Strong or Brittle?

New and improved. At least that’s her story.

As a woman I have to say I found Jan Flory’s observation about Travis Kiger being intimidated by strong, older women pretty comical. The inference of course is that Jan Flory is a strong, older woman; and that as a corollary, Travis is a weak, younger man, possibly, Flory speculated, because his mommy didn’t nurse him long enough.

Are you my mommy?

And now I ask you to dispel the image of Jan Flory nursing anything (warm blooded) herself to gain mommy experience, as I pursue my essay.

The implication that Travis Kiger is weak, and is in any way fearful of Jan Flory, I leave until the end to address. First I will start with Mrs. Flory’s self-description.

Can she run in mud?

I note that Mrs. Flory bolts out of the starting gate with the implication that she is the victim of ageism and sexism. I am no longer offended by limousine liberals whipping out victimhood status, although generally they apply it to which ever class or race they happen to be pandering to.

Jan Flory isn’t “older.” She is old. She is probably in her seventies. That’s a fact and it’s germane, given the total lack of leadership and intellectual perspicacity, delivered by her “esteemed” elderly friends Bankhead, Jones and McKinley who were also in their eighth decade.

Age is a reality. You can try to hide it with lots of cosmetic surgery, but you can’t hide an ossified mindset locked in forty-year time lag. It reveals itself in rigid thought and its addiction to empty clichés, and meaningless abstractions.

But it looked like a strong, older freeway!

Flory is strong, she says. Must we take her word for it? As a structural engineer I know that some materials such as unreinforced concrete or cast iron appear very strong; and so they are – in compression. Yet they lack strength in tension. They are not flexible and their very rigidity makes them comparatively brittle. And brittle is a term I would apply to the speech and demeanor of Jan Flory at the City Council microphone. Perhaps there is an underlying hysteria waiting to erupt. If it ever does, the crack-up will not be pretty, either.

A little Jack Daniels gets you through the morning.

“Strong” people of neither gender advertise their strength. The fact that Mrs. Flory finds it necessary to do so is a pretty clear indication of an underlying insecurity and inherent weakness.

It seems to have escaped Mrs. Flory’s notice that people may dislike her not because she is a strong, older woman, but because she seems to be an inflexible, humorless, mean, self-righteous scold – a veritable literary stereotype, in fact.

Admit it. You weren’t using the that block of Whiting, anyway.

And then there is the Flory Record to consider, amply described on the pages of FFFF. Her previous years on the Fullerton City Council are informed by failure. Flory voted to approve an illegal tax on our water for six years; which also means she never balanced a legitimate budget. She gave away City property and streets worth millions to her developer friends. She voted to retroactively spike the pensions of “public safety” employees, burying the taxpayers and citizens under a multi-hundred million dollar mountain of unfunded pension liability.

Move on. Nothing to see here.

And then there is the Flory Inaction: totally MIA about the murder of the mentally ill homeless man at the hands of Fullerton cops. Is that the behavior of a “strong, older woman” or the pitiful cowardice of an entropic, conscienceless fossil? What does Jan Flory think about the crime wave perpetrated by members of the Fullerton Police Department, including the sexual assaults by Albert Rincon that even elicited disgust from a federal judge? Well we do know that she actually gave her pal ex-Chief Pat McKinley an award of some kind after all the bad FPD news and after a multi-hundred thousand dollar settlement was reached in the Rincon matter.

Those ladies weren’t like you. They were weak, younger women!

As with many of Fullerton’s “strong, older women (and men)” it has been more important for Flory to back the sclerotic Fullerton establishment to the hilt, rathert than uncover the stinky morass in the FPD. Flory actually wants to hire more cops without reforming the department. Flory seems to think somebody in Fullerton really wants this retrograde attitude. Of course the voters will decide, but I doubt anybody wants to backtrack to the days of complete unaccountability in City Hall that marked the Flory years.

Now as far as Travis Kiger is concerned I will say this. He is one of the most courageous people I know. He has endured the threats and vulgar vituperation of the FPOA trolls on this site with equanimity. They have attacked him and his family, posting his home address long before he was a public figure. He has never backed down. That’s because he believes in principles, one of which is taking responsibility for his decisions. That’s pretty refreshing. And that’s strength.

Travis is thirty-three years old. I sincerely doubt if Jan Flory has embraced a new idea in over forty.

Going Into Labor, Part I – The Problem

I have always been fascinated by the urge for government employees and their die-hard supporters to cling to the notion of collective bargaining as some sort of birthright. The ability for public employees to unionize is actually not even that old, but is a comparatively recent and curious chapter in the history of organized labor.

Classical Marxist doctrine holds that in the capitalist phase of history there are two elements contributing to economic activity. There are capital and labor; the first representing the bourgeois investment class (and their managerial overseers); the second is the workforce that sells its labor to the former. Naturally, the cost of labor , the investment of the capitalists, and the return the latter is willing to accept determine the supply side cost of goods.

The Marxists believed that capital habitually exploited an oversupply of labor through poor working conditions and long hours of employment. There was certainly evidence to support this contention and the capitalists did their best to outlaw labor “combination” through their control of legislatures.

(For the sake of argument I will happily stipulate the socialist fact in evidence.)

Of course labor did combine.

But the idea of government workers unionizing did not enter the into the equation. Why? For several reasons, one of which is succinctly stated by the most effective liberal in American history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Roosevelt realized that people who work for the government cannot hold the same employer/employee relationship since their employer is the people as a sovereign whole. Clearly the idea of collective bargaining, and particularly militant union tactics used against the citizenry was abhorrent to old FDR himself.

Another related problem is that government employees do not fit into the labor-capital equation, since the “capitalist” investor in their operation is none other than the taxpayers and citizens – and not a natural adversary in an economic system. And public employees were granted civil service protection and security to make up for comparatively modest wages.

Cornering the market…

And then there is the problem of the complete public sector labor monopoly. Producers of goods compete with each other in marketplaces that, among other things, sets a value on product that helps determine the cost of labor. No such balance exists in the public sector where nothing is for sale and there is no competition in the labor market at all.

The ability to unionize and the concomitant ability to engage in collective political action has enabled the public sector labor monopoly to elect its favored candidates at all levels, and subsequently to exact greater and greater salaries and benefits for themselves; and always using the argument that all they seek is parity with the private sector. Yet never have they jettisoned the civil service protections that makes in almost impossible to fire an incompetent public worker.

Most comical are the “management” unions that represent the upper tier employees who oversee the lower, and whose own interests in running the “company” are inexplicably linked with the benefits conferred upon the latter!

We didn’t do it!

And so dear Friends, next time you see a “retired” 50 year old cop who was granted almost 100% of his salary as a pension, and who was given two decades of retroactive benefits, ask him whom he has to thank. I guarantee it won’t be you, or even the other public employees who negotiated his benefits on your behalf; nor even the lackeys on the city council like Don Bankhead, Dick Jones, and Jan Flory whom his union got elected. Nuh, uh. He will thank an anonymous “system” that has created this mess and that has virtually bankrupt California and threatens almost every municipality in the state.

Well, we know who to thank.

Flory’s Flock

Molting season arrived early…the landing would be bumpy

An alert FFFF reader just noticed some comments placed on Jan Flory’s Facebook page that should be of interest to all Fullertonians who are interested in Flory and her supporters.

Here’s a semi-literate comment, aimed at the Boss:

 Sonny Black because there they are all puppets and thats how BUSHALA told them to vote!!!!

4 hours ago via mobile · 2

And another the next day:

Sonny Black KIGER AKA BUSHALA SHOULD JUST APPOINT HIS WIFE OR COUSIN OR BROTHER!!!! BUT IM SURE THEY WOULDNT WANT TO APPEAR TRANSPARENT!!!! hahahhaha

 

“Sonny Black.” Hmm. Now where have I head that moniker? Oh, right, it’s the Facebook handle of  Miguel “Sonny” Siliceo, made notorious on these pages as the cop who pinned a rap on Emanuel Martinez that landed him in the county lock-up for five months. The only trouble was that the eye-witness had actually ID’d a completely different person. Whether Mr. Siliceo was just stupid and lazy, or corrupt is a matter for speculation; but an innocent guy spent five months in jail for no legal reason thanks to Sonny. Oh, well.

Subsequently Sonny removed tell-tale traces of his identity, but oops! Too late.

Sonny likes Jan Flory. Alby Al may, too.

For extra fun here is a picture of “Sonny Black,” enjoying some very close personal time with his Facebook pal, “Alby Al” Albert Rincon at a downtown bar.

More Flory Hypocrisy; Oh, No! There’s That Damn Record Again!

Here are Jan Flory’s recent musings on the topic of selecting a Fullerton representative for the Metropolitan Water District. Mrs. Flory has herself torqued up into a faux outrage that a council majority may appoint whomever it chooses. It seems she believes that Doug Chaffee should be the Met rep, simply because he wants the job – instead of a “crony.”

  • WATERBOARDED And the victim would be,—-Doug Chaffee! Last Tuesday night, the council took up the appointment to the Metropolitan Water District Board. No small thing as the MWD is the largest municipal water district in the world. That bears repeating,—the WORLD! Doug had asked for the appointment. He stated that he had a degree in economics, he had extensive experience running his own business, and he had dealt with natural resources in his law practice “from way back.” He seemed to know what he was talking about. Bruce Whitaker, on the other hand, wanted to appoint Tom Babcock. My recollection of Tom was that he was a ringleader of the 1994 Recall that successfully removed Molly McClanahan, Don Bankhead and Buck Catlin from office. For months after the recall (and my subsequent election), Babcock would harangue the council for one thing or another. To my lights, it was all so much sour grapes because when it was all said and done, the 1994 Recall was a bust. The Recallers didn’t get anyone elected to the council with the exception of Conrad DeWitte who lasted 6 weeks before he was booted out of office. Ahead of his time, Mr. Babcock was a Tea Bagger before we had Tea Baggers. Whitaker’s sole premise for wanting Mr. Babcock was that Babcock would be a “rate payer advocate”. No other credentials were cited.
    The agenda letter was “skinny” with the details in the extreme, and merely mentioned that the “Council is being asked to consider whether to make an appointment from the two persons previously nominated.” If I hadn’t attended the August 7th council meeting, I would have had no idea who the contenders were. So much for “transparency”.
    I will have to say that I have never seen a city councilmember denied an appointment by his colleagues. There have been times when two council members wanted the same appointment, but this was always worked out amicably between the two of them. Here, Travis Kiger, ever ready to skewer someone (anyone!), actually moved to reject Doug Chaffee for the position. The motion failed for lack of a second. Kiger did pout out that he could not support Chaffee because Kiger had left a message for Chaffee two months before, and Chaffee had still not returned his call. Oh my!
    In the end, our intrepid Tea Baggers (Kiger, Sebourn and Whitaker) appointed Tom Babcock to serve as a representative to the MWD Board until the first meeting in December 2012. Presumably if all goes well for Tony Bushala, Mr. Babcock will keep his appointment. If not, c’set la vie.

    Hang in there, Doug!

Too bad Mrs. Flory’s own history turns her indignation into a laughable lie. In 2003 Mrs. Flory, having been kicked off the City Council by the voters tried to represent Fullerton on the Orange County Water District! Back then Flory didn’t care that a duly elected councilman wanted the job. Oh, no. In her delusional state of self-aggrandizement, only she could do it!

I’m not self-aggrandized. Just a little happy.

But of course it gets worse. Much worse. Flory now attacks Thom Babcock as a “rate payer advocate” (Oh! The horror!). What Flory isn’t telling her 113 friends is that when she was on the City Council, from 1994-2002 she rubber stamped the re-appointment of a useless local hack named James Blake with zero professional credentials, to the MWD. Of course Blake was also a Flory campaign contributor, by why worry about details, right? FFFF has written all about Blake on numerous occasions, including here and here when we tuned him up for unnecessary travel and wining/dining on the water rate payers’ dime.

Sure I gave her some money. So what?

Looks like the rate payers could use an advocate, and it looks like Jan Flory has once again waterboarded the truth.

 

Ths Cash Cow

You lookin’ at me?

There certainly was a lot of boohooing and breast beating at the Fullerton City Council meeting last week in response to the Council majority pulling the plug on a State DUI grant.

The cops mobilized their MADD allies to tell all the horrible stories of drunk driving mayhem. The only problem was that that’s not the point, no matter how much the liberal spendthrifts like Jan Flory would love to throw at her pals in the FPOA for overtime.

Yes, the real issue is the efficacy of DUI checkpoints in the first place, and something even more sinister: the use of DUI checkpoints to seize vehicles belonging to unlicensed drivers, as detailed in this OC Register story from 2010 that cites an actual, honest-to-goodness study at Berkeley. Apparently the impound/towing fees are immense, as are the fines. We already know about the tens of millions of overtime every year in the state, mostly for cops to stand around.

The cop addiction to all this gravy might explain this video of a public forum in Pomona where the topic of DUI/vehicle seizures is being discussed. Naturally a proud member of the police association is there to scream at those who might object.

Hmm. Sergeant O’Malley?

Thin Skin Flory is Horrified

If you are going to get involved in politics developing a thick skin is essential. If you can’t take the heat, well you know. Here is Jan Flory attacking Travis Kiger for having the temerity to be “webmaster” for the award-winning FFFF blog.

It’s interesting to see how Jan Flory thinks this blog  has some issue “strong, older women” (i.e. her). That’s wrong, of course.

It couldn’t possibly be that our antipathy with Mrs. Flory is because she has always been a mean, vindictive harpy with a trail of votes that have cost the taxpayers of Fullerton a fortune, now could it?

Jan Flory Talks About Sex and Water

Correct. We do not want you to discuss sexy issues.

Okay this post is not about Jan Flory discussing anything remotely “sexy” because the thought of that…well, never mind.

The post is about her latest Facebook scribblings in which she opines on a subject near and dear to the hearts of Fullerton reformers: the illegal 10% tax on your water that the City collected for the past 15 years. $27,000,000 worth.

First I’ll start by stating what you could have already guessed. Jan Flory does not want you to get a refund of the theft. In her world-order the taxpayers are meant to be milked, not refunded.

Her assertion that the collection was “illegal” the past three year is a bad lawyer’s half-truth that amounts to a bald-faced lie, of course. It has been illegal for 15 years, six of them on her watch as a council person. The City has a legal opinion that it is only obligated to refund three-year’s worth of the theft. Not the same thing, is it? Of course Mrs. Flory is desperate to disassociate her name with the tax. Too late. She is on record in the 90s as having known it was wrong and doing it anyway.

Mrs. Flory and her ilk love footling committees, especially when they are selected by ozone brains like Jone, Quirk, McKinley and Bankhead. Even better are the “consultants” selected by staff who give them their marching orders. The “report” cooked up by the water rate consultant was so evidently bogus that it hardly needs to be restated. But I will: their goal was to gin up as much phony cost as possible to keep the bureaucrats greedy little fingers on that 10%. Flory may think this gives her cover, and under the old Culture of Corruption it would have. Not any more.

The 10% was expressly collected  to cover specific City staff costs associated with the water utility. However, it turns out that those departments were already charging directly to the Water Fund. Which is why I am happy to refer to the tax as an illegal theft.

And another point: it’s real easy to say that the illegal tax should be refunded to the Water Fund for capital improvements. That’s convenient, but immoral. The tax that was collected had nothing to do with infrastructure. Nothing. True infrastructure costs should be rolled into an effective rate for water transmission, a correction of years of mismanagement by Mrs. Flory and her cohorts that still needs to be done. Confusing these two issues is simply a convenient way for the perpetrators to hide their crime and their dereliction.

Now, let’s address the issue of the reserve funds, a subject that Mrs. Flory wants people to believe she knows something about. There is no need to empty these accounts to pay refunds. No, indeed. I find it remarkably disingenuous for anybody to assert this, especially given just two of City manger Joe Felz’s most recent “cost saving” measures.

First there was the egregious relocation of former Redevelopment personnel into General Fund departments for which they had no apparent expertise. Most recently the City contracted out your graffiti removal services for $120,000. Yay! Big savings, right? Wrong. The city employees were simply reassigned to other  jobs in the Engineering Department that were vacant. Net cost savings? -$120,000.

The City just missed an opportunity to shave a million bucks off its payroll costs. Of course, my point is that the General Fund is far from depleted.

Finally, in closing, I would submit that Mrs. Flory knows more about witching hours than any of us. However, if she doesn’t like staying up that late every other Tuesday night, then she has no business on a city council. And it’s really too bad that the Council is scheduling special meetings to attend to the people’s business.

Mrs. Flory’s little rubber stamp has been put away and locked up.