Posted on 12/23/2010 2:45:34 AM PST by abb
PRICHARD, Ala. — This struggling small city on the outskirts of Mobile was warned for years that if it did nothing, its pension fund would run out of money by 2009. Right on schedule, its fund ran dry.
Then Prichard did something that pension experts say they have never seen before: it stopped sending monthly pension checks to its 150 retired workers, breaking a state law requiring it to pay its promised retirement benefits in full.
Since then, Nettie Banks, 68, a retired Prichard police and fire dispatcher, has filed for bankruptcy. Alfred Arnold, a 66-year-old retired fire captain, has gone back to work as a shopping mall security guard to try to keep his house. Eddie Ragland, 59, a retired police captain, accepted help from colleagues, bake sales and collection jars after he was shot by a robber, leaving him badly wounded and unable to get to his new job as a police officer at the regional airport.
Far worse was the retired fire marshal who died in June. Like many of the others, he was too young to collect Social Security. “When they found him, he had no electricity and no running water in his house,” said David Anders, 58, a retired district fire chief. “He was a proud enough man that he wouldn’t accept help.”
The situation in Prichard is extremely unusual — the city has sought bankruptcy protection twice — but it proves that the unthinkable can, in fact, sometimes happen. And it stands as a warning to cities like Philadelphia and states like Illinois, whose pension funds are under great strain: if nothing changes, the money eventually does run out, and when that happens, misery and turmoil follow.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
That document has had almost no bearing on the operation of the Federal Government since the Wilson administration.
This LA Times article with video shows Prichard as a small rural community, largely segregated, oppressed by violence and ignored by the surrounding community. "Its young people have come to know their enclave as 'Death Valley.'"
Its poverty is shocking.. even for LA inner-city toughs. But there's stuff that the inner-city homeboys recognize: "drug dealers, shootings, dead-end choices and the desperate situation of youth facing no way out."
Many of the reader comments blame Palin and the Tea Party, of course.
Detroit, Gary, St. Louis, Camden, Memphis, Jackson, etc. I would say Prichard is a perfect, albeit smaller, model for what is going on in many other American cities.
We as a country have poured untold trillions upon trillions into black America. Either through education dollars, healtcare, subsidized housing, policing, prisons, drug rehabilitation, you name it. And the problems only got worse.
Now we are repeating the exact same thing with our Latin American population, whether legal or illegal, just as the money is surely running out.
This topic needs to be brought up as issue priority number one, every day, all day. Because if the target population is not made to understand what truly is going on, it will get bloody, when those checks run out, guaranteed.
I don't have the answers and it's not exactly a sexy topic. But is Rush banging the drum on this? Is Hannity? I haven't heard it or when I do it's so subtle that it's pointless.
It needs to be a calm, blunt, honest and rational assessment and it's going to have to touch on nasty things like inherent abilities and expectations. And we have 5 years tops.
I'm not hopeful.
Yes they do, but running on the "I Got Mine" platform will get you about 2% of the vote. I guess your invisible church will reach out to the victims of government and corporate theft. He!! let them eat cake.
You can argue about the cost of “ Fire protection? Maintaining a sewage system? Police protection?” but not the necessity or do you not recall the garbage strike?
Anyway, get down off your high hobby horse. NYC has what it has worked for, fought for, elected corrupt political hacks to beg, borrow and steal for them. and those that didn’t want to join the fun are being driven out.
There isn’t a city in American that can’t afford to lose 20% of the cops and NOT be better for it.
Less citizen harassment by police and less cost now and future. Also a roll-back of the police state.
They only post the scare stories to make people think they are needed when in fact, we have far too many cops.
Here in Maine people who are in state government appoint each other to cushy high compensation jobs like judge, AG, so they can feather their retirements.
But it really doesn't matter. Government employees are leeches wherever they are. They want, they need; so I should do without.
"Public servants," my a$$.
ML/NJ
I have to put in a good word in defense of boom times, even if they are usually based on false notions. This is because they serve a very useful function over time, *in relation* to other times.
An economy that moves between a situation of modest growth balanced with modest recession, over time tends to build up a lot of business detritus and inefficiency. It lacks both the natural selection of a serious downturn, and the big jumps that come from speculative innovation.
For example, there was a very good reason for the boom of the recent industrial revolution of personal computers. But this boom needed vast amounts of investment capital that could not be obtained through ordinary investment channels. Yet eventually it turned into a stable market that still exists.
However, after this boom, there was a second boom, founded on far less stable market growth, but a lot more speculative investment, the “dot com” boom. When this boom went bust in 2000, it was a crash that was more like a typical speculative boom, throwing the economy into a deep recession—which was needed to rebalance the economy.
As a nation, we now face a much more serious dilemma than this booms, one that has been developing since just after World War II, with the introduction of the easy credit economy. An ordinary, even deep recession will not be enough to fix this philosophical error.
To restore balance to our economy, we almost have to have a depression, losing 70 years of unsustainable growth that right now we still don’t even realize is unsustainable.
I’m sure you raised the intelligence level of the whole area by leaving it.
“They want, they need; so I should do without.”
Sounds like someone who tried to get his nose into the trough and got pushed aside.
I think you are way too optimistic. I think we have less than a year.
You come off like someone whose nose is in the trough and resents having to give it up.
Not even close, Putz. I've always been one of those guys filling the trough. I would do work for the military, and only then as a contractor, but that's it.
ML/NJ
ML/NJ
They don't have the money. They can't get the money. The money doesn't exist. It would be like the government making a law that we can only get maple syrup from oak trees.
You got words on paper, now what?
Hey....This is only supposed to happen to the slaves in the private sector....Not government employees!!
This is just too damn bad for them...
Like those in the private sector, if they can't make it without their lottery style government retirement pensions, they need to go apply at Walmart to make ends meet.
Enough!!
NO federal bail outs of government retirement pensions!!
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