up companies and small businesses. In fact, almost 90 percent of all venture capital investments come from institutional investors such as defined benefit plans and endowment funds. Companies like Starbucks, Staples, and Federal Express all trace part of their success to capital investment by public pension funds. In other words, public pension funds are pools of capital that help create jobs.



    Simon Campbell was inconvenienced by the 2005 Pennsbury teachers strike; he had to reschedule his children's flights to see their grandparents in England! He refers to public school educators as his "servants." It will be a great pity if his opinions on the future pensions of hundreds of thousands of public school employees are taken seriously, since they are due almost entirely to his outrage at being inconvenienced by his "servants." One man's personal and misguided attempts to get revenge on all public employees should not become public policy.
    And as former Pennsbury teacher John McDonnell recently stated here in the Courier Times (here)…

    Prior to retirement in 2003 I taught in Pennsbury for 34 years, was devoted to my students, and loved every minute of my time in the teaching profession. Judging from the number of former students and parents who still keep in touch, it appears I had the privilege to have a lasting and positive effect on a number of young lives. Watching them succeed in life continues to give me great pleasure.

    During the same period I also served in various leadership roles in the Pennsbury Education Association. The former PEA union leadership team, of which I was but a part, presided over 30 years of labor peace. Through mutually respectful negotiations with the school board (sometimes difficult, sometimes easier, but always cognizant of the need to work together for the common good) we reached agreement on numerous contracts without the ugliness and ill will we have seen in recent years. These agreements not only provided Pennsbury teachers with compensation commensurate to similar professions and the economic times, but also established an atmosphere that allowed Pennsbury to become the outstanding district it still is.

    Campbell, on the other hand, is an "independent futures trader." In short, he's a professional gambler.

    Right now Campbell is gambling that those who value Pennsbury will remain content and silent until it is too late to stop him. Let's call his bet. Talk to your neighbors. Contact school board members. Attend meetings. Stop these destructive budget cuts.
    And it’s actually funny to hear Campbell say that he “mentally groan(s)” at Pennsbury school board meetings. That’s the same reaction I have to reading his Guest Opinions.


  • Finally, turning to national stuff, Peggy Noonan, she of the Ronnie Reagan hero worship, tells us the following in the Murdoch Street Journal today (here; with the recent unplesantness of Times Square in mind, she recounts the performance of perhaps Ronnie’s staunchest ally)…

    After he left office in 1974, former British prime minister Edward Heath was the target of two assassination attempts. The IRA bombed his London home while he was away—haplessness among terrorists did not start in Times Square—and tried to blow up his car. But in October 1984 they got close to killing a sitting prime minister. In Margaret Thatcher's memoir, "The Downing Street Years," she recounts with understatement and precision the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton.

    She was up late working on a speech. "At 2:50 a.m. Robin Butler asked me to look at one last official paper—it was about the Liverpool Garden festival." Four minutes later "a loud thud shook the room. . . . I knew immediately that it was a bomb." It had been placed above her suite, which was now strewn with glass. She made her way, covered in plaster dust, out of the hotel, met with aides, slept in her clothes for an hour at a police facility, woke to the news reports—five dead, including a cabinet minister's wife—and turned to her remarks to the Tory party conference. "I was already determined that if it was physically possible to do so I would deliver my speech." Urged to return to No. 10 Downing, she said, "No: I am staying."

    "I knew that I could not afford to let my emotions get control of me. I had to be mentally and physically fit for the day ahead. I tried not to watch the harrowing pictures. But it did not do any good. I had to know each detail of what had happened—and every detail seemed worse than the last."

    Contemporary politicians, please note: In the rewrite of her speech, Mrs. Thatcher removed "most of the partisan sections." This "was not a time for Labour-bashing but for unity in defense of democracy."
    Admirable stuff, actually.

    So I assume “Nooners” would look for similar traits in a “leader” of this country, wouldn’t she?

    Well, as she said here in December 2008…

    When Republicans say, in coming years, "At least Bush kept us safe," Democrats will not want tacked onto the end of that sentence, "unlike Obama."
    Nice.

    Soo…did Number 43 ever realize there was a time not for bashing the opposition “in defense of democracy” (or, as Dubya so often referred to them “the Democrat Party”…the man possessed the working synapses of a dead tree stump)?

    Well, if this is any indication, I think we have our answer, as K.O. recounts for us here…

    The former Secretary of State, (Colin) Powell, had written, simply and candidly and without anger, that "the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism."

    This President's response included not merely what is apparently the Presidential equivalent of threatening to hold one's breath, but within it contained one particularly chilling phrase.

    "Mr. President, former Secretary of State Colin Powell says the world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism," he was asked by a reporter. "If a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former secretary of state feels this way, don't you think that Americans and the rest of the world are beginning to wonder whether you're following a flawed strategy?"

    “If there's any comparison between the compassion and decency of the American people and the terrorist tactics of extremists, it's flawed logic,” Bush said. “It's just -- I simply can't accept that. It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.
    Of course it's acceptable to think that there's "any kind of comparison."

    And in this particular debate, it is not only acceptable, it is obviously necessary, even if Mr. Powell never made the comparison in his letter.
    And this is how Dubya acted towards a member of his own party.

    I will give Noonan some credit in her column today for at least acknowledging the anthrax attacks after 9/11. However, as you can read here, that still didn’t prevent her from stating that Former President Highest Disapproval Rating In Gallup Poll History was “part of a sickness” anyway.

    And in a related note, I learned here that washing your hands “can help ease niggling doubts about decisions.”

    Gee, I wonder if that explains the obsession noted here?
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