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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (121931)	1/18/2012 11:58:40 AM
From: TopCat	5 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224729

The market establishes value, Kenneth. What? You're disappointed the market never found much value in your services? I'm not surprised.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (121931)	1/18/2012 12:26:04 PM
From: TideGlider	4 Recommendations Respond to of 224729

Janitors salaries and speaking fees? A comical comparison lol Now how much did Bill Clinton get in speaking fees? Bill Clinton 2010 Speaking Fees 567 days ago Clinton earns $65 million in speaking fees as private citizen Posted by CNN Political Research Director Robert Yoon 'I never had any money until I got out of the White House, you know, but I've done reasonably well since then,' Clinton said during the Fortune Time CNN Global Forum in Cape Town, South Africa. Washington (CNN) - Former president Bill Clinton stepped up the pace of his paid speaking engagements in 2009, bringing his total haul from these speeches to $65 million since leaving office in 2001. According to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's annual financial disclosure report released Monday, the former president earned $7.5 million from 36 paid speeches last year, up from the $5.7 million he earned for 25 speeches in 2008. Almost half of his speech earnings last year, $3.2 million, came from 13 speeches delivered in nine other countries, ranging in distance from Canada and Mexico to Turkey, Slovenia, and the United Arab Emirates. The remainder was earned in 23 speeches delivered in seven states and the District of Columbia. Almost two-thirds of President Clinton's earnings from 365 paid speaking engagements since leaving the White House have come from overseas. Since 2001, he has earned $40.1 million from 197 speeches in 45 foreign countries. His most popular destination was Canada, where he has participated in 50 paid events for a total of $8.4 million. This includes a June 2008 speech for the motivational speaking conference "The Power Within" in which he earned $525,000, the most he has ever earned for a single event. Clinton has given a total of 21 speeches at various "Power Within" events since 2001 for a total of $4.6 million. The former president's second most popular overseas speaking destination over the past nine years was the United Kingdom, where he earned $3.2 million for 16 events. Also ranking high were Germany ($2.5 million for 11 events), Australia ($2.3 million for 13 events), and Mexico ($2.0 million for 10 events). The $7.5 million Clinton earned in speeches in 2009 tops by almost $2 million the amount he earned the previous year, when he devoted six months on the stump campaigning on behalf of his wife's unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. That year, Hillary Clinton loaned her presidential campaign a total of $13.2 million out of her and her husband's personal funds. The Clintons ended up eating the cost of that loan because the campaign was unable to repay the amount by the deadline required by federal campaign finance laws. However, since Hillary Clinton suspended her presidential campaign on June 7, 2008, her husband has earned $12.3 million in speaking fees for 56 events, going a long way towards canceling out the impact of the loan. President Clinton's most lucrative years on the speaking circuit were 2006, when he earned $10.2 million for 57 speeches, and 2007, when he earned $10.1 million for 54 speeches. In 2004, Clinton spent much of the year writing his memoirs and recovering from heart bypass surgery and earned only $875,000 in speaking fees. Clinton was an elected official on a fixed government salary for all but two years from 1977, when he took office as the Arkansas attorney general, until leaving the White House in January 2001, a fact he noted Sunday at the Fortune Time CNN Global Forum in Cape Town, South Africa. "I never had any money until I got out of the White House, you know, but I've done reasonably well since then," said Clinton. Though it is not unusual for former presidents to command millions of dollars in speaking fees after leaving office, Clinton is the only one subjected to strict disclosure requirements as a result of his wife's employment as a high-ranking federal official, first as a United States Senator and now as Secretary of State. When President Obama first nominated then-Sen. Clinton, his former rival, to be the nation's top diplomat in December 2008, the former president agreed to a number of steps to guard against possible conflicts of interest that may arise from his various post-presidential activities. In particular, he has agreed to allow State Department and White House ethics officials to review his slate of proposed speaking engagements. Secretary Clinton's financial report also indicates the couple owns assets valued at between $10.8 million and $51.8 million, not including the value of their primary residence, which federal regulations do not require them to disclose.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (121931)	1/18/2012 1:54:59 PM
From: locogringo	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224729

What is the "not very much" paid for Romney speaking fees? How much did Monica get paid by Clinton? Do you know if she was unionized, or was she just an entrepreneur? What was the final figure that was paid out by the Clintons for "hush money" after 8 years?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (121931)	1/19/2012 2:18:11 PM
From: TimF	3 Recommendations Respond to of 224729

Janitors 'clean up' Top 20 school scrubbers pull in 140G-plus By YOAV GONEN Education Reporter They're mopping up -- and cleaning us out. Twenty public-school janitors rake in more than $140,000 a year -- far more than the teachers whose classrooms get tidied up, records show. As The Post reported yesterday, suspected crooked custodian Trifon Radef counts himself among the rich elite, making more than $170,000 a year. Radef is under investigation for allegedly using city workers to renovate nine of the 10 properties he owns in Queens, officials say. But Radef wasn't even the highest-earning "custodial engineer." That honor went to Queens janitor Kevin Fitzgerald, who pulled in a whopping $181,643 at PS 229 in Woodside -- thanks to the supplementary work he performed at two other Queens schools, records show. Radef and Fitzgerald were among six custodians who took home more than $150,000 last year -- and among the 20 who hauled in more than $140,000, the records show. The janitors' base salary maxes out at $106,329, according to their latest contract -- about $6,000 more than the maximum salary for teachers. "The idea that custodians make more than teachers is outrageous," fumed former Schools Chancellor Harold O. Levy. Head custodians can earn extra income in one of two ways, including through "temporary care" assignments at schools that don't have a permanent custodial engineer. That work typically lasts less than two months but doesn't require that janitors clock in beyond normal work hours. Head janitors also can pad their pay by helping out at other schools on nights or weekends -- which in Fitzgerald's case nearly doubled his $92,100 base salary. Radef, a 36-year veteran assigned to Roosevelt HS in The Bronx, earned an extra $53,000 last year by helping out evenings at Truman HS. His former employees allege that he paid them with taxpayer funds to do work on nine of his Queens properties, valued at nearly $6 million, and that he created no-show jobs for pals. City officials have been unsuccessfully trying to privatize at least some custodial services for decades but have run into legal hurdles and union opposition. Levy hit the roof shortly after taking office in 2000 over the fact that custodial salaries topped those of teachers and some principals. "It's surprising to me that we still haven't fixed the problem of custodians," he told The Post yesterday. "Too many regard the buildings as private fiefdoms." Four years later, Mayor Bloomberg's attempt to privatize services at more than 100 schools was defeated by a lawsuit filed by the Local 891 custodial union, which has 850 members. nypost.com

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (121931)	1/19/2012 2:39:50 PM
From: Celtictrader	1 Recommendation Respond to of 224729

Mitt Romney's Dishonest and Unsuccessful Record on Job Creation Ben Adler on July 25, 2011 - 4:34pm ET Mitt Romney has made weak job growth under President Obama and his promise to do better the central argument of his candidacy. The Romney campaign sends out daily missives with headlines like “College Students to Obama: Where are the Jobs?” and “President Obama has Failed to get California Back to Work.” They have made multiple videos to hammer the point home. In fact, whenever Romney is asked about another issue, he is liable to preface his answer by saying that nothing matters so much as jobs. In the last Republican debate,when asked about “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal, he began with the total non sequitur, “Well, one, we ought to be talking about the economy and jobs.” At the same debate Romney asserted: “What this president has done has slowed the economy. He didn’t create the recession, but he made it worse and longer. And now we have more chronic long-term employment than this country has ever seen before.... This president has failed. And he’s failed at a time when the American people counted on him to create jobs and get the economy growing.... I spent my life in the private sector, twenty-five years.... You can tell how—how to get jobs going in this country, and President Obama has done it wrong.” Such a claim—that President Obama has failed at creating jobs and Romney’s private sector experience means he would do better—naturally raises the question: How has Mitt Romney done at creating jobs? Not so well, as it turns out. First, during that quarter-century of private sector experience, Romney worked at a private equity firm that attempted to take over and turn around failing companies. As Bloomberg reportedlast week, that often meant laying off workers. Other times, they failed to revive companies and shed workers in bankruptcy. Relative to an innovative entrepreneur such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who invented a product and built a large company, Romney’s record in the private sector was not one of impressive job creation. These incidents have haunted Romney’s career since 1994, when laid-off workers protested his Senate campaign. But even if you were to assume that any private-sector experience equals job creation, it does not necessarily follow that business success translates into success in public office. As governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007, Romney presided over anemic job growth. According to Reuters, “Labor Department figures showed Massachusetts ranked forty-seventh among the states in the rate of jobs growth in those four years —ahead of only Ohio, Michigan and Louisiana.” You might expect this to make Romney shy about constantly attacking anyone else’s record on job growth, but it hasn’t. Nor, apparently, has a series of embarrassing revelations about Romney’s campaign commercials and speeches. In June Romney released an ad featuring a recent college graduate named Ryan King of Midland, Michigan, who complained that he could not find a job. As it turned out, King got a job within days of his college graduation and also happens to be vice-chair of the Midland County Republican Party. The Wall Street Journal dubbed the ad “A Baloney Sandwich.” Meanwhile Romney’s bizarre commercial in which Nevadans stand up and declare they are “not a bump in the road” as a retort to President Obama’s acknowledgment that there have been bumps in the road to economic recovery was plagued by similar dishonesty. Two of the people holding up signs complaining about the lack of jobs available to them turned out to be full time students and leaders in the University of Nevada–Las Vegas College Republicans chapter. Undeterred, Romney has pressed ahead with using these phony stand-ins for supposed victims of Obama’s economic record. Last week a Romney ad in New Hampshire featured Packy Campbell, a former Republican state legislator whose business suffered “in the Obama economy.” It turns out that, even by Campbell’s own admission, his business was falling off before Obama took office. Meanwhile Romney visited the Valley Plaza shopping center in North Hollywood, California, to lament that it has not been redeveloped because of economic conditions. As TPM’s Benjy Sarlin explains, the strip mall was badly damaged in a 1994 earthquake and has struggled ever since. And the death blow to its redevelopment plans were delivered by none other than iStar, a company owned by Romney donor Jay Sugarman, which foreclosed on the property. The Romney campaign did not return a request for comment. Will any of these embarrassing, dishonest gaffes cause Romney to shift his campaign’s focus? Thus far they have not. On Monday, Romney was back at it, with a press release titled “President Obama has Failed Hispanic Americans on Jobs.” Of course, being shamelessly hypocritical has never bothered Romney before, so why should it start to now?