Snakes in a glade

Everglades, that is. There is a problem in Florida, and elsewhere, with non-native species. In the Florida Everglades there are thousands of pythons that are thought to be the descendants of pet snakes that were dumped by their owners when they got too big. There are also some who escape from shipments and pet stores. Regardless, they are there and they endanger the local environment because they are big, there are no natural predators that can handle a really big python – even alligators – and they eat the local wildlife including endangered species.

They also present a danger for pets, small children, adults – people and their families in general.

There are efforts to control the problem, but they mostly involve trapping them and work on limiting the prey. Why not try birth control?

If you can trap a snake, trap it and, male or female, neuter the snake. Then keep it in captivity until it is a nice big snake. Then release it back into the wild. There, the snake will compete with the other snakes for food and for mates. The big snakes may even kill smaller snakes. In other words, let the snakes take care of the problem.

It’s not a perfect solution and there are plenty of ways that it could fail, but in this case I don’t see failure causing more problems. Eventually, wouldn’t there be fewer snakes? It seems like a good plan to me.

Messenger

The Messenger spacecraft entered orbit around Mercury on Thursday. It’s the first craft from Earth to do that. I think that’s really cool.

I go on sometimes about manned space exploration, which I think we need to do more of, but I also like these unmanned missions. For one thing they are eminently practical when we are going someplace we don’t have much information about or where the environment is particularly nasty. They can be very useful and get us a lot of information.

But I think the real reason I like these missions is because they remind me of the missions that were done when I was a kid. I really enjoyed all that stuff and I get the same sort of feeling when I read about the ones today.

Cool.

Living in the past

I keep seeing commercials for The Feast dot com and they really confuse me. They make me feel like I’m watching something from the early 60s. The music is just not typical for a commercial these days. I keep expecting to see a grainy, black and white commercial selling me a washing machine or detergent or something.

Does anyone know what music they are using?

Since I’m clarifying things

Did you know that the federal government doesn’t even directly fund NPR? They give money to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the people who bring you Big Bird. The latest bill just prohibits the CPB from giving any federal money it receives to NPR and local stations from buying NPR programming with federal money.

Oh, and it doesn’t save any money, either. This doesn’t change the funding for the CPB so it doesn’t cut the budget. However, there is a good chance that it will cost thousands of jobs at those local stations.

Shades of Caddyshack

I just read an article about people in Boulder, CO being upset by use of the Rodenator. The device pumps propane into prairie dog burrows and ignites it. The product is not sold as a way to kill the prairie dogs, though I don’t think they have a warning before the bang. Some people are upset about seeing flaming prairie dogs, others complain about the noise which apparently exceeds the city noise limit. The device is only legal outside of the city.

It reminded me of something interesting I learned about prairie dogs. From what I’ve heard, prairie dogs are considered a nuisance because they damage pasture land, but I’ve learned recently that they don’t necessarily. I saw a show about them that had some information I hadn’t heard before. One thing was that they have a language that the ones on guard duty use. Different calls mean different things, to the level of distinguishing between grazing animals, predators, people they recognize as not being a threat and someone who they don’t recognize who may be a threat.

Another interesting thing was that the prairie dogs improve grazing land. They eat plants that grazing animals don’t which lets the grasses grow better. They also aerate the soil with their burrows and other activity and help spread the fertilizer around. When they are left undisturbed, prairie dogs improve the pasture and make it better for grazing.

They do leave holes, but generally grazing animals don’t really care about those. I imagine they are dangerous for horses and people, though.

I originally thought that they were a nuisance animal in pasture land. Amazing what you can learn from good research. I thought it was interesting, anyway. The language thing is weird, though.

Now, if they were living in a backyard it might be another story.

FYI

That info on teachers was actually an average minimum based on basic class time. The other stuff I mentioned – class prep, extracurricular time, personal time – makes it more like a 60 hour week.

I was a little confusing in how I put that together in the other posts and I didn’t want anyone to think one post related directly to the other.

Rut, what rut?

Yes, posting about current events is easier than explaining my life.

Presidential politics

There are reports that President Obama’s team wants to find ways to fire up his base.

Maybe he should just do the things that he campaigned on. That might do the trick. I guess that’s just too hard to do. Or he could just do what most of the country wants done. Nah, that would make too much sense.

NPR

There was an emergency session of the House of Representatives today to deal with the looming crisis of funding for NPR. They voted to kill funding.

With all the problems in this country – jobs, the economy, global warming, funding tsunami warning centers, jobs, health care, nuclear energy issues, jobs – and they hold an emergency hearing about NPR?

Really? That’s what they think is important?

Someone explain to me how that creates jobs.

Most people think NPR is liberal. In my experience it's barely centrist. But it is public. The thing is, even if federal funding is cut, it won’t really hurt NPR very much. It will, however, hurt many small market radio stations. Why would that be OK? I’m sure those parts of the country will still get plenty of AM radio. I guess that makes everything alright.

Lately the people at NPR have been pretty stupid. No, not what they said on tape, that was edited into fiction used to attack public radio. They were stupid because they rolled over when that happened. It was a lame attack. It was a tape edited into a series of lies, and they still couldn’t defend themselves.

I don’t think that this will kill NPR, but it’s like public schools: NPR is a good thing to have, it isn’t great and it could be improved, but if you get rid of it you can’t fix it. This is just an attack against something the people who run the House don’t like – though I doubt they could really explain why.

Rambling

You know, I’ve been supporting teachers on this blog, but I have to admit that I had some lousy ones. I also had some great ones. What I want to do is support public schools and the unions. The attacks lately are designed to push tax dollars to private companies and fund corporate tax breaks with cuts to the middle class.

That is my problem with all of this.

I do, however, think that public schools need to be fixed. I have a feeling that there are a lot of teachers who should be replaced. I also think that the reason for that is that many schools have not been attracting the most qualified teachers because the budgets keep being cut so they don’t pay enough. It doesn’t help when teachers are targets, either.

The same is true with the quality of the schools themselves, their state of repair. Budget cuts lead to lower school quality in level of education and buildings falling apart.

Unions get blamed a lot, but you can have a union and still be able to fire unqualified teachers. They are not mutually exclusive. And I don’t think collective bargaining ever kept a roof from being repaired.

Fix the problem, don’t just trash the entire school system. However bad things are, it is not the ‘public’ part that is the problem. A phrase about babies and bath water comes to mind.

Priorities are messed up and need to be reordered. I know what I think should be done, but for now I’ll just say that there needs to be more equality.

Oh, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen only one contestant make to Final Jeopardy before. Now I have a Weird Al song going through my head.

Maine

OK, just one more that I had lying around.

Maine’s Governor wants to cut state workers’ salaries by shifting 3% of their compensation from pay checks to pension payments. He calls it an increase in the employees contribution to the pension, but really it’s just so the state can save money by cutting workers’ pay. He wants to give that money to corporations as a $203 million tax break.

So again, we have a governor who wants to cut corporate taxes and have middle class state employees pay for it.

There is one state employee, however, who is exempt – the Governor.

Ranting

I have been ranting a lot lately.

I don’t imagine that what I have to say is of much interest to many people, I just need to get it out. I get frustrated when I see so many uninformed stories on line or on the TV, or stories that only give you half the information or deliberately misinform for whatever reason.

I am not a source of otherwise unobtainable information. I just read things. And I have opinions. Sometimes I just need to get these things off of my chest just for my own sake. Sometimes I am hyperbolic, and I haven’t plotted a parabola in decades.

But it is aggravating and writing some of this just makes it worse by focusing my attention on things that undoubtedly raise my blood pressure. I want to make sure the information is out there, but since I can find it of course other people can. It’s just me ranting. And I’m not sure that is such a good idea.

There are some things that are important to me – well, there are a lot of things that are important to me but a few specifically that have been in the news lately. I have this thing for justice, at least as I see it.

So I am posting opinions – as if you didn’t know that. I have them whether I write about them or not but writing about them makes me think about them more. I may need to take a break and go back to posting about myself. That was the reason for this blog in the first place. At least with that I may be doing some good. Anyone who knows me who wants to know what is going on with me can find it here, and if I can share something with someone who is searching for someone who had a similar experience then that is a good thing.

Besides, it helps me to get information about myself out there. On that topic I am an expert and an otherwise unobtainable source of information. So I am going to try to tone things down a bit, for everyone’s sake. I do have some things that I want to report on. Writing about things helps me work them out and putting them on a public blog makes them a little more real. No, I’m not being metaphysical, it’s just that if other people see them then I have made a commitment to saying them. When I’m not ranting that can help me clarify my thinking. If I need to make a personal point I focus and try to be informative and clear.

Except in this post.

So, now that I’ve posted the rants that I’ve written in the past few days, onward with less ranting and more sedate posts.

We’ll see how that goes.

Teachers again

No, I don’t think that all teachers are great and wonderful paragons of virtue. At the very least they are like people in other professions – some are good and some are bad, with some most likely at either extreme. For some reason, though, they are being attacked.

I do think that teaching has become a thankless job and teachers in general are easy targets and a ready distraction to keep our attention from bigger problems. We should focus on the problems instead of attacking some monolithic figment called ‘Teachers’ or ‘Unions’.

Sure, public schools need to be improved, but cutting funding is not going to fix them. Privatizing schools isn’t going to fix them, either. Charter schools and private schools typically show better results only when they refuse admission to difficult or special ed students.

If your plan to fix the schools is to make them unaffordable for most people and not care about the rest of the kids or any special services I think you need to find a better plan. If your plan is to just get rid of public schools and replace them with private schools that do exactly the same thing I think you still need to find a better plan. If the tax money is there to be pumped into for-profit private schools then the money is there to improve public schools that are non-profit and open to all students. It is a question of ideology: should tax dollars go to private corporations or to public schools?

For some reason, many people think that government spending is only good if tax money goes to private companies. I don’t see anything wrong with paying public employees to do jobs that are designed to benefit the public. We need to make things better, but privatizing all government services is not a solution.

Teacher hours

Teachers are required to do, among other things, class time, class prep, staff meetings, extracurricular time, grading and continuing education (that they pay for themselves). The hours add up. As I said before it averages out to about 44 hours a week.

Now, my particular field is notorious for taking advantage of the people who work in it, so a 44 hour week seems quaint to me. A union might have helped. But in a sane world, where people supposedly work an 8 hour day 5 days a week, teachers work the equivalent of 5½ days a week. Except they cram most of that into 9 ½ months.

I know teachers. For them the school year starts in the end of August and lasts until July. In the next 6 weeks or so they get a vacation – that is, when they aren’t in class themselves. And when they aren’t they’re usually busy helping students, spending their own money and dedicating their time to do so much more than what gets done in their own classrooms. Teaching is not a job for the weak.

And every year they get blamed for the budgets they don’t control and the quality of the schools someone else is in charge of and the problems caused by environment and poverty and malnutrition and other problems at home. Their budgets are cut, their jobs are threatened and the solutions that are offered usually include hiring consultants or new district superintendents who get paid 3 to 4 times what the teachers earn. Their recommendations are to lay off teachers, cut back on school repairs and blame the teachers for the problems.

There are people on TV these days ridiculing teachers. People who work a few hours a day and make more in a week than a teacher earns in a month, or who make more in a year than a teacher will make in a lifetime – these people are calling teachers greedy elites who don’t work as hard as people on Wall Street.

I don’t know if it’s just fun to attack people who you don’t know and who can’t fight back or if it makes them feel good about themselves. That would be an unkind thought. Maybe these people believe what they say and are just talking about something they know nothing about. Maybe they think they are well-informed. Maybe they think what they say is true.

Maybe they should learn more and help their audiences understand things better.

How 180 days equals a year

There are 52 weeks in a year. Teachers in the US work on average just over 2100 hours a year. That’s the equivalent of getting 2 weeks vacation and 10 holidays and working 44 hours a week.
Many work much longer than that. The job doesn’t end when class does.

So the next time someone talks about how teachers don’t work a full year remember that they put in the hours for one anyway.

Michigan

Wisconsin is crazy enough right now, Ohio may be worse, but Michigan is really going all out for outrageous legislation. There is a bill making its way through the Michigan legislature that will let the state appoint someone to dissolve any local government. Under this law contracts can be voided, school districts taken over, police and fire departments reorganized, unions and contracts broken and city governments outright dissolved arbitrarily.

All the state has to do is declare a financial emergency and then a single person can be appointed to take over and even unincorporate a city.

There are very broad definitions of emergency. A single person appointed by the Governor can take over an entire city. There is no legislative oversight. There is no recourse. All power of the elected and appointed officers will reside with one person. The emergency isn’t over until this person says it’s over.

The Governor of Michigan wants to be able to take over cities whenever he wants to. We’re not talking one person one vote, this is one person controlling everything.

Doing this to public schools to hand them over to private corporations is bad enough, doing it to entire cities is just unbelievable.

Electric cars

I thought I was clever when I had the idea of having gas stations modified to swap out batteries in electric cars. Instead of charging a battery you just drive in and get a fully charged one.

It turns out that other people had that idea – in 1897. There was an electric cab company operating in the 1890s that did just that.

I don’t see why we can’t do that now. Though I still like the idea of gas powered generators to run an electric motor – it’s efficient and uses existing technology.

Blog, blog, blog

Sometimes I just have to say things. I don’t think that I reach many people, but I want to share things for whatever help it can be. I’ve been doing a lot of ranting on political topics lately. Personally I blame a change in my medication – that and the fact that there is a lot of stuff to rant about these days.

There will be more of that sort of thing to come as well as more personal stuff.

I suppose that’s a warning.

Weekend plans

I'm off to a watch a buck-buck competition Saturday. I have to get up early though so I can stop off first to throw some sneakers over a power line.

Hope everyone has a great weekend.

Japan

I have continued my standard posting, even with the disaster and tragedy in Japan. I’m not heartless, just impotent in the face of something of this magnitude.

I realize that the earthquake and tsunami caused massive destruction and an as yet unknown number of deaths. As in all crises, personal and public, I hope that there is as little damage and injury as possible. I hope this for the people of Japan as well as my friends who have been dealing with personal and family illness and injury.

This is an incredible disaster and I hope the problems with the reactors are resolved quickly and life will to return to normal soon.

I intend to keep posting as usual – or unusual – because, well, this is a personal blog and not a news site. I don’t post about every world event. Maybe I should, but my focus is limited by both personal interest and personal limitations. I can’t cover the world. I will try to bring attention to those things that I can and what I think is being under or misrepresented, and this disaster has been covered elsewhere better than I could.

If you can, contribute to relief funds, for everyone who needs help around the world and around the corner. Major disasters focus attention, but we should all help each other as much as we can every day. That is the essence of community and I hope natural for all of us as human beings.

Public education

I’m a big fan of public schools. I’m not saying that they’re all great and that there’s no room for improvement. What I like is the idea that everyone gets a chance to get a decent education, which is important because it does more than help the individual. Education can make you a more well-rounded person, but it also helps society in general if everyone has an opportunity to live up to their potential. Our communities are better places if everyone can learn the skills to be productive, get a good job and contribute. That’s why we all pay for it even if we don’t have children in the schools.

What I don’t like is the escalation in attacks on public schools. It began decades ago in subtle ways. Class performance was closely examined to call into question teacher effectiveness with no regard to student ability. Then we get standardized tests which do little to educate but are great for manufacturing flaws where there might not be any. One of the more insidious ploys, before the attack on unions started, was to call them government schools.

For some people, government is a bad thing. People support the public – they are the public, so public schools are acknowledged as a good thing. But if you call them government schools then you’ve created a boogeyman to scare people with. It’s all marketing, but where calling prunes dried plums is meant to get you to taste one and like them, calling public schools government schools is designed to get you to mistrust them.

The golden age of America people long for was a time when kids went to (mostly public) school and then went on to trade school or college or an apprenticeship or just worked so they could be doctors and lawyers and plumbers and astronauts and even politicians. Today if you go to public school you’re being manipulated into being a tool of the system. There’s no mention of how schools have always reflected the dominant social mores of their local communities and still do to this day. Nope, now they’re just evil.

But somehow private schools are just wonderful places of joy and learning. That is they are if you can afford them.

In many states funding for public education is being cut at the state level. At the same time local school districts are being blocked from raising more money on their own. State money is cut and local taxes can’t be raised, so we have the self-fulfilling prophecy of school systems in decline. Public schools may need reform and changes to their processes. They need support and they need money. Getting rid of No Child Left Behind would help. That was only ever a back-handed way to promote privatization and never meant to help schools. But schools aren’t failing financially because of bad systems or bad teachers or unions. They are failing because administrations that want to funnel tax dollars into private schools are forcing public schools to fail.

As an example I give you New Jersey, where the state school budget has been cut, the application for federal grants was deliberately fumbled and the Governor blamed the teachers for his own actions. At the same time, a company can get a tax credit for contributing to the tuition for a student to go to a private school – but not for contributing to public schools.

When you control the purse strings and you cut off money to public schools and then point at them and say – Look, they’re not performing well and it’s all their fault – you’re pointing in the wrong direction.

Florida

I also don’t want Florida to feel left out, so I’d like to say a few things about the goings on in that state. The Governor wants to end all public hospitals and clinics. He also wants to phase out corporate taxes over the next 3 years – yes, to 0.

His new budget cuts around $1.75 billion dollars from K-12 public education (more from the education department and higher education as well). He says it’s because the state is in a fiscal crisis. But he isn’t proposing saving that money. Instead, he wants to give a $1.6 billion corporate and property tax cut.

Look a little closer and you see that teacher salaries are cut by $2,335. Each homeowner gets $44.72 in tax relief. I wonder where the other $2290.28 goes.

That is what you call a redistribution of wealth.

Fun facts

There are already tens of millions of acres of oil fields leased but not being developed.

Oil taken out of the Gulf of Mexico does not come to the US, and the US gets no royalties for it.

Drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf would reduce the price of gas by $0.03 per gallon by 2030. (source: the US Energy Information Administration)

Just letting oil companies drill more – even if they would – is not the answer.

Gas prices

If you need evidence that it is commodities trading and not supply and demand that drives oil prices, just go fill up your tank. The current crisis in Libya has not appreciably affected the oil produced by that country. Libya provides about 2% of the world's oil, they are producing at close to pre-crisis levels, and Saudi Arabia has promised to increase their production to meet any shortfalls. So the supply hasn’t decreased, and the demand certainly hasn’t shot up in the last week.

There haven’t been any major problems with global oil production to drive up oil prices. Current global production is actually very high – domestically we have been increasing production for years, yet the prices jump.

The reason is that oil is traded as a commodity on the futures market. You aren’t paying for gas, you’re lining the pockets of futures traders.

There used to be position limits on futures trading for oil. Not any more.

On a coincidentally related note

I don’t know if this is funny or not, but I just stumbled onto this and I think that some of the people that I know might get a kick out of it.

The Federal Reserve just released a report that essentially said that it couldn’t find any cases of wrongful foreclosures. No, that’s not the funny part, that’s just sad. The level of fraud and incompetence surrounding foreclosures is mind-boggling.

What the Fed did say was that there were many poor practices and that they had directed lenders to essentially clean up their act.

One firm was told to update its computer system – because it was using MS DOS. They weren’t told to switch to Linux or Snow Leopard, they were told to upgrade. They weren’t using one of the modern derivatives of DOS, they were using DOS. I suppose it’s betters than Windows for Workgroups, but damn, even Vista would be easier to use for that sort of thing than DOS.

They might want to consider getting a 60 kb hard drive for their 4 MHz machine while they’re at it.

How it can be done - mortgages

Back in 1933 there was a mortgage crisis in the US. Not only had the Great Depression ruined the economy, but people across America were facing balloon payments on mortgages that they could no longer refinance. The real estate market had gone bust along with the rest of the economy and people by the thousands faced losing their homes.

Sound familiar?

For some reason, when a similar thing happened in 2008, the response by the federal government was to give hundreds of millions of dollars to the lenders who had caused the problem in the first place. That hasn’t worked out too well for the homeowners, or the economy.

What FDR did in 1933 was create the Home Owners' Loan Corporation. The HOLC basically bought the mortgages and then the homeowners paid the HOLC. More than a million homes were saved, and when the HOLC shut down in 1951 it had actually made a profit.

I want to repeat that. A Federal agency spent money to save homes, kept over 1 million families in their homes and it made a profit for the US government.

The HOLC was not perfect, but it is something that could have been built on. Like so many other things going on today, it was all done before and we have the framework to build on if anyone really cared about the average citizen or the economy beyond Wall Street.

Obama could have proposed something similar in 2009 but he didn’t – and Congress didn’t help any. It can be done, but the people in power need the will and motivation to do it.

Bullies

I’ve seen on TV some of what has been going on in the Wisconsin House and Senate. Politics aside, the way the votes and meetings have been run lately are unprofessional. They may be legal – though today’s committee meeting doesn’t seem to be – but the behavior is outright bullying. It’s also very petty, which is interesting when coming from professional politicians.*

It gives the appearance of not only no desire to compromise, but because this is being done in spite of what the people in the state want, it also gives the appearance of not caring about the people or what is good for the state. It also looks like maneuvering from people who actually have no popular, logical, rational, responsible or legal foundation for doing what they are doing.





*I know being petty is a major feature of many politicians, but in this case it is so extreme that it seems to guarantee political payback later – either in the government chamber or at the voting booth.

Wisconsin

I can’t say that I’m surprised by what just happened in Wisconsin. I expected it earlier but I think the Republicans were trying to make the Democratic senators who went to Illinois look bad. When that didn’t work they gave up any pretense that this was about the budget.

Since the polls have been against them there wasn’t anything left for the Republicans to gain, so they did what they wanted to do. They passed a bill (if what they did was legal) to strip collective bargaining rights from public employees. Well, from public employees who didn’t support the Governor in the last election, anyway.

It doesn’t save the state any money. It just attacks the unions. It can’t be a budget bill because they don’t have a quorum for that. Even though the argument before was that this was a fiscal provision, now the argument is that it isn’t fiscal so they can vote without more Senators present. The Senate majority leader even said on camera today that the real reason for this was to try to keep unions from supporting Democrats. So apparently it’s OK to attack public servants as long as you can score some political points.

I’m not from Wisconsin. What I know about the people there is what I read and see on TV. They seem mostly to be reasonable people. This doesn’t look like the kind of thing that they would support so I don’t see how this helps anyone at all. Pyrrhic victory, anyone? Hey, I can dream.

Pennsylvania budget stuff

I’ve been talking about New Jersey, but I really don’t want Pennsylvania to be left out. In Pennsylvania, among other things, the Governor’s proposed budget cuts school funding, cuts funding for state run or supported higher education and eliminates a program that gives medical care for poor people.

What the budget doesn’t do is get the state any money from the fracking gas companies. They get more than $2 billion dollars from state resources but don’t give anything back to the state except contaminated water.

So, let’s recap: cut funding for schools and poor people, give away state resources to out-of-state (and out of the country) corporations.

What a swell way to run a state.

Public schools

The Governor of New Jersey’s budget plan cuts funding to public schools but somehow he can find the money to give more to charter schools. Funny how there’s tax money to give to the non-union privately owned schools but not for public schools.

There is also a proposed bill to give tax credits to corporations that give money for private school scholarships. Which is just more corporate tax breaks – a dollar for dollar credit if you support private schools – while funding for public schools gets cut.

The Governor’s new proposed budget also limits the amount by which local municipalities can raise property tax rates which will further erode funding for public schools.

If there is a problem with public schools then they should be fixed. So far no one is listing problems with public schools in New Jersey, just complaints about unions.

There is an argument that if the surcharge on income over $400,000 is reinstated people will leave the state. That’s BS because the rate of millionaires leaving New Jersey when the tax was in place was no more than the average for people moving to other states for any reason before the tax was enacted. There’s research on that sort of thing.

There are no good arguments for gutting public education. Attacks on the schools and the teachers are just an excuse for putting tax dollars in the hands of private corporations. If schools need to be improved than that is what should be done.

What’s going on now is political maneuvering, it is not governance or statesmanship. What do people have against public education, anyway?

Exhausted

Last week I was writing something almost every day and then setting it aside. I didn’t want to start off posting another string of rants. But I keep hearing so much on TV and the radio that is just plain wrong that I had to get my 2 dollars worth out there. So yesterday I posted a bunch of stuff.

There will probably be at least one more, but I’m too exhausted right now to write anything new and I think I only have one already written post that I could put up. I had an interesting day yesterday that I need to write about. One of my doctors put together a panel of patients to talk to medical students. I thought it was a great idea and it was very interesting. Fortunately it was also a good day with good weather so it was doable. There will be more on that when I can get around to it.

For now I need some rest. All I did was sit in a chair yesterday and I am beat. I am such a wonderful specimen of humanity, ain’t I? Well, I have a nice personality.

I do, don’t I?

Adding some detail

There's a point that I didn't make clearly earlier.

Since public employees negotiate their compensation, and that compensation includes salary and benefits, all of the money in the pensions is the employees’ money. Not only because it is contractually owed to them, but because if it hadn’t gone into the pension fund it would have gone to the employees in their paychecks.

It isn’t state money or state support any more than the money in their weekly paycheck is. It's compensation. It is the employees’ money.

Except of course in New Jersey where the State just keeps the money for itself.

For the record

None of what is going on in the country or my home state directly affects me yet. Any damage to the economy or cutbacks to state services or increases in local fees because of state cutbacks will of course change that status.

I have never been in a union or a profession that was unionized, though I recognize the benefits that I have because of unions.

Also, I pay taxes.

There is a game being played

Governors, among others, who like to demonize public employee unions are playing a game. For years, public employees in many municipalities have taken pay cuts in order to preserve their benefits. Now, they are being attacked for having benefits that are too generous.

First you roll back wages then you attack the benefits so you can cut them too.

Even so, many unions have agreed to cuts to their benefits. Some are the only ones funding their pension because the state has stopped paying into it.

The states are in financial trouble because the economy tanked because Wall Street screwed up. Many states also have problems because of tax cuts for the wealthy. New Jersey’s Governor vetoed the extension of a tax on those making over $400,000 a year – then he cut half a billion dollars from public schools claiming the state couldn’t afford it and he blamed the teachers’ union.

It is a self-fulfilling prophecy that foretells economic catastrophe and is very good at bringing about the predicted results.

In case you didn't know

New Jersey public employees have taken cuts for years in order to maintain their benefits. The State promised them a pension so they would take lower pay. And they are not paid more than comparable private sector employees – when compared on education and experience they get less, in fact. They provide needed services, they pay taxes and they contribute to their pension (unlike the State).

Regardless of what anyone may say to the contrary, those are the facts.

The governor gave an almost $500 million tax cut to the richest fraction of 1% of state residents, cut $500 million dollars from education, deliberately cost the state $430 million in school funding and cancelled the job-creating commuter tunnel to New York City which also will cost the state around $270 million it has to pay back. Now he proposes more corporate tax cuts. The only cuts the people of New Jersey get are to services and health care.

There doesn’t seem to be any explanation for this, other than that it is somehow because the state needs money and jobs so we should take in less revenue and cut jobs – or something. None of this is good for the economy or the people of New Jersey.

Who's to blame?

If New Jersey hasn’t contributed to the state pension fund in decades, and the state is not allowed to run a deficit (they just short-change the unions instead), how can the pensions be responsible for the financial problems?

And since the state is responsible for investing the money that the union members did put into the pension fund because they kept paying into it (and the State loses the money in the process), how can the employees be responsible for the financial problems?

For years the union employees have taken pay cuts or no raises in exchange for state promises of pensions and other benefits, thereby saving the state money, so how can the employees be responsible for the financial problems?

In other words, since the state of New Jersey is directly responsible for the current problems, why do people keep blaming the unions?