More government intervention in the free market

Boom-Era Property Speculators to Get Foreclosure Aid

By Prashant Gopal

The Obama administration will extend mortgage assistance for the first time to investors who bought multiple homes before the market imploded, helping some speculators who drove up prices and inflated the housing bubble.

Landlords can qualify for up to four federally-subsidized loan workouts starting around May, as long as they rent out each house or have plans to fill them, under the revamped Home Affordable Modification Program, also known as HAMP, according to Timothy Massad, the Treasury’s assistant secretary for financial stability. The program pays banks to reduce monthly payments by cutting interest rates, stretching terms, and forgiving principal.

The government’s need to protect neighborhoods from blight and renters from eviction by keeping the current owners in place is outweighing concern that taxpayers will end up bailing out real-estate investors. The program is being enlarged after less than 1 million borrowers modified loans through HAMP, compared with the administration’s stated goal in 2009 of helping 3 million to 4 million homeowners.

“When we started the program we focused on owner-occupied houses because the need was so great and we wanted to target the efforts to that group,” said Massad. “Given where we are today, more and more people recognize that vacant properties are a problem no matter how they became vacant.”

Homeownership Rate

Investors are central to the federal government’s strategy for reviving real estate with home prices down 34 percent since July 2006 and as foreclosures deplete the pool of buyers who can qualify for a mortgage. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke told homebuilders inOrlando, Florida last month that the U.S. economic recovery has been “frustratingly slow,” in part because weak housing markets are holding back consumer spending.

The homeownership rate, which peaked at 69.2 percent in June 2004, fell to 66 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. A new Fannie Mae program designed to reduce the overhang of foreclosed homes is encouraging potential buyers, including private-equity firms, to purchase properties in bulk and convert them to rentals. Almost one in four home purchases in January was made by an investor, according to the National Association of Realtors. And investment and vacation properties made up 21 percent of houses in the foreclosure process in January, according to Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac Inc.

‘Huge Change’

The Obama administration announced last month that it would triple incentives to owners of mortgages that reduce home-loan debt and expand eligibility to borrowers struggling under the weight of other liabilities, such as medical bills. The extension will apply to all loans, including those held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage financiers. About 700,000 landlords will be eligible under the revisions to HAMP, which has been plagued by consumer complaints about lost paperwork, servicer delays and restrictive eligibility requirements.

“This is a huge change,” said Dan Immergluck, a housing policy professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. “The excessive concern to make sure nobody who played any role in creating the problem gets any benefit has paralyzed the response.”

The danger of blight to communities from foreclosed, vacant properties is still pervasive six years into the slump. Empty houses push down a neighborhood’s property values, according to a 2009 report by the Center for Responsible Lending, which said foreclosures will affect 91.5 million nearby homes through 2012. That will reduce property values by $20,300 for each household, according to the group, which seeks to protect homeownership and family wealth.

Buy-And-Flip Investors

By widening the program, the plan will inevitably offer aid to buy-and-flip investors who pushed prices higher during the boom by taking out mortgages with little or no down payment. Speculators accelerated the crash because they were quick to default when prices fell, according to a September report from Andrew Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Joseph Tracy, and Wilbert van der Klaauw of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

At the peak of the boom in 2006, more than a third of home purchase loans were made to borrowers who already owned at least one house, according to the study. In California, Florida, Nevada, and Arizona, which had the most pronounced bubbles, investors accounted for 45 percent of the mortgages.

While survivors of the property bust are now long-term investors, some of them may have started out as flippers, Haughwout said.

Taxpayer Dollars

While speculators are “no one’s first priority for receiving taxpayer dollars,” providing assistance to a large class of multiple property owners and “blanket modifications offered regardless of occupancy” would be more efficient than restrictive programs, the Fed said in the September report.

Chandrajit Bhattacharya, an analyst at Credit Suisse Group AG in New York, said that the HAMP changes will result in about 200,000 modifications for investors. While it won’t keep bondholders “up at night,” it will probably slow the process of liquidating foreclosed homes.

Bhattacharya said he doesn’t understand why the government should be subsidizing workouts for property investors who are in the business of making money on their purchases. Vacancies are unlikely to increase if the houses go into foreclosure and are purchased by owner-occupants or new investors who fill them with tenants, he said.

‘Ridiculous’ Policy

John Burns, an Irvine, California-based real estate consultant, said it’s “ridiculous” for taxpayers to come to the aid of individuals who made bad bets.

“What kind of precedent are you going to set?,” Burns said. “Are you going to refund people who lost money on the stock market too?”

Government help to homeowners comes after President George W. Bush’s administration rescued banks with the Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2008, when the housing crash sparked the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Wall Street benefited from Federal Reserve emergency programs to keep credit flowing, while Bush and President Barack Obama directed federal money to save companies including General Motors Co. (GM) and Chrysler Group LLC. The Obama administration then pursued a series of programs meant to reduce foreclosures.

John Russell, 61, of Northville, Michigan, said he was never a speculator seeking to flip houses. He bought four rental properties in neighborhoods in the state more than 10 years ago and said he planned to keep them for decades more. Now the houses are worth far less than he owes, his rents have tumbled, and he has to spend about $20,000 a year to keep them operating.

Chrysler Bankruptcy

Russell, a retired Chrysler executive whose pension was cut during the automaker’s 2009 bankruptcy, said two houses are in foreclosure and he can’t afford to keep them without the federal government’s help.

Banks have repeatedly rejected him for a modification because they aren’t primary residences, he said. Russell said he simply wants his mortgage bills to be brought in line with the rents.

“I guess what you’re always asking yourself is the market going to come back?,” Russell said. “As an investor you want to think that some day the house will be worth more than it is today.”

Moose Scheib, chief executive officer of LoanMod.com, a Dearborn, Michigan-based (MBASMI) firm that advises homeowners facing foreclosure, said many of the investors who hung on through housing bust are “mom and pop” property owners who bought real estate as a source of retirement income. Russell is one of his clients.

“Our economy is in trouble, housing is in trouble,” Scheib said. “Whether you’re fixing it on behalf of investors or homeowners, it benefits everybody to do that.”

Good

Wine: Chateau Margaux Flirts With Screw Tops

Union thuggery on behalf of Obama

UAW Strongarms Transplants To Help Illegal Aliens

The UAW and other unions are on the case of Honda, Hyundai, and Daimler again. They threaten to picket dealers of the carmakers, and to disrupt their stockholders meetings. (Good luck doing this in Japan, Korea and Germany.) What did Honda, Hyundai, and Daimler do now? They did nothing, and the unions say it’s an outrage.

A coalition of 15 civil rights organizations and labor unions is trying to overturn a controversial new immigration law in Alabama. That law requires police to check the immigration status of anyone they detain, if they think that person is in the country illegally. The Obama administration says Alabama is messing with the federal government’s exclusive authority over immigration policy, and challenges the law in court.

What does that have to do with Honda, Hyundai, and Daimler? Nothing. Except that Honda, Hyundai, and Daimler have plants in Alabama, and the unions would like to have Honda, Hyundai, and Daimler on their side. The companies could bring their leverage in the state to bear. The companies don’t want to get involved. Now the unions attempt to strong-arm them.

I can imagine that the foreign carmakers, being guests in the country, don’t want to be found on either side of this corrosive issue. Why do the unions attempt to force them on their side? Aren’t companies that were the target of an abortive UAW organize-the-transplants drive odd allies anyway? What’s wrong with the unions? My take: The unions simply want to discredit Honda, Hyundai, and Daimler with the Latino community.

Automotive News [sub] notes that Asian brands dominate new vehicle purchases among Hispanic buyers in the United States, with especially Honda accounting for 13.9 percent of the Hispanic market. The UAW could be trying to change this. “Nice demographic you have here. It’d be a shame if anything were to happen to it.”

Yet the anti American left like CodePink support No Korea

Anyone Caught Defecting From North Korea Will See Three Generations Of Their Family Executed

And we're sending them food aid in return for halting their nuclear program. How stupid can we get. They have never, never honored any agreement with us. The food will all go to their military and nomenklatura. The peasants will starve by the hundreds of thousands.

China's behavior in this matter is reprehensible and shows their view of human rights clearly. Do you think the UN will challenge them like they recently did Italy on repatriating Libyan illegal immigrants? Not a chance.

Why liberty matters

Dystopia in America

by Andrew C. McCarthy

On the stripping of liberties by progressives, as detailed by Mark R. Levin's Ameritopia.

I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.” The saturnine wisdom of Charles M. Schulz’s immortalPeanuts comic strip is impossible not to recall when reading Mark R. Levin’s new blockbuster,Ameritopia.1 For one thing, there is the sheer Schadenfreude of imagining how the people at the TheNew York Times, those notorious lovers of humankind, must have reacted upon learning that a new book by the popular conservative radio host would debut at number one on the paper’s bestseller list—the slot Levin’s last book, Liberty and Tyranny, owned for more weeks than the Gray Lady cares to remember.

Linus’s snark, more to the point, marks the scrimmage-line in the epic struggle Levin depicts. On one side stand progressives, whose professed humanitarian devotion thinly camouflages a disdain for flesh-and-blood people . . . particularly the kind who go to Tea Party rallies. To the social engineers, people are little more than laboratory specimens in statist experiments contrived to drag the benighted species toward perfection—which is to say, to subjugate people into serving the engineers’ conception of the good.

Huddled on the other side are those of a conservative cast of mind, reckoning human beings as basically worthy but incorrigibly fallible, and human interactions as infinitely complex and dynamic. In our quaint way of thinking, human nature defies grand statist schemes. To quote Karl Popper, as Levin does at the outset of Ameritopia, “Any social science which does not teach the impossibility of rational social construction is entirely blind to the most important facts of social life.” Worse, such schemes are invariably orchestrated by the state. Comprised of people, the state magnifies human flaws; yet, being a mere “Form of Government” (to borrow from the Declaration of Independence), and not a person animated by human incentives and virtue, the state is bereft of the people’s capacity to perceive, self-correct, and improve.

On this side of the scrimmage line, where Levin emphatically situates himself, the key to human flourishing is individual liberty. Leavened by society’s mores and shielded from state meddling, freedom unleashes the people’s work ethic and creative genius. As proof that this is the true path to our advancement, consider the scarcity of great achievements attributable to government planning. Or one could consider the historically unparalleled and sustained success of the American experiment, only recently frustrated by the Fabian conquest of the welfare state.

It is on this conquest that Ameritopia fixes its sights. Levin thus revisits the battleground between statists and conservatives explored in Liberty and Tyranny (which was reviewed in these pages in September 2009). In this book, however, his focus is different: He examines not so much the present crisis, but how we got here. Levin’s lens trains on the intellectual underpinnings of totalitarianism and of the American founding—that sharp turn in our understanding of the relation between the citizen and the state. The author leaves no doubt about which governing construct, in his view, has the better of the argument. But that by no means makes this a cheery tale. Reminiscent of Whittaker Chambers’s melancholy assessment in Witness that his renunciation of Communism amounted to joining the losing side, Levin ruefully observes that “Ameritopia”—the term he coins for the overrunning of our freedom culture by the Progressives’ utopian project—is not some distant prospect.
Ameritopia is here.

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Obama's team

Eric Holder Appoints Taliban Defender Tony West Of DOJ Third in Command

It is Eric Holder who is the United States Attorney General's duty to enforce the law and defend the interests of the United States according to the law; to ensure public safety against threats foreign and domestic; to provide federal leadership in preventing and controlling crime; to seek just punishment for those guilty of unlawful behavior; and to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all AMERICANS. Instead of doing his duty, Holder has appointed a Taliban defender as third in command at the DOJ. agency for enforcement of our federal laws. Of course this comes as no surprise that he has done this, as Eric Holder has done worse and needs to be fired from office long before he ever did this referring to "Fast and Furious" However Holders part in "Fast and Furious" doesn't even begin to explain how anti American his stance has been from way back. "Holder also knows a thing or two about defending terrorists. After all, he was a senior partner in a prestigious Washington D.C. law firm (Covington & Burling) that represented more than a dozen Yemeni terrorists held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay Cuba. While Holder was a senior partner the firm employed a number of radical attorneys to provide the Islamic extremists with thousands of hours of free legal representation, according to a news report."

www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2012/03/al-qa...

Attorney Tony West the one appointed by Eric Holder as third in command of our DOJ, is the California attorney who defended Taliban member John Walker Lindh. Lindth received training at Al-Faroug, a training camp in Afghanistan associated with Al-Qaeda. There, Lindt attended a lecture by Osama bin Laden who is said to have found him "unimpressive". Lindh admits to aiding the Taliban and carrying explosives while fighting our U.S. troops in the region. John Walker Lindh is doing a 19 year sentence now and he prefers using the name Abu Sulayman al-Irlandi.

Attorney Tony West was a fund raiser for Obama in the 2008 presidential race and raised 65 million dollars for the Obama campaign. When Obama took office, two days later he hand picked Tony West and named him to the Justice Post. Tony West likes to recall that he was called “the best candidate to have never won a race.” That sounds comical until one realizes that the joke is on the citizens of the United States of America.

The history of Islamic imperialism

The Historical Reality of the Muslim Conquests

Because it is now almost axiomatic for American school textbooks to whitewash all things Islamic (see herefor example), it may be useful to examine one of those aspects that are regularly distorted: the Muslim conquests.

Few events of history are so well documented and attested to as are these conquests, which commenced soon after the death of the Muslim prophet Muhammad (632) and tapered off circa 750. Large swathes of the Old World—from the India in the east, to Spain in the west—were conquered and consolidated by the sword of Islam during this time.

By the standards of history, the reality of these conquests is unassailable, for history proper concerns itself with primary sources; and the Islamic conquests are thoroughly documented. More importantly, the overwhelming majority of primary source materials we rely on do not come from non-Muslims, who might be accused of bias. Rather, the foremost historians bequeathing to posterity thousands of pages of source materials documenting the Islamic conquests were not only Muslims themselves; they were—and still are—regarded by today's Muslims as pious and trustworthy scholars (generically, the ulema).

Among the most authoritative books devoted to recounting the conquests are: Ibn Ishaq's (d. 767) Sira("Life of Muhammad"), the oldest biography of Muhammad; Waqidi's (d. circa. 820) Maghazi ("Military Campaigns [of the Prophet]"); Baladhuri's (d. 892) Futuh al-Buldan ("Conquests of the Nations"); and Tabari's (d.923) multi-volume Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk, ("History of Prophets and Kings"), which is 40 volumes in the English translation.

Taken together, these accounts (which are primarily based on older accounts—oral and written—tracing back to Muhammad and his successors) provide what was once, and in the Muslim world still is, a famous story: that Allah had perfected religion (Islam) for all humanity; that he commanded his final prophet (Muhammad) and community (Muslims) to spread Islam to the world; and that the latter was/is to accept it either willingly or unwillingly (jihad).

It should be noted that contemporary non-Muslim accounts further validate the facts of the conquests. The writings of the Christian bishop of Jerusalem Sophronius (d.638), for instance, or the chronicles of the Byzantine historian Theophanes (d.758), to name a couple, make clear that Muslims conquered much of what is today called the "Muslim world."

According to the Muslim historical tradition, the majority of non-Muslim peoples of the Old World, not desiring to submit to Islam or its laws (Sharia), fought back, though most were eventually defeated and subsumed.

The first major conquest, renowned for its brutality, occurred in Arabia itself, immediately after Muhammad's death in 632. Many tribes which had only nominally accepted Islam's authority, upon Muhammad's death, figured they could break away; however, Muhammad's successor and first caliph, or successor, Abu Bakr, would have none of that, and proclaimed a jihad against these apostates, known in Arabic as the "Ridda Wars" (or Apostasy Wars). According to the aforementioned historians, tens of thousands of Arabs were put to the sword until their tribes re-submitted to Islam.

The Ridda Wars ended around 634. To keep the Arab Muslims from quarreling, the next caliph, Omar, launched the Muslim conquests: Syria was conquered around 636, Egypt 641, Mesopotamia and the Persian Empire, 650. By the early 8th century, all of north Africa and Spain to the west, and the lands of central Asia and India to the east, were also brought under Islamic suzerainty.

The colorful accounts contained in the Muslim tradition are typified by constant warfare, which normally goes as follows: Muslims go to a new region and offer the inhabitants three choices: 1) submit (i.e., convert) to Islam; 2) live as second-class citizens, or "dhimmis," paying special taxes and accepting several social debilitations; 3) fight to the death.

Centuries later, and partially due to trade, Islam came to be accepted by a few periphery peoples, mostly polytheists and animists, who followed no major religion (e.g., in Indonesia, Somalia), and who currently form the outer fringes of the Islamic world.

Ironically, these exceptions are now portrayed as the rule in America's classrooms, as many textbooks suggest or at least imply that most people who converted to Islam did so under no duress, but rather through peaceful contacts with merchants and traders; that they eagerly opted to convert to Islam for the religion's intrinsic appeal, without noting the many debilitations conquered non-Muslims avoided—extra taxes, second-rate social status, enforced humiliation, etc.—by converting to Islam. In fact, in the first century, and due to these debilitations, many conquered peoples sought to convert to Islam only to be rebuffed by the caliphate, which preferred to keep them as subdued—and heavily taxed—subjects, not as Muslim equals.

Meanwhile, as U.S. textbooks equivocate about the Muslim conquests, in the schoolrooms of the Muslim world, the conquests are not only taught as a matter of course, but are glorified: their rapidity and decisiveness are regularly portrayed as evidence that Allah was in fact on the side of the Muslims (and will be again, so long as Muslims uphold their communal duty of waging jihad).

The dissimulation of how Islam was spread in the early centuries contained in Western textbook's mirrors the way the word jihad, once inextricable to the conquests, has also been recast. Whereas the word jihad has throughout the centuries simply meant armed warfare on behalf of Islam, in recent years, American students have been taught the Sufi interpretation of jihad—Sufis make up perhaps one percent of the Islamic world and are often seen as heretics with aberrant interpretations—which portrays jihad as a "spiritual-struggle" against one's vices.

Contrast this definition of jihad with that of an early edition of the venerable Encyclopaedia of Islam. Its opening sentence simply states, "The spread of Islam by arms is a religious duty upon Muslims in general.… Jihad must continue to be done until the whole world is under the rule of Islam.… Islam must completely be made over before the doctrine of jihad [warfare to spread Islam] can be eliminated." Muslim legal manuals written in Arabic are even more explicit.

Likewise, the Islamic conquests narrated in the Muslim histories often mirror the doctrinal obligations laid out in Islam's theological texts—the Koran and Hadith. Muslim historians often justify the actions of the early Islamic invaders by juxtaposing the jihad injunctions found in Islamic scriptures.

It should also be noted that, to Muslims, the Islamic conquests are seen as acts of altruism: they are referred to as futahat, which literally means "openings"—that is, the countries conquered were "opened" for the light of Islam to enter and guide its infidel inhabitants. Thus to Muslims, there is nothing to regret or apologize for concerning the conquests; they are seen as for the good of those who were conquered (i.e., the ancestors of today's Muslims).

In closing, the fact of the Muslim conquests, by all standards of history, is indisputable. Accordingly, just as less than impressive aspects of Western and Christian history, such as the Inquisition or conquest of the Americas, are regularly taught in U.S. textbooks, so too should the Muslim conquests be taught, without apology or fear of being politically incorrect. This is especially so because it concerns history—which has a way of repeating itself when ignored, or worse, whitewashed.

The southern border war

U.S. cops in shoot out with Mexico drug gang across Rio Grande

(Reuters) - U.S. Border Patrol agents and Mexican drug traffickers fought a gun battle across the Rio Grande river in south Texas, authorities said on Friday, the latest of a spate of cross-border shootings in recent months.

The Border Patrol said gunfire erupted on Wednesday after agents confronted a group of smugglers loading bundles of marijuana into two vehicles on the banks of the Rio Grande west of Roma, Texas, a town about 250 miles south of San Antonio.

The agents opened fire after smugglers fleeing in a vehicle attempted to run them over. Armed traffickers on the Mexican side of the river then shot at the agents, who returned fire into Mexico, the Border Patrol said in a statement.

"Our agents had a posed threat," Rosalinda Huey, a spokeswoman with the Border Patrol's Rio Grande sector told Reuters. "They're trained to deal with that situation," she added.

No agents were injured by the gunfire and it is unclear whether any smugglers in Mexico were struck by bullets, she said.

Agents subsequently recovered nearly two tons of marijuana, with a value of more than $3 million. No arrests were made and the incident remains under investigation.

Drug traffickers in Mexico's northern Tamaulipas state frequently use rafts and ropes to haul marijuana over the Rio Grande to Texas, often under the protection of gunmen.

Huey said traffickers opening fire on agents was "just another tactic" as they sought to move drugs across the U.S. border, where additional agents, equipment and infrastructure have contributed to tightening security in recent years.

"Obviously, they've gotten more desperate," she said. "They're going to use more tactics to avoid apprehension or seizure of their narcotics."

The stretch of the Rio Grande - which is known as the Rio Bravo in Mexico - has recorded one other shooting incident involving Border Patrol agents since October 2011, she said. No injuries were reported.

Concern runs high among U.S. politicians over so-called "spill over" violence from Mexico, where about 50,000 people have been killed in raging drug violence since President Felipe Calderon launched an army-backed offensive against the powerful drug cartels after taking office in late 2006.

In response to a pattern of violence on the border river, Texas earlier this week unveiled the second of six new 'interceptor' gunboats to patrol the waterway. They are similar to Navy swift boats that plied the rivers of Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

A tally of recent cross-border shooting incidents in Texas include an exchange of shots last year between U.S. law enforcement officials and suspected drug runners near the south Texas town of Abram, according to news reports. In a separate incident, a West Texas road crew in Hudspeth County, east of El Paso, also came under fire from Mexico.

And in September 2010, U.S. citizen David Hartley was fatally shot while riding a personal watercraft on Falcon Lake, which straddles the Texas-Mexico border.

Gaming the system...bankrupting the taxpayers

Salary 'spiking' drains public pension funds, analysis finds

Twenty California counties, including Ventura, Kern, Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego, allow some workers to make more in retirement than they did while working. The coffers are underfunded by millions of dollars.

By Catherine Saillant, Maloy Moore and Doug Smith, Los Angeles Times

Approaching retirement, Ventura County Chief Executive Marty Robinson was earning $228,000 a year.

To boost her pension, which would be based on her final salary, Robinson cashed out nearly $34,000 in unused vacation pay, an $11,000 bonus for having earned a graduate degree and more than $24,000 in extra pension benefits the county owed her.

By the time she walked out the door last year, her pension was calculated at $272,000 a year — for life.

Robinson, 62, is among a group of public employees who have increased their retirement paychecks by adding such things as vacation time, educational incentives, car allowances and bonuses to their final salaries.

Such "salary spiking" was banned in 1993 by CalPERS, the state's largest public employee retirement system, to help control spiraling costs. But 20 of California's 58 counties — including Los Angeles, Ventura, Orange and San Diego — do not participate in CalPERS and their employees may legally continue to spike their salaries.

The scope of the practice is unclear because counties have resisted releasing complete pension data, citing the difficulty and cost of assembling the information.

But an analysis by The Times of partial data from Ventura and Kern counties — two small windows into the problem — shows that spiking is affecting pension systems already staggered by massive obligations.

In Ventura County, where the pension system is underfunded by $761 million, 84% of the retirees receiving more than $100,000 a year are receiving more than they did on the job. In Kern County, 77% of retirees with pensions greater than $100,000 a year are getting more now than they did before.

Ventura County officials have defended the practice, arguing that some pension boosts were meant to make up for pay freezes during lean years. It would be unfair to take them away now, Robinson said during a board hearing last year.

And the vast majority of county employees, officials pointed out, retire with modest pensions: an average non-management worker with 30 years of service gets $32,580 a year.

But Jim McDermott, a board member for the Ventura County Taxpayer's Assn., said the burden from spiking was too large to ignore.

"This is becoming an increasing drain on taxpayers … which will have to lead to cuts in service or additional taxes," he said. "Managers have their entire careers to refine spiking. And there is not a nook or cranny that they don't manipulate."

For those who plan ahead, there are numerous ways to spike salaries in the last year of work. In fact, there are 60 categories of payments that Ventura County employees can convert to cash.

Former Sheriff Bob Brooks, for instance, added a $30,500 "longevity" bonus (for working more than 30 years), which boosted his pension to $272,000 a year, almost 20% higher than his base salary.

Former Undersheriff Craig Husband added nearly $92,600 in unused vacation time, resulting in a $257,997-a-year pension, nearly 30% above his working pay. Many county retirees also are entitled to annual cost-of-living adjustments.

Brooks, Robinson and Husband did not return calls seeking comment.

County firefighters and sheriff's deputies can boost their pensions by layering premium pay and end-of-career cash-outs on top of salary. Fire Capt. T.N. Roberts, for instance, padded his final year's pay by nearly $130,000, resulting in a pension 84% higher than his base compensation. He gets $159,598 a year in retirement pay.

A pension is typically a percentage of an employee's highest annual pay — usually, but not always, the final year's pay. A firefighter who worked 25 years, for instance, could get 75% of his or her final salary in many counties.

Government jobs historically have been a tough sell because of the modest salaries they often provide; one incentive for prospective workers was the generous pension that came with being a cop or a county planner.

And when counties and cities couldn't afford to hand out raises, elected officials routinely offered enhanced retirement benefits. Pension payouts did not burden retirement systems in years past as they do today, and the deals seemed to make financial sense: Government agencies could hold the budgetary line and workers in turn would get richer paydays when they retired. It effectively kicked the problem down the road.

But in bad economic times, pension systems can take a beating. Higher benefits and lower market returns put a squeeze on county treasuries.

Orange County last year went all the way to the state Supreme Court in an effort to roll back benefits sweetened through salary spiking and other incentives, only to learn what other agencies already had: Once given, benefits can't be taken away from current employees or retirees.

Gov. Jerry Brown now is proposing to stop spiking by basing pensions on a three-year average of final pay to discourage "games and gimmicks … that artificially increase compensation." Brown is also proposing to base pensions on normal salary only, without all the add-ons lumped in.

McDermott, of the Ventura County Taxpayers Assn., repeatedly has asked county supervisors to eliminate vacation cash-outs, calling it the most abused form of spiking.

A Times analysis of Ventura County data showed that a third of the final salaries for its highest-paid retirees was the result of spiking. About 25% of that final salary boost came from vacation cash-outs; about 20% from accrued overtime and about 12% from the cashing out of healthcare credits.

Supervisors agreed to eliminate the vacation sell-back policy for new managers but declined to do the same for current employees.

Ventura County Supervisor Steve Bennett said that he supports pension reform but that change should come through either statewide legislation or union cooperation. "It took 30-plus years and lots of layering of things back when people weren't paying enough attention to get to this point," he said. "It's not going to be something you can just flip the switch."

The Times has asked for pension data from the 18 other counties that allow spiking, but most have resisted or said it would be too costly and laborious. Some have asked to be paid for extracting the data — $63,000 in the case of Sacramento County.

The data from Kern and Ventura counties also does not provide a complete picture. Ventura County turned over detailed information on 148 officials who earned more than $100,000 a year in retirement, only a fraction of its 5,500 retirees. Kern County provided information for all of its retirees but left out pensions paid to the beneficiaries of deceased retirees and withheld the full amount of pensions that are split between ex-spouses.

Several counties, including Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Santa Barbara, have agreed to provide the data, but the release of the information is dependent on ongoing negotiations over cost and handling.

Limited data provided by the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Assn. showed that at least 4,000 retirees are receiving pension checks that exceed their final compensation. But the data lack additional details to determine whether the workers spiked their salaries or whether the bump is the result of cost-of-living increases or a combination of the two.

Database: Biggest Ventura County pensions

Database: Kern County pensions

No worry the family will now be entitled to welfare. If they weren't already getting any

Convicted killer got unemployment while in LA jail

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Authorities say a convicted killer who gained notoriety for having a murder scene tattooed on his chest received unemployment benefits while he was in jail.

Sheriff's Capt. Mike Parker said Saturday that Anthony Garcia, nicknamed "Chopper," received more than $30,000 in fraudulent unemployment while in Los Angeles County jail from 2008 to 2010.

Parker says Garcia's father and two girlfriends would get the checks then cash them and deposit the money in the inmate accounts of Garcia and fellow gang members.

Garcia's father 47-year-old Juan Garcia, and girlfriends 45-year-old Sandra Jaimez and 25-year-old Cynthia Limas, were arrested Thursday on charges including grand theft.

Parker says authorities have not decided whether to charge Garcia.

He was convicted of the 2004 killing of a gang rival in Pico Rivera. The evidence against him included a tattoo on his chest of the crime scene.

Is this MLK Jr's way

Controversy Over FDNY Exam Workshop

MYFOXNY.COM - A chaotic scene unfolded outside Middle School 72 in Jamaica, Queens, on Wednesday night as several men who wanted to attend a tutorial workshop for the upcoming FDNY entrance exam were turned away.

These men said it was because they were white. The Workshop was being hosted by the Vulcan Society, a fraternal organization of black firefighters, which apparently only let in people who got a special e-mail.

Fox 5 spoke to a few people who were turned away. They didn't want to be identified, but they said it appeared that only African-American hopefuls were admitted to the event.

A federal judge has ruled the FDNY discriminated in hiring and ordered reforms. But these candidates said they are being unfairly punished.

The Vulcan Society did not respond to requests for comment.

City officials said more workshops will be held next week and everyone is invited.