I found this floating in cyber space today. https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/6891-pensiontheft-il-act-now
It is to organize the Illinois teachers unions against the upcoming pension solution bill in the legislature. They oppose the bill because it reduces the annual cost of living increase by about 1-3%. It makes more out of pocket expense for them, raises the retirement age, and some other things that are a reduction in taxpayer funded benefits. This propaganda is flawed, the cuts it mentions are exaggerated. Nothing is being "gutted." In fact, the only "gutting" for years to pay for this has been social service programs for the needy in Illinois, and other essential services across the board, which this fails to mention. The tiny percentage taken from the taxpayer funded pensions annual raises would stand to alleviate the pension shortfall by some $100 billion dollars over time. Some of the pension incomes are as high as $6,000/month, according to various sources, so that adds up. It was proposed by Democrats as well as Republicans. What an uproar about any reasonable proposal to come up with a solution to the parasitic pensions that are guaranteed on the wallets of all of the middle class, and working class. They need to understand their obligation, and that as of yet, the very wealthy, and corporate America are not set to pay a fair share of taxes, so this where the burden will remain.
Franklin D Roosevelt, leader of the armed forces that stopped Adolf Hitler's holocaust, founder of the New Deal, was considered one of the best presidents to have been in office by social democrats and others. He must be turning in his grave by now about public unions. He would have sympathy for all of the poor and low wage workers, struggling for basics, and see the need for protesting for fairness for them. While some unions have an unsustainable stranglehold on taxpayer dollars, and strike for more, they should remember what the labor movement was about, and see their gradual descent from it:
"Meticulous attention," the president insisted in 1937, "should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government....The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service......Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable. It is, therefore, with a feeling of gratification that I have noted in the constitution of the National Federation of Federal Employees the provision that "under no circumstances shall this Federation engage in or support strikes against the United States Government."-FDR
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