Wisconsin’s governor manufacturers a fiscal “crisis”, moves to crush unions and then threatens to call out the National Guard.

The brazenness of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is truly breathtaking. I suppose I have been so naïve that it seemed to me that people like this really don’t exist. No one can be this… Cruel? Cynical? Devious? All while in plain sight, in the garb of “respectability” that is normally afforded a sitting governor.

So, here’s the short version, for those of you who haven’t been following this, from HuffPo.

Enter Scott Walker. Newly-elected GOP governor of Wisconsin with GOP control of both houses, it is understandable that he didn't think he had to ask for permission. But this was way, way over the top, both in terms of procedure and substance.

In terms of procedure, it does not play well to announce a radical bill that will devastate long-standing promises of economic security and then allow only three days for debate before the final vote on ratification. Asked why he did not give the unions even an opportunity to negotiate, Walker's answer joins the litany of the greats along with Richard Daley, Sr., and Huey Long: "To those who say why didn't I negotiate on this? I don't have anything to negotiate with. We don't have anything to give. Like practically every other state in the country, we're broke. And it's time to pay up."

That position was slightly undercut by his insistence that the only alternative would be to lay off 6,000 state workers. It does not quite do to insist that there is nothing about which to negotiate and then to identify a point of negotiation in the very next sentence. All of that, of course, was right before he said that the National Guard is standing by to intervene if public employees try to strike.

In terms of substance, it is hard to know where to begin. Walker's "Repair the Budget" bill is primarily a union-busting measure, many of whose provisions have no fiscal consequences at all. The bill requires public employees to make contributions to pensions and the costs of health care, but union representatives insist that they have no objections to those provisions. They insist that what they care about is the curtailing of collective bargaining rights. But maybe they should read the bill again. Here's a particularly juicy bit:

"Wages would include only total base wages and would exclude any other compensation, including, but not limited to, overtime, premium pay, merit pay, performance pay, supplemental compensation, pay schedules, and automatic pay progressions [emphasis mine]."

In other words, the entire salary grid for teachers would be thrown out, and school districts would be free to define and implement new salary systems from scratch. That's in addition to giving the administration unprecedented authority to redefine Medicaid eligibility (but only downward), and enough other material to fill 144 pages.

OK, I guess that sets the picture. The governor decides that, because of this “fiscal emergency” where the state is absolutely broke, he will gut any and all unions. Sure, that follows. But, if that wasn’t bad enough, guess what? Walker pretty much manufactured the entire “crisis” himself in his first few days in office by giving tax cuts and other gifts to the people and organizations that helped him get elected. Via TPM.

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.

Furthermore, this broadside comes less than a month after the state's fiscal bureau -- the Wisconsin equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office -- concluded that Wisconsin isn't even in need of austerity measures, and could conclude the fiscal year with a surplus. In fact, they say that the current budget shortfall is a direct result of tax cut policies Walker enacted in his first days in office.

"Walker was not forced into a budget repair bill by circumstances beyond he control," says Jack Norman, research director at the Institute for Wisconsin Future -- a public interest think tank. "He wanted a budget repair bill and forced it by pushing through tax cuts... so he could rush through these other changes."

Got that? The state could have possibly ended up with a surplus this fiscal year if it WEREN’T FOR THE DIRECT ACTIONS OF THE GOVERNOR HIMSELF!!

And that’s the reason why unions need to be broken up, and the National Guard called out to deal with any striking workers.

I would like to know what all those Tea Partiers who voted for this criminal were thinking. How much worse do they think a Democrat would be in that office? This guy is gutting the future of most of the middle class who are unfortunate enough to work for the state. “Get the government off the throat of the people! And let’s bust all unions and take away all collective bargaining rights at the same time, O.K.?”

AAARRRGGGHHHHH!!!!

I just truly do not understand how middle and lower class people can vote for Republicans.

Republicans all across the country seem to have declared war on the middle class. Everything that they are doing appears to be for the benefit of the wealthy and big business, at the expense of working class Americans.

Here’s the latest example from Wisconsin, via Washington Monthly.

Citing Wisconsin's gaping budget shortfall for this year and even larger ones expected in the years ahead, Gov. Scott Walker proposed a sweeping plan on Friday to cut benefits for public employees in the state and to take away most of their unions' ability to bargain.

The proposal by Mr. Walker, a Republican who was elected in November after pledging that he would get public workers' compensation "into line" with everyone else's, is expected to receive support next week in the State Legislature, where Republicans also won control of both chambers in the fall.

The prospect left union leaders, state and local employees and some Democrats stunned over the plan's scope and what it might signal for public-sector unions in the state.

On Thursday, the newly-elected Republican governor said he would refuse to negotiate with unions, and on Friday, Walker said he's contacted the Wisconsin National Guard, making sure they're prepared to respond to a protracted labor dispute, doing some of the jobs union members currently do.

Even by GOP standards, the scope of Walker's union-busting efforts is striking. We're talking about a governor effectively stripping nearly all government workers of their collective bargaining rights, and then trying to break the backs of unions themselves.

Mr. Walker made several proposals that will weaken not just unions' ability to bargain contracts, but also their finances and political clout.

His proposal would make it harder for unions to collect dues because the state would stop collecting the money from employee paychecks.

He would further weaken union treasuries by giving members of public-sector unions the right not to pay dues. In an unusual move, he would require secret-ballot votes each year at every public-sector union to determine whether a majority of workers still want to be unionized.

And in case that wasn't quite enough, Walker then added that union members would no longer be allowed to negotiate for better pensions or health benefits at all.

The governor is working with a newly-elected Republican-led legislature, and he's expecting lawmakers to pass his anti-union plan quickly.

And here’s the latest of what is going down in Florida.

Florida's Tea Party-backed Governor Rick Scott proposed cutting more than $5 billion from state spending on Monday while also slashing taxes as he laid out his first budget proposal aimed at closing a deficit of nearly $4 billion.

The Republican, a former healthcare executive, proposed saving nearly $4 billion over two years by reforming Medicaid, the health insurance program for poor people.

He also saw savings of $2.8 billion over two years through an overhaul of Florida's relatively healthy state pension system. Scott also proposed cutting taxes by more than $4 billion over two years. This would include a roll-back of corporate income taxes from 5 percent to 3.5 percent and reductions in property taxes.

Critics of the budget plan from Scott, who was elected in November on a pledge to create 700,000 jobs in seven years, said it would cut nearly 9,000 positions from state payrolls and slash billions of dollars from spending on education.

"This budget from the governor is a frontal assault on the quality of life of every Floridian and will not create a single job nor spur our economy forward; instead it takes us further into the economic ditch," Florida Democratic Party Chairman Rod Smith said in a statement.

And, of course, no discussion of this type would be complete without talking about New Jersey’s Chris Christie and his apparent hatred of school teachers.

And, lest us not forget that apparently every single Republican in the country wants to scale back or get rid of Social Security altogether.

Yeah, I know that everyone is hurting everywhere, and all states are experiencing some major budget crises. But why are all the “remedies” always aimed directly at the working class? Why do we NEVER hear about making big business and the upper crust of this country bear some of the burden? This IS the country that allowed them all to amass all those riches, after all. What is wrong with spreading the pain around, especially to those people who can actually deal with the pain?

If it comes down to a choice between middle and lower class people being able to afford housing, food and a relatively stable future for themselves and their children, and a bunch of rich people not being able to afford luxury homes, or a second home in the Hamptons, or a yacht, I know what I would choose.

What is wrong with these people? And why do lower and middle class voters KEEP VOTING FOR THESE A**HOLES?

I just do not understand…

My own dalliance with racism and bigotry.

The year was very late 1969 or early 1970, when our family, now under the control of new a stepfather, moved from Colorado to rural Alabama. It doesn’t take a huge amount of imagination to understand that this was a huge change for me, a rather shy, unhappy, impressionable and neurotic teenager just starting high school, moving from a relatively progressive place to a very small town in the Deep South, where the Civil War was still very fresh in the cultural consciousness. The Civil Rights movement was not some distant event that today’s kids read in their history books. We were less than seven years removed from the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, attack dogs and fire hoses unleashed on peaceful protestors, also in Birmingham, and the abduction and murder of three young people in Philadelphia, Mississippi whose only crime was attempting to sign up black people to vote. This was the environment into which I found myself dumped, terribly unprepared and uninformed.

My new hometown, which shall remain nameless in this telling, was very similar to every other small town in the Deep South at this time. There was an almost identical town about seven miles to the west. They could have swapped names and it would have hardly made a difference. Unemployment was high, alcoholism was a problem. The towns had very little to offer in terms of employment or entertainment. Both had a white population and a black population that got along marginally well. For the most part, there was no overt hostility between the two groups and there were true positive feelings among a number of individuals. But the subject of race was there. It was always there.

It wasn’t very long after I started in the local high school that I found myself labeled as a “Yankee.” That was, without a doubt, not a compliment. After all, I talked differently. I wore different clothes and tended to have longer hair those days. This was before it became acceptable for country music stars to have long hair. I was an outsider, and that usually means “not acceptable.” Yankee! Outsider! Alien! Looking back, I certainly didn’t do myself any favors. But, at the time, I was just trying to cope with a new family, a sometimes hostile and drunk stepfather and the loss of every friend I had ever managed to make up that point.

At some point in time, I remember being surrounded by a number of the white kids who demanded to know whether or not I was a “nigger lover.” I remember being rather confused by this at the time. I wasn’t certain what that actually meant. My school in Colorado had a total of one black kid in the entire high school, and the football season before I moved away, he had just been voted by the student body as Homecoming King. I don’t remember my reaction to that. I think it was probably confusion, more than anything. I certainly didn’t believe it was somehow “wrong.” However, I do remember that I instantly knew what the answer that my new classmates were expecting from me. I said something to the effect of a very indignant, “No!” I don’t know what would have happened to me if I would have answered otherwise. Probably nothing except some additional ostracism.

The drive-in restaurant in the town (which my stepfather later bought and I was forced to work in when I wasn’t at school or doing school work) had “WHITES ONLY” painted above the walk-up window at the front of the building. There was, of course, the corresponding “COLORED ONLY” sign over the window at the side of the building. This was 1971, not all that long ago. There wasn’t a sign, but it was just an unstated rule that blacks were expected to not come inside into the dining area. Outside was fine, but not inside. During my hours working at the windows at the restaurant, of which there were to be many over the next five years or so, I remember those became my expectations as well. I felt that some unknown code had been violated when a black kid used the window designated for WHITES ONLY to order an ice cream cone. I didn’t say anything, I filled the order. I think it might have been a kid from school. After a few years, that code seem to become relaxed so that the COLORED ONLY window got covered up by equipment so that no one could have used it if they had wanted to. But when it first happened, I do remember feeling uncomfortable.

There was some outward conflict at the school on occasion. I remember one event, which may have lasted several weeks, where there was definitely some animosity going on between the white boys and black boys. It was kid of like a “Jets vs. Sharks” thing from West Side Story. I think it was centered in the higher classes, and I was just a freshman. I remember a bunch of kids standing around, talking, and there were actually some cooler heads trying to prevail. I remember one white kid trying to reason it out saying something like, “Look, if the football team wins, who is it that wins? Is it the colored boys? Or the white boys? No, it’s the team that wins.” Looking back now at that environment and who I remember it was saying that, I am rather impressed. That situation could have easily spiraled out of control. But it didn’t. Everything just went back into the pressure cooker to be heated up a bit more.

The biggest flare up between the two groups of people came not at my town, but the aforementioned town seven miles to the west. It could have just as easily been our town, I suppose. But it wasn’t. The conflict started, if I remember correctly, when several of the white cheerleaders started dating a couple of the black kids who starred on their football and basketball teams. Now, this was definitely crossing a line that the townspeople did not want to see crossed. It came to a head when the two or three couples wanted to go to the prom together. Maybe they succeeded, maybe they didn’t. I honestly don’t remember. But what I am attempting to convey here is my reaction. I don’t remember being outraged. I think my own reaction went something along the lines of, “Gee, those are cute girls. I don’t understand. They couldn’t get a date with a white boy?” No doubt I was feeling a bit left out, like I always did, as I wouldn’t have been able to get a date at that time if my life had depended on it. I cannot say with any amount of certainty what the girls’ motivations were. No doubt they truly liked the black kids, and they were stars on the sports teams, after all. But I imagine a healthy dose of rebellion was in there as well. “You aren’t going to tell ME who I can and can’t date!” I can now respect them for that.

I got along, for the most part, O.K. with the black kids in my class. I didn’t know what to say to them, really. The black boys were on the basketball team, on which I also played. By “played”, I really mean, “sat on the end of the bench a lot.” The black girls, I just didn’t know what to say to them. But then, I usually didn’t know what to say to girls anyway, so that’s no big surprise. Two of the black girls seemed really nice kids and they were rather well liked. The black boys got into no more or less trouble than did the white kids. Maybe less, now that I think about it. I was treated no better or worse by the black kids than my white classmates.

So, now I come to the reason I started to write this. Racism and bigotry have raised their heads again. We have a black man as president, and that doesn’t seem to be going over very well with a segment of the populace. Thoughts and feelings that have been submerged but still present in our society since my days in high school are popping out all over. Things that used to go unsaid are now being overtly trumpeted by the right wing media personalities and even some local politicians. The focus is now more on Latinos and Muslims instead of blacks, but it’s the same thing. “You are not like me. Therefore, you are bad and are to blame for all of my problems.” I won’t try to rehash the current societal mess. It’s just that I can’t help thinking that I have seen all of this before. I “know” the people who say these things that you would not expect to hear in America in the 21st Century.

Why? What is it with people that we can be trained to view with hostility anything different than ourselves? Based on what I know of history and from my own experiences that I recounted here, I have come to believe that human beings are extremely susceptible to manipulation. Some people may call this “tribal knowledge” or “learning at the feet of your elders.” However, manipulation is as good as any term that I can come up with. I believe that you can get a human being to believe anything if you start early enough and repeat it often enough. Children can be taught values when they are young that they carry with them for the rest of their lives. I remember being taught about The Golden Rule when I was in kindergarten. Now, I may not have always practiced that as diligently as I should have, but I have always believed it. Of course, there is the other side of the coin. Children can be taught distrust, hatred and prejudice as well as what most of us would consider to be more positive attributes of society. Protestants can be taught to hate Catholics. Germans can be taught to hate Jews. Many tribes of Native Americans hated each other and were in a constant state of conflict.

For my part, I am rather ashamed that I fell so easily into that trap. Of course I was not a “nigger lover!” How dare you think that about me! I now hope that was more just a knee-jerk reaction to my intense desire to be accepted than it was to my real beliefs at the time. As I said, I do not remember ever really disliking black people because they were black. I have been uncomfortable around them sometime, as I never knew how I was supposed to act or react, and whether they were going to be hostile to me. But then, I can also remember other times, like working with a black guy at a job at an office supply store, and we got along very well together. During one delivery trip, he and I, along with one other white guy, stopped off at a nightclub where a lot of black people hung out. The club band was practicing and we sat and listened to them for a while. My work buddy introduced us white guys to the rest and we sat around and got high. Being a head trumps being a racist, I suppose. I suppose I can feel somewhat mollified by the fact that really don’t believe I ever felt any animosity toward anyone because they were black. I was just reacting to the pressures of the times and of high school.

I am now married to a very nice Asian woman and have been for almost 20 years. We adopted her niece, who is also Asian, it should go without saying, as our own daughter. I have known many black people and gotten along with them well, as I have other “different” people such as gays and lesbians. I am a “good” progressive. The only time I really dislike someone is not because of their skin color, religion or sexual orientation, but because I perceive the person to be a jerk. I am extremely proud of the fact that the United States of America, with its very messy and unfortunate history regarding race relations, has a black man as President. I am the epitome of open-mindedness and acceptance. Until I look past the surface and into my own thoughts and history. Then, I sometimes begin to wonder. Why did I not object to the WHITES ONLY sign above the serving window of our family restaurant? I never questioned that at all, and I wonder why and am rather ashamed that I don't have a good answer. Should I have stood up to the bullies who demanded to know my feelings about my black classmates and told them where to get off? I still dislike thinking about that event and the answer that I so immediately and easily came up with.

Are we ever really truly free from fear and distrust of “The Others”, especially if we have been immersed into a culture that condones that fear and distrust?

It’s an interesting discussion I sometimes have with myself.

"It's like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it."

I recently realized that most of my posting of late isn’t really about politics. It’s about my continuing astonishment and anger about how stupid Americans are, as a people and as a society. Certainly, there are very large numbers of very intelligent and articulate people in the U.S., of all shapes and sizes, genders, and political persuasion.

Some people, including myself at times, might mistake my meanderings and rants at this blog to be against Republicans or conservatives in general. And I, no doubt, help confuse this issue with how I label those I am complaining about. Truthfully, I have absolutely no problem with people who have different opinions than I do. I may not understand why people don’t see things the same way I do, but I accept that this will always be true.

What I do demand, and what is at my heart of my discontent with today’s society, is that everyone start from an easily agreed to set of facts, and then they apply logic and deductive reasoning to those facts. And that is what is missing today. That is what I am really upset about. I don’t care if a Republican or a Democrat is being a dumbass. Anyone taking liberties with logic and coming to your (desired) conclusion first and then finding “facts” to support your decision is wrong. Just flat-out wrong.

So, with that, here is another aspect of our society that really has me worried. That is, our society is setting the latest generation of young people loose on the world without educating them. I mean, really educating them. Memorizing facts and learning to take tests is not education. Education is teaching young people to think logically and methodically to solve problems. That is true whether you are talking about a physics problem or figuring out how to lay out a term paper. Kids need to know what the scientific process is and how it works, not be made to memorize the periodic table. You will always have access to a periodic table if you need one. You will rarely have someone around who will help you walk through an exercise in problem solving. Kids need to have an understanding of history and why that history is relevant. They do not need to memorize a bunch of names and dates that have absolutely no relevance or even context in their lives.

Teachers have it tough. They are underpaid, underappreciated and overworked. I am not bashing teachers. Administrators, maybe, get some of the blame for the poor job, collectively, that schools do when they turn out masses of undereducated people who are not prepared for life in open society. Administrators can certainly make some bad decisions regarding priorities and staffing. Those in charge of setting policy, such as mandatory testing without understanding the reason behind that testing, are absolutely part of the problem. Those who control the purse strings are sometimes to blame, sometimes not. There is little that school administrations can do if the community they serve doesn’t fund the school adequately. There are many culprits, it seems. There is no one person in any single school district that you could point at and say, “This is all your fault!” It isn’t set up like that. Yet, the results are the same and they are getting worse.

Here is part of an article I found (h/t to part-time posting partner Philm Phan) on SFGate on this subject. The author explores this subject and comes to some very unsettling conclusions. I hope this guy’s friend he was talking with is just being really over-the-top about this, because I certainly am not happy with some of his observations.

I have this ongoing discussion with a longtime reader who also just so happens to be a longtime Oakland high school teacher, a wonderful guy who's seen generations of teens come and generations go and who has a delightful poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and his family and his beloved teaching career.

And he often writes to me in response to something I might've written about the youth of today, anything where I comment on the various nefarious factors shaping their minds and their perspectives and whether or not, say, EMFs and junk food and cell phones are melting their brains and what can be done and just how bad it might all be.

His response: It is not bad at all. It's absolutely horrifying.

My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are, absolutely and without reservation, short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero doubt.

Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are overprotected and wussified and don't spend enough time outdoors and don't get any real exercise and therefore can't, say, identify basic plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again, these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored, nothing new.

No, my friend takes it all a full step — or rather, leap — further. It is not merely a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that.

We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.

It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.

Now, you may think he's merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it. It's a bit like the melting of the polar ice caps. Sure, there's been alarmist data about it for years, but until you see it for yourself, the deep visceral dread doesn't really hit home.

He cites studies, reports, hard data, from the appalling effects of television on child brain development (i.e.; any TV exposure before 6 years old and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life), to the fact that, because of all the insidious mandatory testing teachers are now forced to incorporate into the curriculum, of the 182 school days in a year, there are 110 when such testing is going on somewhere at Oakland High. As one of his colleagues put it, "It's like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it."

But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even "democracy." Not a single student could do it.

It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.

It is, in short, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers like my friend nearly powerless to stop it. The worst part: It's not the kids' fault. They're merely the victims of a horribly failed educational system.

Then our discussion often turns to the meat of it, the bigger picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens.


Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cgif=/gate/a/2007/10/24/notes102407.DTL#ixzz0NFT2TcSM