-By Warner Todd Huston
Andrew Thomason of the Illinois Statehouse News agency has a pair of stores on the criminal syndicate that is unions in the Land of Lincoln this week that have to be seen to be believed. In fact, these stories and the ones like them we’ve seen for the past several months in Illinois are proof positive that unions should be illegal for government employees.
In one story, Thomason reports the tale of Michael Johnson, a corrupt teacher out to milk the taxpayers dry by collecting $209,379.43 in pension benefits while at the same time also collected $324,785 from a separate Illinois pension fund. And so far this crook has already collected $1.1 million of our tax dollars on top of the $198,105 a year he makes for “part-time work” for the school district.
This is called double dipping. Johnson was able to do this because he worked at one job in Illinois education, “retired” from it, then took a second job in the same field. This means he gets two pensions to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, likely totaling up to millions by the time he dies. All paid for by the taxpayers of Illinois.
Thomason’s second story is about union leaders that “pull down millions in public pensions.”
Illinois taxpayers are on the hook to make sure union officials’ six-figure pensions keep flowing for years to come.
Former employees of the National Education Association, or NEA, Illinois Education Association, or IEA, Illinois Federation of Teachers, or IFT, and Illinois Association of School Boards, or IASB, drawing pensions have collected more than $47 million from the Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System, or TRS, to date.“The union leaders who are not government workers are draining millions of dollars from the hard working rank-and-file public employee’s pension system each year. This is flat out unacceptable for taxpayers and for public employees,” said Adam Andrzejewsk, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for governor and now runs his own group, For the Good of Illinois, a nonprofit that calls for “limited, accountable and transparent government.”
These two stories are not outliers, either. This kind of stuff is happening in the Firemen’s pensions, police pensions, political pensions, in short every pension system of every public official and government employee is being robed in similar ways. We are paying pensions to people and making them millionaires while government services are cut, our schools are failing, our taxes are skyrocketing, and our state on the verge of bankruptcy.
As I said, this is proof positive that government employees should not be allowed to unionize. It is unionization and back room political deal making that has caused this intolerable situation. Government employees should not be allowed to unionize and in fact, they weren’t able to prior to the 1960s. Even one of our most left-wing presidents of all of them, Franklin Roosevelt, understood that unionizing government employees was a disaster waiting to happen and refused them the capability.
As mentioned above, we finally have a way to find out exactly where our money is going in public salaries.
Adam Andrzejewsk write me to say, “The openthebooks.com portal broke all the state level pension corruption. This is at least a $47 million pension scam from our opponents, union leadership and the corrupt IASB.”
You can review the “For The Record Scorecard to see how your member of the general assembly in Springfield voted on 11 key pieces of legislation.
For more information check out www.forthegoodofillinois.org.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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