City Journal's Steve Malanga captures the sad story of how public employee unions (Calif.)

Unions are the storm troopers of socialism.

Do they not have editors?

"The story starts half a century ago, when California public workers won bargaining rights and quickly learned how to elect their own bosses—that is, sympathetic politicians who would grant them outsize pay and benefits in exchange for their support. Over time, the unions have turned the state’s politics completely in their favor," Malanga writes. "The result: unaffordable benefits for civil servants; fiscal chaos in Sacramento and in cities and towns across the state; and angry taxpayers finally confronting the unionized masters of California’s unsustainable government."

The Unbelievable Expectations of California's Pension System
FR posted Wednesday, May 19, 2010

California Bill SB 400 granted billions of dollars in retroactive pension boosts to state employees, allowing retirements as young as age 50 with lifetime pensions of up to 90% of final year salaries.....

What Calpers (California Public Employees' Retirement System) failed to disclose, however, was that (1) the state budget was on the hook for shortfalls should actual investment returns fall short of assumed investment returns, (2) those assumed investment returns implicitly projected the Dow Jones would reach roughly 25,000 by 2009 and 28,000,000 by 2099, unrealistic to say the least (3) shortfalls could turn out to be hundreds of billions of dollars, (4) Calpers’s own employees would benefit from the pension increases and (5) members of Calpers’s board had received contributions from the public employee unions who would benefit from the legislation.

Had such a flagrant case of non-disclosure occurred in the private sector, even a sleepy SEC and US Attorney would have noticed.

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Calpers Rocked by 'Pay to Play'
WSJ, 10/15/09, By CRAIG KARMIN AND PETER LATTMAN
EXCERPT America's largest public-pension fund, Calpers, revealed that a former board member had reaped more than $50 million in fees for arranging investments that could saddle state taxpayers with hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. The disclosure deepens concerns that alleged conflicts of interest are undermining state retirement funds.

The California Public Employees' Retirement System said it is launching a "special review" into payments by money managers-- including billionaire Leon Black's Apollo Management LP -- to firms including Arvco Financial Ventures LLC. Arvco is headed by Al Villalobos, who served on Calpers's board from 1993 to 1995.

SOURCE http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125553138534384951.html

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Compare your salary w/ California govt employees' salaries (does not include pensions and benefits)

Special Nurse $350,000+
Municipal railway manager:$325,000+
Administrative services department head $280,000+

State college workers salaries:
JEFF TEDFORD UC BERKELEY HEAD COACH-INTERCOLG ATHLETICS $2,831,654
PHILIP E LEBOIT UC SAN FRANCISCO PROF OF CLIN___-MEDCOMP-A $1,979,362
TIMOTHY H MCCALMONT UC SAN FRANCISCO PROF OF CLIN___-MEDCOMP-A $1,945,717
RONALD W BUSUTTIL UC LOS ANGELES PROFESSOR-MEDCOMP-A $1,570,897
RICHARD J SHEMIN UC LOS ANGELES PROFESSOR-MEDCOMP-A $1,195,837
KHALIL M TABSH UC LOS ANGELES HS CLIN PROF-MEDCOMP-A $1,048,891
BEN BRAUN UC BERKELEY HEAD COACH-INTERCOLG ATHLETICS $998,569
http://www.sacbee.com/1098/story/1669273.html

That Malanga story is a good one but it’s been out for months, hasn’t it? Why is Tapscott writing about it this late?

The liberal A$$hole, who is responsible for our mess today and for decades is MoonBeam Brown. He set up this disaster in 1978.

Below is an article written by Roger Hedgecock giving the Browning of California history:

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=163253

Jerry Brown: Reason for California’s failure

Posted: June 07, 2010
1:00 am Eastern

Democrat Jerry Brown, the once (1975-1983) and possibly future governor of California, sat unopposed and smiling on the sidelines these last few months as candidates for the Republican nomination for governor chewed each other up in the primary election ending tomorrow – the most expensive non-presidential campaign in U.S. history.

For the November election, Brown has the union money all lined up, the liberal elites unified, the deceptive conservative campaign rhetoric refined by focus groups. Once the youngest governor in California’s history, if elected, Brown would be the oldest. In a déjà vu campaign, Brown lusts to outdo his father’s two terms as governor.

But for many Californians with long memories, the question is what Jerry Brown will do to cope with the devastating effects his earlier terms as governor had on California. Here’s a little background:

When I was an undergraduate at the University of California in the late ‘60s, Ronald Reagan was governor of California.

Then, California was the envy of the world – the Golden State. Higher education was essentially free – and the best in the world. We had the newest and best freeways, abundant, cheap electricity and water so abundant and cheap that many communities didn’t bother to meter it. New affordable housing communities sprang up every week as millions moved here for the fun, sun and the opportunity California promised.

State and local government taxes were low, less than half of today’s taxes even after adjusting for inflation and population growth. A business friendly environment produced unemployment rates always lower than the national average.

Today, California is a third-world basket case. The K-12 system is collapsing under rising dropout rates and ever poorer performance by the students who remain. The university system is top heavy with expensive bureaucrats, riddled with politically correct “classes” and excludes the poor with ever-rising student “fees.”

The state has stopped building new freeways, halted new power plants and created a man-made “dust bowl” in the fertile Central Valley by blocking water for humans in favor of water for fish. Business is evil incarnate, requiring ever more regulation. Taxes are the highest in the nation, unemployment higher. Millions of productive Californians are leaving for the opportunities in neighboring states. And for those who remain here, the livin’ ain’t easy.

How did this happen? It started with the 1974 election of new-age, radical leftist Jerry Brown and liberal majorities in the state Legislature.

Brown preached a vision of an “era of limits” translating widespread 1970s public concern about air and water pollution and the countryside being paved over by suburbia into big government central planning. New environmental standards helped the environment but delayed and made more expensive everything from hospitals to housing.

Brown canceled the freeway program with some routes abandoned that were already under construction. He canceled dam projects and new aqueducts. He established the California Energy Commission to block new power plants. He expanded the role of the Air Resources Board to the point that bakeries were required to install expensive scrubbers on their exhaust fans to protect the public from the “polluting” smell of freshly baked bread.

In a psychedelic fusion of European socialism and Jeffersonian agrarianism, Brown earned the title “Moonbeam” for espousing the notion that “if we don’t build it, we won’t need it” and the now (after Obama) familiar notion that every area of life could be improved with more government rules.

Radical environmentalism continues as a major theme in California politics. Under Arnold Schwarzenegger, California has already passed “cap and trade” and required the utility companies to get 20 percent of their electricity from “alternative sources” by 2020. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (a municipal utility) has estimated that utility rates in L.A. will have to increase by 28 percent to meet this goal.

That is, if the “alternate” plants are even allowed to be built. A proposed solar electrical generating plant in the Mojave Desert (where the suns shines more than any other spot in North America) has been blocked by Sen. Diane Feinstein because of the adverse impact on the fragile desert environment!

Perhaps even more damaging to California was 1978 legislation signed by then Gov. Brown allowing collective bargaining for public employees. No single act has changed California for the worse more than this one.

Before 1978, there was a relatively small state government. Employees were protected by civil service. Pay was lower than comparable jobs in the private sector but job security and good benefits – plus the old notion of “public service” – drew many talented people to work in government.

Today, the primary goal of powerful public employee unions is to get the Legislature they bought and paid for to enact a new law making it illegal for any city or county to declare bankruptcy without guaranteeing union contract terms. Taxpayers and “public service” be damned.

Today’s public-employee unions will spend millions in campaign money to elect compliant politicians to protect jobs that now pay 20-30 percent more than comparable positions in a private company and retirement benefits that too often pay a public employee more in retirement than when working.

Everyone realizes that this is an “unsustainable” situation. Public services have deteriorated at every turn, but the money earned by the bloated bureaucracies that deliver those services has ballooned out of sight.

California’s Constitution requires a yearly balanced budget. The budget has not been balanced in many years. Each year, accounting tricks, plunder of “trust funds,” misuse of bond proceeds, illegal borrowing and all manner of chicanery is employed by the governor (of either party) and the Legislature to avoid the appearance of an unbalanced budget. This year the budget has an actual deficit of about $20 billion. The answer from the Democrat (read “union”) dominated Legislature? Raise taxes.

The coming campaign will pressure Jerry Brown to explain these legacies from his last tenure as governor. If he is elected (an outcome I predicted last year – a prediction I fervently hope is wrong), Brown must either change his legacy and chart a Chris Christie-like course of tax cuts, smaller government and confronting the public employee unions, or continue to preach the vision he started and the policies that will ultimately make California what Detroit has become.

Mr. Hedgecock, former Mayor of San Diego, certainly has all the facts lined up in a chronology of shame for the once great CALIFORNIA REPUBLIC!!!

I'm BOOKMARKING this for future reference and I hope everyone else will too. Thanks for posting Grampa Dave!!!

Powerfully sickening and shameful information!!! Thanks for compiling and linking it...

OFF with their heads!!

The coming campaign will pressure Jerry Brown to explain these legacies from his last tenure as governor. If he is elected, Brown must either change his legacy and chart a Chris Christie-like course of tax cuts, smaller government and confronting the public employee unions, or continue to preach the vision he started and the policies that will ultimately make California what Detroit has become.

Libertarian-leaning "Reason Foundation" reports that that California's unfunded pension liability "unsustainable and unaffordable" and "translates to roughly $36,000 for each California household."

In 1999, Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill that retroactively allowed some state employees to retire at age 50 with a pension as high as 90 percent of the last year's salary.

"Wasn't my fault," Brown told cheering Democrats at a recent convention.

GUESS FLYSPECK BROWN FORGOT ABOUT THIS (/SNIX) The Cali government's "money machine" to buy votes was engineered in the 1970s when California's legislature cleared the way for public-employee unions to organize and bargain.

Then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed a crucial bill in 1978 that gave public workers, already protected under civil service, collective bargaining rights on top of that. Such legislation created far more than mere bargaining power. It also gave the unions access to dues money that could be deployed to reward friends in the legislature as well as beating back reform efforts at the ballot box.

I hope Whitman zeroes in on all that.

Thanks for the ping, Sierra. It’ll be interesting to see how things go in November with has-been Jerry back in the picture.

"OFF with their heads!!"

Well, it's a cinch they're all out of their heads so go down to Rent-A-Guillotine and then let's consider what the French did in their revolution, I guess... It sure wouldn't change what's in their knot-heads one iota, right??? (I'll bring a butt-load of bushel baskets for collecting all the dead weight!!!)(smirk)

"I hope Whitman zeroes in on all that."

Someone once told me that voting for the worst Republican is still better than voting for the best Deemocrat, but after Schwartzenegger, I'm still having a really hard time with that concept.

I always vote, but I don't always check off every box for every office, or for every issue. It may be dumb, but I just can't help it.

Every election anymore, my nose always starts bleeding from my pinching it so hard as I try to vote for some of these really scummy Republicans to try to keep Democrat bogiemen out of the government!!!

“GUESS FLYSPECK BROWN FORGOT ABOUT THIS (/SNIX) The Cali government’s “money machine” to buy votes was engineered in the 1970s when California’s legislature cleared the way for public-employee unions to organize and bargain.

Then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed a crucial bill in 1978 that gave public workers, already protected under civil service, collective bargaining rights on top of that. Such legislation created far more than mere bargaining power. It also gave the unions access to dues money that could be deployed to reward friends in the legislature as well as beating back reform efforts at the ballot box.

I hope Whitman zeroes in on all that.”

Hopefully, Whitman will zero in on setting up the unions to control our state and Moonbeam’s hatred of Prop 13 before it was voted in.