Democrats and union.......compassionate?.....not

So what we have going on in Wisconsin and Ohio and New Jersey are republican governors trying to prevent a public employee pension from outright collapsing from the weight of it's obligations that quite frankly cannot be sustained even by "taxing the rich".

So how would the democrats and unions handle the same issue. They wouldn't and the tale is that these pensions would collapse and leave seniors in abject poverty. Remember, these people don't get social security.

Also remember, this is no tale. We have a true, honest to God, example of what happens when you do nothing. Talk to the retirees of Prichard Alabama, where they didn't have the benefit of a few republicans cleaning up a generational pension mess when the time came.........

The city of Prichard filed for bankruptcy Tuesday in an attempt to cope with the debt created by fighting lawsuits and addressing the demands of unpaid and agitated retired city employees.

The Chapter 9 filing marks the second time in a decade that the city declared it was out of money. Mayor Ron Davis, who just two years ago helped the city pay off its creditors from the 1999 bankruptcy, blamed the latest financial crisis in part on a flawed municipal pension plan. The filing came a day before Davis and the city Finance Director Rex Williams were slated to be deposed by attorneys representing the pensioners in a lawsuit filed in August.

With the filing, that testimony will be put on hold, along with any other litigation pending against the city.

More.....

Now I did this post in November, 2009. How are things working today? Let's go to our liberal tomb of the NY Times to tell us............

This struggling small city on the outskirts of Mobile was warned for years that if it did nothing, its pension fund would run out of money by 2009. Right on schedule, its fund ran dry.

Then Prichard did something that pension experts say they have never seen before: it stopped sending monthly pension checks to its 150 retired workers, breaking a state law requiring it to pay its promised retirement benefits in full.

Since then, Nettie Banks, 68, a retired Prichard police and fire dispatcher, has filed for bankruptcy. Alfred Arnold, a 66-year-old retired fire captain, has gone back to work as a shopping mall security guard to try to keep his house. Eddie Ragland, 59, a retired police captain, accepted help from colleagues, bake sales and collection jars after he was shot by a robber, leaving him badly wounded and unable to get to his new job as a police officer at the regional airport.

Far worse was the retired fire marshal who died in June. Like many of the others, he was too young to collect Social Security. “When they found him, he had no electricity and no running water in his house,” said David Anders, 58, a retired district fire chief. “He was a proud enough man that he wouldn’t accept help.”

Yet the media will continue to portray Scott Walker as some sort of union buster with the compassion of a viper.

But you tell me. What's so compassionate about the scenario above?

Read the rest.......