NJEA Dues Clues

My local news sources occasionally cover the activities of the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) though not too critically as for some of them the NJEA is a primary (if not sole) sponsor:

• insidernj
• newjerseyglobe
• njspotlight
• politiconj

which today led off with mentions of a northjersey.com (no NJEA ads visible there) story on the millions of dollars that the NJEA spent on Governor Murphy through a ‘dark money’ PAC.

This got me to wondering how and how much the NJEA comes up with to buy a governor and web ads. This is what I have so far:

Pay to Play

A 2009 book by Elizabeth Brackett subtitled “How Rod Blagojevich Turned Political Corruption Into a National Sideshow” that I stumbled upon at the Westfield Library looking for picture books on Chicago that a good part of my family visited over the last week and which turned out to have a lot of parallels to my experiences in both New Jersey and Union County.

NJEA Law Makers

Last week, the Sunlight Policy Center of New Jersey issued a report that uncovered that the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) has been secretly funneling millions of dollars into a dark money group supporting Governor Murphy.  Yesterday they followed up with a report entitled, “NJEA: The Taxpayer-Funded Special Interest,” that lays out how the NJEA has funded itself.

No Debating Corrupt System

It is billed as a debate tomorrow among Democrat freeholder candidates in the primary next week but the rules make it a ‘must-miss’ for anyone but the plants and political operatives who will be stuffing the question box. Among their rules:

• The forum will be video recorded and the media are invited to attend. Only credentialed media are allowed to record the event.
• Each candidate will have 2 minutes for opening remarks to introduce themselves. The moderator will then ask a question from the audience. So that we can address as many questions as possible in the time available, each candidate will have 1 minute to answer each question. If time permits, candidates will also have 2 minutes for a closing statement.
• All questions are screened by a neutral committee to ensure that questions are applicable to all candidates, are not personal in nature, and are addressed to subjects relevant to this forum.

There will be a Plainfield debate immediately after and if all 9 freeholder candidates show up a best case scenario is that there will be six questions. Almost certainly nothing on the theft of Open Space tax money or the Solar Panel fiasco but, if Armstead can sneak it in, maybe something on this.

NJEA Denier

Multi-millionaire union boss Ed Richardson appears on the NJEA’s broadcast partner this weekend to deny that there is any public pension crisis in New Jersey:

Seeing the Light – At a Steep Cost (To Taxpayers)

Back in 2010 when the DeCotiis law firm suckered the Union County freeholder board into bonding to put up solar panels at what was supposed to be no cost then-freeholder Daniel Sullivan was more than eager to reward his political patrons by signing taxpayers up for this boondoggle:
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Today he admitted as much to Bloomberg:

Why are employer-sponsored health insurance premiums higher in the public sector than in the private sector?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) seeks to answer that question with a lengthy article that makes liberal use of differential equations.

For New Jersey, anyway, I have a two-word answer: