But this tactic and/or genuinely aggrieved reaction is being fine-tuned as the years go along. The first time this occurred to me was in early 2001 when auto-racing superstar Dale Earnhardt Sr. was killed in an awful wreck at the Daytona 500.

The New York Times’ amused, condescending front-page story about the emotional reaction to Earnhardt’s death in the South and some other parts of the nation led conservative intellectual journalist Christopher Caldwell to suggest the story should have been headlined “Inexplicably Treasured Cracker with Mustache Immolated in Bizarre Folk Ritual.”

Now Slate does this sort of analysis/satire all the time [with a liberal slant, unlike Caldwell]. So do lots of other folks.

But perhaps it’s time for this sort of pointed, judgmental angle to emerge in California coverage of the latest scandal involving Contra Costa County. Public uproars over stories involving generous public-employee compensation in the wealthy county are a staple of Bay Area commentary and news coverage. Here’s the latest example from Dan Borenstein of the Bay Area News Group:

In their pursuit of a ridiculous 33 percent salary increase, two Contra Costa supervisors may have violated county workers’ civil rights and, possibly, crossed a criminal line.

The FBI, state Attorney General Kamala Harris and the county grand jury should investigate. Contra Costa voters deserve to know what happened and whether Supervisors Karen Mitchoff of Concord and Mary Piepho of Discovery Bay are fit to continue holding office.

A federal civil rights lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges the two supervisors threatened to retaliate against union backers of a referendum drive to block the raise. A television interview with Mitchoff buttresses those claims.

As referendum backers on Jan. 2 turned in nearly 40,000 signatures, far surpassing the 25,407 needed, Mitchoff, speaking with reporters from ABC7 News and KTVU, issued a warning to labor leaders.

“As I’ve told them many times, you may have won the battle, but I’m not sure you won the war.” Asked what she meant by the war, she replied, “We’re going to be going into contract negotiations over the next few years.”

The explicitness of this is unusual even in California hardball politics. Based solely on what is already in the public record, it seems awfully likely that were this to happen in a Third World country covered by U.S. media, the judgment would be harsh, with cliches about “Banana Republics” run by greedy despots.

On the other hand, despite the decline of newspapers, there are arguably more people looking for government wrongdoing than ever before. This could lead to an even-more cynical public that sees government officials trying to enrich themselves using their official powers as the norm in rich countries — not just those in the Third World.

“The mortality issue exemplifies how CalPERS has set the rates it charges too low. Retirement systems are funded by contributions from employers and usually employees, plus investment earnings. Accurately projecting how long people will live is critical to setting those contribution rates.

“Currently, CalPERS studies the mortality data for its members every four years and from that projects how long retirees will live and receive benefits. But those numbers don't account for the expectation that people will live longer in the future; it only considers how long they've lived in the past.”

While CalPERS is at least aware of this issue and apparently doing something about it, I haven't heard of a single other California pension system acknowledging the need to change life-expectancy actuarial accounting. Nor will you ever hear reflexive defenders of the pension status quo like Steve Maviglio bring up this angle.

What about pension funding when life expectancy is 90?

Maybe because a little bit of digging shows the problem could soon be far worse than even Borenstein says, as Cal Watchdog reported in September:

“There is a hugely disruptive wild card in the pension debate that is rarely recognized. It is the growing consensus among longevity experts — a large number of whom are based in California — that they are nearing breakthroughs on several fronts that promise to dramatically expand how long humans live.

“According to data released in 2009, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System expects public employees with a current age of 55 to live to be 81.4 if male and 85 if female. These actuarial assumptions are built into how much public agencies are expected to set aside for all employees, including new hires in their 20s.

“The Golden State’s best-known anti-aging experts — Dr. Aubrey de Grey and Dr. Walter M. Bortz II  — are on the short list of the world’s leading authorities on the topic.  …

“De Grey, a native of England, oversees the SENS Research Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Mountain View. SENS stands for Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence. His focus has been on the idea that the aging process can be 'cured,' allowing humans to live far longer thanks to 'regenerative medicine' that stops the deterioration of the body. … He believes that the average life expectancy of Americans who are now alive is likely to be the early 90s, and that in 25 years time, it could be far longer as 'regenerative medicine' becomes practical.

“Bortz … a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine … sees vast progress ahead in gaining an understanding of human metabolism and its relation to longevity. He believes average life expectancy of Americans could reach 100 in coming decades.”

California's version of 'Elysium': Maviglium

Such developments, of course, would have implications way beyond CalPERS, as I noted in my Cal Watchdog story.

“Funding for Social Security and Medicare already looks imperiled because of the retirements of millions of baby boomers and the declining birth rate. If life expectancy increased to 100, it is impossible to conceive of a federal budget in anything even vaguely resembling its present form.”

But it is also true that a gain in life expectancy would hammer home one more time just how insanely advantageous it is for one set of people to have defined-benefit pensions mostly paid for by those who don't.

“Having a defined-benefit government pension when you live on average until you are 81 or 85 is already an immensely lucrative and reassuring fact of life for public employees. But having such a pension when you live until 100 is a gilded gift, one that makes past complaints about government employees being a special protected class seem simply inadequate.

“Barring a change in benefits or a dramatic increase in the minimum retirement age, public employees would enjoy an advantage so pronounced that it would be somewhat akin to that owned by the privileged elite who live in a satellite colony rotating around a decaying Earth in the recent science-fiction film 'Elysium.'”

We could just call California “Maviglium.”

But for three reasons, I don’t think the prospects for this reform are dead at all. I dealt with the first two in a U-T San Diego column today.

The first: My apologies to Jon Coupal and company, but I really think they were too clever by half with their measure last year:

” … the last time reformers brought paycheck protection before California voters — via Proposition 32 on the November 2012 ballot — they didn’t trust voters enough to just give them a straightforward up-or-down vote on whether union members should have a say on the use of their dues. Instead, the initiative included legally dubious provisions restricting corporate campaign spending that gave critics ample ammunition to depict it as a deceptive power play.

“The measure lost in a landslide. But state voters came fairly close to passing cleaner, simpler versions of paycheck protection in 1998 and 2005.”

The second: There has never been a more egregious case of union power trumping public sentiment than in this year’s Legislature:

“The appalling story of former Los Angeles Unified elementary schoolteacher Mark Berndt would make a simple version of paycheck protection much easier to pass in 2014 or 2016. After evidence turned up indicating Berndt had been feeding sperm to his students, district officials had no choice but to pay Berndt $35,000 to get him to quit because of job protections demanded and won by United Teachers Los Angeles.

“When the Berndt case triggered a public backlash, the state Legislature earlier this year passed a teacher-discipline measure that was billed as a smart way to keep perverts away from students. Instead, it actually gave teachers even more job protections.

“Nothing better illustrates the unions’ chokehold on Sacramento than this. If the CTA and the CFT had less money for political fights, maybe, just maybe, the public would have gotten its way — and parents wouldn’t have cause to think that state lawmakers worry more about protecting predatory teachers than the students of such teachers.”

The third reason is that quite a few veteran state journalists no longer have illusions about how unions have turned governance, especially at the local level, into something akin to looting. It’s no longer just Dan Walters and his occasional contrarian refusal to accept the surface motives claimed by Jerry Brown, Darrell Steinberg and John Perez. Instead, it’s the Bay Area News Group’s increasingly radicalized columnist and editorial writer Daniel Borenstein and a wave of younger reporters at the San Jose Mercury-News, the Sacramento Bee and many online sites.

Even L.A. Times knows which way the wind blows

And even though their concern is always muted, there’s plenty of evidence that the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times is worried, too.

Consider this editorial from last week, headlined “Spend money on the students it’s meant to help.” It makes the same basic point as my CalWatchdog story from three weeks ago about Gov. Jerry Brown’s bid to direct more funds to struggling students being hijacked to put more money in operating budgets for teacher compensation:

“Under the draft rules, if administrators spent all the extra funding on teacher raises, middle-class students would be receiving more of the benefit than needy ones. If those students’ scores rose even slightly, the district could claim it had fulfilled the requirements of the third option.”

If anything puts the spotlight on the gap between union Democrats and real, honest-to-God social-justice Democrats, it is this.

If unions follow up on their Mark Berndt scandal power play by hijacking what’s billed as the most socially progressive education reform in California history, I think opposition to a clean “paycheck protection” bill fades in the newsrooms around the Golden State.

If it doesn’t, God help California. There will be nothing unions can’t get away with.

The first is the fact that many Golden State public agencies routinely act in ways that would yield criminal and civil legal action and shareholder lawsuits if the same shenanigans took place in the business world.

The second is that in special districts — exemplified by the Metropolitan Water District but seen in water, transit and other agencies around California — there is a disincentive for top officials to play tough in salary negotiations because they personally benefit from overly generous pay and compensation practices. If such practices lead to higher bills sent to ratepayers or to poorer services, so be it.

Take it away, Dan:

“… what the district calls ‘perhaps the most significant change agreed to by unions’ … amends a decades-old contract provision that required union approval before BART managers could alter past work practices.

“That provision has impeded attempts to improve technology, reduce paperwork and increase efficiencies. BART leaders made its elimination a top negotiation priority; they got an alteration instead. Nevertheless, they claim the new language will enable them to improve technology and switch equipment without union approval.

“In fact, changes must still be negotiated with the unions. Unresolved disputes will be subjected to binding arbitration. And the arbitrator may provide relief, including ‘additional compensation.’

“That means unions will demand, and likely receive, more money in exchange for modernization, thereby eroding cost-savings BART desperately needs.”

This part is particularly rich: The concession-that-didn’t-happen was treated as if it happened.

“BART officials cite the contract modification as a key reason for agreeing to the financial terms. But they also misrepresent the monetary aspects.

“For starters, they claim employees, already some of the best paid transit workers in the nation, will net a 9.4 percent increase over the four-year contract. That counts salary increases offset by increased contributions to pensions and health care. In fact, the net benefit to workers is 11.7 percent.”

Will BART bosses pay for their perfidy?

Wait, there’s much more — a list of BART’s financial deceptions:

“First, officials claim the deal will save $2.7 million due to retiree health care changes. New employees will now be required to work 15 years before vesting in the plan, rather than the current five years.

“But most of the savings will materialize decades from now. Nevertheless, BART calculated the savings for 30 years and then credited half of that during just the next four years, thereby grossly inflating the contract savings. It’s fictional accounting.

“Second, BART claims it will save $5 million by encouraging employees with spouses who have health coverage to opt out of the transit district’s insurance. Employees will be offered $350 a month to do so. The question is how many people will take the deal. BART estimates 150 employees will, but they really don’t know.

“Third, the district left a $16 million retirement item out of its accounting.”

“The transit system not only provides traditional pensions, it also funds retirement savings accounts similar to 401(k)s. The district currently contributes $1,869 per year. And until 1991 it also kicked in 1.627 percent of salary.”

So as bad a deal as it looked when it was first reported, it was actually far worse. Will top BART officials face any repercussions for their dishonesty and profligacy?

In a just world, of course. But not in California.

By Chris Reed

Steve Maviglio, a leading consigliere to top Sacramento Democrats for more than a decade, now regularly pretends to  a new role. Even though he’s on Speaker John Perez’s payroll, Maviglio offers himself up on Twitter in the quasi-journalistic role of reasoned, reasonable commentator on pensions. On Monday, he stuck up for the reforms Gov. Jerry Brown got through the Legislature in September and depicted the Contra Costa Times’ Dan Borenstein as being on a “jihad” against public employees because Borenstein — like lots of people — thought the reforms were insufficient given the size of the pension mess.

So let’s bother to take Maviglio seriously. A reasoned, reasonable commentator on pensions would offer an honest take on pension problems, not try to downplay their size and significance with name-calling, non sequiturs,  semantic gamesmanship and twisted use of statistics.

That’s not Steve.

In 2011, as spokesman for the Californians for Retirement Security, Maviglio depicted the pension crisis as manufactured. His press releases tore into “myths and falsehoods about public employee pensions” spreadly widely by evil “out-of-state billionaires.” What was their goal, according to Maviglio? To use “a few sensational cases of pension abuse” as a means to “attack middle-class Californians.”

Falling short on consistency, insight, math and honesty

So in 2011, Maviglio depicted the pension reforms won by Jerry Brown in 2012 as unnecessary, and now in 2013, he’s depicting them as broad, sweeping and positive. Consistency ain’t one of your strengths, Steve.

Nor is breadth of insight a Maviglian strength. For years, whenever people talked about the extreme severity of the pension crisis at the local level, in places like San Jose and San Diego, Maviglio would always shift the topic to the state level, where the pension underfunding isn’t as extreme.

Nor are math or honesty Steve’s strong suits. For years, one of Maviglio’s favorite narratives has been to assert the average CalPERS pension is tiny, about $25,000 a year, by citing median pensions of former public employees — knowing full well that category included loads of people who only worked for the government for a few years. Maviglio understands that the pension debate’s core inflammatory issue is the fact that tens of thousands of public employees in California have retired in their 50s with 75 percent to 90 percent or more of their last, highest salaries. But instead he invokes grossly misleading statistics that include pension recipients who worked for local or state government for a few years before taking other jobs.

And these are just the most obvious ways to poke holes in the idea that Maviglio is a credible pension commentator.

The ‘middle-class’ retirees with $100k-plus pensions

There are also more sophisticated ways to do so. For example, Maviglio constantly depicts pension reformers as being at war with “middle class” government workers and retirees. Then why have Maviglio and the California Democratic establishment fought so bitterly against a pension reform approved in similarly liberal Illinois a few years ago that capped pensions at $108,000 going forward adjusted for inflation? Because so many public employees would be affected. They are hardly middle-class.

And then there is the basic, somewhat mean way to poke holes in the idea that Maviglio is a credible pension commentator. He stands to get a gigantic pension after years working in $100,000-plus jobs for Gray Davis, Fabian Nunez, John Perez and others.

In short, Steve Maviglio has as much credibility on pension reform as Kinde Durkee has on campaign finance reform.

But at least his Twitter posturing on the topic will be good for some laughs.

By John Seiler

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” said T.S. Eliot. Nowdays, of course, American university professors brand him a “sexist” because he didn’t say “peoplekind.” “Human” implies “man,” which excludes “woman,” and so is sexist.

But he sure was right about California politics. Consider the new blog by Brian Calle, our editor-in-chief. He writes about Steve Maviglio, the omnipresent Democratic activist, objecting to one of the state’s major pension reform reporters, Daniel Borenstein. I’ve relied on Borenstein’s excellent work for years.

Calle quotes Borenstein:

“Spotting my scheduled appearance on an upcoming conservative think-tank panel to discuss public-employee pensions, union spokesman Steve Maviglio went into Twitter attack mode last week.”

“@stevenmaviglio branded me a ‘pension basher’ and called my ethics into question. His sad attempt to divert the debate badly mischaracterizes my position and further undermines serious discussion of a complex issue.”

And that’s what we need: a serious discussion — including from Maviglio.

Here are two news reports today:

S&P douses Democratic idea to forego budget reserve

And:

Fitch on new California budget problems: Don’t panic

It shows who’s really in control in California. It’s not Maviglio. It’s not Gov. Jerry Brown. It’s not the Democratic Party. It’s not the risible Republican Party. It’s not Treasurer Bill Lockyer.

It sure ain’t the voters of California.

It’s the bond houses.

It’s like what happens if you max out your credit cards. You’re frozen. You have to pay off that debt before you can do anything else. And it’s hard to pay off.

Can you work harder to earn more money? Maybe. But what if you’re already working 16 hours in a day, seven days a week? Then you can’t work more. That’s why California can’t raise taxes: Because we’re already maxed out on what we are able pay.

And the state treasury still spends too much. And state and local governments owe $1 trillion, according to Dan Walters.

For many people and companies, the solution is simple: Leave the state.

But California can’t leave itself. So it’s stuck.

Soon, not just future pensions will be cut, but existing pensions. Brown’s proposed budget includes $4 billion to pay pensions of current retirees. That’s almost half the $8.5 billion he’s calling for in tax increases. That $4 billion is just going to grow. Cities, also, are facing massively increasing pension payments, which is why some of them are headed to bankruptcy.

Because there’s no money. And no chance of ever getting more.

Does the state constitution guarantee the payments? The bond houses don’t care about the constitution. They want their money. And they’re running the show.

Tweet that, Steve Maviglio!

By Brian Calle

If you have not read or heard anything about California’s unfunded public employee pension crisis, you’ve probably been living under a rock or, like union bosses and too many members of the state Legislature, the governor’s office and local elected officials, you are happily in denial.

Tensions are mounting too as pension deniers or pension reform “obstructionists, as Mercury News writer Daniel Borenstein called them, are attempting to publicly shame those of us pointing out that pension liabilities could bankrupt California without serious reform.

Borenstein is joining CalWatchdog contributor Steven Greenhut and David Crane, a former California State Teachers Retirement System board member,  and me for a panel on pension reform in San Francisco on Thursday.The unions have already gone on the attack about the event.

“Spotting my scheduled appearance on an upcoming conservative think-tank panel to discuss public-employee pensions, union spokesman Steve Maviglio went into Twitter attack mode last week,” Borenstein wrote for the Mercury News.

“@stevenmaviglio branded me a ‘pension basher’ and called my ethics into question. His sad attempt to divert the debate badly mischaracterizes my position and further undermines serious discussion of a complex issue.”

Fortunately as unions get louder so do the cries from taxpayers and advocacy organizations.

Christina Tobin, Founder and Chair of Free and Equal Elections Foundation and Vice-President of Taxpayers United of America, this week has been holding press conferences in California cities to draw increased attention to California’s pension crisis, including a planned event in Fresno on Wednesday and San Francisco on Thursday (in the morning before the reform panel).

Instead of denying the flood of economic problems looming because of pensions, it’s time to face the facts and fix the problem.

An excellent article in today’s Contra Costa Times by columnist Daniel Borenstein reports that the state’s government pension crisis is even worse than we thought:

IF THERE’S any hope of resolving the California public-employee pension dilemma, it must start with honest discussion of the size of the problem.

Unfortunately, federal rules for private-sector pension accounting do not apply to government retirement systems. So public-employee plans are free to legally cook the books and hide the full size of the mounting debt.

The difference in the rules allows public-pension plans, when setting rates, to overstate how much money they have, understate how much they need and unconscionably spread out debt payments for generations. It’s politically driven accounting.

If public-pension systems were forced to operate under federal accounting rules that apply to private-sector plans, the required annual payments would often more than triple, devastating state and local government budgets. The public backlash would be unbearable for elected officials and the cost would force layoffs of many more workers.

Instead, public-pension systems paper over the problem.

It’s another case of government operating by its own rules, instead of those in the real world that the rest of us must follow. This in the end is the ultimate problem with government: They don’t play by the rules of reality. Then, when things go wrong, they blame the private sector and boost taxes and regulations.

Borenstein continues:

For example, consider the pension plan for the state’s non-safety workers. When the California Public Employees’ Retirement System required the state to contribute $2 billion for the current fiscal year, it was on a 2009 actuarial valuation that showed the pension plan was 81 percent funded.

If CalPERS had been required to follow private-sector accounting rules, the state would have been required to pay more than $7 billion and the accounting would have shown the plan to be roughly only 55 percent funded, according to estimates prepared for me by a private-sector pension consultant.

Hey, what’s a couple of billion here and there? If things get too far out of hand, the taxpayers will just pick up the tab for the error.

Borenstein concludes:

Keep in mind that this is debt for pension benefits that have already been earned. It’s compensation, just like salary, for work that employees have already performed. So, in essence, CalPERS is pushing off to our children and grandchildren the debt for services we already received.

If CalPERS were bound by private-sector pension rules, the shorter amortization period would drive up current pension costs. But CalPERS officials, like those at most public-pension systems, would rather let the next generation solve the problem.

That’s what government keeps doing: kicking the can down the road. At the federal level, they have run up $14 trillion in debt, with another $1.6 trillion piled up this year. Even though the only real excuse for federal debt, a major declared war, hasn’t happened since 66 years ago, when World War II ended in 1945.

At the state level, governor after governor keeps coming into office promising to “cut up the credit cards” of state spending — then spends too much and increases taxes.

Why do we even put up with these spendthrifts, bankrupts and liars? Why don’t we just privatize the whole kit and kaboodle?

May 31, 2011