Today’s Phrase for Latin Lovers

Rem ipsam dic, mitte male loqui.

Translation:
Speak out the whole truth boldly, but use no bad language. -- John Adams, 1775

------------------

Visit Prudy's Latin Lovers Store for textbooks, readers and fun Latin miscellany!

Support this site. Buy a book.*

@PruPaine Tweets

Ancient History
|Prudence Paraphernalia | The Left

Flashback: WI Teacher Union Outraged Over No Viagra Benefits (UPDATED x2)

By Prudence, on February 18th, 2011%

[Updates at end!...but be sure to check out the new logo that SooperMexican designed for the Wisconsin "public service" union knuckleheads: click here.]

Last August, the Milwaulkee school district’s teacher’s union was all up in arms—insisting they get their Viagra pills put back into their relatively free health insurance plans.

In an article titled “Despite Budget Cuts, Layoff Fears, Milwaukee Teachers Fight for Taxpayer-Funded Viagra,” Fox News reported:

At least one lawmaker questioned why the union is fighting for Viagra while teachers are losing their jobs. A consultant for the school board has estimated that reinstating the drug benefit would cost $786,000 per year — the cost to keep perhaps a dozen first-year teachers employed.

For the math challenged, that works out to a first-year teacher earning $65,500. Sign me up!

The article also said:

The union has argued the costs are tiny compared to the $1.3 billion annual budget. But the school board says they are “particularly burdensome” when it is under pressure to reduce benefit costs.

That the pills — which can cost $20 apiece without insurance — were included in the first place is somewhat unusual. Health insurer Aetna Inc., which provides one of the district’s two plans, says its standard pharmacy plans exclude Viagra and other “drugs for lifestyle enhancement or performance.”

Note that the teachers pay little if anything at all for their health plans. Yet:

Board and union negotiators reached a deal in 2002 to cover six tablets per month for erectile dysfunction drugs in health plans that insure 10,000 employees, dependents and retirees. They quickly became popular.

By 2004, the number of claimants receiving prescriptions skyrocketed to more than 1,000 per year, costing the district $207,000. During negotiations in 2005, the board proposed eliminating the benefit and an arbitrator adopted the plan.

A gender discrimination suit has apparently held up the removal of Viagra from the health plans.

And now these teachers have flooded the halls of the Madison capitol building complaining that they shouldn’t have to contribute anything to cover their health care—among other whines.

I could make a bad off-color joke here about how this Viagra protest was a perfect example of how the teacher unions can’t even screw the public on their own but instead demand the public pay them to do it…but I won’t.

UPDATE:

Several bloggers have done an excellent job in summarizing the events of the Wisconsin union agitations this week:

Jimmie Bise, aka @JimmieBJR, at The Sundries Shack says “This Is the Week That Should End Public Sector Unions” and I could not agree more.

Public sector unions are, as I have said before, a blight on our states and nation. We should do everything in our power to rid ourselves of them entirely and make sure, by law if necessary, that they can never come back again. It would make me very happy if Governor Walker fired every single teacher who called out sick over the past two days. They let down the taxpayers of Wisconsin and, more importantly, taught their students that it’s okay to lie, cheat, and steal in order to get what you want.

What’s more, government “bargaining” agreements with public employees is are no bargain for taxpayers who are essentially unrepresented in any “negotiations.” It’s not the bureaucrat’s money on the line that he gives away without much concern for the fiscal consequences down the line.

Dan Collins, aka @vermontaigne,  of Piece Of Work In Progress says he can’t write much today because of other work and then proceeds to put together an amazing collection of links pertaining to the extortion protests going on in Wisconsin—including creating a new verse to the The Who’s “Magic Bus” which he renames “Union Bus.”

Dan, a former Wisonsin native, wrote at POWIP.com:

What I’d like to see is someone go out and video reactions when they tell the kids that these apparent holidays now will mean make-up days in June. Think any of their teachers taking them to rally have told them that? I seem to recall that Wisconsin has laws regarding truancy, too, or at least so I was told with regard to Senior Skip Day when I was in school.

And then there’s @diggrbiii of The Right Sphere, who writes in his post titled “OFA (Obama’s Re-Election Campaign) Organizes Civil Unrest”:

This entire situation is a case study in corruption. As Jenny Erikson explains, Public Sector unions are inherently corrupt because when they protest, they don’t just impact a company or an industry, they impact the whole society. The PUBLIC. In this case, school districts get shut down. A couple of months ago, people died because a Public Sector Union in New York City decided they were going to send a message to the city leadership.  Public Sector Unions can hold the public hostage. How is that fair to everyone else? Where’s the equality there?

He concludes his post with an update saying the DNC is now claiming they haven’t helped the WI hoopla all that much. I’ve been collecting a bit of evidence on that. Let’s see if I find time to “organize” it and get it posted.

Update #2

Nope, sorry, didn’t get it all organized in time. Still plan to give a few links, but in the meantime I highly recommend checking out two items at SooperMexican’s site:

  1. A union teacher forgets to close the flap on her union suit before she calls into the Tim Conway Jr. radio show because she sure shows her bare bottom, and
  2. The Wisconsin public service unions get a new logo.

Also have you heard about the debacle into which the unions have plunged the Detroit schools? http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/02/21/national/main20034397.shtml

State education officials have ordered the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools to immediately implement a plan that balances the district’s books by closing half its schools.

The Detroit News says the financial restructuring plan will increase high school class sizes to 60 students and consolidate operations.

Hear that? Sixty students per class.  I have substitute taught in high schools before. I can’t imagine how you could ever sufficiently instruct each of those 60 students, let alone even know who they are. A class period would allot for less than one minute of attention per student. Most classrooms barely hold 30 students. How will they pack 60 into one class?

Perhaps Detroit should look at eliminating the administration and the unions and focus on teaching children. Or just give in already and give the money to the private schools to take over the entire system. It would really be for the best.

Oh! and welcome to POWIP readers. Dan Collins has done some fantastic commentary and reporting on the Wisconsin union pity parade (including this post on the shenanigans the Wisconsin Democrats tried to pull in a special lame duck session before the Republicans took over)….AND on the Detroit closing (I can’t stay ahead of that guy)… and the sorry state of the Milwaukee public schools and the interesting reason why they are struggling. I could link to practically all of his recent posts for you. But instead, I suggest just going there and perusing all the posts yourself. I’m sure you’ll find something of interest.

3 comments   Prudence Paraphernalia, The Left   , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  
|Nostalgia | Prudence Paraphernalia

Pictures Tell the Story: Decline and Devastation Wrought Under Democrat Rule

By Prudence, on January 4th, 2011%

As the wealth stampeded out of Detroit mid-dance, they left behind all their trappings, as seen in the ballroom of the Lee Plaza Hotel, a 15-story art deco luxury, full-service apartment building built in the glory days of 1929 and abandoned in the 1990s.

Cry, our beloved Detroit. It’s so easy to forget your heyday, when you rivaled other major cities with your grand architecture and the wealth coursing through your streets and powerful offices, the shining example of industry and efficiency.

The desolation of Detroit has previously been compared pictorially with the aftermath of Nagasaki. However, a shocking new book of photos, The Ruins of Detroit, taken by 20-something French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, show the truth of such analogies. Picture after picture in this book tells the heartbreaking story of a city soiled and abandoned.

In the biology classroom of Highland Park's George W Ferris School, one can almost hear the echoes of the droning instruction moments before everyone fled. It's hard to tell who ran out first: the students or the teachers. It is evident that even the janitorial staff was too fearful to ever return again.

It’s as if the occupants grew disgusted and simply walked away, leaving all their possessions behind to rot and fester.

The moldering remains are emblematic of a society that grew lazy and couldn’t bother to fend for itself. The photos show it was even too much effort to try to salvage what’s left.

These photos present a cautionary tale, which will likely continue to go unheeded. Detroit has been under Democratic rule since 1962, nearly half a century. And yet, the residents, seeing their city fall to the ground around them, continue to elect Democrats and expect a different result.

The remnants of the closed Highland Police Station illustrate the absolute neglect and chaos of the city and its utter disregard for law and order. It's clear that no one saw anything worth saving here, from the furniture and fixtures to the victims who cried out for their help.

The BlogProf has a eye-popping collection of links that demonstrate the absolute devastation that Detroit has given itself over to.

This story wasn’t run in the American mainstream media, where the shame of Detroit is swept under the obituary page. Instead it was told in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, which offers a fuller selection of the photos from the book. The book itself is not readily available in the US, though it can be purchased at the UK Amazon site.

Built 100 years ago, the Gothic Revival--style Woodward Avenue Presbyterian Church quietly falls into shambles with no parishoners left to pray for it.

The equipment remains plugged in at a forsaken dentist's office in Detroit's Broderick Tower.

The Guardian describes the book saying:

This sense of loss is what Marchand and Meffre have captured in image after image, whether of vast downtown vistas where every tower block is boarded-up or ravaged interior landscapes where the baroque stonework, often made from marble imported from Europe, is slowly crumbling and collapsing. The pair have photographed once-grand hotels that were built in a carefree mix of gothic, art deco, Moorish and medieval styles, as well as countless baroque theatres, movie houses and ballrooms —the Vanity, where big band giants such as Duke Ellington and Tommy Dorsey played in the 1930s; the Eastown theatre, where pioneering hard rock groups like Iggy and the Stooges and the MC5 held court in the 1960s.

They have also captured for posterity the desolate interiors that once made up the city’s civic infrastructure: courthouses, churches, schools, dentists, police stations, jails, public libraries and swimming pools, all of which have most of their original fixtures and fittings intact. “As Europeans, we were looking with an outsider’s eye, which made downtown Detroit seem even more strange and dramatic,” says Meffre. “We are not used to seeing empty buildings left intact. In Europe, salvage companies move in immediately and take what they can sell as antiques. Here, they only take the metal piping to sell for scrap. In the Vanity ballroom alone, we saw four giant art deco chandeliers, beautiful objects, each one unique. It was almost unbelievable that they could still be there. It is as if America has no sense of its own architectural history and culture.”

In the story, the two young photographers, Marchand and Meffre, and how they stumbled upon Detroit from Paris were described thusly:

Marchand (29) and Meffre (23) have been taking photographs together since they first met in 2002. They are both children of Paris’s banlieue, hailing from the southern suburbs of the city. Without formal training, they describe themselves as “autodidacts who share an obsession with ruins”, which, says Meffre, “allow you to appear to enter a different world, a lost world, and to report back from there”.

Having photographed old buildings – “mainly disused theatres” – in Paris, they happened upon an image of Michigan Central train station in Detroit while surfing the internet for pictures of abandoned buildings. “It was so stately and so dramatic that we decided right then we had to go,” says Meffre, “but we were naive; we had no idea of the scale of the project, of the vastness of downtown Detroit and its ruins. There is nothing comparable in Europe.”

The books await patrons that will never come again to the East Side Public Library.

Poor Detroit. The last one out didn’t even remember to turn off the lights or close the door.

3 comments   Nostalgia, Prudence Paraphernalia   , , ,