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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A very tough job ahead of us, March 25, 2011
This review is from: Shakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy Against the American Taxpayer (Hardcover)
Steven Malanga has diagnosed a very important public-finance problem with laser accuracy in this book. The problem is the billions or trillions of dollars that are handed out every year to government dependents, in particular the public employee unions. These groups, in turn, pool their assets and make enormous political contributions to corrupt political hacks who will, in turn, support their demands (and I do mean demands) for more money. Needless to say, that government money comes right out of our pockets, and people earning $25 per hour wind up supporting high-school teachers making $47 per hour.
Does that sound right to you? That high-school teachers should be making $100,000 per year, while their students just get worse and worse test scores?
Things you probably didn't know: California Governor Schwarzenegger was planning substantial layoffs to try balancing the budget, right up to the moment when he got a call from President Obama, who read him the riot act. (It is especially amazing that someone from SEIU sat in on the conference call.) Said Mr. Hope-and-Change himself, "If you lay those people off, you are going to LOSE hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money. Have you got that straight, buddy?"
These forces are especially lethal on the local level, where they tend to overwhelm the local officials with their massive funding, organized on the state and federal levels.
This is, truly, gangster government, and our job is to get rid of it. I can think of a couple of steps: (1) ban public employee unions, completely (2) ban sending federal monies back to state or local governments.
But whatever happens will require us to begin paying serious attention to politics. I suspect that we let things drift because life was OK, but now we have Obama in the White House and we're bankrupt. It's time for Rip Van Winkle to wake up!
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14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Union "Shakedown", December 16, 2010
This review is from: Shakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy Against the American Taxpayer (Hardcover)
GREAT BOOK! More should read this book, explaining how over time the unions have made this a socialist county. My believes are that unions were needed at one time. Little did we know or understand (care) just how bad things would become. Read "Shakedown" The Continuing Conspiracy Against the American Taxpayer"
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
If you thought there was hope for America: Think again., December 14, 2011
This review is from: Shakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy Against the American Taxpayer (Hardcover)
America was quite a different place before the radical 1960s. There were no such things as "Entitlements," "Political Correctness," "Affirmative Action," "The Great Society," or "redistribution of wealth," and Americans were simply that: Americans with no hyphens. Would-be lawyers were actually taught ethics and most Americans still understood the founding documents and why they are so critically important to the safety of the American people. Americans prided themselves on being "rugged individualists" willing to work hard to get ahead and earn their way in life, and their children were likewise taught to love their country, study hard, and learn to earn their way --- and they were rewarded on their merits. America was prosperous, powerful, and admired throughout the world. This book explains, in no small measure, how that all changed and how America became what it is today: A morally, politically, and economically bankrupt divided-nation, no longer the envy of the world. It's not a pretty story, but it is one well worth reading and remembering. The book chronicles the activities of the radical social-activists; union organizers; and sympathetic, naïve, and/or corrupt politicians who instigated and brought about the decline of the United States. It was essentially an effort by community organizers, activist thugs and union organizers to gain sway over local, state, and federal governments --- and ultimately over the American people (i.e., the taxpayers). The results are many. Among them: unionized government employees are now able to vote for their own bosses; unionized workers are now being exempted from many government programs being imposed on the private-sector; government workers are now paid significantly more than comparable workers in the private-sector and have vastly superior health plans and retirement benefits; unionized government and pseudo-government workers now represent a massive voting block which allows them to continue increasing their benefits and thwart attempts at reform by supporting Liberal Democrat candidates both financially and at the ballot box; the "War on Poverty" has transformed welfare from a system for temporary assistance into a lifetime stipend; and, by forcing banks to make unsafe loans based on contrived accusations of racism, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to finance them, government social engineers have succeeded in bankrupting the United States in the interest of wealth redistribution. There are so many seemingly independent factions working against America and America's working-class nowadays that it's hard to tell which is doing the most harm: the Federal Reserve (FED), the ACLU, left-wing intellectuals, the Bilderbergers, the so-called "Illuminati," community organizers, radical activists, reverse-racists, unelected Czars, Liberal/Progressive elitists, the "Greens," Environmentalists, government bureaucrats and social engineers, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the mainstream media, or the primary subjects of this book. After reading this book, however, one can't help but believe that these factions, whether working separately or in concert with some others, must surely rank high on the list. The harm they have done is incalculable, and the power they wield to do even greater harm in the future cannot be overstated nor is there any hope that this awesome power can be abated any time soon.
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