Police Pay
The Battle of The Bulge 2010
Cities Begin Final Plunder Of Wages
An organized blitzkrieg is now raging from Los Angeles to Philadelphia – Gainesville to Portland. Protected by the fog of economic propaganda that covers our nation, cities are making their final assault on pay and benefits for this business cycle.
Today’s Wall Street Journal has shouted out the victory chant to the “small government” faithful in the grandstands. The faithful will not disappoint the WSJ. The last two quarters have seen public employees take a trouncing. The winners are downright giddy. Not satisfied with going home with a 21 – 0 victory, management has now entertained the thoughts of a 50 – 0 massacre. The second stringers will remain on the bench until the final gun. The victors are hell bent on making a statement. The WSJ is ever so happy to facilitate this quest for its benefactors – aka subscribers.
The frontlines of this epic battle are Los Angeles, Toledo, Tulsa, and Cleveland. We work for police associations in three of these cities – Los Angeles, Tulsa, and Cleveland. Trust us, things look much different at the epicenter of the battle than in a newsroom in Manhattan or even at the Los Angeles Times, The Tulsa World, or The Cleveland Plain Dealer. War is hell, even if it civilized one, which this is.
Driven by “bumper sticker” rationale, cities go after the “straw men” that are the cause of their current financial plight – overpaid employees and obscene pension benefits. You have to hand it to the management of cities, they know the “hot button” of their citizenry – envy. Today, they are laying down on that button like a cab driver on a horn in Mexico City. The end is near and they know it.
What began in July or August of 2008 as a senseless panic, ended last summer at about the same time. As a point of clarity, the “recession” did not begin in December of 2007 as the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) claims, unless feelings count as macro economics. The NBER is the same organization that announced the end of the 1990-1991 recession two weeks after Clinton defeated the first Bush – the same recession that actually ended eighteen months earlier. The NBER may have an impressive lineup, but its credibility as an honest monitor of recessions is suspect.
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