Pasadena Sub Rosa

STATE BUDGET TRAILER BILL PROTECTS TEACHERS

Lawmakers suspend fiscal oversight

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Provisions in trailer bill appall school officials

Posted on 6/30/11 • Categorized as State Budget, Taxes

By John Fensterwald - Educated Guess

Superintendents, business officers, and budget consultants are expressing bewilderment over demands and restrictions in the education trailer bill – AB 114 – that they say could throw already financially stressed school districts into serious financial jeopardy. School Services of California, which advises many districts on financial issues, has called on Gov. Jerry Brown to veto one particularly worrisome section of the bill that suspends fiscal oversight by county offices of education for the coming year. In adopting the provision, theLegislature “has eclipsed all of its previous low standards for ethics and integrity,” the company wrote on its website.

The 100-page trailer bill was published Wednesday morning, 12 hours after Democrats in the Legislature passed it without discussion. Except perhaps for a handful of insiders, educators had no idea what was in it.

After manipulating Proposition 98, which determines how much will be spent on education, legislators appropriated the same amount for K-12 schools as last year. Because it is based on an optimistic projection of $4 billion in additional revenue, the budget also lays out $1.9 billion in cuts, primarily by shortening the school year by as much as a week, if by January revenues are coming up short.

The problem is not the budget per se. Some school officials say it may be the best that schools could have expected, given Republican legislators’ refusal to extend about $10 billion in temporary taxes. “To this point, I have no quarrel” with legislators or with Gov. Jerry Brown, who “asked for shared sacrifice” and “put out a responsible and fair solution,” said Michael Hulsizer, chief deputy for governmental affairs in the Kern County Office of Education.

But in the trailer bill, he said, legislators “did things that tie hands of school district boards, superintendents, and county superintendents that provide oversight of budgets. They limit officials at local levels to respond to the same risks they acknowledge exist through midyear cuts.”

AB 114 does this in three ways:

1) Requiring that each school district, regardless of its individual circumstances, assume the same level of funding as last year and maintain staffing and program levels consistent with that. Legislators are dictating this even though they admit there’s a good chance that revenues may not bear that out. Many districts, taking no chances, set aside in reserve $350per student to cover a possible $2 billion revenue shortfall. Now the Legislature is saying abandon that caution and rehire teachers and staff and reinstitute programs as before, Hulsizer said. School Services observed that even with the same amount of state revenue, expenses  and other f actors– health care costs, depletion of federal stimulus money, step increases in salaries – require adjustments.

Those districts that based their budget on Brown’s May budget revision – and its assumption that temporary taxes would be extended – might choose to make further cuts now. But the Legislature precluded that by:

2) Eliminating the option that districts would have over the next 45 days to make staff adjustments if they view this as necessary. Instead, the Legislature is suspending that capability under the law for the next year. As School Services noted, “This provision is clearly designed to protect union positions, even if the district cannot afford to pay for the services.”

Once the 45 days are up, districts no longer will be able to lay off any certificated teachers this year. That means that if revenues turn south, their only option will be cutting the year short, cutting teachers’ pay but also shrinking learning time. That may be the Legislature’s intent, but furloughs still must be negotiated locally. The Legislature did not authorize school districts to unilaterally impose them. Some local unions may resist additional furloughs or stretch out negotiations for months. If so, districts could run into big money problems.

“So the Budget is essentially limiting schools to only one tool in their toolbox – furloughs – for dealing with mid-year cuts,” Bob Blattner of Blattner & Associates, an education consulting firm based in Sacramento, wrote in a memo. “And furloughs are the equivalent of a two-handed saw; if the local bargaining units don’t help from their end, the tool is useless.”

Some privately speculate that the two provisions are a payoff to the California Teachers Association for agreeing not to file suit over the machinations that siphoned about $2 billion away from Prop 98 for a year. (AB 114 includes a commitment to repay schools the money over five years, though one Legislature cannot bind the next to do that.)

But the new president of the California Teachers Association, Dean Vogel, doesn’t see it this way. Calling from the National Education Assn. convention in Chicago, he said that suspending the August layoff provision will provide stability to school districts and set the right spending priorities. “This will give districts, teachers, and students assurance that once they begin the school year, the learning environment will not be disrupted.”

What most exasperated school officials was the final provision:

3) Suspending key provisions for one year of AB 1200, under which school districts must self-certify that they can balance their budgets in the current year and one and two years into the future. Those that cannot must work with their county office of education to align revenues and spending. This year 13 districts were negatively certified in the latest filing, indicating they could not balance their budgets this year and next. An additional 130 districts – nearly one in seven – acknowledged trouble balancing their budgets two years out. AB 114 would require districts to assume the same revenue as this year and prevent county offices from seeking evidence of financial stability for the next two years.

Blattner likens this to “sending riders in a dirt-bike race with blindfolds on. You have got to see what’s coming around the corner.”

Hulsizer said it would be “frightening to pull the plug on a warning system that works. The consequence will be to enable districts to make bad decisions.” A year from now, he said, districts will declare insolvency.

In his letter to Brown, School Services CEO and President Ron Bennett was more specific. “Stripping the county superintendents of their oversight responsibilities in 2011-12 will almost certainly bring dozens, if not hundreds, of school districts to the state’s door for emergency loans in future years,” he wrote. “The authority of the county superintendents to protect the state should not be taken away when it is needed most.”

At the same time, in its commentary to client districts, School Services predicted that districts would continue to do their multi-year financial projections anyway. If they don’t, they won’t be able to obtain short-term loans, called TRANs, that will keep districts afloat. “It would be difficult to find even one district chief business official who would be stupid enough to follow this misguided direction from the state,” the commentary said.

Tagged as: AB 114, Bob Blattner, Michael Hulsizer, School Services of California, trailer bill

 

PUSD SHUT OUT IN TOP 500 SCHOOLS IN U.S. LIST

Arcadia, Temple City and La Canada made the list.  PUSD did not have one school on the list compiled by Newsweek. Link

http://www.newsweek.com/content/newsweek/feature/2011/americas-best-high-schools.html 

VANDALS PLUNDER RURAL CAL: CITIES NEXT

THE METAPHYSICS OF CONTEMPORARY THEFT
Victor Davis Hanson - Pajamas Media

Same old, same old…

Last week was another somewhat depressing chapter in a now long saga of living where I was born. I returned to the farm from leading a European military history tour, and experienced the following—mind you, after a number of thefts the month prior (barn, shop, etc.):

1) I left my chain saw in the driveway to use the restroom inside the house. Someone driving buy saw it. He slammed on the brakes, stole it and drove off. Neat, quick, easy. Mind you there was only a 5-minute hiatus in between my cutting. And the driver was a random passer-by. That suggests to me that a high number of rural Fresno County motorists can prove to be opportunistic thieves at any given moment. The saw was new; I liked it—an off-the-shelf $400 Echo that ran well. I assume it will be sold off at a rural intersection in these parts, or the nearby swap meet for about $60. I doubt the thief was a professional woodsman who needed a tool of the trade to survive.

2) On the next night, three 15-hp agriculture pumps on our farm were vandalized—all the copper wire was torn out of the electrical conduits. The repairs to each one might run $500; yet, the value of the wire could not be over $50. I was told by neighbors that reports and descriptions of the law-breakers focused on youthful thieves casing the countryside—in official parlance a “gang”, and in the neighborhood politically-incorrect patois “cholos”—like the fellow who recently drove in, in his new lowered shiny red pickup (hydraulic lifters are not cheap), inquiring about buying “scrap” and “just looking” before I ran him out.

3) A neighbor has a house for sale. It is unoccupied and rather isolated. I saw someone approach it on Friday, and drove over to ensure he was lawful. It was the owner’s assistant who lamented that someone had just stolen all the new appliances out of the house—carting off the refrigerator, dish-washer, stove, and microwave. But why? Do these miscreants wish a civilization of the sort that all houses must seem occupied all the time, or are otherwise considered ‘communal property’ for the taking? Don’t the appliance thieves have homes, and if so, do they have locks on the doors to protect their investments from the likes of themselves?

These days I sympathize with gloomy St. Augustine, writing after the sack of Rome in 410, and then again contemplating things lost when back home, near death and besieged by the vandals at Hippo Regius. He died I think convinced that a millennium of culture was about to end. And despite a Belisarius to come, it did.

Reflections on the Redistributive State

I think the public would react in two different ways to the above occurrences—and such a dichotomy explains a lot why the nation has never been more divided.

A majority would believe the thieves took things for drugs, excitement, or to buy things like an IPhone or DVD, rather than out of elemental need (e.g., the thief hawked the chain saw to purchase the family’s rice allotment for the week). In this view, contemporary American crime arises not so much then from Dickensian poverty, as we see in South America or Africa, but out of a sense of resentment, of boredom, from a certain contempt for the more law-abiding and successful, or on the assurance that apprehension is unlikely, and punishment rarer still. After all, Hollywood, pop music, the court system, the government itself sympathizes with, even romanticizes those forced to take a chain saw, not the old middle-class bore who bought it.

The remedy to address theft would be not more government help—public assistance, social welfare, counseling—but far less, given that human nature rises to the occasion when forced to work and sinks when leisured and exempt. I don’t believed my thieves have worked much, and instead figured a day’s theft beats tile setting or concrete work beginning at 5 AM.

I conclude that most Americans would agree that chain-sawing a peach tree or pumping irrigation water enriches the nation, while cruising around looking to destroy such activity does not. The latter represents the sort of social parasitism that I read about each Saturday night in our environs (and, in terms of illegal immigration, once wrote about inMexifornia — a book I seemed doomed to relive in Ground Hog fashion each day — nearly a decade ago): gang-banger A shoots up gang banger B; B goes to emergency room for publicly funded $250,000 worth of surgery and post-op treatment by C, an MD, who otherwise would have been insulted and intimidated by A or B should he have met either earlier in the day. Indeed, C is more likely to be ridiculed or sued by B than thanked. And yet C does not need either A or B; both need the former in extremis.

Where does this all end—these open borders, unsustainable entitlements and public union benefits and salaries, these revolving door prisons and Al Gore-like energy fantasies?

We are left with a paradox. The taxpayer cannot indefinitely fund the emergency room treatment for the shooter and his victim on Saturday night if society cannot put a tool down for five minutes without a likely theft, or a farmer cannot turn on a 50-year old pump without expecting its electrical connections to have been ripped out. Civilization simply cannot function that way for either the productive citizen or the parasite, who still needs a live host.

I will make a wild leap and suggest that a vast majority of Americans are reaching the point where they accept that the blue statist paradigm is reaching its logical end, and simply cannot go on any more, given that it is antithetical to human nature itself. There is not always a Germany for every Greece. Let me offer a few examples:

In the American southwest, open borders, unassimilated illegal immigrants, ethnic and tribal chauvinism predicated on racial solidarity (after all, La Raza, Inc. is not complaining about the deportation of the Korean or Ugandan who overstays his visa or agitating for an open immigration policy with Kenya), a culture of grievance and complaint, all embedded in a contempt for federal law—all that leads to enclaves that resemble more the country abandoned than sought out. In other words the entire therapeutic vision of illegal immigration would lead to a society to which illegal immigrants would not wish to flock. Only assimilation, intermarriage, integration, legality, mastery of English, and acceptance of American culture would ensure the continuance of the sort of society which future illegal aliens would wish to cross into.

The same is true of unions, pensions, and compensation. Highly paid and pensioned California teachers and professors are resembling bishops, knights or rooks surrounded by a host of part-time, temporary, one-year contract pawns, lacking the salary, security, and benefits of the kingpins. Yet the liberal establishment in education cannot continue in such an apartheid world of unionized winners and exploited subordinate losers, or public fiefdoms propped up by private toilers. It is a contradiction in terms, and there is no money to pay for it, despite the fiscal logic of its exploitation. The logical conclusion to the blue state would be a handful of six-figured union grandees surrounded by a sea of part-time lackies. (sort of like the CSU system with its blue-chip administrators and tenured faculty propped up by legions of part-time lecturers). Note the surrealism of the European unrest: who are the “they” who “stole” the money that is now no longer there to fund socialism? Did not the socialists at last get what they wanted? The “they” who used to fund it by expanding the economy disappeared a long time ago and now lie in the graveyards of Europe.

I went to the warehouse local food store the other day, soaked it all in, and wondered: if everyone is on food stamps (actually computerized government plastic credit cards designed to avoid the old stigma of pulling out a coupon), are there still food stamps? We are nearing 50 million recipients. So what will come next? Food stamp A, Food Stamp Category B? Super-food stamps? Can 100 million receive then? 150?

Our California prison system is said to be letting out 30,000-40,000 criminals. If all the court rulings mandating libraries, counseling, second medical opinions, legal help, etc., coupled with the cost of a unionized, highly compensated guild of guards, makes prison too expensive, then will we be left with virtual prisons in which trials and sentencing are followed by freedom? If it is cheaper each year to send the felon to UCLA or even Stanford, why then have a prison—a new metaphor for almost everything gone wrong with contemporary American society.

This liberal notion of being careful of what you wish for extends to energy. Obama promised “skyrocketing” energy prices, and to “bankrupt” coal, and has discouraged almost all new fossil fuel production (a great wonder of the age is how private enterprise keeps finding new gas and oil reserves despite the discouragement of the government), why then he is worried about $4 gas. Is not $4 or $5 gas the point?

It is near $10 in Europe. So why not soon here the same? If the university president cannot afford to drive his Lexus to campus, if the trial lawyer cannot take his Mercedes to Yosemite, if the professor’s Volvo is too expensive to drive to the postmodern lit conference, have we reached nirvana or chaos?

Watching the tastes, the behavior, the rhetoric, the appointments, and the policy of this administration suggests to me that it is not really serious in radically altering the existing order, which it counts on despite itself. Its real goal is a sort of parasitism that assumes the survivability of the enfeebled host. That does not mean it has not done a lot of damage and will do even more in the next two years, only that it never quite wanted to see cap and trade legislation enacted, blanket amnesty, Guantamo shut down or Predators ended; these were simply crude slurs by which to demonize Bush, ways of acquiring power and influence, but not a workable plan of living. Note that Obama is now zealous on just those issues which he could have easily rammed through his Democratically-controlled congress in 2009-10 when he had large majorities, such as amnesty, cap and trade.

You cannot fly to Costa del Sol on solar panels. The light switches might not go on at Vail without coal burning somewhere. The Holder or Obama children might not be safe in the Stockton or Parlier city schools. Some right-wing nut in the Dakotas is still necessary to pump the oil to refine the gas for Air Force One; there is no golf without an irrigation system and a supply of either ground or surface water.

In short, the currently insulted class is necessary and Obama knows it.

If I were not flying economy today for eight hours to speak on the other side of the country, and did not write this reflection, cramped up on the plane, there would soon will be no more chain saws or copper wire for the oppressed in my region to steal.

 

PORTANTINO'S FAKE OUTRAGE PROVOKES BRAWL IN LEGISLATURE

GO HERE TO SEE THE PROVOCATEUR IN ACTION

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/nov05election/detail?entry_id=91132

 

A MESSAGE TO MICHELLE OBAMA UPON VISITING PASADENA

Confession of a Reluctant Tea-Partier

By Luba Sindler - American Thinker

In the Soviet Union any mass expression of public sentiment was by definition a fraud.  To participate in a demonstration of any kind meant a complete waste of a perfectly good day.  All organizations got their quotas to provide a certain amount of bodies to march through the town celebrating state holidays.  Being a child was no excuse -- I remember taking part in an annual May Day demonstration as a 10-year-old member of an ice-skating girls' group.  The sacred duty of any self-respecting citizen was to avoid being drafted at all costs.  I could not imagine that intelligent people could spend time and energy coming to a rally of their own free will.

My late and very much missed father used to say: "First, you have to know why you want to leave the old country, and only then to decide why you want to settle in a new one."  Boy, did we know the first part!  Our difficult journey to America started in 1978 and ended in 1987 -- nine long years of being "refuseniks," surviving persecution with humor and general youthful light-heartedness.  There was no time or opportunity to follow the second part of my father's advice.

My family came to the United States the day before the Thanksgiving of 1987.  Being intellectually curious, I immediately began wondering how this country functions and what makes the United States the envy of the world (don't believe all that criticism from outside -- it's mostly ignorance).  As a confirmed bookworm I started reading everything in sight from the Constitution and Federalist Papers to the New York Times to National Review by way of the Economist and the Village Voice.  My English improved dramatically but my respect for the media evaporated.  However, I got some basic knowledge of American institutions.

My husband and I applied for US citizenship the day we became eligible.  I think my examining officer got the shock of his life when during the interview I recited the Bill of Rights, named all Supreme Court justices and added the names of all elected officials of the state including our hapless congressman.  Talk about useless knowledge!  After that we proudly voted in every election, but the idea of venturing a political opinion never crossed my mind (an unfortunate result of being brought up in a totalitarian society where keeping your mouth shut is a basic rule of survival).  There was something unseemly in proclaiming my deep love and appreciation of America for all to hear.

When candidate Obama showed up, I realized that I had heard his typical stump speech every single day of my old Soviet life from big and small Communist party bosses -- the same structure, the same cadences, the same bogeymen, the same demagoguery, the same targets.  The American people had no defense against this rhetoric.  The result of the elections was totally predictable.  To me it was a "Back to the Future" moment.

Imagine you are having a terrible nightmare.  Just as you are about to suffer torture or certain death, you wake up and realize the sun is shining, your family is peacefully sleeping, and everything is in place.  After enjoying a few blissful moments, you turn your head and see that hideous monster from your dream coming after you for real.  This image described the trajectory of my life perfectly.  Running from Communism, finding the safe haven and a new life, and now to have the same wrecking crew coming even here?

In February or March of 2009 my husband, two friends, and I went to the first New York City Tea Party in front of City Hall -- more out of helplessness than anything else.  The signs were great and funny, including a board showing odious Senator Schumer as Marie Antoinette.  When a man next to me remarked on the steadfast conservatism of the Cuban-American community, I mentioned the huge Russian contingent right here in New York City as an equally conservative bloc.  He looked at me like I was from outer space.

I attended a few more Tea Parties in our area (my husband dropped out, not believing in lost causes) just to support a worthy idea, not to expect any tangible result.  Then we found out about a big march on Washington on September 12, 2009 and decided to give it a try.  The march was already in progress when five of us emerged from a downtown metro station and joined in our first protest action.

The atmosphere was incredible.  Complete strangers were talking to each other, taking pictures of thousands of funny posters, smiling, and feeling as one.  Contrary to popular opinion outside the United States, here was an ample proof that Americans have a great sense of humor.  There were so many people that it was not really possible to see, let alone really hear the speakers.  But nobody cared.  People were just expressing their opinions in a typical American fashion, loud and clear.

I felt as if I had come home.  Or, to paraphrase our First Lady, for the first time in my life I felt like a real, full-blooded, free American.  It was glorious. 

Luba Sindler is an overeducated classical musician who ponders the world's problems in her spare time.  Obviously, she has too much time on her hands.

 

STOCKTON SWAT RAID A REPEAT OF SUB-PRIME LOAN PROGRAM

By Wayne Lusvardi

As recently pointed out by no less than eminent sociologist Peter Berger “symbols of tyranny” are on the rise in America such as the body pat downs at airports, the legal “degradation rituals” of putting criminal suspects through a “perp walk” even though there is supposedly a presumption of innocence, the revival of old fashioned “chain gang” prisoner work crews, and the arrangements of Congressional hearings where the interrogators sit on raised platforms over the “serfs” who are summoned to appear before them. Link: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/berger/2011/06/01/symbols-of-tyranny-in-america/

Of greater concern are the reported tragic cases of SWAT team raids where nervous police have targeted the wrong person and ended up killing them. 

But the recent report at NetRightDaily.com is also symbolic of a widespread paranoia initially triggered by liberal-tabloid TV broadcast media that spreads virally through both Right and Left-wing websites without any fact checking on the truth.

Let’s take a look at the case in Stockton, California where KXTV Channel 10 in Sacramento initially reported that a local police SWAT Team had raided a home purportedly because the “estranged wife” of the male occupant of a home had failed to pay student loans.

First, I called the Stockton PD and they told me they only had a backup “black and white” unit at the scene and that the raid was conducted by theFederal Office of Inspector General (OIG) acting on a search warrant. The Stockton PD public affairs officers told me that an unpaid student loan would be a civil, not criminal, matter and would not ever trigger a police raid on a home.

I checked online and KXTV had already issued a correction on their online webpage indicating that the raid was not by the Stockton Police but they stuck to their erroneous story about an unpaid student loan as the legal grounds for the raid.

I then found online the actual Search Warrant issued by U.S. Magistrate Judge Gregory G. Hollows on June 3. Link: http://www.news10.net/news/pdf/Ed-dept-Wright-warrant-060711.pdf

I had a retired prosecutor friend of mine look at the warrant. Here is what he indicated. He noted that the Search Warrant is missing the statement of the Affiant (officer who describes the basis for why the warrant is necessary).  This statement should include a factual rundown of the alleged criminal activity, how the activity was executed, and why the criminal activity is reasonably ties to the suspect, etc.

Later, the Inspector General’s Office released a statement that the raid did not involve a mere unpaid student loan but a case involving student aid “fraud, bribery and embezzlement.” 

This squared with what both the Stockton PD and my prosecutor friend told me.  He said that his reading of the warrant and his experience suggests that the suspect was using phony I.D.’s and documents to obtain a large number of student loans.  “The total amount of the student loans obtained probably constitutes a very significant amount of money, which is what triggered such a major response for serving the warrant,” my source said.  He added that it is “just a guess, but I’ll bet the figure is in the millions.  It also may be part of a larger ring.”  

My prosecutor source also said he doubted whether you could find a judge anywhere that would issue a “no knock” search warrant on a civil matter of an unpaid student loan, which would be a violation of the 4^th Amendment against illegal searches and seizures.  

The alleged female defendant in this case was not at home at 6 a.m. and no one reported whether she had fled, been detained and was being held in jail, or had failed to appear or produce records in response to a bench warrant.  It later was reported in the media that the alleged victim of the raid, a male ex-spouse, was also named as a suspect in the case.

Coincidentally, I also found online that on June 8 in South Carolina a different woman had pled guilty to student loan fraud she had pulled off while an inmate at the Leath Correctional Institute in Greenville, South Carolina.  She used phony I.D.’s to apply for 23 student loans totaling $467,500 while working as an inmate in the educational department of the prison. Link: 
http://kirkwood-webstergroves.patch.com/articles/woman-pleads-guilty-in-webster-university-fraud-case

Apparently under the Obama Administration, student loans are so easy to apply for if you use a false ID that it is being used as a form of welfare. My guess is that there is a widespread informal criminal network a la ACORN involved with the Internet being the facilitator both with how to apply for student loans and how to pull the crime off.  

Coming back to the situation in Stockton, it is now apparent that the raid involved gathering information about stolen ID’s used to obtain fraudulent student loans.  The media story about a raid aid on an ex-spouses home for unpaid student loans was in error. And the so-declared victim boyfriend was an apparent accomplice in this case.  How much more could you get wrong in a news story? 

The initial media story of the Stockton SWAT raid was overblown but was great “news” for a slow TV news day. It resonated with a fearful audience overloaded with debts.  

I followed up on the story and could not find one media source that has come out with the true context of the SWAT raid in Stockton. 

In a scene from some sort of parallel universe, coincidentally a Florida couple that had erroneously had their house foreclosed on by a bank were able to secure a court judgment to “raid” branch of the Bank of America to seize furniture, computers and cash on the premises to recover their legal fees.  The legal system in the U.S. isn’t entirely broken or corrupted.

There is a bigger story here about institutional corruption that breeds both loan fraud and police raids, albeit legal.  What the Stockton SWAT case reflects is the metastasizing of a government loan program into what political scientist Walter Russell Mead calls a Great White Hope, then into a Great White Father, then into a Great White Elephant, and finally a Great White Shark. At the “shark” stage of such government programs they turn criminal and deadly. Link: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/06/10/when-government-jumps-the-shark/

Loan recipients turn into criminal plunderers of the system and those that administer the program have to turn into police or hire paramilitary units to keep the criminality in check. But the criminality is so widespread that they mainly focus on only the most flagrant violators involving the largest sums of money.  

This is reminiscent of what we just experienced with the sub-prime loan scandal and Bank Panic of 2008, only with foreclosures instead of police raids.  There is an institutional basis to both. This is what we can expect with Obamacare.  

Here we seem to be facing what historian Klaus Bringmann describes in his book A History of the Roman Republic where free distribution of grain hastened the collapse of the empire.

 

PASADENA LOSES 100 JOBS TO FLORIDA

The City of Pasadena and the Pasadena School District has spent over $2 billion dollars in Federal Stimulus monies and bond funds to stimulate the local economy. But all of the money has gone to government, unions or well-connected cronies. The result: A security firm is moving out of Pasadena and taking its 100 jobs with them to Florida. 

CANADIAN SECURITY FIRM BRINGING 100 JOBS TO FLORIDA

Garda shifts U.S. headquarters from California to Boca Raton

Published: Wednesday, June 8, 2011 7:00 am

SUNSHINESTATENEWS.COM  BY: KENRIC WARD 
Gov. Rick Scott confirmed Wednesday that a security and cash logistics company is moving its U.S. headquarters to Florida, bringing 100 jobs to the state with an average wage of more than $65,000.

The relocation, which had been announced in press reports back in February, involves Montreal-based Garda World Security Services. The company's U.S. office will  move from Pasadena, Calif., to Boca Raton.

Stéphan Crétier, Garda's president and CEO said he was "excited to move our U.S. headquarters to Boca Raton, which will provide us the ability to expand in the United States."

With more than 50,000 employees in North America, Mexico, Europe and the Mideast, the 15-year-old company provides an array of services, ranging from physical security and pre-employment screening to "cash logistics" through armored cars.

Garda's website says the company's Consulting & Investigation group helps organizations "gather business intelligence to make more informed business decisions prior to business activities, such as mergers and acquisitions or joint ventures, as well as investigate incidents of unethical or illegal behavior."

Posting $1.2 billion in annual revenue, Garda is the sixth largest security and logistics company in the world, and ranks second behind Brinks in cash logistics in North America after entering the U.S. market six years ago.

Cretier said he was "impressed with the vibrant business climate Florida is seeking to create" and appreciated the attention his company received from Scott, who contacted Garda in January.

"Gov. Scott called on his fifth day on the job," Cretier related. "I do a lot of sales as a CEO, and I was very impressed."

Garda reportedly was considering a move to Illinois or Delaware at the time. Those states, as well as California, have significantly higher corporate tax rates than Florida.

Scott, who has been in Canada since Monday, said he plans to meet with 120 companies to pitch economic opportunity in Florida.

"We have the benefit of adding jobs while unemployment is up in the United States. We're capturing the attention of business worldwide," he said at a joint news conference with Cretier in Montreal.

Scott called Garda's move a "win-win for Quebec and Florida," and thanked the Palm Beach County Business Development Board for its work in landing the company.

State and local officials agreed to provide Garda with $1 million in incentives. In exchange, Garda would hire 100 people by the end of 2013 at an average salary of $65,769.

Contact Kenric Ward at [email protected] or at (772) 801-5341.
http://www.sunshinestatenews.com/story/canadian-security-firm-bringing-100-jobs-florida-0

 

CA'S ENERGY FUTURE: GREEN IDEOLOGY, NOT FRACKING

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

There is a joke that should be going around about the Lawrence Berkeley Labs Report about California’s Energy Future which goes something like this: “How many future postmodernist Californians will it take to screw in an energy efficient halogen light bulb?”  Answer: “None.  Californians won’t grow tall enough in the future to reach light bulbs on ceilings after it enacts its new Energy Future Report calling for lifestyle changes such as the elimination of red meat from one’s diet to conserve energy.

Modernization is generally understood as the expectation of being delivered from hunger, disease, debilitating conditions, and early death.  While a modernizing China scrambles to get animal proteins into their diets to cure widespread anemia and developmental defects, California wants to revert to veganism as part of its long-term energy strategy. You think the above words are merely hyperbole to sell online news?  Read on.

California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory must have had something like the above joke in mind when it seriously released a new report titled “California’s Energy Future – the View to 2050,” which provides “portraits” of what the next state energy system will look like.

About 60% of California’s future energy system would be based on shifting the entire state population into electric vehicles and eliminating natural gas heating and cooking in all homes and replacing it with electric-powered stoves, water heaters, and space heaters with power supplied from green power sources.  All buildings in the state would have to be retrofitted or replaced. 20% would be based on costly low-tech energy storage in salt domes and air compressor batteries or in speculative technological breakthroughs that do not exist today and that would impose huge costs on electricity consumers.  And another 20% would be based on behavioral changes such as changing diets to eat less red meat and controlling home thermostats and electric meters to make people wear warm clothing instead.

Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s Template for Cal Energy Future
Method	Percentage
EXISTING TECHNOLOGIES such as retrofitting every building in the State by 2050, switching from petroleum and natural gas for vehicles, space and water heating, cooking, and bus and rail fleets to electric cars, stoves, water heaters, buses, and rail.	60%
BREAKTHROUGH TECHNOLOGIES such as artificial photosynthesis, fusion energy, more efficient and sustainable biofuels, hydrogen fuel, more effective carbon capture storage and advanced batteries for both vehicles and grid storage.	20%
BEHAVIORAL CHANGES such as changing diet to eat less read meat, carpooling, setting back thermostats and wearing warm or cool clothing, telecommuting. 10% will come from lifestyle changes	20%

While most of the nation is rapidly catching on to the emerging revolution in natural gas fracking (hydraulic fracturing of rock formations) technologies and expanding hydropower, California’s energy future is to be based on a post-modern ideology that seems to want California to trash its entire modern energy system.  In its place would be a modernized version of medieval windmills, sophisticated solar-powered magnifying glasses, water wheels, and heat from subterranean geysers all transmitted to energy conserving consumers via a Rube Goldberg contraption-like energy grid that would be prone to brown outs, black outs, and rapid physical deterioration.

Reading this you probably say to yourself that this is yet another utopian scheme by a couple of academics that will get a lot of media attention but go nowhere. Nope. This report was funded by the California Energy Commission, the California Air Resources Board, the S.D. Bechtel Corporation, and endorsed by the California Council on Science and Technology.  This is apparently the template for California’s future energy system.  And as important as the report is it hasn’t received much scrutiny in the uncritical newspaper or broadcast media or even the Internet. It is apparently being taken for granted that this utopian energy scheme is a fait accompli. 

The justification for a rapid deconstruction of the modern energy system is population growth and the much-ballyhooed increase in “green house” gases.  According to the Berkeley Labs report, state population is expected to double by 2050. To combat the effects of population growth and air pollution the state must intervene to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.  Deducting 80% of today’s state population means the air pollution must drop to about that of 1935 when the population of California was about 6 million people.  Given an assumed 40-year technological lag time to implement a whole new de-modernized energy system, California must start right now with a massive program to re-engineer everything in society. And as it is presumed only the government can do this that rapidly - not private markets alone - it implies totalitarian control of everything including life styles of Californians: thus, veganism not nutrition, draconian regulation not freedom of choice, ideology not fracking.

Criticism of this new energy plan is not another conspiracy theory about Big Government.  This IS the undeniable template for California’s energy future crafted by California’s ruling cognitive elites.

What is driving this mad rush to dismantle the present-day modernized energy system is not science but a countermodern ideology.  The Lawrence Berkeley Labs and California Council on Science are only being used to put a patina of science to what is ideological.

In California there are ideologies that endorse energy modernization such as shifting to nuclear power as recently proposed by in the City of Fresno.

And there are ideologies that seek to control, contain, or mitigate air pollution from modern energy plants, such as catalytic converters on cars, natural gas fracking, and expansion of hydropower. 

But what the Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s new template of the state’s energy future reflects is a full-blown countermodern ideology that proposes to dismantle many of the state’s power plants and make the electric grid into a precarious system of dubious reliability. 

A forerunner of this radical ideology is the State Water Resources Control Board’s order to forbid all coastal power plants, especially nuke plants, from using ocean water for cooling systems.  This entails shuttering all the nuke plants in the state or running costly new water pipelines to the plants or using expensive air-cooling systems.  Even if costly fresh water or air cooling systems are installed this would raise the price of nuclear power so high that costly green power could finally compete with it.  The rationale for making nuke plants uncompetitive is not to eliminate pollution, because nuclear technology is clean.  The rationale reflects a countermodern ideology.

Instead of a repeat California Gold Rush, the Great California Green Energy Race is about to be kick-started in 2012 to find the highest priced clean technologies for new forms of energy.  To do this markets must be highly regulated to control prices not just to regulate health and safety.  Markets must be short circuited because they are mechanisms for producing the lowest-priced goods and services.  This is why California is on the cusp of shifting from Market Capitalism to State Capitalism. California’s political elites want to pick winners and losers in the economy and want political exactions in return.  The apparent cover for doing this is environmentalism. 

Unfortunately, many in academia and the media believe that state capitalism is the morally superior system when there is no effective reduction in air pollution from Green Power. Green Power and Cap and Trade Emission Regulations will not result in replacing dirty imported coal power with clean green power because wind and solar farms are located in remote areas far away from California’s urban air traps.

Ironically, as postmodern cognitive elites fear the complexity of modern energy technologies as seen in the recent nuclear plant disaster in Japan, they nonetheless believe the energy grid can be fine tuned to accommodate unpredictable surges of power from wind and solar plants without sacrificing reliability, breakdown, or the rapid deterioration of electric lines that would require their frequent replacement.  Alternatively, they believe costly and unproven new battery systems can be integrated along the electric transmission grid to balance out the surges.

At the core of this radical counter modern ideology we find the quasi-religious idea that modernization is tantamount to damnation. Everything that is wrong with modern society is reflexively tracked back to monopolistic oppression by big energy corporations.   In California this ideology goes back to the influence of the Southern Pacific Railroad and the rise of Progressive politics to counter not merely economic monopolies but modernization itself.

Put into a bigger historical perspective, what the proposed new ideological template California’s future energy system reflects is something like the Japanese elimination of all Western influences in the seventeenth century. In that case, a deliberate attempt was made to wipe out every vestige of Western influence, especially religion, and anything that had become “contaminated” by modern technologies and markets.  The attempt was amazingly successful.  Japan was rigorously isolated from modernizing influences until the Meiji Restoration around the mid 1800’s. 

California’s insular turn away from the Tea Party trend of the rest of the nation is not merely political but a revulsion against Capitalism, open markets, and modernity itself.  For example, California opposes the Obama Administration’s proposal to open all the western states up to a new regional green power grid where those states with cheap natural gas or hydropower can ship electricity into the state, which is the region’s largest energy market. California’s future energy template calls for embargoing imported power.

California believes that the solution to its structural state budget deficit is to eliminate reliance on imported sources of energy.  With the enactment of air pollution regulations in the 1970’s, California’s only option for reducing air pollution in its urban air traps was to shut down old fossil fuel power plants in urban areas and rely on imported coal power from surrounding states.  

But why undertake such a radical transformation of the state’s energy systems as proposed by Berkeley Labs when you can continue to import cheap energy from states that are rapidly shifting to the natural gas fracking revolution that would entail no increase in pollution in California?  Even liberal Michael Lind writing in the left-of-center New Republic magazine says: “Everything You’ve Heard About Fossil Fuels (natural gas fracking) May Be Wrong.”  Lind asks:

“Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels, not its final decades? The very thought goes against everything that politicians and the educated public have been taught to believe in the past generation. According to the conventional wisdom, the U.S. and other industrial nations must undertake a rapid and expensive transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy for three reasons: The imminent depletion of fossil fuels, national security and the danger of global warming. What if the conventional wisdom about the energy future of America and the world has been completely wrong?”

While much of the rest of the nation is turning toward energy policies that favor of natural gas fracking and hydropower, California is determined to reject it on ideological grounds.  The problem is that the retail price of electricity is regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), but not fuels or wholesale hydropower where prices are set by markets.  As long as California is dependent on imported natural gas shipped through the Golden Gate Center in northern California and the California Energy Hub in southern California, the state energy system will be exposed to market energy prices. The same goes with cheap hydropower shipped from, say, Hoover Dam to run the gigantic pumps on the Colorado River Aqueduct for a meager two cents a kilowatt-hour.  As long as California’s energy system is open to market prices Green Power is in jeopardy.

There are a number of hydropower projects for California probably being pushed by California Congressman Tom McClintock who is on the powerful House Committee on Natural Resources.  The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has recently released a report “Hydropower Resource Assessment at Existing Reclamation Facilities” (March 2011) of the increased hydropower potential of existing dams and rivers the U.S. that would involve only modest impacts on the environment.  Seventy potential hydropower project sites were identified with 5 of them in California that could produce 15,256 megawatt-hours of electricity.  See table below - the threshold for considering a project as practical is 0.75).

Potential California Hydropower Projects

Facility Name	Installed Capacity (kW)	Annual Production (mWh)	Benefit-Cost Ratio
John Franchi Dam – Fresno River	469.1	863	0.9 +/-
Boca Dam – Little Truckee River	1,184	4,370	1.68
Prosser Creek Dam – near Truckee	872	3,819	1.98
Putah Diversion Dam – Green River in Lake County	363	1,924	1.16
Casitas Dam – Coyote Creek, Ventura Co.	1,042	3,280	1.57
Total:	3,930	15,256	1.5 average

Development of added hydropower at the John Franchi Dam on the Fresno River for example would take only $3.6 million with $108,000 in yearly operations and management costs.  While this may be drop in the bucket of California’s total energy needs many of the other hydropower project sites in the Western region identified by the Bureau of Reclamation could end up shipping additional electrons to California through the regional power grid. It is the impact that cheap hydropower would have on all wholesale energy prices that is critical.

But California’s Green Power Law – AB 32 – forbids hydropower from qualifying as “green” even though it emits no air pollution.  The reasons for this are more ideological and political than economic or environmental.

Those who would not for a moment believe whatever the U.S. Secretary of Defense or the head of Occidental Petroleum said would take whatever the Lawrence Berkeley Lab says as gospel truth.  The Energy Future report by the Berkeley Lab is not a rational response to a body of vetted evidence.  It is supported by a belief system and an economic ideology.  Government in California does not always follow what is in its rational interest.  It does what is consistent with other things it believes in. 

There are powerful vested interests for continued modernization of the energy policy via nuclear power.  There are similar vested interests, albeit diminishing, for centrist energy policies that would entail continued modernization of the energy system and grid but with mitigating measures such as fracking and hydropower.  And there are nearly insurmountable vested interests for scrapping modernized energy policy and the energy system in favor of highly risky and costly countermodern energy policies. 

There are powerful interests, money, political power and status at stake on all sides.  But right now it is not vested interests but the vested ideology of countermodernization that is driving future energy policy in California with some possible influence being made by the Federal government for fracking and hydropower. 

But fracking is being demonized by the Environmental Left to render it illegitimate. The media has already spread the urban myth of fire coming out of water faucets in the vicinity of fracking operations. And California’s Green Power Law has already made hydropower legally illegitimate.  Energy in California is not a policy for rational problem solving but ideological warfare.

It is the power of ideology not necessarily economic interests that will likely determine California’s future energy policies.  Here, a vigorous case needs to be made for markets and moderated modernization of the energy system including relatively less-polluting natural gas fracking and clean and cheap hydropower. 

There is need in California for a middle ground energy policy that is somewhere between the radical utopian vision of the Berkeley Lab and the impacts of a nonexistent bogeyman of unregulated energy markets. 

Without competition from cheaper natural gas and hydropower to contain prices the price of Green Power will likely go through the roof.  This was demonstrated during the California Energy Crisis of 2001 when cheap imported hydropower from the Northwest was unavailable due to a drought and the price of natural gas spiked when Cal-Trans ordered a shut down an interstate natural gas line purportedly to do freeway repairs right in the middle of the crisis. Together with price controls on retail electricity imposed by California’s legislature at the time these unforeseen events created a “perfect storm” for an energy price “bubble” in wholesale energy markets that was erroneously blamed on Enron to avoid the political consequences. The experience of the California Energy Crisis of 2001 teaches that the Law of Unintended Consequences is much more likely to raise its ugly head without open markets than with them. 

Postmodern policies are a way to cope and mitigate the impacts of modern energy technologies. But they are not any way to “run a railroad” or an economy.  California’s cognitive elites don’t seem to understand the difference to the detriment of it structural state budget deficit and high unemployment rate.

California needs an ideologically centrist and open market energy policy not a radical countermodern energy plan for the future based on an ideology that can only succeed by closing off markets and the regional grid to California. As long as Gov. “Moonbeam” Brown is in office California is not likely to get that.  Like Japan before it walled itself off from modernization in the seventeenth century, California may be poised to enter into a “Dark Age” in more than one sense of the term.

 

 

SCHOOL "MANDATES" CUT ONLY SLIGHTLY

NEW: Brown Cut Only 1% of School “Earmarks”

JUNE 7, 2011 - from CalWatchdog.com

By WAYNE LUSVARDI 

The word “mandate” sounds like something absolutely essential and mandatory. However, when it comes to school funding “mandates” in California, it is no guarantee that what is being described is an essential job or program.  

Mandates are political designations for “categorical” ancillary jobs or programs and do not fund core teachers or administrators in California’s public school system.

The editor of this website, Steven Greenhut, prefers to call them “budget fluff” or “earmarks.”

Putting it about as diplomatic as he can, the California Legislative Analyst calls public school mandates “a broken system.”  
The Urban Dictionary online calls a government-funding mandate “a euphemism for a bribe.”  Other more vulgar definitions are: “a viral mechanism for getting political ‘whores’ to vote for bad policy” and “a corrupting policy of political enticements to manipulate the legislature into self-serving, palm greasing, government expansion and treasury looting.” 

The average “Joe” and “Jane” would probably simply call it “political pork.”

Even though “categorical funding mandates” do not necessarily include all pork, it is difficult if not impossible for the public to distinguish the fat from the meat in school budgets for funding “mandates.”

Brown Cut Only 1 percent of Earmarks

Despite all the outcries in the media by public school advocates that the “sky was falling” on K-12 school budgets, Gov. Jerry Brown only cut 1 percent of the funding “mandates” from his proposed 2011-2012 state budget.  

According to the Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) report “K-14 Mandates: Governor’s May Revision Proposal” (dated May 27, 2011), Brown eliminated “half” of all K-14 public school mandates from his May Revise State Budget Proposal, achieving $96 million in cost savings.  Brown also shifted $13 million from certain mandates to other “mandates.” 

What the LAO apparently didn’t report, however, was that the half of the funding “mandates” that were cut reflected only 1 percent of the $7.4 billion in potential cuts for all mandates in a 2008 LAO report titled “Categorical Reform.”

Brown actually increased total K-12 school funding for the 2011-2012 fiscal year by $2,040,917 in his May Revise Budget, mainly due to an apparent rise in one-time capital gains taxes. Sacred cows such as child nutrition, adult education, day schools, music block grants, charter schools and English language education were not cut in Brown’s May Revise budget.  However, funds designated for class-size reductions in elementary schools were apparently cut.

Back in 2009 the State Legislature cut $4.5 billion from the “mandate” funding system for K-12 schools under Assembly Bill AB 4-X-2, equating to  $731 per student in avoided costs statewide. In other words, cutting out funding mandates in the 2010 fiscal year was equivalent to a statewide school parcel tax of $731 per student per year.  The average school parcel tax in the state is about $300 per student/year.

“Mandates” Being Shifted into a Block Grant

State Assemblywoman Julia Brownley, D-Santa Monica, chairwoman of the Education Committee, has floated a draft bill, AB 18,  which would reform K-12 school funding formulas by replacing the existing “mandate” system with block grants.

A “block grant” is a grant of funds for discretionary use. It allows schools to decide how the money should be spent within a broad category of funds. By contrast, “earmarks” are politically protected narrow categories of funds or job descriptions often meant to buy political patronage and votes. Block grants are a way of saying to school districts that they have to select what programs and jobs they want to fund. In a time of austerity, that means they can’t pig out at the cafeteria of possible programs and fund them all.

The sky isn not falling” on school district budgets, despite school district press releases and media reports to the contrary.  Yes, the “ceiling” of school funding has been decreased since 2009. But the “floor” of mandated costs has also been reduced to offset the cuts.  The mainstream media has conveniently only reported the “revenue” side of the state K-12 education budget not the “expenditure” side as well.

For those school districts that still plan to put a parcel tax to a vote of the electorate within their district, there continues to be little in the way of justification for such a tax.