Tuesday, March 25, 2014

The last post.

I know, you haven't heard from me in over 3 months. That's because I've just about run out of things to say. And so this will be my last blog post.

I began this blog in 2011 with this purpose stated in the first post: "Public employees in general--and teachers in particular--are currently under attack. It is the purpose of this blog to give teachers some hard ammunition with which to fight back against the "everybody knows" arguments wielded by those who don't bother to actually get the facts, but simply rely on biased news outlets, accepting their "talking points" as proven facts delivered from the hand of God."

And that's just what I tried to do, for 216 posts. In each post, I tried to include something other than just opinion. When that annoying neighbor or relative began the refrain about how "public employees with their lavish salaries and pensions were destroying our economy," I saw my job as providing you with the well-researched facts to cram down their throats.

You've been with me as we covered the facts about a variety of topics of interest to retired educators: The fake "crisis" in public education; Health care in the USA; our looming retirement crisis; the fight to bring down public employee unions and many more topics.

Back in 2011, the fight against public employees had just begun in Wisconsin. It was flying under the radar. That's now changed. Those of us in the public sector are well aware of what is happening, and we're fighting back.

Around the same time, a fake "crisis in public education" was being ginned up, with teachers--and their unions--identified as the reason our public schools were in decay. Now, people are beginning to see that this is mainly an effort to privatize public education for profit. To some, this sounds like a good idea. Privatizing prisons used to sound like a good idea too. Check out how that has worked out!

Those 216 posts contain a lot of useful information. To make it more useful, I will be spending a few weeks organizing these posts by topic and turning them into pdf files with a table of contents. Expect an email from me--containing a link--when this project is complete. (I will also put up the link as a final blog post.)

The blog will not disappear. All 216 posts can still be reached by going to rsteinfeldt.blogspot.com.

Oh, one more thing. Most of you know that we made the move to Florida about 18 months ago. Most readers are retired and have probably thought about moving as well. I will pass along what we have learned about moving to Florida in a future email.

Thanks for reading these posts. I've enjoyed every minute spent writing them!

Dick Steinfeldt