Lookit those socialist union people leaving behind their jobs and responsibilities, like all lazy union yahoos, to come to the Wisconsin capitol and create a such a ruckus! Can you believe that bunches of them are lazy, over-paid, over-pensioned, only-work-9-months-a-year teachers? They are failing the poor, special, Wisconsin students by standing around in Madison exhibiting their greed!? ASSHOLES! COMMUNIST ASSHOLES! MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD COMMUNIST NEW WORLD ORDER ASSHOLES WHO HATE AMERICA!?!?! Jeeze-US Lord, it's just like Cairo came to Wisconsin!
Lookit them just storming in like they think they are deposing a dictator?! Governor Walker is an elected governor backed by the one true American party...The Teeeeeaaaaaaa Parteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!! How DARE they RIOT and carry signs comparing American Governor HERO Walker to Socialist/Commie/Dictator/Thugs like HITLER and HOSNI MUBARAK!?! Good, God fearing Tea Party Americans never do that.
And then, THEN, those good for nothing, lazy, useless, idiot, America hating, Democratic senators of Wisconsin took their ball and went...to Illinois?! Lazy ASSHOLES! Listen to your freely elected, hard working governor?
"I'm actually going to show up and do my job, unlike those state senators," Walker said at the end of the interview. "I'm in the Capitol doing my job. I'm daring them to come back and do what they're supposed to do, what they were elected to do and what I hope they will do by the end of the day."
See? Lazy twats, he showed up to work because he's a hard worker who cares about working at his job unlike the lazy, layabouts stealing money through their fat-cat unions, and absorbent pension plans and over-compensated health care packages that everyone else in the poor, poor, barely paid 'private sector' don't have but are still showing up to work today in Wisconsin.
In all seriousness, it is truly invigorating and exciting to see something like this happen. For all the Tea Party bluster and whiny claims of having socialism, or whatever -ism they misunderstand as being crammed down their poor, disabused, true-patriotic little throats to see the shoe on the other foot, for a change. Now sure, there are debates and discussions that could be had on the merits and goals of unions and surely there's something to be said about how state employees get pension plans and health care doled out. Nothing is perfect, to be sure, BUT to sit and pretend that a state's budget shortfalls, or a nation's for that matter, are truly only caused by the internal payment structure is fairly absurd. Furthermore, as many deeply involved in this protest/issue will say, the bigger issue is taking away the collective bargaining ability which is fundamentally what unions exist to do. It really is an attempt to gut unions and, in turn, find another way to ding the average middle class member.
Sure it seems unions, in general, are a dying entity and there really are not that many sectors in the employment-verse left that even have unions anymore. Which to someone on the right is proof positive of their 'relevance' or rather lack there of. No matter that it's actually a symptom of long, long running attack on labor, and the "common American" that can be traced throughout the last century and especially amplified in the Reagan years. Not to say that Democrats are somehow exempt from 'union busting' tactics...What it really is, not unlike some of the signs in Madison say, class warfare. The rich on one end, most everyone else on the other...the far, far other end, that is.
Don't take it from me, let's take it from Noam Chomsky (bold emphasis mine):
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. There has been a huge attack against private sector unions. Actually, that’s been going on since the Second World War. After the Second World War, business was terrified about the radicalization of the country during the Depression and then the war, and it started right off—Taft-Hartley was 1947—huge propaganda campaigns to demonize unions. It really—and it continued until you get to the Reagan administration.
Reagan was extreme. Beginning of his administration, one of the first things was to call in scabs—hadn’t been done for a long time, and it’s illegal in most countries—in the air controller strike. Reagan essentially—by "Reagan," I mean his administration; I don’t know what he knew—but they basically told the business world that they’re not going to apply the labor laws. So, that means you can break unions any way you like. And in fact, the number of firing of union organizers, illegal firing, I think probably tripled during the Reagan years.
Then, in fact, by the early '90s, Caterpillar Corporation, first major industrial corporation, called in scabs to break a strike of industrial workers, UAW. That's—I think the only country that allowed that was South Africa. And then it spread.
When Clinton came along, he had another way of destroying unions. It’s called NAFTA. One of the predicted consequences of NAFTA, which in fact worked out, was it would be used as a way to undermine unions—illegally, of course. But when you have a criminal state, it doesn’t matter. So, there was actually a study, under NAFTA rules, that investigated illegal strike breaking organizing efforts by threats, illegal threats, to transfer to Mexico. So, if union organizers are trying to organize, you put up a sign saying, you know, "Transfer operation Mexico." In other words, you shut up, or you’re going to lose your jobs. That’s illegal. But again, if you have a criminal state, it doesn’t matter.
Well, by measures like this, private sector unions have been reduced to, I think, maybe seven percent of the workforce. Now, it’s not that workers don’t want to join unions. In fact, many studies of this, there’s a huge pool of workers who want to join unions, but they can’t. And they’re getting no support from the political system. And part of the reason, not all of it, is these $2 billion campaigns. Now, this really took off in the late '70s and the ’80s. You want to run for office, then you're going to have to dig into very deep pockets. And as the income distribution gets more and more skewed, that means you’re going to have to go after Jeffrey Immelt and Lloyd Blankfein, and so on and so forth, if you want to even be in office. Take a look at the 2008 campaign spending. Obama way outspent McCain. He was funded—his main source of funding was the financial institutions.
But wait a second the Tea Party people, and many conservatives, always cry about the Democrats being backed by labor and the unions and so forth. I always see bits declaring that "the unions" have all the stroke in Illinois, and especially Chicago, how could it be that the national Democrats (except Dick Durbin) have said very little. A youtube question put to Chomsky, essentially, asked him how Democrats and other "progressive leaders" speak out against Gov. Walker and Co. and try to end union busting in general and his response is enlightening (bold emphasis mine):
It’s very interesting. The reason why you can’t get Democratic leaders to join is because they agree. They are also trying to destroy the unions. In fact, if you take a look at—take, say, the lame-duck session. The great achievement in the lame-duck session for which Obama is greatly praised by Democratic Party leaders is that they achieved bipartisan agreement on several measures. The most important one was the tax cut. And the issue in the tax cut—there was only one issue—should there be a tax cut for the very rich? The population was overwhelmingly against it, I think about two to one. There wasn’t even a discussion of it, they just gave it away. And the very same time, the less noticed was that Obama declared a tax increase for federal workers. Now, it wasn’t called a "tax increase"; it’s called a "freeze." But if you think for 30 seconds, a freeze on pay for a federal workers is fiscally identical to a tax increase for federal workers. And when you extend it for five years, as he said later, that means a decrease, because of population growth, inflation and so on. So he basically declared an increase in taxes for federal workers at the same time that there’s a tax decrease for the very rich.
And there’s been a wave of propaganda over the last couple of months, which is pretty impressive to watch, trying to deflect attention away from those who actually created the economic crisis, like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, their associates in the government who—Federal Reserve and others—let all this go on and helped it. There’s a—to switch attention away from them to the people really responsible for the crisis—teachers, police, firefighters, sanitation workers, their huge pensions, their incredible healthcare benefits, Cadillac healthcare benefits, and their unions, who are the real villains, the ones who are robbing the taxpayer by making sure that policemen may not starve when they retire. And this is pretty amazing, like right in the middle of the Madison affair, which is critical.
The CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, got a $12.5 million bonus, and his base pay was more than tripled. Well, that means he—the rules of corporate governments have been modified in the last 30 years by the U.S. government to allow the chief executive officer to pretty much set their own salaries. There’s various ways in which this has been done, but it’s government policy. And one of the effects of it is—people talk about inequality, but what’s a little less recognized is that although there is extreme inequality, it’s mostly because of the top tiny fraction of the population, so like a fraction of one percent of the population, their wealth has just shot through the stratosphere. You go down to the—you know, the next 10 percent are doing pretty well, but it’s not off the spectrum. And this is by design.
Money talks, bullshit walks so get walking fuck-o because you ain't got no money, and you ain't gonna get none anyhow. Then again, what does Chomsky know he is just a curmudgeon who complains and offers no solutions, or so I am told.
What's also amazing about this specific Madison protest situation is within the complexity of the Wisconsin budget system that brought this baloney up in the first place. If you watch FOX or listen to Beck or Rush or whatever you will likely hear a lot of similar talk to what I opened this post with; fat-cat, lazy liberal, unwilling to pay their fare share of their health benefits/retirement plans "like everybody else." Essentially saying these people are greedy and inflexible in the face of much need budget austerity and smaller government. Leaving out an important piece of this pie:
Wisconsin's new Republican governor has framed his assault on public worker's collective bargaining rights as a needed measure of fiscal austerity during tough times.
The reality is radically different. Unlike true austerity measures -- service rollbacks, furloughs, and other temporary measures that cause pain but save money -- rolling back worker's bargaining rights by itself saves almost nothing on its own. But Walker's doing it anyhow, to knock down a barrier and allow him to cut state employee benefits immediately.
What? Does that mean that Gov. Walker ginned up this budget crisis?
To the extent that there is an imbalance -- Walker claims there is a $137 million deficit -- it is not because of a drop in revenues or increases in the cost of state employee contracts, benefits or pensions. It is because Walker and his allies pushed through $140 million in new spending for special-interest groups in January. If the Legislature were simply to rescind Walker’s new spending schemes -- or delay their implementation until they are offset by fresh revenues -- the “crisis” would not exist.
More specifically, according to TPM via Jack Norman,research director at the Institute for Wisconsin Future -- a public interest think tank.
It holds that "more than half" of the new shortfall comes from three of Walker's initiatives:
* $25 million for an economic development fund for job creation, which still holds $73 million because of anemic job growth.
* $48 million for private health savings accounts -- a perennial Republican favorite.
* $67 million for a tax incentive plan that benefits employers, but at levels too low to spur hiring.
In essence, public workers are being asked to pick up the tab for this agenda. "The provisions in his bill do two things simultaneously," Norman says. "They remove bargaining rights, and having accomplished that, make changes in the benefit packages." That's how Walker's plan saves money. And when it's all said and done, these workers will have lost their bargaining rights going forward in perpetuity.
You don't say? I wonder if the Tea Party will come out in defense of this horse shit and Gov. Walker en mass in Madison as well? Or perhaps they are too afraid they will get sucked into the Muslim Brotherhood + Union Liberal + Obama + Communist/Socialist Conspiracy to bring the U.S. into it's New World Order?!?!
Here's hoping it stays peaceful and some sort of meaningful negotiation can come out of this, or something...No way to tell at this point but whatever, it's at least compelling!
No comments:
Post a Comment