Anti-Trump Hysteria Plagues Our Schools

November 24, 2016 By Larry Sand 6 Comments

Worse than anything Donald Trump ever said, the backlash to his election has been horrifying. While the hysteria and teddy-bear-clutching over the election of a Republican president is nothing new – remember “Bushitler?” in which some on the left equated W to Der Führer – the present-day Trumphobes are second to none.

trump-protestIn Los Angeles, the teachers union, stressing the “politics of fear, racism and misogyny,” supported students who skipped school on November 14th to protest the election. “As educators, as people spending every day with students and caring about each student’s future, we believe we have a sacred role in times like these….” the union said in a statement.

Sacred?!

And if you care so much about the students’ future, please don’t encourage them skip school for a useless protest. Late afternoon and weekend venting would be just as effective.

Then there is San Francisco, where the teachers union has issued a “Lesson Plan on the 2016 Election,” a guide for teachers that is truly deplorable. The United Educators of San Francisco document issues the following advice to teachers when talking to their students about the election: “DO NOT: Tell them that we have LOST and that we have to accept this. We do not have to accept ANYTHING except that we must and will fight for justice against an unjust system and against unjust people.” (Emphasis in original.)

Well sorry, but assuming Clinton was your choice, you did lose and you do have to accept it. But the denial here is just the tip of the iceberg. Regarding students, the plan advises:

I know that they might curse and swear, but you would too if you have suffered under the constructs of white supremacy or experienced sexism, or any isms or lack of privilege. You would especially do so if you have not yet developed all of the tools necessary to fight this oppression.  It is our job to help them develop these tools, i.e. the language etc., Let’s not penalize and punish our youth for how they express themselves at this stage.) (Hate mongering people see this as an invitation to use profanity, keep your hate to yourselves, our students are not hateful.)

The rest of this repulsive lesson plan continues in this vein and should be read in its entirety to fully appreciate its blatant intention to indoctrinate. While teachers are free to accept or reject the lesson plan, the fact that some will use any or all of it is truly alarming.

Sadly, there is so much more bad news to report:

  • California: A “Holocaust scholar” compared Trump to Hitler in an attempt to show his high school students “that the 2016 election is a reflection of the past.” (As I said, when a Republican is elected….) Interestingly, the teacher has been put on paid leave, but not to worry, his union-protected job is safe and his suspension won’t cost him a penny.)
  • Texas: Under the watchful eye of a teacher, two 10th grade students staged a skit featuring “The Assassination of Donald Trump.” Parents were outraged by the performance in which one of the boys made a gunfire sound effect with his cellphone as the other boy, portraying Trump, fell to the ground in mock death. The teacher and his students were “reprimanded.” (When a second grader nibbled a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun in Maryland a couple of years ago, he was suspended for two days. Maybe had he chewed a second Pop Tart into a replica of Newt Gingrich, and pointed the “gun” at it, he too could have gotten away with a reprimand.)
  • Alabama: An 8th grader was paddled by the assistant principal for writing “Trump” on the blackboard, allegedly because the time for discussing the election had passed. However I can’t help but think that if the student had written F— Trump on the blackboard, he may have gotten a high five instead of a beating.
  • Maryland: A bunch of anti-Trump students severely beat up a classmate who had the temerity to sport a “Make America Great Again” cap. The frenzied and ironically-challenged perpetrators were ditching school and carrying signs reading, “Love Trumps Hate.” I guess peace and love just ain’t what it used to be.

We owe it to our young people to tell them that the election is a done deal and all the acting out, whining, marching and screaming, “He’s not my president!” won’t change a damn thing. While kids often do silly things, the scary part is that, in this case, they have support from many teachers and their unions. They, along with a compliant media, are fanning unnecessary flames and ratcheting up the indoctrination of our kids. As Rick Hess and Chester Finn wrote in “Stop Teaching Anti-Trump Bias,” a must-read piece in U.S. News & World Report, the election could have been a “teachable moment.” Teachers could have educated their students about how the Electoral College works or the great tradition our country has for a peaceful transfer of power. They could have suggested that their students follow the advice of President Obama, who said that we should give Trump a chance. But sadly, all too often, none of this is happening.

In fact, notorious America-hater and author of “A People’s History of the United States” Howard Zinn’s philosophy often reigns supreme in our classrooms: “Objectivity is impossible and it is also undesirable.” Zinn felt that the teaching of history “should serve society in some way.” As a Marxist, he’d prefer a society that resembles Stalin’s Russia. That his book is assigned reading in many colleges and high schools is a red flag – in both senses of the term.

With Thanksgiving right around the corner, I wish we could all take a deep breath and celebrate our commonality and put aside the acrimony… oh, at least until next week. But the National Education Association has other ideas. While unrelated to the recent election, the following does point out the true radical agenda of the teachers unions. The NEA devotes a page on its website to educators across the country who want to embrace “the truth and teach the real story of Thanksgiving.” You thought the Pilgrims and Indians happily broke bread together? Wrong! According to NEA, the Pilgrims were a bunch of murderous, disease-spreading thugs who treated the “indigenous people not as human beings like themselves, but rather as inferior beings and ‘spawns of the devil.’”

Just remember that as you stuff your face with turkey, Paleface!

The unions and the media constantly browbeat us into thinking that there has been an epidemic of hate crimes, all of which have come to pass because of Trump’s nomination and subsequent victory. What they don’t comprehend is that their vicious anti-Trump propaganda is so much more devastating than any isolated bullying due to anything Trump has ever said or done.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I am no fan of Donald Trump. In fact, of the 17 Republican candidates, he was my 18th choice. That said, the people have spoken. Now grow up and deal with it.

Previously published at Union Watch.

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California’s Economically Illiterate Legislature

April 7, 2016 By Ed Ring 4 Comments

Minimum Wage chartCalifornia’s minimum wage is set to rise to $15/hour over the next six years. While this topic has been beat to death, it is seldom pointed out that the inflation-adjusted minimum wage, based on 78 years of precedent, at most should only be around $10 per hour. A recent UnionWatch post “Raise the Minimum Wage, or Lower the Cost of Living?” proved this using CPI data. As can be seen, only once, in 1968, did the minimum wage in 2015 dollars exceed $10/hour.

A lot of things have happened since 1968, of course. To name just two, the earned income tax credit didn’t arrive until 1975, and the Affordable Care Act, offering health insurance to low-income participants at give-away rates, didn’t arrive until 2010. Needless to say these programs make it easier to survive on minimum wage.

The point of this isn’t to suggest workers shouldn’t earn more money, or to argue about whether or not we should have a minimum wage. The point is that the minimum wage, at $15 an hour, has no historical justification. And because of this, the unintended consequences are more severe. Like never before, this minimum wage increase will kill small businesses and it will kill entry level jobs.

There’s another point missing from the debate over the minimum wage. It is an indictment of the members of California’s state Legislature, because collectively, they have a simplistic, ideologically driven view of economics that is divorced from reality. Their naive enthusiasm is harming the working families they claim they want to protect. California’s legislators, nearly all of them coerced and controlled by government unions and seduced by extreme environmentalists, have enacted policies that deny upward mobility to working people.

These policies only begin with an excessive minimum wage hike that is going to reward large corporate franchises and drive small emerging companies out of business. They extend to the unaffordable cost of housing, caused by misguided “urban containment” policies in what is one of the most spacious developed regions on earth. They extend to the high cost of electricity and natural gas, elevated by policies inspired by a futile wish to set an example to the rest of the world – regardless of their regressive impact. They extend to a pension system built by an alliance of government unions and powerful financial interests that guarantees retirement benefits to government employees that are literally five to ten times more generous than Social Security, paid for by taxpayers, teetering on the abyss of insolvency. The list goes on.

Legislator business experienceHere’s part of the reason why: California’s legislators do not have experience running a business. Most of them have never worked in the private sector. A 2014 UnionWatch post “How Labor Money Undermines the Financial Literacy of California’s Legislators” documents, based on biographical analysis, the level of business experience in California’s 2014 state legislature. In all, 56 percent of them have NO experience in business – having spent their entire careers in government or nonprofits. Of the majority democrats, 76 percent of them have NO experience in business. The 2016 class of legislators is unlikely to be any different.

Understanding that you can’t raise the minimum wage without killing entry level jobs is a basic economic concept. So is the fact that if you make it nearly impossible to develop land or energy, prices will rise for those commodities. And it isn’t much of a leap to realize that when you do this, you are hurting the most vulnerable members of society.

More sinister, and perhaps harder to grasp, upper division stuff, is the fact that every time you add a regulation, you further empower the monopolistic corporate special interests who are supposedly the bad guys you’re fighting. Every time you lower interest rates to stimulate spending, you invite people of limited means to go further into debt, and you decimate the savings accounts of people unwilling or unable to gamble their modest fortunes in a volatile stock market. And every time you raise pay and pension benefits for government workers, you create deficits, pouring additional billions into the pockets of bond underwriters, and you redirect the money into the hands of the pension funds and their investment bankers.

And at the graduate level, in that rarefied space where sound-bites (that perform so well in Sacramento) just echo meaninglessly in the vast alpine air, consider this:  The impact of artificially elevating the cost of living creates an asset economy, so pension funds and rich people alike can ride the bubble for one more year, while ordinary folks endure servitude to their $700,000 mortgages. It doesn’t take an economist, however, to know this can’t last. It just takes horse sense. That too, appears to be in short supply in Sacramento.

Could it be that if California’s Legislature were committed to lowering the cost-of-living via policies that encouraged competitive development of natural resources including land and energy, maybe they wouldn’t have to bestow such lavish benefits on government workers, nor the crumbs of minimum wage increases to private workers?

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Ed Ring is the president of the California Policy Center.

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10 Government Union Myths and the Moral Implications

October 15, 2015 By Ed Ring 1 Comment

union-protest-washington-132Often missing from entirely legitimate criticism of government unions is an accompanying explanation of the moral values that underlie the criticism. Last month we published a post entitled “Deceptive and Misleading Claims – How Government Unions Fool the Public,” which listed 10 myths that government unions use repeatedly in their propaganda campaigns. Missing in that post, and added here, are the moral values that underlie the need to expose each of these myths.

TEN GOVERNMENT UNION MYTHS AND THE MORAL ARGUMENTS AGAINST THEM

Myth #1:  Government unions are protecting the middle class.

Reality:  Government unions are protecting government workers at the expense of the private sector middle class. The agenda of government unions is more wages and benefits for government workers, and more hiring of government workers. To adhere to this agenda, failure of government programs still constitutes success for these unions. More laws, more regulations, and more government programs equates to more unionized government workers, regardless of the cost, benefit, or need for these programs. The primary agenda of unionized government has nothing to do with the welfare of the private sector middle class, whose taxes pay for it.

Moral value:  The dignity and security of ALL workers is important, not just government workers.

Myth #2:  Government unions are a necessary political counterweight to “Wall Street,” big business, and billionaires.

Reality:  When government is expanded to serve the interests of government unions, the elite and privileged special interests are relatively unaffected, and often benefit. Large corporations can afford to comply with excessive regulations that drive their emerging competitors out of business. When governments borrow to finance deficits created by an over-built unionized government, bond underwriters profit from the fees. Government pension funds are among the biggest players on Wall Street, aggressively investing hundreds of billions each year to secure their 7.0% (or more) per year returns. Billionaires can afford to pay taxes and fees – it’s the middle class taxpayer who can be overwhelmed by them. When powerful special interests want favorable legislation passed in California, they go to the government unions and make a deal. Government unions are the brokers and enablers of special interest cronyism. They are allies, not counterweights.

Moral value:  As government contractors and as representatives of public servants, financial special interests and their government union partners should care about ALL citizens, not just themselves.

Myth #3:  Government unions represent and protect the American worker and the labor movement.

Reality:  For better or worse, government unions represent and protect government workers. Government unions and private sector unions have very little in common. Unlike private unions, government unions elect their own bosses, and their agencies are funded by compulsory taxes, not through profits earned by creating products and services that are voluntarily purchased in a competitive market. Moreover, government union members operate the machinery of government, giving them the ability to harass their political opponents under cover of authority. Private sector unions – properly regulated – have a legitimate role to play in American society. Government unions, on the other hand, exist to serve the interests of government workers, not the ordinary American citizen.

Moral value:  Democratic government represents and serves ALL Americans, not just government workers.

Myth #4:  Public employees are underpaid.

Reality: In past decades, prior to the unionization of government, a public worker exchanged lower base pay for better retirement benefits and more job security. But today, not only have retirement benefits been greatly increased from what was normal back in the 1980’s and 1990’s, but in most cases the base pay of government workers exceeds the base pay for private sector workers performing jobs requiring similar skills. A 2015 study by State Budget Solutions estimated the total compensation of California’s government workers to exceed private sector workers by 31%. But these studies typically omit lower paid independent contractors who now constitute one in three workers. A California Policy Center study that examined 2012 data showed the average pay and benefits for California’s city workers was $124,058, county workers $102,312, and state workers $100,668. And this study did not take into account the value of additional paid vacation benefits, extra paid holidays, and generous “comp time” policies, which add significantly to the total value of annual compensation. Just how much public employee pay exceeds private sector pay for equivalent jobs is the topic of ongoing debate. But they’re not underpaid by any reasonable measure.

Moral value:  Taxpayer funded government benefits – whether they are generous or minimal – should extend to ALL workers according to the same set of formulas and incentives.

Moral value:  Public service should not automatically bestow better pay, more job security, and superior benefits compared to private sector workers.

Myth #5:  The average public sector pension is only $25,000 per year (or some similarly low number).

Reality:  The problem with this profoundly misleading statistic is that this low average is the result of including participants who only worked a few years in state/local government, barely vesting a pension. Should someone who worked less than a decade (or two) in a job expect a pension based on a full career of service? When normalizing for 30 year careers and taking into account the uptick in retirement benefit formulas that rolled through California starting in 1999, the average state/local retiree in California collects a pension and retirement health benefit package worth over $70,000 per year. For a private sector taxpayer to collect this much in retirement, they would have to save at least $1.5 million.

Moral value:  We support modest, financially sustainable retirement security benefits for ALL American workers, not just government workers.

Myth #6:  California’s state/local pension systems are being reformed and will be just fine financially.

Reality: Virtually every official post-reform projection among California’s 80+ public sector pension systems are predicting eventual financial health based on a huge, extremely risky assumption – that the average annual returns of these funds over the next few decades will exceed 7.0% per year. Common sense should tell any unbiased observer that ongoing 7.0% average annual returns are not a safe bet. If they are, why are Treasury Bills only yielding 3.0%? What are mortgage bankers only able to get 3.5% on 30 year fixed mortgages? Why are bank CD’s only offering 2.0%? The spread between equity returns and truly risk-free returns has never been this large for this long. Pension funds are basing future performance projections on past results. The problem is that over the past 30 years, interest rates have been steadily lowered to allow people to borrow more. This borrowing stimulated the economy, creating corporate profits and driving up the price of corporate equities. But interest rates cannot be lowered any further. We are at the end of a long-term credit cycle, and pension funds are just beginning to deal with the consequences.

Moral value:  Government worker retirement funds should be managed cautiously and responsibly, not gambled on Wall Street with taxpayers liable if returns don’t meet unrealistic expectations.

Myth #7:  The teachers unions care about student achievement more than anything else.

Reality: The evidence simply doesn’t support this assertion. Consider the reaction of the California Teachers Association to the recent Vergara decision, in which a Los Angeles superior court judge agreed with student plaintiffs who challenged three union work rules. The CTA criticized the ruling and announced their support for an appeal. What does the Vergara lawsuit aim to accomplish? It would take away the ability for teachers to earn tenure in less than two years. It would end the practice of favoring seniority over merit when deciding what teachers to layoff. And it would make it easier to fire incompetent teachers. These are commonsense, bipartisan reforms that the teachers unions oppose.

Moral value:  Good educations for our children matter more than job security for bad teachers.

Myth #8:  Billionaires are trying to hijack California’s public education system.

Reality:  Wealthy individuals come from a diverse background of political orientations. All of them share a desire to rescue California’s next generation of citizens from a union monopoly on education. And unlike the unionized traditional public school, public charter schools and private schools survive based on the choice of parents who want a better education for their children. And if they don’t do a great job, the parents can withdraw their children from the failing charter or private school. Introducing competition to California’s unionized K-12 education system is a healthy, hopeful trend that gathers support from concerned citizens of all incomes, ethnic groups, and political ideologies.

Moral value:  What matters is the character and intentions of philanthropists and investors, not whether their ideology is right-wing or left-wing.

Myth #9:  Proponents of public sector union reform are “anti-government workers.”

Reality: This sort of claim is a distraction from the reality – which is that public sector unions have corrupted the democratic process and have been attempting to inculcate public employees with the “us vs. them” mentality that is the currency of unions. Sadly, the opposite is the truth – government unions alienate the public from their government, and, worse, alienate government employees from the public. They have created two classes of workers, government employees who have superior pay, benefits, job security and retirement security, and everyone else in the private sector. They know perfectly well that this level of worker comfort is economically impossible to extend to everyone. Government unions have undermined the sense of common rules and shared fate between public and private individuals that is a foundation of democracy. Those who oppose government unions recognize this threat. It has nothing to do with their support and respect for the men and women who perform the many difficult and risky jobs that are the role of government.

Moral value:  All American citizens should live according to the SAME government laws, rules, incentives.

Myth #10:  Opponents of government unions are “right wing extremists.”

Reality: The problems caused by government unions should concern everyone, and they do. Conscientious left-wing activists who favor an expanded role for government expect positive results, not failed programs that were created merely to increase union membership. They realize that unionized government is expensive and inefficient, leaving less money or authority to maintain or expand government services. Public libraries and parks with reduced hours and curtailed maintenance. Pitted, congested roads. After school recreation programs without reliable funding. Public schools where students aren’t learning and apathetic teachers are protected from accountability. Government has to be cost-effective, no matter how big or how small. Opponents of government unions can disagree on the optimal size of government, yet passionately agree on the problems caused by a unionized government.

Moral value:  Good government is something EVERYONE believes in, whether they are right-wing or left-wing.

This list of ten myths promulgated by spokespersons for government unions only begins to chronicle their many deceptions. But each of these myths offer strategic value to these unions – giving them the ability to put reformers on the defensive, change the topic of discussion, redefine the terms of the debate. Each of them has powerful emotional resonance, and each of them – along with many others – is continuously reinforced by a network of professional communicators backed by literally billions in dues revenue. But they are myths, not facts, and equally if not more important, they rely on premises of questionable moral worth.

Although intellectual integrity and emotional resonance are important and necessary elements of any effective argument critical of government unions, it is the moral worth of those arguments that matters above all. When you consider these myths – which is a charitable way to describe these distortions, deceptions, and misleading claims – in the context of the moral arguments that impel critics to refute them, what emerges is a new and decisive approach to countering union propaganda. Because government unions are destroying our democracy, our freedom and our prosperity, merely to enrich themselves. The moral high ground belongs to their critics, not to the government unions.

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Ed Ring is the executive director of the California Policy Center.

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California’s Government Unions Collect $1 Billion Per Year

May 21, 2015 By CPR Editors Leave a Comment

PileOfMoney“If you say there is an elephant in the room, you mean that there is an obvious problem or difficult situation that people do not want to talk about.”

–  Cambridge Dictionaries Online

If you study California’s Legislature, it doesn’t take long to learn there’s an elephant in both chambers, bigger and badder than every other beast. And considering the immense size of that elephant, and the power it wields, it doesn’t get talked about much.

Because that gigantic elephant is public employee unions, and politicians willing to confront them, categorically, in every facet of their monstrous power and reach, are almost nonexistent.

Government reformers and transparency advocates are fond of attacking “money in politics.” They attack “soft money” and “dark money.” Most of the time, these reformers are on the so-called political left, concerned that “rich billionaires” and “out-of-state corporations” have too much political influence. They are misguided and manipulated in this sentiment. Because billionaires contribute to both major political parties (and both political wings) roughly equally, and the largest corporations – in state and out of state – play ball with the government unions because, as monopolies or aspiring monopolies, large corporations and government unions have an identity of interests that far outweighs any motive for conflict. At the state and local level in California, there is no amount of money, anywhere, that comes close to the sums that are deployed by government unions to control our government.

Thanks to a lack of transparency so thick that public corporations, and even private sector unions, are required to submit far more publicly available reports on their operations than public sector unions, it is almost impossible to estimate how many government union members there are in California. From the U.S. Census we know that California’s “full-time equivalent” state workforce numbers 397,348, for local governments, 1,313,344, meaning there are – on a full time basis – about 1.7 million state and local workers in California. But how many of them pay dues? And what is their total statewide revenue?

If you turn to the 990 forms that government unions file with the IRS, you’ll note that the California Teachers Association’s 990 reported “dues revenue” of $172.3 million in 2012. You’ll also know they were sitting on $100 million in cash and securities, net of all long and short term liabilities and not including their fixed assets and real estate. But that’s just the financials for the CTA’s state office. If you search for “California Teachers Association” on Guidestar, here’s the message you get on the results screen: “Your search for California Teachers Association produced 1,083 results.”

As we noted in a 2012 CPC study entitled “Understanding the Financial Disclosure Requirements of Public Sector Unions:”

Most of the statewide unions, such as the CTA, the CSEA, the CFT and the CPF, collect revenue from members through their local affiliates, which themselves retain most of the money for local collective bargaining and political expenditures. There are over 1,300 CTA local affiliates, 20 (public sector) SEIU local affiliates, 42 AFSME local affiliates, 45 AFT local affiliates, several hundred CSEA (School Employees) local affiliates, and hundreds of CPF (Firefighter) local affiliates. Then there are federations of various unions, such as the California State Employees Association and the Peace Officers Research Association of California, which also collect revenue from members through local affiliates.

There are over 6,000 local government union organizations in California, each of them an independent financial entity, each of them merely required to file a minimal 990 form that barely, and with a maddening lack of clarity, discloses financial transfers between entities. Against this opacity, there is no precise way to learn just how much money California’s public sector unions collect every year, no way to determine how many members they’ve got, no way to determine their annual dues assessments.

An article published nearly five years ago on UnionWatch, “Public Sector Unions and Political Spending,” estimates the total annual dues revenue of California’s public sector unions at $1 billion per year. While the number of state and local government workers has actually declined slightly since 2010, the percentage of unionized state and local government workers has increased, as has their average pay upon which dues are calculated. That estimate, $1 billion per year, is probably still accurate.

Behind closed doors and off the record, Democrats resent government union power with increasing intensity. But apart from an isolated whisper here, a passing utterance there, they are silent. Just like their Republican colleagues who grasp for their own pathetically minute share of government union contributions, they fear the wrath of the elephant in the room at the same time as they keep taking the money.

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Ed Ring is the executive director of the California Policy Center.

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