Greece is a country with powerful public employee unions and they have been engaged in unsustainable fiscal practices for years now, borrowing the money they need to cover their excessive spending on pensions, salaries and the like.

Now, the investors who loaned that money to Greece, believing it to be a very safe investment (what first world country defaults on its debt?) are watching those same public employee unions riot in the streets, demanding what is not rightfully theirs.

It got so out of hand, these rioters set fire to a bank building, killing three bank employees.

There are two questions on the minds of global investors who are funding all of this unsustainable government spending with their loans: will the governments cut their spending and repay the debt, or will they capitulate to rioters and simply default?

That’s what caused the markets to end up down 348 points today. We’ll see what happens tomorrow morning.

Mohamed El-Erian is the CEO of Pimco, the world’s largest bond fund with over a trillion dollars in assets under management, and told CNBC that we would be foolish to consider this a European problem.

“We’ve seen a crisis start in a country—Greece—become regional, impact the whole of the Euro zone and is on the verge of truly going global…we should take this very seriously.

“We are on the same fiscal path. We are not Greece. We have more time. But what the Greek crisis tells you is debt and deficits matter. The structure of your deficits matter and the US doesn’t have much flexibility.

“Don’t underestimate how quickly this can happen. There are structural headwinds out there and we better get our act together before those structural headwinds become overwhelming.”

You can watch his entire interview below:

(Mobile, feed and e-mail readers: embedded video above.)

Board Meeting Details:

• May 11, 2010 at 2:00PM
• Sierra College Tahoe-Truckee Campus, Room 225
• Main agenda items begin at 2:00PM, public comment for items not on the agenda at 3:40PM
• Meeting Agenda
• Contracts (General / Capital Projects)
• Warrants

This meeting will feature an update from the Citizen’s Oversight Committee for the Tahoe-Truckee expansion, as well as briefings for facilities planning and educational programs at that campus. It’s always great to get up to our other campuses and get to “feel the rhythm” of how they operate.

Use the comments below to answer the Question of the Month! (You can “log in” with your Facebook or Twitter account with a single click, or just fill in your name and e-mail address to leave a guest comment.) If you’re registering for Sierra College classes, how are you finding availability? Is it as crowded as expected, or are you finding the classes you need?

Most people recognize that there are a lot of problems with the foster care system in our country, but I’m not sure we realized how deep they are. The New York Times published the results of a study of 602 youths in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin, and the results are rather sobering.

Only half the youths who had turned 18 and “aged out” of foster care were employed by their mid-20s. Six in 10 men had been convicted of a crime, and three in four women, many of them with children of their own, were receiving some form of public assistance. Only six in 100 had completed even a community college degree.

“We took them away from their parents on the assumption that we as a society would do a better job of raising them,” said Mark Courtney, a social work researcher at the University of Washington who led the study with colleagues from the Partners for Our Children  program at Washington and the Chapin Hall center at the University of Chicago. “We’ve invested a lot money and time in their care, and by many measures they’re still doing very poorly.”

I’m all in favor of parental rights. I don’t think it should be easy for the government to intervene in the relationship between parents and children.

But I think our system for dealing with genuine situations of neglect and abuse needs to recognize the deep and inherent need that children have for permanence.

The story for many foster youths is tragically similar: the system is biased towards reunification, even if drug or alcohol-addicted birth parents are making almost no measurable progress toward becoming stable enough to care for their kids again. The result: these young people are shuffled from foster family to foster family for years, opening up deep wounds and leaving many of them incapable of self-sufficiency.

Eventually, they age out of the foster system and are left to become adults on their own – and you see the outcomes listed above.

Children need and deserve permanent and forever families, ideally with a mom and a dad. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but one of the starting points has to be a limit on the amount of time that the foster care system fights for reunification. At that point, the law should require the state to face reality and begin advocating for permanence through adoption.

I hate to say it, but one of the core problems here is that the “business” of foster care would shrink – and the foster care system has grown into a multi-million dollar business of programs and services. I don’t question that the social workers and program coordinators love kids – but their goal should be to work themselves out of a job by eliminating the need for their help, not expanding it.

The structure of the current system has effectively ensured that we continue to have a large population of orphans in the United States – children who desperately need but do not have permanent parents. We don’t tend to think of these kids as orphans, but after being shuffled through the system for years, that is precisely what they are.

This is a tough problem, and advocating for the reform of our local foster care system is one of the four initiatives that we’re planning as a part of our new adoption and orphan care effort. I look forward to sharing more with you on that soon.

Many people didn’t think that the $787 billion dollar stimulus package was a good idea when it was pushed through in a highly partisan fashion in early 2009.

President Obama promised that if we passed the bill and spent all that money, unemployment would drop to about 7.5% at this point. Instead, the jobs haven’t materialized and unemployment rates are frozen at 9.7%. Worse, many people have given up looking so real unemployment is likely a bit higher than that.

Right now, even with the new jobs we have seen in the last month or two, we’re on track to end 2010 nearly five million jobs short of where President Obama promised we’d be if we passed this legislation and spent $787 billion dollars.

And according to the Pew Research Center, the American people are well aware of this. Nearly two thirds of Americans – 62% to be exact – believe that the stimulus hasn’t helped to create jobs.

Instead, we have deficits as far as the eye can see, along with rapidly climbing taxes that are shackling the economy to the ground.

The economy is in the process of recovering, and unemployment will eventually come down – it’s inevitable in an economic system as resilient as the United States. But I think we just learned yet again that you cannot spend your way to prosperity.

Hopefully we remember that next time.

There are far too many examples these days of the big trying to stamp out the small through the use of government regulation.

Whether it’s UPS lobbyists inserting language into transportation bills to try to make life harder for FedEx, or lobbyists who manage to make buying their company’s product a requirement by federal law, there are untold examples of stifling innovation and competition through government regulation.

The same applies to big government, as well.

The latest effort is here in California, where the public education lobby is trying to stamp out their chief source of competition, charter schools, by passing a hard cap on the number of charter schools that can be opened. The bill is AB 1982, and it will be heard in the Education Committee next week – you can make your voice heard on this issue by clicking here.

Never mind that charter schools provide parents with alternative choices for educating their kids. Never mind that many public schools are now performing much better, spurred on by the innovative ideas and competition that charter schools have delivered. Never mind the unsightly scene of government trying to stifle its own competition through the force of government.

At Sierra College, we have plenty of competition: not just four year schools, but also trade and technical schools like Heald and ITT. We provide superior value and higher quality education. Competition has driven us to be better and to develop innovative career and technical programs (a good example is the only Mechatronics training program west of the Mississippi river).

Public education is at its best when it has to compete. Stifling competition and innovation is wrong, whether it’s at the hand of big business or big government.

(Mobile, feed and e-mail readers: embedded video above.)

A big hat tip to @abrahampiper for posting this piece of weekend fun.