Saturday coffee.

What a beautiful morning! Kind temperature. Blue sky.

We had coffee outside. Back at Letizia’s on Division Street in West Town. Outside means that Ulysses can join us.

Odd that Letizia’s still has pay-as-you go wi-fi. So many places provide it free. I’m glad I chose the iPad 2 with network access.

This has been a week of resistance.

It started with over 1,000 teachers surrounding the CPS board offices at 125 South Clark Street, protesting the huge salary bump for three-week-old CEO Brizard and the 4% cut-back in teacher salary.

Then there is the reoccupation of La Casita at Whittier School in Pilsen, where parents and students were promised  the field house as a library and then they found the promise was broken by Mayor Rahm the Bomb and Brizard.

In New Jersey thousands of state employees hit the streets after the legislature voted support for Governor Christie’s millions dollars in cuts to benefits such as health care. Democrats who supported the cuts were accused by union members of being Christie-crats.

And in Connecticut, where union leaders agreed to a $1.6 billion two-year wage freeze on public employees, union members voted to reject the deal.

I’m hoping that spirit of resistance carries over to the NEA RA, which starts here in Chicago on Thursday.

A word about the passing of Peter Falk at the age of 83. Falk played Columbo for years on TV.

Falk was a terrific actor by any standard.

But what made his Columbo character so appealing to me was that the bad guy, the murderer, was always some rich asshole from Beverly Hills who thought he was so much smarter than the working class Columbo. Columbo’s wrinkled trench coat and stammering style of speech always fooled the rich guys into underestimating Columbo’s ability.

Columbo always made the best of that.

Here’s a must-read column from this morning’s NY Times by Garret Keizer.

The fact is that our entire economic system rests on the principle of paying someone less than his or her labor is worth. The principle applies in the public sector no less than the private. The purpose of most labor unions has never been to eliminate the profit margin (the tragedy of the American labor movement) but rather to keep it within reasonable bounds.

But what about those school superintendents and police chiefs with their fabulous pensions, with salaries and benefits far beyond the average worker’s dreams?

Tell me about it. This past school year, I worked as a public high school teacher in northeastern Vermont. At 58 years of age, with a master’s degree and 16 years of teaching experience, I earned less than $50,000. By the standards of the Ohio school superintendent or the Wisconsin police chief, my pension can only be described as pitiful, though the dairy farmer who lives down the road from me would be happy to have it.

He should have it, at the least, and he could. If fiscal conservatives truly want to “bring salaries into line” they should commit to a model similar to the one proposed by George Orwell 70 years ago, with the nation’s highest income exceeding the lowest by no more than a factor of 10. They should establish that model in the public sector and enforce it with equal rigor and truly progressive taxation in the private.

Right now C.E.O.’s of multinational corporations earn salaries as much as a thousand times those of their lowest-paid employees. In such a context complaining about “lavish” public sector salaries is like shushing the foul language of children playing near the set of a snuff film. Whom are we kidding? More to the point, who’s getting snuffed?