MILWAUKEE – The sky is falling. Hell’s freezing over.

Well, almost. The Milwaukee school board has decided to invoke Act 10 and cut labor costs, without permission from its large and influential teachers union.

Welcome to the real world of school finance, Milwaukee.

If you recall, Milwaukee was one of those districts that couldn’t accept the benefits of Act 10 this year.

That’s because the school board, despite its financial problems, retroactively entered into a four-year collective bargaining agreement with its teachers union, complete with salary increases, in 2010.

Apparently someone in Milwaukee woke up in recent months. The district announced last week that the school board took “bold action” Nov. 17 by approving a three-year wage freeze for all employees, which will be applicable as soon as current collective bargaining agreements expire.

The teachers contract expires in June 2013, while pacts with the district’s other unions expire next year.

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Media Trackers discovered that over 20 individuals voted, some illegally, from one of Senator Lena Taylor’s (D-Milwaukee) properties during the April 5, 2011 spring election. According to a Media Trackers open records request with the City of Milwaukee Election Commission, the property at 1018 N 35th St. in Milwaukee currently has 36 active voter registrations and at least 23 individuals voted using the address.

Media Trackers was tipped off to Senator Taylor’s property by the Wisconsin GrandSons of Liberty, who found 11 individuals that registered on election day to vote from Taylor’s property, 7 of which were corroborated by Senator Taylor’s mother, Lena J Taylor.

“Using open records requests, we obtained copies of the 11,017 Milwaukee County Election Day Registrations and created a database to analyze the entries from all 19 municipalities in the county,” said Tim Dake of the Wisconsin GrandSons of Liberty. Dake explained further that “our volunteers ran numerous queries on the data and were surprised to see the name Lena Taylor appear on so many forms.”

The Property

According to property records obtained from the Milwaukee Department of Neighborhood Services, Senator Lena C. Taylor owns the property at 1018 N. 35th St. in Milwaukee. The property has 6 units and is zoned by the Milwaukee Zoning Code as RT3. According to the City of Milwaukee Zoning Code, properties zoned RT3 are intended to “promote, preserve and protect neighborhoods intended primarily for two-family dwellings.”

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When the leftist educator Bob Peterson, president of the Milwaukee teachers union, addressed his “comrades” at the Save our Schools conference in July, he couldn’t contain his emotions.  He openly shed tears over the fact that Madison teachers walked away from their jobs during the February protests, leaving their students behind.  According to footage obtained exclusively by EAGtv.com, Peterson told attendees:

“When things came down in Wisconsin – the Madison teachers…I’m getting emotional…the Madison teachers (Bob drinks water)…went out four days straight.  It’s illegal to strike in Wisconsin.  It’s illegal to strike.  It wasn’t a strike.  They called in absent.  They exercised their political – their right to free speech.  They weren’t striking against their employer.  They were striking, really, against state power.  They inspired the rest of us.  The school I’m at – the first day, 87% of us teachers at Fratney [Elementary School] called in sick and went to Madison.  We couldn’t shut down.  We had a phone bank at Rethinking Schools the previous night trying to call enough teachers in Milwaukee to close down, we didn’t succeed.  Our principal, though, said ‘go to it.  If I have to have 400 kids in the gym, I’ll take care of it for you.’” (applause)

Peterson told his audience that a school administrator participated in a union plot to abuse sick leave policies and close schools.  I stand corrected in my belief that the teachers unions were the only ones ignoring student needs while looking out for the selfish interests of adult employees.  Fratney Principal Rita Tenorio is allegedly guilty, too.

Peterson told the audience that power comes from money and people.  “We don’t have as much money as our enemies, so we have to organize ourselves.”

“We also have to name the enemy.  We have to name it accurately.  In Wisconsin, for instance, there’s a whole section of the ruling class – say, the GE company, the GE foundation – that doesn’t like Walker.  They only support public schools.”

It’s virtually impossible to verify that statement. And who in their right mind thinks in terms of the “ruling class?” Only Marxists think like that.

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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is living in Big Labor’s head – rent free.

The state’s public sector employee unions recently suffered an embarrassing rebuke from voters when four of the six targeted Republican lawmakers survived their recall elections. Big Labor took back two seats, but it was not enough to regain control of the state Senate.

If you thought Big Labor would be chastened by the defeat, think again.

Do you recognize this thug unionist?

The unions are so angry and have become so obsessed with Scott Walker, that a contingency of union thugs followed him to Milwaukee’s Messmer Preparatory Catholic School last Friday where the governor was to read to students and tour the school.

An unidentified union thug tried to prevent the visit from occurring by tampering with the school’s door locks. Media reports indicate that the vandal put super glue and sticks in the locks of eight school doors late Thursday night. Things went downhill from there.

Protestors spent the day on the sidewalk outside the school, chanting and displaying anti-Walker signs, such as “War on Walker, not on workers.” One protestor was even arrested on battery charges.

The protests got so raucous that at least one parent said that she felt unsafe entering the school with her child.

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While the world mainstream media is focused on the unrest that has plagued Great Britain, they are delinquent in reporting on societal unrest elsewhere in the Western world. In Chile, tens of thousands of students staged violent protests, demanding changes in government-funded public education. In Philadelphia, a rash of “flash mob” incidents has forced that city’s mayor to impose curfews for teenagers in several neighborhoods. And in Milwaukee, authorities are investigating a string of mob-like actions involving large groups of predominantly black teenagers near the Wisconsin State Fair, leading one City Alderman to attributing the violence as a sign of “deteriorating African American culture in our city.”

In all of these instances – from London to Milwaukee, Santiago to Philadelphia, one common factor exists: Young people, who have been endowed with a falsely elevated sense of self-esteem, are narcissistically demanding more from a grossly over-extended government entitlement system instituted by Progressives to create a dependent populace. Why would anyone want to create such an unstable and dangerous societal atmosphere? Power.

In its detailed examination of Progressivism, DiscoverTheNetworks.org, states:

“In the progressive worldview, the proper role of government was not to confine itself to regulating a limited range of human activities as the Founders had stipulated, but rather to inject itself into whatever realms the times seemed to demand. The progressives reasoned that although America’s Founders had felt it necessary to limit the power of government because of their experience with King George III, government, as a result of historical evolution, was no longer the menace it once had been; rather, they believed government had become capable of solving an ever-greater array of societal problems — problems the Founders could never have envisioned. Consequently, the progressives called for a more activist government whose regulation of people’s lives was properly determined not by the outdated words of an anachronistic Constitution, but by whatever the American people seemed to need at any given time…

“As its name indicates, progressivism suggests movement toward a goal – in this case, bigger government and increased state control. But it is a gradual, incremental movement rather than a sudden transformation. Progressives endorse evolution (rather than revolution), a process by which society drifts gradually but inexorably toward statism.

“To facilitate this evolution, progressives have sought, ever since their entry into the pages of American history, to infiltrate society’s power structure and its key institutions – the schools, the media, the churches, the entertainment industry, the labor unions, and the three branches of government…”

We can see the intervening hand of Progressivism at the root cause of the civil unrest in Britain, Chile and the United States.

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I was seeing red this morning when I read this first-person account of 3^rd grade socialist indoctrination in Millwaukee Public Schools.

It came from Dale Weiss, an MPS teacher and devoted radical.

“The process of addressing budget cuts with my students taught me an incredible amount,” Weiss recently wrote. “I learned that laying a social justice foundation for young students is a complex process. I learned when issues are addressed, they need to be revisited many, many times.”

“Social justice foundation?”  Oh wait, dear readers, the giddy and proud Ms. Weiss explains how she set the 8- and 9-year olds up for a fall:

“Several weeks later, right as the bell was about to ring at the end of the school day, I casually mentioned to my students that I wanted to learn more about doing art with children since Ms. Sue [the art teacher] would not be with us next year. The students clearly were taken off guard:

“But I thought if we wrote letters to the school board there would be more money for MPS and we could keep Ms. Sue.

“Michael and Dakota read their letters at that meeting, and they asked for more money for our school. I really thought we would get more money. But now I don’t think it happened.

“Looking at the disappointment on their faces, I realized I had unintentionally led my students to conclude that if we believed something to be unfair and took action, the unfair situation would turn into a fair one. I remembered saying over and over: ‘There is always something you can do to try to turn the unfair situation into a fair one.’

Yet my students heard something quite different. In their hope and optimism as 8- and 9-year-old children, they knew that their actions would bring about a miracle. My heart sank; I felt I had let my students down.”

To Ms. Weiss and other unionists, the students are little more than political pawns in their game.  They’re setting them up to do their dirty lobbying work.

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The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is the latest school doing everything they can to shut down and silence any conservative voice on campus. I am an alumnus of this school who luckily had great teachers while acquiring a major in film studies (of all things). Unfortunately, there was nothing but horror stories from my friends taking courses in communication (some of which I took) and sociology. Even worse was trying to find anyone who would refer to anything conservative as something other than “controversial.” This is a university that prides itself on bringing Martin Luther King to campus decades ago when he was a “controversial” speaker. Today, controversy is anything Right of the leftist mafia on campus.

It took me a while to realize how radical the campus was because my film professors (even the far-Left ones) were willing to have civil discussions about politics, which were always pleasant and welcomed. In fact, most of them would avoid politics altogether because it wasn’t a pivotal part of the coursework in the majority of classes. What opened my eyes was the first time I saw how conservative guest-speakers were treated on campus by the students. I’ve long heard about issues of indoctrination in humanities courses, that’s not what I saw here. Instead, what I witnessed at UWM was bigger than a single academic department.

As with any conservative speaker at most universities there is always an attempt from the Left’s foot soldiers to shout down the guest in an attempt to silence their voice. When I was still a student at UWM, I attended a speech by conservative activist David Horowitz which endured consistent and disrespectful disruptions (not to mention that he was subject to an anti-Semitic cartoon being distributed around campus prior to the event). The atmosphere was even worse when former PLO terrorist Walid Shoebat was invited to speak about the threats of radical Islam. Neither of these speakers are “Right-wingers” by any means, but their voice was not tolerated. Because of threats, both events required security which should not have been necessary.

On April 25th the UWM College Republicans invited Karl Rove to speak at their campus. Able to predict how the Left would try to disrupt the event, the College Republicans found a way to thwart leftist attempts to shout down an invited speaker to campus. They were able to distribute tickets themselves and through local conservative radio host Vicki McKenna. This helped fill the front rows with donors or supporters and also helped for security purposes. The reaction from the democrats and allies in the Student Association (SA) on campus was to attack the College Republicans, fighting to cut their funding.

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When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker curtailed collective bargaining privileges for public sector workers (formerly known as public servants), it resulted in all-out political war in Madison.

Walker won the showdown, and now the state can get its financial house in order.

But that doesn’t mean Walker is done taking on the unions.

One of the governor’s next goals is to improve the state’s public education system by giving more kids access to quality schools. That means expanding Milwaukee’s wildly successful voucher program to even more families. And that means a raucous showdown with the teacher unions.

As part of his budget proposal, Walker wants to lift income restrictions on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program so that families earning up to 325 percent of the federal poverty line would quality for vouchers, the School Reform News reports.

Walker also wants Milwaukee voucher students to have access to all private schools in Milwaukee County, not just those within the city.

The voucher program was established in 1990, and is the oldest program of its kind in the nation.

The reality is vouchers are working in places like Milwaukee and Washington, D.C. because it gives kids a way out — an alternative to the drop out factories known as public schools.

The Milwaukee voucher program has been enormously successful. EAGtv recently visited a school in Milwaukee that takes kids of all races, economic backgrounds and social classes and  prepares them for life. The school, Eastbrook Academy, graduated its first high school class last spring, and reports that each graduate is currently studying in a four-year college program.

Those who value “social justice” should be the biggest supporters of school choice and vouchers. As EAGtv’s Milwaukee story shows, school choice benefits kids by allowing them to attend a school they otherwise couldn’t afford.  It’s “spreading the wealth around,” in the form of quality schooling.

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If you’ve noticed over the last few days, the protests in Madison have gotten smaller. They’ve actually shrunk in size. Despite a visit from Fidel Castro Michael Moore over the weekend, the three-week old protests have just sort of begun to peter out.  Now, there could be a perfectly good explanation for this, or it could just be they’ve decided fighting over the small things isn’t keeping their members energized enough, because on Monday…

The Milwaukee teachers union has dropped a lawsuit seeking to get its taxpayer-funded Viagra back.

The union sued in July 2010 to force the school board to again include the erectile dysfunction drug and similar pills in its health insurance plans.

Wait a minute! You mean you didn’t know that the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association was fighting to save their $786,000 (per year) purple pill-popping habit?

Two years ago [in 2008], the Milwaukee school district decided that it was more interested in enhancing teacher performance in the classroom than the bedroom.
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The fount of business knowledge that is Forbes.com ran a bit dry this weekend when it published a blog by one Rick Ungar in which he made the case that taxpayers don’t actually fund public employee pensions in Wisconsin. Just let that marinate for a moment.

Ungar was attempting to disprove Gov. Scott Walker’s assertion that the state’s pension and health insurance systems for public sector workers are budget-busters that can only be fixed with the budget repair bill and the curtailing of collective bargaining privileges.

(The leading health insurance plan, WEA Trust, for example, is controlled by the state’s largest teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council.  But I digress…)

As his ace in the hole, he cites a blog written by “Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter” David Cay Johnston. A Pulitzer – wow – why even waste my time scrutinizing that one?

Writes Ungar:

“The pension plan is the direct result of deferred compensation – money that employees would have been paid as cash salary but choose, instead, to have placed in the state operated pension fund where the money can be professionally invested (at a lower cost of management) for the future.”

If this is true – that pensions are simply “deferred compensation” – then why do taxpayers only ever hear about “low” teacher salaries, and not the teachers’ total compensation package? Because that wouldn’t fit the unions’ narrative that school employees are eating dog food and living one step above poverty.

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The disturbing protests that are spreading across Europe are setting the table for similar showdowns across America in the coming months and years.  Public employee unions and their socialist allies will take to the streets of Washington, D.C. and state capitals as the federal and state governments finally deal with out of control spending.

It’s largely because, for the longest time, our elected leaders were more interested in courting unions for money and votes than keeping government spending in check.

And some are still putting the problem off – and actually making it worse – by continuing to negotiate multi-year contracts with unions with no real way to pay for them. That’s particularly true in our nation’s public schools.

In Anderson, Indiana, the union-controlled school board recently tried to pull a fast one and actully negotiated an unheard-of 10-year contract with the teachers union.  Community outrage led to court action and the length of the contract was cut to 5 years – still way too long in this economic climate.

More recently, news surfaced that the state could be taking over that district because it could be insolvent within two years.  But who cares?  The union now has a signed contract that carries the weight of law.  The children may not be learning, but at least the adults know somebody has to come up with their pay and benefits!

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Dick Morris has picked up on a theme Education Action Group has been trumpeting for months: public employee union contracts, including school employee contracts, are unsustainable and have several states on the verge of fiscal collapse.

Recently on Fox News, Morris suggested California, Michigan, Illinois, New York, and Connecticut are the top five most likely to default, given the severity of their situation and the unlikelihood of the Feds or bond holders coming to the rescue.

“Education Action Group has been way ahead of the curve on this,” Morris told me.  “EAG has been showing the major spending problems, stemming from outrageous contracts, for quite some time.”

Buffalo Public Schools revealed recently that it spent $9 million last year alone on elective surgery for employees.  Coverage for such an extravagance, by its very nature taking funds away from the education of children, was due to the collective bargaining agreement.

In Milwaukee, the school district pays nearly $24,000 per employee for health insurance because such lavish benefits are demanded by the union. (more…)

Nationwide, government at every level is requiring more and more of the workforce to get its permission just to earn a living.

In the 1950s, only about 5 percent of the workforce needed a government license to do their job. Today, that number is over 30 percent.  And governments impose all kinds of other requirements that make it hard for would-be entrepreneurs to start and grow small businesses.

Entrepreneurs like Chuck, here:

Unemployment in the United States has now topped 9.5 percent for 14 straight months—the longest stretch since the Great Depression.  Nearly 14.8 million people were unemployed last month.

Consider the nation’s capital.

Year after year, Washington, D.C., is ranked the worst place in the United States to start a small business. How can the District change its ways to allow entrepreneurs to create more jobs and opportunity?

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When the Congress passed the Public School Bailout, it was akin to slapping a band-aid on a bleeding head wound.  American public school systems spend somewhere around a half-trillion dollars a year, and another $10 billion is going to make everything alright?  Hardly.

Public schools have a serious spending problem.   When a local teachers union bargains with the school district over a new teacher contract, the new contract typically includes all kinds of hidden expenses.  Collective bargaining agreements typically put school districts on the hook for sick leave pay, cash payouts for unused sick days, release time to conduct union business, and other embedded costs that cause school districts to hemorrhage huge amounts of money.

News coverage of teacher contracts, if there is any, is rarely controversial or in-depth.  It usually covers the general raise every employee receives, as well as the modest increase in health insurance co-pays.  But dig beneath the surface, and a different story emerges.

Education Action Group is dedicated to pointing out the huge spending problems plaguing our schools.  We recently conducted an analysis of nearly 20 teacher contracts in southwest Ohio and uncovered some shocking numbers.  For example, Cincinnati Public Schools spent $7.5 million on sick leave in last year.  How many teacher salaries would that cover?

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From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Organized labor is hatching a plan to use prominent Democratic officials and TV ads to pummel Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker over the O’Donnell Park garage accident to try to keep him from being elected governor.

So says a local union official with loose lips who was secretly recorded yakking away outside an east side bar earlier this month. `

Here’s what he said everyone can expect in the next six weeks:

TV spots will hit Walker for neglecting county facilities; supervisors will continue to call for an independent investigation of O’Donnell Park; Walker’s opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, will push legislation on the subject; and Gov. Jim Doyle’s administration may let state engineers come in to inspect the county facility.

“I’m kind of at the center of a maelstrom right now in terms of kicking Scott Walker’s (expletive),” said John-david Morgan, a lobbyist and spokesman for the Service Employees International Local 1, on Sept. 10 outside the Y-Not II tavern on E. Lyon St. “I’ve been kicking Scott Walker’s (expletive) for two months now. We’ve been on TV; we’ve done all kinds of stuff.”

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When Congress created Labor Day in the late 1800s, it was to placate an increasingly hostile labor movement.  At a time when American workers needed protection from heavy-handed industrial bosses, labor unions made sense.

But with the growing effort by Big Labor to unionize public employees, it’s left its mission of worker protection from dangerous conditions and now has increasingly become a leech on the taxpayers.  Public employees hardly need protection from their employer, the government.

If there’s any segment of society that needs protection from the government it’s taxpayers, not their employees.

Big Labor’s legacy today is that of creating pension systems that are continuing to plunge deeper into the red.  Some reports indicate the collective debt, just of school employee pensions, is around $1 trillion.

Public employee unions have also created scenarios where the health benefits of their members now cost school districts nearly $24,000 in places like Milwaukee.

And they’ve instituted schemes where teachers receive raises for not dying over the summer.  With negotiated “step raises,” increases are based on years of service, not value added to the “company.”

Big Labor is bankrupting government – and we should continue honoring that?

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Other than the Klan, is there a more useless organization in American than the NAACP? Violent crime in black urban communities remains unsettling, the learning gap between black and other students still exists, marriage is all but nonexistent among poor blacks, and all too many households are headed by single mothers.

So where does the NAACP level its attack? Beyond street crime, apart from dysfunctional communities, ignoring the skyrocketing rates of HIV AIDS, they say the real problem for black folks is … the Tea Party movement. Benjamin Jealous, the NAACP’s president, says Tea Party activism is “pushing the country backwards.”

But wait, the problems facing urban black communities pre-date the growth of Tea Party formations by a significant number of years. But facts aside, since the end of the 1980s, the NAACP has been completely unable to craft an authentic agenda dealing with the real issues facing black communities.

So what’s a stuffy, out-of-step civil rights group to do? It throws down the victim card and places blame for its organizational failures in odd places.

Last time I checked, most Tea Party formations are organized around issues like limited government, maximum individual liberty, free markets and fiscal responsibility. Issues of race have not been a featured part of any Tea party gathering in any place that I’ve been aware of.

But, facts to liberals are like kryptonite to Superman. And neither facts nor logic seemingly played a role in the NAACP’s decision to take up a resolution at its national convention condemning “The Tea Party”for“explicitly racist behavior.

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