And who is leading the charge -- why its the Democrats and Obama's own "Organizing For America". A Streak of Castroism in Wisconsin Someone wrote me that the “public employees” in Wisconsin reminded her of Chávez and his goons in Venezuela. Actually, they remind me of Cuba. There, the dictatorship sends its loyalists to the homes of those suspected of not being loyalists. They scream, beat on things, denounce, and threaten. The idea is, the “disloyal” Cubans are supposed to quake in their homes, and they do. These tactics are called actos de repudio — “acts of repudiation.” They are a mainstay of the regime. In Wisconsin, the schoolteachers and other “public employee” beauties are going to the homes of Republican lawmakers, screaming, denouncing, etc. The situation has gotten very bad. We know where you live. Yesterday, I had a talk with Sen. Randy Hopper, recordedhere. Republican lawmakers have received threats, and credible ones: threats to their physical well-being. They are not disclosing their movements, whether they are sleeping in their own homes. They are working with law enforcement on how best to protect themselves and their families. I admire these Republicans, for persisting in the face of these threats, for continuing to do the job that the voters elected them to do. It’s not easy. It would be more comfortable to give in — to give in to the screaming and violent minority. And I don’t know about you, but I never want to hear from the Left about “civility” again. Ever. One more thing: Years ago, I left the Left, after experiencing some of life, after thinking things through. One of the main reasons I left: It was clear that, if things didn’t go their way, they wouldn’t mind violence at all. They may not commit it; but they wouldn’t mind it. There was no respect for process — democratic process. All that mattered was, “My way.” Idaho has a “superintendent of public instruction,” and his name is Tom Luna. He has proposed some measures that the teachers’ union doesn’t like, at all. And his opponents have made sure that he feels good and threatened. Someone went to his mother’s house — his mother’s. Someone slashed his tires and spray-painted a threat onto the door. As reported in this article, Luna has said, “Family and personal property are off-limits. You don’t cross that line . . .” Oh, yes, you do. At least some do. I will repeat what I have already said this morning: I don’t want to hear from the Left about “civility” for the rest of my life. The public-employee unions don’t own this country. They may think they do. But we all do. Right? I hope people all across the country, even those who disagree with him, will back Tom Luna: back his right to operate unmolested. P.S. Following events in Wisconsin and elsewhere, I think of a phrase from The Wizard of Oz: “and your little dog, too.” That’s the malevolent spirit these union jerks are expressing. I gave my take on events in Wisconsin — and Obama’s role in them — a bit earlier today in “Who’s Polarizing America?” And you’ll find Jay’s great stuff on Wisconsin if you scroll through yesterday’s Corner. But what about the Left? There’s a fascinating debate on Wisconsin going on between Harold Meyerson and Charles Lane at the Washington Post. It’s of interest that Meyerson is a proud socialist, while Lane appears to be a Democrat unhappy with the left-turn his party has taken of late. At any rate, this debate is well worth following. Here is Meyerson’s initial op-ed, followed by Lane,Meyerson, Lane, and Meyerson. John Boehner’s Got Scott Walker’s Back: Don’t ‘Demagogue Reform-minded Governors’ Speaker John Boehner Friday accused President Barack Obama and his political apparatus for “inciting” protests in Wisconsin’s captal, saying that the president is trying to “demagogue reform-minded governors.” Boehner was referencing Obama’s deployment of his political operation, Organizing for America, to Wisconsin, where public-sector workers are protesting Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to strip them of collective bargaining rights. Boehner said that OFA is “colluding with special-interest allies across the country to demagogue reform-minded governors who are making the tough choices that the President is avoiding.” “This is not the way to begin an ‘adult conversation’ about solutions to the big challenges facing our country,” Boehner said in a statement. “Rather inciting protests against those who speak honestly about the challenges we face, the president and his advisers should lead.” It’s the second statement the speaker made in response to the uproar in Wisconsin. This time he took it a step further, and likened the protests in Wisconsin to the Greece debt uprising, but noted that it is “fueled by President Obama’s own political machine.” “Rather than trying to ‘win the future,’ the president’s political allies are trying, desperately, to cling to a failed past by fighting reforms our nation needs to liberate our economy from the shackles of debt and create a better future for our children and grandchildren,” Boehner said. “The President should make it clear to his friends that the people of Wisconsin, and states across America, can handle their own affairs without Washington special-interest money and meddling.” |
Child’s Play: Wisconsin Teachers Recruit Their Students to Save Union Jobs Madison — On Valentine’s Day, over 100 students in tiny Stoughton, Wis., marched out of their classrooms and into the unseasonably warm air. They had decided to protest Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s new bill to require higher pension and health-care contributions from state and local government employees. As a student “union” leader barked into a megaphone in the background, one high-school junior expressed his concern for his teachers. “A lot of my teachers have been really concerned about this — they don’t know if they’re going to have jobs next year or not,” he worried. Two days later, schools in Madison canceled classes so teachers could join 20,000 people in picketing the capitol building. A 700-student entourage from Madison East High School, urged on by their teachers, marched the three miles from their school to the capitol. Wisconsin’s MacIver Institute, armed with a video camera, asked one of the students what the group was there to protest. “We’re trying to stop whatever this dude is doing,” he eruditely explained. This “dude” is trying to fill a $3.6 billion hole in the state’s budget by requiring state and local government employees to pay 5.8 percent of their salary towards their pensions (most currently pay nothing), and increasing their share of health-care premiums to 12 percent (double their current share). Governor Walker’s plan would also eliminate collective bargaining for almost everything except salary for government employees. Some of the responses to Walker’s plan from legislative Democrats made our friend from Madison East High look like Winston Churchill. One state senator said the plan instituted “legalized slavery.” (Apparently Wisconsin’s benefits aren’t quite as lucrative as the slave pension plan.) A Democratic assemblyman compared Walker to Hosni Mubarak. On Thursday, with a vote on the full bill scheduled in the Senate, 14 Democratic senators delayed the vote by fleeing to a hotel in Rockford, Illinois. Before he ran for the border, Democratic senator Jon Erpenbach posted a single word on his Facebook page: “Democracy.” In the meantime, the capitol was packed with thousands of government employees, many of whom had staged a “sleep-in” the night before. One sign-wielding protester approached a tie-wearing GOP staffer and sneered, “You must be a Republican.” He turned and asked, “Because I’m working?” The raucous, drum-beating crowd was mostly made up of teachers, high-school kids, and University of Wisconsin students. On Thursday, school districts all over the state began canceling classes as their teachers called in sick en masse — government-employee strikes are illegal in Wisconsin — and teachers continued to bring their students to protest with them. Of course, what the kids don’t understand is that Walker’s plan is intended to save their teachers’ jobs. Without the modest employee contributions required in the bill, Walker estimates he will have to fire up to 6,000 public employees. The teachers are in effect choosing massive job losses over moderate concessions. In fact, that might be the silver lining in this whole imbroglio: If teachers and their students manage to succeed in killing Walker’s bill, the next government employee demonstration will be half as big. — Christian Schneider is a senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. The Many Paradoxes of Barack Obama When President Obama called for a new civility, I was somewhat confused. In 2004–7, the uncivil demagoguery of the Left damaged Bush; immediately after Obama’s call for civility, someone wrote an “I hate Joe Lieberman” column; now, Governor Walker–Nazi signs have appeared in Madison. Given that the country polls center-right, the hysterical style is something that the modern Left uses to counteract public opinion; Obama has condemned a methodology that is predominately embraced by his own hard-core base. (Indeed, swarming someone’s private home, or using terms like “enemy” and “punish,” are not unknown to either the younger or older Obama.) The result is the hypocrisy of condemning the incivility that will only become more useful to the Left as the election nears In the Middle East, Obama seems not to grasp the central paradox, analogous to Jeane Kirkpatrick’s in the Cold War: The relatively pro-American authoritarians (in Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, and the Gulf) are more vulnerable than the anti-American and far more savage totalitarian regimes (Iran, Syria, Libya, etc.), at least for now, because the latter are more willing to blockade the international media and to use brutal force to crack down on popular protests. Not only has the administration not appreciated how this paradox may change the strategic map of the Middle East to the detriment of U.S. interests, but it almost seems to consider the more anti-American regimes more sustainable, untouchable, and authentic, and their protesters tainted with Westernization. I don’t know how else to explain the administration’s otherwise inexplicable failure to support Iranian dissidents in 2009, or its harsh attitude toward Mubarak versus its mild treatment of Ahmadinejad, or its efforts to reach out to a rogue Syria while pulling back from a democratic Israel. At some point, Obama will have to see what Gov. Jerry Brown here in California has already realized: Out-of-whack public-employee compensation and pensions drain the treasury and preclude grandiose green projects and other dubious liberal programs. To put it rather crassly, the liberal calculus often works out as mostly older white guys wanting their unsustainable pension and benefit payouts while the “other” and the more needy are shorted from receiving proper public attention. Since the states cannot print money and often lose population to other states when they raise taxes, the reality is that the well-off are enjoying perks that younger and private-sector workers lack while social services and the green visions of an Al Gore or a 2008 Obama are defunded. Finally, what distinguishes Obama’s homespun platitudes about public-sector jobs from state governors’ more honest worries is just that ability to print cash — together with the fact that Americans cannot migrate to a kindred but lower-tax nation, in the fashion overtaxed Californians flee to Texas or Utah. But pass a law that the U.S. must balance its books like the states must, or have something like a workable, low-tax Singapore off our shores, and Obama would start sounding like a Governor Brown, Christie, or Walker. I wrote today about how extraordinary it is to have a reformist Republican governor taking on public-sector unions in Wisconsin, the intellectual breadbasket of American progressivism. A couple of points made by friends via e-mail: 1)“What Walker is doing isn’t unprecedented—18 states deny collective bargaining rights to some classes of public workers, or allow municipalities to do so. Virginia and North Carolina have outright bans on public sector collective bargaining. And nearly every state has some sort of restrictions on the scope of collective bargaining– for example, in New York, pension benefits are an excluded subject from collective bargaining.” 2) “Boosting pensions is an especially attractive way for unions to increase members’ overall compensation because pensions are commitments that come home to roost far in the future, when the politicians negotiating them will no longer be in office. Getting wage raises is harder because the must be factored into budgets immediately. So, reducing collective bargaining to wages only is a big deal.” |
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment