The Political Power of Teacher's Unions

From: http://teachersunionexposed.com/dues.cfm

In almost every state, teachers are automatically signed up to have their dues money diverted to their unions’ political funds. But the facts show that when “paycheck protection” laws require unions to get permission from teachers before taking money for political purposes, teachers almost always say “no.”

When teachers were given the chance to opt out of paying for the political causes of education unions, they did — in droves. The number of teachers participating in Utah plunged from 68 percent to 6.8 percent, and the number of represented teachers contributing in Washington plummeted from 82 percent to 6 percent.

Predictably, union officials fight tooth and nail against “paycheck protection” laws that give teachers a real choice about how their money is spent.

It is well-recognized that if you take away the mechanism of payroll deduction you won’t collect a penny from these people, and it has nothing to do with voluntary or involuntary. I think it has a lot to do with the nature of the beast, and the beasts who are our teachers.”

—Robert Chanin, former NEA general counsel

Money & Power

It’s well known that education unions are perennial political powerhouses, nationally and locally. In his groundbreaking study of teachers unions, Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, Terry Moe argues that “by comparison to other interest groups, and certainly to those with a direct stake in public education ”parents, taxpayers, even administrators — the teachers unions are unusually well equipped to wield power.” Consider:

• Fortune magazine has consistently ranked the National Education Association in the top 15 of its Washington Power 25 list for influence in the nation’s capital.
• Over the last 20 years, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has given more than $28 million in campaign contributions; the National Education Association (NEA) has given almost $31 million. That's almost $60 million, more than any other organization — but that's just the tip of the iceberg. At the state level, the AFT and NEA combined to spend an additional $61.8 million on candidates and expenditures for ballot initiatives in 2008 alone. Plus, teachers unions spend millions more on uncoordinated expenditures and get-out-the-vote efforts.
• According to The Heritage Foundation, through July 2010, unions spent almost three times as much money on campaign ads as all corporations combined.
• According to the Reason Foundation, the California Teachers Association has spent more than $200 million on ballot initiatives, candidates for state and local office, and lobbying. They used this money not only to argue against education reforms, but also to defeat healthcare reform measures and to defeat bills which would have prevented voter fraud.
• In retaliation for Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's commitment to education reform — and in an effort to remove the effective school chancellor, Michelle Rhee, who weakened tenure and got rid of bad teachers — the American Federation of Teachers dumped more than a million dollars into the 2010 Democratic Mayoral primary between Fenty and Vincent Gray.
• Colorado saw sweeping education reforms come to the state in the form of weakened tenure and increased merit pay. How did the Colorado Education Association respond? By pumping almost a million dollars into the state. The money went almost exclusively to Democratic candidates and Democrat-backed proposals and ballot initiatives.
• The head of the Chicago Teachers Union had this warning to any mayoral candidate in the 2011 mayor's race who didn't toe the teacher's line: "I think the opportunity is to throw the weight of 30,000 members and their families and students and teachers. I mean, we're looking at maybe 800,000 people we could affect on some level."

Due to their massive base, and the massive dues that they charge, teachers unions can both mobilize voters and spend huge sums of money to defeat ballot initiatives and candidates that they don't like. If you've ever wondered why education reform is slow in the offing, now you know: Politicians have real reason to fear crossing the unions. As Terry Moe put it, "when all is said and done, the power of the unions to block change is the single most important thing that anyone needs to know about the politics of American education."

Unions Don’t Reflect Members’ Politics

The officials who wield teachers unions' enormous political clout do so at the expense of their members, who frequently disagree with union bosses' political agendas.

Consider the numbers above: Of the almost $60 million in campaign contributions distributed by the NEA and the AFT, more than $56 million went to Democrats. That means that roughly 95 percent of the unions' money went toward Democratic candidates.

Yet, it's hard to believe that 19 out of 20 teachers are Democrats.

Indeed, looking at polling data from the 2003 National Education Study, only 51 percent of teachers who are also union members identify as Democrats. The rest identify as Republicans (25 percent) or Independents (24 percent). Republicans who join unions typically feel alienated from the organization and its political giving; a Harris Interactive poll from 2003 showed that 83 percent of Republican teachers union members felt that the union was more liberal than they were.

The Education Intelligence Agency obtained results of a massive internal survey of NEA membership and leadership, issuing a report in October 2005 titled "The NEA Pyramid: The View Changes As You Rise to the Top of the Nation's Largest Union." The report noted: "The larger a local affiliate is, the less likely the local affiliate president will reflect the demographics, philosophies and tendencies of his or her constituent members." That certainly describes the NEA and AFT at the national level.

Political Money

The NEA has long known that its political expenditures don't reflect the views of its members. According to the NEA's own "Status of the American Public School Teacher 2000-2001," only 45 percent of public school teachers are Democrats. Two internal surveys of NEA members, conducted in 1980 and obtained by the Public Service Research Foundation, showed a serious gap between spending and results:

• As many members voted for Ronald Reagan (44%) as did for Jimmy Carter (44%)
• More NEA members identified themselves as conservatives (27%) than liberals (21%)
• A large number — 29% — said they did "not trust" the union

Here are some examples of groups that have received funding from the NEA over the years:

Left-leaning recipients of teachers’ forced NEA dues:

Organizations:

• ACORN
• American Rights at Work
• Americans United for Separation of Church and State
• Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund
• Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance
• Ballot Initiative Strategy Center
• Business and Professional Women/USA
• Campaign for America’s Future
• Center for Community Change
• Center for Policy Alternatives
• Children’s Defense Fund
• Communities for Quality Education
• Communities United to Strengthen America
• Congressional Black Caucus Foundation
• Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute
• Democratic GAIN
• Democratic Leadership Council
• Early Vote Denver
• Economic Policy Institute
• Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network
• GLAAD
• Human Rights Campaign
• Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies
• Labor Council for Latin American Advancement
• Latina Initiative
• Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
• League of Rural Voters
• Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund
• NAACP
• National Association for Bilingual Education
• National Council of La Raza
• National Partnership for Women & Families
• National Women’s Law Center
• People for the American Way
• RainbowPUSH Coalition
• Sierra Club
• Southern Christian Leadership Conference
• The Citizenship Project
• The National Coalition on Black Civic Participation
• The Task Force Foundation
• USAction
• Women’s Campaign Forum
• Women’s Voices, Women Vote
• Working America

Ballot Initiatives:

• Arizona Minimum Wage Coalition
• Citizens for Education
• Citizens Who Support Maine’s Public Schools
• Citizens United to Protect Our Public Safety
• Coloradans for a Fair Minimum Wage
• Coloradans for Excellent Schools
• Coloradans for Responsible Reform
• Committee to Protect Our Children’s Legacy
• Conserving Arizona’s Future
• Creating Arizona’s Future
• Give Missourians a Raise
• Give Nevada a Raise
• Nebraskans Against 423
• Nebraskans for the Good Life
• Not in Montana: Citizens Against CI-97
• Ohioans for a Fair Minimum Wage
• Utahns for Public Schools

Left-leaning recipients of teachers’ forced AFT dues:

Organizations:

• Alliance for Retired Americans
• American Friends of Yitzhak Rabin Center
• American Rights at Work
• Americans for Democratic Action
• Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance
• Ballot Initiative Strategy Center
• Center for National Policy
• Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
• Children’s Defense Fund
• Citizens for Tax Justice
• Coalition of Labor Union Women
• Committee for Education Funding
• Congressional Black Caucus Foundation
• Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute
• Economic Policy Institute
• Labor Council for Latin American Advancement
• Labor Project for Working Families
• Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
• NAACP
• National Association for Bilingual Education
• National Black Caucus of State Legislators
• National Conference of Democratic Mayors
• National Labor College
• Pride at Work
• The American Prospect
• The National Coalition on Black Civic Participation
• The National Public Pension Coalition
• Union of Palestinian Teachers
• William J. Clinton Foundation
• Women’s Policy, Inc.
• Workers Independent News

Ballot Initiatives:

• Citizens for Education
• Citizens Who Support Maine’s Public Schools
• Coloradans for a Fair Minimum Wage
• Give Missourians a Raise
• Ohioans for a Fair Minimum Wage
• Misc. initiative contributions

Pensions and Promises and Perfidy

By Paul Jacob

1/1/2012 -  http://townhall.com/

Promises, promises.

Politicians love to make ’em. But who has to fulfill those promises, and how?

The tendency to rely upon political assurances without establishing workable, reasonable plans and follow-through has to be high on the irresponsibility list. Our politicians may promise us the stars, but what we wind up with remains of a more earthy nature.

Take pensions. There are two basic ways of setting them up. One is to sock money away, or invest it, taking it out at retirement. The other is to promise to give somebody a certain amount of money on retirement . . . and figure out how to pay for it later.

Between these two extremes lie compromise positions, of course. The government takes money from people now, for instance . . . but then immediately spends it on current retirees. That’s Social Security, and it combines the two methods in a rather fraudulent way. It’s not “our money” going into “our retirements”; it’s “our money” going into other people’s retirements. We will (if the system survives) take our retirements from younger “investors.”

It’s a dubious deal on the face of it. Like a Ponzi scheme, it tends to reward earlier participants (retirees) at the expense of later ones. Of course, the government, being government, had an advantage Ponzi did not: It forces us all into the scheme — something ol’ Ponzi could not do — and it changes the deal as it goes along, and makes us accept it. Hence the long-term “viability” of Social Security.

But Social Security isn’t the only pension system to over-rely on promises and skip the actual savings and investment part. Many a government employee pension system does the same. Not only do they unfairly shift burdens onto future retirees and future taxpayers, they also build up huge debt loads to whoever has done the promising.

Well, that’s not exactly right. Politicians make the promises. Taxpayers get stuck with the bills.

The defined benefit pensions concocted by politicians are now throwing towns and municipalities into bankruptcy, and California and New York are just two of many states to be greatly harmed by the unworkability — the sheer irresponsible design — of the defined benefit packages contracted with government workers.

This problem has been brewing for some time. In the mid-2000s, Congress attempted to forestall disaster with the U.S. Postal Service by requiring fully funding postal worker pensions.

Now that the postal service is failing — for reasons having to do with any number of factors, including a decline in need for the service — the people who decide the fate of our public institutions are trying to take money from the pensions and save the current accounting.

When private businesses do this, people cry Fraud! Theft! Greed!

But when it happens in a badly run outfit controlled by government, you can count on some people to attempt to take a most dubious “high moral ground.” Consider this petition from the people at MoveOn.org:

To be delivered to: The United States House of Representatives

We, the undersigned, urge you to co-sponsor and vote for H.R. 1351, which will restore the U.S. Postal Service to a sound financial footing. We oppose H.R. 2309, which will unnecessarily destroy many good jobs and ultimately the U.S. Postal Service, itself.

USPS management is proposing a drastic downsizing and service reduction. In part, it is due to an unreasonable requirement instituted by G.W. Bush through the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, which requires the prefunding of retiree health benefits for 75 years within ten years. H.R. 1351 will relieve the some of the most unfair aspects of this legislation and refund to the USPS part of the current overpayment.

Yes, a MoveOn fellow wants to take money from a funded pension program and “refund” it to the USPS, diminishing the viability of a pension system — not merely promised to current employees, but contracted — to shore up a failing enterprise?

One could be cynical and respond by saying that, if the commercial concern fails, they wouldn’t have a job, and . . . which do they want more?

But this would simply sell out principle for short-term gain — it’s the kind of thinking that leads to utter disaster. Real businesses exist in time, over time. If they cannot meet current obligations, and move funds from a contracted future obligation to meet a current crisis, the danger is real, and smacks of embezzlement. Moving money from worker pensions to a business is not traditionally associated with those who lean left, like those at MoveOn.

How can they justify the idea?

Well, the email promoting the petition provided a clue.

“The management of the U.S. Postal Service is proposing a drastic downsizing and service reduction—including possibly shutting down [your local] branch post office..., harming local service, and laying off 100,000 workers nationwide.

You see. The appeal is partly to local patrons. Those services you use every now and then, why, some might be cut out so that at least a few core services can be financially sustained. How shocking! Whatever you think about mail delivery, six-day-a-week delivery and a post office in every podunk town is not written into the Constitution.

Upon mere whims, nebulous expectations, and outrageous promises made by politicians? A campaign to take pension money and give it to the USPS to continue a losing business plan.

Taking a wider view, one could ask why the postal service has a pension plan at all. Why not fund each retirement account at time of wage payment (in a defined contribution plan) and let the workers — perhaps guided by their union? — decide how to manage their individual pensions. At that point, any attempt to grab their pension would not only become unthinkable, but unachievable.

Even for someone at MoveOn.

Of course, MoveOn’s got itself covered. The above petition, and its promotion from the MoveOn.org email, was written by a MoveOn member, “not by MoveOn staff, and MoveOn is not responsible for the content.” Thank you. I believe MoveOn that MoveOn is not responsible for this bit of content.

In general, it’s been my experience that, when it comes to understanding the nature of contracts and of responsibility itself, MoveOn is, indeed, not responsible.

Paul Jacob is President of Citizens in Charge Foundation and Citizens in Charge. His daily Common Sense commentary appears on the Web and via e-mail. 

COMMENTARY: Happy New Year Suckers, Pay Up: Your Share of Public Pension Crisis Now $424,500

Posted on December 30, 2011

By Frank Keegan

Here is a New Year’s resolution every American private sector worker must keep no matter what: Write a check for $14,150 Jan. 1 to make up for state and municipal pension shortfalls. Prepare to write one every year for 30 years. This is on top of all other taxes and fees governments at all levels gouge from us.

Taxpayers – through governments and public workers – pumped $25 billion into the top 100 pension funds in three months ending Sept. 30, according to the latest report. Those fund’s managers paid out $52 billion and lost $199 billion in market value. How deep into the fiscal abyss do they have to plunge us before somebody wakes up?

Even if by some miracle fund managers can meet promised average earnings to pay benefits through 2036 — which would require an average annual risk-free return of almost 10 percent  —  somebody must come up with an additional $45 trillion for all state and municipal pension funds in between to pay promised benefits.

That’s about $1.5 trillion a year  —  one and a half times greater than the entire U.S. Defense budget —  to provide absolutely no public services. No police on the streets, teachers in classrooms, sanitation workers picking up our trash. No public buildings repaired or built, no food for the hungry or shelter for the homeless, no health care for the indigent  —  no anything.

For decades through accounting tricks and outright lies politicians used pension funds as secret credit cards. The Great Recession market crash did not cause the pension crisis but merely exposed the scam.

The latest U.S. Census report on 100 top public pension funds, representing about 89 percent of value, for the third quarter proves the accelerating death spiral. It shows those funds down $395 billion, 13.5 percent, from the 2007 peak of $2.9 trillion.

Based on those numbers, taxpayers and state and municipal workers pumped at least $28 billion total into all public pensions during in the third quarter, and fund managers lost it all plus another $195 billion. In addition to those losses, pensions paid out almost $58 billion  —  more than double the “contributions.” That’s $56.6 billion in benefits and $1.5 billion in “withdrawals” by those who lost all the money in “earnings on investments.”

Those investments  —  which must grow every month, every quarter, every year to pay promised benefits  —   lost money in seven of the past 23 quarters and did not produce enough income to pay benefits and expenses in three more.

None of this massive accumulating debt shows up on state and municipal books when they claim “balanced” budgets. It just continues to accrue and compound while politicians and their crony managers, brokers and placement agents loot and pillage pension funds at will.

Oblivious taxpayers refuse to pay attention, and public workers continue to cling to those who betray them.

Nobody knows what will happen when the money runs out. What politicians refer to as “structural” deficits  —  deficits they themselves structured  —  are set to eat more and more revenue through health care, infrastructure repair and replacement, mandates, debt service, catastrophe and insurance funding, and an array of cost increases  —  including more for themselves  —  that politicians built into the budget process.

The declining number of private sector taxpayers who pick up the tab for everybody else  —  down 3.1 million, or 2.8 percent, in a decade  —  simply cannot continue to fund government when all the hidden deferred costs start hitting the abyss of reality in coming decades.

Total private wages increased only 25 percent from 2001 to 2010, but total official government spending increased 73 percent. The real catastrophe is that number does not include spending politicians hid and inflicted on future taxpayers.

False pension promises to state and municipal workers are a big part of that secret debt and are growing every year.

The longer politicians try to stretch out the payments the more it costs, ultimately passing a fiscal event horizon of no return.

For example, the latest census data mean that during the past five years state and municipal pension funds paid about $98 billion more in benefits than they earned on investments.

Total earnings on investments was about 3.4 percent a year for the average total cash and security holdings, not the 8 percent pension managers claim they miraculously will get every year.

What that means, best case, dear private sector worker, is we owe $14,150 in extra taxes for 2012 and every year for the next 30 years even if the politicians who have lied to us for decades somehow accomplish what they failed to accomplish in the past.

Good luck on that. Happy New Year suckers. Just pay up and shut up.

   

Frank Keegan is a national editor for The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, watchdog.org and statehousenewsonline.com . Any disgusted public employee, journalist, activist organization or citizen watchdog who wants help exposing government waste, fraud and abuse may contact him at: frank.keegan@franklincenterhq.org

For a comprehensive primer on state and municipal government pensions, check Statebudgetsolutions.org and sunshinereview.org . And for an aggregation of news from around the country, checkPensiontsunami.com .

Dept. of Labor: Public School Teachers Are Highest Paid State Workers; Compensation Doubles the Average in Private Industry

By Terence P. Jeffrey December 14, 2011

(CNSNews.com) - Public school teachers receive greater average hourly compensation in wages and benefits than any other group of state and local government workers and receive more than twice as much in average hourly wages and benefits as workers in private industry, according to a new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Public primary, secondary and special education teachers are paid an average of $56.59 per hour in combined wages and benefits, BLS said in the report released last week.

That is slightly more than twice the $28.24 in average hourly wages and benefits paid to workers in private industry.

In fact, according the BLS, the $28.24 in average hourly wages and benefits that private-industry workers now earn in the United States is less than the overall national average for hourly wages and benefits of $30.11.

That is because the overall national average compensation is dragged upwards from the private-industry average by the much higher wages and benefits paid to state and local government workers—who take in an average of $40.76 per hour, according to BLS.

The BLS report only calculated and published the average hourly wages and benefits for workers in nonfarm private industry and state and local governments. It did not include federal government workers.

While no category of state and local government worker earned more in average hourly wages and benefits than public school teachers, the report listed a few subcategories among private-sector workers who did earn more in average hourly wages and benefits than public school teachers.

These included, for example, managers in private utilities businesses, who averaged $56.94 in hourly wages and benefits; managers in professional and goods-producing businesses who averaged $59.63 in hourly wages and benefits; and workers in aircraft manufacturing, who averaged $61.66 in hourly benefits and wages.

The BLS determines the average hourly wages and benefits of American workers by surveying employers. It defines the number of hours a teacher works by the number of hours the teacherʼs employer says the teacher is required to be at the site of the job. BLS used the same methodology to determine the number of hours worked by other salaried employees. Because teachers have extended vacation periods when they are not required to be at school, they tend to work fewer hours, as calculated by BLS, than many other types of workers, including other types of government workers.

For example, in BLS's most recent National Compensation Survey, the agency determined that public primary, secondary and special education teachers worked an average of 1,405 hours in a year. Overall, state and local government workers worked an average of 1,823 hours in a year.

On the high end, government computer software engineers worked an average of 2,124 hours in a year. On the low end, government transportation attendants worked an average of 1,170 hours per year. Government bus drivers worked an average of 1,399 per year—not quite as long as the average for school teachers.

By contrast, according to BLS, private school primary, secondary and special ed teachers worked an average of 1,560 hours per year—or an average of 155 hours more than their public school counterparts.

According to the BLS report, private school teachers were not compensated as highly as public school teachers. When private school primary, secondary and special ed teachers were added to the pool with public teachers, average hourly wages and benefits for teachers dropped from $56.59 to $53.87. The report did not publish the disaggregated average compensation for private school teachers alone.

The $56.59 average hourly compensation for an American public primary, secondary and special education teachers includes $39.69 in wages and $16.90 in benefits, BLS reported.

For each hour at work, according to BLS, the average American public school teacher is paid $4.78 in retirement and savings benefits alone.

The average private sector worker, according to BLS, is paid $1.02 per hour in retirement and savings benefits--or less than one-fourth the average hourly retirement and savings benefits paid to public school teachers.

A Gift of Light

Republicans delay a phase-out of Thomas Edison's bulbs.

Christmas is known as the season of lights, so perhaps it's fitting that Republicans did a modest service on behalf of the incandescent light bulb in the budget negotiations. An omnibus rider will delay for one year the de facto ban on the old-fashioned Edison that was part of the 2007 energy bill.

The Energy Department won't be allowed to enforce the efficiency standards that were due to take effect weeks from now and would prohibit the manufacture or import of 100-watt bulbs, and then phase out nearly all of them in later years in favor of compact fluorescents. Imagine that: Letting adults make the trade-offs among cost, efficiency and personal preferences for themselves, without Washington mediation.

The green movement claims to speak on behalf of consumers who don't know the light bulb ban is for their own good—if only they were more enlightened, as it were. But consumers aren't cooperating. Millions of Americans hate the new bulbs, the headache-inducing quality of the light, their delay, their price.

The light bulb police—not to mention the light bulb industry suddenly banned from selling cheaper products—say government must enforce innovation. But the iPhone wasn't created because the government regulated out of existence rotary phones and switchboards. Wait until Congress decides to outlaw the internal combustion engine.

The political problem is that, unfortunately, the GOP rider may have no practical consequence because the efficiency standards are still on the books. So stores like Home Depot and Ikea will have to start clearing the shelves of the old bulbs anyway. At least Democrats made a concession, and perhaps the reprieve will lead to a full repeal in a new Presidency. Meantime, stock up on the old bulbs while you still can.

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Monarch Fire Board Fires New Chief in Contentious Meeting

BY PHILLIP O'CONNOR • poconnor@post-dispatch.com > 314-340-8321 | Posted: Sunday, December 11, 2011 12:00 am

CHESTERFIELD • A divided Monarch Fire Protection District board on Saturday hired Thomas J. Vineyard as its new chief. Vineyard is now chief of the Mid-County Fire Protection District. His one-year contract at Monarch takes effect Jan. 2 and calls for a salary of $127,500.

The vote came in the middle of a contentious meeting that included calls for two of the three board members, Kim Evans and Steve Swyers, to resign. The board has been in turmoil in recent months, in part over a suit by two female district employees that alleged a hostile work environment. The district recently lost an appeal of a verdict that awarded each of the women $200,000.

Last month, the board voted to dismiss four high-ranking officers over the matter. On Thursday, one of those officers, Fred Goodson, committed suicide, a point of anger for many of those who spoke Saturday morning. Some alleged his death was related to his dismissal, a charge that Evans, the board president, called "ridiculous."

Evans opened the meeting with a prepared statement in which she noted that Goodson's death upset everyone and that "a good deal of misinformation" had circulated about recent events.

She criticized a group of residents that includes former board member Richard Gans for making personal accusations and trying to intimidate the board. The group, Monarch Concerned Taxypayers, issued a release saying Goodson's death "is not lost upon us in light of how he was treated by those on the Monarch Board."

In her statement, Evans lashed back. "We will not engage in political attacks related to the untimely and unfortunate death of a former employee."

Evans said the board took actions necessary to correct violations that a jury had determined existed.

"The board cannot and will not tolerate an abusive working environment," she said.

She blamed Gans and other former board members for not doing anything when workplace problems surfaced years ago. Failure to take action then led to the four men recently losing their jobs, she said.

Gans, who was defeated by Swyers in a re-election bid in April, and about a half dozen others spoke during the often-tense public comment part of the meeting. Several accused Evans and Swyers of being corrupt, union-controlled and wreaking havoc on the district, and called for them to resign. 

Others criticized the recent dismissals of the four officers, saying the dismissals were unfair, badly handled and could result in more litigation for the district. At one point, a speaker told Swyers to wipe a smile from his face.

"This is not a joke," the man said. "You don't need to smile when you're called corrupt because that's what you are."

Later, Swyers addressed the audience of about three dozen and told them he was an honest man with no agenda. As for being a "union puppet," he said, "I don't know what that means, quite candidly. I'm my own man."

He said he has no plans to resign.

At the November meeting where the firings were approved, board member Robin Harris attended by telephone but was not allowed to vote. At Saturday's meeting, Harris said he recently spoke with retired Monarch Fire Marshal Dave Nichols who told him that a firefighter from an adjoining district told him in October that four senior staff were going to be let go.

Harris said that would have been before the conclusion of the court case purported to be the cause of the firings and before he had taken part in any discussions on the subject. Reached at home, Nichols confirmed Harris' account, but declined to comment further.

Harris said: "I want to know how union members knew of final, future board decisions more than one month before the full Monarch board had even addressed the issue?"

At that point, Harris also called for Evans and Swyers to resign to cheers and applause.

Like Swyers, Evans said she has no plans to resign. After the meeting, a visibly shaken Evans briefly sat alone in a break room.

Evans and Swyers voted to hire Vineyard. Harris opposed the hiring, saying Vineyard did not meet the education or experience qualifications set by the board, was not a paramedic and had run a much smaller department that did not respond to water, airborne or confined-space rescues, services that Monarch provides.

"Mr. Vineyard does not even possess the qualifications we require to hire an entry-level paramedic/firefighter, and yet the two of you are suggesting he should become our next chief," Harris said.

The Mid-County district has about 20 employees and serves Greendale, Hanley Hills, Hillsdale, Pagedale, St. Louis County, Vinita Park, Vinita Terrace and Wellston. The Monarch District includes five firehouses, a maintenance facility, training center and headquarters, and employs about 125 people. The district serves Ballwin, Chesterfield, Clarkson Valley, Creve Coeur, Maryland Heights and Wildwood.

Vineyard will receive the same fringe benefits as other full-time district employees, plus a vehicle.

Obama Administration Welcoming Islamic Group to Washington for Discussion on ‘Tolerance’

By Patrick Goodenough

December 9, 2011

(CNSNews.com) – The Obama administration says a meeting in Washington next week seeks to make progress in combating religious intolerance, but critics say the U.S. is pandering to an ideological agenda aimed at restricting speech critical of Islam.

According to the State Department the aim is to find ways to combat religious hate without compromising freedom of expression. Detractors are skeptical that this can be done, and they suspect that free speech will end up the loser.

Among those criticizing the event are GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, the Traditional Values Coalition, and scholars at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom.

The State Department-hosted meeting is the latest step in a process stemming from a resolution on “combating intolerance based on religion,” adopted by consensus at the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC) last March.

The move marked the first time in more than a decade that the U.N.’s top human rights body did not pass an annual “defamation of religion” resolution, sponsored by the bloc of Islamic states, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

Many rights advocacy groups regard the OIC campaign as an attempt to outlaw valid discussion of Islamic teachings – to extend to democratic societies the type of blasphemy provisions enforced in some Islamic states.

The new resolution, known as “resolution 16/18,” called on countries to combat “intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization” based on religion, without seeking to criminalize speech – except in cases of “incitement to imminent violence.”

The administration characterized it as a significant breakthrough: “[T]he Council took an important step away from the deeply problematic concept of defamation of religion by adopting a constructive new resolution that promotes tolerance for all religious beliefs, promotes education and dialogue and is consistent with U.S. laws and universal values.”

Some human rights and religious freedom advocacy groups opposed to the “religious defamation” drive also praised the development.

Others were skeptical, noting that the OIC had watched its defamation resolutions receive less and less support each year and may view resolution 16/18 as an alternative route towards achieving the same end.

OIC leaders themselves did not help to allay these suspicions, stressing that the Islamic bloc had not abandoned its agenda of “protecting” Islam and insisting that the “religious defamation” campaign was not dead.

On the sidelines of a first meeting held to advance resolution 16/18, in Istanbul last July, Pakistan’s U.N. ambassador Zamir Akram said that the OIC would not compromise on three things – anything said or done against the Qur’an, anything said or done against Mohammed, and discrimination against the Muslim community. (Akram represents a government overseeing some of the Islamic world’s most controversial blasphemy laws, where “blaspheming” the Qur’an or Mohammed carries the death penalty.)

At that Istanbul meeting, co-chairs Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu issued a statement urging countries “to take effective measures, as set forth in Resolution 16/18, consistent with their obligations under international human rights law, to address and combat intolerance, discrimination, and violence based on religion or belief.”

Next week’s gathering in Washington is a follow-up to the one in Istanbul, and it aims at “implementation.”

From the OIC’s viewpoint, resolution 16/18 is clearly part of the defamation campaign: “Washington plans to host a meeting on resolution opposing defamation of religions,” the OIC’s official news agency reported last August.

Ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom Suzan Johnson Cook says the meeting will bring together international organizations, including the OIC, European Union, Arab League and African Union, as well as law enforcement and justice officials representing some 30 foreign governments.

The meeting will “discuss best practices for two of the recommended actions from resolution 16/18: engagement with members of minority religious communities and enforcement of laws that prohibit acts of discrimination on the basis of religion or belief,” she said.

The State Department would afterwards submit a report on “best practices identified during these sessions” to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and for public distribution.

‘Americans never signed on to submit their sovereignty to the U.N.’

The administration argues that the way to find a middle road between combating religious hate speech and upholding free speech is to use the tools of education, public debate and interfaith dialogue rather than legal prescriptions.

Naming and shaming is also part of the arsenal, with Clinton at the Istanbul meeting speaking of using “some old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming.”

Also in Istanbul, U.S. permanent representative to the HRC, Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe, gave an OIC publication an example of the type of action regarded as effective, citing the administration’s condemnation of Florida pastor Terry Jones’ Qur’an-burning demonstration.

“When you have the president, the secretary of state and public figures jointly condemning that, it will be more effective than throwing that pastor in jail,” the OIC Journal quoted Donahoe as saying. “I believe the same is true for the hateful [Mohammed] cartoons. We should all be joining together in conveying our disgust with such intolerance.”

Critics question the wisdom of partnering with an organization with a troubling agenda. They also wonder why the administration is cooperating with an OIC effort to give legal teeth to what is a non-binding resolution.

“President Obama should put a stop to this nonsense and declare that in free societies all views and religions are subject to contradiction and critique – and the OIC must learn to tolerate that,” Hudson Institute Center for Religious Freedom director Nina Shea and senior fellow Paul Marshall in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week.

Former House speaker and Republican presidential hopeful Gingrich also voiced concern.

“Just days after chastising Israel for ‘unfair’ treatment of women, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will welcome a Saudi-based Islamist group, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to Washington for a conference on ‘tolerance,’” he wrote in a Human Events column on Wednesday. “Far from a tolerant organization, however, a primary mission of the OIC is to restrict free speech critical of Islam.”

The Traditional Values Coalition has requested permission to be admitted as an observer to next week’s meeting, and says the State Department has so far refused.

In a letter to Clinton Thursday repeating the request, TVC President Andrea Lafferty wrote that not allowing the organization to observe would only “lead to the conclusion that the objective of this meeting is not religious liberty and toleration, but rather a concert designed to chill, contain, and curb religious liberties and free speech.”

“Why is it that the U.S. Constitution must come second when representatives from Islamic counties such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan demand we must curb our religious liberties and free speech?” Lafferty asked in a statement.

“Americans never signed on to submit their sovereignty to the United Nations, nor should they be expected to submit to the will of Islamic countries whose human rights record against women, Christians, and other persecuted minorities continues to shock the world.”

Municipal 'Millionaires'

By LAWRENCE MONE

NEW YORK POST - December 1, 2011

Gov. Cuomo, under enormous pressure from public-employee unions and Democrats in the Legislature to extend New York’s “millionaires’ tax,” is considering at least some higher taxes on higher incomes. The big irony here is that much of the money raised from any “millionaire” tax hikes would go to fund the growing phenomenon of public-sector millionaires.

How’s that? Well, most dictionaries define a millionaire as someone with wealth (i.e., assets) of $1 million. By that definition, many New York teachers and the vast majority of police and firefighters are millionaires, because the “net present value” of their retirement benefits is well in excess of $1 million.

That is, if they had to fund their retirements from their own savings, they’d have to set aside seven figures today.

Few who don’t work for the government sector have comparable assets. Over the last several decades, the private sector has moved increasingly to the 401(k)-style “defined contribution” model, which yields a retirement nest egg based on what both employers and employees have contributed to individual accounts.

Public-sector workers, on the other hand, still rely on “defined benefit” pensions, which provide a guaranteed stream of income based on career longevity and late-career peak salaries.

A New York City public-school teacher earning $100,000 can retire at 55 with a pension of $60,000. A private-sector worker would need $1.2 million to buy an annuity with the same yield and starting at the same (relatively young) age, according to the online pension calculator developed by the Manhattan Institute’s Empire Center.

It would take an even larger nest egg to replicate the pension income of city police officers, who typically retire in their 40s. According to data posted at SeeThroughNY, an Empire Center Web site, the average newly retired city cop collects a pension of $58,563 — plus a $12,000 annual supplement.

(Of course, public-sector workers also receive lavish health-care retirement benefits.)

Few private-sector workers have anything close to $1 million socked away in their retirement accounts. According to the Federal Reserve, the average worker in his late 50s has a balance of $85,600 in his retirement account, and a net worth of $222,300 overall.

To be sure, most public employees do contribute a small portion of their salaries to their pension funds, but the state and city contribute many times more. By contrast, private employers and employees more commonly do a one-to-one match.

And private-sector workers assume all the risk of these investments, while public-sector workers enjoy generous rates of guaranteed return. As former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein quipped when he discovered his city pension offers a guaranteed 8 percent annual return, “Who but Bernie Madoff guarantees” such a return “permanently?”

Let me be clear: Many public-sector employees — especially frontline employees like teachers, cops and firefighters — have difficult, important and often dangerous jobs. They deserve to be well-compensated. And, for the most part, they are. After six years, police and firefighters can earn more than $90,000, excluding overtime.

Another irony: Salaries for public employees — math and science teachers, for example — could be raised if so much of their compensation wasn’t backloaded in pension costs.

In the popular 1950s TV show “The Millionaire,” a fictional character would hand out checks for a million dollars. Over the last few decades, we’ve developed a public-sector retirement system that basically does the same. It’s a system New York’s beleaguered taxpayers can simply no longer afford.

City pension costs have jumped from about 4 percent of city tax revenues to 20 percent over the past decade, crowding out other vital public investments. If New York is to avoid the fate of cities like Central Falls, RI, which have been driven into bankruptcy and are slashing promised retiree benefits, we must begin to fix the system now. Ideally, for new employees, by switching to the same type of “defined-contribution” retirement system now used by virtually everyone in the private sector.

There simply aren’t enough private-sector “millionaires” to support all the new public-sector millionaires being created every day.

Lawrence Mone is president of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

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