Marie Antoinette Syndrome

[Gipper]

Absurd $96,000 pension is just the tip of the governmental iceberg

He’s 41 and holds a top job for the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department that pays him $194,000, but Matthew Schenk apparently is fixin’ to start drawing a $96,000 pension due him from a top job at Wayne County.
Nice work, that.
From the feds who track phone calls and sic the Internal Revenue Service on conservative groups to county officials who imperil the pensions of others with dubious “severance” payments, shoddy job contracts and early-out programs, the Marie Antoinette syndrome is perfectly alive and well in the public sector today — minus her infamous cake.
No wonder Americans are cynical about government, a sprawling, multi-layered and mostly expanding enterprise in which insiders ostensibly working for the public make the rules the rest of us have to live by, but they often don’t.
Your privacy isn’t yours, it’s increasingly theirs. Your money isn’t yours, it’s theirs. You get the privilege of watching them dole it out in plain view to the fortunate few like Schenk, the former Wayne County chief of staff turned chief operating officer of Detroit’s water department.
Or see it used for the General Service Administration’s boondoggle conferences in Vegas, or for city pension confabs in Hawaii (because Toledo was all booked up), or so the IRS can recreate the bridge on the Starship Enterprise for a team-building exercise — all of it underwritten by the hapless dupes known as taxpayers.
Been to Washington lately? It makes New York City look cheap. Construction cranes define the horizon. The metro area’s unemployment rate is one of the lowest in the country. The district’s suburban counties rank among the wealthiest in the nation.
You can’t make this up. Nor are the antics limited to a federal bureaucracy apparently running amok, unsupervised and unaccountable. The county led, in theory, anyway, by Executive Robert Ficano is a monument to sweetheart deals, half-baked employment contracts and walking-away money whose costs all end up reaching into the same place — the taxpayers’ wallet.
Now, critics of the Democratic Party-organized labor cabals that run the likes of Detroit and Wayne County might be quick to say this kind of thing generally doesn’t happen in L. Brooks Patterson’s Oakland County or in corporate America.
But corporate America is littered with examples of disgraced CEOs who get bounced and leave with accrued bonuses, restricted stock and long-term payouts. That, too, is the deal, and the stink is just as putrid as Ficano’s recurring financial fiascos.
The difference is whose money is fueling the process and whether the process can withstand public scrutiny. In Wayne County, the answer once again is no.
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130614/BIZ/306140031/Absurd-96-000-pension-just-tip-governmental-iceberg?odyssey=mod|newswell|text|FRONTPAGE|p

Big, unaccountable, and very expensive government works for those in it, but not for the rest of us. We get screwed. This is yet another consequence of Liberalism. It defies reason, but continues unabated.

 

[Centrehalf]

Big, unaccountable, and very expensive government works for those in it, but not for the rest of us. We get screwed. This is yet another consequence of Liberalism. It defies reason, but continues unabated.

Unfortunately Schenk isn't even close to the only one. Gip, are you from the Detroit area? If you aren't check into Turkia Mullin...at one point that woman, who is a friend of Ficano's, was collecting 3 government paychecks at the same time and was earning consulting fees from clients doing business in Wayne County. There are many more gaming the system, we hear about them all the time. I'm going to guess you live here or near here so I probably don't need to tell you about it.

 

[Gipper]

Unfortunately Schenk isn't even close to the only one. Gip, are you from the Detroit area? If you aren't check into Turkia Mullin...at one point that woman, who is a friend of Ficano's, was collecting 3 government paychecks at the same time and was earning consulting fees from clients doing business in Wayne County. There are many more gaming the system, we hear about them all the time. I'm going to guess you live here or near here so I probably don't need to tell you about it.

I was born and lived my early years in the City of Detroit. It was a time before the city cratered into a liberal abyss.

I do read the two Detroit newspapers regularly. So yes, I know of the over the top corruption that exists in all levels of the city and county government. It has existed for a long long time.

The sad thing is that governmental corruption exists throughout America at all levels of government. And yet many Americans want more government. Obama, with the help of his leftist friends and fiendish followers, may have transformed America permanently.

 

[Gipper]

Unfortunately Schenk isn't even close to the only one. Gip, are you from the Detroit area? If you aren't check into Turkia Mullin...at one point that woman, who is a friend of Ficano's, was collecting 3 government paychecks at the same time and was earning consulting fees from clients doing business in Wayne County. There are many more gaming the system, we hear about them all the time. I'm going to guess you live here or near here so I probably don't need to tell you about it.