January 20, 2012

 

 

My moaning and kvetching about the wasteful travel on the taxpayer’s dime of a US Postal Regulatory Commissioner –read the lede in The Rambler on the front page today to get a feel for what I am talking about, is really just small potatoes in the scheme of the fruit and vegetable section of contemporary American life. 

 

But, over the years, those little spuds have filled millions of burlap sacks at every level of local, state and federal government, all at the expense of ordinary people.  The crushing weight of the profligate spending of tax money by appointees and the politicians who reward them has contributed mightily to our coming bankruptcy.

 

I am focusing today’s ire on Ruth Goldway, the former mayor of the People’s Republic of Santa Monica, California –an experience puffed-up in her curricula vitae that qualifies her for absolutely nothing requiring sense or good judgment.

 

 Ruth Yannatto Goldway is a left wing Democrat from New York. She was raised in a family of Communist Party members. Her father was David Goldway; a life-long functionary for the US CP, once its paid "director of education” while it was under the control of Joseph Stalin. She is not responsible for her parents. But, she is a hard leftist herself, no surprise, I suppose.  She is Obama’s appointee as Chairman of the US Postal Regulatory Commission. She has been on the commission itself for 14 years of highly paid federal sinecure.

 

The US Postal Service, locked into sweetheart pensions and benefits for hundreds of thousands of former employees, is fast drowning in debt. They lost more than $13 billion in the past two years. Their mail and counter service is often the pits, they plan to close thousands of rural post offices and processing centers, and cancel mail delivery on Saturdays. Waste, fraud, abuse and general stupidity is rampant in USPS –and Ruth Goldway and her fellow four political appointees continue on snuffling at the trough offering "advisory opinions” to the folks who really run the place.

 

The Postal Regulatory Commission itself is a little hive of useless political appointees from both parties, parasitic hacks whose existence is irrelevant to the sensible running of the postal service, which already has a cadre of highly paid senior executives who, the evidence is clearly in, don’t know what they are doing.

 

Ruth Yannatta Goldway was a close political running dog of Mr. Jane Fonda –Tom Hayden, back in the early 80’s.  A radical feminist and radical environmentalist, Goldway was propelled onto the Santa Monica City Council and then its mayoralty when Hayden and his political organization took over city government. Hayden was in the California State Assembly representing the Santa Monica area then. He called his org the Campaign for Economic Democracy, CED, a "grass roots movement.”   Actually, donations from individuals at the grass root level were minuscule.  Hayden funded CED by combining large amounts of Jane Fonda’s money from an exercise salon she owned named WorkOut (and its ancillary video sales) with federal funds siphoned from a solar power project and a large federal grant ripped off from the Santa Monica Police Department.

 

Tom Hayden and CED took over the Santa Monica government and its Rent Control Board and imposed the most draconian rent control law in the nation, seizing control of the city’s thousands of apartments (more than 70% of Santa Monica voters were renters) and shafting the owners of the buildings, big time.  Hayden’s chief advisor then was a hard-left socialist named Derek Shearer who was, ta da, married to Ruth Yannatta Goldway. Shearer, a board member of the notorious loony-left Institute for Policy Studies has since dumped Goldway, just like the Postal Regulatory Commission ought to do.

 

Derek Shearer, now a professor at Obama’s old university, Occidental, was a friend of Bill Clinton’s from college. It was Clinton who appointed Ruth Goldway to the US Postal Regulatory Commission.  She (and her ex-husband) were big Obama supporters and it was Obama who appointed Goldway chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission. 

 

Ruth Goldway has run up quite a travel record over the 14 years she has been on the US Postal Regulatory dole. She collects a $165,000 plus salary and lots of generous bennies from her patronage job. The good news is that because our country is running out of public funds, and federal income taxes are now being paid by fewer and fewer people –about half of the adults, those burdened folks are now paying attention as their money is blown by entitlement queens like Ruth Goldway. 

 

Even soft pro-government liberal outlets like the Washington Post, where I first learned of the travels of Ruth Goldway in a couple of excellent stories by reporter Ed O’Keefe, are paying more attention to the sleazy self-dealing of patronage parasites,

 

As a Postal Regulatory Commissioner Goldway travels frenetically, particularly abroad.  Last year, the Washington Post tells us, she was in Paris, Brussels, Bern, etc. When the USPS was announcing its mind-boggling multi-billion dollar losses in the fall, Goldway was in Scotland meeting with European envelope makers. A couple of weeks later she was wining and dining her way through Portugal, Switzerland and China. She told the Post, try not to laugh, "I must admit I like traveling, but I don’t see it as a perk of the job, I see it as an obligation.” Oohh, those tough Parisian obligations. Get rid of her.

Richard W Carlson is a retired U.S.ambassador and the former director of the Voice of America. He is Vice Chairman of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank concerned with international terrorism. He is also the host of Danger Zone on Sirius/XM satellite radio and British Sky Radio abroad. DangerZone.org.uk