More evidence the state (and country) are going to hell.

States across the country, led by Wisconsin and New Jersey, but others are joining in, are trying to undermine all unions so that state workers and teachers can all be screwed financially for the sake of lowering taxes. Our esteemed governor spent much of his first year decrying the precarious state of the state workers/teachers’ pensions, and how necessary it was that we members pay part of our salaries to stabilize the pension.

Naturally, most of the state residents approved of this solution, not caring that the reason the pension was short of cash was because for a dozen years the state legislature and governors stole the legally-required annual payments and gave that money to the state’s citizens as annual rebates. So while the average citizen had the missing pension money in their possession, the governor and most citizens felt that only the teachers and state workers should make up the difference.

Perhaps the most infuriating part of this was that two of my relatives, staunch Republicans, believed that the governor’s solution was fair, since it did not impact them, although it affected 5 family members who are teachers. Can we spell greedy?

But now the governor has abandoned all pretensions that he actually wants to help the pension fund. His newest demand of the state legislature is that all teachers should pay a portion of our salaries to the state, which money will immediately be turned over to the state’s citizens as rebates, while he still refuses to put the legally-required payments into the pension funds.

I need to re-emphasize this: all teachers will be losing between $5,000 and $10,000 per year, while our pension will continue to deteriorate, but the state’s citizens will get a windfall from the state in the form of money taken directly from teachers’ salaries.

This is beyond greed. This is amoral, and treats teachers like lower-class citizens beneath the dignity of non-public workers. Remember the landless serfs who worked in order to give the majority of their profits to their landowners? That’s what the governor wants to do to teachers. And by the way, the governor still refuses to make rich people pay any additional taxes to help the pension fund. He claims–and so do most state residents–that it’s not their problem. So who’s goddammed problem is it if teachers’ own money will not even be used to support our own pension fund?

Any teacher who agrees to give up part of their salary to reward non-public workers while our pensions slowly fade away is a fool. This is a caste system, in which teachers are the untouchables, and I refuse to support it.

As a side note here, the state has announced that it will specifically reject the Parsippany Board of Education’s budget because their superintendent is earning too much money. Let’s do a bit of comparisons of salaries here:

Parsippany Superintendents’ salary: $225,000
Rutgers head football coach’s salary: $2,250,000 (including bonuses and “hidden” money)
Assistant Rutgers football coaches’ pool: $1,500,000.

Have any of you heard a single complaint by the governor about the outrageous salaries paid to Rutgers’ football coaches, especially the head coach, even though they are also public employees? Of course not.

We have a serious double standard here: teachers should give up some of their money to the rest of the state’s citizens, and the superintendent of Parsippany is vastly overpaid, yet his salary is approximately 10% of a football coach's salary who has not been asked to contribute anything to the welfare of the state’s residents!?!

This state is seriously screwed up, and so is everybody who supports this inequity and believes that teachers are part of the problem. No, folks, we are not the problem. You and your amoral governor are the problem.