Thursday, May 19, 2005

West of Hollywood

"I'm way deep into nothing special, riding the crest of a wave breaking just west of Hollywood"

Stop reading right here if you're not ready for one of my (possibly) incoherent rants.

Just change the last word to Salem and you'll have a pretty good idea what I'll be doing during 2006. We have a lot of people sent to Salem to do the people's business who seem more interested in their own business than ours -- those of us 300,000 + who are connected directly or indirectly to PERS. Just remember folks, a large group of us is watching your every action and dissecting it publicly, loudly, and in multiple forums. This blog site is averaging about 10,000 "hits" per month; my PERSList counts about 2600 members; and Dana Jackson's Oregon PERS Discussion Group just turned 600 members last week. Dana's site gets about 500 messages a month, on average. Some months there are many more; other months less. The point is that taken together, all these sites can harness an enormous constituency in amazingly short order to unleash cruel and unmerciful assaults on the candidacy of anyone who's crossed us in the past few years. PERS members have worked hard and mostly uncomplainingly throughout their careers and have asked relatively little in return - just what we were promised, no more and no less. I don't regard PERS as an entitlement program. It was and is our money on terms that we agreed to (and actually didn't have any choice over). If the terms turned out to be more generous than some stupid legislator and employer thought they'd be oh so many years ago, why do I have to pay for THEIR mistakes. I lived up to my part of the bargain at submarket wages in exchange for a brighter retirement. Why is it that these politicians and employers can decide that they can remove the lightbulb just as I enter the retirement room. NOTHING the court can do can fully compensate me (or anyone else) for the nearly 3 years of non-stop anxiety over matters that have always been outside our (working people's) scope of control. Let's move the finish line or change the rules just as people are closing in on retirement. Better yet, let's change them AFTER they retire and have no way to ever go back. We *might* be made financially whole, but this entire scheme will probably benefit the employers and the State in more subtle ways - by reducing the life expectancy of those entering the retirement years. PERS Coalition attorneys try to soothe peoples' anxieties by reminding them that this is all about money and nothing else. Sorry, but I'm not soothed. How do you compensate someone for the added physical stress this has created in so many people. How do you bring back valued employees who've simply upped and left. How do you create a loyal workforce after you've raped them like this -- even if the Court makes you apologize and orders restitution? It does not make up for any of that.

If you've gotten this far, you're already one of the 10,000 who stop by here every month to check out what alfalfa sprouts from my keyboard - today it may be more like hops, as in "hopping mad". Once the City of Eugene decision is finally announced and the outcome of the current PERS litigation is resolved, one way or another, I plan to turn my attention to harnessing this energy to eliminate all those folks down in Salem who are hostile to PERS and its members/retirees. Even if "we" win on the City of Eugene case, memories shouldn't be short. No one should relax. A "win" in the City of Eugene case will only delay further retribution until the next Legislature in 2007. We will need to be vigilant regardless of the outcome. I won't regard my own PERS benefit as fully safe until my wife and I are both deceased and we've both lived out our actuarial lifetimes plus an extra 10 years just to be ornery. Lest anyone have a morsel of doubt that we're going to continue to play this perverse game of jeopardy no matter how the courts rule, just get hold of this month's (May 2005) "Brainstorm NW" magazine. Read Ron Saxton's latest screed against PERS, written AFTER the Supreme Court ruled in Strunk. Remember Ron Saxton. He's going to try to oust Kevin Mannix as the Republican gubernatorial candidate, leaving voters with the choice of Two-Faced Ted ("I'm sorry I had to do this to all my loyal supporters - about 60% of whom are PERS members - but the devil made me do it"), or Ron whose opinions on PERS are about as subtle as a Glock-9. Then we have Kevin ("I used to be a Democrat") Mannix. Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters? And I haven't even begun to describe my animus towards the Legislature.

So consider this a warning. Just because I don't live in your legislative district doesn't mean I won't try to use these various bully pulpits to defeat you in 2006. Just because I might have voted for you in 2002 or 2004 doesn't mean I'd lift a finger or blacken a box on a voting form for you again. I might just as easily use energy, words, and money to help defeat you. You may view me as an arrogant and conceited SOB who has delusions of power and grandeur. Not true. It is you who have the delusions of grandeur and power. What you need is to be taken down a peg or two or plain knocked out of the game. Game over, out of time. Just be careful that you don't take me or any of the other 300,000 or so PERS-connected Oregon voters for granted. If you do, you'll be making a huge mistake. You might think of yourself as the lesser of two evils, but many of us have long ago given up on that calculus in election choices. We KNOW how bad you are; it hardly matters to us that your opponent might be worse. Worse than what? You may think that by straddling the fence you can sucker us into voting for you again because you'll try to "kiss and make up." Again, bad assumption. I'd sooner vote for someone who's got one hand on my wallet and the other hand squeezing my ...., than someone with one hand around my shoulder and the other hand patting my back patronizingly while cooing in my ear that "it will only hurt for a moment." Horse hockey. I'm done with that game and I think quite a few others are too. Hubris doesn't play well in our sandbox anymore. Just watch out for that wave breaking just west of Salem. It isn't "surf's up, dude". It's "time's up, dude".

I like to think of participants in and readers of all the different venues mentioned above as "brothers in arms" all marching to that great rap song - "California Love" by a group known only by its initials - NWA (do a Google search on that group if you don't know what the initials stand for). Just think of us as PMWA. Payback time is coming soon, starting as soon as the "silly season" of 2006 begins in earnest. Tomorrow we'll continue with "Disco Inferno" - a great song title even if I can't think of how to hook it into what I might say. Perhaps I'll start with Howard Beale's perfect rant in Paddy Chayevsky's "Network".


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