Reported in the Examiner, Philadelphia:
Firefighter Union to City: Liar, liar, pants on… you get it already.
Exactly a week ago, it was written here how a fire in West Philadelphia killed a 12 year old boy. Much blame was put on the fact that Philly’s Democrat Mayor Michael Nutter recently made Fire Department cutbacks, or “brownouts” to punish us all for not going along with this stupid soda tax idea.
Please bear with me, before I begin this story a little back story is necessary. Apparently Philadelphia is our future and we need to see where the present proposed Marxist policies will lead us, if we allow them to be adopted.
First you need to know what the DROP program is as it seems to be the root cause of the problem.
The Committee of Seventy continues to do our job for us with a succinct explanation of the city’s embattled Deferred Retirement Option Plan (DROP). Simply put, DROP is a way for city workers to both collect salary and accumulate pension money over the last four years of their employment. DROP was originally introduced as a revenue neutral management tool, and largely flew under the radar until last week when Mayor Nutter announced that revenue neutral really means it costs $22 million a year.
What is DROP anyway?
It’s a program that was designed to keep experienced employees on the job a few extra years to train their replacements. City Council created it in 1999, worried that police and firefighters from the Baby Boom generation would retire all of a sudden with nobody to take their places.
How does it work?
An employee promises to retire but stays on the job for as long as four years. The employee keeps getting a regular salary, but gets a pension payment too. The city puts the pension payment in an account that earns 4.5 percent interest. When the employee finally retires for real, he or she gets that pension money in one big lump. Most of that is money the employee would have gotten from a normal retirement anyway, but there is that extra from the interest as well. And remember that the employee has been getting a regular salary all that time too.
This charming, innocent program which (for a few examples) is playing out like this:
Several dozen senior government workers, including the Council President who will get $584,777 from DROP at the end of 2012 whether she retires for real or runs for a new term. Besides the Council leadership, several other council members are in DROP. The Register of Wills is enrolled in DROP, as is the Sheriff, who says he will retire soon and collect his $331,744 DROP payment. The Former Mayor enrolled in the program before he left office too. (his payout was $400,000)
The really obscene part about it comes from two elected officials who already collected big DROP payouts: the Councilwoman who took home $288,136, and the City Commissioner who reeled in $308,625 on retirement. Wait, aren’t they still working? Right, they retired for a day, took the cash, and returned to office. A handful of other “high-value” non-elected employees were allowed to do the same thing. It got so bad that the state of Pennsylvania, which is about the opposite of a paragon for good government, had to step in and tell the city to quit allowing politicians to sign up– but not before six additional Council members got their names in the hat.
All of these payouts have left a $258 Million deficit since 1999. So, what’s a mayor to do? Why first, propose a tax. Mayor Nutter dutifully did this with his plan to add a tax on all sweetened beverages including soda, energy drinks, ice tea, even chocolate milk. The tax rate would be 2 cents per ounce, 40 cents on a 20-ounce bottle of soda. The levy would cover fountain-drink syrups and powders (they want to tax Kool-aid by the ounce?) based on the number of liquid ounces they produce. Diet drinks without added sugar and baby formula would be excluded. Of course the proposal was crouched in the “Healthy Philadelphia Initiative” costume to make it more palatable. It’s for the chil’run you see.
Well the ungrateful citizens of Philadelphia balked and then the fun began.
A drink tax was briefly considered by the House Ways and Means Committee as a way to pay for a health-care overhaul last year. The mammoth soft-drink lobby, led by the American Beverage Association, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo, helped quash the idea, boosting their spending on lobbying from $4.7 million in 2008 to $40.4 million in 2009, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The local campaign against the Philadelphia proposal surfaced yesterday with an alliance between the Pennsylvania Beverage Association and the Teamsters.
The Unions and the Lobbyists teamed up and started playing dirty (yes, I said money, honey).
Mayor Nutter, unsuccessfully, proposed the soda tax again this year. When this effort failed. Mayor Nutter had to try Plan-B, which as we all know by now is to lay off Firefighters since they are the ones who really cause all the deficits. Right?
Firefighter Union to City: Liar, liar, pants on… you get it already.
Exactly a week ago, it was written here how a fire in West Philadelphia killed a 12 year old boy. Much blame was put on the fact that Philly’s Democrat Mayor Michael Nutter recently made Fire Department cutbacks, or “brownouts” to punish us all for not going along with this stupid soda tax idea.
The firefighters were laid off and a fire broke out and a 12 year old autistic boy died and the Mayor blamed the soda tax!
The point is that Mayor Nutter has this City wrapped around his finger, ready to do his bidding when he brings back the soda tax idea in a few weeks. If a 12 year old Autistic kid’s life means nothing in his Socialist game: what will he do when he doesn’t get his way, next time?
But the Firefighter’s union isn’t willing to roll over and take the blame for a child dying when they are risking their lives on a daily basis and doing their job despite all the obstacles placed in their path and the overtime sacrifices that the Mayor’s plan B causes them. They claim they responded to the fire and arrived within three minutes of the alarm.
Firefighters are heroes, honorable men.
Ergo: “At any rate, the Fire Department’s union came out over the weekend and stated that the report that the Nutter Administration fed to the hungry and sycophantic media here in Philadelphia was a lie. Surprise, surprise. Nutter’s “ingenious” plan to save a few bucks and get everyone to feel bad about thinking taxing soda was a bad idea is coming back to bite him in the rear end and is now pitting him versus Unions.
Never mind the fact that Unions support this City’s idiotic DROP program or that Unions are generally violent people who would rather bleed the City’s funding dry than let the City flourish by not spending any more money – but here’s the rub: The Union is telling the truth, sorta, in this instance.
This kind of reminds me of WWF Summerslam 1992. One of the opening matches from the mid-summer wrestling classic, that year live via satellite from Wembley Stadium in London, pitted two heels (wrestling jargon for “bad guys”) against one another: Shawn Michaels and Rick Martel. Basically, the great thing about the match was that nobody cared who won and everyone just wanted to see the two beat the hell out of each other. Oh, and they were fighting over the “managerial services” of Sensational Sherri.
Well, Nutter is Michaels, The Union is Rick Martel and public opinion is Sensational Sherri, supposedly.
So, Philadelphia’s government operations become a parallel to a WWF smackdown match and the city plunges into debt without a solution in sight. The union firefighters are heroes, but their union bosses and especially, the indoctrinated and instructed bosses’ bosses know just what destruction they are causing — and why.
The schemes of Alinsky and Cloward-Piven: the destruction of free America, by a delayed and welled-up to overwhelming cataclysm of the expenses of government programs, in any and all phases possible, by any means feasible, all to feed pervasive unrest, hopelessness, and dependency — The Marxist Revolt — coming soon, to a city near you!
And as for the rumblings — we ain’t seen nothin’, yet.
Janet Smiles, a contributor to Gulag Bound, is an advocate of Internet and person-to-person activism, to overcome the false taboos of “avoiding faith and politics” with well-behaved and vital communication, for the sake of love for our neighbors. She welcomes comments directed to mamacooks50@gmail.com.
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