Wisconsin is a strange state, and not just because people wear cheese on their heads. It is politically schizophrenic. It spawned both Joe McCarthy and Gene McCarthy. So, regardless of current events, you can’t lump them in with the crazy states – South Carolina, Alaska, Arizona – which seem to be competing with each other to produce the biggest right wing lunatics.
However, Governor Scott Walker is a piece of work. Officially, of course, he is a Republican. There are no politicians who put -T for Teabagger after their name. The Tea Party is not mentioned at all on his Wikipedia page. Nonetheless, he is opposed to abortion, even in cases of rape, thinks pharmacists should be allowed to not provide contraceptives if they feel like it, opposes stem cell research, turned down federal funds for high speed rail which would have provided a lot of jobs in his state, and got $43,000 in campaign contributions from the Koch brothers, who have pretty much bankrolled the whole tea party movement. Most of the Teabaggers in Wisconsin voted for him in the 2010 election, and that was enough to make him governor.
State Employees and Supporters Take Over Wisonsin State Capitol
Anyway, Walker seems to have bitten off more than he can chew. The issue is not just how much state employees are going to get paid. It’s that he wants to take away their right to join a union. State employees are furious. The protests have been massive, and there is something very Egyptian about them.
I think the teabaggers are going to lose this one. Everybody talks about cutting the budget, but nobody really wants to screw their kid’s teacher, or their postmen or garbage collectors, or the lady down at the DMV. Walker did one thing that was strategically brilliant but show’s the true colors of the teabagger movement. He exempted the police.
I don’t know who it was that said it, but it’s really true, that the people in power, the rich elites at the top of the pyramid, can maintain control by paying half of the people to oppress the other half.
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He exempted the Firefighters Union too. Actually, I read that both of those unions foolishly supported him for Governor. But now that he’s demonstrated his utter disdain for organized labor, reps from both of those unions are protesting alongside the rest. I’m happy to see the protests. But it’s sad the police and firefighters unions didn’t vote for their own interests in the first place.
One thing that often gets left out of discourse on this topic: public side organized labor is a different animal than private side organized labor. Public labor unions can contribute huge amounts of money and exert too much control over who ends up sitting across from them at the bargaining table. Not so on the private side. Private side labor unions bring a balance of power. Public side labor unions bastardize power and in the process protect the jobs of people who would be fired in a minute in the private sector.
I find it difficult to support public side labor unions when they make it nearly impossible for schools (for example) to eliminate totally incompetent school employees. I’m not picking on teachers/coaches/etc. here as the majority of them do an outstanding job but there are far too many lousy and protected ones that we can’t seem to eject from the system. Forget the whole idea of judging teachers based on how their students perform on tests. In the private sector the manager would do their job – spend plenty of time in the classrooms to judge for themselves – and TALK TO THE END USERS(students and parents). If the majority of students/parents think a teacher should get the boot, there’s a very good chance they’re correct. Same thing for those in any other public sector job. Get some boots on the ground to see what employees are really doing, then get some boots on the butt if they’re incompetent. That’s just management 101 in the private sector.