SOS Forests

In Oregon a public employee does not have to join the union for his or her workplace, BUT they do have to pay union dues, which are taken from their pay, accounted for, and distributed to the unions at no cost to the unions. The taxpayers are held accountable for all monies taken from workers and paid to unions. Quite a responsibility really, when you think about it. The State as a lackey to the unions. That is Oregon. Unfortunately, there are probably more of them than there are people who are not dependent upon the Government for payroll checks and spending in Oregon.

I have a lifetime of listening to people in business bitch about government, and I ask why don’t they speak up, write a letter, do something about it. “Oh, no. If I say anything the public employees can boycott my business and I will go broke.” Held hostage by public employees and evidently they like it.

No sympathy from me. “You should write a letter, Bear Bait.” Screw you, Dude. Write your own or suffer. I don’t care. Don’t ask anyone to pack your water on this subject. You pack your own and live with it. Or live without doing a thing, which is how we got here.

In private business, if the workers’ union demands too much, the business goes broke and everybody loses. It is incumbent on the union to keep the business afloat, because everybody’s job depends on the business remaining profitable.

That’s not the case with public employee unions. They think the government has an endless well of money. They think the government can’t go broke, and so their demands are endless, too.

But state and local governments don’t own currency printing presses. There is not an endless well of money for employee salaries. State and local governments can, and do, and have gone broke in Oregon. Dennis Richardson discusses the $3.5 billion shortfall in state revenues over the next two years. He doesn’t mention (in the essay above) that half the counties in Oregon are also in the red. And the unfunded mandate for state public employee pensions alone is something like $20 billion in the long term.

What makes it all the more painful is that state employees such as University professors, DEQ employees, and ODFW employees have perpetrated a massive economic collapse over the last 20 years that has put Oregon into the highest ranks of unemployment, home foreclosure, business bankruptcy, and HUNGER in the Nation.

It’s hard to comprehend and understand that a state such as Oregon, with abundant natural resources and a formerly bountiful agricultural sector, can lead the Nation in hunger and malnutrition, but those are the facts.

Public employees, and the corrupt Democrat Party that has been in power here for 30 years, have shut down our natural resource based economy and drained the state coffers, not just today but as far as anyone can see into the future. We are enslaved to government functionaries who are hellbent on starving us to death. Oregon is the North Korea of America.

Think about what I write here carefully. Think about trending and the direction of economies in their maturation.

Agriculture in Oregon is practiced on fewer acres every year as the most flat, best drained, deepest soils are developed for housing, light and heavy industry. The absolute best soil in Oregon is under Washington County developments, both residential and commercial.

Governor Kulongoski denied Umatilla county farmers access to Columbia River water for irrigation because he said his job was to “preserve salmon.” 45,000 acres of high value soil could have had water and grown the row crop industry and food processing. Instead, we allow the State of Idaho to do their damnedest to drain the Snake River from its headwaters to Brownlee reservoir. Washington draws from the Columbia from the Canadian border to it confluence with the Snake and then down along the border with Oregon to the sea. The low elevation arable land in Washington is hugely benefited by irrigation waters. Most of Oregon’s land east of the Cascades is layers of rhyolite and basalt with a skiff of loess on it, and then at 3500 to 5000 feet in elevation, all the while you don’t see those elevations along the entirety of the Columbia River in the US except in maybe Montana. That our past Governor would piss away opportunity to feed people is what he was about, evidently.

In the intensive agriculture of the Willamette Valley and western Oregon, there is a dearth of business in major crops. Proprietary grass seed, grown on contract, sits in warehouses feeding mice and will not be paid for until the seed variety owner picks it up, if ever. The rest of the commodity grass varieties are at low prices and low demand. Christmas trees have been at a low ebb for sales, and hundreds of acres of trees have grown beyond selling height and are being slashed. The nursery industry is in the tank with home building and the demise of golf as it has been ignored due to financial considerations and job loss. It is not good times for some specialty farming. On the other hand, commodities that can be exported, or made into biofuels, are doing well. So is the livestock industry, even though profits are slim due to increased feed costs. Dairy, as it is across the nation, is working at a loss every day. That said, agriculture in Oregon has grown from being 10.3% of Oregon’s GDP to over 15% of its GDP.

Oregon is becoming more of an agrarian state!!! Full speed astern!!! Ag has grown 50% in its part of the total economic picture for Oregon. At a time when business is tough, and jobs are hard to come by, even for illegal aliens in menial jobs including parts of agriculture, ag has half again more impact on Oregon’s GDP!!!

You build a house with a full basement. It is 20 feet from the ground level to the top of the roof. An erosive event comes along and takes 5 feet of dirt away from the foundation, and now it is 25 feet to the top of the roof. Did your house grow in height by 25%? Or did the rest of the landscape erode and your house stayed the same but is now 25% taller relative to the ground. That is agriculture in Oregon. We have lost so much of our economy, high tech, home building, low tech, resource extraction and retail, that ag has been elevated by 50% to where it is now 15% of Oregon’s GDP. We are going backwards!! We are becoming a colony again. China’s? Korea’s? or Japan’s? India’s? Who knows? But this is NOT GOOD NEWS. It is sad news, and shows how far we have fallen, regressed.

Oregon as North Korea. Funny. I was talking to an old time barber in Corvallis, retired for decades. He was asked if he would root for the Ducks in the BCS Bowl game. He said he would root for North Korea if they were playing the Ducks… (the guy is a Korean War vet with some latent dislike for Koreans from the North and their Chinese cohorts.) The joke when I was a kid was that we were so poor we got food packages from Korea at Christmas… Our town had missionaries from Poland. The only way to get a bike was to put your brother up for adoption, and then you had to share the bike with your mother. I am sure that we will find more on the subject for Oregon down the road, because the road to Economic Perdition appears to be the one of choice for the Nanny Beaver State. All belt buckle and no ranch. Ya gotta love Or-y-gun. This is where any good thing can get ruined before anyone ever has a clue it was good in the first place.

They? Who in the hell is they? They? Why, they is the plain and fancy they, that’s who they is! — Freddie Sykes, The Wild Bunch

Government worker unions are the tool that Marxists use to overthrow this and other countries. Government worker unions are what keeps wolves on the ESA list in MT, ID, MN, WI, OR, WA and elsewhere.

Governor Brian Schweitzer called over to MT Fish Wildlife and Parks and demanded the immediate firing of MFWP Wolf Project coordinator Carolyne Sime the morning of November 3, 2010, following the worst defeat and landslide rebuke of the leftist agenda since 1934 throughout state and federal government. Sime’s union told him to go piss up a rope.

Note: see Montana Eliminates Wolf Coordinator Position [here]

It is time to end compulsory union membership of government workers, and political “contributions” squeezed from taxpayers used by the unions to buy off politicians, that are driving Marxist policies and growing bureaucracies like cancer.

“They” are the imbeciles who cook up any lie, excuse, or program to grow wolf populations and the government union bureaucracies necessary to force this and other meaningless, extravagant, and worthless programs down our throats with money borrowed in our children and grandchildren’s names by Ponzi Government.

I think Rep. Richardson would be much happier living in Wisconsin. What poll are you referring to? Link? It is easiest to place the financial burdens of the economy on …The public workers are not responsible for the budget shortfalls. THE GOVERNMENT IS! The fact is that the average State pension payout is under $25,000. Most of the professional people I know in the private sector have had opportunities for 401Ks with employers matching contributions, stock options, etc. Had the private employee invested wisely over the duration of 30 years, they would be living off of more than $25,000 at retirement. In addition, public teachers make an average of 20% less than their equally educated counterparts in the private sector. Allowing this rape of public employees is nothing more than propaganda to assist an agenda. It makes my skin crawl when I think of what happened in the recession 2006-2008. People lost their jobs, retirements, hope…and now the American people full of greed and jealousy attack those that are no better off then themselves. The focus should be on the real problem. STOP CORPORATION BAILOUTS…START TAKING CARE OF THE PEOPLE. STOP BELIEVING LIES. THEY ARE TAKING YOUR MONEY AND GIVING IT TO THE RICH. THEY ARE NOT MAKING JOBS, THEY ARE LYING OFF WORKERS!!!

Reply: uh oh. Public employees are being raped!?!? Yes, if you call being given a fat job with no work, easy money, free health care, a guaranteed pension rape. It’s darn hard to get fired, too, no matter if you commit actual rape, against children no less.

Just so you know, it was public employees who raped Oregon’s economy, sending us into a tailspin 20 years ago that we have never recovered from.

Let me guess, Cynthia (if that is your real name). You were a useless public employee, who gave terrible service, actually worsening whatever problem it was you were allegedly hired to solve, and are now living high off the hog in Florida on a pension you didn’t earn, paid for for actual workers who are not in the public employ? Right? Yep, I nailed it.