Friday 29th of November 2024
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reflections...

reflections

 

“People I don’t even know are calling me horrible names,” said Ms. Corfield, an art teacher who had pleaded the case of struggling teachers. “The mantra is that the problem is the unions, the unions, the unions.”

Across the nation, a rising irritation with public employee unions is palpable, as a wounded economy has blown gaping holes in state, city and town budgets, and revealed that some public pension funds dangle perilously close to bankruptcy. In California, New York, Michigan and New Jersey, states where public unions wield much power and the culture historically tends to be pro-labor, even longtime liberal political leaders have demanded concessions — wage freezes, benefit cuts and tougher work rules.

It is an angry conversation. Union chiefs, who sometimes persuaded members to take pension sweeteners in lieu of raises, are loath to surrender ground. Taxpayers are split between those who want cuts and those who hope that rising tax receipts might bring easier choices.

And a growing cadre of political leaders and municipal finance experts argue that much of the edifice of municipal and state finance is jury-rigged and, without new revenue, perhaps unsustainable. Too many political leaders, they argue, acted too irresponsibly, failing to either raise taxes or cut spending.

A brutal reckoning awaits, they say.

These battles play out in many corners, but few are more passionate than in New Jersey, where politics tend toward the moderately liberal and nearly 20 percent of the work force is unionized (compared with less than 14 percent nationally). From tony horse-country towns to middle-class suburbs to hard-edged cities, property tax and unemployment rates are high, and budgets are pools of red ink.

A new regime in state politics is venting frustration less at Goldman Sachs executives (Governor Christie vetoed a proposed “millionaire’s tax” this year) than at unions. Newark recently laid off police officers after they refused to accept cuts, and Camden has threatened to lay off half of its officers in January.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/business/02showdown.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

cloaked in the comfort of a news-free zone

Here on Oahu, where Mr. Obama and his family are staying in a luxury oceanfront rental home in the sleepy town of Kailua, the president is cloaked in the comfort of a news-free zone. The public does not see much of him, except for when he is zipping by in his armored sport utility vehicle, and it does not much seem to care.

Images of the president at leisure — sharing a Hawaiian shave ice with daughters Malia and Sasha, golfing, dining out with his wife — have trickled out, orchestrated by aides who have also taken care to allow pictures of the president at church and visiting the troops on Christmas Day. His advisers calculate that there has been roughly one photo opportunity every day and a half.

News photographers are grousing. They were kept at a safe distance and given strict instructions to put away their telephoto lenses when the Obama family went snorkeling on Tuesday at the Hanauma Bay Nature Preserve, where green sea turtles and fish in all shapes and colors dart in and out of a coral reef. (The president does not want to be photographed with his shirt off, and the preserve is closed on Tuesdays, so the public was not around, either.)

Mr. Obama spent Thursday on the island’s North Shore, which is famous for its monster waves and the sweet, succulent shrimp that are sold from trucks on the side of the road. But there was no presidential sighting; he was tucked away at the beachfront home of his childhood friend Bobby Titcomb, who throws an annual barbecue for the Hawaiian White House.

On Friday, the president played golf — his fourth round so far this trip — and he spent a quiet New Year’s Eve at home, a gathering that included a talent show with family and friends, an annual Obama tradition. Again, no photos.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/us/politics/02memo.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

see no photo toon at top...

infested area

From Chris Floyd

"Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. ...  And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for 'the universal brotherhood of man' -- with his mouth." -- Mark Twain, The Damned Human Race

As President Barack Obama consoled the nation Wednesday with talk of "rain puddles in heaven," his agents were murdering four more people in his illegal war in Pakistan. The incongruity was excruciating; you could almost feel your neck snapping from the moral whiplash induced by the contrast between word and deed.

But of course this contrast remained totally obscured. Instead, the media was saturated with bipartisan praise for Obama's heavenly puddles and "transcendent" rhetoric about "aligning our actions with our values" and measuring our lives by "how well we have loved and what small part we have played in making the lives of others better." Naturally, in the midst of so much self-congratulatory afflatus, there was not much room for a short story from the Associated Press noting that Wednesday saw yet another attack by American drone missiles on a remote village in Pakistan.

Yet even this report was itself drenched in the mindset of righteous murder that lurked behind the treacly tropes that Obama was delivering to a rapturous crowd. You can see it in the language of the very first paragraph:


Suspected U.S. unmanned aircraft fired four missiles at a house in a militant-infested area of northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, killing at least four people, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

An "infested" area -- the language used for vermin, for insects, for filthy creatures fit only for extermination. These insects are what is being killed in the wilds of Pakistan: not human beings, not sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters. Just strange, worthless little creepy-crawlies called "militants." And if you think this is too extreme an extrapolation, not truly representative of the imperial mindset, recall the words of Admiral William Fallon.

Surely you remember the good Admiral -- former head of U.S. Central Command, the military cockpit of the Terror War.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2076-speech-pathology-rain-puddles-in-heaven-hellfire-on-earth.html

see toon at top...

mama and fada christmas...

While Assange mused darkly in his exile, one of his lawyers sent out a mock Christmas card that suggested at least someone on the WikiLeaks team was not lacking a sense of the absurd.

The message:

“Dear kids,

Santa is Mum & Dad.

Love,

WikiLeaks.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/magazine/30Wikileaks-t.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

see toon at top...