Free Republic

The Fezzan is an area of approximately 212,000 square miles of unforgiving desert and valleys. Situated in the south west of modern day Libya it’s not an area you’d easily traverse, let alone live in. Yet in the 1st millennium BCE a people did exactly that. They created art, irrigated the baked earth and sustained a culture. One of the earliest surviving references to the Garamantes is found in Herodotus’ Histories, written in the 5th century BCE[1]. Herodotus’ description was contradictory, they had no weapons, but they hunted a cave dwelling tribe nearby using chariots. He also went on to...

Outgoing Ohio Education Association (OEA) President Patricia Frost-Brooks was paid a total of $998,949 from 2008-2012, the first five years of her six-year tenure. Thanks to union contracts that existed long before many current teachers were hired, the vast majority of OEA’s revenue comes from more than $450 per year in dues deducted automatically from tens of thousands of Ohio teachers’ paychecks. Based on OEA’s annual report to the U.S. Department of Labor, the union collected over $58 million in dues and “fair share” fees in 2012. While Frost-Brooks has benefited the most from OEA’s generous officer and executive salaries...

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Members of Ohio's largest teachers' union have agreed to a one-time, $54 dues increase to pay for the fight against Ohio's new collective bargaining law. A spokeswoman for the Ohio Education Association says 111,000 active union members would pay the extra dollars under a proposal overwhelmingly approved Friday. School support staff would pay $25. Student and retired members were exempted. The dues change could mean an additional $5.5 million for the union.

Last week as Ohio Governor John Kasich was signing Senate Bill 5 into law, the Ohio NEA affiliate, the Ohio Education Association, was already mobilizing their efforts to repeal the measure that would end forced unionism, makes strikes illegal and close major budget shortfalls via a ballot referendum. In a current forced unionism state, the OEA already collects at least $63 million in dues per year. Apparently that figure isn't enough to advance their agenda as they are now considering extracting an additional $50 per member for the referendum campaign in November. Regardless of what teachers think about the law,...