Despite Claims Otherwise, Detroit's Public Employees Are To Blame For Its Insolvency

After 20 long years of sleeping on the job, those Detroit
pensioners earned their pensions! It’s not fair to fault them
for their greed and incompetence just because their avarice
cratered one of America’s greatest cities.

Fox News has an article today on the very real issues facing Detroit’s retired employees. As part of Detroit’s bankruptcy filings, retirees learned that Detroit plans to pay them 16 cents on the dollar of their promised pensions. To ‘Puter, this sounds about right, though it will have a horrible toll on retirees.

Without cruelty, and simply as a matter of fact, ‘Puter takes issue with this statement made by Fox News reporter Perry Chiaramonte:

It was the politicians, and not longtime city workers like Olivia Gillon, who brought Detroit to the brink of insolvency, but now Gillon can only watch as lawyers negotiating the Motor City’s bankruptcy bid place a new value on her hard-earned pension: 16 cents on the dollar.

This statement is patently false. Detroit’s employees, thanks to their inflated salaries and obscene benefits have everything to do with Detroit’s bankruptcy. Detroit’s public employee unions were (and remain) every bit as greedy and corrupt as Detroit’s infamously corrupt politicians and bureaucrats.

Detroit’s public employee unions, just like those in every other jurisdiction, made a bargain with politicians. In return for politicians approving public employees overly generous salaries and obscene benefits, unions would recycle some of that largesse (involuntarily taken through mandatory union dues deducted from employees’ paychecks) into campaign contributions to the same politicians. This quid pro quo is not illegal, though it should be.

‘Puter’s said it before. Detroit is the canary in the coal mine for public employee unions and public pensions. Detroit’s public pension recipients are simply the first to receive a rude awakening, but they most certainly won’t be the last.

'Puter

Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.

’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.

The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.

His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.

He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.

Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.

‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.

The Gormogons

Despite Claims Otherwise, Detroit’s Public Employees Are To Blame For Its Insolvency