Category Archives: Government workers and pensions

The Cooch’s Freak Show Dream Team

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 6 Comments

cooch dream teamBy Peter Galuszka

Ken Cuccinelli just can’t keep away from the bizarre, but perhaps that’s what makes him what he is.

He stages a convention instead of a primary to neuter Bill Bolling. And since a convention is smaller, it draws more GOP hard-righters than  June bugs on a humid night and they succeed in getting Bishop E.W. Jackson and Mark Obenshain selected. They underline the social conservatism that turns millions off and makes Virginia the butt of jokes on late night talk shows.

The Bishop is an even bigger gay basher than Cuccinelli and says that Planned Parenthood is responsible for more fatalities among African-Americans than the Ku Klux Klan. This may be new to a Harvard Law graduate, but women of any color have a legal right to an abortion within limits. The U.S. Supreme Court said so. Look under Roe vs. Wade.

Then there is the attorney general candidate Mark Obenshain of the legacy Republican family. He proposed and withdrew legislation to require any woman in Virginia who miscarries a pregnancy to report it to the police. The idea is so repulsive it is beyond words. A woman may have miscarried to her great sorrow due to medical reasons and then would have to go through the added horror of having to report to the police? Yes, this comes from a cabal that otherwise wants to keep the government out of your lives. Even Josef Stalin wouldn’t think of this.

What does the dream team have to say on the many policy issues facing a troubled state? We have a bunch of lame and poorly thought out tax cuts and Cooch playing hardware store populist. Cuccinelli was against McDonnnell’s mammoth road building tax plan and has since backed away from his opposition.

Is this good news for Terry McAuliffe, who has plenty of issues of his own? Yes, I would think. Cuccinelli doesn’t need the fringe hard right voters. He’s already got them in his pocket. He needs the center and Mark and the Bishop aren’t going to be much help there.

It boggles the mind how Virginia is so schizo. It is attracting hundreds of thousands of newcomers who are running the state’s economy and are dragging it into the 21st century world. Yet the Republicans put up people like this who aren’t dragging us to Virginia’s recent dark past but to medieval times.

Global investors might think twice or three times before investing in this freak show.

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McAuliffe: Can a Schmoozer Transform?

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 3 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

On Easter Sunday, I was driving in a cold rain to Charlottesville for a family event. My cell phone started beeping with messages from Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Terry McAuliffe.

He said he was on his way to his own family brunch but wanted to tap me for $5. I got similar messages from two other staffers.

Why bother me at Easter? Political analyst Larry Sabato wondered the same thing. In a tweet that day he complained about finding “11 obnoxious messages for $$$. Now I know the answer to the age old Q; Is nothing sacred?”

And that may be McAuliffe’s biggest problem as he faces arch-conservative Ken Cuccinelli in the off-year governor’s race. In my profile of him in Style Weekly, I note that McAuliffe is trying to rein in an expansive personality that has made him a top political schmoozer and fundraiser for Democrats from Jimmy Carter to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

A decades’ long political operative who has never been in elected office, he can be bombastic and smooth, as his recent dealings with GreenTech Automotive shows. He flirted with Virginia for a hybrid  car plant before going to Mississippi. He has been accused of somehow using the car plant to win special visas for foreign workers and maybe misleading the Virginia Economic Development Partnership about his intentions in the Old Dominion.

Meanwhile, he must overcome some of his misunderstandings of traditional Virginia thinking. However, it’s probably a good thing that he’s going to skip the Shad Planking in Wakefield tonight with its Confederate flags where Cuccinelli will be keynote speaker.

While polls are about 50-50 in the race, McAuliffe’s fundraising prowess has shown brightly. In the first quarter, he raised more than $5 million — more than double the take of Cuccinelli, who has hamstrung by not being allowed raise money during the General Assembly session because of his position as Attorney General. Read on…

(Also, here as a Q&A with McAuliffe)

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Posted in Economic development, Economy, Education (K-12), Electoral process, Energy, Entitlements, Environment, Federal, Finance, Gay rights, Governance reform, Government workers and pensions, Gun rights, Health care, Housing, Immigration, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor & workforce, Land use & development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and race relations, Regulation, Science & Technology, Social services, Taxes, The Economy, Transportation

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Virginia Pension Shortfall Still Horrendous

Posted on April 11, 2013 by James A. Bacon| 7 Comments

by James A. Bacon

Last July I argued that, despite the significant pension reforms enacted in the 2012 session of the General Assembly, Virginia had only partially restored the actuarial integrity of state and local government pensions. (See”Virginia’s Pension Bomb Is Still Ticking.“) The debate at the time: whether the Virginia Retirement System should assume that it would generate an 8% annual rate of return, as preferred by Governor Bob McDonnell, or a 7% rate of return, as recommended by the VRS board. Though a single percentage point seems to be a small difference, it amounted to $540 million a year — not exactly chump change — that would have to be made up by state and local governments.

Apparently, the VRS board carried the day. According to an August 2012 document published by the National Association of State Retirement Administrators, the VRS was assuming a 7.0% return. That was the most cautious assumption of almost any state retirement plan in the country — only the Indiana pensions assumed a lower (6.75%) rate of return.

Unfortunately, even the VRS assumption is likely way too optimistic.

Andy Kessler, a former hedge-fund manager and author of “Eat People,” lays out the case in the Wall Street Journal for assuming a 3% rate of return for the indefinite future. How bad is that? To make up the difference, Virginia state and local government would have to cough up an extra $2 billion a year! Good luck with that.

Kessler boils down the math as follows:

The right number is probably 3%. Fixed income has negative real rates right now and will be a drag on returns. The math is not this easy, but in general, the expected return for equities is the inflation rate plus productivity improvements plus the expansion of the price/earnings multiple. For the past 30 years, an 8.5% expected return was reasonable, given +3%-4% inflation, +2% productivity, and +3% multiple expansion as interest rates plummeted. But in our new environment, inflation is +2%, productivity is +2% and given that interest rates are zero, multiple expansion should be, and I’m being generous, -1%.

To some, that may sound unduly pessimistic. Hasn’t Kessler noticed — the stock market is hitting new highs almost every day!

Don’t count on the boom lasting. The United States has enjoyed a long-term bull market in bonds and other interest rate-bearing instruments since the early 1980s. Since 2000 the long-term composite for 10-year Treasuries, a key benchmark, has tumbled from 6.9% to 2.7% today.

The earnings multiples of stock, real estate and other assets move inversely with interest rates. When interest rates go down, price-earnings ratio (essentially, the value placed on a dollar of earnings) for alternate investments go up. Thus, the long, secular decline in interest rates has driven a significant portion of the generous return on pension investments over the past 20-30 years.

With interest rates near zero, however, it is impossible for them to fall any more… which means that it is very difficult to expand the earnings multiples of stocks and other investments. Indeed, if the Federal Reserve Board ever decides to end “quantitative easing” and interest rates return to historical norms,  earnings multiples will shrink, as Kessler suggests.

The current bull market is predicated on the belief that the Fed will maintain near-zero interest rates for years to come. If the economy remains weak and inflation stays quiescent, maybe they will. Perhaps Kessler is too pessimistic. Perhaps we won’t see a rise in interest rates and a consequent contraction of earnings multiples. Perhaps earnings multiples will remain stable. Perhaps pension funds will generate long-term returns of 4% annually, not 3%.

Gee, that would mean Virginia is under-funding its pensions by a mere $1.5 billion a year more than officially acknowledged.

Virginia has done more than most states to put its government pensions on a sound actuarial footing. But that’s more a comment upon the total ineptitude, cowardice and, in the case of Illinois, fraudulent misrepresentation of other state officials than a kudo for our own. We need to deal with this issue now. Every year of delay will make the final reckoning only harder.

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Posted in 2013, Budget, Government workers and pensions, Taxes

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McAuliffe Pitches Jobs vs. Ideology

Posted on March 16, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 17 Comments

 By Peter Galuszka

“Fantastic,” says Terry McAuliffe as he listens to officials at the Culpeper, Va., campus of Germanna Community College talk about projects ranging from designing machine controls to a weight-loss competition. The tall, curly-haired McLean businessman — a Democrat who wants to be Virginia’s next governor — walks through a campus building while tossing out a barrage of questions and furiously taking notes. “I’m going to help with you with that, Ben,” he says to one teacher. “These community colleges are just jewels,” he remarks to another.

The visit to the Germanna campus, on which I tagged along in February, is part of McAuliffe’s effort to cast himself as a moderate jobs creator in a head-to-head campaign against firebrand Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II. The off-year race is already attracting national attention as Republicans seek to turn the page from their drubbing in the 2012 elections. The media are watching closely to see how Cuccinelli will play his hand — how much will he tone down the rhetoric that’s made him a star on the right? — and a flood of out-of-state money is expected to flow to both candidates.

“My focus is all on economic development,” McAuliffe says flatly. “It’s job-creation, and that’s why I am touring every community college in Virginia. That is my focus — to bring mainstream, pro-business ideas. My opponent’s more into a social, ideological agenda.”

This bread-and-butter strategy is as obvious as it is essential. Early polls show the two candidates running neck and neck, but Cuccinelli has assets that could give him an edge: experience in state government and a better-known name. News this week that Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling doesn’t have the cash to mount an independent bid only puts more pressure on McAuliffe to reach beyond the safely anti-Cuccinelli, Democratic base. University of Virginia analyst Larry Sabato and his colleagues noted that Bolling’s decision leaves the state with “two deeply flawed candidates” who “have limited positive appeal.”

McAuliffe indeed has baggage to overcome. In decisively losing the Democratic primary for governor in 2009 to underwhelming state Sen. Creigh Deeds, he was unable to shake off an image as a hard-charging Democratic Party operative and former fundraiser for Bill Clinton. More recently, the Connecticut-born banker-turned-entrepreneur has been criticized for locating a hybrid-car factory in Mississippi instead of Virginia — a story line that offers an obvious counterattack to his Virginia-jobs-first appeal.

McAuliffe clearly will have to contend again with accusations that he is a carpetbagger out of touch with Virginia’s problems. The Cuccinelli campaign played that card this month when it ridiculed McAuliffe for urging in a tweet from Florida that Virginia residents take care as snow approached. McAuliffe’s answer is to stress his Old Dominion ties: “My wife and I have lived in the same home in Northern Virginia for 21 years,” he says. “We have five children. I want our children to stay here and have jobs.”

This outsider problem may actually be less than meets the eye. Plenty of successful Virginia politicians did not grow up in the Old Dominion. One is none other than hugely popular Democrat Mark Warner, an Indiana-born entrepreneur who ran Douglas Wilder’s 1989 campaign for governor before becoming a successful governor himself and then a U.S. senator.

Warner’s brand of tech-savvy centrism clearly has not been lost on McAuliffe. As he steps through classrooms at Germanna, he regularly brings up Warner’s name. He also praises fellow Democrat Tim Kaine, another former governor who became a U.S. senator, and even Republican Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, as pro-business leaders. In contrast with Cuccinelli, McAuliffe backs McDonnell’s breakthrough with the General Assembly that produced the first real money for roads since 1986. “I’ve got to give Gov. McDonnell credit for keeping the discussion going,” he says.

The big question is whether identifying with practical politicians such as McDonnell will be enough to distance independents and moderate Republican voters — who might be turned off by McAuliffe’s deep history with the Democratic Party — from Cuccinelli and the tea party movement that stands with him.

Cuccinelli may be wondering the same thing. Lately, he seems to be avoiding inflammatory rhetoric (there was hardly a reference to gays, abortion or any other social flashpoint to be found in his recent book about constitutional federalism). He might be wise to stick to that approach. McAuliffe is clearly planning to pounce if Cuccinelli goes rogue.

“I always say the most important family value you can have is a job,” McAuliffe says at the end of his community college tour. “There’s a real difference between us, and we can’t be sending out signals with a social-ideological agenda that says that people aren’t wanted. We can’t divide people. We’ve got to unite them.”

(Note: This is article appears in the Local Opinions section of The Washington Post)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-frame-mcauliffe-wants-jobs-vs-ideology/2013/03/15/caf57a3e-8c11-11e2-9f54-f3fdd70acad2_story.html

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Posted in Demographics, Economic development, Economy, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Electoral process, Federal, Finance, Governance reform, Government workers and pensions, Health care, Labor & workforce, Money in politics, Politics, Science & Technology, Social services, Taxes, The Economy, Transportation

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Cuccinelli’s Strange Lesson in Federalism

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 2 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

(Note: You’ve heard from Jim and Les on Ken Cuccinelli’s book. Here’s my review that runs in this week’s Style Weekly).

Kenneth Cuccinelli, Virginia’s firebrand attorney general and Republican gubernatorial hopeful, is typically full of fire and vinegar that make him such a lively politician. But you’d never know it from his much-touted book, “The Last Line of Defense, The New Fight for American Liberty” (Crown Forum).

Nowhere do Cuccinell and co-author Brian J. Gottstein, his media man, get into the marquee issues that have made headlines such as bashing gay rights, driving legal abortion clinics out of business by tightening clinic rules, and unsuccessfully hounding Michael Mann, a former University of Virginia climatologist who has the temerity to believe that humans are responsible for global warming.

What we get instead are 250 or so dry pages of a primer on Constitutional federalism. States retain power and give it to the federal government, not vice versa. The Obama Administration, in his view, has seriously endangered this crucial balance and “are the biggest set of lawbreakers.” His chief exhibits are ObamaCare, The Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Communications Commission.

Mind you, Cuccinelli is running for governor but nowhere in this book does he talk about serious problems specific to Virginia, such as creating jobs, dealing with military industry budget cuts, funding schools or finding a way to pay to unclog the states poorly-maintained highways.

In the Cuccinelli and Gottstein view, the far more pressing issues read like an outdated Tea Party template from a couple of years back. Obama’s Affordable Health Care Act is seen as dangerous and unconstitutional because it requires all Americans to buy health insurance. Along with a couple of dozen Republican attorneys general from other states, Cuccinelli spends much time recounting his frontal assault.

In fact, he drags readers through practically half of the book, quoting patriots like Patrick Henry along the way, before we learn on page 141 that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld most of ObamaCare as constitutional on June 28, 2012. He does offer some solutions for health care, but they are the usual, garden variety stuff, such as allowing insurance companies to sell policies across state lines.

After wasting our time with ObamaCare, Cuccinelli shoots blanks at everything else. He claims the FCC is trying to regulate the Internet which has not been in the headlines for a while.

He goes into a controversy, covered endlessly by the Wall Street Journal, that the NLRB handled a complaint that charged Boeing with unfair labor practices when it moved some production work for is 787 Dreamliner aircraft to South Carolina, which is unfriendly to labor unions. The NLRB later dropped the complaint. That tends to destroy Cuccinelli’s argument that it is a threat to our freedom.

On other matters, he’s just plain wrong. He criticizes the Interior Department for going beyond a 1977 strip mining law by insisting on issue permits for coal mining. He writes that the law gives the states the exclusive right to issue permits, but in fact, the federal government oversees the state’s permit-letting in some states and handles it itself in states where the is no partnership agreement.

As for Cuccinelli’s big complaint that the EPA overstepped its bounds when it declared that masses of carbon dioxide are pollutants that need to be regulated, he ought to read the Clean Air Act that does give the EPA such authority. He claims that new rules to reduce carbon emission at coal-fired electricity stations are putting Virginia miners out of work. Nowhere does he mention that a flood of cheap natural gas brought on by controversial hydrofracking drilling is the most important reason.

To their credit, Cuccinelli and Gottstein write clearly and concisely. The book, for which Cuccinelli reportedly got a $30,000 advance, is an easy read. But given the fact that he’s been running for government for months, one has wonder whether Cuccinelli, along with Gottstein, another public servant, wrote this book on the public dime – that is, when he wasn’t filing politically-charged lawsuits against the federal government that went nowhere.

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The Lessons of the 2013 General Assembly

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 21 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

If there’s any good news from the 2013 General Assembly session, it is that the hard right’s strange hold on taxation has been broken. Republicans can start acting like responsible adults once again instead of dogmatic shills or spoiled children.

Gov. Robert F. Donnell and legislators found a way to raise badly needed money for transportation although it came via a very bad law that ties itself up like a contortionist doing this and that when all that needed to be done was to simply raise the gasoline tax for the first time in 26 years.

The Democrats were right to strong-arm McDonnell into going along with expanding Medicaid. It would have been absolutely ridiculous for Virginia to hold its stubborn head high and deny thousands of needy people medical assistance so they can feel good about some ludicrous oath from Grover Norquist they may have recited at one point to get votes. The feds will be paying for the expansion until 2016 and then for 90 percent of it. Imagine a well fed delegate saying, “No, you poor person can’t have health care because it is doctrinally impure!”

The upshot is is that we need to get of the Grover Norquists, the Tea Baggers and all their ilk to get on with the serious business of running the state and country. The sequestration debacle is more than embarrassing for its stupidity. So is Kenneth Cuccinelli with Bob Marshall cheering him to to find any bogus constitutional challenge to anything he finds political impure as far as taxation.

The bottom line is that if you want fixed roads, good schools and a decent place to live, you have to pay for them through taxes. Simple. You can’t depend on private industry to see you through, especially not when a good chunk of it in the Old Dominion is actually federal government money that’s about to be cut off in a big way. You can’t do it through little shell games with public private partnerships to build roads you often do not need. And you just can’t kick the can to younger generations so you can remain holy.

In other words, the days of the Tea Party, “Boomergeddon” and all the clarion calls to the need for budget cutting are over. They’ve been over for a while. We get it. We’ve been spending too much. But it is idiotic to go cold turkey without some thought given to it because you will crash the economy and die of the DTs. You don’t cure a crash victim by denying him blood. That’s not voodoo economics, that’s vampire economics. You need a balance and that’s exactly what the Boomergeddons and Baconauts want to deny us.

As for McDonnell, well, he’s finally got his legacy. It looks pretty messy. He did manage to get more money for roads, but he did through a Rube Goldberg contraption of taxation. He has a totally wrong-headed tax on alternative vehicles which shows,once again, just how Neanderthal much of the thinking in the General Assembly is.

McDonnell failed to get legacies through privatizing state alcohol stores or erecting offshore oil rigs. Last year, the legislature got so out of control with social conservative nonsense — another Tea Party legacy — that Virginia scored on national Snark TV for its inane war against women. That cost McDonnell a hell of a lot, namely the vice presidential nomination.

Now, he’s reportedly thinking about something bigger and I gather his platform for that will be his tax victory. Good Luck.

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Is Virginia Uranium Quickly Running Out of Money?

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 3 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

Just how financially viable is Virginia Uranium, which appears to be losing its battle to lift a 31-year-old ban on uranium mining in Virginia?

Corporate documents filed with Canadian securities regulators state that as of last September, Virginia Energy Resources Inc., Vancouver, British Columbia-based parent of Virginia Uranium that wants to mine a 119-million pound deposit of uranium near Chatham, was having serious problems with financial losses and cash flow.

According to documents obtained through Canada’s System for Electronic Document Analysis and Retrieval (SEDAR): “For the period ended September 30, 2012, the Company incurred an operating loss of $5,354,146, and has an accumulated deficit of $17,109,894, limited resources, no source of operating cash flow and no assurances that sufficient funding will continue to be available.”

For several years, Virginia Uranium has funneled cash and gifts to legislators to influence them to support ending the state’s uranium mining moratorium. The effort appeared to fall apart when State Senator John Watkins, R-Powhatan, withdrew a bill that would have ended the ban and started setting up the regulatory to allow mining. He did so before it was due before an unfriendly Senate committee that most likely would have killed it.

Lobbyists are now focusing on Republican Gov. Robert F. McDonnell to get the issue moving again before Tuesday, known as the “crossover” day or the last day in a General Assembly session that a bill in one chamber can move to the other. A bill similar to Watkins’ is in the House of Delegates but, so far, McDonnell seems to be avoiding taking a stand on uranium.

Despite having paid legislators to go on trips to France, including stopovers in Paris and Canada, to drum up support for uranium mining, there were hints that something was amiss financially. In 2011, Virginia Public Access Project records show that Virginia Uranium spent $120,000 on gifts – the most of any company in the state. This past year, that amount dropped to $107,000. With the exception of Democrat Richard Saslaw, most of the money went to Republicans.

So, big questions loom.  Would McDonnell kick start the move for Virginia Uranium as it struggles with money? Why would the General Assembly seriously consider spending millions in new expenses setting up as many as 30 new regulators to handle uranium mining?

Watkins and others have said that Virginia Uranium would pay for the cost so it won’t fall on taxpayers. But how could that happen if the firm itself seems to be running out of money?

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Who’s Really Behind These Capitol Coups?

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 11 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

Coup II seems well underway among Virginia’s Republican legislators.

According to The Washington Post, state-level Republicans in the Old Dominion and several other states including Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania are trying to redistrict voting more along the boundaries of federal congressional districts that typically are more heavily lopsided to one party or another. All of the states went for Barack Obama in 2012 but Republicans control state legislatures.

The Post reports that had Virginia had such a voting district system, along with a provision that would apportion electoral college votes along congressional district lines, then Obama would have won only four instead of all 13 of the state’s electoral votes.

Virginia’s Republicans are pushing for switching to a congressional district system as Nebraska and Maine have already done. A supporter, State Sen. Charles W. Carrico, a Republican from Grayson County, says that going with congressional district vote counting protects voters in less densely populated rural areas.

A few problems with that. First, it is a sneaky way to slow the impact of newcomers to Virginia as non-Virginians who tend to be more diverse in race and background move to the state. Their political concerns are not necessarily maintaining the status quo or keeping money flowing to rural areas that voters from rural areas worry about. In other words, it’s a backdoor scheme to slow the state’s inevitable change from red to purple to blue.

Another issue is why this is coming up now, other than the fact that Obama and Democrats trounced Republicans in November. A redistricting plan had been decided upon two years ago. Republicans like John Watkins and Tommy Norment won national derision this week for their covert and heavy-handed way of pushing redistricting plans through the evenly-divided Senate when civil rights leader Henry Marsh happened to be spending Martin Luther King Jr. Day attending Obama’s inauguration.

Their cheesy ploy made the Alpha Dog section of The Colbert Report.

There may be something far more serious afoot — or off the foot — if a shoe drops. One has to wonder if the Republican geniuses in the Virginia State Senate thought these ploys up all by themselves while Republican Gov. Robert F. McDonnell jumps for cover crying like Sgt. Schultz in TV’s “Hogan’s Heroes,” “I know nothing.”

Could that next shoe have something to do with the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council, the national network of conservatives funded by the Koch Brothers and various corporations to push self-serving laws nationwide via state legislatures?

ALEC are the people who brought you the “Stand Your Ground” firearm defense law that figured in a racial shooting in Florida last year. Public outcry shamed many big companies into pulling out from ALEC.

And guess what other state ALEC played a role in redistricting? The Badger State, which was been a hotbed last year for all kinds of right-wing flash points such as Voter ID laws and bashing public employee unions.

Reports from Wisconsin link ALEC to the ID laws and possibly as well to a controversial redistricting. What about the other states?

I personally have no direct evidence, at least yet, about ALEC and the current coups in Virginia State Capitol, but they may pop up. Plenty of Virginia legislators have past ties to ALEC, including House Speaker William J. Howell.

And what is McDonnell’s role in this, exactly? He seems being set up once again, just as he was last year with the transvaginal ultrasound business to blunt abortions. Now, instead of giving McDonnell some kind of legacy with his transportation plan, The Republican leaders seem to be following someone else’s script as part of a national coup to keep Democrats from pulling off a 2012-style victory again.

Why aren’t they being open and honest about it?

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The Overweening Power of Labor Unions

Posted on January 24, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 14 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

Not that long ago during last year’s presidential campaign — before Bacon’s Rebellion became the mush it is now — brave conservatives were skewering Virginia’s and America’s most venomous threats and holding them high for us all to see.

They were, of course, labor unions and the very unsavory thought that working people had the absolute temerity to think that they had rights as workers instead of bowing gracefully before their employers to thank them for the money in their hands and the pork rinds in their bellies.

Our own James A. Bacon Jr. was having his own little tea party bashing the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (which does deserve bashing, but never mind) for having on its board a former union official. Union man! Bolshevik! Beelzebub! Don’t get him started on right to work laws or public employees unions.

The Wall Street Journal all but buried a revealing story this morning. At the bottom of A6 comes news that union membership is at its lowest level since World War II. Private sector organized workers have dropped from 6.9 percent to 6.6 percent of the labor force.

The big issue was public service workers unionizing but they have also slipped from 37 percent to 35.9 percent of the total. One reason the Journal says is state-level bargaining battles such as ones in Wisconsin and Michigan cheered on by the conservative commentators we all know and love.

So, let’s give this a rest. I don’t what to read another Chamber of Commerce diatribe about the wonders of right to work. I’ll go ballistic if I have to read another puff piece about how right to work has made Virginia  the No. 1, 2 or 5 choice for business as if we really give a damn what some trade magazine in bed with the bosses says.

Enough is enough. You read it here first.

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The Rehabilitation of Helen E. Dragas

Posted on January 17, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 9 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

Call it the rehabilitation of Helen E. Dragas.

Dragas, the head of the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia, got into a big mess last spring when she tried and failed to oust popular university President Teresa Sullivan.

After a national embarrassment, the reappointment of Dragas, a politically influential construction firm owner from Virginia Beach, seemed on the line. But as The Washington Post’s Robert McCartney points out, the state’s cosmic forces are lining up to keep her, albeit with a slap on the wrist.

McCartney points out, “She’s a member, or at least a close associate, of an elite group of top business-friendly politicians and corporate executives who often guide the state’s affairs — and they take care of their own.”

Spot on. Dragas was first appointed by Sen. and then-Gov. Tim Kaine and has been actively supported in her trials by Sen. Mark Warner. Both are Democrats, the party favored by Dragas in her political donations. Republican Gov. Robert F. McDonnell went along by not canning her last summer when her botched effort at dismissing Sullivan brought the school unwanted attention.

Virginia has long been ruled by an oligarchy of lawyers, bankers and business people. Their locus had been Richmond, but it has migrated more to Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads as population movement and businesses shift their focus.

One would think that Virginia might grow beyond this traditional and typically Southern model, but apparently it hasn’t. For evidence, take a look at U.Va.’s current board.

Almost everyone is a business person of some sort. I count four lawyers from powerful state firms, a New York area financier, a Texas beer distributor, a coal industry veteran and developers. There’s also a student member, the dean of Johns Hopkins Medical School and the former president of James Madison University.

Contrast that with Harvard University’ Board of Overseers and the picture gets a lot more interesting. There are business people and lawyers, to be sure. But there’s also a writer-in-residence from Yale, a concert violinist and professor, distinguished biographers and journalists, and even an astronaut.

It seems obvious that Harvard’s board might have a broader vision than the strictly-business views at Mr. Jefferson’s University. That’s a shame, because one of Dragas’s initiatives was to reassess and perhaps dismantle some of her university’s strengths, such as teaching the classics and non-mainstream foreign languages.

A personal note:  last night, I attended a dinner sponsored by the World Affairs Council of Greater Richmond of which I am a member. One of my table mates was a young woman who graduated from U.VA. in 2011 and had spent a number of months in Dushanbe, the capital of the former Soviet Republic of Tadjikistan. I had spent some years in the Soviet Union and later Russia and although I had never been to Tadjikistan, I knew and worked with people from there.

The young woman got her start in Charlottesville because the university offers relevant languages including Persian. She also picked up some Tadjik and Dari. “They even offer Tibetan,” she said.

Will that survive if the Dragas approach continues? Good question.Big Business wants more engineers and researchers. Some members of the U.Va. board think it’s time to think more Chinese, and streamline courses to those that can make a buck faster. After all, it’s been in the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal and maybe they read “The Battle Hymn of a Tiger Mother,” so that has to be the appropriate course of action.

On the block might be Persian, not to mention more universal tongues such as German. Good luck next time this country needs a skilled linguist in an during the next time of terror.

With Dragas on the way to rehabilitation, the University of Virginia is hardly out of the woods.

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