Oil prices are skyrocketing up again and since everything is dependent on oil, everything is going up. Of course we all know who gets hurt: The middle class working family and fixed-income senior citizens. In other words, most of us. I don't know if you have noticed or not but this is the second year that retirees living on their lifelong working investment in Social Security have received NO cost of living raise. Have you gone without a pay increase over the past 2 years? Government employees did not. The government gave themselves a substantial raise. Senators and congressmen rake in an annual salary of about $174,000.00 and that doesn't include expense and other little perks such as riding for free on our Air Force jets, which probably all add up to much more than just their salary, figuring in junkets around the world for no good purpose whatsoever. Do I recall many experts warning our "Great Leader" that restricting oil drilling in the Gulf and in Alaska would have just this effect? Do I recall two judges declaring the moratorium on gulf drilling "un-constitutional"? Now Louisiana Federal District Court Judge Martin Feldman found the Obama Interior Department in contempt of his ruling that the offshore oil drilling moratorium, imposed by the administration in 2010, was unconstitutional. After Feldman struck down the initial drilling ban, the Interior Department simply established a second ban that was virtually identical. While the story was reported on Thursday by wire services like the AP and picked up by a few Internet news sites it seems all the top players in our lame-stream -- ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN -- all ignored the story altogether! Do I find that interesting? No, dammit, I find that un-acceptable! When a governing body sets itself ABOVE the law, there is NO law; only TYRANNY. We must not allow this kind of thing to pass without protest: Write letters, send e-mails, make phone calls to every one of your elected representatives in DC and make your displeasure heard. Knowing the chaos in Egypt will probably put the Suez Canal oil traffic in jeopardy, I must ask: Is our White House Administration deliberately tanking our economy? Is this administration just stupid, naive, greedy, or just totally unaware of the effects that these anti-oil-drilling, unconstitutional mandates will have on our already struggling economy? Something smells rotten about the whole Gulf Oil spill and how it was handled (or NOT handled), and I don't mean in Denmark.
As I have often stated before, such crap starts at the local level and goes up from there. Here is a little example from home:
Buncombe County, NC population 2009 census 231,452
Our beloved County Commissioners are paid $41,509 on average plus stipends; about 37% more than the average salary, including travel and technology expenses, for commissioners in much larger counties in North Carolina. Our erstwhile commissioners get $1300.00 per month to cover travel -- whether they drive or not. They get car and technology stipends regardless of whether they have those expenses, County Manager Wanda Greene said, and they do not have to file receipts showing how the money was spent.
They get taxpayer issued iPads and mobile phones and $350.00 per month as a "technology allowance".
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The compensation package, along with base salary, makes them North Carolina's highest-paid county commissioners, according to a Citizen-Times analysis of pay data from the UNC School of Government.
Most county commissioners — all Democrats — defended the compensation packages last week as fair, even as the county considers budget cuts of 3-10 percent for the fiscal year beginning July 1.
Records from 2001 show the chairman then got $250 every two weeks and commissioners got $200. They got $35 every two weeks to cover phone costs.
I hope your salaries have grown like that. Mine hasn't. Oh, and please note that these people have regular jobs besides their salary as elected county officials.
On today's news broadcast the commissioners have agreed that the pay is "a little out of line" and should be adjusted. When the news first broke in the Asheville Citizen Times on Feb 6 in an article by John Ostendorff, they all said the pay was fair and Bill Stanley even said he would not take "a penny less". Now what we have to do is clean house at the next election. Like I said, this is where it starts and this is where it must be stopped. Start at home.
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