[Newsbot]

Title: Maywood: A city that sacked its entire staff
Category: Uncle Sam
Posted By: commanderkai
Date: 2010-08-01 11:50:06

[Arctic_Menace]

WOW.

[PluggyRug]

This should happen where I live, the council offices are staffed by a bunch of inept stupids.

[Brenda]

Sometimes it is just better to tear it all down and build from the ground up.

[CommanderSock]

This is a great idea actually.

Privatize the civil service for good, maybe it's the beginning of a new era?

[andyt]

$1:

The police cars, however, are from “out of town” and manned by deputies from the county sheriff’s department, while the lifeguards and clerks are on loan from the neighbouring city of Bell.

So they're mostly shifting the cost to other taxpayers, since these cops and lifeguards are still svivel servants of another juridiction. Maybe there's some savings in economies of scale here, and maybe these other jurisdictions are better and more efficiently run. But if at some point selling these services to Maywood brings in less to those other jurisdictions than Maywood pays them, those other taxpayers aren't going to be too happy. Mostly Maywood seems to have shifted liability issues re police (DD, here's a gold mine for ya) to other jurisdictions. If their insurance rates all of a sudden skyrocket, they won't be so eager to supply services to Maywood anymore. And since Maywood residents don't get to vote in these other jurisdictions, those jurisdictions may find it very easy to cut corners in policing Maywood, since there's no electoral blowback. But it may blowback on Maywood.

Do you really want to have private police forces? Did you see the part in Capitalism, A Love Story where some state had private juvenile prisons? Turns out the private company was giving kickbacks to the judges to send them more inmates for longer sentences. Now those judges get to stay in a state run prison, see it from the other side.

I always wonder when people cheer for people at the lower income scale losing their benefits and getting wages slashed. How long can this race to the bottom last, before there just aren't enough consumers in the country anymore to feed the capitalist maw? Henry Ford was onto a good idea when he said I'm going to pay my workers enough so they can afford to buy the products they are producing.

One day that race to the bottom will get all the cheerers for paying lower and lower wages. I would be surprised if anybody on this forum is in the top 1% of US citizens who have as much wealth as the bottom 95% (not a misprint). Or maybe it already has, and they're jealous of people who still have decent jobs with decent benefits. We'll never outcompete the Chinese in the race to be the cheapest, we have too many qualms about slave labor and such. (At least most of us do) But then the Chinese are starting act up, blowing up tax offices, rioting etc.

[commanderkai]

andyt andyt:

Do you really want to have private police forces? Did you see the part in Capitalism, A Love Story where some state had private juvenile prisons? Turns out the private company was giving kickbacks to the judges to send them more inmates for longer sentences. Now those judges get to stay in a state run prison, see it from the other side.

I don't think anybody ever has rationally argued for a private police force. Hell, even before the New Deal and the shift from purely capitalist to a mixed economy, police forces were commonly run by the government.

Even so, private prisons aren't really an issue, in my opinion. Sure the chance of corruption exists in the legal system. But that would occur with or without private prisons. Who knows how many judges in the past and/or present have been bought off to rule in one direction or another.

[Dragom]

I'm not so sure their "Reallocating tax dollars." Some police forces give better service for your dollar.

[BartSimpson]

I live in California where this is pretty big news. To clarify some things: the city of Maywood is paying other cities and the county to provide services to Maywood. The next step that will probably occur is that the city will disincorporate and become part of the county or allow itself to be annexed to another, more solvent city. The part of this story that's making world headlines is how much money city officials have been paying themselves. It's obscene than in a city of 40,000 the city manager is making $800,000 a year.

[andyt]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

I live in California where this is pretty big news. To clarify some things: the city of Maywood is paying other cities and the county to provide services to Maywood. The next step that will probably occur is that the city will disincorporate and become part of the county or allow itself to be annexed to another, more solvent city. The part of this story that's making world headlines is how much money city officials have been paying themselves. It's obscene than in a city of 40,000 the city manager is making $800,000 a year.

So we have lawsuits against the city because cops are raping while on duty, and we have the city managers raping the treasury. I believe they just gave themselves a 40% pay cut, but that likely won't be enough from having them recalled. One can only hope.

In Vancouver the city manager gets $500,000. She has lots of experience and is good at her job. But I still think she's grossly overpaid. I love the part in Capitalism, A Love Story, where Moore profiles a bread factory that's co-operatively owned. The guy on the line pushing tins of bread around gets paid $64,000 a year, and so, if I understood it right does the CEO. The company is apparently making a good buck. (Assuming Moore didn't bullshit too much here.) As the CEO says "how many cars do you need. I make a good living." Then Moore brought up Salk, who gave away the patent to the Polio vaccine. Salk was apparently content with his researchers salary, the raving commie. Can you imagine something similar happening now?

[BartSimpson]

A cooperative is meant to be egalitarian and if they can succeed, then I'm happy for them!

But, likewise, if someone mortgages their home to start a business and it prospers because they risked everything then they have every right to profit from the risk because, if they fail, the burden of failure is theirs alone.

[andyt]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

A cooperative is meant to be egalitarian and if they can succeed, then I'm happy for them!

But, likewise, if someone mortgages their home to start a business and it prospers because they risked everything then they have every right to profit from the risk because, if they fail, the burden of failure is theirs alone.

Sure, no argument there. Doesn't apply to big business of course, Wall St types aren't mortgaging their homes, they're getting rich fraudulently mortgaging other people's homes. That's the thing that Adam Smith was talking about - cobblers for God's sake, a whole bunch of them competing with each other, and competing for helpers who haven't flooded in from another country. Not Cobblercorp, which is selling shoe deriatives.