People inside the Occupy movement — including one of the leaders of the Occupy Newark encampment — claim that Occupy Wall Street is racist against people of color. These new accusations of racism are based on people’s personal experiences with the increasingly secretive and “fascist” Occupy Wall Street leadership and the actions of OWS participants.

Imagine the amount of press the following story would get if it occurred at a Tea Party event; “If you ever want to see the biggest bunch of a**holes in the world, it’s Occupy Wall Street,” an unidentified man told me. We were in the atrium of 60 Wall Street, a location that Occupy Wall Street uses for meetings especially on evenings such as this past Friday when the weather outside was rainy and cold. The gentleman speaking to me was clearly upset, in his late 30s, neatly dressed and black. He eyed the tables of white Occupiers chowing down nearby. “I brought plates,” he said. “I brought plates free for everyone to eat on and what do they do? They asked me if I’d washed my hands. That’s how they treat us here.”

This man’s complaints about his own personal experience of antiblack racism at Occupy Wall Street were echoed by every black person I spoke to this past week in New York. Some people did not want to go on record, possibly fearing reprisals from people at Occupy Wall Street, but others freely admitted in video interviews that BigGovernment.com and Breitbart.TV will be releasing this week that they think the Occupy Wall Street movement is “clearly” and “absolutely” racist against people of color based on their own personal experience.

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Dannel Malloy, Connecticut’s Democratic and Working Families Party Governor, told citizens of his state last year that the highest tax increase in the history of Connecticut, including a retroactive state income tax hike, would balance his state’s budget. It appears he was wrong. Bloomberg has reported that Connecticut will have a $94.9 million revenue shortfall in fiscal year 2012. In addition, official estimates indicate that the state’s revenues will trail by $139 million in fiscal year 2013.

Minimizing the significance of the shortfall, Gov. Malloy said in a press release:

All today’s announcement means is that, as is the case in other states with high wage earners, fourth quarter revenue is coming up short of expectations. That’s why today, I’ve instructed Secretary Barnes to pare back on current year expenses.  But let there be no confusion – we will end the current fiscal year in the black, and in a more stable fashion than this state has seen in many years.

Blaming the shortfall on the “uncertainty surrounding the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts,” Mr. Malloy said that such “uncertainty at the federal level” resulted in taxpayers’ shift of capital gains and income, as well as declines in bonus levels in the financial service industry.

Last year, Gov. Malloy used the tax hike to balance his state’s budget against a public sector union concession package that actually required few concessions of unions: no layoffs for four years and no furloughs; wages frozen for two years, then followed by three annual 3 percent raises; retirement age raised by only two years, and not until after 2022; and minor changes in health benefits such as mandatory annual physician visits and mail-order prescription plans.

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TRENTON, N.J. – Take a look inside a typical public employee union contract – including teacher contracts – and you’ll find provisions that give public servants a payout for any unused sick or personal leave time they have banked.

Sometimes the payouts come incrementally, like at the employees’ 10^th anniversary. More often they come at retirement. The payments are almost always based on the employees’ current or final salary, rather than the amount they were making when they banked the unused day off.

While these might seem like innocent, well-deserved bonuses, they are, in reality, ticking financial time bombs that threaten to blow a hole in the budgets of schools and other government entities.

That’s the case in New Jersey, which is on the hook “for an accumulated $825 million in unused sick days,” according to Syracuse.com. That’s the cumulative amount owed by all levels of state government, including school districts. “This works out to an average of $250 in property taxes per resident,” writes the HudsonReporter.com.

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BG contributor Charlie Gasparino in The New York Post:

Jon Corzine appears to have committed more than a few sins in the runup to the demise of MF Global, including possibly using client money to pay for the risky trades that forced his brokerage firm into bankruptcy over the weekend. But possibly his biggest sin was his steadfast belief in the power of government.

The former New Jersey governor and Goldman Sachs chief executive went wrong by assuming that a government bailout would somehow turn his firm’s bet on some of the worst investments in the world — the sovereign debt of Italy and Spain — into gold. That absurd faith has doomed many chief executives — Dick Fuld of Lehman Bros. chief among them, just a little more than three years ago.

And, more than any of the other shenanigans that may have taken place during the ill-fated firm’s final hours, it’s what did in Corzine and MF Global.

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From the Associated Press:

A person close to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says he is not running for president, despite pressure from donors and others in the Republican Party establishment.

The person, with direct knowledge of the decision, spoke on grounds of anonymity Tuesday to avoid pre-empting the governor’s early afternoon announcement.

Christie had spent the past week reconsidering his long-time refusal to run for the White House as GOP leaders clamored for another option in the search for a Republican to take on President Barack Obama next fall.

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So just when everyone had concluded the Chris Christie matter — saying “Great speech at the Reagan Library, but he’s not gonna run for president” — the New York Post comes along with a story that says the New Jersey governor is seriously considering a 2012 run. Apparently the Reagan Library experience had a big impact on Christie, and others. He’s now being urged to go for it by Nancy Reagan, Henry Kissinger, former president George W. Bush, and former first lady Barbara Bush.

According to the Post story, even Christie’s wife Mary Pat is warming to the idea.

I don’t have anything to add to this in the way of a forecast. But it does give me a hook to weigh in on Christie’s speech. It was uplifting and inspiring. As many have commented, it was a Reagan leadership speech on exceptionalism, or “earned American exceptionalism,” as the Wall Street Journal editors put it. I agree.

There are a couple a points that I want to emphasize, though.

First, Christie gets the linkage between domestic economic growth, national security, and foreign-policy influence. This was an absolute key Reagan principle.

Reagan’s firing of the PATCO workers was heard around the world by the old Soviet Union. But it was Reagan’s tax cuts, limited government, deregulation, disinflation (with Paul Volcker), and free-trade policies that grew the economy by nearly 5 percent annually during the recovery period of the 1980s, with nearly 20 million new jobs added. That ultimately knocked out the Soviet Union. (Throw in deregulated oil prices, too. They decimated Soviet coffers.)

Second, at the Reagan Library, Christie talked about the New Jersey model, where in a tough war against government unions and teachers, divided government worked to reform the state’s pension and health benefits, cap property taxes, and hold down arbitration awards for union salaries. (Christie didn’t mention this, but he also stopped the millionaire’s tax in New Jersey.)

And while the governor said there was compromise on a bipartisan basis, and while he emphasized leadership in compromise several times in his speech, he noted that he balanced two budgets with over $13 billion in deficits without raising taxes.

So there’s compromise, and there’s compromise.

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Here we go again, another sexting scandal perpetrated by a Democrat. But New Jersey Democrat Louis Magazzu, 53, had a darn good excuse for why his sexting of nude photos of himself should be ignored. He was set up, you see? Isn’t this like a crack addict blaming the crack?

Magazzu admitted readily enough that he sent to a woman he’d been texting for several years the nude pictures he took of himself with his cell phone. But apparently he felt we should cut him some slack because the woman gave the photos to one of his political enemies. She’s at fault… don’t you see?

Yep. She’s the bad guy here. “I did not know that she was working with an avowed political enemy to distribute these pictures,” Magazzu whined.

Magazzu, a Cumberland County Freeholder from southern New Jersey, resigned this week due to the scandalous photos. Freeholder Director Bill Whelan had been urging the sexting prone Democrat to resign for the past three weeks because of the mounting scandal. (more…)

From The New York Times:

New Jersey lawmakers on Thursday approved a broad rollback of benefits for 750,000 government workers and retirees, the deepest cut in state and local costs in memory, in a major victory for Gov. Chris Christie and a once-unthinkable setback for the state’s powerful public employee unions.

The Assembly passed the bill 46 to 32, as Republicans and a few Democrats defied raucous protests by thousands of people whose chants, vowing electoral revenge, shook the State House. Leaders in the State Senate said their chamber, which had already passed a slightly different version of the bill, would approve the Assembly version on Monday. Mr. Christie, a Republican, was expected to sign the measure into law quickly.

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This article may need a bit of contextualization first: almost two years ago, the SEIU launched a corporate campaign against Sodexo. It’s not particularly uncommon of unions to engage in vociferous campaigns against a corporation to obtain unionization rights. However, SEIU’s campaign against Sodexo differed on two notable counts. First, the scale of the campaign, with SEIU student organizations and international unions in several States as well as in other countries and spending several thousand dollars in the process. Second, and perhaps most important, the viciousness of the motives behind the campaign.

You see, in a “normal” union-driven corporate-campaign, a union backed up by company workers which are not or poorly represented, will fight to obtain the right to represent these workers. In SEIU’s case, the situation is rather different. The union has traditionally always been foreign to the catering industry. In accordance with its growth strategy, it decided to penetrate the sector. After all, unions are corporations like any other, and they make their money on the paiements of workers they represent.

In SEIU’s case, to try and secure greater financial growth (in spite of the fact that the union is already filthy rich) meant striking big. That’s why it went for Sodexo. Sodexo is the second largest company in the food-catering industry in the world and employs close to 380 000 people worlwide. For the workers-hungry union, it represented a tasty treat.

Only problem was, Sodexo has no problem with workers’ rights and is already in agreement with several unions in the United States and worldwide. Basically, noone there really needed SEIU – as a matter of fact, few workers have come forward during the campaign to specifically ask for the union to representent them. So SEIU went at it alone.

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You really have to see this one to believe it:

The video above was just released by the Institute for Justice. It begins with an elderly woman lamenting:

When my son came back from Kuwait he couldn’t believe it.  He said, “Mom, what’s going on?” And I said, well they want to get rid of us and they’re finally doing it.  He was upset.  He said, “I’m sorry, I’m halfway around the world to help other people and I can’t even help my own mom keep her own home.”

For the past ten years, township officials in Mount Holly have been destroying a close-knit community called the Gardens.  They’ve been recklessly bulldozing select individual row-houses — even when they are attached to occupied homes — to make way for fancier homes for richer people.  The current owners have never been offered a place in the new redevelopment, or enough money to buy comparable home nearby.

A new Institute for Justice study, available here, shows that this redevelopment project may result in a loss of one million dollars every year, one tenth of the township’s budget.

Despite these terrible conditions, the community never gave up hope.  They continued to fight against all odds for their cherished neighborhood.   And on Wednesday, a federal court came to their defense.

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Public school teachers are at the forefront of protests against state budget cuts and restrictions on collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Ohio, and elsewhere.

Teachers have a lot to lose. According to Department of Education statistics, in 2007-2008 (the latest year available), full-time public school teachers across the country made an average of $53,230 in “total school-year and summer earned income.” That compares favorably to the $39,690 that private school teachers pulled down.

And when it comes to retirement benefits, public school teachers do better than average too.According to EducationNext, government employer contribute the equivalent of 14.6 percent of salary to retirement benefits for public school teachers. That compares to 10.4 for private-sector professionals.

Those levels of compensation help explain why per-pupil school costs have risen substantially over the past 50 years. In 1960-61, public schools spent $2,769 per student, a figure that now totals over $10,000 in real, inflation-adjusted dollars. Among the things that threefold-plus increase in spending has purchased are more teachers per student. In 1960, the student-teacher ratio in public schools was 25.8; it’s now at a historic low of 15.

Among the things all that money hasn’t bought? Parental satisfaction, for one. Despite public teachers’ much-higher salaries, parents with school-age children in public schools report substantially lower satisfaction rates than parents with children in private schools. In 2007, the percentage of parents with children in assigned public schools who were “very satisfied” with the institution was 52 percent. For parents whose children attended public schools of choice, that figure rose to 62 percent. Parents sending their children to private schools, whether religious or non-sectarian, were “very satisfied” 79 percent of the time.

It’s little wonder that parents with little or no choice report the lowest-levels of satisfaction (about 90 percent of K-12 students attend public schools). Despite all the extra resources devoted to public school teachers and students, student achievement has been absolutely flat over the past 40 years. The National Assessment of Educational Progress is “the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what America’s students know and can do in various subject areas.” When it comes to 17-year-old students (effectively, high-school seniors), nothing has changed since reporting began in the early 1970s. In 1971, 17-year-old students averaged 285 points (out of 500) in reading. In 2008, that had risen to 286. For math in 1973, the average score was 304 (out of 500). In 2008, it was 306.

Public school teachers make about $14,000 a year more in straight salary than private school teachers; when you add in benefits, the gap widens even more. They teach fewer students than ever before and taxpayers at all levels spend increasing amounts of money on education. Yet for all that, the best you can say is that we’re spending more than three times as much money as we were 40 years ago for exactly the same outcomes.

The National Governors Association says that states are looking at $175 billion in shortfalls over the next two years. Local governments are in the red too. As legislators look for places to cut or reduce spending, there’s no question that public school teachers have a lot to lose in terms of compensation.

And there’s no question that, even if there were no budget emergencies, the nation’s public school system is failing to return much of anything on an ever-growing pile of tax dollars.

“To Surly, With Love” was written and produced by Nick Gillespie and Meredith Bragg. Go toReason.tv for downloadable versions of all our videos and subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live.

Who runs our government? It may be hard to tell when looking at Wisconsin and Indiana. But, in New Jersey, the state’s SEIU firefighters’ union, New Jersey State Firemen’s Mutual Benevolent Association (FMBA), President Bill Lavin appears to think that forced-unionism power has given him complete control over New Jersey firefighters on and off the job.

New Jersey State Firemen’s Mutual Benevolent Association (FMBA) President Bill Lavin "DO NOT EXPECT HELP FROM THE FMBA EVER AGAIN IF YOU DON'T ATTEND THIS RALLY"

“DO NOT EXPECT HELP FROM THE FMBA EVER AGAIN IF YOU DON’T ATTEND THIS RALLY!!!”

Ocean City Fire and Rescue Services Captain James P. Smith sent, at taxpayer expense, the verified e-mail below demanding that firefighters attend a union political rally on Thursday, March 3rd at 11:00 a.m. His e-mail manifests the tyrannical power that monopoly bargaining power over government employees creates for union bosses:

The legislators in Wisconsin have left their State because they support their working class. We need to show our legislators that we care about our benefits. If we don’t show up, why the hell should they care about our benefits? A paltry turnout does not help President Lavin to stand up as our leader. If our numbers are small then the legislators will chuckle at us.

This rally is MANDATORY for all members. To quote President Lavin “I expect EVERYONE of our members to be in attendance. The only excuse is that you are on duty in the firehouse or that you’re in the hospital!!! Your second job is not a valid excuse!!!”

President Lavin was strong in his message “YOU SHOULD BE EMBARRASSED IF YOU DO NOT ATTEND” and he was adamant when he stated “DO NOT EXPECT HELP FROM THE FMBA EVER AGAIN IF YOU DON’T ATTEND THIS RALLY!!!”

Allow me to repeat how strong President Lavin feels about your attendance at this rally next Thursday. … “DO NOT EXPECT HELP FROM THE FMBA EVER AGAIN IF YOU DON’T ATTEND THIS RALLY!!!”

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Our investigative team has just released the second undercover video revealing Planned Parenthood counseling a pimp on how to obtain secret abortions for his under age sex slaves, by bypassing Virginia parental consent laws meant to protect children. In the footage, taken January 12, 2011, undercover actors tell the Planned Parenthood worker that they are involved in sex work, and manage 14 and 15 year old girls,
“some of them from out of state, out of country.” The Planned Parenthood staffer assures him it is confidential, that “we see people here from all walks of life,” and goes on to coach the pimp how to obtain secret abortions for his sex slaves by circumventing Virginia law that require parental consent for underage abortions.

Just last Tuesday, our team released footage showing the manager of the second largest clinic of Planned Parenthood of Central New Jersey counseling a pimp how to have his under age sex slaves lie on paper, how to purchase cheap birth control, and how to ensure that his young victims can still make money for him “waist up” after coerced abortions. Along with the New Jersey footage, the Virginia footage further reveals the endemic cover up of abuse at Planned Parenthood clinic across the country. For four years, our investigative team has been documenting the widespread abuse cover up at Planned Parenthood.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss Jeffrey Immelt’s new job and the fiscal crisis facing many states.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

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Higher Taxes Wouldn’t End Some Deficits
Where the New Jobs Are: In Texas, not California.
Pej: Bankruptcy for the States?
Ben on the Cost of Medicaid to States
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Education Action Group has produced an eye-opening chart illustrating the torturous, time-consuming and expensive process New Jersey schools must follow when attempting to fire a tenured teacher for “inefficiency, incapacity, conduct unbecoming or other just cause.”

EAG created this chart after consulting with James Smith, the executive director of school security for Paterson, NJ schools. We believe the chart is a clear indication that lawmakers in New Jersey and other states must seriously consider reforming and streamlining the tenure process, to make it quicker and easier to remove bad teachers from public school classrooms.

Click here for the full version.

Recently, Paterson schools made national news after it successfully fired a tenured special-education teacher.  The defendant was found guilty of “unbecoming conduct,” which included hitting and/or punching a handicapped student.  It took Paterson officials four years and over $400,000 to successfully fire the teacher.

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There’s a weird thing happening in public education.  Hardcore unions are attempting to rebrand themselves as “professional organizations.”  In fact, the American Federation of Teachers bills itself as “A union of professionals.”

Both the AFT and the larger National Education Association attempt to portray themselves as associations yet negotiate collective bargaining agreements and oftentimes act like their brethren in the industrial unions – hardly white-collar professionals.

So with the increasing call for more professionalism in the teaching ranks – and less of a collectivist mindset – conflict arises.

Consider these two recent statements by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis.

Conventional wisdom would tell us that Lewis would be demanding that teachers be treated like professionals.  Think again.

It’s clear that Gov. Christie supports the professionalism of teachers more than the teachers’ elected leader does.  That doesn’t speak well for those wishing to increase the professionalism of the career.

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It’s not every day you hear a governor laying the smack down on a group of thugs like the New Jersey Education Association, but that’s precisely what Gov. Chris Christie did before a stuffy crowd of education reformers recently.

Christie didn’t mince words.  He said when he was elected and “arrived on the playground,” he found the administrators and school board laying on the ground bleeding.  “That meant there was a bully,” he said.

So his message was simple:

“You walk onto the school yard and you say punch them, I punch you.”

Here’s a governor who is impatient with awful schools and the snail’s pace the Education Establishment travels because adults’ perks and comfort may be disrupted.

But he’s on a mission to explain to his citizens the state of the education system.  He’s telling them about the union’s penchant for “protecting lousy teachers” and “free health benefits from the day they’re hired till the day they die” and the union’s opposition to pay freezes.

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With most of the media focusing their 2010 election coverage on whether or not Republicans will reclaim one or both houses of Congress, the 37 states that are about to elect (or re-elect) a governor get lost in the shuffle.

If Republicans do as well as projected, most observers expect gridlock to descend upon Washington D.C.  That means the real action and drama will be at the state level, where newly-elected governors will have to deal with high unemployment, shrinking budgets and public employee unions that will fight as if very existence is at stake (which it is).

Here’s a brief overview of what’s at stake for the governors of three states.

Michigan: The Wolverine State’s manufacturing-based economy has been ravaged by free trade agreements and obstinate unions.  Since 2000, Michigan has lost over 900,000 jobs.  The current unemployment rate is 13 percent, and unlikely to drop below double digits any time soon.

The state’s public employee pension funds are awash in red ink.  The Mackinac Center reports that the state has underfunded pension plans by almost $12 billion.  The state’s next governor will almost surely be Michigan businessman Rick Snyder who ran under the slogan, “One tough nerd.”  Come November 3, Mr. Snyder will face one tough job.

Ohio: Like its neighbor to the north, the Buckeye State is barely hanging on.  The unemployment rate is 10 percent, which only exacerbates the state’s “structural budget shortfall” that could reach $8 billion by 2012.  On top of that, the State Teachers Retirement System (STRS) has $40 billion in unfunded liabilities.

On the bright side, Ohio was recently awarded $400 million in federal funds from the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” initiative. The bad news: after four years, that money will dry up.  Since Ohio spends “49 percent more on district-level bureaucracy than the national average,” there will have to be some big changes to the public education system.

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Tea Party groups in New Jersey are outraged over ads that have mysteriously surfaced in support of a supposed Tea Party candidate.  The sponsored ads on Google are being served up all over the web, in places like BlogTalkRadio, in support of one Peter DeStefano, and direct viewers to the website of njteapartycoalition.org.

The problem is, the NJ Tea Party Coalition, the owners of that website, did not purchase any such ads.

“I find this ad extremely troubling,” Brian Baldwin of the NJ Tea Party Coalition told local press. “We did not authorize this nor are we supporting Mr. DeStefano.”

What’s worse is that the group – and every Tea Party group in NJ that I’ve communicated with – has been denouncing DeStefano as a “fake” Tea Party candidate for months now.  They’ve all been complaining about this to the appropriate authorities for some time now.  After seeing these latest ads, Tea Party leaders in NJ are urging their members and other like-minded leaders to contact the local election officials and the Secretary of States’ office to look into DeStefano’s candidacy.

After hounding the press about their suspicions, some in the media had taken notice of the Tea Party’s claims in NJ.  And they agreed.

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Well, the left and the mainstream media came to bury James O’Keefe. And I guess they failed. His latest Project Veritas ‘Teachers Gone Wild’ — New Jersey teachers union members exposing their institutional arrogance and lack of seriousness and accountability — is now a huge story in New Jersey politics, according to straight-talking Governor Chris Christie’s own mouth.

This is what I’ve been talking about.  This is another exhibit as to what I’ve been talking about.  The arrogance, the greed, the self-interest, the lack of introspection, the lack of standards.

And it hurts the great teachers just as much as it hurts the kids.

I think that this video makes the distinction better than I ever could.  This is their leadership conference where they’re in a hotel, having this leadership conference, singing songs together about kicking the governor in his tool box.  I wonder what they mean by that?  But I can tell you I sense it would hurt.

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