Free Republic

Universities and corporations are desperate to hire people whose sole job is to tell you how racist you are. In a recent discussion about the "wokeness" situation in American universities, Prof. Kimberly Johnson presented a table showing the salary compensation data for DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) personnel at Michigan State University (MSU) in 2018–2019. It contains 82 full-time positions ranging from a modest $42,000 salary for the administrative assistant to $408,000 for chief diversity officer (that's just above the salary of the POTUS, at $400,000). The total annual compensation for DEI staff at MSU is $10.6 million. Isn't that too...

<p>Institutions are being absorbed not just by the woke apparat, but by an array of ideologies that seeks to destroy them.</p><p>The collective madness that ensued from the pandemic, the quarantine, the self-induced recession, the George Floyd killing and subsequent months of exempted riots, the election year, and the resurgence of variants of the Chinese-engineered coronavirus, all ignited the fuse of formerly inert socialist dynamite. And the ensuing explosion of revolutionary fervor in just a few months has made America almost unrecognizable.</p>

BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors has been busy upgrading her 'Marxist' mansion in the rustic but ritzy Topanga Canyon area of Los Angeles County amid the fallout over her $3million property portfolio. As these exclusive DailyMail.com photos show, shortly after closing on the three-bedroom, three-bath, 2,380 square foot property in March, the 37-year-old activist got right to work with some home improvements. Last month workers were spotted in the early morning hours trenching mounds of dirt in front of and around the property in preparation for a formidable barrier to wrap around the home.

President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is going after Harley-Davidson for allegedly selling motorcycles that emit more air pollution than the almighty federal government allows, and is punishing them by making them pay for people’s stoves. The federal tree-hugging watchdog complained that the motorcycle company “manufactured and sold approximately 340,000 illegal devices, known as ‘super tuners,’ that, once installed, caused motorcycles to emit higher amounts of certain air pollutants than what the company certified to EPA.” “Since January 2008, Harley-Davidson has manufactured and sold two types of tuners, which when hooked up to Harley-Davidson motorcycles, allow users to modify certain aspects...

American incomes have tumbled over the last decade. But for many people in Washington, D.C., it’s been something of a party. The income of the typical D.C. household rose 23.3% between 2000 and 2012 to an inflation-adjusted $66,583, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, its most comprehensive snapshot of America’s demographic, social and economic trends. During this period, median household incomes for the nation as a whole dropped 6.6% — from $55,030 to $51,371. The state of Mississippi, which had one of the biggest declines, dropped 15% to $37,095: Nearly one in three people there have an income...

A federal government shutdown will temporarily cut off pay of thousands of Uncle Sam’s workers, but for those considered “excepted employees,” there could be a nice salary bump thanks to rules allowing overtime, compensatory time and other benefits provided to those the administration feels too important to furlough. In advance of the potential shutdown, the Office of Personnel Management distributed a 30-page “Guidance for Shutdown Furloughs” that spells out who will get what, if anything, if President Obama and House Republicans can't negotiate a break in the budget stalemate by Monday night, the end of the fiscal year. Most workers...

Earlier this year, Jeb Bush told ABC that both his father George H.W. Bush, and brother George W. recommended he run for president in 2016. Mama Barbara Bush is not keen on the idea, declaring in April that “the nation’s probably had enough Bushes.” But in the constantly shifting equations of potential Republican hopefuls for future president and vice president, the former Florida governor’s name has been tied with another former governor: Sarah Palin. The pair have now been framed as a “the GOP’s only chance” in the race by American Thinker contributor Michael Sheppard. “Would Jeb Bush have as...

Congress is not as stupid as you think. I realize that is not a high bar; but still, credit must be given when credit is due. Quite often when our duly-elected political representatives get together in Washington to pass some ill-designed, over-intrusive and brutally expensive law, they recognize the difficulties it will create -- and so they exempt themselves. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration? The National Labor Relations Act? Minimum wage laws? None of them govern Congress. The much-lauded Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which sends corporate executives to prison for falsifying financial data, would decimate Congress if it were applied to...

Government: With the passage of health care reform and the ongoing boom in federal hiring, it's becoming increasingly clear that America is now run by a new, privileged class of bureaucrats. For those who remember the old Soviet Union, it was a grim place — at least for average citizens. But not so for those in government. Contrary to the official ideals of equality and a classless society that the ruling communist regime espoused, the USSR created a privileged class of party members inside government — the nomenklatura. This semipermanent bureaucracy earned higher incomes, got better health care, ate better...

The uncomfortable effects of government actions are being felt everywhere. Obamacare concerns are, anecdotally, delaying hiring, causing firms to change benefits for the people, and increasing taxes on the great majority. On the other hand, in the context of the "sequester", which is merely a slowdown in the breakneck rate of government spending, anyone who has traveled by plane in the last month knows the full court press efforts under way to ensure the American public knows just how 'devastating' the sequester cuts are - with delays rising exponentially with every dollar removed from the FAA budget. But there...

Working for the public good has also worked well for one California county administrator’s bank account. According to reports by several newspapers, Alameda County, in the San Francisco Bay Area, is paying its County Administrator Susan Muranishi, north of $400,000—for life. This includes a generous base salary of $301,000, plus taxpayer-funded deferred pension plans paid for by the county. The pension accounts are set by a formula that multiplies years of service by 2 to 3 percent of the top salary to calculate the benefit, the San Jose Mercury News reports. With 38 years of service under her belt, the...

My Cato Institute colleague, Chris Edwards, put together a remarkable (and depressing) chart showing that federal bureaucrats get almost twice the level of compensation as workers in the productive sector of the economy. Defenders of the bureaucracy (including a federal pay panel dominated by bureaucrats) claim that government employees actually are underpaid because…well…just because.My modest contribution to the debate was to put together a chart based on the Labor Department’s JOLTS data, which shows that bureaucrats are far less likely to voluntarily leave their jobs than folks in the private sector, which is very strong evidence that they are being...

Seventy-three percent of the new civilian jobs created in the United States over the last five months are in government, according to official data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In June, a total of 142,415,000 people were employed in the U.S, according to the BLS, including 19,938,000 who were employed by federal, state and local governments.

State workers and their families will pay more for medical care starting Jan. 1 under the latest changes to emerge from a state law that wiped out most public employee union rights. The changes in the state health plan require 183,000 participants to pay 10 percent of their bills for doctor visits, tests, surgeries and hospitalizations up to an annual maximum of $500 for single people and $1,000 for families. Health plan administrators have explained the new system previously, but they expect to get a lot more questions when workers begin reaching into their pockets. "I think the reality will...

‘It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation is all about,” Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid claimed last week. Senator Reid is simply wrong: The private sector has suffered from much deeper job cuts than public-sector workers have faced. Obviously, Americans are hurting, with some 7 million losing their jobs since the start of the recession. And that doesn’t include the 7.2 million people who should have entered the work force over the same time period. But the pain hasn’t been in...

In his numerous fund-raising and policy speeches around the country these days, President Obama often bemoans the difficult economic times and uncertainties afflicting millions of Americans, including the nearly 14 million still seeking work unsuccessfully.

Here's some fun facts. OK, maybe not so fun depending on your perspective. The average retiree from San Francisco city government earns an annual pension of $46,272, according to the San Francisco Employees' Retirement System. The average retiree who worked at least 30 years in city government earns an annual pension of $76,981. The average pension for a retiree from the fire department is $108,552. From the police department? $95,016. And everybody else? $41,136. The figures show most retirees aren't getting anywhere near the fat packages that outrage many city residents - like the $264,000 pension paid to former Police...

Republican leaders in Congress think so, and they are calling for an overhaul of the entire federal pay system to help slash government spending. Democrats and other defenders of the government work force say federal workers are actually underpaid compared with their private counterparts. A closer look at the data shows that both sides have a point but that supporters of federal workers are a bit closer to reality.... That argument is backed up by a 2002 study of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It found that federal salaries for most professional and administrative jobs lagged well behind compensation offered...

Shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue in Washington, D.C. recently, Maria Shriver and her daughter left all the clothes the daughter tried on -- but didn't purchase -- on the floor of the dressing room. The sales staff was shocked that Shriver allowed her daughter, whose father is California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, to leave her rejects in a pile during their visit in mid-October. "She left the dressing room in a shambles," according to a sales clerk. "Why doesn't Maria Shriver teach her daughter manners and respect for others?" Shriver writes: "My role model, like most daughters, was my mother. She...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's likely future president, Dmitry Medvedev, does not have a car of his own and the only family transport is his wife's nine-year-old Volkswagen Golf, an official income declaration showed on Monday. The modest means set out in the declaration submitted to election officials contrast sharply with the funds he controls: he is chairman of gas giant Gazprom which in 2006 notched up a net profit of about $13 billion. President Vladimir Putin, who has to step down as president at the end of his second term in May, backed Medvedev last month as his favored candidate...