A picture from the Rochester solidarity rally I attended today:
I saw a lot of signs like this at the rally. Class fucking warfare.
by DougJ| 119 Comments
This post is in: Fuck The Middle-Class
by DougJ| 93 Comments
This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor
“We have people pull up at the pharmacy window in a BMW and say they can’t afford their co-payment.”
–Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, Feb. 27, 2011Haley Barbour’s colorful remark, made to The Washington Post while attending a National Governors Association meeting in Washington this week, recalls Ronald Reagan’s description of a “welfare queen” living high on government largess, driving a Cadillac. In Reagan’s telling, she bilked the government out of $150,000, when the actual case involved $8,000.
Next it’ll be strapping young bucks buying Kobe beef.
by DougJ| 77 Comments
This post is in: Fuck The Middle-Class, Republican Venality
An (admittedly small sample) Public Policy Polling survey finds that if Wisconsin voters could re-do their votes from last November, they’d vote against Scott Walker by seven points. The shift is mostly caused by independent and Republican members of unions turning against Walker.
This is pretty much exactly what I thought would happen here. The longer this goes on, the more the anti-Walker feelings of union members solidify, the more it hurts Wisconsin Republicans in 2012.
by DougJ| 32 Comments
This post is in: Fuck The Middle-Class, Readership Capture, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?
The national media ignored the huge rally in Madison this weekend as well as the solidarity rallies that took place all over the country, but I suspect they got a lot of local coverage.
Here’s a picture a reader sent in from Madison.
And here’s one from St. Paul.
There’s a solidarity rally in Rochester on Wednesday that I hope to attend and I’ll have some pictures from that later this week.
Keep fighting.
This post is in: Free Markets Solve Everything, Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, Glibertarianism, Assholes, Teabagger Stupidity, The Math Demands It
Chris Christie is the latest Galtian “it” boy. He got there by being loud, rude and factually challenged–but with a Jersey swagger. And like the other rising stars of wingnutopia, he is racing to make his bones by selling the idea that working people–especially teachers–are greedy little bastards who need to give back most of the wages/benefits they are paid.
It is, of course, all nonsense. In reality, teachers are not overpaid. In fact they are under paid for the job they do. The $1.67 average hourly-rate-per-child that teachers are paid does not look very high when compared to what babysitters get ($6.04) and the average nanny ($12). But unlike babysitters and nannies, teachers have organized into Unions to fight for better schools and a living wage–and that is why they must be crushed.
And the best way to crush these teachers is to make shit up and sell it as a data set that can be sold as an alternative to reality. Fact are avoided by your average wingnutter the way a vampire avoids sunlight. What has made Christie a rising star is his ability to hide his fact-free data set through loud bluster, bombast and bullying.
This was on full display last month in a seven plus hour Twitter fight Christie had with a Facebook poster. The battle between Christie and “stopthefreezeNJ” has been preserved by blogger Jersey Jazzman–who is a good source for following the growing Chris Christie mess.
The Twitter fight was over a math challenged press release that Christie put out pimping the magic of Charter Schools. Turns out that the facts in the press release actually told a story of Charter School fail. But those details didn’t stop Christie from hyping Charter schools as the golden pathway to Galtian Utopia in New Jersey.
Jersey Jazzman set the scene for the Tweets:
I don’t describe this flame war as “astonishing” only because of Christie’s lack of candor and twisting of the facts; we’ve seen this before plenty of times. Nor would I say his evasiveness in the face of a direct question all that surprising as well; non-answering has become the standard operating procedure of the modern conservative pol. [snip]
No, what really made my jaw drop is Christie’s utter disregard for the dignity of the high office he holds. This is a man who not only engages in ad hominem attacks – he clearly relishes them. His first line of attack is to go after the motives of those who oppose him. This not only spares him from having to answer with a more compelling argument; it gives him a bizarre personal satisfaction that shines through even in the 140-character limits of his tweets.
I’m glad that Jersey Jazzman has preserved this example of high wingnuttery. It is a public service. This exchanged happened about a month ago, but something like it happens everyday as Christie and his fellow Republican Confederate Party Governors compete to see who can best lead the attack on workers, the poor and the middle class. Christie is still the Galtian “it” boy, but Scott Walker is fast on his heels. As the competition for head pats, kind words and warm smiles from their Galtian Overlords heats up, there will be a lot more of these kind of things to document–and fight.
Cheers
by DougJ| 91 Comments
This post is in: Fuck The Middle-Class, Going Galt
Use this thread to talk about solidarity rallies. Also send me any pictures (or link to pictures in the thread) and I will post some if I get them before 1 today (I am going off the grid at around 1 pm today til about 10 pm tomorrow).
This post is in: Fuck The Middle-Class, Fuck The Poor, The Party of Fiscal Responsibility, Ever Get The Feeling You've Been Cheated?
I know that probably everything below is obvious to this audience and/or already presented better by someone else here, but anyway: following up John’s post on the deliberate deception behind the “contribute more” demand of public service workers in Wisconsin, here’s some inconvenient data.
The shorter: public service workers are not overpaid. Not even a little bit.*
Let me turn it over to an MIT colleague (one vastly more accomplished than I), Thomas Kochan,
Kochan is a Wisconsin native and a University of Wisconsin graduate. He’s recently been involved in some creative and effective labor negotiations in Massachusetts. In his day job, he studies industrial relations and labor policy at MIT in both the Engineering Systems Division and the Sloan School of Management (i.e. not habitats exactly overpopulated with DFH’s).
Here’s what he had to say to his home state:
It has to start by getting the facts right. Wisconsin’s public service employees are not overpaid relative to their private sector counterparts. Rutgers University professor Jeffrey Keefe has done the analysis. (See his complete study on our Employment Policy Research Network website: www.employmentpolicy.org.) Controlling for education and other standard human capital variables he found that Wisconsin’s public sector workers earn 8.2 percent less than their private sector counterparts in wages and salaries. Taking fringe benefits into account shrinks the difference to 4.2 percent. Thus, public sector workers have lower wages and higher fringe benefits (yes, pensions and health care benefits are the two standouts). But overall, they are not overpaid compared to the private sector. No easy scapegoat here.
That is: Wisconsin state workers are living exactly the way their fellow citizens should want them to: they are deferring present consumption for income security in retirement. This is what every financial counselor begs their clients to do. It is what as a society we want to happen — better by far that our citizens anticipate and prepare for life after work than to hit the bricks with a grin and a sawbuck in their pockets.
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And Wisconsin civil service is exercising such prudence at a cost to the taxpayer lower than that of private sector workers. You can argue whether or not that 4% figure is a sufficient price to pay for the (at least partly) notional job security public employees possess, but the basic point is clear: Wisconsin state workers are hardly bilking the tax payer to enjoy lives of sloth and opulence.
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And as for Governor Walker — this is just the (n)th over determination of the fact that his attack on public unions has nothing to do with underlying issues of state finance.
Rather, it is both malign — an attempt to complete the transfer of wealth from the middle to the affluent begun with the recent tax cuts he championed — and dumb, another way to undermine the state’s economy in the midst of recession, according to an analysis by the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future.
Is there a better way?
Kochan thinks so.
Given that the evidence seems to me to be overwhelming that the GOP both in Wisconsin and nationwide does not actually seek ways to govern well, such optimism could be dismissed as feckless idealism, yet one more out-of-touch professor’s dream of the way things ought to work in a world that we do not inhabit.
Except for this: Kochan has just recently completed his participation in what any observer of Massachusetts politics would have told you is impossible: to secure a policy and employment practice (and pay) bargain in the context of a merger of six state agencies and a bunch of unions and contracts. (see the linked op-ed. for a bit more on this).
It can be done, in other words — though only if the parties recognize some common interest. Here’s Kochan’s thumbnail sketch of what Wisconsin could do (were it only governed by grownups — which is my snark, not that of my far more genial and patient colleague):
1. Get the facts right and communicate them to the public. Create an expert panel to document and generate options for addressing your pension and health care issues. Have this panel report within three months.
2. Use these findings as inputs into your own “Grand Bargain” by bringing together state officials, representatives of all public sector unions, and neutral facilitators experienced in interest-based negotiations (you have some of the best in the country living in Wisconsin) and instruct them to negotiate solutions to the problems and to communicate their solutions to the public.
3. Use the lessons learned from this experience to carry out an evidence-based analysis of how to modernize the state’s public sector bargaining statute to fit the needs of today’s more transparent and financially strapped environment. That approach worked well before — a similar expert panel provided the ideas that were enacted into Wisconsin’s public sector statute in 1962. You can do it again, and if you do Wisconsin will again lead the nation in the practical, forward-looking problem solving that us ex-Wisconsinites brag about almost as much as we brag about the Packers.
I’m beginning to get the sense that some real buyer’s remorse is sinking in over in Packerland.
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I certainly hope so. For this isn’t just a battle about unions and worker’s rights and futures — though it certainly is all of that. But layered over those battles is the big one: does the idea of a social contract stand a chance in America anymore? If not, then it’s decline and fall time, I’m fearing: the cocktail that Gov. Walker is mixing for Wisconsin — more income inequality (and lives made harder to live) and less wealth overall in the long term — is the bitter cup the rest of us will taste soon enough.
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*It’s certainly true you can get local exceptions like the notorious Vallejo public safety contracts implicated in that city’s bankruptcy in 2008. But nationwide, the numbers are clear. Just to anticipate the use of data points like that coming from this one badly run small city, the old trick of pulling out the extreme tail of a distribution and deeming it typical is effective in media terms; it’s a disgraceful and stupid way to make policy.
Images: Rembrandt van Rijn, An Elderly Woman (in widow’s dress and black gloves), 1632-1635
William Hogarth, Marriage à la Mode (No. 2), c. 1743
Reality Has A Well-Known Liberal Bias, Wisconsin EditionPost + Comments (50)