Dear Friends:

You may recall that in my April rant, I aired a plaint about the danger of the imperial government using the country’s resources to benefit itself while the plight of the Plebeians (that’s us) whose toil was responsible for generating the country’s wealth were of secondary importance. Along with that, I warned of the danger of government employees joining unions and using the power thus generated to insure the perpetual reelection of the imperial government’s beneficiaries. A few things have appeared in the public prints recently that drive home the point.

Recently, it was revealed that the State of California had been deliberately concealing the actual obligation to its state employee pensions.

On April 6, the Los Angeles Times carried an article by David Crane which elaborated on that some horrendous news. I quote part of that article below:

“The State of California ’s real unfunded pension debt clocks in at more than $500 billion, nearly eight times greater than officially reported. That’s the finding from a study released Monday by Stanford University’s public policy program, confirming a recent report with similar, stunning findings from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

To put that number in perspective, it’s almost seven times greater than all the outstanding voter-approved state general obligation bonds in California .”

To save space, I will summarize some points Crane raised - $5.3 billion was diverted this year from higher education, transit, parks, and other programs to pay a token amount toward the current unfunded pension and healthcare promises. That figure is on schedule to triple in the next 10 years and without reform of pensions, to continue to grow, crowding out many vital programs. Crane goes on to explain that costs on existing contracts will continue to rise dramatically and there’s nothing to be done about it. However, last summer, Governor Schwartzenegger proposed reducing the size of promises made to new employees and requiring truthful disclosure so that pension debt can never be hidden again.

Crane asks, “What has happened since then?” Then he gives the answer.

“Silence. State legislators are afraid to even utter the words, ‘pension reform’ for fear of alienating what has become – since passage of the Dills Act in 1978, which endowed state public employees with collective bargaining rights on top of their civil service protections – the single most influential constituency in our state: government employees.”

"Because legislators are unwilling to raise issues that might offend that constituency, they have effectively turned the peroration of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on its head. Instead of a government of the people, by the people and for the people, we have become a government of its employees, by its employees and for its employees.”

My friends, as Mr. Crane says, it’s too late to undo what has been done in California . Very frankly, I don’t know and apparently neither does anyone in California have any idea how they will dig themselves out of this pit legislators have dug for their constituents.

The rest of us can take warning from that state’s unhappy plight. I for one am not willing to support government that is devoted to glorifying and making rich the employees of the state above all other needs. Let me ask, why do government employees need labor unions when they already have civil service protection? Union protection is redundant and in many cases superior. Why then have unions? Could it be that certain politicians knew they could count on the unions’ support in election campaigns?

You will recall that Franklin Roosevelt, bless his liberal heart, was all for supporting industrial labor unionization. However, he was opposed to government employee unionization. We are seeing now that the old boy knew whereof he spoke.

Maxim Gross
For freedom, free speech and
free enterprise.

The recent headlines about lives lost in Chinese and American coal mine disasters were unsettling, as news of such disasters always has been. Aside from the grief, mourning and suffering of which these accidents remind us, it should also remind us we are making no real progress toward divesting ourselves of this energy source. Not only does it cost lives, lives that we seem to be content to lose as long as our homes are heated and we have light to read by, it produces an abundance of ash, generates acid rain, emits mercury and arsenic and, of course, the currently premier boogey-man, carbon dioxide. We have read the TV ads and heard the talk about clean coal which, alas, remains an oxymoron.

I hasten to say I am not advocating shutting down our nation’s coal mines. We can’t, not for the foreseeable future, and unless our leaders in Washington finally devise a national energy policy, we’ll be using coal into the next century and, absent the invention of an effective scrubbing and sequestering technique, with disastrous results for our health and our atmosphere. Coal provides roughly half of America 's electrical power and serves as an indispensable link in our energy chain. With 275 billion tons in recoverable reserves, no other nation is as rich in coal. We have enough to meet domestic demand for 250 years. Those inconvenient facts cannot be swept aside or made non-significant by political rhetoric, no matter how eloquent. These facts also compel us to be strong supporters of coal and the jobs it provides.

But, we must also support nuclear energy which can provide a much larger portion of our electrical energy needs without the manifest drawbacks of coal.

The United States has 104 commercial reactors at 65 plants and is the largest nuclear power provider on Earth. It is sad to say, however, that atomic energy generates only 20% of our electricity. Of the plants that the federal government once predicted we'd have by now, only a 10th are in operation. A new reactor hasn't opened since Watts Bar 1 went on-line in Tennessee in 1996.

It is also an inconvenient truth (to use the phrase coined by an environmental entrepreneur) that certain environmental groups protest the building of nuclear reactors out of unreasoning, unfounded and unscientific fears, claiming they are dangerous. Why?

How many people died in the Three Mile Island nuclear accident? Answer: none. And we should ask, how long ago was that? Has nuclear design improved since then?

Worldwide, only 56 deaths are directly traceable to a nuclear energy accident. And all of those were the result of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster that has correctly been blamed on poor Soviet engineering and design, not atomic power's inherent risk. There have been no radiation-related deaths among crewmen on nuclear powered war ships or submarines. Does that not tell us something?

When properly harnessed, nuclear power is a clean, steady source of renewable energy. It has been safely used for decades in the U.S. , Sweden , Switzerland, South Korea, Belgium and France . The last two use nuclear energy to meet more than half of their electricity needs.

Did you get that? The Frogs, of all people, get half their electricity from nuclear generating plants! And we are supposed to be the most innovative, imaginative, energetic and efficient economic power on Earth? That statistic alone should be enough to shake us out of our semi-comatose state.

We hear grand talk about converting this nation’s energy needs to “renewable sources.” The only thing these sources have renewed are the bank accounts of purveyors of windmills, solar farms and moonshine, made possible by taxpayer-provided subsidies. I can’t help but note that several European countries, which so feverishly passed laws to establish these “renewable” sources, are now disenchanted of the results and are cutting off those once-lavish subsidies. Denmark, despite operating 6000 wind turbine generators, has not been able to shut down a single, solitary coal-fired generating plant and has to import electricity when the wind doesn’t blow.

My friends, the President can speak all the gilded words his speechwriters can invent about cap and trade and “renewable” sources, but he obviously doesn’t know what those “renewables” will be and has no plan other than to impose ruinous and inflationary penalties on energy users. This country has not had an energy plan since Darth Cheney sat down with the oil companies and devised one. Do you know what it said? No? Neither does anyone else. And Obama hasn’t even pretended to know what “energy plan” means. Chicago politics didn't cover such mundane pursuits.

An energy plan will, among other things, establish priorities for research into such things as scrubbing coal-burning plant emissions, researching a non-carbon fuel for transportation purposes, replacing coal with natural gas on a progressive basis, and establishing incentives for private companies and public utilities to build nuclear-powered generating plants along with associated time lines. It should examine the methods and expense of building infrastructure to support new energy sources, natural gas to fuel automobiles for example.

Any politician that utters the phrase: “end our dependence on foreign oil” or “end our addiction to foreign oil” should be taken out and shot! Those snake oil salesmen have been spewing that asinine and empty catch phrase for decades, ever since the Carter administration. It’s time we demanded that they get off high dead center and get something done, and that doesn’t mean buying votes by subsidizing a particular group’s grandiose and impractical scheme, but causing formulation of a scientifically sound, practical and realistic plan for our energy use into the 22nd century.

It’s time we become world leaders again and stop kowtowing to those who envy and despise us.

“Hey dude,” Max said, looking up from a magazine he was reading. “Que pasa?”

“Nada,” I replied. “I’m still waiting for my ship to come in. But it looks like it’s lost at sea or ran aground on a reef.”

“Still believing in miracles, huh? You Christians do put a lot of stock in that stuff.”

“Don’t go making fun,” I groused. “The watchword is diversity. You must make allowance for the foibles of others.”

“Sure,” he shot back. “Like staying quiet and holding your nose when one of our democracy-loving , precious ablutophobic immigrants who have never learned the virtue of bath tubs or toilet tissue walks by.”

“You’re in a good mood today,” I ventured, changing the subject.

“I made the mistake of reading the public prints. I have been reviewing statements made by some of intrepid and glorious leaders inside the Beltway,” he said, waving the magazine.

“Oh, someone has uttered something that offends you?” I asked. “Will wonders never cease!”

“Yes,” he said, referring to the periodical. “It seems that the pillar of reason and knowledge, Howard Dean, on CNBC of course, said this about the Obamacare legislation:

‘The health bill was needed to correct economic inequities. The question is, in a democracy, what is the right balance between those at the top … and those at the bottom? When it gets out of whack, as it did in the 1920s, and it has now, you need to do some redistribution. This is a form of redistribution.’”

“There’s supposed to be a balance?” I asked, surprised. “Is there a formula? Hell, I thought that’s what the graduated income tax was for. Is that not enough?”

“You ain’t heard nothing yet,” Max chuckled. “Get what the steadfast and reliable Max Baucus said on March 25th:

‘Health reform is an income shift. It is a shift, a leveling, to help lower income, middle income Americans. The mal-distribution of income in America has gone up way too much, the wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy, and the middle income class is left behind. The new health care legislation will have the effect of addressing that mal-distribution of income in America .’"

“Damn!” I spat. “He’s right! All those arrogant clever people that get college degrees or start their own businesses and work their butts off 70 hours a week are making way too much money.”

“There’s more,” Max said, holding up a hand to stifle my rant.

“Surely not!” I muttered in despair.

Max grinned. How would you like to hear what a leading New York Times columnist said?”

I said. “I can’t wait!”

Max read: “David Leonhardt called Obamacare ‘the federal government's biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.’”

“Quelle suprise!” I remarked

“And here is the piece de resistance,” Max said, mocking my fractured French.

“This week,” he read, “the DNC group called ‘Organizing for America ’ offered a commemorative certificate to supporters who helped pass the health care bill. The certificate said, ‘We achieved the dream of generations — high-quality, affordable health care is no longer the privilege of a few, but the right of all.’”

“The privilege of a few!” I choked. “They gotta be kidding! That’s straight out of the Marxist playbook! Hell’s kitchen! The figure I saw said that 85% of people in this country had health insurance and the majority of ‘em were happy with what they have. The privilege of a few? Max nodded. “And I might mention that these folks got in trouble with the party faithful for admitting the scheme behind the health care bill. They committed the unpardonable sin of departing from the bill’s cover story that it will cover an additional 32 million uninsured people, lower our costs at the same time and save us from Bush’s runaway deficit.”

“They may as well tell the truth, Max,” I said. “Not even a half-way bright third grader is buying into that lower cost scenario.”

“Depends on what you’re smoking I suppose,” Max mused.

I said, “In great Briton, they have a 17% Value Added Tax. It will be interesting to see what the great middle class, that Max Baucus is so concerned about, has to say when we get hit with one of our own. What’s going to be the cover story then?”

Max threw back his head and laughed. "Just wait till the lobbyists hit Washington by the thousands, each one of them trying to make the case that his product should be exempt from the tax. We've been griping about purchased favors and earmarks? As Al Jolson said, 'Folks, you ain't heard nuthin' yet!'"