Absolutely. Considering their work effects the nation as a whole, I say they should receive as much compensation as they can.

And I’m not simply claiming that because I’m seeking federal employment as an intelligence analyst.

You still did not answer my question regarding government employees. I have presented the facts from the Washington Post. Is that FAIR?

Yay or Nay.

“… you don’t have to be brilliant to know that sub prime lending caused the crash, and that sub prime lending was started under Carter/Clinton when they in effect ordered the banks to make sub prime loans.”

Securitization of subprime mortgages that lenders knew would default was the actual cause, and Wall Street, under the laissez-faire policies of the Bush administration, was the culprit behind that scam. Internal memos written by staffers at the lenders, filed in various lawsuits, confirm that these companies were well aware that they were writing loans to people who could not repay them, and selling those loans (and the default risk) to banks all over the world while lying baldly about their safety. If you’re trying to refloat the myth that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were the main culprits, save your breath.

As for federal government employees, I’ll restate my earlier comment more simply: The problem is not that federal workers are overpaid, it’s that everyone else except corporate executives is underpaid. And the whole tendency of the right-wing/libertarian/Tea Party movement is to free business owners from any obligation to pay workers a fair, living wage for what we do. Anyone who opposes that tendency, Occupy Wall Street and the labor unions included, is doing good, important work and deserves an honest hearing.

If we need to raise taxes, then raise taxes. But issues like this need to be addressed FIRST.
And, unless the press and others report the facts in an equitable manor, these issues will not be addressed.
Read a book called Rise and Fall of the Third Republic (this is about France, not Germany). It presents a scary view of France between WWI and WWII in which the country was terribly polarized and the press was terribly biased. The true news was not being reported. As a result, the country was split and wholly unprepared for Hitler.

You want a real life today example of how truth gets twisted in the media: Ask anyone the question ‘Who caused the great recession?’ and most people will say Wall Street and Bush, because that is all the media says. But, you don’t have to be brilliant to know that sub prime lending caused the crash, and that sub prime lending was started under Carter/Clinton when they in effect ordered the banks to make sub prime loans. They created Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who bought the loans. You can go to YouTube today and see videos of Barney Frank in 2005 blasting Bush’s regulators for trying to put new rules into place for Fannie and Freddie that might have saved us a few hundred billion.
But who gets the blame for the recession… Wall Street and Bush. (And I am not relieving them from blame in total, only in part.)
And, if you don’t identify the real cause of a problem, then you don’t know how to prevent it from happening again.

Sorry for being long winded.

We get that you don’t like Occupy Wall Street, you don’t like labor unions and you don’t like the federal government. In fact, you apparently don’t like anything that protects workers and consumers from exploitation or enslavement by the owning class, which leads me to surmise that you’re a business owner yourself, or one of their mercenary lackeys. But your not liking it doesn’t make it bad.

You refer to “outrageous” federal pay and benefits, for example, but for many of us, no matter what the accurate figures are, the point is that federal workers are better-protected than their private-sector peers because the Civil Service system provides a scale of grades and steps for determining compensation on a more or less rational basis. In the private sector, on the other hand, these things are largely left to the whim of the business owner, who would pay nothing at all if he thought he could get away with it. Unions, of course, are the best protection workers have against this kind of selfish, arbitrary and often hostile treatment, so naturally the owners don’t like unions and do everything they can to demonize them.

What the libertarians and their ilk are aiming at appears to be the goal of imposing something like the feudalism of a pre-UMW West Virginia coal town on the U.S. as a whole. Surely you can understand why many of us are opposed to that goal.

Of the 15 largest contributors to political campaigns from the 80’s through 2012, 9 of 15 are labor unions. 12 of the 15 give most of their funds to Democrats. Unions representing government employees are #3, #5, #6, and #11 on the list.

My apparent error was in the quote of $120K annual salary. That figure was likely salary plus benefits. (The $108K below is from 2008. So $120 in 2010/2011 seems reasonable.)

By Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY
Federal employees earn higher average salaries than private-sector workers in more than eight out of 10 occupations, a USA TODAY analysis of federal data finds.
Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector.

Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.

CHART: Federal salaries compared to private-sector
These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

I was wondering when someone was going to bring that up. You make a very good point.

Do you have the link to that? That would be awesome. Normally I’d expect stuff like that from WND.

“Occupy Oakland protesters told the media that the shooting had nothing to do with the encampment and didn’t involve any activists. Proteers [sic] surrounded the scene of the shooting and made a human chain to keep photographers from filming the victim.

Barucha Peller, who is part of the Occupy Oakland encampment, said some of the first people to help the victim were medics from the camp.”

It’s pretty clear this incident had nothing to do with the protest going on, but of course leave it to the astute bloggers at PJM to make it seem like some kind of conspiracy was afoot.

1. Labor unions have lent support to OWS but unions have FAR less money than think tanks.

2. I’m not a liberal.

3. Most important point. Your claims about US taxes prove my point entirely. For example, you quote the figure of 50% of Americans not paying federal income tax. This claim is false, and those that actually do pay no income tax pay the federal payroll tax, in addition to state taxes. In the late 1940s and 1950s, during America’s largest economic boom, income tax rates were as high as 90% for the richest strata of society. The recent decades’ tax cuts on this group has not delivered its promises of higher wages and more jobs. In fact we have seen the opposite.

I fail to see how Ruslan’s language smacked of ‘hate.’ They were descriptors. Nothing more.

And regarding the salaries of government employees, you’re simply wrong. I have many friends who work for various federal agencies. Many of them have been there for over a decade. And working incredibly hard. Yet they only make 90,000-95,000 dollars per annum. They could make a great deal more in the private sector. The government offers those benefits to prevent a brain drain.

Oh, wait. It seems you would prefer we had an East-Berlin style brain drain caused by elimination of competitive government benefits. I would love to hear about how well your country is run.

Also, got any facts to back up those figures? Because I’ll bet you three delicious chocolate chip iCookies that you can’t produce verifiable sources.

Ball’s in your court, buck-o.

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2011.....y-oakland/

Actually, this says ‘near the site’ so it may not be related.

If OWS was intelligent and sincere, they would also protest against outrageous federal employee salaries (avg now at $120K/year) and outrageous government benefits.

But, my point in all of this was merely to ask for an even handed treatment of OWS vs TP. You can agree or disagree with either, but report on both fairly. SPLC does not report on much of anything fairly.

By the way, let us look at some of the addictions that Mr Rusian has used in his last postings:
Lazy, Ignorant, Willfully and profoundly stupid, idiotic, whining. SPLC, Once again you need to address the hate of those that post on your blog.

OH, I forget. Liberal hate is good hate. Sorry, I keep getting confused with that.

By the way, the US tax receipts during the last years of the Bush administration were at roughly the same percent of GNP as the prior fifty year average. And this is with about 50% if the people not paying any income taxes. Oh and also, there are $400 billion in tax increases in the healthcare law. Just thought you might want a couple facts that never make it to the media.

That having been said, there is another fundamental difference between the Tea Party movement and Occupy Wall Street. See, thanks to right-wing bloggers, I know that there were some pretty stupid people at the Occupy rallies. There were a lot of videos where unsuspecting people naively answering trick questions and not for a moment suspecting that they were being used. Then of course each Occupy movement had a contingent of self-important, pseudo-intellectuals known as Ron Paul supporters. So indeed, Occupy had its share of idiots and ignorant people.

On the other hand, Occupy protests have attracted some highly intelligent people, many of whom are never heard from in the US very often, if at all. Occupy brought class back into the American discourse.

The Tea Party on the other hand, doesn’t have that other end of the spectrum. Now bear with me here, dear conservatives, because this may seem like just name-calling but I’m going to explain it in detail. The Tea Party runs the gamut from lazy/ignorant to willfully and profoundly stupid. Let me break this down as I promised.

The Tea Party raged against taxes and out-of-control spending. The first point about this, which tons of people pointed out almost immediately, was the question as to where these people were when Bush blew a massive surplus for tax cuts and then massively increased spending with an unnecessary war. This question has never really been answered. Every individual will say “Oh I’m not satisfied with either party,” or “I was angry about that too,” but the bottom line is that they weren’t organizing rallies back then. Oh wait, sorry, some of those people were. They were protesting our anti-war rallies and calling us traitors for criticizing the president during war time. I guess that rule changed in 2009.

Anyway, so they’re upset about taxes. Just one problem, Obama cut most Americans’ taxes at the time when the Tea Party was most active, and taxes are at record lows. The US has the second lowest tax burden in the entire industrialized world. Check it out: http://www.straightdope.com/co.....ized-world

So you’ve got people screaming about taxes, despite the fact that their taxes are either low, or actually going down. That is why the BEST elements of the Tea Party can be called ignorant/lazy. That is to say that before going out and waving around a sign and screaming about their high taxes, these people never bothered to actually look at US tax rates, and the trends associated with them. As a general rule, conservatives NEVER CHECK when claims are handed down to them by their pundits. If you want to get into the conservative talk radio business you would do well to remember that advice.

Anyway, so the people whining about taxes who didn’t bother to check are lazy and ignorant. That’s the best part of the Tea Party, the elite vanguard if you will. Next you’ve got the morons who believe in death panels and think that France is socialist. Now back in the early 1990’s there was this debate about healthcare, and it was easy to lie to Americans about how European countries work because we didn’t have the internet much less web 2.0 and social networking. So one needs to ask, “If these people are so concerned about socialized medicine(single-payer was never on the table and Obama gave up the public option very quickly) , WHY don’t they bother actually contacting some random people from countries like France, Canada, or Norway, and find out how the system works there? Well of course they don’t bother because they are ignorant, lazy, and a bit stupid. Ditto for the people who whine about “Czars” despite the fact that many presidents have had such sub-cabinet level positions.

Then we’ve got the next layer of stupid. These are the people who claim that the US government is socialist, that Obama is a Marxist, that ACORN is the equivalent to the SA, and so on. These people will pass on any meme that Glenn Beck gives them. If I could pass myself off as a guest on a right-wing pundit show, and if I claimed that Obama is actually a more radical type of Marxist known as a “Galievian” Marxist, sooner or later you’d see these idiots ranting about how Obama is a doubly-dangerous “Galievian Marxist.” Just look at the way they’ve turned “Community Organizing” into some kind of dirty word, which of course, they are terribly afraid of. So it’s better to have our communities DISORGANIZED?

Anyway, most of the Tea Party’s problems are typical conservative traits, most of all laziness and ignorance. They are scared to death of crime when violent crime has been going down. They are afraid of illegal immigrants when plenty of studies show that they contribute more than they take from society(also there’s this thing conservatives claim to like called the “free market”). They think America’s becoming socialist when it has actually been privatizing a lot of things for a long time now. They scream about taxes when taxes are at record lows. In all these cases the cause is the same: They…don’t….check.

Now someone might claim that the Tea Party is about “liberty” or “freedom”, but this is just BS. You’ll never hear people like those at the Tea Party openly coming out against the War on Drugs, standing up for gay marriage, abortion rights, etc. Moreover, these people were nowhere to be found when America suffered one of the most significant blows to civil rights in recent history, the PATRIOT act. The only exception to this lies with the Ron Paul supporters, but they’ve got a whole host of other problems.

So that’s the difference between OWS and the Tea Party. OWS may have a lot of ignorant and even stupid people, but it also has highly intelligent people. Also, many of the ignorant people at rallies like OWS are eager to learn new things. Sometimes they might be a bit too naive, but they want to acquire knowledge. I observed this when working with anti-war movements. You could tell some people didn’t really know much about politics, but when you told them about things they had never heard they were curious, they asked questions, they asked about books they could find to learn more, and so on.

The Tea Party on the other hand, does not have a brilliant element to it. At the very best, its most intelligent people are whining about taxes when they really shouldn’t be. The rest are not simply ignorant, but lazy. I try to discuss with these people, and I find that no matter how obsessed they are with Marxism, taxes, capitalism, economics, US history, etc. they really don’t want to discuss these things in detail, and they don’t want to so much as look at anything which might upset their worldview.

Worse still, some people seem to make a conscious effort to remain ignorant, because for many of these issues it is difficult to avoid seeing or hearing evidence which contradicts your beliefs. How does one, for example, become obsessed with George Soros, and then NEVER bother to read his basic biography or some of his articles, either of which would easily destroy the idiotic idea that this capitalist is supposedly bankrolling worldwide Communist revolution.

So that’s OWS vs. TP in a nutshell.

“The Tea Party had several well-funded think tanks plus a major political party backing them.”

Don’t leave out Fox News, which organized (stage-managed) and promoted the Tea Party from the start.

1. Non-profit status bars organizations from political campaigning. It is clear that the SPLC does not involve itself in political campaigns. I have never seen the SPLC endorse or support any political candidate.

2. Most of your idiotic charges can only apply to people who showed up at these rallies. OWS was a grass-roots movement and they don’t have the right to deny the 1st Amendment rights of anyone who wants to show up.

3. Nobody was looking for weapons at Tea Party rallies; they were obvious and many Tea Partiers called attention to them. It’s obvious that whatever transgressions of Tea Partiers are brought to your attentions, you will claim they are “debatable.”

4. Please provide evidence that someone was murdered in one of the camps.

As for blocking access, attacking police(that’s what happens when you use violence), and unlicensed public kitchens. Too damned bad. The Tea Party had several well-funded think tanks plus a major political party backing them. OWS has nothing.

People like you can’t run around talking about “watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants” and then throw a hissy fit when dissenters have an unlicensed public kitchen or smoke some pot. It’s this kind of nitpicking and whining that makes me do two things: 1. Believe that the “authoritarian personality type” may be real after all. 2. Call BS on all the right-wing “rebels” who talk about taking “their country back” from the gubmint.

But let’s see what OWS events I can recall:
Trying to block Brooklyn Bridge.
Trying to block access to subways.
Trying to block streets.
Anti-Semitic signage.
Lice and filth.
Refusing police orders.
Attacking police. (several police officers have been sent to the hospital).
Killing someone in the camp.
Uncounted use of illegal drugs.
Unlicensed public kitchens.
Blocking access to the port of Oakland.

And lets see. What did we have on the Tea Party:
A few armed people at the protests. (Of course. no one ever looked for weapons at OWS.)
Maybe some name calling and spitting on a person (although that is subject to debate.)

Granted, I have likely missed some TP transgressions. But I bet there are many more OWS activities that have been unreported.

Again, all I ask for is some level of fairness in reporting. Or perhaps the SPLC would like to give of their 501(c))3) status?

I have absolutely nothing but respect for the Republican Party. But I dislike the conservative wing.

I am hardly out to demonize it (well, maybe a little bit…), but compared to the polemics coming out of the other side, I’m a marshmallow.

One need only look at the cover of this month’s issue of the NRA’s ‘American Rifleman’ to see what I’m talking about.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that I’m an NRA member.

Let’s give RRoberts some time to clean up the parts of his mind I just blew.

Good to have you back. Comic relief is always welcome.

Then when you couple those comments with the liberal, open minded, and tolerant comments of the posters who agree with SPLC and you CLAIM to be an organization that wants to eliminate Hate and endorse Tolerance.

HA.

Come on, at least be honest with yourself and admit that you are out demonize any conservative you can.

Perhaps if organizations like SPLC and ACLU actually tried to represent all the people, then they might actually accomplish something.

How come SPLC did not give the Tea Partiers the wonderful glowing comments that you give OWS? Could you be extraordinarily biased?

The answer to that is YES.

Brief correction, Buchanan’s “amen corner” comment was made during “The McLaughlin Group” on August 26, 1990 and was about the Persian Gulf War, not the Supreme Court.