Daily Archives: 23 April 2010

Questions about Polish Plane Crash

President Obama, Prince Charles, Chancelor Merkel, President Sarkozy, and Prime Minister Berlusconi all canceled their appearance at the funeral on short notice.

Poland refused the Swine Flu vaccine. They had their own Central Bank and wouldn’t submit to the Euro zone. They wouldn’t jump in bed with the IMF and were not suffering a recession but were prospering.

According to the big wobble, “Author of the video seen by everyone by now has been stabbed near Kijow on 4.15 and transported in critical condition to the hospital in Kijow. On 4.16 three unidentified individuals unplugged him from life support system and stabbed him 3 more times. Andrij was pronounced dead that afternoon. Russian government claims it was a coincidence.”

Predictably, CNN’s report reinforces the official explanation and ignores everything unusual, like the shots heard in the video above.

“When I found the first piece of fuselage, I was shocked. It was flimsy, the thin metal easily twisted back on itself.”

“If you look down this bank, you begin to see all these bits of broken wood from the trees where the plane is beginning to hit as its coming down.”

“Looking up at the top, you can really see how the plane cut into them [the trees]. What investigators are going to focus on are the black box recorders. They say they’re still looking at the possibility of human error, the possibility of bad weather, . . . when the crash happened 24 hours ago there was thick fog, and they’re also saying there’s a possibility that it could have been mechanical error, so they’re not ruling out any of those things right now. The bodies have been removed from the site here. Most of them already taken to Moscow for identification. ”

Talk about framing the debate.

40,000,000 Americans Receiving Food Stamp Assistance

The latest food stamp data for January of 2010 shows that 39,430,724 Americans are receiving food stamps or are part of the supplemental nutritional assistance program (SNAP). If you make the acronym and name long enough and with a neutral undertone average Americans won’t fret that 40 million of their fellow neighbors are one government debit card away from being unable to eat. Yet this is the new corporate funded recovery and somehow things don’t seem to be improving for the middle class and definitely not for those at the lower rung of the socio-economic ladder. In fact, we may have more than 40 million on food assistance today. Since the start of the recession in December of 2007, we’ve added on average 474,000 people each month to SNAP. Since the data lags a bit and we only have January 2010 data, it is likely we now have between 40 million and 41 million Americans on food assistance.

There is little to doubt where the trend is heading. (Read more from mybudget360.com)

Why work when I can get £42,000 in benefits a year AND drive a Mercedes?

The Davey family’s £815-a-week state handouts pay for a four-bedroom home, top-of-the-range mod cons and two vehicles including a Mercedes people carrier.

Father-of-seven Peter gave up work because he could make more living on benefits.

Yet he and his wife Claire are still not happy with their lot.

Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1265508/Peter-Davey-gets-42-000-benefits-year-drives-Mercedes.html#ixzz0lUIzQiwn

. . . .

‘It’s really hard,’ said Mrs Davey, 29, who is seven months pregnant. ‘We can’t afford holidays and I don’t want my kids living on a council estate and struggling like I have.

‘The price of living is going up but benefits are going down. My carer’s allowance is only going up by 80p this year and petrol is so expensive now, I’m worried how we’ll cope.
How it adds up.jpg

‘We’re still waiting for somewhere bigger.’

Mrs Davey has never had a full-time job while her 35-year-old husband gave up his post in administration nine years ago after realising they would be better off living off the state.

At their semi on the Isle of Anglesey, the family have a 42in flatscreen television in the living room with Sky TV at £50 a month, a Wii games console, three Nintendo DS machines and a computer – not to mention four mobile phones.

With their income of more than £42,000 a year, they run an 11-seater minibus and the seven-seat automatic Mercedes. (Read more from dailymail.co.uk)

The Beholden State. How public-sector unions broke California

The camera focuses on an official of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), California’s largest public-employee union, sitting in a legislative chamber and speaking into a microphone. “We helped to get you into office, and we got a good memory,” she says matter-of-factly to the elected officials outside the shot. “Come November, if you don’t back our program, we’ll get you out of office.”

The video has become a sensation among California taxpayer groups for its vivid depiction of the audacious power that public-sector unions wield in their state. The unions’ political triumphs have molded a California in which government workers thrive at the expense of a struggling private sector. The state’s public school teachers are the highest-paid in the nation. Its prison guards can easily earn six-figure salaries. State workers routinely retire at 55 with pensions higher than their base pay for most of their working life. Meanwhile, what was once the most prosperous state now suffers from an unemployment rate far steeper than the nation’s and a flood of firms and jobs escaping high taxes and stifling regulations. This toxic combination—high public-sector employee costs and sagging economic fortunes—has produced recurring budget crises in Sacramento and in virtually every municipality in the state.

How public employees became members of the elite class in a declining California offers a cautionary tale to the rest of the country, where the same process is happening in slower motion. 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. 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.

California’s government workers took longer than many of their counterparts to win the right to bargain collectively. New York City mayor Robert Wagner started a national movement back in the late 1950s when he granted negotiating rights to government unions, hoping to enlist them as allies against the city’s Tammany Hall machine. The movement intensified in the early sixties, after President John F. Kennedy conferred the right to bargain on federal workers. In California, a more politically conservative environment at the time, public employees remained without negotiating power through most of the sixties, though they could join labor associations. In 1968, however, the state legislature passed the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act, extending bargaining rights to local government workers. Teachers and other state employees won the same rights in the seventies. (Read more from city-journal.org)