Government Unions to Taxpayers: "Me Master! You Slave!"

One can see the economic future of at least half the states and cities of the US, by looking at California. Nowhere in the US is the power of unions so total and uncontested, and nowhere is the Democratic Party so dominant. And nowhere in the US is the economic future so rutted into a predictable  path to total collapse. The complete fusion of government unions with the US Democratic Party presents a picture of corruption and an apparent impossibility for meaningful reform which staggers the logical mind.

The Democratic Party has folded Sacramento into one of the tightest one-party grips in contemporary American politics. In November, bucking the national trend, Democrats in California won not just the governorship but 51 Assembly seats to Republicans’ 29, 24 state Senate seats to Republicans’ 14, and every statewide office. With the passage of a referendum lowering the number of legislative votes required to approve a state budget (from a two-thirds majority to a simple majority), California is that rarest of land masses for the 2011 Democratic Party: conquered territory. State Democrats have freedom to rule virtually unchallenged by the scattered, rusticated Republicans.

As 72-year-old Jerry Brown enters his second governorship, he has an agenda to match that power, with visions even greater than those that haunted his two-term administration of the 1970s and ’80s: building 20,000 megawatts of renewable power, laying a new high-speed rail network that will connect the state’s major cities, forging a statewide infrastructure for alternative energy, hiring thousands of green employees. The new governor’s environmental agenda is ambitious, untenably expensive, and indelibly popular with voters and lawmakers.

Yet when Brown looks out on Democrat-controlled California, he seems less like Caesar at the Rubicon than Wojciech Jaruzelski at the Gdansk Shipyard. Brown is champion of a workers’ party with monopoly control, yet all his plans are being derailed by a labor movement nobody can harness. _Reason

The unions’ political triumphs have molded a California in which government workers thrive at the expense of a struggling private sector. The state’s public school teachers are the highest-paid in the nation. Its prison guards can easily earn six-figure salaries. State workers routinely retire at 55 with pensions higher than their base pay for most of their working life. Meanwhile, what was once the most prosperous state now suffers from an unemployment rate far steeper than the nation’s and a flood of firms and jobs escaping high taxes and stifling regulations. This toxic combination—high public-sector employee costs and sagging economic fortunes—has produced recurring budget crises in Sacramento and in virtually every municipality in the state. _CityJournal

California may be more beholden to government unions than most US states, but it is far from alone. Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, Illinois, New York, and a score of other states are deeply wrapped within the web of government union power, and may find it ultimately impossible to escape doom.

...public-sector workers are spoiled rotten. Government employees earn 21% more than private ones and are 24% more likely to have access to health care. Only 21% of private workers enjoy a defined-benefit (DB) pension, which guarantees retirement income based on years of service and final salary. But 84% of state and local workers still receive DB plans.

All this might be grand if states and cities could afford it, but they cannot; unlike the federal government, they have the pesky obligation to balance their budgets. The recession has already drained pension funds. _Economist

US governments are corrupted by ties to government unions from the top to the bottom. Good government is impossible under these conditions, much less a viable economic plan for commercial prosperity.

The enslavement of taxpayers by government unions is virtually complete in California, and at least a handful of other states. But the Obama government wants to put every US state into the same position as California and Illinois. It is not clear that the nation could recover from such a disastrous plan, if achieved.

More: Even the NYTimes is beginning to see the handwriting on the wall for government unions. Anyone still pro government union by now, simply has no brain. Such people are generally referred to as zombies, in the age of Obama. ;-)

The Lunatic Who Believes He Is Barack H Obama

Somewhere in a Washington DC asylum, a lunatic who believes he is Barack H Obama is busy writing yet another autobiographical account of his short life.  The US elections of November 2010, and a recent media release of internal US State Department diplomatic correspondence, should provide some excellent -- though unsolicited -- grist for the book mill. What do others think about what the cables reveal?

The cables, in sum, reveal an American administration that refuses to look at the facts on the ground, even when friendly governments rub the noses of American diplomats into them. Obama is beyond reality; he has become the lunatic who thinks that he is Barack Obama. _Spengler_via_ReverseSpins

Image via ScottySarnesIt is Obama's turn to be riding on the "down" escalator, although nobody in the White House dares to be the one to tell "The One" what is going on. Unfolding events will simply need to "drip, drip, drip . . ." through the lunatic's near-impervious skull like a Chinese water torture, until he finally gets it. It may, finally, require the moving van's arrival at the asylum to remove his personal belongings, before this one begins to comprehend the turning of the screw.

Napoleon was a lunatic who thought he was Napoleon, and the joke applies to the 44th United States president with a vengeance. What doesn't the president know, and when didn't he know it? American foreign policy turned delusional when Barack Obama took office, and the latest batch of leaks suggest that the main source of the delusion is sitting in the Oval Office.

...The initial reports suggest that the US State Department has massive evidence that Obama's approach - "engaging" Iran and coddling Pakistan - has failed catastrophically. The crisis in diplomatic relations heralded by the press headlines is not so much a diplomatic problem - America's friends and allies in Western and Central Asia have been shouting themselves hoarse for two years - but a crisis of American credibility.

Not one Muslim government official so much as mentioned the issues that have occupied the bulk of Washington's attention during the past year, for example, Israeli settlements. The Saudis, to be sure, would prefer the elimination of all Israeli settlements; for that matter, they would prefer the eventual elimination of the state of Israel. In one conversation with a senior White House official, Saudi King Abdullah stated categorically that Iran, not Palestine, was his main concern; while a solution to the Arab/Israeli conflict would be a great achievement, Iran would find other ways to cause trouble.

...How do we explain the gaping chasm between Obama's public stance and the facts reported by the diplomatic corps? The cables do not betray American secrets so much as American obliviousness. The simplest and most probable explanation is that the president is a man obsessed by his own vision of a multipolar world, in which America will shrink its standing to that of one power among many, and thus remove the provocation on which Obama blames the misbehavior of the Iranians, Pakistanis, the pro-terrorist wing of the Saudi royal family, and other enemies of the United States.

Never underestimate the power of nostalgia. With a Muslim father and stepfather, and an anthropologist mother whose life's work defended Muslim traditional society against globalization, Obama harbors an overpowering sympathy for the Muslim world. He is not a Muslim, although as a young child he was educated as a Muslim in Indonesian schools. His vision of outreach to the Muslim world, the most visible and impassioned feature of his foreign policy, draws on deep wells of emotion. _Spengler

The lunatic who believes he is Obama contains many deep wells of emotion, and little else. Besides his deep well of emotion connecting him to the Muslim world, is his deep well of emotion connecting him to third world liberation movements, and the deep wells of emotion containing unbridled hatred toward capitalism and anything European. Any deep wells of emotion he may have regarding his wife Michelle, or anyone else who has managed to get reasonably close to him, might best remain unexplored. Like the Wikileaked documents, many people may not like what is revealed by such explorations.

This lunatic's delusions might have been better left undisturbed altogether, if not for the unbounded stupidity of voters within a growing Idiocracy.

Whooops! The Bat Slipped, I Swear!

Source_via_

A few decades ago, most Americans would never believe that an elected US President would intentionally disrupt and disable large portions of the private sector economy of the US. Alas, more thoughtful Americans are now being forced to acknowledge what is happening. The zombies, of course, remain mired in tunnel vision....or, perhaps not all of them. Some may be having second thoughts.

Jobless America Threatens to Bring World Down With It

Obama Cuffs Recovery

Entering a Stormy Period

PDF The Gathering Storm PDF A Risk of Extreme Meltdown

Obama's Big Hole

People are Becoming Concerned

Things Are Going to Get a Lot Worse

Public-sector unions aren't protecting government workers against abuse; they're inflicting abuse on the rest of us -- because private workers pay for all the government jobs by losing their own jobs and with higher taxes. _NYP

Public sector unions are sucking the blood out of the private sector.

Thirty years ago the vast majority of union workers were in the private sector. Public employees in unions reached parity with private sector members by 2009. This was aided in part by campaign contributions from the unions to elect Democratic Party candidates and generous pay packages and retirement plans passed by those same politicians in return.

By 2010, the general public received a series of shocks. The first shock was the jobless recovery of the Great Recession that cost 8 million jobs. Most of the job losses occurred in the private sector yet the majority of the $800 billion Stimulus Bill went to “save and create” public sector employment. The second shock was learning that civil servants earned twice that of private workers. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Federal workers received average pay and benefits of $123,049 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation. The third shock was revelation of incredible retirement plans doled out by politicians since 1999. In 2002, California passed SB 183 that allowed police and safety workers to retire after 30 years on the job with 3% of salary for each year of service, or 90% of their last year’s pay. During the Great Recession, fireman began retiring with $150,000 pensions at age 52 despite a life expectancy approaching 80. In Orange County CA, lifeguards, deemed safety workers, retired with $147,000 annual pensions. The Orange County sheriff, recently convicted of witness tampering, will receive $215,000 annually while in jail. Bob Citron, the Treasurer of Orange County who pushed the county into bankruptcy in the 1990s, receives a pension of $150,000 per year. A tsunami of anger and resentment is building. _NG

$3 trillion pension disaster on the way Will Obama Pelosi bail out their union buddies yet again -- at the private sector's expense?

Pension Tsunami blog

Overpaid government worker blog

Is it time to end tenure for university indoctrinators?

At a time when nearly one in 10 American workers is unemployed, here’s a crew ...who are guaranteed jobs for life, teach only a few hours a week, routinely get entire years off, dump grading duties onto graduate students and produce “research” on subjects like “Rednecks, Queers and Country Music” or “The Whatness of Books.” Or maybe they stop doing research altogether....dropping their workweek to a manageable dozen hours or so, all while making $100,000 or more a year... _NYT

And those are the more responsible of the tenured professors. ;-)

Things are going to get a lot worse, because there are a lot more shoes left to drop.

As US interest rates inevitably rise, every additional $trillion that Obama adds to the national debt will be felt by all but the richest Americans. Eventually even Obama zombies will mutter Obama's name as a curse, like everyone else.