September 30, 2014

First Ebola Case Diagnosed in the United States of America

Similar to the incident in 2009 with the swine flu, paranoia is being heightened by corporate media, which will lead to a heavily-promoted vaccine that will produce massive profits for the pharmaceutical industry.

The Club of Rome in 1968 conducted a study with the aim of determining the limits of human growth. The result of their study was that civilization as we know it would collapse shortly after the year 2000 and natural resources would become scarce for the hegemonic powers; and the capitalist system itself would be in danger unless the population was severely reduced by some medium, either by hunger or disease. Several intelligence agencies of the American government made ​​recommendations to the ruling elite, presented to Dr. Aurelio Peccei, Director of the Club of Rome at the time. The main recommendation was the development of pathogens that attack the immune system and thus make the development of a vaccine immediately impossible. The orders given were to develop pathogens and also develop prophylactic. Pathogens could be used against the general population and could be introduced by vaccines administered by the complicit World Health Organization, O.P.S. Pan American Health Organization, and health agencies in Africa, South America and Asia. The cure would be administered to the survivors when they decide that enough people have died. This plan was called Global Plan 2000. [Source]

Texas patient confirmed as first Ebola case diagnosed in US (Video)

September 30, 2014

Yahoo – A man who recently arrived in Texas from Liberia has been confirmed as having the first case of Ebola to be diagnosed in the U.S.

Authorities with the Centers for Disease Control revealed the finding late Tuesday, two days after the unidentified patient was admitted to a Dallas hospital with suspicious symptoms.

Officials at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas put the man into “strict isolation” and sent a blood specimen to state and federal labs for testing.

Both came back positive for the deadly disease, which has killed more than 3,000 people in Africa this year. According to the World Health Organization, there have been more than 6,500 Ebola cases confirmed in Africa, with Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone among the hardest hit.
“He is ill, he is under intensive care, he's being seen by highly trained, competent specialists, and the health department is helping us in tracing any family members that might have been exposed," said Dr. Edward Goodman with Texas Health Dallas.
Authorities declined to name the adult patient or even say if he is an American.
“The patient was visiting family members and staying with family members who live in this country,” said Dr. Thomas Frieden, CDC director.
Frieden said the man arrived from Liberia on Sept. 20, but didn't start feeling ill until Sept. 24. He sought medical treatment at Texas Health Dallas on Friday, Sept. 26 before being sent home. He was then admitted to the hospital on Sunday the 28th.
“The initial symptoms of Ebola are often nonspecific ... they are symptoms that may be associated with many other conditions,” Frieden said. “That's why we have encouraged all emergency department physicians to take a history of travel within the last 21 days.”
The CDC has a team en route to North Texas to help health officials retrace the man's contacts since he has been in the states. Officials characterized the patient as having close contact with about a "handful" of family members while in Dallas.
“I have no doubt that we'll stop this in its tracks in the U.S., but I also have no doubt that as long the outbreak continues in Africa we need to be on our guard,” Frieden said.
Along with all other passengers, the patient's temperature was taken as a matter of precaution when he left Liberia for the U.S. on Sept. 19. Because he didn't show fever then, Frieden said, officials have no immediate plans to make the man's flight information public.
“At this point there is zero risk of transmission on the flight," Frieden said.
Ebola is highly contagious and deadly, but only spread through contact with bodily fluids. Dallas County Health and Human Services Director Zachary Thompson spent most of his day trying to calm the fears of North Texans.
“It is easier to get the flu than it is to get the Ebola virus,” Thompson told KTVT-TV. "You have to get it through secretion, blood, that type of transmission. So this is not a situation where you go to the grocery store and you get infected with the virus.”
Ebola symptoms include sudden fever, fatigue and headache. Officials said symptoms may appear anywhere from two days to three weeks after exposure.

Four American aid workers have contracted Ebola in West Africa and been evacuated to the U.S. for treatment since late July. Three of them were released after making full recoveries. A fourth patient arrived in Atlanta on Sept. 9, but spokespersons at Emory University Hospital have said privacy laws prevent the release of an updated condition.

On Sunday, a U.S. doctor who had been volunteering in an Ebola clinic in Sierra Leone was brought to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, as a safety precaution after he was exposed to the disease (see story below).

In past years Ebola has killed up to 90 percent of those it has infected, but officials say the death rate in the current outbreak is closer to 60 percent due to early treatment.

US doctor exposed to Ebola virus admitted to NIH

September 28, 2014

The Associated Press - An American doctor who was exposed to the Ebola virus while volunteering in Sierra Leone was admitted Sunday to a hospital at the National Institutes of Health near the nation's capital.

The patient, who was not identified, arrived at NIH's Clinical Center about 4 p.m., NIH said in a statement on its website.

NIH said that out of "an abundance of caution," the physician was admitted to a special isolation unit. NIH infectious disease chief Dr. Anthony Fauci wouldn't discuss details about the patient but said that in general, an exposure to Ebola doesn't necessarily mean someone will become sick.
"When someone is exposed, you want to put them into the best possible situation so if something happens you can take care of them," Fauci said.

"NIH is taking every precaution to ensure the safety of our patients, NIH staff and the public," the agency said in a statement.
Four other American aid workers who were sickened by Ebola while volunteering in the West African outbreak have been treated at hospitals in Georgia and Nebraska. One remains hospitalized while the others have recovered.

An Associated Press photographer saw a person dressed in a white protective suit get off a plane and walk to a waiting ambulance at the Frederick Municipal Airport in Maryland about 3:30 p.m. Sunday.  

The plane's tail number matched that of the aircraft that has been used previously to transport other Ebola patients to the United States from overseas.

NIH spokesman John Burklow confirmed that the plane carrying the patient landed at Frederick.

Click here for photos; click here for video of the transfer of the doctor at Frederick Regional Airport.
Editor's Note:

Some are questioning why Frederick was chosen as the relay airport when there are other regional airports closer to NIH in Bethesda than Frederick. One theory is that if an outbreak occurs in the area because of a release of the virus from Fort Detrick, the government can deny culpability and blame it on the transfer at the airport in Frederick.

Local airports near Bethesda, MD:

11 miles: Buzzards Pt Sea Plane Base Anc. Rvr Dc - Buzzards Point Seaplane Base, DC
12 miles: Pentagon Army - Washington, DC
15 miles: College Park Airport - College Park, MD
18 miles: Reston Airport - Reston, VA
18 miles: Montgomery County Airpark - Gaithersburg, MD
24 miles: Tipton Airport - Odenton, MD
27 miles: Davison Army Airfield - Fort Belvoir, VA
28 miles: Andrews Air Force Base - Camp Springs, MD
30 miles: Joint Base Andrews Naval Air Facility - Camp Springs, MD
34 miles: Leesburg Executive Airport - Leesburg, VA (JYO / KJYO)

Frederick is the home to Fort Detrick, the center of the US biological weapons program from 1943 to 1969. In 2008, Bruce Ivins, a microbiologist at the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, reportedly committed suicide. Fort Detrick was the nation's, and likely the world's, "largest and most sophisticated" BW testing center. Officials admit that accidental anthrax deaths did occur at the facility.

Frank Rudolph Olson (July 17, 1910 - November 28, 1953) was an American bacteriologist, biological warfare scientist and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee who worked at Fort Detrick (formerly known as Camp Detrick): he was covertly dosed with LSD by his CIA supervisor and, nine days later, plunged to his death from the window of a New York hotel room. Some — including the U.S. government — term his death a suicide, while others allege murder. First, the Army told Frank Olson's sons that the Fort Detrick scientist's death in a fall from a 13th-floor window of a New York hotel had been an accident. Then a presidential commission revealed that the CIA had given an unwitting Olson LSD as part of a mind-control experiment in remote Western Maryland only nine days before the fall, and concluded that his death had been a drug-related suicide. Eric and Nils Olson believe their father — who had told colleagues before he died that he wanted to quit the top-secret Special Operations Division — was murdered on November 28, 1953.
1967 FT Detrick Biological Weapons Program Victim Speaks Out - True Story of Diana Quintanilla Montoya


Related:

September 29, 2014

Ben Carson Thinking About Running for President in 2016

Host Chris Wallace noted Ben Carson’s August comment that if the Republicans don’t win a majority in the Senate this year, the 2016 elections might not even be held and asked the retired neurosurgeon if he stood by it:
WALLACE: You said recently that there might not even be elections in 2016 because of widespread anarchy. Do you really believe that?
CARSON: I hope that that’s not going to be the case. But certainly there’s the potential because you have to recognize that we have a rapidly increasing national debt, a very unstable financial foundation, and you have all these things going on like the ISIS crisis that could very rapidly change things that are going on in our nation. And unless we begin to deal with these things in a comprehensive way and in a logical way there is no telling what could happen in just a couple of years.
Carson then noted that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has “over three hundred bills sitting on his desk” that he won’t bring to the floor for a vote, “thereby thwarting the will of the people.”

Carson finished a close second Saturday in a straw poll at the 2014 Values Voters Summit for 2016 presidential preferences. 

Carson's thoughts on the definition of marriage: 
"My thoughts are that marriage is between a man and a woman, it’s a well-established uh, fundamental pillar of society. No group, be they gays, be they NAMBLA [the North American Man/Boy Love Association], be they people who believe in beastiality, it doesn’t matter what they are, they don’t get to change the definition. So it’s not something that’s against gays, it’s against anybody who wants to come along and change the fundamental definitions of pillars of society. It has signifcant ramifications."
Carson compared the Affordable Care Act to slavery at the Values Voters' Summit Friday, saying, 
"It was never about health care; it was about control." 

He’s already a famous surgeon and author, so why is Ben Carson toying with a longshot presidential bid?



— Ben Carson sees bullies everywhere.

Maybe that’s what happens after years of being walloped by stronger kids, and ridiculed by the smarter ones at his inner-city schools in Boston and Detroit.

The bullying is central to the stories Carson tells about himself. Onstage here today in Iowa, where all presidential campaigns begin, he starts with a tale about studying hard enough to best his tormentors.
“I went from the bottom of the class to the top of the class, much to the consternation of the students who called me ‘dummy,’ ” he says with a grin. “Now they were coming and saying, ‘Benny, Benny, come help me with this problem.’ I’d say, ‘Come sit at my feet while I instruct you, youngster.’ I was perhaps a little obnoxious, but it sure felt good to say that to those turkeys.”
Fifty years, a pioneering career as a pediatric neurosurgeon and six best-selling books later, Carson, 62, gleefully recites this story as though it happened yesterday.

But he didn’t come to Iowa just to tell his parable about schoolyard jerks. He’s inside this meeting hall, before a sellout crowd of nearly 400 people at the Polk County Republicans’ end-of-summer fundraiser, to discuss bullies of a different order. He wants to talk about the “secular progressives” in the news media, politics and academia who will stop at nothing to change the nation as we know it. He also wants to do this in Iowa, while raising money for local Republicans, coinciding with the start of his new PAC, which will “lay the groundwork” should he decide to run for president.
“The vast majority of people in this country actually have common sense; the problem is they’ve been beaten into submission,” Carson says, standing onstage between two mounted moose heads and beneath a series of chandeliers made of antlers. 
He speaks softly, almost as though he’s reading a child to sleep. But this is a scary story. If Republicans don’t win back the Senate in November, he says, he can’t be sure “there will even be an election in 2016.” Later, his wife, Candy, tells a supporter that they are holding on to their son’s Australian passport just in case the election doesn’t go their way.
“Bullies do whatever they can get away with and keep pushing boundaries until they meet resistance,” he writes in his new book, “One Nation” — one part memoir, one part political tome and one part tactical field guild for dealing with oppressors. “It is the people’s job to stop them before they become uncontrollable.”
It’s the perfect message for people who feel like the government is pushing them around. Carson’s experience — of growing up poor and black, thinking he might not make it past his 25th birthday and going on to become a world-class surgeon — may be unusual here in Polk County, but his feelings of being disrespected are universal.

His views seem to resonate in particular with evangelicals. And, for people who fear they will be pilloried by the “PC police” for speaking their minds on same-sex marriage, or how black voters are bought off by “goodies” from Democrats, or how President Obama’s health-care law is akin to slavery, Carson is a godsend. He isn’t afraid to say any of these things.

It started in February 2013 when he confronted bully numero uno. Speaking just feet away from Obama at the National Prayer breakfast, Carson gave a blistering critique of the Affordable Care Act. Then, as he describes it in an interview, “everything exploded.” The next day, the Wall Street Journal ran a column titled, “Ben Carson for President.” This gave birth to the National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee, which has raised $8.7 million (as of July, Ready for Hillary had raised about $8.25 million). His new book will be No. 1 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list next week (he loves pointing out how much better it’s doing than Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “Hard Choices,” No. 6 on the same list).

Carson says that at the time of the prayer breakfast, he was planning a relaxing retirement. He even bought an organ with designs on honing his musical skills and spending his days away from “The People’s Republic of Maryland,” as he calls it, in sunny Florida.

He did retire from surgery last year, but his retirement plans changed.
“Sometimes I realize there are forces greater than me,” he says. “I am an instrument that’s being used to help restore this country.”
Last week, he took his “One Nation” tour into the politically important state of Iowa, where, in addition to signing books in various Barnes and Noble stores, he headlined three Republican fundraisers. (Carson, however, does not identify himself as a Republican, saying he wishes there were a “Logic Party” he could join.) He entered the state Sunday saying he was thinking about running and left his final crowd Monday night saying, “There’s a strong chance that [he] will.”

Carson ends this speech in Des Moines to chants of “Run, Ben, run!” Sherill Whisenand, co-chairman of the Polk County Republican Central Committee, makes an announcement over the loudspeaker that Carson has won the group’s presidential straw poll, with 62 percent of the vote.
“In this room tonight, I can probably count on both hands the amount of regular people that come to most meetings,” Whisenand says later. “These are new people we’ve never met. . . . He’s clearly reaching people who aren’t always part of the process.”
In Des Moines, a man who used to drive a limo for Carson in Baltimore showed up because he always has admired him. “He doesn’t see color because all he knows is the inside of a brain,” he says. In Davenport, a black physician who grew up in inner-city Chicago says no other politician has come as close to representing him in terms of background and principles. In Cedar Rapids, a woman named Rebecca Stone drove from Chicago in a rainstorm, arriving at a Barnes and Noble three hours early, and nearly burst into tears when she met him.
“His story is just so remarkable. I know he would be an incredible president,” she says in the parking lot, clutching an autographed copy of his book.
Las Vegas oddsmakers wouldn’t recommend putting a big bet on Carson’s presidential chances. Even his friends give him the nickname “Long shot.” But Stone is right about one thing: His story, which he recounts in his book “Gifted Hands,” is remarkable.

Carson’s mother was one of 24 children, got married when she was 13 and divorced when she found out that her husband had more than one family. The combination of growing up poor, having a broken family and facing constant bullying from classmates made Carson a tinderbox of a child. Once, he tried to stab his friend in the gut, only to have his knife break off on his buddy’s belt buckle.

As he tells it, he locked himself in a bathroom afterward and prayed to God for the ability to control his temper. It worked. His mother told him to stop watching television and to read more, and just like that he became a better student. He attended Yale, got his medical degree at the University of Michigan, at 33 became the youngest director of a major division in the history of Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital as head of pediatric surgery, and rose to worldwide fame as the first surgeon to separate twins conjoined at the head (note: His middle name is Solomon, perhaps the first person ever to consider dividing a baby).

When “Gifted Hands” was published in 1990, the Rev. Jesse Jackson wrote a blurb on the back calling Carson “a model to all the youth of today.” Carson became so famous that when the Farrelly brothers made the 2003 comedy “Stuck on You” about conjoined twins, they asked him to make a cameo. He agreed to do it only if the movie premiere was held in Baltimore. For that day, Charm City felt like Hollywood. Here’s how broad his appeal was, politically speaking: He said in an interview this week that he turned down offers from George W. Bush and Obama (in 2009) to become surgeon general. He said that he found the job too ceremonial and that it wasn’t worth the pay cut.

If it all sounds like a made-for-TV movie, that’s because it is. Cuba Gooding Jr. played Carson in a film for HBO. The film, "Something The Lord Made," premiered in 2004.

At 33, Carson became the youngest major division director in the history of Johns Hopkins as head of pediatric surgery. Here he is seen with Sharon and Jim Schear of Annapolis after he completed brain surgery on their daughter. (Yoni Brook/The Washington Post)

It’s easy for people to say there are two Ben Carsons: the one who wrote the inspirational “Gifted Hands” and the one who is jumping into the political arena with both feet. Carson says that anyone who reads his past works can see that he’s writing about the same stuff as always: the importance of self-reliance, education and standing up to those trying to bring you down.
“Go back and read my books, they are exactly the same things,” he says in an interview at the Cedar Rapids Marriott after his second Republican fundraiser. He squints through his rectangular glasses, talks slowly and flashes an easygoing smirk. “But now, because they’ve classified you as a sellout or Uncle Tom, then all the things that they praised you about before they’ll say, ‘No, we can’t hear that, that’s not right.’ ”
That’s one way to look at it. Another is that Carson has upped the tenor of his language, daring people to criticize him so he can shoot them down as nothing more than bullies trying to silence him.

Since the Prayer Breakfast, Carson has been in the news for saying the health-care law is “the worst thing to happen in this nation since slavery,” for seeming to compare same-sex marriage to bestiality, and for saying that “America is very much like Nazi Germany.”

Does he worry that perhaps comparing Obama supporters to Nazi sympathizers may sound like something a bully might do?
“You can’t dance around it,” he says. “If people look at what I said and were not political about it, they’d have to agree. Most people in Germany didn’t agree with what Hitler was doing. . . . Exactly the same thing can happen in this country if we are not willing to stand up for what we believe in.” 
So stand up he does, citing Nathan Hale and Patrick Henry along the way. He wants his only regret to be that he has but one life to give. Or at least give him sound bite or give him death.

For there he is with a new contract on Fox News Channel and a column in the Washington Times. There he is on television debating Jesse Jackson about the recent killing in Ferguson, Mo., saying that a white police officer’s fatal shooting of teenager Michael Brown, who was black, had “nothing to do with race.” There he is on Bill O’Reilly’s show saying sure, he doesn’t have political experience, but he didn’t have experience separating conjoined twins when he did it for the first time. And this weekend, he’ll be in Texas at a summit for the conservative group Americans for Prosperity.
“If he can do all those things he did as a surgeon, I promise you he can figure out our immigration system and reduce the deficit,” says John Philip Sousa IV, who in addition to being the famous composer’s great-grandson also started the Draft Ben Carson PAC.
Even Carson can’t pretend that he isn’t excited about being back out there scrapping with people who want to see him fail.
“I have to admit that it’s heady stuff,” he says. “You pull up to a bookstore and there are 500, 1,000 people there. I walk in and everyone starts applauding and chanting, ‘Run, Ben, run!’ It’s everywhere I go, and it makes me realize how important it is to keep going.”
Can he become president? Probably not. But man, it will feel good for him to give it to those turkeys if he proves everyone wrong.

September 25, 2014

Ebola Manufactured by Western Pharmaceuticals Says Liberia

Liberia’s Largest Newspaper Accuses US of Manufacturing Ebola Virus (Video)

September 25, 2014

Gateway Pundit - The Liberian Daily Observer, which is the largest newspaper in Liberia, just published an article on their front page with the headline, “Ebola, AIDS Manufactured By Western Pharmaceuticals, US DoD?” The article accuses the US of manufacturing the Ebola outbreak in a scheme to use Africa as a testing ground for bioweapons.

From the article:
SITES AROUND AFRICA, AND IN WEST AFRICA, HAVE OVER THE YEARS BEEN SET UP FOR TESTING EMERGING DISEASES, ESPECIALLY EBOLA
The World Health Organization (WHO) and several other UN Agencies have been implicated in selecting and enticing African countries to participate in the testing events, promoting vaccinations, but pursuing various testing regiments. The August 2, 2014 article, West Africa: What are US Biological Warfare Researchers Doing in the Ebola Zone? by Jon Rappoport of Global Research pinpoints the problem that is facing African governments.
Obvious in this and other reports are, among others:
(a) The US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), a well-known centre for bio-war research, located at Fort Detrick, Maryland;
(b) Tulane University, in New Orleans, USA, winner of research grants, including a grant of more than $7 million the National Institute of Health (NIH) to fund research with the Lassa viral hemorrhagic fever;
(c) the US Center for Disease Control (CDC)
This is the kind of propaganda relief workers are facing in Liberia and Western Africa.

The Average Household Income By State

Here's how much you need to make to be in the top 1% in your state

September 24, 2014

Business Insider - The nature of income inequality in the U.S. and elsewhere is one of the biggest questions in contemporary economics and politics, with the Occupy Wall Street movement popularizing the division between the top 1% and the remaining 99% of earners.

Using 2012 American Community Survey household income data from the Minnesota Population Center's IPUMS dataset, we estimated what income a household would need to earn (rounded to the nearest thousand) in order to be in the top 1% of the income distribution in each state (click here for larger version of map):





View gallery
.
There's a divergence across the country in what it takes to be in the 1%. In the Northeast, top level incomes are in the area of a half million dollars, while in parts of the South and West, the cutoff is much lower.

These figures should be interpreted as being very rough estimates. Surveys like the ACS frequently have difficulties in capturing the true nature of the very top of the income spectrum. Recent research based on income tax records, like this remarkable slideshow by Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, can give us much more detailed insight into what's going on with the super-rich.

If you want to know if you're in the top or bottom half of your state, here are 2012 median incomes, as per the Census Bureau's 2012 ACS estimates:
View gallery
.

South Carolina State Trooper Fires Four Shots at Man, Who Had Just Parked at a Convenience Store, Alleging a Seat Belt Violation; NY City Cop Filmed Slamming Pregnant Women to Ground



Dashboard video shows shooting of unarmed driver

September 25, 2014

AP - A South Carolina state trooper's dashboard video shows an unarmed driver being shot just seconds after he was stopped for a seatbelt offense — and the trooper, who was fired last week, has now been charged with assault.

As Levar Jones cried in pain waiting for an ambulance, he repeated one question: "Why did you shoot me?" Jones' painful groans and then-Trooper Sean Groubert's reply — "Well you dove head first back into your car" — were captured by the camera.

Groubert's boss, state Public Safety Director Leroy Smith, called the video "disturbing" and said "Groubert reacted to a perceived threat where there was none" as he fired the officer Friday.

The 31-year-old former trooper is charged with assault and battery of a high and aggravated nature, a felony that carries up to 20 years in prison. He was released after paying 10 percent of a $75,000 bond.

The dashboard camera video was released by prosecutors Wednesday night after they showed it at Groubert's bond hearing.

Jones was stopped Sept. 4 as he pulled into a convenience store on a busy Columbia road. With the camera recording, Groubert pulls up without his siren on as Jones is getting out of his vehicle to go into the store.
"Can I see your license please?" Groubert asks.
As Jones turns and reaches back into his car, Groubert shouts,
"Get outa the car, get outa the car." 
He begins firing before he has finished the second sentence. There is a third shot as Jones staggers away, backing up with his hands raised, and then a fourth.


From the first shot to the fourth, the video clicks off three seconds.

Jones' wallet can be seen flying out of his hands as he raises them.

Groubert's lawyer, Barney Giese, said the shooting was justified because the trooper feared for his life and the safety of others. Police officers are rarely charged in South Carolina. In August, a prosecutor refused to file criminal charges against a York County deputy who shot a 70-year-old man after mistaking his cane for a shotgun during an after-dark traffic stop.

Groubert is white and Jones is black. Neither state police nor the FBI keep detailed statistics on the races of people in officer-involved shootings.

Much like the recent police shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, the racial aspect of the South Carolina shooting bothers state Rep. Joe Neal, an African-American lawmaker who has spoken out against racism in law enforcement for years.
"You are doing exactly what the police officer asked you do to and you get shot for it?" said Neal, D-Hopkins. "That's insane."
Neal said he doubts the trooper would have been charged without the video. South Carolina has nearly 300 police agencies, and many smaller forces don't have dashboard cameras.
"If it had been the trooper's story versus his story, I'm not sure anything happens," Neal said.
Jones is recovering after being shot in the hip. He released a statement last week saying he hopes his shooting leads to changes in how police officers treat suspects.
"I thank God every day that I am here with a story to tell and hope my situation can make a change," Jones said.
He and his lawyer have not spoken publicly since Groubert was charged Wednesday.

Groubert first worked for the Highway Patrol from September 2005 to September 2009. After going to work for the Richland County Sheriff's Office, he returned to the state agency in July 2012.

This isn't the first time Groubert fired his service weapon. In August 2012, Groubert and another trooper chased a man who drove away from a traffic stop and fired at the suspect after he shot first, according to the Highway Patrol. The suspect was convicted of attempted murder and is spending 20 years in prison.

Groubert was awarded the agency's Medal of Valor Award for his actions in protecting the public.

So far in 2014 in South Carolina, police have shot at suspects 35 times, killing 16 of them, according to the State Law Enforcement Division. The number of officer-involved shootings has been steadily increasing over the past few years, with 42 reported in 2013.

NYPD Officer Filmed Slamming Pregnant Woman to Ground



September 24, 2014

Gawker - An NYPD officer was filmed violently throwing a pregnant woman to ground early Saturday morning. Sandra Amezquita, who is five months pregnant, reportedly suffered vaginal bleeding after the incident, and her arms and stomach remain bruised.

The incident took place in Sunset Park, Brooklyn at about 2:15 am Saturday. Amezquita and her husband, Ronel Lemos, claim they approached the scene and attempted to intervene as police arrested their 17-year-old son, Jhohan, for possession of a knife.

The video, filmed by a witness, shows an NYPD officer slamming Amezquita to ground and handcuffing her before forcefully shoving another woman, identified by the New York Post as Amezquita's friend, to the street.

Amezquita was given a summons for disorderly conduct and Lemos was arrested for assaulting a police officer, reportedly after striking the officer who was arresting his son.
"The first thing I thought was they killed my baby, and they're going to kill my wife," Lemo told the New York Daily News on Tuesday.
"You would think the police would respect a woman that is pregnant," Amezquita added. "I was afraid something happened to my baby. I am still afraid that something is wrong."
The NYPD's Internal Affairs unit is reportedly investigating the incident, which took place just one week after an officer from the same precinct—the 72nd—was filmed kicking a street vendor. That officer was suspended and remains under investigation by Internal Affairs.
 

September 22, 2014

U.S. Launches Airstrikes on Syria

"The strategy for the Iraq war is now making itself known. By using 9/11 as a pretext to invade Afghanistan, Iran is flanked on the east side. By using the Desert Storm protocols and UN Resolution 1441, among others, the excuse to invade and occupy Iraq is brought forward because Saddam is not disarming, we are told. By taking Iraq, the U.S. forces then flank Iran to the West. Having troops stationed in Turkey is a key part of this plan, for then Iran is flanked to the North, which is why so much pressure is being applied to Turkey to allow our troops there. Although we cannot be sure which incidents will be used to bring war with Iran, we can be sure something will transpire to make is necessary to invade Iran, and most likely Syria would be next. Syria is also isolated in all directions. With Israel the main benefactor in the Middle East, this strategy will totally rearrange the Middle Eastern landscape and set the stage for the appointment of the 10 puppet kings of Revelation chapter 17, which have no 'kingdom yet' but will with the beast for 42 months... If we are reading the book of Habakkuk correctly, not only do we win the Iraq war, it is over rapidly and with few casualties on our side; however, there may be massive casualties of Iraqi civilians and military. We then use this stronghold to further buildup our Middle East military might for the strikes on Iran and Syria, and then eventually every Arab state in the region. This may take some time, and it is difficult to assess that part of it, because Habakkuk does not tell us how long this conquest of the Middle East is. We only know that it happens, and that it sets the stage for the demise of the United States and the rise of the "antichrist" powers in America. It is this war that sets the stage for the removal of Babylon-America by nuclear strike at a later time." - Steward C. Best, March 2003, The Strategy for Taking the Middle East

Middle East Map 

US Airstrikes Against ISIS Targets Under Way in Syria

PHOTO: Fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) celebrate on vehicles taken from Iraqi security forces, at a street in city of Mosul, June 12, 2014.

Most Private-sector Workers No Longer Receive Defined-benefit Pensions That Pay Them for Life and Must Wait Until Age 65 or 67 to Collect Their Full Social Security Benefit or Draw from 401(k) Accounts; Volunteers Are Taking On Jobs Once Performed by Public Employees

Federal workers get a 401k-style plan, but they also get an old-fashioned defined-benefit pension plan with inflation protection. They also get health care benefits when they retire above and beyond Medicare. You just don't see that kind of stuff in the private sector anymore, and I think the federal work force ought to reflect the private work force. It shouldn't be an elite island separated from the rest of us.

Public retirement ages come under greater scrutiny

December 10, 2011

Associated Press - After nearly 40 years in public education, Patrick Godwin spends his retirement days running a horse farm east of Sacramento, Calif., with his daughter.

His departure from the workaday world is likely to be long and relatively free of financial concerns, after he retired last July at age 59 with a pension paying $174,308 a year for the rest of his life.

Such guaranteed pensions for relatively youthful government retirees — paid in similar fashion to millions nationwide — are contributing to nationwide friction with the public sector workers. They have access to attractive defined-benefit pensions and retiree health care coverage that most private sector workers no longer do.

Experts say eligible retirement ages have fallen over the past two decades for many reasons, including contract agreements between states and government labor unions that lowered retirement ages in lieu of raising pay.

With Americans increasingly likely to live well into their 80s, critics question whether paying lifetime pensions to retirees from age 55 or 60 is financially sustainable. An Associated Press survey earlier this year found the 50 states have a combined $690 billion in unfunded pension liabilities and $418 billion in retiree health care obligations.

Three-quarters of U.S. public retirement systems in 2008 offered some kind of early-retirement option paying partial benefits, according to a 2009 Wisconsin Legislative Council study. Most commonly, the minimum age for those programs was 55, but 15 percent allowed government workers to retire even earlier, the review found. The study is widely regarded as the most comprehensive assessment of the issue.

Police and firefighters often can retire starting even younger — at around age 50 — because of the physically demanding nature of some of those jobs.

Yet with cities, counties and states struggling to pay pension bills, changes are afoot.

In November, San Francisco voters supported a local ballot initiative to hike minimum retirement ages for some city workers. Since that time, laws increasing retirement ages for government workers were signed in Rhode Island and Massachusetts in efforts to address underfunded pension systems.

Earlier in New Jersey, part of a legislative deal struck between Democrats and Republicans raised the normal retirement age from 62 to 65.

An initiative circulating for California's 2012 state ballot seeks to increase the minimum retirement age to 65 for public employees and teachers, and to 58 for sworn public safety officers.

Godwin said all the antagonism toward public retirees is misplaced. His pension payout follows 36 years as an English teacher and school administrator in California, with two years' sick-leave credit added for never being absent.

He said lack of accountability on Wall Street and exorbitant corporate salaries are a more justified target of the public's anger.
"Those things I think are a much larger problem than what a public employee is making as a pension," he said. The AFL-CIO labor coalition's Executive PayWatch project estimates chief executives went from making 42 times the average blue collar worker's salary in 1980 to 343 times as much last year.
Overall, Americans are working to older ages — even with the expanded ability for some to collect partial pensions younger if they retire. Over the past 20 years, the average retirement age for men has edged up to 64, for women to 62, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Data compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show 29 percent of people between 65 and 69 worked at least part-time last year, up from 24 percent a decade ago and 21 percent in 1994. Almost 7 percent of people 75 or older were employed in 2010, compared to less than 5 percent 15 years ago.

Experts say no reliable figures exist that could show whether public sector workers retire younger than their private-sector counterparts. That's because the Bureau of Labor Statistics has no way of defining "retirement," and nearly all analyses involving the American workforce begin with the bureau's data.

It is clear, though, that most private-sector workers no longer receive defined-benefit pensions that will pay them for life. Most must wait until age 65 or 67 to collect their full Social Security benefit or draw from 401(k) accounts that are invested in the stock market and, in many cases, have sustained significant losses during the recession.

It is this shift in the style of benefits, and not the age of retirement, that should be scrutinized, said Hank Kim, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems, which advocates for government pensions.
"I think the biggest difference between the private and the public sector is that, for whatever reason, the private sector has largely abandoned the pension system," he said.
Kim believes that shift has left a generation of private employees — who make up the bulk of the American labor force — unprepared for retirement. In 2010, there were 18 million government workers and 94 million private sector workers in the U.S.

Rising retirement ages and reduced pension payouts for many private-sector workers are emboldening those seeking to rein in the obligations of overextended public pension systems.

Former California state Assemblyman Roger Niello, a Republican, is backing the proposal to take the age issue to California voters next year.
"It's a huge concern, arguably maybe the biggest concern aside from things where the system is being abused, like pension-spiking," said Niello, referring to the practice of artificially inflating retirement benefits by boosting pay at the end of an employee's career.
Defenders say union-negotiated retirement packages help attract and keep people in jobs necessary to society, whether teaching, environmental protection, law enforcement or garbage collecting.
Maureen Reedy, a long-time elementary instructional specialist in Upper Arlington, Ohio, a Columbus suburb, said benefits form part of the financial equation workers use to decide whether to go into public service.
"After 20 years, most teachers are making $50,000 — woo-hoo," she said. "Our pension and our security are part of the long-range outlook of our profession."
Ohio, New Jersey and Wisconsin were among states this year that sought to limit the power of public employee unions, in part out of concern over rising pension costs. Reedy, 53, was considering retirement before Ohioans voted in November to repeal a new law making sweeping changes to the collective bargaining abilities of unions representing 350,000 public workers. Pension changes are still on the state's agenda.

Some states began raising retirement ages around five years ago, before the issue had garnered wide public attention. Illinois and Missouri, for example, increased the normal retirement age to 67. Before the change, Illinois workers could retire with full benefits at 60 after just eight years of service.

Matt Mayer, president of the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, a conservative think tank in Ohio, believes states' pension woes could be remedied by having their public pension systems operate more like the federal Social Security system.
"Frankly, I don't have as much a concern about when they retire as I do about when they get access to the pension," he said. "I believe in the economic freedom of workers. If a teacher wants to retire at 55, fine. They just don't get their pension until 65."

Does Government Work Require Government Employees?

April 2011  
'Stop! Taser, Taser, Taser!'
Triggers pull, nitrogen canisters pop and barbed darts clatter against body silhouettes taped to a wall. If the silhouettes had been people, five-second pulses of electrical current would have flowed into their bodies, toppling most of them to the ground.
“Don’t aim too close to the heart,” says Sgt. Jeremy Floyd. If someone’s coming at you, he says, shoot for the lower abdomen.
Floyd, the training instructor at a Wednesday evening Taser recertification class in Redlands, Calif., is sharing the fine points of stun gun use with a small group of men and women, all of them outfitted in blue trousers and white shirts with police badges. 

The badges identify them as members of the Redlands Police Department, but things are not what they seem. For starters, Taser target practice isn’t taking place at a police firing range. It’s happening on the porch of the Joslyn Senior Center.

And in a state where many sworn law enforcement officers retire in their 50s, most of these officers look, well, older. White hair is the norm here rather than the exception.

There are other oddities, too.

Police department physical fitness requirements often exclude individuals with disabilities, yet one of the men is firing from a motorized wheelchair.

That said, the men and women gathered on the porch are members of the Redlands Police Department, as their badges denote. But they are not sworn or paid officers. They’re volunteers, part of the city’s Citizen Volunteer Patrol (CVP) unit. And they’re at the forefront of the one of the country’s more ambitious efforts to integrate volunteers into the workings of local government.

At a time when most city and local governments are preparing to do less with less, officials in Redlands are taking a different approach: They’re attempting to maintain current levels of service through other means. Ramping up the use of volunteers is one of them.

It’s easy to see why. Three years ago, the police department in Redlands, a city of 71,000 people east of Los Angeles, had 98 sworn officers, 208 civilians and about two dozen volunteers. The police budget was $23.8 million, nearly half of the city’s operating budget. Today, the department employs 75 sworn officers and 138 civilians and relies on 291 active volunteers, who last year contributed more than 31,000 hours of their time to the city.

The volunteers are not just answering the phones at police headquarters. They cordon off crime scenes, direct traffic, patrol the city’s 14 parks, write parking tickets, assist with animal control and provide crowd control at special events. They are also trained to check in parolees, assist with records processing, help staff DUI checkpoints, take reports on routine property crimes, serve as the liaison with the local San Bernardino County district attorney’s office, provide counseling to crime victims and monitor sex offenders remotely.

In addition, they serve more traditional functions as volunteer reserve officers. Two volunteer reserve officers even conduct investigations alongside the city’s detectives. One has his own caseload. Some of the volunteers -- those who go through the special training session -- are allowed to carry Taser guns for their own protection.

It isn’t just the police department that’s assigned volunteers to important duties. Eighteen months ago, when Les Jolly took over the city’s Quality of Life Department, he started to develop a program that will soon field volunteer code inspectors.
“Our staff was cut by over 10 percent this fiscal year,” Jolly says. “If you don’t think of creative ways to supplement what you do, then you are going to fail.”
Redlands also employs a part-time volunteer coordinator, Tabetha Johnson, who routinely works with local civic clubs to mobilize hundreds of volunteers for events such as Redlands’ annual professional bicycle race.
“We have fewer resources,” says City Manager N. Enrique Martinez. “We had to cut staff. My challenge is to maintain the same service level if not better. The public is not interested in whether you have 15 fewer people than before or not.”
Nor should they be. At least that’s the argument Police Chief Jim Bueermann makes.
“The fallback position for most local government bureaucrats like me,” he says, “is that it’s so much easier to say, ‘We have $3 million less so you are going to get fewer services.’ But there are multiple ways to get to the outcomes that taxpayers expect their police department is going to deliver.” 
Prominent among them are a greater reliance on technology and a greater use of volunteers. Call it do-it-yourself government. But can volunteers really put in the hours and perform sensitive, highly skilled jobs that take more than a friendly smile? Can they enable a government to do more with less? A close look at Redlands’ experience suggests that under some circumstances, the answer just might be yes -- although that might not translate into taxpayer support.

Jim Bueermann took command of the Redlands Police Department in 1998. A lifelong resident of the city and a 20-year veteran of the force, he knew his community well -- the rough neighborhoods as well as the affluent enclaves where, starting in 1870, wealthy visitors from the Midwest and the East found an ideal retreat in Redlands’ fragrant orange groves and snow-capped San Bernardino Mountains. Over the years, the visitors endowed their new community with such gifts as a symphony, a magnificent Moorish-style library, and perhaps most importantly, the University of Redlands. The city soon became known as “The Jewel of the Inland Empire.”

That phrase is not heard much anymore.

Today, the Inland Empire is defined more by foreclosures than orange groves. The problems of neighboring communities, such as gang-plagued San Bernardino, with which Redlands shares a border, have crept in. And, despite its relative affluence, Redlands has suffered through three years of declining revenues, which have resulted in budget cuts to city departments, including the police.

When the police department’s workforce fell by a third, Bueermann turned to a city tradition: volunteerism. He accelerated volunteer-recruitment efforts and hired a volunteer coordinator to oversee his department’s initiatives. In the process, Bueermann discovered something surprising. Volunteers are not deterred by requirements that are demanding and responsibilities that are real. They are attracted to them.

Veteran police officers discovered something too. When the volunteer program was starting out, says Lt. Chris Catren, “we were filling the gaps with volunteers.” But as police came to realize that volunteers could do many of the routine tasks that had once constituted a significant part of their workdays -- directing traffic, taking reports, delivering evidence to the district attorney’s office, providing crime-scene control -- they came to depend on them.
“They are,” Catren says, “as much a part of our service delivery model as the person in a black-and-white uniform with a badge and a gun.”
The department has used volunteer officers to take on specific, new tasks, such as patrolling parks, municipal orange groves and desert areas that stretch across the 40-square-mile city. One such area is the Santa Ana river basin, known locally as “the wash.”

The Santa Ana River, Southern California’s largest, begins in the San Bernardino Mountains and ends in the Pacific Ocean at Huntington Beach. Once upon a time, mountain storms would send deluges of water coursing through the river’s channel and into the sea. Today, subdivisions in Orange County occupy many of those floodplains, and the Seven Oaks Dam holds back the waters that would otherwise sweep those subdivisions away. But dams silt up. To maintain them, authorities must occasionally release water into the wash. That poses a problem because the wash also serves as home for the homeless.

In the past, police officers alerted encampments of the homeless to the coming water release so they could move to safer grounds. Now, the city relies on a group of volunteers known as the Citizen Volunteer Park Rangers to make sure the homeless are out of harm’s way.

On a recent Friday afternoon, two uniformed rangers, Lee Haag, a retired Air Force officer, and Sherli Leonard, the executive director of the Redlands Conservancy, descend on their horses into the wash. A few weeks earlier, they had distributed fliers warning of the water release at two recently spotted encampments -- one north of the Redlands Municipal Airport, the other in the lee of the Orange Street Bridge. Now they’re checking the encampment near the bridge. As they approach, it is deserted except for a stray dog. As the horses climb out of the wash, the rangers encounter a woman out for a walk. She stops to pat the horses. Knowing that rangers are out patrolling the wash, she says, has made her day.

The creation of the Volunteer Park Rangers says a lot about how the city interacts with its volunteers. The ranger program started almost accidentally. Three years ago, retired audiologist Brad Billings read an interview in the local paper in which Police Chief Bueermann expressed a desire to organize a volunteer patrol to tackle problems of graffiti and disorder in the city’s parks. Billings e-mailed the chief and two hours later got an e-mail back inviting him to a meeting. Their discussion was brief.
“Brad, it’s yours,” Bueermann told him. “Go for it.” 
Bueermann appointed a sergeant to supervise the program but left it to Billings to organize, raise funds and run the initiative, which now numbers more than two dozen volunteers. Like the Citizen Volunteer Patrol, rangers received training, uniforms, iPhones (to mark the location of graffiti and other problems) and access to city equipment. Sending volunteer rangers into the wash is something many cities wouldn’t do -- even if the volunteers were trained and well equipped. Bueermann says such risk-taking is essential.
“Too often we accept a lack of money as a reason not to do things,” he says. “There are so many ways to get around that if we just accept a level of ambiguity, develop a tolerance for risk-taking and realize that sometimes failure is about learning.”
As for Haag and Leonard, they say they have never felt unsafe.

Redlands is unusual for the depth and breadth of its volunteer activities, but it isn’t alone. Confronted with the challenges of the Great Recession, cities across the country have begun to reconsider what can be done with volunteers. In December 2009, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg assembled 15 mayors to announce the launch of a new initiative, Cities of Service. Underwritten by both Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Rockefeller Foundation, the initiative provides cities with $200,000 grants to hire “chief service officers” to identify local priorities and develop plans to address them, using volunteers.

One of the mayors who appeared with Bloomberg was Nashville’s Karl Dean. In January 2010, Nashville received one of the first $200,000 Cities of Service grants. Dean tapped Laurel Creech to run the program. Her first day of work last May coincided with the 100-year flood that submerged parts of downtown Nashville as well as several residential neighborhoods. From the city emergency command center, Creech worked with a local volunteer group, Hands On Nashville, to text thousands of volunteers with a request for help sandbagging downtown against the rising Cumberland River. Within three hours, more than a thousand volunteers were on hand.

Since then, Creech has developed a service plan that focuses on two issues -- education and the environment. According to Creech, working with the heads of city agencies has been challenging. Although quite a few departments utilize volunteers in many ways, a lot of them don’t use volunteers as effectively as they could or, she says, they “don’t really know what suitable volunteer programs are and what volunteers can do and can’t do. The challenge is getting them to recognize that there are opportunities for improvement.”

Still, Nashville’s chief service officer believes that volunteers will take on more and more tasks once performed by government employees.

In Redlands, that moment has already arrived. When budget cuts nixed the Redlands Police Department’s plans to lease a helicopter from the county (at a cost of $500,000 a month plus operating costs) to provide air support, the department used drug forfeiture funds to purchase a 1967 Cessna 172, which it then kitted out with a $30,000 video camera that could be operated by a laptop in the back of the plane. To operate the plane, the department turned to volunteer pilots like Bill Cheeseman, age 70.

Cheeseman is a retired engineer who describes himself as “a gentleman acrobatic flier.” On a recent sunny afternoon, he takes the plane up for a patrol shift. A police officer, Sgt. Shawn Ryan, sits in the back, along with his electronic equipment: image-stabilized binoculars, a laptop to monitor the police dispatcher and operate the video camera, as well as a LoJack system for detecting stolen cars. As the plane lifts off the runway of the Redlands Municipal Airport, a police dispatcher reports a recurring alarm in a neighborhood of mansions between Caroline Park and the Redlands Country Club. Two patrol cars arrive at the scene just minutes before the Cessna, which circles overhead.

Two officers from the patrol car have entered the house. They have silenced their radio. If there’s a burglar inside, they don’t want its squawk to announce their presence. Two thousand feet overhead, Ryan focuses on the house.
“If someone runs out,” he says, “we’ll see them.”
No one makes a run for it. The officers on the ground report that the wind was opening and closing an unlocked door. But even when the plane responds to a false alarm, it serves a useful purpose. One of Bueermann’s first and most controversial actions as chief was to disband a “beat” system that assigned police officers to various sectors of the city, with little regard for actual crime rates. Needless to say, affluent low-crime neighborhoods were unhappy with the change. By putting a plane in the air -- and highly visible police vehicles on the ground (albeit ones often driven by volunteers) -- he’s been able to assuage their concerns and free up his officers for the proactive police work of targeting gangs, guns and violence in the most dangerous parts of town.

It’s the kind of creative problem-solving that has allowed the city to cut personnel by 16 percent without damaging city services, says Redlands City Manager Martinez. Last spring, San Bernardino County and the city of Redlands commissioned a polling firm to gauge public satisfaction with city services. Even though citywide staffing and funding have been cut and cut again since 2007, 81 percent of respondents said services were at least satisfactory -- and 30 percent of that 81 percent actually rated services as better than satisfactory.

To Martinez, it was a testament to the creativity of city staff and the partnerships they have been able to build.
“Less is not less,” he says. “The way services have been delivered for the past 20 years is very labor intensive.”
But the city’s approach may also have lulled the citizens of Redlands into thinking that city leaders have solved the problem of doing more with less and that the city doesn’t need more money to keep providing a top-notch level of service. Last November, when a measure to impose a half-cent sales tax surcharge to shore up city services went before the voters, it failed. In Redlands, the voters have spoken. Do-it-yourself government is here for good.

September 21, 2014

California Debt Crisis Can Be Extrapolated to the Federal Level - Government Salaries, Benefits and Pensions Are the Cause

California Debt Crisis Explained

February 18, 2010

RedState.com - Most Americans have not been paying attention to the real cause of the California debt crisis, along with the crises in other Democrat-dominated states like New York, New Jersey and Illinois, and in the federal government. These crises are gutting American taxpayers and bankrupting entire states.

And they are being caused by the corruption and greed and massive political power of public-employee unions to simply commandeer whatever they can get in salaries, benefits and pension plans as discussed in Steven Greenhut’s book Plunder!, which was the subject of a recent C-Span Book TV segment. The book’s subtitle is How Public Employee Unions are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation.

Greenhut was the deputy editorial page editor and columnist for The OrangeCounty (Calif.) Register from 1998 to 2009 and now heads the new InvestigativeJournalismCenter and News Bureau at the Pacific Research Institute in Sacramento, Calif.

For decades Americans have been fed the sob story that unionization has been shrinking in the private-sector economy, and that us “common people” have suffered as a result.

And in fact it has been shrinking, but this is a positive thing. Because for decades Americans watched unions run companies out of business and destroy millions of jobs and trillions in wealth. But not before those unions and their multimillionaire bosses had drained those companies of every last penny they could.

The other side of the story, however, is that unionization has expanded its power exponentially in the public sector and now is, in essence, driving entire states out of business, particularly in the area of pensions.

And this union power is so entrenched and so corrupt in California that even liberal Democrats like state treasurer Bill Lockyer are alarmed at what their union friends are doing in running up the state’s bills. Said Lockyer of the Democrat-dominated legislature, “…it’s impossible for this Legislature to reform the pension system, and if we don’t it will bankrupt the state.”
Note: No state ever has been driven to bankruptcy by a capitalist, a corporation or a so-called ‘robber baron’.
Now the trend is toward less and less in public services costing more and more money, or the classic socialist outcome as predicted by any rational economist who really understands the numbers.

On City-Journal.org, William Voegeli wrote:
It’s neither a coincidence nor a surprise, then, that California’s government employees receive higher compensation than those in any other state. The Census Bureau’s latest figures cover the year 2006, and show that California’s local government employees were paid at an average annual rate of $60,780, 33% above the national average. … California’s public workers receive more, often significantly more, than government employees in other states with high living costs. Californians who work for local governments were paid 7.7%, 9.1%, 11.5%, and 21.4% more than their counterparts in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts respectively.
Note that these California salaries are higher than all the other most expensive states…

In Plunder! Greenhut discusses the sweetheart deals and insider politics that have turned lifeguards on public beaches into unionized ‘public safety officials’ with skyrocketing salaries, rich benefits, early retirements and overstuffed pension plans that are gutting the state’s taxpayers and causing an exodus of productive residents.

Meanwhile the California public education system, run by the same unionized public employees, has its own exorbitant salaries, lifetime employment, early retirements and plush pensions along with failed schools and a 50+% dropout rate in many cities, leading to an exploding growth in the deadbeat population, leaving fewer and fewer productive people to pay the taxes to bankroll all those wealthy civil servant retirees. The average public schoolteacher salary in America today is $35 an hour while California is certainly higher.

In other words, the state is being squeezed on both ends by the unions in a vicious cycle that simply is unsustainable.

Conservatives have warned for decades that this would happen, and that public salaries should not be set artificially by unions, but by markets. In other words, by the will of rational consumers, also known as ‘voters’. Yet conservatives today have little voice in California with every statewide office in the hands of pro-union Democrats except for governor Schwarzenegger, who is just a figurehead liberal Republican with no real power and a propensity to agree with Democrats.

Greenhut exposes the tactics used by unions and their elected Democrat cronies, as well as some Republicans, to rig the system in favor of public employees, while Democrats in return get huge campaign contributions. He talks about public officials announcing at the last minute on Friday evening that crucial pension issues will be settled at a meeting on Tuesday, leaving little time for opposition forces to muster. He talks about the widespread tactic of ‘pension spiking’ or basing a pension on the income in just the last year of employment. So an employee will work many extra hours during that final year, and fix his pension at a much higher rate.

Or Greenhut talks about laws like Three-for-Thirty that allow public employees to get 3% of their salary for every year they work, so that a pension after only 30 years of work and retirement at age 51 can amount to 90% of that final year’s inflated salary. And when pension fund investments cannot pay those figures, taxpayers pick up the difference as is happening big-time in California right now.

Look here to see a list of 3,000 public school teachers with annual pensions of more than $100,000 per year, some collecting more than $150,000. These teachers generally are retiring in their 50s and have an expected lifespan longer than the American average at 82 years. And remember that they only worked 9 months a year during their careers and often will spend as many years retired – or more years retired – as they did working. And those years of retirement are going to have all 12 months, you can rest assured.

Greenhut talks about the abuse of the disability system where 80% of the police administrators in one city had applied for special pensions for disabilities – including irritable bowel syndrome and other fictional maladies – that magically appeared in their final year in service.

He also talks about the ‘wall of silence’ surrounding public employees who refuse to reveal wrongdoing in their ranks, or about special license plate numbers issued to state workers that cannot be traced for running red lights and skipping through toll booths, or parking in restricted areas etc. Greenhut also calls lifetime state employment a “benefit” that has incomparable value.

You can extrapolate all this to the federal workforce as well. That is why the richest counties in America per-capita are in Maryland and Virginia, directly outside of Washington, DC, which are populated mostly by federal government bureaucrats.

And now that these unions have pushed California into the ditch, the federal government is being asked to bail out California. This is like Obama bailing out the car companies but not asking United Auto Workers members to make any concessions in their $70+ per hour salary/benefit/pension packages. So in both cases, public and private, taxpayers all over America are being asked to work more and more hours to satisfy the fiscal demands of union workers who earn more money and work many fewer hours than the average American taxpayer.

Groups like the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility (californiapensionreform.com) are offering serious proposals to fix the pension crisis.

Here is a column from Thomas Elias writing on December 29, 2009 on vcstar.com, the website of the Ventura County Star newspaper about the inner workings of the crisis:
Here, for example, is what the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, better known as CalPERS, told its retired members early in the fall of 2008, when it had lost more than $70 billion on its investments so far that year, more than one-fourth of the previous $260 billion value of all its investments:

“It is important for you to know that the current credit crisis does not directly affect your retirement benefits, which are securely protected by law, or our ability to pay benefits.”

Translation: Not to worry; the taxpayers will have to bail us out.

In fact, retired public employees from the 2,000-odd cities and counties that contribute to the plan have not seen a nickel’s reduction in their stipends. CalPERS paid out $10.88 billion in retirement benefits in 2008, plus an estimated $5.7 billion in health benefits.

This meant, for instance, that in the small San Francisco suburb of San Bruno alone, 12 retirees received benefits totaling at least $100,000, with the top city retiree getting $187,358 for the year. Plenty of larger cities and counties had many more six-figure pensioners.

But until now, those cities and counties have not been forced to cut services and work forces or seek new taxes. That’s because the setting of CalPERS “dues” generally lags two years behind investment performance. Rates paid by member cities and counties have been flat during this fiscal year because fiscal 2007 was a very good year for CalPERS investments, the peak of the real-estate bubble producing gains of 19.1 percent on the huge fund’s often-risky investments.

That fat year is long past, and CalPERS will be challenged this year to attain the 7.75 percent annual gain on investments it has said it needs to meet its obligations. That’s where things get back to the reassuring statement the fund sent its pensioners 15 months ago.

For pensions are protected by law and contract, even when the pension fund can’t pay. Where does the money come from in such times? Cities and counties, of course. Us.

So CalPERS has warned state, city and county governments their annual pension contributions could increase by nearly one-third — the same percentage as the losses in the value of the fund’s investments during the disastrous 2008-09 nosedive of stocks, bonds and real estate. No one is quite sure what the fund will actually dun its contributors, though, as stock and bond markets might rebound before next summer even more than they already have. The CalPERS portfolio has reportedly recovered about $40 billion of its former value since bottoming out early last year along with the markets.

Contributions from cities, counties and special districts now come to about 13 percent of payroll, but that could rise anywhere from 2 percent to 5 percent of payroll despite efforts to spread the losses and increases in contributions over 30 years. “If investments perform well, then rates go down. If not, then rates have to go up,” Edward Fong, a CalPERS spokesman, told a reporter.

For a city like Fullerton, in OrangeCounty, that could mean $5.5 million a year for four years in added payments that have to be made regardless of other obligations. Payments by larger cities might increase far more even as they’re seeing big drops in tax revenues from 2007 levels because of recession and the housing bust. For sure, labor unions won’t willingly give back any pension rights.

The result will be that hundreds of cities and counties will have to tap their rainy-day funds — if there’s anything still in them after two tough years. Some local governments will surely seek to cut employee pay, decreasing both direct expenses and pension contributions.

Because public employee pensions of all but a few cities, counties and other public entities are administered by CalPERS, the crunch will be felt in every part of the state — unless CalPERS’ investments suddenly pick up.

With that in mind, the fund has lately taken new risks, hoping to resolve its crisis internally rather than pass it along to participants. The beleaguered CalPERS board, under fire for making large payments to middlemen who steered it into bad investments in the past, has authorized a big increase in the percentage of plan holdings that can be invested in private equity funds — which took even bigger losses than publicly sold stocks during the crash. The hope is that these funds will also recover faster than stocks — but that’s only a hope.

In the end, taxpayers stand to pay plenty for all this, either through increased taxes or diminished public services — closed libraries and shelters for battered women, fewer trash pickups, shuttered courts, slower police and fire response times, more potholes, early county jail prisoner releases and much more — if local governments see layoffs and furloughs as their only way out.
Please visit my website at www.nikitas3.com for more. You can print out for free my book, Right Is Right, which explains why only conservatism can maintain our freedom and prosperity.