By DR. LARRY MOSES
No one asked me but… By the time you read this, Hillary Clinton will have delivered her non-campaign-campaign speech to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Foundation. She will have pocketed her $225,000 fee.
While the students at UNLV demanded that she donate the fee to the University, they were about as successful as their football team. The fee will be donated to the Bill, Hillary, & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.
While you and I, as middle class Americans, may find this fee obscene, it really is not out of line with speakers of Clinton’s stature. The Foundation has indicated that they will see a profit of over $100,000 for this event that usually loses money.
I do not resent the money Hillary Clinton is able to demand for speaking. While you may feel Hillary’s compensation is unfair, this is the American way. In America a man running up and down a basketball court in his underwear, a man who sacrifices his body and blood on the football field, and a man who can hit a ball, or can keep another from hitting the ball, is paid millions of dollars a year. Meanwhile, classroom teachers are paid $35,000 a year. Americans pay for what they value.
The only objection I have to the 100 million dollars the Clinton’s have made through speaking engagements is the hypocrisy of their attack on America millionaires.
There are those who fear that Hillary will not be able to identify with the middle class due to the wealth she and Bill have enjoyed since he left office. Of course, she can’t identify with the middle class, but what national politician can?
Hillary contends that she and Bill left the Whitehouse dead broke; however, they are now multi-millionaires. Isn’t America great?!
It is time for the American middle-class to understand that the country is going to be run by one set of billionaires or another no matter whether those elected to office are Republicans or Democrats. When Harry Reid attacks the billionaire Koch brothers for having too much influence on conservatives representatives in the federal government, he does so with the financial support of liberal billionaire George Soros. While Hillary laments the influence billionaires have on conservative candidates, she seeks out liberal billionaires to support her efforts to become President of the United States.
The federal government being controlled by the financially elite is not a new phenomenon. It has been the case since the beginning of the nation. Washington, Jefferson, the Adamses, were certainly not from the middle class of the colonies. Early in American history middle class
Americans could escape the government by migrating west to the frontier. The frontier is gone and the middle class American is now trapped and forced to live with the federal government.
No one asked me but…The Clark County School District Superintendent Pat Skorkowsky has sent a letter of apology to parents of Clark County for the secrecy surrounding the attempt to reform the District’s sex education program. The Superintendent also promised to throw out the guidelines for comprehensive sex education curriculum, presented at the invitation-only community meetings. If you have read the document, you will understand the secrecy.
While many parents were concerned with the content of the curriculum, the American Civil Liberties Union was concerned with the closed meetings and the fact that they may have violated open meeting laws. The ACLU saw nothing wrong with the obscene nature of the instruction; they in fact felt the considered changes should be praised. However, they threatened to file a complaint about how the change was coming about.
The President of the Clark County School Board, Erin Cranor, stated that she had unsuccessfully fought all summer to make the input meetings public. She stated, “If we’re looking for public comment, shouldn’t we invite the public?” She refused to participate in any of the input meetings because of their secrecy.
No one asked me but…I find it intriguing that everyone values teachers until they find out they are going to receive even the smallest of increases in compensation.
The new contract between the teachers and the school board makes a provision for a one percent increase in salary across the board. At the bottom of the teacher salary schedule that would be an increase of $350 a year and at the top $700.
A national organization, StudentsFirst, headquartered out of California, stated the one percent raise is out of line because it is based on seniority and continued education rather than performance criteria. This might be a valid argument if the base pay of the teachers in Clark County was anything but minimal. One must remember that, not only has there been no increase in teacher salaries for years, but also that the District has refused to meet its contractual obligations in the past, refusing to pay for contracted increases based on yearly and educational growth increments. This in effect negated the contractual agreement between the District and the teacher. It did, however, save the District millions of dollars at the expense of the teacher.
The District has reported that many applicants have turned down offers in CCSD to take higher paying positions in other districts. Salt Lake City offers 9 percent more than CCSD. The Houston School District’s teachers are earning 42 percent more than the teachers in CCSD are.
Is it any wonder that nearly 10 percent of the CCSD staff resigned in August? When you add those to the 1,700 teachers the District laid off a couple of years ago in an attempt to destroy the union, it should not come as a surprise that the District came up short 600 teachers at the beginning of this school year.
No one asked me but…The CCSD is down to its last 54 million dollars of the 1998 bond issue.
There is a debate as to where to spend the remaining funds. The representative of the Southwest is lobbying for two new elementary school in her District. Boulder City is campaigning for a major upgrade of their old high school. The representative for West Prep is hoping to build a campus for elementary students who have, for years, been attending school in portables.
When the time comes for a board vote, we can only hope that our board member remembers who supported Moapa Valley in its quest for its long-promised gym. And it sure wasn’t Boulder City or the Southwest representative.
Thought for the week…If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle.
-Hillary Clinton
