Yesterday, I wrote about an appalling but typical example of how bi-partisan "debate" is really an argument taking place on one side, in this case King Cuomo's immoral decision to attack workers' pensions by regurgitating Republican talking points that the economic crisis we face is the fault of the middle-class, workers, unions, and a generous way of life--not the fault of a greedy elite.
Today, we get another view of the one-sided nature of the debate, this time courtesy of The New York Times editorial board, which publishes an editorial that is shameful, full of errors and is simply another example of the crisis we all face.
Let's lay down the first marker here: it's not a new point to say that the editorial board of The New York Times is out of touch with the lives of regular workers. I have never quite understood why a lot of non-conservative people, who spend an inordinate amount of energy obsessing about FOX News, refer to the Times as "liberal"...whatever that means. Not a single one of those editorial members has ever held a job, outside of maybe a summer job slicing pizza (riding to work in daddy's Saab or Benz), that required that they actually punch in at 9 a.m., or work in any place but a very comfortable office. They are entirely clueless when it comes to the rigors of...well, work.
It's a paper whose editorial page actually has been rigorously aligned against workers and for the so-called "free market". Oh, sure, it frets when the "free market" gets a bit out of control. But, it has been a loud champion of the very "free market" philosophies that have hurt workers, notably it's loud cheerleading for every one of the so-called "free trade" deals that have been rammed down the throats of workers, and regularly spouts the foolish nonsense about the phony debt and deficit "crisis".
So, it is not surprising that the cloistered, comfortable denizens of the newspaper observe:
Gov. Andrew Cuomo campaigned for office vowing to reduce the ruinous growth in New York State’s public pensions, and on Wednesday he offered a strong set of proposals that would also rein in New York City’s skyrocketing costs. Although unions howled, such sacrifice is essential to preserve the state’s and the city’s most essential services. It is also fair that New York’s public workers — long cosseted by Albany — share more of the burden.
Over the last decade, the state’s pension costs have risen tenfold, and the city’s have risen nearly eightfold, largely because lawmakers were eager to curry favor with public employee unions, which are among their most generous campaign contributors.
While schoolchildren crammed into crowded classrooms and poor families lost medical coverage, public employees preserved better benefits than those in many other states and did far better than private-sector workers. [emphasis added]
And:
Employees would have to work 12 years instead of 10 to qualify for a pension. The proposal would end the widespread practice of padding pensions with overtime earned in the last year of a career. Many of these limits would also apply to newly hired teachers, New York City workers and, significantly, police and fire employees, who have long enjoyed extraordinarily generous pension benefits.
The most shameful part of the editorial is buying the-poodle-for-the-rich Governor's frame that it's the workers of the state of New York who must sacrifice and "share the burden".
"The burden"? I assume the "burden" the Times is referring to is the budget deficit the state faces--a budget deficit that has little to do with workers' salaries and pensions and mostly to do with two ECONOMIC FACTS:
1. Tax cuts enacted in 1994 in New York that overwhelmingly favored the wealthiest--tax cuts King Cuomo, the-poodle-for-the-rich, does not intend to undo because, heaven forbid, he alienate his current and future donors who will finance his maniacal drive for power. And, of course, The Times' Publisher Arthur Sulzberger certainly does not want to have to defend an editorial calling for a return to a progressive taxation system--which would eliminate any budget crisis--to his country-club friends or society friends who would have to pay slightly higher taxes for the greater good of those people who make it possible for them to drive to their country clubs on decent roads, or educate children who they might need to hire for their newest IPO-waiting, Internet-bubble driven company.
2. An economic crisis. I'm not referring to the economic crisis of 2008--engineered by Wall Street financiers, the kinds of people Sulzberger counts as his drinking buddies--which blew a hole in the finances of New York State government, not to mention millions of workers. No, I am referring to the economic crisis over thirty years that continually drains money away from the people and away from government services into the hands of the very few.
The Times editorial does come down on the side of a clear economic strategy: we don't believe in a middle-class anymore, we don't believe in unions, and we firmly believe in poverty because we do not believe that people should have a safe and secure retirement.
No? That is the only way to read this phrase: "public employees preserved better benefits than those in many other states and did far better than private-sector workers."
Let be clear about two ECONOMIC facts.
1. Public employees have negotiated better pensions because of unions and because of the DECLINE in unions in the private sector. It isn't some miracle that public sector unions have better negotiators than private sector unions. It is that private sector unions are disappearing. And, as an aside, when there are negotiations in the private sector, any measly dollar left on the table is usually something fought for to protect health care benefits, not increase wages or pensions.
2. Suggesting that public employees have pensions like the private sector says to older people, "fuck you if you have to eat dogfood". As I wrote yesterday, since 1978, the number of defined-benefit plans (meaning, real pensions where you can count on a set amount of money no matter what greedy Wall Street traders do) has plummeted from 128,041 plans covering some 41 percent of private-sector workers to only 26,000 today (source: Employee Benefit Research Institute). Only 21 percent of workers in the private sector have defined-benefit pensions. And almost have of the people with pensions today don't have them through the companies they work for--basically, because the CEOs are taking whatever cash is left on the table.
So, in a nutshell, this is the face of the crisis.
Every day, the people are being lied to about what we are up against. We are lied to by leaders of the two parties, who care only about their own political careers, and by media organs from "liberal" to "conservative" who want us to believe that the crisis we face is our fault and that workers should "share in the burden" of a crisis that he had ho role in creating.
The Times just jumps in on the pile, contributing to the raping of the middle class.