Here’s a fun match up between pension watchdog Steven Greenhut and the head of the OCEA public employees’ union, Nick Berardino. The subject of yesterday’s debate was “Can pensions be reformed co-operatively?”
Who won?
Tonight’s Martha Montelongo radio show will feature author and editorialist Steven Greenhut, who was attacked this week by the International Association of Firefighters and painted as an evil front man in the battle to rein in ridiculous public employee pensions.
Here is the new IAFF commercial, which was also featured on a segment of some left wing thing called “The ED Show.” The ad replays truthful statements of Steven Greenhut along with John Stossel and Glen Beck interlaced with video of fire heroes falling down and putting people on stretchers.
The underlying theme of conflict between logic and emotion is believed to be intentional.
Tune in to KRLA AM 870 or KRLA870.com tonight at 11 pm to catch Greenhut and a few others on the Martha Montelongo Show.
In this video from CSPAN’s BookTV, Steven Greenhut talks about his book Plunder!: How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation.
Fast forward to 22:20 and listen to Greenhut recount the story of how Shawn Nelson saved Fullerton taxpayers from a secretive retroactive pension spike orchestrated by council RINOs Jones and Bankhead in 2008.
Steven Greenhut just launched The CalWatchdog website (www.calwatchdog.com), a journalism project designed to provide investigative coverage of the state’s increasingly dysfunctional government.
This project could not have come at a better time, considering how the California budget is facing unprecedented shortfalls while the power and size of government continues to grow.
CalWatchdog’s first major story describes some upcoming state bills that allocate $11 billion to water projects which may not even be feasible. The story describes a “ready, shoot, aim” approach to water bonds that is destined to fail much like Gov. Jerry Brown’s geothermal “ghost” plants from the mid-1980s.
We hope that Steve’s new venture will bring some long-missing accountability to our negligent state legislature.
Steven Greenhut, author of “PLUNDER! How Public Employee Unions are Raiding Treasuries Controlling our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation ” has written an excellent article for the Wall Street Journal describing the financial horrors created by public employee unions across the nation.
Steven will be at a book signing event on Thursday at Barnes and Noble in Orange. All FFFFers are invited to attend.
Thursday, December 10, 2009 – 6:00 PM
Barnes and Noble
791 S. Main Street
Orange, CA 92821
714-871-7148
The event will be filmed by CSPAN
Friend, author and staunch proponent of limited government Steven Greenhut will be hosting a 3 hour show on KFI AM 640 this Sunday from 7 – 10 PM. Tune in online at kfi640.com for a great show.
Steve has been busy lately. Last week he released a book titled “Plunder: How Public Employee Unions are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation”. In the book he argues that public workers earn more than other Americans and receive vastly superior benefits, creating an unsustainable burden on state and federal treasuries. The end result is higher taxes and massive debt.
Steve’s message has been getting an enormous amount of traction lately, primarily because a floundering economy has substantiated the truth that challengers like Steve have been warning us about for years: that big government equals big failure.
Our old amigo Steve Greenhut has taken a job up north in Sacramento to untangle some of the worst of California’s governmental pathologies, but he still writes an occasional piece for the OC Register. It obviously has not been lost on Steve that the current battle for the 72nd Assembly District is a pretty good symbol of an attempt by the entrenched GOP old guard to hold on to their influence and money apparatus – and that ties directly to the mess in Sacramento.
Over the week-end Greenhut dropped a devastating editorial scud on the Ackerman, Inc. machine that was both informative and entertaining. Read Steve’s piece here.
The OC Repugs don’t like the antiseptic light of day shining on their doings, so one can only imagine the consternation Greenhut’s editorial has caused. And they also don’t like their ideology questioned by anybody. Ideology is their purview, see, by which they whip up the stupider ranks of the rank and file and get them mobilized. But that’s mostly window dressing. When in office the ‘Pugs like to settle in and start milking their cash cow for all it’s worth.
In case any of you Friends happened to come across this 10/12/09 blog post in The Register, by Teri Sforza, you might have come away with the idea that Fullerton City Manager Chris Meyer was the white knight who came to Fullerton taxpayer’s rescue last year when the unions proposed to increase their retirement formula.
The usually healthy skepticism of Ms. Sforza seems to have been suspended in her conversations with Chris Meyer. He fooled her into thinking that he was the fiscally responsible official who put a stop to the craziness.
Wrong! That person was Councilman Shawn Nelson – who the blew the whistle on Meyer & Co., who had been trying for months to push the deal through quietly, behind closed doors. The poor public suckers who are ultimately on the hook weren’t supposed to know what was going on, so the agenda items were not described. It was only after Nelson went public with the news that a pension spike was on the way, and Steve Greenhut of the Register brought wider scrutiny to the secret plan, that it was ultimately dropped. The fact that the market had really tanked by then helped.
For Meyer to try to grab the credit a year later is pretty low. Especially when he was one of the prime architects of the plan. He must think we have real short memories. Here’s your real hero:
Ultimately the credit goes to Nelson for the fortunate turn of events. For Meyer to take credit for any of this is just laughable.
Steven Greenhut confirmed the other day that uber right wing “Republican consultant John Lewis will be supporting (although not working for) Clerk/Recorder Tom Daly in his bid for the 4th district supervisorial seat once Chris Norby is termed out,” according to the Orange Punch Blog
. Apparently Lewis “appreciates that Daly was one of the very few people who backed Norby when the entire establishment was behind Cynthia Coad.”Greenhut points out the fact that Daly, who is a prominent Democrat, willl not likely be a better advocate for limited-government than either of the two likely Republican contenders, Fullerton Councilman Sean Nelson (Republican elected official of the year), or Anaheim Councilman Harry Sidhu.(Click here to read the rest of this article by Art Pedroza)
The Chinese calendar has recently ushered in the Year of The Ox, which seems appropriate in Fullerton given the recent clumsy effort by City Council bovine Dick Jones to attack Orange County Register editorial writer Steven Greenhut – for doing his job.
It seems that this prominent statocrat has held a grudge against Greenhut since he helped expose the closed-door public employee pension spike at the end of last summer. And so Jones, with his council colleague Don Bankhead in tow, attended a Chamber of Commerce function in which Register publisher Terry Horne was the guest speaker – and proceeded to publicly attack the Register for the damage done to his sterling reputation by Mr. Greenhut.
Horne, to his credit defended Greenhut’s professionalism and integrity against the odd effort by Jones to defend his own honor – something some Council observers thought he had abandoned after about three months on the Council. Jones is used to getting his own way, and it probably came as something of a shock to him that it’s a lot easier to bully the public from the council dais than it is to push around a newspaper publisher.
Rather than criticize the Register, and by extension Mr. Greenhut, Jones would do well to search his own conscience to find out why he consistently places the welfare of city employees ahead of the taxpayers and citizens of Fullerton.