The smooth operators in Pittsburgh who spun a web of patronage and quick fixes have finally hit bottom. There's no money left; a $60 million (and rising) deficit looms; the state is stepping in.
If a Pittsburgher is not a fondled member of the favored class, he ought to rent "The Matrix."
Countless warehoused human bodies are sucked of their life's energy to feed the machines. Their bodies are kept pumping out the nectar by a monstrous computer program that deceives their brains into thinking they're living real lives. A relative few are free of the neural prison and fight for freedom.
Is that Pittsburgh, or what?
City police are, adjusted for the cost of living, the highest paid among the 150 largest cities in the United States.
Contract clauses exempt the too-large-by-a-third fire bureau from layoffs, as well as AFSCME white collar workers and foremen.
Arbitration typically favors the unions, and have known for a long time that as the unions go, so goes the Democrat machine.
In this matrix of economic delusion, the head of the police union -- Lodge No. 1, the first in the nation -- is defiant.
"If you look at the job we do, we should be well above that," said Gene Grattan, concerning wages. And the excitable firefighters union chief, Joe King, makes Mr. Grattan look like a buttercup.
There is one way out of the stranglehold -- receivership that allows the city to break contracts, cold and clean.
Does anyone really think that cost-cutting here and higher taxes there within the current web of waste and wanton politics will carry the city through?
No, that would doom us to "The Matrix: Reloaded."
