One of the Moral Monday folks, Betsy, sent me some more info on this crowd:
McCrory and the future policy advisors celebrate on election night
Source: Charlotte Observer photo donated to the. N.C State Archives
Gov. Pat McCrory says a pair of 24-year-old campaign staffers landed senior-level jobs in his administration because they were the most qualified applicants, beating out older candidates.
But the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services, where Matthew McKillip and Ricky Diaz got big promotions and raises after only a few weeks of government service, has been unable to provide any evidence their positions were ever advertised to other potential applicants or that other candidates were considered.
“They were actually moved over to areas that frankly a lot of older people applied for, too. But frankly, these two young people are very well qualified and they are being paid for jobs at which that’s the pay rate for that job.”
A review of job descriptions for similar government positions posted online by the Office of State Personnel show McKillip and Diaz don’t meet the academic or experience requirements to qualify for even entry-level positions in the areas they now oversee. Their pay also exceeds the listed maximums for the most senior listed positions.
Before joining state government, McKillip worked for McCrory’s 2012 campaign and transition team. Before that, he spent 11 months as a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, according to his LinkedIn profile page. He has a bachelor’s degree in English.
Diaz previously served as a McCrory campaign spokesman and worked for about a year in New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s office directing social media and digital communications strategy, according to his LinkedIn page. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and East Asian studies.
Since taking office, McCrory has moved to exempt more than 500 state positions from the State Personnel Act beyond the number given that classification under his immediate predecessor, Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue. McCrory recently signed a new GOP-backed law giving him direct authority to hire and fire about 500 additional state government employees, bringing the total number to 1,500.
Speaking to a business group in Asheville on Monday, the governor suggested his administration is getting negative coverage of his economic and tax policies because news reporters don’t have the education or experience to understand his policies.
“This is too complex for the journalists,” McCrory said. “They don’t have economics degrees. They’ve not been in business.”
The taxpayer-supported salaries for McKillip and Diaz are about three times the starting salary for North Carolina public school teachers, who received no raises in the $20.6 billion state budget signed by McCrory.
Here’s one of those teachers:
Second grade teacher Barbara Dell Carter prepares for a new school year at John Cotten Tayloe Elementary School. (Photos by Lindsay Wagner)
As we walk around her classroom, Carter points out all of the little ways in which she has prepared this room to be a great place to learn for her 21 second graders. Her positivity and excitement are palpable, but as we sit down to discuss her preparations for the upcoming year, Carter speaks in hushed tones about what is to come.
She is worried. Not the back-to-school jitters kind of worried; she has deep-seated concerns about the challenges she will face this year as educators grapple with a public school budget that spends $500 million less than what was spent in 2008.
Seventy-seven percent of the school’s approximately 600 students received free or reduced lunch during the 2011-12 school year.“I am lucky that my husband works in a field that is lucrative enough so that I can teach,” said Carter. Without that income, she doubts she would be able to continue in this line of work.
“I just wish the lawmakers at the General Assembly would come to our classrooms. They need to meet with teachers and understand what it takes to meet the needs of our children,” said Carter.
This North Carolina public school fills the same hole my local public school fills for low income kids. Poor people lead stressful, chaotic lives because it’s a hell of a lot easier to plan if you’re not constantly putting out fires brought on by erratic work and pay schedules and no financial cushion at all. Poor kids here rely on the public school. It’s a constant in their lives. It’s free, it’s open to all comers and it’s always there to fill whatever hole needs to be filled. It’s true in the school my son attends and we’re at 45% of students who qualify for free and reduced lunch. She teaches in a school where it’s 77% of students.
I feel your pain North Carolina, because my local public school in Ohio has lost 1.6 million a year in state funding since 2011. When we say we value education and kids, we’re lying. We value tax cuts and cronies.
flukebucket
This is god damned disgraceful and inexcusable.
cleek
another fun nugget: these raises happened after McCrory issued a directive in March to freeze salaries in state agencies.
fiscal responsitility!
Baud
Thanks, Kay. Keep blogging on this. I hate to keep embarrassing you, but I consider you an stark example of what blogging could have been.
Roger Moore
@cleek:
Is for little people. So is following the law.
TriassicSands
Well, there you have it. In Lunatic Land, eleven months with the AEI would qualify a person — anyone older than 18, anyway — for any position up to and including presidential cabinet secretary. The Wingers have always had very high standards and this looks like just one more textbook case of the meritocracy.
Butch
Certainly is a lot of diversity in that photo of McCrory, isn’t there?
c u n d gulag
Uhm…
What did you expect from Art Bell and his puppet, Gov. McCrory?
Incompetence, intolerance, cronyism, and cutting taxes for the rich while cutting benefits for others, are some of the few things Conservatives and Republicans do well anymore!
Maybe if/when McAuliffe wins in VA, Bell will have McCrory and the NC state legislature declare war on that state.
Conservatives and Republicans like war, too – though, because they’re incompetent, intolerant, depend on cronies to conduct it, all without paying for it, it’s ‘un-possible’ to say they do “war” well.
Gex
It’s so cute the way she thinks there’s something that could be done to make these monsters care about the children.
There’s no way to make all the other children be the children of these legislators. That’s pretty much the only thing that would make them care.
Baud
@cleek:
That’s not how they see it. In the aggregate, workers cost more money than high-level officials simply because there are more workers. So for them, it’s all about figures on a spreadsheet, with no regard for the underlying humanity that those numbers represent.
Litlebritdifrnt
Kay as I posted downstairs thanks to those bastids my husband (a teacher) has taken a pay cut. Now it is not much of one $45.00 a month but when your budget is as tight as ours it makes a difference.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
That is despair inducingly true. I found this essay instructive:
Would the tax busting cronies send their kids to a public school as you do, Kay? Not likely, to be sure. It fails to conform to the religious tenet of IGMFY. But the author’s point is a good one – you’d see a damned quick improvement in the system if they did, at no tangible costs to the education of the special snowflakes. Beyond the important real world experience of spending days with icky poor (and sometimes brown) people.
SatanicPanic
I thought a liberal arts degree was a conservatives definition of unemployable moocher.
danielx
Done seen this movie before and when the stakes were higher*, unfortunately – when totally unqualified Heritage Foundation and AEI interns were hired to rebuild Iraqi goivernment and institutions. Not all that common a pattern for Republicans – domestically, anyway, they don’t really believe in government as such, so they think it doesn’t really matter if unqualified and inexperienced people are hired or appointed to manage government functions.
*Which is in no way to belittle what McCrory and the Republicans in the NC state legislature have and are inflicting on the citizens of the state.
MomSense
Thank you, Kay!! You are a gem.
Mino
Don’t forget the cost of prisons with guaranteed occupancy contracts. Those are sacrosanct.
I guess I am shocked at how easily civil service reforms have been subverted.
Gordon, the Big Express Engine
Test
SiubhanDuinne
@c u n d gulag: I think you mean Art Pope, not Art Bell, yes? Unless you know something very, very strange.
Napoleon
As a reminder, Kasich did something very similar him in Ohio hiring wise.
negative 1
You want to hear something pathetic? A lot of people truly think that her position, husband makes the money, teaching is a part time job for women, maybe just for the benefits, is what all teachers are doing. They actually justify the lack of funding for teachers’ salaries with that argument in the statehouse from time to time. And I live in the northeast.
Kay
@Mino:
That’s a great point. Oh, the rich irony of conservatives re-instituting “machine politics” in civil service hiring, of all things.
CONGRATULATIONS!
America = Third World country.
Not if but simply when.
GregB
@c u n d gulag:
I think you mean Art Pope. Art Bell hosted the popular overnight radio show Coast to Coast.
Kay
@negative 1:
I’m not now nor have I ever been a teacher, but I’m convinced some of the teacher-bashing and cheapskateness on wages is based on the fact that teachers in K-12 are still primarily women.
I can’t prove it, but I read a hell of a lot of it, and I’m convinced. Would they go after a traditionally male occupation or profession with such ferocity and dishonesty? I don’t think so!
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Kay: These are exempt positions. One of the first things McCrory did was expand the number of exempt positions by about a thousand.
SiubhanDuinne
McCrory and his gang of equal parts puppeteers, enablers, and lackeys, remind me of the most excessive hedonistic Roman emperors. Back in January (holy fuck, has this guy been in office only eight months?? And his term is four years??), he couldn’t be satisfied with a one-day inaugural event. Instead, he took his oath of office a week early, then took the inauguration show on the road every day for an entire week, each day preening and partying in a different part of the state.
Gene108
@c u n d gulag:
It is Art Pope, not Art Bell.
Ash Can
Out of all the things we’re doing wrong in this nation, it’s the lack of investment in public education more than anything else that’s going to be the ultimate downfall of this nation. And, in fact, the process is already in motion.
Ben Cisco
I brought this up down below in the Open Thread – I’ll repeat here:
What kills me about it is that when the “conservatives” are challenged about this, their responses range from:
“Maybe they WERE the best qualified!” – at 24, haven’t been on the planet long enough for this to be true.
“Democrats did the same thing!” – clearly a lie, but even if true, would’ve been something they would have SCREAMED about; now…crickets.
“The Republicans are doing what WE THE MAJORITY sent them there to do!” – again, clearly garbage, but they run with this b/c Tribe Uber Alles.
Kay
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
Right, because he needs the freedom to run the state like a (poorly managed) business. Kasich uses the same spiel. The fundamental problem with it is they’re horrible at both things, government OR business. I think the REASON we get them in government is they’re horrible at business. Kasich got a crony revolving door private sector job after he was in Congress where he made millions and now he’s back! You can’t pay them to go away!
Jennifer
Sounds like to me that the people of North Carolina are getting what they voted for. And getting it good and hard. Maybe they’ll learn from the experience, but probably not.
c u n d gulag
WHOOOOOOPS!
Yeah, it’s Art “Pope,” NOT Art “Bell.”
Sorry!
I got the Fascist loon confused with the space alien radio ding-a-ling.
What did I just write on an earlier post, about ‘the rush to glibness?’
Glib-ician, heal thyself!
Amir Khalid
@Ben Cisco:
Perhaps “best qualified ” in the sense of being Kasich loyalists.
Ahh says fywp
1500 patronage hires. Call it what it is. Patronage hires. James Garfield died in vain.
negative 1
@Kay: I work for a teachers’ union. You’re right. We’ve explicitly had that argument with legislators. They think they’re all women, and therefore their husbands are the breadwinners, so cutting salary doesn’t hurt them. Explicitly. Been. Told. This.
cleek
@Jennifer:
well, we’re getting the results of gerrymandering. the GOP won 2/3s of the legislature on just over half of the votes.
Amir Khalid
@Amir Khalid:
I may have got the governor’s name wrong. I think I meant McCrory.
Xecky Gilchrist
@SatanicPanic: Yeah, it’s true the contards look down on liberal arts degrees. I personally don’t think it’s that big a deal what someone’s degree is in, if they have brains and drive and approach the work in good faith – not what qualified these dorks, though.
Jennifer
@cleek: Gerrymandering didn’t elect this asshat governor, though. That was a statewide vote.
Ben Cisco
@Amir Khalid: Yes, it is Puppet Pal Pat McCrory.
And what he’s doing is a naked money grab AND declaring war on the non-1%.
And they may yet still be enough rabid gomers in this state to make removing him difficult.
But it’s going to get done.
It has to.
We won’t survive as a functioning state if we don’t.
kdaug
Name change.
Sorry, OT, but still.
? Martin
Looter!
Kay
@negative 1:
Thanks! It was a theory :)
I feel like it’s hard to miss. It’s all of it, the micro-managing, the patronizing tone, the “point” systems they’re always coming up with, how everyone and their brother feels like they can weigh in on how they’d be GREAT at it when they would probably suck at it, and on and on. The assumption is it’s easy. I don’t think it is. Hmm. Wonder why there’s no respect? I’m just asking! Just raising my concern! I have no dog in this fight, but I picked up on it. I can’t imagine how I’d be were I in it. Ranting, probably.
? Martin
@cleek: Maddow has been reporting that it was on LESS than 1/2 the votes.
Boots Day
I just wanted to add that that’s a brilliant choice for the headline on this post.
SiubhanDuinne
@c u n d gulag:
Happens all the time.
Full Metal Wingnut
You know who else had no business experience? Ayn Cuntrag Rand.
Roger Moore
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Which is a great theory, but it doesn’t work well when a minority of voters have school age children. There are unfortunately many people who think that the quality of local schools doesn’t matter because they don’t have kids there, and would rather have tax cuts than fund them adequately. What we really need to do is to sell people on the idea that schools are a public good that they should support even if they aren’t directly affected by them.
Steve
My wife and I are both teachers, she in middle school and I at a medium-sized university. Being a university teacher is certainly better financially, but every year I wonder if I will be here next year, or if I am going to need to get a job that actually pays me commensurate with my degrees and experience so that my wife can keep doing what she loves (and is very good at).
Not Adding Much To The Community
OT, breaking story. Apparently, Glenn Greenwald’s significant other, David Miranda, had 58,000 pages of “highly classified” UK intelligence documents when he was detained. The ultimate source is a Torygraph reporter so I’m sure it was all a misunderstanding, and Miranda was actually being unfairly targeted for his association with brave truth-teller Greenwald.
kc
“They’ve not been in business”
Unlike the 24 year olds he hired at big fat salaries whose entire experience is in political campaigning.
This is how your modern Republicans operate. Small government means nothing for you, fat paychecks for me and mine.
MattR
@Kay:
I am definitely not disputing your point that one reason teachers are looked down on is because it is considered a female profession, but at the same time I think this one aspect that I excerpted is a more universal belief among conservatives. They seem to believe that any person is capable of doing any job if they are just willing to work hard (along with the flip side that anyone stuck working a crappy job must lazy and unwilling to do that hard work). They never consider that different people have different intelligence levels and skill sets that make some people well suited for some jobs and completely unsuited for others. It also means that they can easily understand jobs outside their area of expertise and that their advice about how to do things better should not be ignored. The obvious exception to this is running a business – which is something that can only be understood and appreciated by Republicans whether or not they have experience doing so (and Democrats that have run their own small or large businesses for decades don’t really understand how capitalism really works)
The Fat Kate Middleton
@Ben Cisco: I call him “McCrony”.
Baud
@The Fat Kate Middleton:
I like that. Needs to go viral.
MattR
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): @Roger Moore:
I initially read that and thought they were pushing for mandatory procreation.
Not Adding Much To The Community
On topic, and echoing others, this is indeed a goddamned shame. If lip service were money, the US would spend more on children and education than every other country combined (we all know where we spend more money than the rest of the world, combined). Low taxes are clearly more important than education; that’s been evident since 1978 and the “revolution” of Proposition 13.
pseudonymous in nc
You missed the payoff at the end of that AP story, just after the “journalists don’t have economics degrees” from McCrony.
Chris
@MattR:
Yep. It’s the general trend in which being a businessman is held up as the only possible worthwhile job in American society (well, that and being in the military). Everything else is just a mass of useless peasants.
pseudonymous in nc
Also, the $70k+ salaries for the Mini McCronies are more than high school principals or prison administrators receive, or pretty much any senior state employee outside the newly-expanded patronage tier.
Some scuttlebutt: high-ranking career employees in NC are basically being forcibly retired by the administration, in order to do one of two things: replace them with patronage hires, or remove the most experienced people in state government who can push back most effectively against the patronage hires.
Kay
@MattR:
I have thought about this so much in the past couple of years, and I think it’s a general devaluation of work, except that work that is considered “prestigious.” It’s how they can make these ridiculous arguments where they claim that in order to get the BEST managers and executives they have to pay out the nose, while they’re race to the bottom on all other wages.
I have this sense that whatever politician picks up on that, says he or she values the work that people do, he or she is going to have a hell of a following. It was so much a part of the MLK message, the dignity idea of work.
I don’t know why they don’t see that it might be politically potent. It’s like they get close to the idea and miss. I know why conservative politicians miss, because they can’t argue that certain work is undervalued or treated as less-than because MARKETS! but liberals and Democrats miss this too. I don’t know if they’re out of touch, too rich, not listening to people, what it is.
Betsy
@Jennifer: Actually we did not vote for this; the gerrymandering produced it. Also, Citizens United opened the doors to a boughten government here.
North Carolina is a purple state — this is not about writing off a stupid, red Confederacracy like South Carolina or Alabama.
Betsy
@Full Metal Wingnut: hey, I’m flagging your comment for misogyny.
Baud
@Kay:
I think it’s history. Until someone proves that the message is a winning one at election time, politicians aren’t going to start moving in that direction. FWIW, I think we are starting to see some slow movement in that direction.
Clay
OK, I’m a NC native and resident, and I’m as opposed to the Republican agenda as the next guy. It’s bad news for our state, and in other states. But this story is getting way too much air time. All employees of city, county, and state governments understand they’re working for a political organization, and that there are political appointees, typically above the level of most employees, that are not bound by the usual hiring and employment process. I agree it’s unseemly that these lads are making so much for doing so little, but that’s politics folks. Every administration brings in it’s political operatives and they are not normal pay scale employees. Let’s go after them on policy matters and let this sideshow drop. The Governor is the boss of these employees and he’s got the right to put his cronies in positions of influence and pay them a salary he considers “appropriate” to “executive class” persons. Elections have consequences, and this is one of them. If you don’t like it (I don’t much care for it), get organized and take your complaints to the ballot box.
cleek
@? Martin:
using data from here : http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/NC/42923/114645/Web01/en/filters.html# (Results button, Summary download)
and Excel formulas:
// NC Senate
=SUMIF(D63:D145,”=DEM”,E63:E145)
=SUMIF(D63:D145,”=REP”,E63:E145)
// NC House
=SUMIF(D146:D341,”=DEM”,E146:E341)
=SUMIF(D146:D341,”=REP”,E146:E341)
i get:
1,854,358 : NC Senate Dem votes
2,072,984 : NC Senate Rep votes
1,875,038 : NC House Dem votes
1,998,155 : NC House Rep votes
NC Senate : 47.2% Dem
NC House : 48.4% Dem
Davis X. Machina
@Chris: Religions have priesthoods. Just because we have the First Amendment, doesn’t mean we don’t have a state religion.
Baruch atah ha Shuk, dayan ha emet.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Roger Moore: That’s totally true, and of course there are often reasons it’s more important individually to send kinds to private schools, so I disagree with her premise while endorsing the mechanics she observes.
If I knew how to sell it as a public good, I could be in business as opposed to trying to save a little NAMI chapter from extinction by underfunding. Anyone can help at the link!
Full Metal Wingnut
@Betsy: go ahead. I haven’t used the c-word in years, but if it applies to anyone it’s her.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Full Metal Wingnut: I agree that Rand is an abomination, but I cringed at the misogynistic descriptor too.
Ben Cisco
@The Fat Kate Middleton: I wholeheartedly approve.
Svensker
@MattR:
We visited our small town bank on our recent trip to NJ. It is run by a really excellent woman and her staff/tellers have been there for years, all friendly, good at their jobs and wonderful. The bank is a small building and they had it decorated (very tastefully) with drapes, comfy chairs, pictures on the walls, plants, and each desk had a range of family pictures, tchotchkes, etc. When we went in this time, the drapes, the chairs, the pictures, the plants, the tchotchkes, were all gone. What happened? we asked. BofA bought the bank and personalization is no longer allowed. Each branch must look as much as possible like every other branch and each desk must be the same…so that people can move from one branch to another without having to relearn where the stapler is. We are all just cogs to them. Soulless cogs.
Gene108
@Roger Moore:
The idea of public goods needing to be funded because of indirect benefit went out the window a long time ago. IGMFY is the order of the day.
Scott S.
It drives me nuts that the Republicans in the legislatures and governor’s offices are so relentlessly negative about nearly all government employees. I can’t think of any business where the bosses would tell anyone who listened about how much they hated their own employees. My folks are both old-school Republicans, but they worked in government all their lives, and all us kids work in government — and it’s really frustrating for my folks to know that their Congressmen would like to see all their kids jobless.
Scott S.
@Svensker: That’s kinda horrifying. :(
The Republic of Stupdity
And clearly McCrory is in business…
It might be the business of buying votes… but nonetheless, it’s still a business…
It’s now impossible to not despise and hate these people completely…
Bill in Section 147
Republicans can constantly grift and abuse the system because they are getting elected by people who vote for them because the system is “full” of abuse now that it is run by Republicans.
I am not sure how the masters of the universe work…obviously.
Bill in Section 147
@Scott S.: A friend of mine has worked at CalTrans since the mid 80s and basically the most common political talk his entire time there has been, “to many damn taxes.” and, “too much government.”
I don’t remember the last company I worked with where the workers constantly griped that the company was bringing in too much revenue and had too many workers.
James E. Powell
When we say we value education and kids, we’re lying. We value tax cuts and cronies.
If “we” means Americans and not you and me then I agree. I have been saying it for years. Americans value their own children and their own children’s education, not those of other people. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to come up with reasons why those other people and their children are less deserving.
Americans do not appreciate the value of an educated population. The arguments for having one are almost always put in the old Cold War formula, i.e., the U.S. needs to “keep up” with other countries. As if there were valuable prizes awarded to countries whose students scored highest on standardized tests.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@Bill in Section 147: A common thread of conversation at NCDOT over the past thirty years has been “We’re one department where privatization doesn’t produce better results.”
But for a very long time, the budget being negotiated included specific targets for laying off NCDOT engineers by work description and targets for handing out projects to private firms. I’m convinced that if they had thought they could have gotten away with it, they would have written in which firms were to get the work.
Bill in Section 147
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: My friend now supervises private contractors and work done by outside (non-CalTrans) companies. Amazingly when the work is for profit his biggest problem is cutting corners and skipping steps. So from an agency that made decent roads, etc., sometimes a bit slower than planned, occasionally hiring cronies and frauds to an agency that oversees people who sometimes make decent money even if they are occasionally cronies and frauds.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
On the other hand – it does say a lot that this is the best these wingnuts have for talent.
pseudonymous in nc
@Clay:
And we’ve got the right to hit him with it until he comes up for re-election, along with the other shit at the political-appointee level like the DPS boss who retired because he couldn’t moonlight as a lawyer and basically considered the job beneath him.
McCrony’s campaign schtick was “business-friendly non-nutjob non-insider”, and stocking his administration with twentysomething acolytes gives the lie to that.
Pococurante
Thanks Kay. Easily worth ten thousand “OMG SyriaNoMoreBeer!!1!” posts.
RSA
@negative 1:
And you can see this in the
cesspoolcomments for any news article about teachers. From an article by my local TV news station, for example, we have this:And of course the top comment currently is this:
I am sometimes enraged by the cluelessness.
rikyrah
Kay,
You continue to rock
Tehanu
@Svensker:
That’s because they are soulless cogs themselves. I’m finding lately that practically every comment I make on any blog (not just this one) should end with the sentence, “God, I hate these people.”