by Eric Martin
Ezra Klein offers an insightful summary of recent events in Wisconsin, including the fiscal decisions that gave impetus to the sizable protests taking place in that state over the past few days.
The short version is that Governor Scott Walker turned a projected budget surplus into a deficit by passing a series of tax cuts, as well as an unfunded health care bill (sound familiar?). Klein provides the details:
The Badger State was actually in pretty good shape. It was supposed to end this budget cycle with about $120 million in the bank. Instead, it's facing a deficit. Why? I'll let the state's official fiscal scorekeeper explain (pdf):
More than half of the lower estimate ($117.2 million) is due to the impact of Special Session Senate Bill 2 (health savings accounts), Assembly Bill 3 (tax deductions/credits for relocated businesses), and Assembly Bill 7 (tax exclusion for new employees).
In English: The governor called a special session of the legislature and signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health-care policy experiment that lowers overall tax revenues (among other things). The new legislation was not offset, and it turned a surplus into a deficit. As Brian Beutler writes, "public workers are being asked to pick up the tab for this agenda."
Then, like any good Norquistian, Walker proceeded to use the budget crisis he created by tax cuts and unfunded programs to make structural changes and assail the constituencies of political foes:
But even that's not the full story here. Public employees aren't being asked to make a one-time payment into the state's coffers. Rather, Walker is proposing to sharply curtail their right to bargain collectively. A cyclical downturn that isn't their fault, plus an unexpected reversal in Wisconsin's budget picture that wasn't their doing, is being used to permanently end their ability to sit across the table from their employer and negotiate what their health insurance should look like.
That's how you keep a crisis from going to waste: You take a complicated problem that requires the apparent need for bold action and use it to achieve a longtime ideological objective…And note that not all public-employee unions are covered by Walker's proposal: the more conservative public-safety unions — notably police and firefighters, many of whom endorsed Walker — are exempt. […]
If all Walker was doing was reforming public employee benefits, I'd have little problem with it. There's too much deferred compensation in public employee packages, and though the blame for that structure lies partially with the government officials and state residents who wanted to pay later for services now, it's true that situations change and unsustainable commitments require reforms. But that's not what Walker is doing. He's attacking the right to bargain collectively — which is to say, he's attacking the very foundation of labor unions, and of worker power — and using an economic crisis unions didn't cause, and a budget reversal that Walker himself helped create, to justify it.
The sleight of hand and misdirection are reminscent of many of the "solutions" being proferred in response to the inexplicably sudden attention that the deficit and debt are being shown in Washington.
Like Ezra, I'm of the opinion that certain pension features for public employees are in need of a tweak (especially in New York, where annual pension amounts can be gamed due to the piling on of overtime in the final year of employment, and then using that year's compensation level as the basis for the pension amount). In addition, there are arguments to be made (not that I agree) that public sector unions are anachronistic and no longer serve a useful purpose. However, Governor Walker is not making those arguments. At least, in the latter case, not without false pretenses.
Hey, the Camembertians elected this schmuck and his co-schmucks in the legislature, maybe they should think twice about that next time.
My guess is, there was a series of facepalms cracking like a chain of firecrackers going off across the state…
This is classic Disaster Capitalism: create a disaster, then use it as an excuse to remove wealth and rights from ordinary citizens and transfer them to the rich and powerful. Not a new tactic at all, but this is about as brazen an implementation as we’ve seen inside the US. I’m glad to see the anger and resistance that’s sprung up against it; previous examples, such as what’s been done to New Orleans since Katrina, have not generated much notice or much objection.
Speaking of electing schmucks:
House blocks fed aid for Planned Parenthood
One wonders why this didn’t get passed when the GOP controlled both houses of congress and teh POTUS.
Ugh:
Why, it’s almost as though they aren’t *serious* …
Wisconsin has been one of the best at funding its retirement commitments.
The problem with deferred pay has always been that someone else controls the money — as many found to their chagrin when their retirement programs went up in smoke in the private sector.
Government employees made it very clear at the rally today at the State Capitol that they would negotiate on wages and benefits, but they would not willingly give up their rights.
…but this is about as brazen an implementation as we’ve seen inside the US.
I don’t know, Obama signing tax cuts in December and cutting home heating subsidies in early February is pretty brazen.
Michael Hudson …shows that it is global. I’ve kinked to his home page because any of the articles are worth reading, and all are on the same theme, although Hudson mostly focuses on Europe. Highly recommended.
Once you understand Disaster Capitalism as a coup by the creditor class, then you can go back and look at the bank crisis in fall-summer of 2008, and the early months of 2009 with some better tools.
I was speaking to a co-worker based in Madison yesterday. He expects Walker to be recalled within the year.
We’ll see what happens. In the meantime, I’m glad to see folks in the streets.
What is interesting and important about Wisconsin (and I think the ME, but connecting them is another story) is the first signs that the people in the US are recognizing that the entire political system is irredeemably corrupted by finance+ money and beyond reform, that some kinds of direct action are the only possible efficacious responses, and that the electoral politics establishment will need to be bypassed, circumvented, or overthrown.
Dr. Science:
“Why, it’s almost as though they aren’t serious …”
Geez, I can imagine a small nuclear mushroom cloud far off on the horizon over the spot where John Emerson just went kablooey along with a good part of the surrounding scenery.
May we please, at the very least, while observing the bland-faced posting rules, take these people seriously?
They are as serious as the murderous Red-State-backed Mubarak vermin who raped Lara Logan.
They are as serious about their plans for this country as the murderous, sadistic vermin in al Qaeda were about the threats outlined in the memo Condoleeza Rice tried to put under George W. Bush’s nose the summer before 9/11.
I don’t believe that memo contained the words “negotiating position” to refer to what was coming, much like the sadistic vermin elected by ignorant sadistic vermin last November used the words “negotiating position” anywhere during their campaigns, or since.
I agree with McManus and thank him, on behalf of all, for expressing himself within the posting rules.
There will no posting rules, however, for what is coming in this country.
There will no posting rules, however, for what is coming in this country.
along these lines, in addition to the union busting going on in WI (which AFAICT is only failing by a single vote) and other states, the backup/other part of the plan is to change the bankruptcy code to allow states to declare bankruptcy and clear out the public employee unions that way.
We’re also headed toward either a government shutdown at the federal level or draconian cuts to non-defense discretionary spending (or, if we’re lucky, both), as the GOP has just voted to defund the Health Care Reform bill as part of the spending bill.
And what you’re also going to see is the GOP getting away with it, doing its best to keep unemployment as high as possible until the 2012 presidential election in the hopes that the GOP nominated ignorant sadistic vermin* (to borrow a phrase) is elected, and then the real partying will begin.
And also, just wait until you see the GOP pounce on Obama and blame him for the wave of less-US-friendly (but more democratic) “radical islamic brotherhood al qaeda” governments that will probably emerge in Egypt and elsewhere in the middle east among our former “allies.”
Meanwhile, there’s going to be a lot of praying and wishing the unemployment rate down over at 1600 Penn, cause ain’t nothing they can do about it now.
But hey, should be interesting, pass the popcorn and fallout shelters.
*Emerson would have called them moronic brownshirt fncks, IIRC.
In 1972, when I was a freshman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave a lecture at my high school. Violent demonstrations on college campuses were recent events in those days; it wasn’t clear the phenomenon was over. Moynihan’s theme was demographic reassurance: the tumult had much to do with the baby bulge moving into its late teens and early twenties. Things would quiet down, said Moynihan, as the boomers aged.
I bring this up because of the current waves of unrest in the Mideast and the Midwest. On the grand scale, both seem related to demographic bulges. In the Middle East, I gather a baby boom is moving into its troubled and troublesome twenties, anxious about its prospects for work. In the US, an earlier baby boom is moving into its dotage, anxious about its prospects for retirement.
Moynihan’s lecture was the first time I had ever heard of the “baby boom”. I don’t remember whether I instantly appreciated Moynihan’s analysis, but looking back over nearly four decades I think the man had a point.
What I wonder is whether he ever foresaw the potential for demonstrations in the streets as the leading edge of the American demographic bulge starts squeezing out the back end of its working years. Sixty-ish people are supposed to be more sedate than twenty-ish ones. But maybe it’s a cohort’s numbers, rather than its age, that drives it to protest and agitate when life transitions loom.
–TP
So, if not taxing HSA’s is viewed as a “cause” of the budget problem, shouldn’t the answer be to tax employer-provided health care benefits? If not, why? Wouldn’t a tax on those benefits, including those given to unionized government employees, provide far more revenue than the HSA taxes ever would?
I’m not sure about the other “causes” of the budget crises. Both seem to be stimulus measures. The devil must be in the details.
I don’t see the need for full collective bargaining for public sector employers, at least how it exists now. Looks to me like in Wisconsin they were still going to get to bargain over base pay and they keep the civil service code. And public safety is exempt (because, like in California, there are some unions too entrenched to take on).
Since the unions are playing the “democracy” card, why not require all increases in pay/benefits to be approved by the employer (i.e. the public)? For that matter, why not vote (legislators) and let the voters take it out on the legislature next term? Hiding? What’s up with that? That seems completely undemocratic. I can see it if it were a truly moral issue and a civil disobedience situation, but not over this.
I don’t see the need for full collective bargaining for public sector employers…
need?
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I don’t see the need for full collective bargaining for public sector employers
What’s different about public sector employees?
People who work for a wage or salary bargain because that’s the lever they have to influence what they get. Without that lever, they get no more or less than what’s offered.
And what cleek said. Folks assemble to voice their point of view on every imaginable issue. It’s hard for me to see people’s livelihoods being of less importance than every other thing that folks protest over.
Conservatives hate labor unions, and the governor of WI is taking his opportunity to try to break the public unions in his state. Folks who either belong to or support unions have every reason and every right to object.
And yeah, “conservatives hate labor unions” is a gross generalization, but it’s one that I’m happy to stand behind, because I’m not totally ignorant of the history of the freaking United States.
Is there a better definition of “conservative” than “hates labor unions”?
Was there ever?
–TP
Nice title, but first place has to go to LGM’s Paul Campos and his post entitled On Wisconsin
“What’s different about public sector employees?”
Just about everything. Most important you cant buy what they do from anyone else when they go on strike so they have absolute negotiating power. Even for people who don’t like unions they like public sector unions even less.
But, everyone who doesn’t live in a right to work state raise your hand: everyone with your hand raised continue discussing how awful this is.
The rest of us will scratch our head and wonder how it is we suddenly don’t live in a democracy.
The Michael Hudson blog bob mcmanus linked to is fabulous. bobbyp, if you’re reading, it’s right up your alley.
Note the last few words of this quote from the latest post (as of this comment):
Most important you cant buy what they do from anyone else when they go on strike so they have absolute negotiating power.
right. which is why they all live like total fncking kings. P-Diddy just wishes he was a teacher in downtown Detroit, making $50K with a doctorate and 5 years of experience! that’s the dream, yo. absolute power.
cleek,
Not all unions abuse the negotiating power they have, it doesn’t mean they don’t have it.
Also, teachers unions have often taken benefits in lieu of salaries at the negotiating table. Many unions have taken job security and lifetime health and retirement benefits in lieu of current salaries.
Then you have states where the unions have abused the power they have. Just like companies that have abused the power they have.
Not all unions abuse the negotiating power they have, it doesn’t mean they don’t have it.
errr. no. “absolute negotiating power” should yield some awesome lifestyles – especially if union members are as corrupt and unprincipled as “conservatives” make them out to be. i know if i had “absolute negotiating power” (and was in a union), i’d be crazy rich. to hell with 17-year programmer salary, i’d be all like “Bieber, git me a quesadilla!” and i’m not even corrupt. imagine what a truly self-serving person would do !
Marty:
Please provide an example of a state where public-sector unions have abused their power. Then show how this is “just like” the way companies abuse power. I am not seeing the comparison.
I’ve got to wonder why they were so reluctant to do anything about it before. ISTM that the last two years have given us the same kind of nastiness (kneecapped recovery stimulus, increased power to building the security panopticon, cover for torture and detention without charge, etc.), only introduced a bit slower. As I’ve been saying for awhile now, I consider Obama a right-of-center Republican (let’s say, right of Nixon, for instance).
I was speaking to a co-worker based in Madison yesterday. He expects Walker to be recalled within the year.
I know there’s a petition going around right now to recall half a dozen of the Republican state senators; while it would be nice to think that Walker’s going to suffer the same fate, I think it’s unduly optimistic.
One thing to remember is that it’s hard to underestimate the hatred that Republicans have ginned up for Madison in the rural parts of the state. Back in the contract negotiations of 2001-2002 — the last time the Republicans tried to seriously screw the public employees* — there were Republican state senators (notably John Gard, who later ran for the US Senate) whose pitch to their constituents boiled down to: we’re going to screw those a**holes in Madison to show them who’s boss. [This was almost expressly what John Gard later said to my union-of-the-time in the 2003-2004 negotiations.] Nothing against the folks from the sticks, of course — some of my best friends &c — but there’s enough support for Republicans and resentment against Madison that I don’t see Walker going anywhere soon.
Though I’d love to be wrong…
* As it was almost ten years ago, I may have the dates slightly wrong; things got confusing in part because our contract for that biennium wasn’t actually signed until after the biennium was over, instead of before it began.
or the right of the people peaceably to assemble
A law not requiring the government to bargain or prohibiting the government from bargaining does not violate the 1st A., as far as I know. Several states (Virginia?) already prohibit bargaining, and in some it is not mandatory (Utah).
What’s different about public sector employees?
You can’t be serious. Right?
Public employment is taxpayer funded. The government doesn’t have to make a profit, and the incentive to save money is not really there. Add in political scratch, and you have a recipe for disaster. Take a look at California, where I live. You end up getting voting blocks in exchange for $$.
Public employment used to be a trade off between a lower wage with a good pension. Now it’s both. And employment for life. Look at what it takes to fire a teacher. It’s a far cry from the poor working conditions that lead to unionization in the private sector. Workers can vote with their feet and go to the private sector. And leverage? Take a look at the public safety unions in California and talk to me about leverage.
I remember the clerk’s office when I was a law clerk unionizing (IBEW). They already had great working conditions, a generous pension, good pay and just about every other Friday off with all the holidays. They ended up bargaining for a pay raise to cover the money they lost with union dues.
Not every job is the same, I realize. I’m still amazed at how quick the iron workers were that raised a building I was associated with. Not that there isn’t a place for unions. I don’t see the benefit to taxpayers in public bargaining.
russell – Just fyi – he has to be in office for a year before he can be recalled, but, of course, the organizing can start at any time. I think it is safe to say that it has.
@MikeDrewWhat
Madison
I was warning about this happening when ACORN controversy was going on before Robert Reich shut the comments on his blog down. GOP main effort is to destroy Democrats voting base and every their speech and every word was and still is about how amoral and unamerican is every segment of Democrat base. Women, Latino, Muslims, African-Americans, unions
On top of that add Citizen United and Democrats are finished and permanent GOP rule is in.
This is concerted, planed nationwide effort by GOP and is working like a charm. I can see some of you are still laughing at republican talking points and lack of facts. Keep laughing while they are destroying our bases. Keep arguing nuances with believers while they are working to destroy you. They are believers, they can not be argued with. Arguing requires use of facts, while believing doesn’t. No amount of fact can shake a belief, trust me i was married to a narcissist/alcoholic and once you win an argument they switch to another topic.
When i read Karl Denninger (right wing market analyst and a tea party founder) about how this economic crisis was predicated and intentional, i thought it is another conspiracy theory, but now i can see it as a part of the multi-year GOP plan. Almost all large bank and hedge fund managers are republicans.
Only thing worth arguing about with your republican friends and family is about history of middle class: FDR and unions. They still did not destroy the fact that middle class created US what it is. Everything else above mentioned is just a distraction from what matters. If you want to argue about what is happening in Wisconsin with a republican believer just point out to the “rich unionista” clothing of the demonstrators
That the public employees in question have a monopoly and are thus kings is (at least in the US afaict) digestive final product of ruminants. Teachers at private schools, private security companies, private or volontary firefighting services, private for-profit prisons*? I even hear about ideas floated to reintroduce tax farming** (if the collection process has not yet been outsourced in some places already).
*remember the scandal where one of these companies bribed judges to get more ‘customers’?
**can’t resist the pun: that would be re-publicanizing the land.
bc: Public employment is taxpayer funded. The government doesn’t have to make a profit, and the incentive to save money is not really there. Add in political scratch, and you have a recipe for disaster. Take a look at California, where I live. You end up getting voting blocks in exchange for $$.
Replace “public employment is” with “government contractors are” and tell me why the rest of your paragraph would need to change. Well, okay: I suppose you might need to replace “voting blocks” with “campaign contributions”, in the last sentence.
Unions can drive a hard bargain with us taxpayers because they’re big, disciplined organizations. Corporations are even bigger, even more disciplined organizations. Both insist on negotiating contracts with “the government”.
We taxpayers all hate the thought that our spendthrift government gives over-generous contracts to big, disciplined organizations. We only differ over which kind of big, disciplined organization we’d rather get screwed by.
–TP
Hey Anarch! Great to see you.
If you (or Mike D or anyone else in Wisconsin area) would like to make a guest post about the situation, please contact the kitty at the email address or me directly at libjpn (at) gmail. Of course, links are great (Bob McManus posted a link to this blog post that has some interesting links) but having someone who is there or who was recently in Wisconsin and can give an informed view would be wonderful.
I’m particularly interested in the teacher’s union sick-in that I’ve seen mentioned and that one or two sources (sorry, I’ve not been organized enough with my reading to find the cite) said that the union leadership wasn’t really so hot on the idea. Crooked Timber’s Harry Brighouse obliquely mentions it here and Josh Healey, who lived in Madison until just recently, also has a useful summary
This same kind of thing is going on in Ohio, and even some conservative analysts here think the Republicans have gone too far. I heard a statistic that only 2% of the negotiations even go into arbitration, so this is just another instance of Republicans’ overblown, dishonest rhetoric.
Most important you cant buy what they do from anyone else when they go on strike so they have absolute negotiating power.
See also, PATCO. And those stupid f***ers supported Reagan in 1980. Last laugh was on them.
You can’t be serious. Right?
I’ll rephrase. What is different about public employees that makes collective bargaining inappropriate?
Public employment used to be a trade off between a lower wage with a good pension. Now it’s both.
And private sector compensation used to rise roughly in step with the growth of the economy. Now it doesn’t.
Public employees look like they’re living fat and happy because everyone else is getting screwed..
And Walker wants to make sure that public employees get screwed in just the same way.
t’s a far cry from the poor working conditions that lead to unionization in the private sector.
Which is why everyone is clamoring to be a teacher, a firefighter, a cop, or a clerk in the office of deeds. Fat city.
Workers can vote with their feet and go to the private sector.
Not quite 10% official unemployment, the U6 is closer to 20%.
And leverage? Take a look at the public safety unions in California and talk to me about leverage.
No doubt CA is FUBAR. That problem has many fathers, it ain’t just union malfeasance.
If you don’t like unions, the solution is to get out of the business of treating people who work for a living like a “labor market” and treat them like folks who bring value to the organizations they work in and for.
If you can’t do that, folks are going to do whatever they need to do to make sure they can have a decent life.
Walker has thrown the gauntlet down. He started a knife fight, and the other side is not backing down. Good for them.
One thing to remember is that it’s hard to underestimate the hatred that Republicans have ginned up for Madison in the rural parts of the state.
The population of WI is about 5 million.
The population of greater Madison is about 570K. The population of greater Milwaukee is about 1.5 million.
68% of the folks in WI live in or near cities. American’s Dairyland or not, manufacturing and services bring more money into the state than agriculture.
If Walker wants to make this all about those snotty city slickers down in Madison, he’s welcome to do so. But his state, like many if not most states in this country, runs on the back of the folks that live in the cities.
It may not be a winning strategy for him, long-term.
Here’s an interview with Michael Hudson primarily concerning income tax rates (how they used to be 90% in the highest bracket), but it touches on wages and productivity and how they relate to overall economic health. It’s really only semi-relevant to this discussion, but it’s just so good and interesting that I had to link to it.
Thanks to bob mcmanus for introducing me to a blog that will be regular reading (and viewing, as the case may be) for me from now on.
Yet another edition of “what russell said”…
“It may not be a winning strategy for him, long-term.”
Which is really the problem that has grown around public employee unions. Agreeing that the problem has many fathers, one of the most problematic is the political clout that they have. In many places far greater than any of the corporate dollars that are regularly complained about here.
Between PAC money and pure get out the vote power they don’t have to collectively bargain because they get what they want in the campaign. They are the yen to the corporate greed yang in terms of effective government. Both have a tremendously deleterious effect on the rest of the working class in America.
For every Tea Party complaint about corporate overreach and government overreach, they also complain about union overreach. At least they are consistent.
It all seems pretty distant from down here. I can tell you, from this neck of the woods, public employee unions giving votes and funds to one political party that, in turn, rewards the union at the expense of taxpayers would not play well. Add to that a strike, and I would not expect to see the union survive. Kind of like air traffic controllers.
“For every Tea Party complaint about corporate overreach and government overreach, they also complain about union overreach. At least they are consistent.”
Yes, consistently idiotic. And what do they do about it? Swoon in the arms of corporate overreach thanks to the ridiculous economics they embrace, and flock to government overreach when it comes to beating up on people they don’t like – immigrants, gays, Muslims, et al.
So union overreach? Oh, please… what percentage of Americans are in unions?
A piffling, trifling amount, and another right-wing canard. This will have the effect of making more Americans want to join unions, which will be high time.
“A piffling, trifling amount, and another right-wing canard. This will have the effect of making more Americans want to join unions, which will be high time. ”
Well, no, probably not.
Here is a great piece by a teacher in Wisconsin who is clearly caught up in the middle of this, in which she reveals that, as a second-year teacher who is a class away from her Master’s degree, she brings home the princely some of . . . $36,000 a year.
Now, granted that a master’s in an appropriate subject for primary or secondary school education isn’t, generally, nearly as expensive as a medical degree and associated training, but remember how healthcare reform was supposed to be so bad because doctors have all those school bills to pay? Yeah.
Which is really the problem that has grown around public employee unions. Agreeing that the problem has many fathers, one of the most problematic is the political clout that they have.
I don’t see that as a specifically public sector union issue. All unions exert political influence, to the greatest degree they can.
I also don’t disagree that unions lead to market distortion and inefficiency. IMO unions are not the optimal solution to conflicts between ownership, management, and labor. They’re just the only solution that has yielded a useful result from the point of view of lots of folks who work for a wage or salary.
So, we have unions.
If you want to make unions go away, make them superfluous. Professions where folks can demand solid levels of compensation through other means don’t tend to be unionized. Doctors, lawyers, highly technical professions – those fields are generally not unionized because their practicioners can enforce scarcity through other means.
If you want to get rid of organized labor, pay people more. Distribute more of the wealth of productive activity to the folks who *do the activity*. Distribution, not redistribution.
It’s not that complicated.
If you’re not willing to do that, folks who work for a living will continue to do what they need to do to make sure they can have a decent life.
If you don’t want a knife fight, don’t bring a knife.
For “wealth of productive activity” please read “wealth created by productive activity”.
Shorter: when democracy doesn’t get you what you want, circumvent democracy.
hairshirt,
I have bookmarked Hudson. Great stuff! Thank you, bob mcmanus.
It is remarkable as conservatives continue to speak of “their money” as, well, “theirs”. They have consistently used private and government power to tilt the playing field–funneling more of OUR resources to their private gain, and then calling it “theirs”.
This is theft.
That sounds like a grown up’s work day. Most people work those hours, but they don’t get summers off.
Yes Phil, and I watched an interview yesterday witha teacher in Madison who said she made 70k and her husband(a teacher) made 70k and she wasn’t too worried about paying for benefits.
Like always we can find an anecdote.
That sounds like a grown up’s work day. Most people work those hours, but they don’t get summers off.
You might want to actually RTFA: And I already spend my summer working. In my district, many families send their children to summer school. I mean, I quoted it and everything. Those hours are also generally the hours spent IN THE SCHOOL BUILDING. Every teacher I know, personally, also works 2-3 hours a night at home at least two nights per week.
But, I guess if one is determined to approach this through the lens of ideology rather than facts, you can come up with all the snotty bons mot you want.
Marty, if you were a betting man, would you bet most teachers are more in the position of the one I posted or the one you claim to have seen?
“It may not be a winning strategy for him, long-term.” Russell, you must be kidding.
-They succeeded in not trowing banker criminals in jails,
-they succeeded in enabling unlimited campaign contributions,
-practically permanent low taxes on investment income(which benefits only wealthy investors which are extremely agile on backs of pension funds),
-nothing can stop Walker in passing the law, the time is on his side
-they will succeed in shutting down the government this time since Obama caved in every single time (Can you point to one example he did not cave in, please?).
-they succeeded in damaging and causing the first deficit year ever to SS fund
Please do not hope that they will not succeed, everything is on their side now after Citizen United. They want us to be hopey and do nothing.
‘Um, are there even any private sector jobs left?’
Well, the young teacher finally got around to asking an important question. It is well understood that the action in question has a negative effect on teachers in Wisconsin.
‘I’m not sure how Walker thinks reducing the salaries of thousands of workers like me is going to save the economy. With that kind of wage reduction, I won’t be able to buy new clothes, go to movies, go out to eat, go to happy hour, buy Christmas presents, buy birthday presents, get haircuts or buy pet food. I won’t be able to replace my 20-year-old furnace or my 20-year-old kitchen cabinets. I already gave up cable and I drive a used car with more than 140,000 miles on it. So it’s clear I won’t be buying any iPods or iPhones or anything else shiny any time soon.
Hell, with that kind of cut, I won’t be buying food or gas, either.’
Some of these items may not be indispensable. These are not exactly the ‘good times’. Does the advanced degree increase the earnings scale for a teacher in Wisconsin? My guess is there are plenty of well educated unemployed who would find the pay and benefits more than acceptable under present conditions.
And I agree with those who have pointed out that public sector unions have not gotten their pay and benefit packages through arms-length negotiations but rather by supporting politicians who promised such in their campaigns in return for support. Not good.
“….when democracy doesn’t get you what you want, circumvent democracy.”
Amazing. That’s word for word in the letter I sent Mitch McConnell last year.
School teachers are ruining our economy, or something. There might be a few stupid tenure rules in various places, but school teachers aren’t the problem. Let’s have just a touch of perspective here. They aren’t part of the FIRE sector. They aren’t our modern day robber barons. This focus on government employees is silly. It’s scapegoating, and it’s plainly ridiculous to anyone with any idea of what’s going on. It’s not even worth arguing about, at least it shouldn’t be in a sane world. Populism has been turned on its head, not that I’m into populism, really, but it’s mutating for the worse. People in the middle class are blaming their economic woes on other people in the middle class, those evil school teachers and such. Feh. Feh. Feh. Oh, and, meh.
I was going to explain that teachers salaries are pro-rated over the entire year, in most instances.
And, that many work a second job during the off-months, if they aren’t teaching summer school.
But that’s gotta be the, I don’t know, 5000th time I’ve explained the situation in my life and so, just f&ck it from now on.
The last time Democrats walked out in GOP majority congress was in 2003 about redistricting in Texas, presented by Rachel Maddow yesterday.
One of the democrats caved in to enable a quorum needed to pass the redistricting law. Guess how many of the 14 Wisconsin senators are needed to defect and fill the quorum? One.
There is only a half-assed support for them from national democrats while there is total support for Walker from GOP. GOP knows what is at stake, while most of Dems do not quite grasp it or are hopey that such atrocities can not pass in a modern society no matter how it played out in other similar atrocities. Like Banking crimes of the century, abortion rights, ACORN destruction with fabricated videos, Rick Scott win in Florida, Sarah Palin fame. To me those are all atrocities on human dignities and logic
The teachers in Bahrain have joined the protests there.
More guts than the teachers in the vermin state of Texas.
goodoleboy:
“My guess is that there are plenty of well-educated unemployed who would find the pay and benefits more than acceptable under current conditions.”
You can play both sides against the other for a awhile, but at some point both sides look up and wonder why their race to the bottom seems to please you so much.
You’ve made a major miscalculation. You and your Party have armed these people.
And I agree with those who have pointed out that
public sector unionsbig corporations using highly paid lobbyists have not gotten theirpay and benefit packageseconomic rents and tax breaks through arms-length negotiations but rather by supporting politicians who promised such in their campaigns in return forsupportcampaign contributions.Fixt.
68% of the folks in WI live in or near cities. American’s Dairyland or not, manufacturing and services bring more money into the state than agriculture.
That includes the Fox valley area, though (Appleton, etc), which for these purposes self-identifies as “rural” — which may approximate something like “not-Madison/Milwaukee” or “upstate” or even “not-minority” — even though it’s reasonably urban. Trust me: Walker isn’t going against 68% of the population of the state, much though I’d like it to be so.
Looking at concentrations of wealth in America, it is clear that public sector unions wield way more power than the banking/finance, pharma, defense contractor, fossil fuel and insurance industries.
Clearly, these public sector unions have perverted our economy and brought great harm to us all. The recent crash, I believe, was the fault of public sector unions, as is the pollution and lax safety standards in mines, oil rigs, etc.
Come on people, let’s focus on the REAL power in America. School Teachers!
GoodOleBoy: My guess is there are plenty of well educated unemployed who would find the pay and benefits more than acceptable under present conditions.
I’m sure the same thing has been said of prostitution.
[Or, what others have said about the race to the bottom.]
And I agree with those who have pointed out that public sector unions have not gotten their pay and benefit packages through arms-length negotiations but rather by supporting politicians who promised such in their campaigns in return for support. Not good.
That’s true in a vague sort of way but not in the specifics. In Wisconsin, unions gave up (were forced to give up?) their right to strike in return for guaranteed third-party mediation of contract negotiation. It’s true that the members of JCOER (Joint Committee On Employee Relations, aka “Joker”) are drawn from, and influenced by, the elected representatives; I can tell you from second-hand experience, though,* that even representatives who are generally suppportive of union rights still bargained like the dickens.
Besides, while unions certainly do lobby for politicians supportive of union rights, they’ve got nothing on the lobbying of corporate interests or (more generally) the wealthy for tax cuts and other preferential treatment. I find the hand-wringing over the former to be somewhat silly given the brutal excesses of the latter – Scott Walker’s tax cuts for the wealthy earlier in the year being a prime example, seeing as how they’ve led to the “crisis” he’s now trying to exploit.
* I was friends for several years with members of our bargaining committee.
Trust me: Walker isn’t going against 68% of the population of the state, much though I’d like it to be so.
Not to be dismissive, I’m sure you’re right, but whatever.
If Walker wants to bring it, and clearly he does, then bring it. He wants to break public labor in his state, and he’s being quite blatant about it. Frankly I hope he remains totally and unequivocally blatant about it, because it puts the issue out in the open.
Unless I misunderstand the situation, Wisconsin is facing a deficit because Walker cut a variety of taxes. The cuts were conservative pet projects intended to stimulate growth, but amazingly enough they did not do so.
So now WI is in the hole.
And Walker’s solution is not merely to cut salary and benefits for public workers, but to totally eliminate their ability to engage in bargaining. So they’ll have to either just take what he offers, or “vote with their feet” and go find another job in the incredibly robust private sector.
My understanding is also that WI public employees have a history of making reasonable concessions when times are bad. So Walker’s not doing anything necessary, or acting in good faith, he’s just taking the opportunity to see if he can break the public unions, because he’s a conservative and conservatives absolutely freaking hate organized labor.
So, it’s a knife fight. Walker started it, and now he’s going to have to deal with it.
I’m glad the public unions are standing up to it, because they’re being handed a sh*t sandwich and told to eat it and smile.
I have no idea how it will turn out. It may end up with the unions getting totally beat down.
But we have, depending on how you count, 10 to 20 percent unemployment in this country. The economy is not bouncing back, there is still billions or trillions of dollars in dead losses still waiting to be eaten in the housing sector, we are not creating jobs.
Screwing the public employees is not going to make any of that one bit better.
If the public workers in WI get screwed, that is going to mean fewer services for the people of WI. Schools will close, classrooms will have more kids, less sports, less music programs. Public university will cost more. Fewer cops. Some fire houses will close. More potholes. Less frequent trash pickup. Etc etc etc.
It means life for the average person in WI is going to suck just a little more.
If they don’t have their heads totally up their @sses, they will figure that out. If they do have their heads totally up their @sses, there ain’t much anyone can do for them.
WI will just become a crappier place to live.
WI will just become a crappier place to live.
As someone who’s lived in Wisconsin for the past decade – yes, I’m well aware of that 🙂 Here’s to hoping that doesn’t happen!
Perhaps relevant:
http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2011/feb/18/rachel-maddow/rachel-maddow-says-wisconsin-track-have-budget-sur/>No, Walker didn’t create the deficit.
“It has taken hold with conviction: the idea that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker ginned up a phony budget crisis to justify his bold bid to strip state employees of most bargaining rights and cut their benefits.
A volley of e-mails, blog posts and inquiries to reporters followed a Madison Capital Times editorial on Feb. 16, 2011, that said no state budget deficit exists for 2010-’11 — or if it does, it’s the fault of Walker and the Republicans in the Legislature.
Liberal MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow joined in Feb. 17, accusing Walker of manipulating the situation for political gain.
“Despite what you may have heard about Wisconsin’s finances, the state is on track to have a budget surplus this year,” she said. “I am not kidding.”
She added a kicker that is also making the rounds: Walker and fellow Republicans in the Legislature this year gave away $140 million in business tax breaks — so if there is a deficit projected of $137 million, they created it.
Maddow and others making the claim all cite the same source for their information — a Jan. 31, 2011 memo prepared by Robert Lang, the director of the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
It includes this line: “Our analysis indicates a general fund gross balance of $121.4 million and a net balance of $56.4 million.”
We were curious about claims of a surplus based on the fiscal bureau memo.
…
We re-read the fiscal bureau memo, talked to Lang, consulted reporter Jason Stein of the Journal Sentinel’s Madison Bureau, read various news accounts and examined the issue in detail.
Our conclusion: Maddow and the others are wrong.
There is, indeed, a projected deficit that required attention, and Walker and GOP lawmakers did not create it.
…
More on that second point in a bit.
The confusion, it appears, stems from a section in Lang’s memo that — read on its own — does project a $121 million surplus in the state’s general fund as of June 30, 2011.
But the remainder of the routine memo — consider it the fine print — outlines $258 million in unpaid bills or expected shortfalls in programs such as Medicaid services for the needy ($174 million alone), the public defender’s office and corrections. Additionally, the state owes Minnesota $58.7 million under a discontinued tax reciprocity deal.
The result, by our math and Lang’s, is the $137 million shortfall.
It would be closer to the $340 million figure if the figure included the $200 million owed to the state’s patient compensation fund, a debt courts have declared resulted from an illegal raid on the fund under former Gov. Jim Doyle.
A court ruling is pending in that matter, so the money might not have to be transferred until next budget year.”
GOB: And I agree with those who have pointed out that public sector unions have not gotten their pay and benefit packages through arms-length negotiations but rather by supporting politicians who promised such in their campaigns in return for support.
GOB has surely heard the same thing we all have: Gov. Walker apparently exempts the cops and firefighters from his union-busting plan. By sheer coincidence, THOSE unions supported him in the election.
So GOB is probably right: (certain) unions apparently get to avoid “arms-length negotiations” by supporting the right politicians. Like Walker.
Is irony dead, or what?
–TP
Let’s try that again:
http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2011/feb/18/rachel-maddow/rachel-maddow-says-wisconsin-track-have-budget-sur/
So union overreach? Oh, please… what percentage of Americans are in unions?
Not that many Americans are in unions. But a large number of white middle class people from suburbs– precisely the group of people under attack by Walker.
(for all the talk of well-heeled public employees, the newly-appointed chief of the Wisconsin State Patrol — and father of the two leading republican legislators in WI — makes less money than I do, and I’m half his age).
Rather, what I mean to say– “a large number of Americans are white middle people people from the suburbs”. When this group is your main target of attack by the governor, you can’t expect things to go well for him.
Let’s try that again
If there’s a deficit and the money is not there, you go to the table and make a new deal.
That isn’t what Walker is doing.
One World One Pain h/t Louis Proyect
I just came across the link Brett provided from a different source. That certainly changes the argument that I made in this post that Walker created the current shortfall.
However, it seems an odd time to cut taxes given the current shortfall, and the fact that the cuts will effect future budgets should not prove too comforting in light of the fact that this makes it more likely that future shortcomings are coming.
Also, it does not change the fact that instead of trying to fix the shortfall through temporary, targeted measures, Walker is trying to strip state workers of the right to bargain collectively.
The solution doesn’t match the crisis.
I see the Tea Party, erm, party is organizing a counter protest in support of the union-busting bill.
Could someone who is more familiar with the art of Tea Party remote viewing tell me what their interest in this is?
So, Brett, according to that article Walker must simultaneously believe that
a.) he needed to do something drastic (he says ‘modest’) to address the deficit which prompted him to axe the right to collective bargaining for his political foes, but…
b.) the projected deficit is not so alarming that it should prevent him from cutting business taxes for his allies even though this would worsen that deficit in the near future.
Seem right?
I think Walker is doing two things, and they’re both things that need doing:
1. Addressing a budget shortfall that he didn’t create.
2. Reforming the outsized ratio between public and private sector compensation.
When the state has trouble staffing it’s positions, because people would rather work in the private sector, you’ll know that further public sector pay cuts are excessive. They’re nowhere near that point today.
Reforming the outsized ratio between public and private sector compensation.
but only certain kinds of public sector jobs. and the difference seems to be that he’s only interested in going after the kinds of public sector jobs that didn’t support him.
mmm. i can almost smell the Serious.
I think Walker is doing two things, and they’re both things that need doing:
Neither of those things have anything to do with collective bargaining– so why is Walker harping on that?
I suppose he figures that the state can better weather a teacher’s strike, than a police strike. I’d like to see a wider attack on excessive public sector pay, but better half a loaf, than none.
I’d like to see a wider attack on excessive public sector pay
What’s “excessive”? The head of the state patrol makes less than I do, and I don’t even have to supervise anyone!
When I left the public sector, I got a 30% raise.
Wisc has had public sector pay slashed in the form of furloughs and lower contributions to the pension funds, which under the circumstances, everyone is willing to go along with. What is unusual and can’t be explained is why the governor is making a specific attack on collective bargaining rights of public employees– it’s almost as though he’s not motivated by fiscal concern but from an unhinged hatred of unions and a desire to use an economic crisis as an opportunity to lash out in hateful rage at the rights of middle class people. While most Republicans harbor that kind of hatred, they generally keep it silent except during family holidays. It may be that Walker is willing to put aside economic concerns to focus on certain personal and psychological feelings of animus he has held against union workers and middle class people he feels are getting “above their station.” But generally I don’t think it’s a good idea for politicians to play out their prejudicial hangups in the public sphere like that. He was elected to handle the state of wisconsin’s economic and budgetary issues, not act like and angry, hateful uncle going through a midlife crisis who’s pissed off that the high school classmate he used to beat up has a decent job as a school teacher.
Walker created this budget shortfall, by all appearances deliberately.
Ah, damn.
Sorry Brett; that’s good information, and I regret posting the above before having read it.
The observation by nous remains : Walker, facing a deficit, immediately moves to reduce taxes on his political allies, worsening the impending budget shortfall by over a hundred million.
Unless you are referring to StateU football coaching salaries, there is no such thing as “excessive” public sector pay.
Given that, the rest of your argument is, to put it charitably, not serious.
Like nearly other state, Wisconsin is on the cusp of looming fiscal abyss (to the tune of $3.6b), especially now that federal backfill under TARP has so short-sidedly ceased.
The feds need to step in and spend, but the House and the Administration are engaged in a recklessly stupid game of dick waving to demonstrate their fiscal hawk cred……which is exactly ass backwards.
As usual, forgive if links have already been posted
UK Uncut Movement
Koch Brothers National Plan to Break Labor
Digby “provides all the arguments you need” Digby also links to a Naomi Klein video in the post immediately preceding this one.
Max Sawicky said “We Don’t do Policy.” We do politics. It is not my job to balance Wisconsin’s budget. It is not the public union’s responsibility to manage state fiscal policy. I can’t even relate to ordinary people trying to wear the green eyeshades and work the spreadsheet. Not so productive.
Our job is to organize, show ourselves, and frighten rich people and the politicians and commenters that work for them. Koch and Walker are not yet frightened.
The class war is on, I think, because the good side is starting to fight back. Observe the posting rules, but our job is to intimidate our enemies.
Never? Ever?
I imagine you’re going to have to ask the people who are doing the paying.
I don’t mean to make this meta, but when I see what Walker has said, and the way this is all going down here on the list, at what point should one call on people to say that he’s acting on bad faith and ignore arguments and anecdotes for what he is doing? I’ll ask Brett directly, what sort of evidence would you need? (I don’t want to discourage rants from folks who, like me, have no doubt what Walker is up to, but I think those will come up naturally)
The budget situation is complex enough to have Ezra Klein issue an update (and his blog has several more posts about the situation), but TPM shows that Walker made a suggestion to decertify unions.
Which has me wonder, what evidence would have someone here like Brett admit to bad faith? I don’t want to claim that I’m thinking that Walker is acting from some bizarro world best intentions, it seems crystal clear to me what Walker is doing. (I would like to know more about his background and the campaign he ran, but again, this is not because I am still wavering about this, I’d just like to see if the warning signs were there earlier)
More meta, but not ObWi meta. I believe that this is a structural advantage of the Tea Party and anyone else who tries to glom on to that demographic. When a candidate who uses Tea party creds and takes a Tea Party approach to getting elected (i.e. both sides are crap, elect me to fix it), they get any number of passes for misstatements and errors, because they are ‘new’. Rand Paul’s campaign seems like a perfect example of that, and though she wasn’t elected, Christine McDonnell seems like a poster girl for the approach.
more meta, the blogging type, John Cole and Andrew Sullivan are now starting an octagon match focussed on how much attention one pays to particular aspects of budget austerity while simultaneously illustrating the dangers of assuming things about real life situations, even with passing comments. (Though one of the commenters makes the what I think is telling observation that Sullivan’s blog has posted nothing on Wisconsin)
I might not have posted my comment if I had seen what Bob wrote. Bob’s line that ‘we don’t do policy, we do politics’ is a pithy rejoinder to what I wrote. Save my comment for later (or just ignore it) but go check out the links. They are good.
“it seems crystal clear to me what Walker is doing.”
What? I mean without the epithets or hyperbole. What exactly is it crystal clear he is doing, beyond exactly wg=hat he says he is doing. Which is balancing the budget and reducing the power of the unions.
Maybe it would help if you explained what he’s doing that’s bad faith, as opposed to something you think is bad policy. I understand that he wants to dramatically reduce the power of at least some public employee unions. And that he’s not being consistent in going after all of them. Picking your fights is hardly new.
But what exactly is the bad faith you see here? Did he run as pro-public unions, and I missed it?
Republican state of mind is based on beliefs not on facts.
But what exactly is the bad faith you see here? Did he run as pro-public unions, and I missed it?
Handing out stupid tax breaks and then claiming to be oh so worried about the deficit?
Standard GOP policy, I understand, and multiplied a hundredfold or more at the Federal level, but dishonest and slimy at all levels.
So, he figures the budget should be balanced at a lower level than you’d like? I think you’re confusing bad faith with having more than one goal in mind.
Replace “public employment is” with “government contractors are” and tell me why the rest of your paragraph would need to change.
unions wield way more power than the banking/finance, pharma, defense contractor, fossil fuel and insurance industries.
TP/Eric/russell: sorry to leave in the middle of the conversation, but I’m battling power outages/snow.
I agree with this. I see both as having an adverse fiscal impact on taxpayers. But pointing out government contracting is rife with problems isn’t an argument in favor of bargaining in the public sector.
Public employees look like they’re living fat and happy because everyone else is getting screwed..
No doubt CA is FUBAR. That problem has many fathers, it ain’t just union malfeasance.
I don’t think this is entirely true. When public employees don’t feel the pain the rest of us do, it does make one question their pay.
In California, I believe the average worker earns just under $70k. With the benefit package that’s around $105,000. And that’s average.
And Brown isn’t cutting prison guard pay, which averages around $73k not counting overtime. Hmmm. Wonder why?
Marty,
That he is aiming to break the public unions of the groups that did not support him in the election and who are not pro-Republican. Von often decried the notion of class warfare here back in the day, so I’m trying to understand why this isn’t just another variety of that.
Brett,
as the TPM link shows, Walker was thinking of decertifying unions before he took office. Eliminating them is different, at least to me, from reducing their power, even with the modifier ‘drastically’.
I am assuming that this TPM post doesn’t provide enough support to have you stop saying ‘oh, he’s just picking his spots’, so I’m asking, what would you have to see. Something like this looms large for me, but I’m assuming that it makes no difference to you. You seem to have one suggestion, that if he ran on a pro-public union platform and then done this, but that seems to be a rather narrow case. And since his policy preferences seem to mirror yours, the question of what is bad faith doesn’t seem to matter to you because it is just a means to an end. So I’m curious, in the interest of understanding where you are coming from, what would have you say that Walker is operating in bad faith.
So, he figures the budget should be balanced at a lower level than you’d like? I think you’re confusing bad faith with having more than one goal in mind
No. I’m not. If you’re really worried about deficits you don’t start by cutting taxes.
Look. As I said, this is straight out of the playbook. Manufacture a fiscal crisis and then claim there is no choice but to cut A,B, and C, where A, B, and C are programs the GOP hates. You know, like environmental protection, education, WIC, etc., but not NASCAR ads.
Frankly, Brett, I’m tired of this s**t and I’m tired of those who defend it. It’s dishonest and worse. The GOP is throwing a national temper tantrum that makes about as much sense as any two-year-old’s tantrum. The big difference is that the GOP’s tantrum is going to wreak massive harm on this country.
Policy preferences? Yes, I have policy preferences. I don’t think the way to improve the national economy is to cut billionaires’ taxes and reduce school budgets to pay for the cuts, because “that creates jobs.”
What utter, shameless, stupidity. Cut Paris Hilton’s taxes so she can hire another maid or gardener? That’s your idea? The way to have a productive economy is to have productive people. The way to have productive people is to educate them. But that’s not what you and Walker and your pals want. Keep them dumb, and they’ll take the crumbs you throw and never complain.
Can’t feed their kids? Too bad. The CEO’s want another tax cut.
[posting rules violation] you.
I feel the same as Bernard, which is why I would really really really like some voices from Wisconsin. It may be that for Brett, he thinks that Michigan is close enough (and Marty, not meaning to discount your opinion, but Texas might as well be Mars when we talk about the issues in Wisconsin), but I think that there is enough of a difference that I’d want views from the state.
Things like this also are of great interest to me
Walker said the 14 senators, who by their absence are forestalling a vote on Walker’s bill, met in caucus in exile Saturday morning, though he wouldn’t say exactly where the meeting took place.
“It was good,” Erpenbach said. “We talked about what we’re hearing from our districts. We are very, very strong in our resolve, probably stronger than at anytime since Tuesday.”
Erpenbach said the situation is difficult for all of the senators. He said he has a part-time job and will have to call in Monday morning to see if he can take off work for the foreseeable future.
Also, Erpenbach said, he worries about his family in Middleton. He said his daughter received a threatening telephone call and he asked the Middleton police to check his home every couple of hours.
Let’s say that rich will use the extra income from tax cuts to hire another maid or a gardener but they will be illegal immigrants.
But that is not what rich use extra money from tax cuts. They use the extra money to invest but not in creating a new jobs, that takes too much effort, it is much easier and secure return from investing in other paper(bonds, stocks, securities, swaps and so on..) and we all know investment money knows no state borders. Investment is worldwide, there is no guarantee that it will stay in the state where tax cuts are implemented.
Another reason why there was long time growth and economic wealth for all when top tax rates are over 60% is that too much investment money creates bubbles and when they get out on top of the values the pension funds and small investors are left holding the bag.
Tax cuts for rich are destructive force cause they invest that money into bubbles that hurt the poor who can not afford it anymore. Tax cuts for lower class is beneficial cause they will spend it for what they need into the local economy.
Republicans mix those two facts in order to fool the masses and fool their own trolls into believing that they will participate in share of the loot.
Bad Faith? Wasn’t that a rock band back in the day…oh, wait…perhaps I’m of two minds on that…existential crisis here, and I’ve been nit picked above…
Things like this tend to reinforce my bad faith reading. Unfortunately, the video requires downloading MS Silverlight.
unions wield way more power than the banking/finance, pharma, defense contractor, fossil fuel and insurance industries.
I agree with this
Allow me to say that I do not agree with it. I think it’s freaking delusional crazy talk.
What Walker is trying to do is remove the ability for some public employees to engage in collective bargaining. I think that’s crap.
People who work for a living should be allowed to organize and bargain collectively for the terms of their compensation.
That’s the beginning and the end of the story as far as I’m concerned.
If you need to balance the budget, go the table and make a new deal. The public employees in WI have apparently been receptive that that before, the history would indicate that they’d be open to it again.
You can say what you want about unions, but they are largely responsible for the existence of a middle class in this country throughout most of the 20th C. And all or nearly all of the US residents reading this have benefited from that reality.
I have no idea how this will play out but I hope the unions kick Walker’s @ss.
Bernard: You know, like environmental protection, education, WIC, etc., but not NASCAR ads.
The Daily Show summarized it admirably: everyone [Obama, the Republicans, etc.] agrees that the programs that should be cut are the ones that Democratic voters like.
liberal japonicus: I don’t have any special insight. I have a bunch of friends who’ve been protesting, and for a wide variety of reasons — some admirable, some less so — and I have some friends who… well, “opposed” is the wrong word, but find the protests a little overdone. I haven’t heard of any violence, and nothing has flared up that I’ve heard; I had a friend break up a little scuffle with some teabaggers this morning, nothing serious.
Of course, I live in Madison where pretty much everyone is in support of the protests. [Heck, the cops even brought brats and cheese to the protesters.] Other parts of the state are less sanguine and (unsurprisingly) the media is once again hostile to labor. I have no idea what’s ultimately going to end up happening; I’m frankly flabbergasted that the Democrats had the balls to pull this off — ironic that the only time they show some spine is when they run away — and we’re into uncharted territory here.
Other Madisonians or Wisconsinites, feel free to chime in. I’d hate to be considered the voice of the state…
russell:
I agree with this
Oops. My bad. I wasn’t clear. I was agreeing with what Eric REALLY meant. He was being sarcastic and I took my quote out of context. I was recognizing his and Tony P’s points. I really don’t think unions are that powerful.
lj: I’m not so sure. On the one hand, the R’s weren’t sure the D’s were going to even show up. Starting the roll call to see if you have a quorum is unproblematic to me. Having the vote right at 5 is hardball but fair. However, it looks like the vote to engross occurred at 4:57. Vote, IMHO, is unfair.
OTOH, if you know that the vote is going to happen at 5:00 p.m., why in the world do you wait to come in at 4:59? Unless, maybe, you are trying to delay?
Thousand dollar question: why did the D’s show up? Was it because someone told them Fitzgerald was already gearing up for the vote and was serious? If they were caucusing until the last minute, that is understandable. If they were planning on boycotting like their Senate brothers and sisters, another thing entirely. I wonder if the whole entrance and yelling thing was staged and planned by the D’s . . . Nice play and theater, if so.
Best timeline I found was here .
But, in the end, in light of the Dem Senators fleeing the state, I think it is valid for Fitzgerald to see if the D’s in the assembly were even going to show up. And the right thing was done in putting the bill back at the amendment stage.
bc,
Thanks for taking the time to read that and responding and thanks for the great link. I’d note that the article I linked to also said
The action, taken on a voice vote, prevented the Democrats from introducing any amendments to the bill, which severely curtails public employees’ collective bargaining powers.
so taking a vote at 5 seems like a hardball aimed straight at the head.
And I also think that the Assembly is where the Rs have a 60-30 advantage, and it is the Senate Ds who are not there to stop the quorum, so I’m not sure if it was really a question of seeing if they were going to show up, despite what Fitzgerald said. Even if all the Assembly Ds boycotted, there would have still been a quorum.
It’s these kinds of wrinkles that seem to separate theatre from governance and bad faith from taking fair advantage of the rules. Perhaps the Assembly Rs just wanted to have a bill passed so they could claim that the Senate Dems were preventing something that had been duly passed by the House and were therefore being undemocratic and maybe they were just taking advantage of that wrinkle. But, if previous sessions had always started with people getting to their seats in the first 5 or 10 minutes, and trying to pass a bill at the stroke of 5 was a departure from what had gone on before, even if it is in the rules, it seems like bad faith.
I want to make it clear that I’m not accusing you of bad faith, I’m just trying to get a feel for what is the consensus, if any, on what bad faith would be.
And sorry, re-reading our comments makes me realize that I should acknowledge that you are aware that it is a bicameral legislature, which isn’t clear in my comment.
While it may be redundant, to those who aren’t bothered by the prospect of a whole subset of workers being deprived of the right to collective bargaining:
It may indeed be the case that to you, public sector unions wield a kind of power that seems out of proportion and line, but such unions do not seek to deprive mass groups of people of anything; the purpose of any union is to ensure that management holds up its responsibilities to labor, and play a role in crafting a synergy of labor-management relations that ensures a balance of interests are being maintained, that such balance is within labor law, and that neither side abuses its prerogative.
What is happening in Wisconsin, however, is political interference in that balance for the purpose of upsetting it to the favor of a top-down mandate of managerial fiat, for the expressed purpose of deriving labor of the right to collectively bargain, destroy a union, and disadvantage a large group of workers who have not sought to deprive anyone of anything.
So yes, I couldn’t agree more with LJ: at what point is this action by a state governor not an article of bad faith, and what vocabulary is necessary to both satisfy what isn’t, and is, bad faith? It’s as if the burden of proof of bad faith is never up to the perpetrator, but the perpetrated-upon, with what nuances that are trying to be parsed out big enough to drive a semi through.
To any Badger State folks out there: is this an impeachable offense that Walker’s done?
bc:
Why should any workers not have the right to collectively bargain?
I can answer that question, but I think the starting place should be to default to to having that right, and then we can discuss why we might want to have exceptions, rather than vice versa.
Or, in other words, the police and fire unions tend to vote Republican. Want cites?
Why the scare quotes?
By referendum? Okay. So long as thepublic also gets to vote on approving the pay/benefits of management. I’ll go for that equality. You? If not, why not?
Last I looked, that’s how it worked, doesn’t it?
How’s that? Are you saying that legislators should be compelled to show up and vote? What principle are you invoking here?
Moreover, let’s take a look at some history, shall we?
If we’re talking “anti-democratic” in such a context, let me delve faintly digressively into:
Note that both parties can be idiots about filbustering, and this sort of thing. I emphatically think that Senate rule 22 should be changed, and that I’m inclined to let states decide their own rules, but I’m not noticing a partisan issue in this matter, save when we start talking about, say, the last twenty years in the national senate, or specifics in various states. Meanwhile, if you’d like to discuss your own principles you have in mind, I’d find that interesting.
Marty:
This is a problem because?
Which places? And, again, the reason that ordinary workers on salaries are more “problematic” than corporate dollars is?
There’s an endless amount to post about Wisconsin, and I’m not awake enough to do it, but here’s an in interesting little video of Fox reporters being greeted with chants of “Fox Lies! Fox Lies” and their reaction.
“at what point is this action by a state governor not an article of bad faith, “
At the point where he has run for years, publicly opposing and attacking unionization of government employees, and got elected running on this. And now you think it’s bad faith of him to not run a bait and switch on the voters, and suddenly say, “Just kidding!”
Yes, it’s inconsistent of him to not go after the prison guard and police unions. It’s a tactical inconsistency, it’s not a very good idea to have the police going on strike at the same time that the prison guards have thrown the doors to the prisons open and walked off.
No, I don’t think he’s acting in bad faith by actually carrying through a program he has advocated for years. He’s acting in good faith by doing what he told voters he’d do.
Oh, and you probably heard it first here; You’ll know when he’s ready to go after the prison guard unions: He’ll call out the national guard, and have the prisons surrounded, first, so as to deprive those unions of the power to release their prisoners into the general population as they go on strike.
Brett, you may be thinking of this WaPo article, but in my online searching, I have found nothing in Walker’s gubernatorial campaign about removing the right of public employees to form a union and negotiate. I’m not sure what you are talking about with the prison guards, I think you are confusing CA and WI.
This is a summary of Walker’s campaign promises and this is another. Also, when Walker did talk about unions, he only spoke about pay and benefits and not about taking away their right to unionize. link.
Specifically, Brett, I think you are thinking of bc’s comment here
In California, I believe the average worker earns just under $70k. With the benefit package that’s around $105,000. And that’s average.
And Brown isn’t cutting prison guard pay, which averages around $73k not counting overtime. Hmmm. Wonder why?
Walker’s supporters on this thread are demonstrating classic Republican-supporter behavior. They see a slight potential benefit for people like themselves ( a tax cut) achieved by screwing over a catagory of people to which they do not themselves belong (in this case public employess) so they absorb and regurgitate all kinds of fact-imparied rationalizations to justify the screwing over.
The same people who lied about PP and ACORN are spreading the lie that people in lab coats are handing out fake medcial slips to excuse people from work (they might even be supplying the people in lab coats if the people in lab coats are real)…how long before that lie shows up here as proof of the inate screwoverness of public employees? The lie comes from a source that that has lied before but that hasn’t stopped conservative bloggers from spreading the lie without mentioning the previous lies of course.
Divide and conquer is what conservatives do.
And they do not do it for the benefit of the common good.
Brett:
Oh good grief, Brett. That is one wild-ass paranoid fantasy.
Although I am technically a Wisconsin native, I haven’t lived there for most of my life — but most of the people on my mother’s side live there and of course I’ve visited a lot, so I feel like I have a pretty good feeling for the place.
The idea that Wisconsin prison guards would release the prisoners if they go on strike is utterly preposterous. It wouldn’t be the Right Thing to do, and WI culture places a high value on Doing the Right Thing, consistently. It’s a very Lutheran sort of conservatism.
Brett, you are confusing Egypt and WI.You are writing in bad faith and trying to confuse us as confused as you are. But you are believer anyway, no fact can persuade you anything.
Btw, republicans will never undermine enforcement part of the government as long as they enforce it against lower classes. If they do enforce the law against rich and powerfull as Elliot Spitzer was doing to Wall Street then that is another matter.
“and Marty, not meaning to discount your opinion, but Texas might as well be Mars when we talk about the issues in Wisconsin”
I am not sure why you singled me out but I welcome input from Wisconsin also????? I think early on i noted that this is a very different discussion in many right to work states.
GOB,
And I agree with those who have pointed out that public sector unions have not gotten their pay and benefit packages through arms-length negotiations but rather by supporting politicians who promised such in their campaigns in return for support. Not good.
bobbyp has already eviscerated this argument above, but I’d just like to reiterate that when the Republican Party quits acting at the behest of corporate lobbyists and contributors it can complain about this.
Until then, it’s laughable.
“bobbyp has already eviscerated this argument above, but I’d just like to reiterate that when the Republican Party quits acting at the behest of corporate lobbyists and contributors it can complain about this.”
You guys are just as bad, used to not be a good argument here.
I suspect the prisoners, in collusion with Wisconsin’s Kochsucking Republican Party will take the guards hostage, and begin torturing and killing them.
The prisoners, having connections among the ordinary citizenry, believe the guards and their families have it too good, too.
The Governor will send the National Guard in, and under the ruse of rescuing the guards, release fatal indiscriminate violence against everyone but the Republican/libertarian ringleaders among the prisoners, who will reappear soon after “in the community” as Republican candidates for political office, security details for Governor Walker, Brietbartian pimps at local Planned Parenthood facilities, and as homemade alatle craftsman at the local gathering of the camouflaged, non-breast-fed fat f*ck brigade deployed at the nearest taxpayer-financed public park.
Yet more news heard first at Obsidian Wings.
Hey, let’s use our imaginations.
Countme
You are just a decade ahead of the present. No worries, you will be called a prophet on the internet when it happens, for all 5 ooo internet users.
Brett: He’s acting in good faith by doing what he told voters he’d do.
This is not a trick question: can you find me an example of Walker saying that he would (selectively) eliminate the bargaining rights of unions from this most recent gubernatorial campaign? ‘Cause that was news to me, and most other folks.
well it’s not like the unions didn’t know he was coming
Can you find where he said he wouldn’t? Because that’s what you’d need to do to prove bad faith. Which consists of more than doing something your political opponents don’t like… It would require doing something you’d given people reason to believe you wouldn’t do. Who is surprised by what Walker is doing? Nobody who paid any attention, that’s who.
I’d advise caution in the bad-faith argument accusations. They amount to an accusation of lying. Now, if you’ve got evidence to support such accusations, please expose them to the light. Otherwise, you should keep this kind of opinion to yourself.
Now, if somebody could explain something, I’d appreciate it: Republicans have a majority in both houses, per the Wisconsin constitution a majority constitutes a quorum, so, why did the Democrats leaving change anything? Is there something that’s not being reported?
Brett: Can you find where he said he wouldn’t? Because that’s what you’d need to do to prove bad faith.
In Wisconsin? No, you don’t; it’s part of the fabric of our lives here.
To put it another way: everyone expected that if the Republicans won the governorship or the state senate, the unions would get screwed at the bargaining table. This has happened before (notably during the fiascos of 2001-2005) and, though regrettable, is what it is. [I’ll note in passing for Marty that the WI unions are actually quite good about accepting cutbacks if they’re necessary for the state’s fiscal well-being; see the 2003-2005 contract negotiations, for example.] However, what Walker is proposing is radical and constitutes bad faith with the Wisconsin voters: he’s trying to remove the bargaining table altogether. [And yes, eliminating the ability to negotiate for anything except salary is tantamount to removing the bargaining table altogether.] If he had been operating in good faith, the least he would have done is announced this fact during the campaign; that he didn’t tells me that he knows damn well that this is a radical power-play that the voters of Wisconsin wouldn’t have supported had they known it was coming. Bad faith, pure and simple.
There’s also the simple fact of bad faith that he’s trying to break the unions on the grounds that there’s a fiscal crisis while simultaneously cutting taxes on the wealthy. Or, IOW, the fiscal crisis that is so dire that it necessitates cutting the wages of Wisconsin workers by approximately 12% is yet so minor that we can afford to cut taxes on the wealthy by 3-4% (best estimates I’ve seen). To which I say: bullshit. If this is truly the fiscal crisis Walker says it is, one that requires massive cutbacks and calamities amongst the workers of Wisconsin, it damn well better require similar austerity measures amongst the wealthy. These tax cuts aren’t “fiscal policy” in any meaningful sense; they’re the autonomic response from the Republican party, a sort of quasi-policy-related belch, that in present circumstances are both unjustified and unjustifiable. Claims otherwise are, in and of themselves, an act of bad faith with Wisconsin voters.
[As an aside: Wisconsin’s been in worse budget holes this past decade. Strangely, those previous issues didn’t necessitate removing bargaining rights from the unions. Of course, they also didn’t necessitate tax cuts either. Strange, that.]
And, for that matter, if this were to be necessary it should apply to all public unions. Which is the third sign of bad faith: if we’re truly under fiscal onslaught the likes of which we’ve never seen, that requires fundamentally re-architecting the landscape of public policy in Wisconsin, then it applies to everyone, not just the unions which inconveniently voted Democratic. Fortunately, this appears to be backfiring: the police and firefighters’ unions have rightly perceived this to be an insulting form of divide-and-conquer and seem to be in support of the protests. Here’s to hoping they stay that way.
But that’s the extent to which I can play this game, which is a truly silly one. It’s blindingly obvious that Walker is using the fiscal crisis (one which his tax cuts have worsened, if not necessarily created) to make a radical, transformative power play aimed at enriching his friends and cronies at the expense of Wisconsin workers. It’s largely moot as to whether he’s been operating in bad faith or whether he’s “just” a radical ideologue who likes to screw the little guy; the latter should automatically disqualify him from public office, and frankly polite conversation, regardless of whether he publicly announced that he was a selfish, mean-spirited shit or not.
“….per the Wisconsin constitution a majority constitutes a quorum,”
Well, obviously a majority does not. Not having read the entire Wisconsin state constitution, it strikes me as fairly standard that such rules are set by the bodies themselves, and not set forth in the Constitution. You might look there for your answer.
“well it’s not like the unions didn’t know he was coming”
Marty,
If Mr. Keuhn’s email is taken at face value, then it demonstrates beyond a doubt Walker was acting in bad faith. His campaign asked the unions to cease bargaining until he could take office and ‘start new negotiations’. Given subsequent events, it appears reasonable to now assert that the new governor had absolutely no intention of restarting ‘negotiations’. He has issued a diktat and widened the scope to include the very reason unions exist, i.e., collective bargaining itself.
This is classic bad faith bargaining in the framework of current labor relations law.
BobbyP, it’s actually quite standard that quorum requirements ARE set in constitutions. See the US constitution:
“Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members, and a Majority of each shall constitute a Quorum to do Business; but a smaller number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the Attendance of absent Members, in such Manner, and under such Penalties as each House may provide.”
From the Wisconsin constitution:
“SECTION 7. Each house shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members; and a majority of each shall constitute a quorum to do business, but a
smaller number may adjourn from day to day, and may compel the attendance of absent members in such manner and under such penalties as each house may provide.”
I had looked there, that’s why I was puzzled.
You guys are just as bad, used to not be a good argument here.
GOB took a simple statement of political principle (political actors give support to those who will aid them in achievement of their goals), wrapped it up with standard wingnut fact free over-the-top anti union bias, and you try to tell me what a “good argument” is?
You continue to crack me up, Marty.
Slarti
Talking in bad faith does mean lieing, and also means using a hypothetical false warnings and treat of violence and fear-mongering. Brett used a hypothetical scenario of prison guards releasing prisoners as Walker’s reasoning for not including police, firefighters and prison guards in proposed benefit cuts to state employees. That is a false presentation, hence a lie. There are two reasons for Walker not including them in the cuts. 1st- they supported Walker in last election since they are more conservative part of the state employees everywhere.
2nd- republicans love enforcement part of the government like army, police and guards. The reason for that is obvious and it goes both ways. Soldiers and police are on average less educated then the whole and love power. Just like republicans that love power.
As long as the enforcement part of the government is enforcing the law on poor and middle class they will be protected by both parties. But if they try to enforce it on rich and powerful they will be removed. Take for example Elliot Spitzer that was going after the fraud and crime on the Wall Street they got him removed. None of the fraudsters were put in jail after the Wall Street crash.
Brett,
Apparently 20 senators are needed to constitute a quorum, and the GOP has only 19. They need one of the 14 dems present:
http://www.examiner.com/political-buzz-in-national/wisconsin-democrats-find-company-with-abraham-lincoln
Hope that helps.
Can you rephrase this, please? I don’t understand what you’re trying to say, here.
I’m not following you, here. “False” does not equate to “lie”.
I am not sure why you singled me out but I welcome input from Wisconsin also?????
Sorry, Marty, was just trying to keep you in the conversation rather than singling you out. You wrote
What? I mean without the epithets or hyperbole. What exactly is it crystal clear he is doing, beyond exactly wg=hat he says he is doing. Which is balancing the budget and reducing the power of the unions.
link
in response to something I wrote (that is was crystal clear what Walker was doing), so I thought it was polite to acknowledge you. Didn’t mean for it to come off as a dismissal, just thought that the TX-WI comparison really was a good example of how things vary from state to state.
I mentioned my ties to WI in this comment but that was in another thread, but in my head, I may have thought I was making a clearer statement about the impact of differences in culture on the state level than I was.
Again, sorry if you felt I was singling you out, that wasn’t my intention.
Republicans have a majority in both houses, per the Wisconsin constitution a majority constitutes a quorum, so, why did the Democrats leaving change anything? Is there something that’s not being reported?
I think I mentioned above, Wisconsin has a bicameral legislature. The Rs have a 60-30 advantage in the Assembly, but only a 19-14 advantage in the Senate. link Apparently, a quorum for the senate is 3/5, but that is as much math as I’ll do here :^)
Thousands of bankers and accountants were send to jail after the S&L crisis when there was a loss of about $250B and 2008 crash brought about $13T ($13T is the total ammount that was transfered to FIRE institutions in US and still not cured) in loss and not one was persecuted for crimes yet and will never.
Bush, Chaney, Rumsfeld and company caused about million of dead Iraqis and 5,000 American soldiers not counting wounded and permanently disabled and nothing happened to them.
Except, Bush cancelled a trip to Switzerland a month ago cause there is a request to be arrested and persecuted for war crimes. He can not travel to Europe anymore without a treat to be arrested. Spain is asking for indictment for Bush because of kidnapping and torture of Spanish citizens, Britain’s court is asking for documents on extradition of their citizens to Guantanamo. And so on and on
GOP loves to use the power of the state to protect their benefactors, to enforce anti-abortion laws on women, loves to use the power on illegals but not on employers of illegals. GOP loves to enforce the state laws HA-HA-HA
Brett,
Further investigation: See Article 8, Section 8 of the WI State Constitution. Hope that helps.
http://autonomyforall.blogspot.com/2011/02/semi-apology-about-wisconsins-senate.html
I forgot to mention a lack of empathy that characterizes both GOP and police and millitary.
“Apparently 20 senators are needed to constitute a quorum, and the GOP has only 19. They need one of the 14 dems present:”
See, that’s exactly what is puzzling me: The state constitution says that a majority constitutes a quorum, clear as day. Article VI, Section 7, I quoted it above. And the Senate has 33 seats. 19 Republicans, 14 Democrats, adds up to 33. A majority of 33 is 17, which is two less than 19, and conspicuously NOT 20.
The link you gave said the state constitution says 20, but here’s the state constitution, and it says “majority”, not 20.
I’ve no doubt at all that 20 votes are actually required, but I can’t find a convincing explanation as to why.
And this by Slarti
I’d advise caution in the bad-faith argument accusations. They amount to an accusation of lying. Now, if you’ve got evidence to support such accusations, please expose them to the light. Otherwise, you should keep this kind of opinion to yourself.
is something I agree with completely, and is one of the reasons why I’ve been trying to engage Brett and others with what precisely would allow us to say ‘Walker is operating in bad faith’. If talking about that gave a green light to anyone to take those examples and apply them to commentators on this site, it wasn’t intended.
Anarch gives a reason why one can argue that Walker is operating in bad faith, and crithical tinkerer refines his argument to people who voted for Walker, but I’d remind him (and everyone else) that Brett didn’t vote for Walker, so I’d appreciate it if we kept the discussion of bad faith to describing Walker’s actions. Perhaps that is a line too finely drawn, and if it is, I’ll take the blame for trying to draw it here.
‘GOB took a simple statement of political principle (political actors give support to those who will aid them in achievement of their goals), wrapped it up with standard wingnut fact free over-the-top anti union bias, and you try to tell me what a “good argument” is?’
bobbyp:
The distinguishing attribute of public sector union support for electoral candidates is that after they are elected, they become the union members workplace boss, and since they want the union support for the next election, they will enact or support enactment of laws and/or rules beneficial to the union members and, consequently, to themselves, but which may very well be detrimental to the taxpayers and the state’s fiscal soundness.
Thanks for that, lj.
I’m all for backing up the bad-faith accusation made against Walker, but IMHO that same kind of accusation made against another commenter (Brett, in this case) is doubly in need of substantiation.
Brett, this post references Article 8, section 8, which is
Vote on fiscal bills; quorum. Section 8. On the passage in either house of the legislature of any law which imposes, continues or renews a tax, or creates a debt or charge, or makes, continues or renews an appropriation of public or trust money, or releases, discharges or commutes a claim or demand of the state, the question shall be taken by yeas and nays, which shall be duly entered on the journal; and three-fifths of all the members elected to such house shall in all such cases be required to constitute a quorum therein.
In this post from a conservative site, the writer is arguing that what is necessary to recall one Dem senator, which would then give the Republicans the majority they need. I find the comments quite revealing as well.
Drat, bobbyp wins the competitive Googling elimination round in this thread, which will make him eligible to compete against Gary. (hint, stay away from the Nixon/Watergate category)
Ok, article 8, section 8, which I missed on my first read through, not expecting the quorum to be in two places. that explains it, thanks.
I support the idea that the Governor should declare the missing senators to have abandoned their office, give them a period to return, and declare a special election. It would take a court action to stop such a process and the missing senators would need to show their face in Wisconsin.
“and crithical tinkerer refines his argument to people who voted for Walker”
lj, this is my statement
“Brett used a hypothetical scenario of prison guards releasing prisoners as Walker’s reasoning for not including police, firefighters and prison guards in proposed benefit cuts to state employees. That is a false presentation, hence a lie.”
which described what Brett did state here previously:
Brett:”It’s a tactical inconsistency, it’s not a very good idea to have the police going on strike at the same time that the prison guards have thrown the doors to the prisons open and walked off.”
This was Brett’s statement about why Walker did not include prison guards and police in cuts to state employees. Somehow Brett knows what is on Walker’s mind.
This is a treat of consequences that are totaly hypothetical and false. A threat of released prisoners, a fear-mongering. This is what happened in Egypt recently. And again Brett and you Slarti are acting in bad faith.
Slarti:” “False” does not equate to “lie”.”
Slarti, have you ever heard of Verbal Fallacies?
Was that a rhetorical question, or were you accusing me of something? I’m not sure how that was in any way a response to my statement.
A Day in Life of Joe Republican
by Mark Halperin
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/the_coloured_european_observer/2009/10/a-day-in-the-life-of-joe-repub.php
Joe gets up at 6:00am to prepare his morning coffee. He fills his pot full of good clean drinking water because some liberal fought for minimum water quality standards. He takes his daily medication with his first swallow of coffee. His medications are safe to take because some liberal fought to insure their safety and work as advertised.
All but $10.00 of his medications are paid for by his employers medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance, now Joe gets it too. He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs this day. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.
Joe takes his morning shower reaching for his shampoo; His bottle is properly labeled with every ingredient and the amount of its contents because some liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained. Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some tree hugging liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air. He walks to the subway station for his government subsidized ride to work; it saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees. You see, some liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.
Joe begins his work day; he has a good job with excellent pay, medicals benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe’s employer pays these standards because Joe’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union. If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed he’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some liberal didn’t think he should loose his home because of his temporary misfortune.
Its noon time, Joe needs to make a Bank Deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe’s deposit is federally insured by the FDIC because some liberal wanted to protect Joe’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the depression.
Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae underwritten Mortgage and his below market federal student loan because some stupid liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his life-time.
Joe is home from work, he plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive to dads; his car is among the safest in the world because some liberal fought for car safety standards. He arrives at his boyhood home. He was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans. The house didn’t have electric until some big government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification. (Those rural Republican’s would still be sitting in the dark)
He is happy to see his dad who is now retired. His dad lives on Social Security and his union pension because some liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn’t have to. After his visit with dad he gets back in his car for the ride home.
He turns on a radio talk show, the host’s keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. (He doesn’t tell Joe that his beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day) Joe agrees, “We don’t need those big government liberals ruining our lives; after all, I’m a self made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have”.
So, all y’all who think that, if the public employee unions get collective bargaining, the taxpayers should get to vote directly for the level of pay and benefits: Do you also think the public should get to vote directly for the salary of the Governor and the Legislature? If not, why not?
“…which will make him eligible to compete against Gary.”
I don’t know how you would spot points, goals, or strokes in such a competition, but against Gary I would need a number that approaches infinity.
The distinguishing attribute of
public sector unioncorporate and business support for electoral candidates is that after they are elected, they becomethe union members workplace bosslackeys of private whim, and since they wantthe uniontheir wealth benefactor’s support for the next election, they will enact or support enactment of laws and/or rules beneficial to theunion memberswealthy and, consequently, to themselves, but which may very well be detrimental to the taxpayers and the state’s fiscal soundness.bobbyp:
Well, we have a system that allows corporate and business support for candidates as well as union support for candidates, and we can see that those elected legislate favorably toward their supporters. That’s what we have going on in Wisconsin, so what’s the issue? Collective bargaining for public employees is not a basic human right and not one guaranteed under the US Constitution.
Collective bargaining for public employees is not a basic human right
Coming from one who believes owning a gun — not self defense, but owning a gun — is a basic human right (which means it had to pre-date the very existence of guns), I think we can give this all the consideration it’s due.
and not one guaranteed under the US Constitution.
Wait, do you believe in the 9th and 10th amendments or not? Can you please make up your mind?
As near as I can tell, the point here is that elections are only supposed to matter when Democrats win them. That’s all this is about.
‘Coming from one who believes owning a gun — not self defense, but owning a gun — is a basic human right (which means it had to pre-date the very existence of guns), I think we can give this all the consideration it’s due.’
Did I say that? If I did, I must retract. Self-defense is a basic human right and ‘the right to keep and bear arms’ is a right guaranteed in the Bill of Rights for Americans.
‘Collective bargaining for public employees is not a basic human right and not one guaranteed under the US Constitution.’
If you are having trouble understanding how I can say this, let’s clarify. All individuals have a right to bargain for their labor, and to do this collectively, but there is no constitutional requirement that the other party bargain in any particular way. So, whatever state laws may exist addressing collective bargaining may be repealed, as long as that does not violate U.S. law or sate constitution. Tell me if this is incorrect legally, but please be specific.
oops, state constitution
For the results-oriented:
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2011/02/but-i-thought-union-busting-solved-all-educational-problems
“so what’s the issue?”
There is none. You have tried twice to assert without any substantiating evidence that the influence of public employee unions on public officials is uniquely inimical to good public policy.
Both times you have been shown this is not the case.
GOB: “So, whatever state laws may exist addressing collective bargaining may be repealed, as long as that does not violate U.S. law or sate constitution.”
I fail to see why anybody should respond to this in the manner which you have requested. In all the above comments, not one person has asserted otherwise.
You have successfully argued against an issue that is totally of your own creation. Well done.
‘so what’s the issue?”
There is none’
So, let’s vote!
As near as I can tell, the point here is that elections are only supposed to matter when Democrats win them. That’s all this is about.
No, it’s not.
In the interests of comity, let me give a quick summary of how the process is supposed to work:
– Prior to the biennium (I think it’s supposed to be about eight months prior), representatives of the state and representatives of the union meet to negotiate the union’s contract.
– It is impermissible to negotiate next biennium’s contract in the current contract cycle. The most that can be done is to promise in a non-binding way that you’ll make concessions in the next cycle. This was done by the unions in the 2001-2003 biennium negotiations; they promised, and kept their promise, in the tail end of the 2001-2003 negotiations that they would agree to cutbacks in the 2003-2005 biennium. The reasons for this are complicated, see below.
– Beyond the restriction on negotiating next cycle’s contract, everything can and should be on the table: salary, benefits, whatever. There are particular unions and particular benefits that are considered sacrosanct but even those can be put on the table under bad circumstances, see below. The only requirement is that the bargaining proceed in “good faith” as (ultimately) determined by a third-party arbitrator.
– Unfortunately, it’s nigh-impossible to prove bad faith. One of the definitions of “good faith” is that the offers on both side of the table should converge towards one another, i.e. each offer should improve. In one of our negotiations (for the 2005-2007 biennium, if I remember right) my union lost its zero-premium health care — a key benefit, given how woefully underpaid we were in other regards — because the state not only failed to improve their offers, they made each successive offer worse than the one that came before it. Such is life under the Republicans.
As yet more inside baseball: the Republican negotiators declaimed publicly that this was to save the state of Wisconsin money, it was fiscal responsibility, blah blah blah. However, they admitted privately that this had nothing to do with money: they didn’t like us and felt it was a matter of principle to make us pay. Of course, they proceeded to lie and re-claimed fiscal responsibility when we called them on it; such is life under the Republicans.
– Once the bargainers have agreed upon a contract, it’s sent the larger group for formal ratification. On the union side, that’s the union as a whole; on the state side, that’s JCOER followed by the state congress.
– This process should be completed a few months prior to the signing of the new contract. Unfortunately, Wisconsin has been reeling since the catastrophic 2001-2003 biennium, when the contract was signed several months after the biennium was over. The very, very short version: the state Republicans, led by John Gard (then-head of JCOER), tried to renege on the contract that had been approved by the unions and by JCOER when the Wisconsin economy turned sour. They did this by “mysteriously” failing to send the contracts to the full congress for ratification. When called on this, Gard claimed that his office had never actually heard that the contract had been approved by the unions; when a signed affadavit was produced showing that his office had, in fact, received the relevant approval from at least one union (the UW-Milwaukee grad students, god bless’em), he hemmed, hawed and said he’d “have to look into the matter” — and there the matter died. Such is life under the Republicans.
Anyhoo, the contract cycles have been out of whack ever since then, which is why I have trouble remembering the dates on these things.
To summarize:
* When Republicans win elections, the unions get screwed at the bargaining table. This is expected, and a fine illustration of elections having consequences.
* The Republicans have done so in demonstrably bad faith — though, I regret to say, we were never able to prove it legally — so the degree to which we get screwed is problematic, but again, this falls within “acceptable” parameters. Barely.
* However — and for the love of Christ, please pay attention to this because it’s the crucial point — no-one relevant had ever talked removing the right to negotiate altogether. Even though the Republicans had de facto removed our ability to negotiate on health care premiums in the 2005-2007 biennium, it was a single issue that we could, in theory, revisit once the economy improved. This is different: this is a de jure ability to eliminate our negotiate over some of the most important issues in our contracts.
And to be explicit about what’s at stake, many (most?) of the unions have the suite of benefits they do because they’re horribly undercompensated in salary. During the 2005-2007 biennium, for example, it was revealed that our union was in the bottom 15% of compensation amongst our peer group even after benefits were taken into consideration. If the Republicans are not forced to negotiate on these benefits, they will screw us. There is absolutely no way in hell that they will EVER offer equivalent compensation in salary to the benefits they will take away. The immediate 12% “pay cut” is only the beginning; historically, when this sort of legislation passes, the consequences get significantly worse in each biennium.
Now, am I personally affected? Not any more; I left my union when I graduated and joined the private sector. [And made 400% more money than I had as a grad student, despite my graduate qualifications being irrelevant. Don’t talk to me about public sector employees being overpaid.] But this is bad policy for the state and bad faith with the voters. It’s a radical right-wing move to seize power for the wealthy at the expense of the workers of Wisconsin and I could not be more happy that they’re getting called on it. I just hope to Christ that we can fight them off long enough, and hard enough, to make it stick; given our past history with these zealots, though, I’m not optimistic.
‘In the interests of comity, let me give a quick summary of how the process is supposed to work:’
This seems to be a description of the customary re-negotiation process, which is not what is going on, so would not be in play.
Don’t worry, guys, the Teatards — REPORTING FROM OCCUPIED AMERICA AND FIGHTING FOR LIBERTY — have a sooper dooper sekrit plan to infiltrate the union rallies and make them look bad.
GoodOleBoy: This seems to be a description of the customary re-negotiation process, which is not what is going on, so would not be in play.
You’ve misunderstood. All union contracts need to be re-negotiated in each biennium, since contracts cannot be made binding across biennia. What Walker is proposing is precisely to break the existing rules of this re-negotiation, as well as (I presume) any additional negotiations that would ensue. This is exactly what’s in play.
Actually, it’s worse than I thought. Courtesy of Ezra Klein, here’s the summary from the Office of the Governor, with emphasis added:
This is even worse than I’d thought: the union won’t even be allowed to negotiate raises as fast as the benefits the Republicans will be stripping away, since they’ll be bounded by CPI.
[I’m a little perplexed by the claim about frozen wages, since that’s pretty much what already happens. Maybe it was informal and Walker’s trying to formalize it? Either way, eh, that’s not a big deal.]
And of course, the last few points are pure union-busting. Collective bargaining units required to re-certify every year? Prohibitions on the collection of union dues? Argue for them on their “merits” if you like, but there’s no way in hell one can justify these on the grounds “just trying to close the budget gap”.
Morning crithical tinkerer,
I went to bed right after I posted my last, so sorry about the gap and sorry about talking about meta immediately after a comment as fine as Anarch’s, but let me address this.
This was Brett’s statement about why Walker did not include prison guards and police in cuts to state employees. Somehow Brett knows what is on Walker’s mind.
This is a treat of consequences that are totaly hypothetical and false. A threat of released prisoners, a fear-mongering. This is what happened in Egypt recently. And again Brett and you Slarti are acting in bad faith.
As I pointed out, I think that Brett has confused California and Wisconsin, based on an off hand comment by bc. So it is not a question of what is on Walker’s mind, it is a question of what is on Brett’s mind. I believe that Brett is wrong, but you are confusing wrong with Brett knowing something and saying the opposite. As you point out, False does not equal a lie. As you have no access to Brett’s thoughts, there is really no way you can assert that in a way that moves the conversation forward. (I’d also point out that Slarti made no assertions whatsoever about prisons and I am willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that the question of striking prisoners was not in his mind, though again, we have no way of satisfying that bet, absence the invention of mind reading software)
You’ve also posted a piece by Mark Halperin. Posting it is fine, though a link would have been better, but are we to assume that you are saying that Brett (and Slarti) are ‘Joe Republicans’? Because, having interacted with both of them online, there are any number of areas where they differ from what Halperin describes as the standard Republican line. But even if they conformed to Halperin’s description to a T, we would be left to guess that this is the connection that you wanted to make, so you are forcing us to interpret what you say. While there is a place for that, doing that when you’ve just accused the other side of having something on their minds and saying the opposite is likely to cause problems.
This is all a prelude to noting that I think you are a newcomer here (and, if I am not mistaken, the handle sounds like a tribute to Sylvester the Cat?) and so want to welcome you here and assure you that this isn’t some sort of hazing the newbie ritual. It’s just that the practice that has evolved here is to try and separate out accusations of bad faith against people who are commenting here and speculations about people who we presume are not coming here (like Governor Walker) It may seem like a silly nod to civility that has become (or should become) superseded because of the state of politics and the issues we debate, but it’s the way we have rolled here, so I hope you can stay within that as we don’t want to chase anyone off. Thanks.
lj
BTW, ROFL:
As Scott Lemieux adds, This isn’t to say that the lack of collective bargaining explains these poor outcomes, of course, but it is true that the evidence that breaking teacher’s unions improves educational outcomes is somewhere between “exceptionally weak” and “non-existent.”
Slarti:
Second the request.
Also, I’d to again remind everyone that the Posting Rules, which may finally get a rewrite Real Soon Now, include this:
I don’t want to jump down anyone’s throat here, but I’d like to ask that people try using the modifier “some” a great deal more than they tend to, which in many cases is not at all.
A good use would be to say that “some conservatives do X” or “some liberals do Y,” or even “many conservatives/Democrats/liberals/libertarians/leftists/Republicans/breatharians do Z,” rathr than blanket statements that declare that all conseratives/liberals, etc. do X.
It’s just not true, and it’s not a lot of trouble to use modifiers such as “many” or “most” or “some” or others, rather than to go with blanket condemnations that wind up insulting everyone who identifies in any way with a group, and yet is not, in fact, a cardboard cut-out for the most extreme lunatics of the Other Side, nor a substitute for our favorite Hate People.
If people could give such modifiers a bit of a try, I’d appreciate it.
Thanks.
I’m not sure it says anything about *breaking* teachers’ unions; Those are all right to work states, did they EVER have collective bargaining for public employees? IICR, such unions were illegal basically nation-wide not so long ago.
Way back upthread I asked:
Is there a better definition of “conservative” than “hates labor unions”?
This rhetorical question, I now recognize, was asked in bad faith. “Hates” implies that I can read conservatives’ hearts, for one thing. And anyway, it’s wrong to imply that conservatives don’t hate other things as well.
So I curse, detest and abjure my previous heresy. It is merely an accident, a coincidence, a chance correlation, that those among us who call themselves conservatives (or at least, have never called themselves liberals) should be so unanimous in their reasoned, good-faith support of Gov. Walker’s position. I cannot read their minds, or their hearts; only their words. Not a one of them has written the words “I’m conservative because I hate unions”, or even the words “I hate unions because I’m conservative”. It was very wrong of me to imply, even rhetorically, that ANY conservative hates unions, let alone that ALL of them do.
E pur si muove.
–TP
lj
I am not really a newbie here, probably have been posting here before you were. I was here before Hilzoy left, just posting intermittently but reading constantly.
I wasn’t black and white worldview as i am now but there are reasons for that.
I am from Croatia where all this that is happening here right now happened in Croatia before the war. All the same things after economy collapsed there but in slow motion. I see the party in power that caused the economic crash is blaming the victims and playing divide and conquer. I see destruction of the country played by the Powers That Be using the believers to do their dirty work. They believe that they will enjoy the pie once they win. I am sure that they know in the back of their mind that something is wrong with their beliefs but can not let go since they already stepped into it. I had a chance to be married with a Narcissistic personality disordered person that is doing and acting the same way republicans act. Blame the victim and project your guilt onto the “enemy”. No amount of the facts can change a believers mind. Total lack of empathy.
I know that i am very aggressive and that it will contribute to more animosity, but my principle was to always protect the weak and powerless and to never trust the power. Seeing how GOP is attacking the poor and weak i have to take the stand and that attack is more and more organised and strategical leading towards Fascism i have to try to stop it. They are destroying everything that created this country, that created the middle class: FDR’s New Deal and Unions.
GoodOleBoy:
And almost no laws are guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution: that’s what we have legislatures and laws for. Which is what’s under argument: what laws the legislature in Wisconsin should pass. Not whether the constitution of the United States compells all laws in all states. Someone as interested in federalism as you are surely understands this distinction, as well as, of course, the 9th Amendment:
And the 10th:
. You ask:
The issue is whether public employees should have a right by state law to collective bargaining or not.
People are certainly entitled to different opinions on this, but that’s the answer to your question, I believe: that’s the issue.
That’s correct. And what the state law should be is what is under debate.
We all analogize for our own experience — that, and our acquired knowledge, and abilities to extrapolate, and imagine, are all we have.
Nonetheless, this is not Croatia, the things that happened there are not happening here, and if you wish to analogize, I suggest that you be as specific as possible, and not make statements that are so generalized as to be unhelpful in communicating what points you wish to make.
I understand now that English is not your first language, so I’ll try to take that into account, but nonetheless: please be specific, and discuss actual events here in America. That you think you see generalities in Croatia being reproduced in ways you vaguely describe as generalities in America is not communicating a useful argument.
It’s only communicating the fact that you believe you see commonalities, and that you want us to believe that some commonalities must therefore lead to similar events in America as took place in Croatia. This is so vague as to not be helpful in communicating other than that you have strong opinions which you haven’t articulated.
If you “see” things, then give citations to specifics. You use constructions such as “They believe that” when you can’t know what other, unnamed, unspecified “they” believe, both because you haven’t specificed who “they” are, and even if you did, you are not capable of knowing what other people believe. You can only give us cites to quotes of what they’ve said, and reports on their actions. Please try sticking to those, and then make arguments based on those.
Thanks.
If anyone wants to buy pizza for the crowd at the capital in Madison the number is 608 252 9248 Over one thousand pieces have been given out now by the fortuate pizza point that is located right next to where the protests are! The pizza folks are keeping track of where the orders come from and they just got an order from Egypt.
I am not going to take back or modify what I said about the Republican party and its supporters. The pattern has been repeated now over and over for thirty years. Real people are getting screwed over by the Republicans. I’m sick of it and don’t feel like being nice about it.
Here’s one of those public employees who should have to sacrifice to balance the state budget screwed up by the Repubicans of Wisconsin: a freind I’ve known since high school who supports her adult developmentaly disablled daughter. My friend has been a steady employee and taxpayer all of her adult life. She spends her money on things that support other business around where she lives. She ahs a modest house, an old car, saves what she can, and helped put three kids thorough college. She’s been a good citizen. But I guess none of that matters as much as creating a deficit by cutting taxes and then scapegoating public employees.
Those state employees are not theoretical people. They aren’t stereoptypes. They aren’t for god’s sake over paid! They aren’t any of the lies made up to justify screwing them over to balance a budget mess that the Repubicans of Wisonsin made. It’s a shame that anyone is trying to rationaiize their way to support for Gov. Walker’s attack on their ability to negotiate wages with the state. Shameful.
To crithical thinker: thank you for joining us. While I know some may feel that accusations of a slide into fascism in the U.S. are extreme, I have to believe that CT knows a thing or two about what he’s talking about given where he comes from.
Beating up on people we don’t like and feel little for certainly isn’t an exclusively American trait, and I don’t happen to feel that GOB is mean-spirited through-and-through; but even a cursory run-through of the rhetoric over the last 30 years of American politics, and certainly the last 10, have undeniably yielded a level of rhetoric on the right that, at times, approaches that of Victorian England, or even Franco-era Spain – ideas of the poor as somehow morally bankrupt, with a synergy of money and power and a religious veneer more in tune with fascist religious regimes far more than what some conservative Americans would be comfortable with, if they truly though clearly about what they parrot from the right-wing media.
So if some find this distasteful, think of it this way – it is less so comapred with what is regularly served up nightly on Fox News, or in the rolling pages of right-wing blogs, or Ann Coulter whispers in her bedtime prayers.
It’s also frightingly more plausible than we’re comfortable thinking is possible in America.
Phil… about those rankings.
i assume they came from here (1999 scores, no less). now, i’m no statistician, so could someone explain how the sum of the positions of two unrelated rankings (SAT, ACT) means anything ?
on the other hand, and in this century, SAT by state for 2009 shows NC @ #39, while Hawaii and Maine take 49 and 50. with NY @ 46.
WI is #2, which is great for WI. but only 3% of WI students take the SAT. and in general, the more kids that take the SAT, the worse a state does. the real winners in the SAT scores rankings appear to be the new england states which only place in the middle of the rankings but all have very high participation rates.
Gary
What you ask of me will demand at least 600 pages to fulfill. It includes historical conditions, mass psychology, peer pressure and small community relationships.
I cam to the US after the war in Croatia but i was still confused with question: How the civil war was possible? During college courses i learned what is the most basic condition for war, Any war to start. It is that one side think of other side as not human, and my question was answered, everything fell in place.
The most recent and well known example of that is in Rwanda where Hutu that controlled the power and media called Tutsi cockroaches(not human). That was a precondition for Hutu not to feel the guilt when they kill another cockroach(Hutu). The same analogy happened in Germany with Aries and Jews. The same is happening now on Fox where liberals are presented as nazy, unamericans and enemy of democracy. It is all about the media and who control it. Media where truth is not objective, where truth can not come out and be presented. Today’s US media is about extremes that will catch the eye and keep the viewer occupied on that Chanel, the truth is shunned as not interesting. All those so called journalists abdicated their constitutional assignment to keep the check on the power. The most clear example of that is leading to Iraq War and even clearer is the Wikileaks. Wikileaks is publishing the pure truth, no opinions there, just citing what someone else wrote and unedited videos. Pretty much 95% of the mainstream journalists attacked it as terrorists and the enemy of the US. Wikieleaks is doing what the media is supposed to do but abdicated for their jobs at private corporations. Only one is MSNBC that is partially there, still doing its job, Fareed Zakaria and Ali Welshi.
The government under the Bush already set up the system for non-judicial persecution of terrorists and Obama only strengthening it and enlarged. Many of those terrorists can not be persecuted in court because there is no sufficient evidence against them. Majority of those are sold by Afghanis for $5,000 reward. Glenn Greenwald describes all this in every detail and reference you ask of me. Many examples of neighbors selling the person they had a grudge with or envy of their property to the law enforcement under false pretense. The people sold that were second class citizen like Jews in Nazi Germany and had standing as immoral and enemy of the state like on both sides in Croatia.
The reason Glenn Beck is crying about (non-existent) FEMA camps is knowledge of what they are supposed to be used for, but now that the “enemy” is in White House and controlling it is a cause for alarm. He is projecting their intentions for dissenters.
Next step is total control of all branches of government. GOP controls the Supreme court(proof is Gore-Bush and Citizens United, mind boggling decisions)and Congress. In 2012 will be total completion of control. Last defense is unions as the last institutional base working for democrats. GOP destroyed ACORN which was a very important part for Democrats, important for registering voters and push to vote. And now it is turn on unions.
It is a concerted and well oiled (money) effort that is years in the making. I know it is planed because it was planed in Croatia but visible only after it was all over. True planers are not visible in public or on the media. Visible ones are true believers who do not know where will it end.
‘That’s correct. And what the state law should be is what is under debate.’
Gary:
I appreciate your elaboration. However, I’m not under any misapprehensions regarding the constitution, state law, or what is going on in Wisconsin.
The fact is, nothing is under debate in the Wisconsin senate because they do not have a quorum. If the missing senators will return to Madison, then the proper debate and vote can take place. This is what we call civil order in a nation of laws. Once the vote is taken on the proposed statute, those who disagree may begin whatever work they need to do to change that result.
“A nation of laws”?
After Bush v. Gore? After torture? After warrantless wiretapping? After no prosecutions of the perpetrators of the financial collapse?
That we still have a nation of laws is a fantasy. It has come down to “whatever you can get away with.” It’s about time the Democrats took this to heart.
‘That we still have a nation of laws is a fantasy. It has come down to “whatever you can get away with.” It’s about time the Democrats took this to heart.’
All who agree this is the path that should now be taken may chime in.
Here you can hear from another person that went trough and seen things as i did. The person that survived Nazi Germany.
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/george-soros-fox-has-imported-methods-geor
GOB: The fact is, nothing is under debate in the Wisconsin senate because they do not have a quorum.
This is a very reasonable point under one interpretation of “debate”. It is disingenuous sophistry under a different interpretation.
In normal life, debate is discussion for the purpose of persuasion. I’m not familiar with the WI senate, but if it’s anything like the US senate as I’ve seen it on C-Span2, then “debate” means something very different there from what it means in normal life.
Far be it from me to suggest that GOB is aware of that fact. Still, it IS a fact.
I can say without fear of contradiction that I have never seen a US senate “debate” which resulted in any senator changing his or her mind due to anything any other senator had to say on the senate floor. Senate “debate” is a series of speeches, not a discussion. It’s a formality to be dispensed with before senators vote as they intended to vote in the first place.
From all I have heard or read, none of the WI senate’s 19 Republicans are in doubt about which way they’ll vote. They are not pining for a healthy discussion with the 14 Democrats to help them make up their minds. All they want is a quorum so that they can get past the formalities and pass Walker’s bill.
In the US senate, 40% of senators can prevent passage of any bill they dislike without having to skedaddle out of DC. Reading between the lines, I gather the WI senate doesn’t have quite the same filibuster rules as the US senate. If it did, the WI senate Democrats could take the same honorable route as the US senate Republicans have taken about 100 times in the last Congress, without all the fuss and bother of a road trip.
Filibustering with your feet, like the WI senate Dems are doing, may be less dignified than the way US senate Republicans do it, but it’s functionally equivalent. I will not presume to suggest that GOB would ever condone either kind of filibuster.
–TP
CT,
Please let me start off by apologizing, I honestly thought you were a native speaker, so please don’t take any comments I made about the spelling of your handle as an attack on your English.
I appreciate your discussion of your background and the fact that you have been around here for a while. I would be very interested if you brought your experiences to a guest post here, so please consider it.
Having said that, I think that ObWi differs from Croatia in one key aspect, in that we are trying to talk to each other here. (perhaps there were attempts of Croatian-Serbian dialogue, perhaps you feel that they simply accelerated what happened, but if that is the case, it serves us here to lay that out) The communication here is imperfect and people, from time to time, leave because they don’t see the point, but nonetheless, it’s the way this place has developed, as you must know if you have been here since before Hilzoy’s departure.
There is one point that I cannot emphasize enough. That is that Marty, Brett, GOB, and others are not Fox News and are not Glenn Beck. You can’t hold them responsible for what is said on Fox or by Glenn Beck unless they actually come out and state agreement.
Your observation that civil wars begin when one side is unable to see the humanity of the other side is one I agre with. By drawing the lines of responsibility so strictly here, we are trying to make it possible to see the other side as human. Making Brett and others simply kneejerk representatives of Fox News is a way to deny them their humanity and it is something we want to avoid. Tempers still flare and we can all say enough things and have enough beliefs that we can be mad at each other with little trouble. And people have noted that this line drawing can be too restrictive and and others claim that it is too loose, often at the same time. But sometimes, it is really all that we have.
“Filibustering with your feet, like the WI senate Dems are doing, may be less dignified than the way US senate Republicans do it, but it’s functionally equivalent.”
Aside from, you know, being something like illegal, in as much as the federal constitution, and most state constitutions, prohibit it, and permit the use of force to bring fleeing legislators into the chamber. Which is why the Wisconsin legislators fled to another state, to be beyond the reach of their own police.
The filibuster is an act within the rules of the body, whether or not it might be better if the rules were otherwise. The “filibuster with your feet” is prohibited by the rules of most legislative bodies. People who write laws, and expect to be taken seriously, really have to at least pretend to care about the legality of what they do…
Oh, and thanks for the defense, Gary, LJ. I am actually quite atypical as conservatives go, being an atheist and so forth. I’m quite used to having people on the left ignore what I’ve actually said, and respond to me as though I’d conformed to their internal model of a conservative, but it never ceases to be annoying.
more on those SAT scores.
I sometimes think the most terrifying thing about a government shutdown, from a liberal perspective, is prospect that a lot of people might not notice it. And then might notice that they didn’t notice it…
– Brett Bellmore, commenting at The Reality-Based Community, only three short hours before complaining about people arguing with the imaginary Brett in their heads.
tp,
As I presume someone has determined it is illegal, (a misdemeanor?, civil offense?), I am really no more upset about their delaying tactics than I would be over a filibuster.
The peoples business will eventually get done. Either way. But next time we talk about the filibuster let’s recall that when “your” side (you being whichever side) is doing it) is filibustering it always seems to be for the best and noblest reasons.
Still going on?
The Less Discussed part of Walker’s Wisconsin Budget fro Mike Konczal of Rortybomb. 16.896
“The bill would allow for the selling of state-owned heating/cooling/power plants without bids and without concern for the legally-defined public interest.” …Konczal
Koch Brothers are of course, big in energy. Koch Brothers financed Republican pols in WI.
Ok, so you have a political party that once in office sells off public utilities and other public goods. Among countless other atrocities.
I honestly don’t think Republicans should be allowed to run for or hold political office in America anymore. The consequences of nostalgia for the no longer effective forms of liberal democracy are too catastrophic, possibly irreversible, and more catastrophic than civil war
But next time we talk about the filibuster let’s recall that when “your” side (you being whichever side) is doing it) is filibustering it always seems to be for the best and noblest reasons.
Marty, that is not only a poor defense, but it’s no defense at all, like any tu quoque. And, obviously the reasons you do it do matter, don’t they? You aren’t a postmodernist are you?
But I also would note that you’re demonstrating how to take the analogy too far: howling about recent filibusters in the Senate is pretty different from this situation. How often did the GOP use the filibuster in the last congress? You know, the one that served with the newly elected Democrat/Negro person? Well over a hundred – 116 in one year, I believe. Quite a lot of the ‘people’s business’ didn’t get done; Republicans filibustered bills they had formally been in favor of – or had even come up with themselves (what conceivable noble reason is there for that?). OTOH, how often do state reps walk out of the statehouse, in WI or in any state? I can think of one instance in recent memory (TX).
All that said, I’d say it doesn’t look good for those unions on this issue. We’ll see, but their odds don’t look too good. The upside is that people are pissed off, as well they should be. Maybe there will be a little more organized, public acknowledgment of the class war has which has been waged against working and middle class people for many years. Overreach sometimes has an upside.
Brett: As near as I can tell, the point here is that elections are only supposed to matter when Democrats win them.
Oh come on now, in the very first comment on the thread I took the Cheeseheads to task for voting for Walker and his co-republicans in the legislature (I did use the technical term “schmucks”) and that they’re going to have to live with the consequences until next time.
Same thing for people nationally for electing (directly or indirectly) the Great Orange Satan (or is that Kos?) as Speaker of the House.
From the bill McManus cites:
16.896 Sale or contractual operation of state−owned heating, cooling, and power plants. (1) Notwithstanding ss. 13.48 (14) (am) and 16.705 (1), the department may sell any state−owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state. Notwithstanding ss. 196.49 and 196.80, no approval or certification of the public service commission is necessary for a public utility to purchase, or contract for the operation of, such a plant, and any such purchase is considered to be in the public interest and to comply with the criteria for certification of a project under s. 196.49 (3) (b).
Seriously, who the hell here wants to continue defending Walker? The man is a carpetbagging sleazeball.
Here are my questions for all of the folks who think public sector employees should STFU, take what Walker wants to give them, and smile.
The average salary of a schoolteacher in WI is $48,733.
Average per capita income in WI is not quite $37K. That’s total state personal income divided by total population, not divided by workforce.
Other average incomes in WI can be found here. Teachers make, on average, a little less than an RN, a lot less than a construction project manager or a mechanical engineer, way way less than an IT project manager, but more than a retail store manager.
How much should a teacher make? How much should a state cop make? A fireman? A court clerk?
The conservative agenda is to treat the efforts of working people as a pure, fungible commodity, to be bought and sold on a market like carrots, televisions, or tube socks.
People’s labor is not a fungible commodity, analogous to carrots, televisions, or tube socks.
If Walker has his way, the people of WI will end up with all public services either sold off and provided by private entities, or by whatever public employees are willing to work for whatever bottom-scraping crap wage the great Republican minds of WI deem to be sufficient.
In the first case, they will get exactly the services that those private entities find sufficiently economic to provide, and not a f**king ounce more.
In the second case, they will get exactly what they pay for, which is the minimum.
And Wisconsin will suck. The schools will be crap, the roads will be crap, police fire and emergency provider response times will be crap. Crap, crap, crap.
Wisconsin will be on its way to being just like freaking Mississippi, only colder.
And Mississippi is a lovely place in its own way, I’m quite sure, but in terms of its public life and institutions is bloody sucks.
The blanket statement I am completely comfortable saying about the Republican party is that they have no respect or regard for public institutions or public life. None. I agree with McManus that they ought not to be allowed to run for or hold public office, but unfortunately that’s neither my call or his to make. People vote for them, so there they are.
And no, I’m not trading in our currently crappy liberal democracy for whatever stupid Animal Farm would flow from trying to prevent stupid, anti-social political actors from doing stupid, anti-social things.
And yes, I’ve actually been in the streets in fairly recent memory, so it’s a purely academic question to me.
I have no idea how things will turn out in WI. It may be that Walker will prevail. If so, the state of WI will be that much sh*ttier a place to live, and the people who live there can thank all of the jerks who thought it was a great idea to stick it to those latte-drinking liberal do-gooders in Madison.
I live in New England, and I’m glad of it. We have our flaws, and in great number, but as of yet we haven’t taken to letting the governors of our states sell off power plants to their buddies. If we head that way, you can bet your @ss I will be putting in face time at the capitol.
Nuts. Don’t know what’s up with the links, so here are the URLs.
State annual income tables:
http://www.bea.gov/regional/spi/default.cfm?selTable=summary
Average salaries for a sample of WI professions:
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/State=Wisconsin/Salary
Average teacher salary in WI (this has it at $46+):
http://teacherportal.com/salary/Wisconsin-teacher-salary
And “so it’s a purely academic question to me” should be “so it’s *NOT* a purely academic question to me”. Seeing your reflection in a cop’s mirror shades is interesting.
Brett, Slarti
I apologize for being overly antagonistic and aggressive toward you personally and i am in awe of you guys being able to persist and contribute to what is in general a liberal blog site. Opposite view forces the other side to dig for more support of any view and strengthen the knowledge. That’s what makes this site so precious and full of informations and kept me coming back for years. I was a bit outside of deductive reasoning rules that i tried to keep for long time when it comes to responding to arguments that do not apply to the present situation. My views of GOP actions are not changed by my apology.
LJ
Thanks, i do not feel that your apology to me is needed but it calmed my anxiety. Thanks. Btw, my handle is intentional.
Thank you for the invite to guest post even tough i think i am not capable to do it on my own.
Links fixed, russell, after a few false starts.
Basically you were putting the double quotes before the href, not after the =.
crithical tinkerer:
No need to apologize to me; you haven’t wronged me. Or at least, not so that I noticed.
Cluelessness (my own) is its own gift, possibly.
I was wondering about your language skills, and whether you’d acquired English later in life than native English-speakers, but couldn’t ask in the middle of our conversation in a way that seemed polite.
Lastly: welcome!
russell: The blanket statement I am completely comfortable saying about the Republican party is that they have no respect or regard for public institutions or public life. None.
I was going to post something along these lines, only I was going to say that there is no respsect/regard among the GOP for “public service,” at least not anymore and dating back at least to Reagan. People who work for the government are not viewed as public servants, they are not there because they have a sense of wanting to improve their society through serving it via government.
Instead, they are “lazy bureaucrats,” overpaid, underworked, bums who are leeching off the productive hard work of the folks in the private sector. They aren’t even a “necessary evil”, they’re just evil (with certain exceptions).
So, when the GOP does win elections these days, you get what we saw under GWB – people like Monica Goodling who thought their oath was to him, and not to the Constitution and, by extension, the people of the United States. They were there to serve him and his political cronies because, hey, since “government doesn’t work” anyway, we might as well use our positions to enrich ourselves and our friends, by things like allowing the executive branch to sell state assets “with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state.”
Are the Democrats perfect? No. Are they just as bad or worse in some ways? Yes. But I don’t get the general sense from them that they have abandoned the general notion of public service with respect to working for and in government.
Feh.
Russell
there is also a fight to destroy anything socialistic in this country under a ruse of free capitalism. The real reason is that the states are out of money and they do not want to come clean. Both parties were spending on their own constituents in order to be reelected, spending the pension funds or not paying the pension obligations, just like federal policy of taking from SS fund. That is the dark truth on both sides. Both of parties do not want responsibility of paying for it and Dems are intentionally loosing elections in order for other party to take hot potato.
Even tough yearly budgets are not that bad, the projected layouts are crushingly devastating. While GOPs constituency is rich, Dems’s is poor and minorities.
But why i am still for Dems is that getting the poor to pay for projected future deficits is just devastating. The economic history of any country can teach us that.
All other talk and arguments do not lead anywhere, but talking about bottom line: ” who will pay for the debt?”
Tea party is right about identifing the problem, but totally wrong and devastating about solutions of the problem.
Talking about the bottom line is only way, i repeat, the only way to get the other side to change their mind.
The history proves that getting the lower classes to pay is destructive, while making wealthy to pay for it has double benefits. 1-Taxing wealthy is not damaging to the economy as is taxing the poor, as is damaging to the number of lives lost trough malnutrition and lack of health care.
2-Taxing the wealthy prevents manipulation of the market and political structure.
This is the only matter worth talking about with the other side of this battle.
Slarti
Thank you.
About my English skills. I grew up with two slightly different languages not knowing the difference between the two. Then learned another two languages which is normal in tight environment as Europe. One of them (German) trough school. Before i arrived to US at 27 year of age i had a fairly good English vocabulary trough movies, music and contact with tourists, but no grammar skills, totally absent. One college course of advanced grammar was sufficient to qualify me for English college courses. After that was keeping in touch mostly with natives instead with my countryman that improved my skills.
I was ostracized and rejected by my countryman and Croatian nationals cause i had a big dissagrement about causes of the war and how to proceed the redevelopment of the new country. Twenty years after the war in Croatia my views are becoming more and more mainstream in Croatia, not that i contributed to it in any way. Truth always comes out to surface, but only after much, much damage and suffering caused by lies.
Right out of the IMF playbook, down to the selling off of public assets to benefit the rich elites. A pretty clear indication the U.S. is going third world, or at least the Republican parts.
lj:
“Making Brett and others simply knee-jerk representatives of FOX News is a way to deny them their humanity and something we want to avoid.”
I’ve no doubt that all of the conservatives (with the exception of the occasional drive-by from john t. and other murderous Redrummers) at OBWI, in their varied approaches to conservatism, will provide shelter in their root cellars and attics to crithical tinkerer and other liberals here when the Serbian Becks, Ailes, Limbaughs, Levins, Norquists and the rest of CPAC finally loose the machetes and their other well-fondled and beloved weaponry on their enemies.
I’d be a little more confident in that judgement if so many of the rhetorically violent and secession-minded hadn’t been given the privilege of holding high office last November, not to mention permitted to run for office un-effing-scathed, but I guess the prospect of taxes not being raised for eternity was too good to pass up for even the squeamish conservatives at OBWI.
That said, I’d choose to be hold up at Mackinney Texas’ because at least a guy would be invited out of his hiding place for cocktail hour, rather than say at Brett’s, where I can imagine there would be a quota of alatle-wittling (sp?) to be done weekly in exchange for shelter, though I would be willing to do some filing at McKT’s law office, to lighten the load when marginal tax rates are finally permitted to rise, which isn’t going to happen except over dead bodies, probably mine.
Meanwhile, what should be done about Beck, et al?
I hope the Tides Foundation and George Soros are very heavily armed.
Excellent point TJ.
That is the same battle being waged in Croatia right now, about selling the public assets (only left are utilities) even tough it is not a requirement to enter the EU, but corrupt government is paying off the debt from arming from scratch during the war. Paying off the debt with inflation doesn’t work as it used to work after the WWII. Debts everywhere you turn.
“Seriously, who the hell here wants to continue defending Walker? The man is a carpetbagging sleazeball.”
seriously russell, have you read a single sentence on why someone thinks this might be a good idea, or necessary? Have you done any homework? Or have you just worked dyourself into such a tizzy that anything someone writes that you can jump will send you into namecalling histrionics?
I haven’t seen one pro or con fact on this bill in this thread. Cons: Koch brothers have somethings to do with air conditioning.
Really? That’s the depth of analysis we use now? I mean you could be right, it could be a sweet deal aimed straight at the campaign donors. God knows no Democrat ever did that, like give the unions a sweetheart deal.
Isn’t this whole thing just a little overblown? It is great political theater. There are definitely key issues from state workers standpoint. But these issues have been on a pendulum in our country for decades. There are 22 right to work states and the country hasn’t dissolved into chaos. They can vote him out in a few years if it doesn’t suit them.
He doesn’t need defending or pillorying. he is a new Governor implementing his new agenda. Disagre vigourously, but “carpetbagging sleazeball”?. Really?
Countme
“I’ve no doubt that all of the conservatives (with the exception of the occasional drive-by from john t. and other murderous Redrummers) at OBWI, in their varied approaches to conservatism, will provide shelter in their root cellars and attics to crithical tinkerer and other liberals here when the Serbian Becks, Ailes, Limbaughs, Levins, Norquists and the rest of CPAC finally loose the machetes and their other well-fondled and beloved weaponry on their enemies.”
That didn’t happen but in very very limited numbers. Barely any protection given by moderates due to extreme peer pressure.
While spending 3 months in concentration camps, one of the guards was my fairly good high school friend, i received 4 sandwiches accompanied with despise in the eyes. Maybe i got less beating and maybe he kept me alive confirming results of my interrogations but i can not know what happened behind closed doors. I know that he arranged the death of a math professor that failed him one year. The teacher that was in the same camp as me and died after numerous beatings stopped short of the last breath.
Peer pressure prevents the dialogue when emotions flare to extremes. Anyone dared to openly help was being killed by their own side.
Wisconsin will be on its way to being just like freaking Mississippi, only colder.
That’s the actual plan, russell. Mississippi and Alabama are ‘conservative’ Valhalla, as they have been the entire time they’ve been states. I happen to know Mississippi pretty well. Lots of good people; state/local governments are an absolute piece of you-know-what. Plantation mentality. That’s the plan for the whole country. God must love humble people because he made so many of them, ergo, it’s good to be humble (poor and docile).
Serfdom is a kind of Freedom® – freedom from education, from aspiration, from complexity. In fact, serfdom is simplicity itself – so few of those pesky *options* to worry about. Let’s just learn to accept it, people.
I thinkthat what the Republicvan party lacks is a sennse of the common good. An awful lot of Republican voters lack that, too.
Refusing to connect the dots is part of how peole rationalize support for the rightrwing agenda. Wilson’s attack on collective barganing is not isolated, and not the agenda he ran on. As pointed out up thread, he ran on the usual Republican platitudes and hot air, no specifics about the unions, collective bargaining, or anything else realting to the currant controversy. Furthering the decline of the middle class probably was his real agenda since he’s a Republican politician, but it is unlikely that he got elected on that platform.
Russel is correct to label this as “Norquistian”. What Walker is doing is part of a larger picture, the larger picture of Republican efforts over the last thirty years to create deficits and then use th edeficts to destroy the social safety network, the unions, those government programs that keep people out of abject poverty like Socail Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and anything else that does not translate into support either for red state ecdonomic interests or the corporate donors.
So yes this fight is worth the levels of anger. In fact anger at the intellectual dishonesty, hypocrsy, and meanspiritness that is core to the rightwing approach to politics should have broken out long ago.
“Peer pressure prevents the dialogue when emotions flare to extremes. Anyone dared to openly help was being killed by their own side.”
On the other hand, recently in Egypt, at the height of the unrest, Christians watched over Muslims as they prayed during the day.
All things are not equal.
Marty
“They can vote him(Walker) out in a few years if it doesn’t suit them.”
That would be true if this attempt is not about destroying the institutions that help Democrats. The unions are the main organizing factor for Democrat’s vote. Effectively preventing them to get union dues and making them to spend the money and effort around survival every year will limit unions to effectively work on elections.
This is about destroying the Democrat’s base, like it happened to ACORN, not about the budget. GOP is effectively working on permanent majority in power, very very effectively.
GoodOleBoy,
I noticed that this thread brought out some fighting spirit from participants I didn’t expect (e.g., Anarch, Bernard Yomtov).
Paul Krugman today pretty much expresses my point of view on unions. They are just as subject to human foibles as any other institution but they are a necessary counterbalance to the power of capital.
In a prior thread McKinneyTexas and I sparred briefly on the subject of power. A Maoist would say it comes from the barrel of a gun. My view is that in our society more often (thank goodness!) it just derives from money.
The only lever labor has in this struggle is the threat to strike — to withhold labor. That is what makes collective bargaining work.
Separation of powers was a brilliant design of the founders. The idea applies just as well in power relationships other than the federal government. Taking away the only (non-violent) weapon labor has will not end well.
I am not advocating lawlessness. I have observed that it is on the rise. I don’t like it but we ignore it at our peril. Just giving in to Republican bullying is no answer.
Marty:”On the other hand, recently in Egypt, at the height of the unrest, Christians watched over Muslims as they prayed during the day.”
This is very superficial outsiders view on sides in Egypt.
Sides in Egypt were Regime on one side and all others on the other. The sides were not lined up as you see it. Muslims and Christians were on the same side against Regime which was Muslim
I like it when Russell erupts in some righteous anger.
Marty, if OBWI existed in a vacuum, I could see us carrying on like “The Dobie Gillis Show” — ah, cmon, fellas, things can’t be that bad!”
Marty, if your shrugging, bland-faced centro-conservatism (maddening in and of itself 😉 ) ruled the waters we swim in outside of OBWI, things might be different.
But, in the real world, thugs like Andrew Brietbart (calling liberals, animals) and Joe the Plumber show up in Wisconsin to support Walker in his union-busting.
Why don’t you pop over to Redstate and moderate there, where you could learn all on one thread that the teachers in Wisconsin are commies AND that the first thing commies do when they gain power is outlaw unions, unlike Walker … or something.
Not speaking for Russell, but he doesn’t need a crossing guard to tell when it’s O.K. to cross what you think is a dangerous street.
The downside of RINOs being demonized and thrown out of the Republican Party is that now we have to humor them.
Which we don’t mind. 😉
CT,
Nor would McK and Count be on opposite sides of any conflict in this country. My point exactly.
One must me careful what parallels one draws.
Kicking out RINOs is the perfect example of peer pressure by organized extremes against sensible minority.
No-bid sales/contracts suck pretty much by definition, Marty. I’d say Russell’s got a point.
Marty
No, they would not be on the opposite sides in a violent conflict, which might, i say, might come in the future. Majority of a population in any conflict is not participating in violence part of the conflict. It never is in the whole history. But huge majority participated in support of the violent parts.
But in the present McK and Countme are on opposite sides enabling and supporting each side which will eventually lead to violent conflict.
I am on the side that is trying to prevent the destruction of the system that created the middle class while the other side is progressively and successfully destroying it.
You are enabling and morally supporting the side that is slowly trying to destroy the system that was in place for last 60 years.
You may gloat about winning, because you are very close to it, but i guarantee you that the pie (GDP) you are hoping to share after your side win will be much, much smaller then you have now and you will not be included in the share.
I experienced it, i have seen it and the history shows it.
“How much should a teacher make? How much should a state cop make? A fireman? A court clerk?
The conservative agenda is to treat the efforts of working people as a pure, fungible commodity, to be bought and sold on a market like carrots, televisions, or tube socks.
People’s labor is not a fungible commodity, analogous to carrots, televisions, or tube socks.”
You know what? Either you’re treating the labor of people working for the government like a fungible commodity, to be bought at the lowest possible price for an acceptable level of quality, or you’re treating the labor of people not working for the government as a fungible commodity, to be taken from them and spent wastefully from their perspective.
On the theory that the government exists for the people, or ought anyway be FORCED to exist for the people, and not the other way around, I prefer the former situation.
GOB, Marty and others,
I’m wondering what you think about this
link
I think CT has a very good point.
I haven’t seen one pro or con fact on this bill in this thread.
Actually, in the post you’re responding to, I cite a section of the bill verbatim. What it says is (a) “the department” can sell any state-owned power generation or heating facility to whoever it pleases, for any price or fee it pleases, and (b) the approval of the public service commission is not required.
Sounds messed up to me. How about you?
But you’re correct, I haven’t read the whole bill. If I have time to do so, I will, because I’m sure there’s more entertainment to be had.
lj,
I think it looks a lot like the House of Commons on a good day. Or Pelosi’s House on most days, except she would just call for order and the Republicans would shut up. I was trying to discern your point.
Brett:”On the theory that the government exists for the people, or ought anyway be FORCED to exist for the people, and not the other way around, I prefer the former situation”
Brett, i agree with your statement on its own. Where is the possible disagreement is how to understand, comprehend, interpret the word “EXIST”. Knowing your affiliation and previous effort on the topic of the tread i take it that you mean EXIST in the pure present form, machine that exist for the purpose of serving the people. Nothing around that is visible, nothing that they are human beings, with families, health problems and needs. In short, slaves that serve the people, not giving them the right to be the part of the people.
If you could use some emphaty to put yourself in their position using the facts, on which we disagree on(level of pay), would you like to work for slave wages or not? would you like to be You to be forced to EXIST to serve the people? What pay level and rights would you like to have?
“Sounds messed up to me. How about you?”
Sounds like a Mubarak move to me. Has anyone actually seen Wilson and Mubarak’s son at the same time?
I’m sorry, the House of Commons does not look like that. You seem to be confusing rowdiness with lack of observance of procedure. (see here for rowdiness) The House of Commons does not turn people’s mics off and then try and conduct voice votes while they are requesting procedural points of order. The House of Commons does not start 5 minutes early. If Pelosi did something as egregious as Fitzgerald was in that video, I would be demanding that she be relieved. That you think this is business as usual suggests that CT has a point.
Yes, CT has a point (“big time” as a former Vice President might put it).
We are much closer to the edge than I like.
[Hmmm… Google “close to the edge” and you mostly get a Yes song.]
lj, is that last link the one you wanted. Or did you want the House of Commons?
lj
Inability to differentiate the types of disorder in House of Commons, Pelosi’s handling of Congress from the type of disorder in your link is republicans inability to consider the positions of the other side, lack of empathic skills. That inability is trained and improved trough childhood while competing for things. Ayn Randian psychology of total self preoccupation, “I” is the only thing that matter. Narcissistic personality disorder in various stages of development. No empathy.
It is the basic difference of liberal and conservative mind. We try solve the problem by fully understanding both sides of it, while they do it by winning of what is perceived as immediate benefit to themselves, no matter long term consequences.
In short you can say that they do not act in bad faith, but switching the topic of the conversation when they start loosing it is in bad faith. In good faith will be if they ask the additional questions in order to understand the topic better. Since the republican view is based on believes, not on facts, and they kinda know it, deep down they know it, but can not give up to win, to enforce the ego that is very insecure.
When McManus and dozens and hundreds of radical, like-minded folks on the Left can get elected and prosper politically and use their political privilege to spout hate (without protest from the nominally more moderate members of their Party) for their fellow Americans on the other side like this vermin and dozens of her ilk stealing my tax money for their f*cking children’s health insurance………..
http://minnesotaindependent.com/77966/bachmann-glenn-beck-can-solve-the-budget-deficit
……. I might consider the bland-faced conservative protestations about a little liberal outrage here at OBWI over obvious union-busting and worse in Wisconsin.
We don’t need better conservatives at OBWI; we need worse conservatives.
Like the ones that get elected.
We used to have them here. What? Did their feelings get hurt?
I’ve been trying to catch up on this because, well, I’ve been sick. Tired. Probably allergies.
So far as I’ve been able to gather, Walker has enacted some tax cuts (some of which are, as far as I can tell, incentives for businesses to move into Wisconsin; could be wrong on that) that amount to several tens of millions of dollars. Facing a budget shortfall in the billions-with-a-b, Walker has chosen some things to attack.
Is it really Ezra’s (and, by citation, Eric’s) point that Walker has created a multibillion-dollar budget crisis via tax cuts, here, in order to to attack public employee unions?
Apologies if this has been addressed, already. Have I mentioned that I’m trying to catch up on this?
Slarti
Those tax cuts do not affect current years deficit, and deficit is small anyway. what you described is a story for the public, not what is really at stake here.
There is a projected state deficit of around $3.6B. Projected!! just like projected expenditures for SS is $100T in next 50 years.
$3.6B projected deficit is mostly from never paid pension obligations in past 20-30 years. Instead of covering the obligations as they are contracted, state managements form both parties were hiding those obligations and just covering for current expenses.
That bill will soon come out to light when cash flow is exceeded. On personal, local, states and on federal level cash flow is becoming a problem. The whole society is overwhelmed with future obligations and finally cash flow is coming under the bridge.
The real question is how to pay for it? not what caused it since it is there already.
All this information is used to confuse the public, comparing apples to oranges in order to push for the cuts to opposing constituents. GOP supports the rich, and Dems support the rest.
If you wanna debate sincerely then lets debate what happens when wealthy pay for deficit and what happens when the rest pay for it. The history provides many examples of what happens to the economy when the bill is due.
Count Me–it’s “atlatl”, i.e. the leverage-enhancing dart throwing device that will soon be all the rage among bloggers. You may hide in my basement anytime. Although, on the merits, I’m with Marty and the rest. But you probably knew that.
Facing a budget shortfall in the billions-with-a-b, Walker has chosen some things to attack.
Based on my personal state-of-art in keeping up with the discussion, the shortfall looks like about $137 million, with an ‘m’.
Where are you seeing the number with a ‘b’?
Here, russell. Page 5 or thereabouts.
crithical tinkerer, I’d gladly accept any of your assertions as ponderable fact if you link me to them.
Sorry for not having done so to start with; I assumed everyone else was way ahead of me on this.
Slart,
The 137M is THIS YEAR. The rest is through 2013. Both trying to be solved.
Slarti
You can see all the informations that i am using on Dylan Ratygan show right now on TV. I do not have links for it and my financial info is from Dylan, Brad DeLong, Krugman and Karl Denninger.
Here, russell. Page 5 or thereabouts.
Thanks slarti.
The Lang memo projects a shortfall in the neighborhood of $2.5B over two years. That’s a big number.
For perspective, there are 2.1 million households in WI. That works out to about $50/mo, per household.
It’s not nothing, and they shouldn’t ignore it. But does it merit eliminating collective bargaining? Does it require the ability to sell public facilities with no bidding process and no requirement for approval from the public affairs folks?
Is WI really looking at stark financial ruin, such that only the most draconian measures will do?
Or is Walker taking the opportunity to advance a political agenda that the facts of the matter do not demand?
Don’t forget that the public employees in WI have a recent track record of making concessions on their compensation when times are hard.
You’ll forgive me if I continue to find Walker to be a sleazeball. Nothing personal, I’m just looking at what the situation is, and what he’s calling for as a solution.
Some people actually are sleazeballs. IMO he’s one of them.
russell:
The billions vs. millions is an important point. I had a whole comment on this that was eaten when firefox crashed.
Basically, Klein’s article is way off. Eric acknowledged that and Klein updated his article, but his update completely fails to discuss the looming shortfall in the next biennium. It was known at least by September of last year that the shortfall for the next biennium was going to be $2.5B to $3.2B, way before Walker was on board. The special session tax cuts are clearly not the big picture here.
LJ:
Regarding bad faith:
1) On the voting issue, I think there is some bad faith here on the part of the legislature on both sides. On the R side, get the bill out in advance and let everyone read it. Allow amendments to be suggested, etc. Don’t call for a vote at 5:00 if traditionally roll call starts at 5:00, etc. etc. The R’s backed away and have let things proceed normally, so whatever bad faith existed I think is now remedied. But it sure looks bad even if they were just trying to see if the D’s would show up. They did.
On the D side, don’t leave the state. Gary made a comment about the filibuster. Although I think, like Gary, the Senate rule needs reform, my other thoughts are essentially “what Brett Beltmore said.” A filibuster is part of the rules. Leaving the state is not. Bad faith. I’d be fine with it if the D’s said “hey, we need time to read the bill and you didn’t give us much time so we’ll be back on Tuesday” or something like that. But that’s not what’s going on. So I see continuing bad faith in the part of the D’s; bad faith remedied on the part of the R’s.
2) Bad faith re collective bargaining. I looked at your links. One looks like it is from 2002? I looked at Walker’s campaign website and googled a bit I didn’t see anything specific about passing a bill to ban bargaining in his campaign talk. However, it is clear he had union issues . Bad faith? I can’t tell exactly. Maybe someone more in tune with the campaign can comment.
IMHO, natural corrollaries of campaign themes are not bad faith unless it arises to a level of misrepresentation. IOW, he was clear about cutting pay and benefits and he clearly wasn’t perceived as a friend of unions. So far so good, no bad faith. He ran on that. It seems odd to me that it wouldn’t have been mentioned bargaining at some point in the campaign, even if it wasn’t a bullet point on his website. And maybe the full impact of the budget shortfall wasn’t clear until fall. But, yes, bargaining sees momentous enough that a deliberate attempt to obfuscate would be bad faith. I’m not clear that he did that.
General Comment: Why all the R hate talk? And putting us all in one box? I for one specifically mentioned that I see a place for unions but not so much in the public sector. When a union produces cost effective, efficient, quality labor that’s one thing. I’m not convinced that is the case in the public sector, at least not very often. If all workers were like the iron workers I referenced, no problem here.
Why should any workers not have the right to collectively bargain? I can answer that question,
And I think I did, above.
Or, in other words, the police and fire unions tend to vote Republican. Want cites?
Didn’t the CCPOA endorse Brown? The $100k/average, retire at 50, negotiated under Davis folks?
Since the unions are playing the “democracy” card
Why the scare quotes?
Uh, I don’t follow. I was using the quotes in the “so called Democracy card” context.
By referendum? Okay. So long as thepublic also gets to vote on approving the pay/benefits of management. I’ll go for that equality. You? If not, why not?
I’m actually o.k. with that in principle. I wouldn’t want it pure referendum necessarily. I’d want some sort of non-partisan council to give recommendations.
When a union produces cost effective, efficient, quality labor that’s one thing.
That isn’t what unions do, and it’s not what they’re meant to do.
Unions exist to advance the interests and concerns of labor in their dealings with ownership and management. They came into being because, absent their existence, people who worked for a living were treated like crap.
There are many situations where unions do, in fact, result in greater quality, safety, and a variety of other things that are good both for them and for their employers.
But making labor available on the most cost effective terms is not what they do, or what they will ever do. It’s not their function.
If you don’t like what their actual function is, change the attitude toward labor and they won’t be necessary.
Respectfully, crithical tinkerer, you seem to be under the impression that you are bringing news of these things to people who have been writing intensively about them for years, and reading intensively on them more or less every day, many hours a day.
I’m glad you’re here, I add to the welcome, but I’ve been reading all the blogs you mention since, well, I was correcting Glenn Greenwald when he started blogging many years after I did, he’s an invaluable resource, I’m far more familiar with his work than you are, ditto the other blogs, ditto the other issues, and I appreciate that you think I want 600 pages, but I’ve in fact written over 60,000 pages on these subjects, and I’m not going to suggest you go read them all, or a fraction, or even 60, but all I’m saying is that you’re not updating at least some of us on stuff which we may, I respectfully suggest know far more about than you do, though obviously you’ll know far more about Croatia than we do.
I respectfully invite you to read any of the thousands of posts on this blog in the past eight years on the issues you’ve brought up, or any of the hundreds of thousands of comments we’ve discussed them in for since 2003.
Otherwise, I wish I had more time to respond, but I assure you that I’m intimately familiar with the history of fascism, both in Europe, the flirtations America had with it in the Thirties, and since, I’ve been a dedicated student of civil liberties for over 40 years, I can tell you endless amounts about the Tea party, the politics of every state, many counties, most Congressional districts, the history of each to a large degree since they became states, the contemporary media scene, and really, you’re not telling me anything I don’t know quite a bit about, so let’s please try to either stick to specifics, or otherwise if you want to talk generalities, all I can do is talk generalities back to you, and that’s not a productive conversation.
Welcome, and hope you stick around, your views are interesting, and I look forward to more conversation with you, and hope you find ObWi congenial.
Everything Russell said about unions.
Plus: “Why all the R hate talk? And putting us all in one box?”
What box is that? The anti-union, pro-corporation box? The pro-gun, anti-abortion box? The anti-deficit, pro-tax-cut box? Which of those boxes would you like to be let out of, bc?
And BTW, how many of those boxes can you step out of before you get called a RINO? Not by me; by people for whom RINO is not a term of endearment.
–TP
Fearless predictions, presented utterly without evidence :
0. Founding assumption: many voters in Wisconsin who in the last cycle either: voted Republican out of anger at feckless Democrats, or who did not bother to vote in the out of ennui, or out of “what difference does it make” cynicism are now experiencing some serious buyer’s remorse.
1. Eventually the missing Dem legislators in WI will come in from the cold.
2. At least three of the currently-recallable Republican WI Senators will immediately face credible recall campaigns.
(Serious organizing for this has already begun).
Fork :
3a. The Republican WI Senators who feel they will lose their seats if the Walker bill passes will break the unity of the Republican caucus, and the Walker bill will pass without the provision that strips collective bargaining rights.
4a. The Republican(s) who broke ranks switch parties before the next cycle, and maybe retains seat.
or
3b. No Republican WI Senator breaks ranks; the Walker bill passes as written.
4b. At least one Republican WI Senator is successfully recalled about as quickly as that can legally be accomplished.
Join :
5. Walker is succesfully recalled in 2011, and this blatant overreach has the long-term effect of damaging the Republicans in WI and nationwide.
6. In 2012, a WI government dominated by Democrats start to undo the damage done by the Walker administration.
Brett:
Brett, a point I’ll go on repeating until my dying breath, whenever I have time and think it will do any good, is that all of us feel this way, no matter how it looks to someone else.
Every single one of us is an individual, and while some are less thoughtful than others, and some more kneejerk, and we all have to use some shorthand to communicate, because no one has infinite time to either write or reading, and generalizations are useful up to a point, no one should be treated as a cardboard “liberal” or “libertarian” or “Republican” or “Democrat” and thus generalizations about how “all conservatives this” and “all Democrats that” are really strong distortions of the truth, they simply lead to seeing individuals as masses of The Other, and thus the kind of fascism that crithical tinkerer is rightly concerned about.
It’s not helpful. It produces an echo chamber. And it drives away people who might otherwise listen.
So do assumptions that “all sensible people believe X,” and if you don’t believe X, you’re obviously one of Them, and not worth talking to.
I’m not addressing this to you, Brett, but again to everyone in general, and it’ll always be necessary to keep pointing this out to people because it’s necessary for all of us to simplify to some degree, and hard to address complications, but one simple truth is that All Conservatives don’t believe the same thing, all All Liberals don’t, and so on.
So when any of us — and I don’t claim to be innocent of this fault at times myself, though I like to think it’s usually through haste of writing, rather than faulty thinking — engage in forms of “ignor[ing] what [someone] actually said, and respond[s] to [them] as though [they’d] conformed to their internal model of a
[category of political people]…it never ceases to be annoying” to any of us who feel treated in that manner.
It tends to simply cause hackles to rise, tempers flare, people respond in like manner, and then stalk off, yet further convinced that Those People just Won’t Listen To Reason, and the fact is that it’s not reason that they’re being presented with, but demands that other people have the same information we have, the same past lives, the same past beliefs and experiences which form our political (and other) views and filters, and it’s simply not helpful, and I’ll go on asking that people quit making blanket statements about how all Tea Partiers are clones, or all conservatives, all Republicans (more necessary on this blog which has long been far more left/liberal than not, despite the original intent of being cross-spectrum), or contrawise that All Leftists/Liberals/Democrats, well, that’s when we get into Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh territory.
And my observation is that most intelligent people are indeed susceptible to, over time, reconsidering their views if presented with enough verifiable information, presented in a reasonable manner, while being given the benefit of the doubt, treated as if they’re acting in good faith, and that’s still what ObWi is about, in my view, and should be about.
And I’ve seen two opposite trends in blogging and people in politics in general, and they’re simply this: either groups or individuals go into positive feedback loops or negative feedback loops.
Which is to say, either they start listening more and more to people they already agree with, and they egg each other on and become more and more convinced that more and more extreme views are plausible and The Truth, and thus from the other side, and any reasonable side, become kookier and kookier, and that’s a positive feedback loop.
Or they keep listening to opposing views, and realize more and more that not all the views or people they think are nuts really aren’t completely nutty, understand better that some of the views they thought were crazy might have some reason behind them, and they become more and more understanding of why views may differ, and become more and more reasonable themselves.
And I think I’ll avoid naming which bloggers, and their blog communities go in which direction, though I’m sure we can all name our own sets, but I’ll close by recommending this summary by James Joyner, a very sensible man.
Marty, I’ve been entirely consistent for decades in maintaining that Senate Rule 22 should be modified, I’ve written at great length about it, I believe that either:
1) the filibuster on judicial positions should be retained or slightly lowered, as it’s for lifelong appointments, and unless we’re lowering the terms of service for federal judicial positions, a higher standard is reasonable, but that otherwise:
2) the filibuster on legislation should either be drastically cut back, or eliminated, period end of story.
Mostly I would prefer that it be cut back, and not entirely limited.
I don’t give a damn which party is in power, that’s my view, it’s long been my view, and I expect it to stay my view until such time as either the country and politics and circumstances change enough for me to warrant changing my mind, which I nonetheless reserve my right to do. 🙂
See here for some related thoughts: WHAT IT MEANS TO REQUIRE AND END A FILIBUSTER.
Then here, which includes links back to comments I made on… Obsidian Wings back, six years ago in 2005.
GOB,
I fail to see how this distinguishes public sector union members from anyone else who sells goods or services to government and also tries to influence elections or other political outcomes.
Businesses negotiate contracts with governments at all levels all the time. They also lobby for favorable legislation and special consideration, as well as doing what they can to elect candidates who will favor their industries and companies, pay generous prices, etc.
Having political influence over one’s customer is not restricted to public employee unions.
Let’s see. Thanks to Count for pointing out the screwed up link. Can’t find the exact one I quoted, but this might stand.
I also found this from the Canadian House of Commons, where the speaker is reading the riot act. No, really. Just thought everyone might be interested.
Also thanks to bc for his lengthy comment. I just pulled up Walker’s website and didn’t check the date, so maybe it was a google-fu bridge too far. I did try to find youtube videos with local news reports and went thru the local newspapers, but even that can be rather tricky (as an aside, my hometown newspaper had the headline of Obama wins the presidency balanced by a heading in equally large type about McCain getting 72% of the vote in the county. Which one could use to point out the nature of the state that my hometown is in or not, but it just demonstrates that local newspapers are embedded in the local culture, and so shouldn’t be considered as completely neutral observers)
I still feel that denying the quorum is, given the lack of consultation and the nature of the proposals, more than justified. However, one reason why I’ve been looking for (and calling for here) views from Wisconsin is because it’s always better to have as complete a picture, imho.
And while the rest wasn’t addressed to me, I’d just make a couple of points to suggest some caution. First is that the question wondering why ‘putting all Rs in a box’ is occuring is followed almost immediately by invoking a California union. I’m still not sure, but I think Brett lost his way when he started talking about prison guards, something that I have been unable to find at all in the Wisconsin stories. I don’t want to blame you, but if it sends mixed messages when you decry treating Republicans being treated as a homogeneous group and then looking at unions in other states. One could say that you were just addressing Gary’s assertion, but the ‘tend to’ does a lot of work in there. This is not giving you a yellow flag, or even a cross look, but just trying to sort out some threads that I am seeing on waking up here.
This is an interesting development A couple of points I take-away
-even though the Rs could pass non-budget amendments with a simple majority, they feel it would not be in their best interests to do that. Perhaps that is because of what happened in the Assembly, or just the weight of the protestors, but people who are advocating that Senate Rs do everything they can legally to force the Ds back are not seeing their arguments win the day.
-The article names Dale Schultz as floating a compromise of taking away bargaining rights for 2 years and then restoring them. The argument is that with the cuts in the state budget, local authorities can’t be hamstrung by collective bargaining. Here are the key grafs
Fitzgerald said Republicans could not back down now because the governor’s two-year budget blueprint, to be released in coming days, slashes spending for public schools and municipal services by $1 billion or more. Local government leaders will need to make cuts without bargaining with employees, he said.
Walker’s plan would allow unions representing most public employees to negotiate only for wage increases, not benefits or working conditions. Any wage increase above the Consumer Price Index would have to be approved in a referendum. Unions would face a vote of membership every year to stay formed, and workers could opt out of paying dues.
The plan would also require many public employees to cut their take home pay by about 8 percent by contributing more of their salaries toward their health insurance and retirement benefits. Union leaders said their members are willing to accept those concessions, but they will not give up their right to collectively bargain.
Also, it was noted that 3 (I think) of the R senators were elected with 51% of the vote. I’d be interested to know more about those races and to find the extent that voter apathy did or did not play a role.
I would note that the Walker’s far-reaching proposals don’t seem to mesh with the rationale of needing to give local municipalities the ability of make the kind of budget cuts they need and because the budget has not been previewed, it doesn’t really smell right, but that’s just me thinking that and I’d welcome more info on Walker’s proposed budget, and what sort of costs we are talking about when we talk about municipal budgets.
lj:
box comment not at all aimed at you. It was a general comment.
As for me citing California, it’s only because 1) I live here and am better informed about what is and is not working here; and 2) it’s to support my belief that bargaining at the public level. it is a good example of what can happen when unions elect their own boss through the political process.
As for the “box” thing, what Gary said. I want out of all boxes, Tony.
I am all for a livable wage, a strong middle class, etc. etc. etc. However, I think that most states are beginning to see that public employee pay and benefits are soon to be unsustainable without some changes. Like retiring after age 55.
the governor’s two-year budget blueprint, to be released in coming days, slashes spending for public schools and municipal services by $1 billion or more.
Raising taxes is of course off the table.
The entire pain of the recession is to be borne by the serfs and servants, not by the nobility.
Ever been in Kohler, WI ?
Another interesting development Wisconsin protests tapering off, but tense budget standoff remains
And yes this problem is being discussed lots of places (from the link)
At the risk of tossing kerosene on this smouldering thread, I suggest this is a good reminder why allowing unions to only argue about wages and not about working conditions might be problematic.
Gary
Thank you for welcoming me.
I have to say that i learned many great things in years of reading ObWi, and learned how to hear the other side from you and Hilzoy.
My problem is that i see us as a country approaching the point of no return and i am getting aggressive, which you probably deducted from my posts. I am not nearly informed as much as you are, i just have more of a street experience with thought on where actions lead to. I feel that not using the history to compare it to present is the way to repeat the same mistakes. When everybody is worried only about the present then things get out of control.
Recently i had an experience that scared the sh.t out of me. I live in Phoenix where there are few artificial lakes used as water reservoirs for Phoenix. I was at a gas station filling the watter bottles which was right next to Red Box kiosk. While i was doing my thing a guy was renting the movies out when he said: “i would not use that water” and while handing me his business card with his Arizona department Water resources written on top with his name and info “they do not let us inspect those anymore”. I responded with: “then i will by only new bottles”
Him:”do you know they dumped 40tons of waste into Canyon Lake, and we are not allowed to do nothing about it”
Me: “Then we are in Fascist state already”
Him:”Yes, it’s fascism already”
lj,
I would like to take a left turn, somewhat literally from the discussion of Wisconsin based on this:
I grew up as much a left wing liberal as one could be. I attended sit ins and know the words to every song in the Woodie Guthrie genre songbook. In the 20th century unions played an enormous role in making the workplace fair and safe for the working clas in our country, and there are places where they could do great things today.
The problem is they have built their own power base that they protect just as vigorously as the most mendacious of our worst corporations. To say all unions are bad and a problem is just as wrong as saying all corporations are bad and and a problem.
In 2001 and 2009 I had to stand in front of a company and tell them they would all have to take a 10% pay cut and(in 2001) start paying 20% of their health benefits.
These people didn’t have retirement benefits except whatever they put into a 401k and they weren’t getting any bonuses until further notice. This corporation wasn’t doing this because we wanted to maximize profits, we did it so we didn’t have to lay off any MORE employees and we could keep giving 120 people a job and stay in business.
So, if we all want to take a breath, talk a little less about how all unions are terrible, and all corporations don’t care about their workers maybe we can get a little perspective.
I don’t know how the leadership of the Wisconsin unions have negotiated in the past, how they have treated the budget constraints of the state or the reasonable needs of the people of the state.
I can certainly name a few unions who have negotiated lifetime employment, huge retirement packages at 50 years old and health care for life that I think have taken more than their share from the public and private sector. Some of them now own a substantial portion of GM and will soon own a lot of the state of California.
I can name some corporations who have treated workers like scum and deserve whatever they get. But it isn’t near all of them.
Marty: Have you done any homework?
Have you? Your responses certainly don’t seem to indicate that you have. For example…
I don’t know how the leadership of the Wisconsin unions have negotiated in the past, how they have treated the budget constraints of the state or the reasonable needs of the people of the state.
I. Just. Told. You.
Specifically, the unions agreed to cutbacks in the 2003-2005 biennium because of Wisconsin’s fiscal woes. They’ve also taken it in the ear the past decade — real wages have pretty much stagnated — in part because the state has pled poverty and continued austerity measures, even through the bubble. Everyone knew the unions were going to get screwed in contract negotiations in the next biennium — cf “elections have consequences” — it’s the fact that Walker doesn’t even want to negotiate (and de facto wants to remove the right to negotiate) that’s got us up in arms.
ral: I noticed that this thread brought out some fighting spirit from participants I didn’t expect (e.g., Anarch, Bernard Yomtov).
As a member of a Wisconsin public union for eight years, experiencing second-hand the bargaining and first-hand the effects of Republican antipathy towards public employees, yeah, it’s got my hackles up. I don’t like their tactics, I don’t like the fact that they out-and-out lie, I don’t like the fact that the media abets their lying, and I don’t like the fact that they get a free pass to denigrate the workers and taxpayers of Wisconsin just because we’re employed by the government. The fact that they’ve now decided to sh** all over public workers because they think they can get away with it is really gravy — though angry, angry-making gravy.
By the by, since Gary’s vaguely alluded to this up-thread: when I talk about Republicans in this thread, what they’ve done and what they’re going to do, I’m specifically talking about Republicans at high levels in the Wisconsin state government since those are the Republicans of import in these negotiations. I thought that was obvious but perhaps not. Consider that as a qualifier to statements like the above; if you’re a Republican but not in power in Wisconsin, I’m not talking about you. Apologies if anyone construed it otherwise.
I think that most states are beginning to see that public employee pay and benefits are soon to be unsustainable without some changes.
They can add that to the long, long list of stuff that’s going on that is unsustainable without some changes.
In the economic sphere, right up at the top of that list is continuing to make middle class working people pay for everybody else’s brilliant f**kups.
I’m sure there are lots of reasons why WI is in the hole. Somehow I doubt that the lavish lifestyle of WI state workers is the cause.
bc, you keep talking about conditions in CA. CA is FUBAR. WI ain’t CA.
Anarch (and russell),
With all due respect. I have not done enough of my own howmework, as I stated, to accept out of hand your assertions that the unions in Wisconsin have been completely reasonable.
The fact that they still have 100% paid benefits with no contribution from workers would make me want to look at what was traded of for that. For one example only.
Almost no where else has that been true for several years.
But, to be clear, as with corporations, I believe this is a question of the quality of the leadership, not a question of the quality, value or intentions of the workers.
I have not done enough of my own howmework, as I stated, to accept out of hand your assertions that the unions in Wisconsin have been completely reasonable.
The unions have already offered to accept the pension givebacks Walker asked for in exchange for retaining collective bargaining.
See here, around para 12.
Walker says no deal.
Walker wants to take it to the mat. So, it’s gonna go to the mat.
Yes, that’s been more or less the case for over two centuries. We’ve learned to live with it.
Take Douglas Adams’ advice, is my advice.
bc, you keep talking about conditions in CA. CA is FUBAR. WI ain’t CA.
Ahh, but it might end up being California. Why not look at California and see how it got there? Sure, Prop 13 and other things played a role, but you cannot ignore the public unions. You cannot ignore 50 and 55 year retirements and therefore the pension obligations in the future.
Wisconsin public employees are paid well. From what I gather, they get paid either right there with private employees or better. According to this analysis, Wisconsin public employees get paid 5% less than private adjusting for education (they actually get paid more if you don’t adjust for education). But from what I can tell, the report analyzes benefit pay (other than paid vacations/leave) based on what it costs government now, not what the government will have to pay in the long run (i.e. the actual present value of the benefit bestowed upon the worker). If the future obligations of public pensions are indeed underfunded now, the true cost should be accounted for now and not in, say, five years as the bill becomes due.
Also, the study adjusts for hourly work week but does not indicate whether it takes the work year into account (i.e. for teachers). I would think that it does, but if it doesn’t it under reports public employee income considerably.
It seems to me that the true cost of public employment according to this study may well be under reported, but I cannot definitively tell. So perhaps no “lavish lifestyle” but maybe there is.
And, as I said before, one of the tradeoffs for a public career with “for cause” termination, etc. was lower pay. I’m not convinced that’s happening in Wisconsin. Certainly not in many jobs in California.
“lavish lifestyle” you say?
Does anyone speak English here?
Not that there is anything wrong with French, but, what, do the faculty restrooms in Wisconsin public schools have bidets now?
Does Paul Ryan have a little Ayn Rand class bitterness because he used to butler for the local junior high school guidance counselor and parasite before he brought his Eddie Muenster act to Capitol Hill?
I agree, bc, that public pensions should be fully funded via employee and state contributions, but if they were, this would merely be another class grievance ginned up by Dick Armey among the Tea Partiers about their unfunded or non-existent private sector pension systems.
The only thing that is lavishly provided in America is horseh*t.
What is wrong with some of your fellow citizenbs being well paid ( not the publican employees are paid more than private–The Eocnomist has an article debunking that myth)?
The Eocnomist has an article debunking that myth)?
Wonkie: Not sure what article you are referring to, but is it this one? If so, that article cites the very EPI study I am questioning.
It also raises my very question:
For most people who work for the government, however, the expectation is that your year-to-year salary will be lower, but your benefits will be better, in particular your pension. It turns out, however, that state governments won’t have the money to pay a lot of those pensions. They’re likely to renege on their promises, and Republicans in Congress want to allow them to declare bankruptcy in order to do so. (Funnily enough, this may be the one area in which labour unions and Wall Street are in alliance: neither one wants states to be allowed to declare bankruptcy.) In other words, as Ezra Klein points out, the public-sector employees got rooked: they accepted lower pay in exchange for retirement benefits, and now the retirement benefits look unlikely to come through.
Putting to one side whether the government will actually pay those pensions (I assume that they will be paid), shouldn’t the actual value of those pensions be factored into the equation rather than the cost being paid out now? Frex, in California (sorry russell) once the bulk of the prison guards retire we’ll be in one heck of a mess.
And I personally don’t think a 5% difference is that significant. That’s what the EPI says the difference is (and if I’m right on the pension analysis the difference is in favor of public employment and probably greater than 5%).
Countme-in
I was just responding to russell’s comment that the lavish lifestyle of WI public employees wasn’t the cause of the fiscal crisis. I don’t think this is a case of lavish lifestyle in the traditional sense of the word. But I expect to pay less for public services than private given the greater job protection and earlier retirement. And not 5% less.
Do you really think this is a case of class warfare? I kinda agree with a comment early on in this thread that public employee pay has highlighted how hard the recession has hit the private middle class. It looks to me that a large portion of the middle class expects more of a sacrifice from the public sector than four furlough days per year.
According to this analysis, Wisconsin public employees get paid 5% less than private adjusting for education (they actually get paid more if you don’t adjust for education)
Actually, bc, according to that analysis, if you leave education etc out of it, WI public employees are paid not merely less, but much much much less than private employees.
There’s a slight differential at the high school grad level. For the 60% of public employees who hold a degree, the differential ranges from $20K less on average (for undergraduate degree holders) to over $80K (for folks holding doctorates).
You get to 5% by including *all factors* – education, age, actual hours worked.
And what I would like to point out, since it seems to slip folks’ minds, is that all of the above is true after 30 years of wage stagnation in the private sector, in the context of an economy with 10 to 20% un- or underemployment.
Things are historically freaking tough in the private sector, and WI public employees *still* make less than comparable private employees. Even with union representation and collective bargaining.
And they’ve already offered pension givebacks and other concessions in the current situation. Walker’s not interested, collective bargaining is the hill he’s going to live or die on.
So be it.
I don’t think this is a case of lavish lifestyle in the traditional sense of the word.
It’s not a case of lavish lifestyle in *any* sense of the word, at all, whatsoever.
But I expect to pay less for public services than private given the greater job protection and earlier retirement. And not 5% less.
Yeah, well sometimes we don’t get what we expect. Life’s a bitch that way.
If you actually do want lazy, incompetent, undermotivated public employees, the way you will get them is to pay them crap and tell them they should STFU and count their lucky stars that they don’t work in the private sector, where they can be laid off if their boss has a bad hair day.
“Bad hair day” sound too flippant? How about “if their boss needs to drive the cost numbers down so he or she can make their bonus”. Happens every god-damned day my friend.
Welcome to my world, b*tches.
It looks to me that a large portion of the middle class expects more of a sacrifice from the public sector than four furlough days per year.
It looks to me like a large portion of the middle class needs to get themselves a bigger piece of the pie. Why are middle class people – *all* middle class people, public and private – the only ones who are “making the sacrifice” in the first place?
It also looks to me like the strongest argument against WI public employees having collective bargaining rights is “if I can’t have it, they can’t have it”.
Which to my eye is a pretty crappy argument.
It’s funny how different people see different things in the same situation.
5% is not enough for you, you want public employee compensation to be beaten down to a greater percentage less than the private compensation. What will do it for you? 10%? 20%?
Here’s what I want. I want unearned income taxed at a rate closer to, if not equal to, earned income. I want earned income above $5 million to be taxed at something north of 50%. And I want all of the Bush tax cuts above the 15% bracket rolled back.
That’s my idea of shared sacrifice.
But we can’t have that, because it will demotivate them. They’re delicate flowers.
Seriously, WTF.
If it bugs you that WI public employees make 95% of what private employees make, maybe you should just be happy you don’t live in WI.
The only legitimate way to determine whether you’re underpaying a position, is whether you’re getting enough adequately qualified applicants to keep the position staffed. Wake me when the government has trouble getting people to take it’s jobs, until then you don’t have an argument.
By that argument, migrant workers doing agricultural labor are not being underpaid.
its. The possessive of it is its, not it’s.
/oneofmanypetpeeves
Your fairly complete, semi-irate and (to me) highly amusing source on how to use apostrophes, here.
The only legitimate way to determine whether you’re underpaying a position, is whether you’re getting enough adequately qualified applicants to keep the position staffed. Wake me when the government has trouble getting people to take it’s jobs, until then you don’t have an argument.
Step 1: Declare that the metric you prefer is the only metric for measuring something, even though there are plenty of others available that are equally legitimate. (Correct me if I’m wrong, but your, um, expertise is in engineering, not in human resources, labor low or employment economics, no?)
Step 2: Follow up with a sentence that makes certain assumptions with no cites to any actual evidence whatsoever.
Step 3: Profit!!
Wake me when the government has trouble getting people to take it’s jobs
No Brett, I think I prefer to just let you sleep.
By that argument, migrant workers doing agricultural labor are not being underpaid.
It’s sh*tty work, but compared to their alternative, it’s better money. They would be working much harder, for much, much less money and under much worse conditions in Mexico, if they could find work in the first place. Sad fact of life.
Brett is correct up to a point. A job is worth what someone is willing to do it for. However, on the employer side, you get what you pay for. My files are in pretty good shape because I pay my file clerk 35K a year plus benefits. I could hire two “don’t give a damns” at less money and I’d have more problems, get less done and ultimately spend more money unscrewing their screw-ups. Some lines of business can treat certain classes of labor as fungible, others can’t. Employers who treat their employees like raw material may be able to keep that plate spinning for a while, but they expose their own livelihoods to a better job down the street or an economic turnaround. Stupid in the mid and long term. High turnover is the sign of a poorly run business.
Henry Ford may have been strongly anti-union (among other things), but he at least go what McKinney is saying. If lots more capitalists acted like Ford, we might not have needed a labor movement to create a strong middle class. I’m guessing Bellmore Motor Company wouldn’t have lasted, had there been one.
Wake me when the government has trouble getting people to take it’s jobs
Set your alarm clock for August and the annual Philadelphia teacher shortage.
Wake me when the private sector stops their incessant whining about government jobs and solves the effing problem by hiring all of the unemployed, competent and otherwise, at wages and salaries above what the government pays.
Outbid the government for labor and lower or eliminate your taxes as the government employment market dries up.
C’mon, compete.
Most jobs could be done by inmates of federal prisons. Compared to that there are few if any underpaid persons in the country.
—
And there are people that would call the above argument valid (and some of them run for-profit prisons including supply rackets involving the judiciary)
If you haven’t seen this already, a blogger at The Buffalo Beast managed to speak to Gov. Walker by calling up and pretending to be David Koch. Walker eagerly took his call and spoke at length. It’s a real peek under the hood: http://www.buffalobeast.com/?p=5045 .
My favorite part is that Walker admits explicitly to having considered placing troublemakers among the union ralliers and supporters.
Wake me when the government has trouble getting people to take it’s jobs
This strikes me as a bizarre point. The government can probably fill its employee requisitions even with dramatic compensation reductions. I’m sure there are completely unqualified people who would be happy to work as bridge inspectors or Child Protective Service investigators. But I don’t want unqualified people doing those jobs. I don’t think anyone does. Do you really want to have unqualified or inexperienced or mentally unstable people making determinations about which children will be taken from their families by the state?
I mean, much of what the government does is important. And it is important enough that having qualified people working there can make a big difference. Dropping compensation by 20% may seem like a brilliant money saving plan until the lower calibre of applicants screw up and cause lawsuits that require millions of dollars to pay out.
Brett is correct up to a point.
Brett is an engineer. I can virtually guarantee you that I can find someone who will do what Brett does, in his market, as well as Brett does or close enough that it don’t matter, for less money than Brett gets paid.
Ergo, Brett is overpaid.
There’s always somebody out there hungrier than you are. Watch your backs, y’all.
A job is worth what someone is willing to do it for.
Define “worth”.
However, on the employer side, you get what you pay for.
Aha! The penny drops. We begin to examine the meaning of “value”.
Some lines of business can treat certain classes of labor as fungible, others can’t.
In real life, damned few. I’m hard pressed to think of one.
Actually, bc, according to that analysis, if you leave education etc out of it, WI public employees are paid not merely less, but much much much less than private employees.
Not sure what you mean by “etc.” russell. According to the source study , if education is left out of it, public employees make almost exactly the same ($33 more per year). That’s because those without a high school education do really, really good in public employment. And those with higher degrees make a lot less.
Adjusting for “everything” it comes out public employment is 4.8% lower. This is within what I think the margin of error is personally when you see where the data comes from.
But nobody is addressing my point that the study “values” non-wage compensation–specifically pensions–by using the current cost to the government. I could be wrong here and that’s why I’ve asked for feedback, but it seems to me that this completely eliminates the booming pension problem. If the future obligations for current employees exceed the current output, that reflects greater value to current employees. Much as we value a pension using a present value analysis, some effort should be made to analyze the non-wage value of the future benefit to current public employees in comparing public to private compensation.
If you actually do want lazy, incompetent, undermotivated public employees, the way you will get them is to pay them crap and tell them they should STFU and count their lucky stars that they don’t work in the private sector, where they can be laid off if their boss has a bad hair day.
Looked at another way, what would be the value to you, russell, of having for cause employment? Maybe you already have that. Certainly that has a value or unions and employees wouldn’t be bargaining for that. IMHO, it has a significant value. As do less hours, mucho vacation days and an 8-5 work week. In my profession, many make the rational, valid choice to do government work in exchange for less money. Because the non-wage benefits are worth it to them. Sometimes it’s just the experience. Nowhere in the analysis I cited is there an effort to account for greater job security. Some effort is made to account for less hours, but I’m not convinced that was really accurate (I’ve emailed the author on this point).
Seriously, WTF.
If it bugs you that WI public employees make 95% of what private employees make, maybe you should just be happy you don’t live in WI.
You know, I don’t stay up at night worrying about public employment, even here in California. The pay of some public employees in CA does bug me, I guess. But it’s not in a “gee I hate union workers” way, more of a “we’re getting fleeced” way. I’m more than happy to pay a fair wage/benefit package and my general expectations are more or less what I’ve stated above. I haven’t quantified whether it’s 5% or 20%. It depends on the job.
My main point in bringing up the study was to have a discussion based on facts. There is a lot of hand wringing about the pay on both sides. On the right, a lot are saying they are overpaid. On the left, saying that’s not so. Well, it either is or it isn’t in my book and it’s a really, really valid criterion for discussion in making public policy.
And then there is argument deflection. I’m actually very receptive to your middle class rant, russell, which is why I brought it up in an earlier comment. You are arguing with me (I think) over something I’m not trying to argue over.
Turb, I don’t think the folks arguing for cutting government employee wages and salaries are going to be convinced by the argument that government jobs and functions are important.
You are logical. Brett is principled.
Smile to the two of ya.
I just hope the tens of millions of engineers a click away in India, China, and the Mideast can be staved off from taking Brett up on his principles long enough to get him through until retirement.
By the way, I don’t want anyone and certainly not Brett or his family to lose their job, nor to endure salary and benefit cuts.
This longing for others to suffer as much as the market for suffering can bear is so animalistic …. except for the longing part.
That last is human, but also ineffably American.
There but by the grace of God go I, sucker.
By the way, a link to Phil’s referral to the Buffalo Beast punking of the Wisonsin Governor is in my most recent comment on the “The Wisconsin Waltz” thread.
Brett is an engineer. I can virtually guarantee you that I can find someone who will do what Brett does, in his market, as well as Brett does or close enough that it don’t matter, for less money than Brett gets paid.
Ergo, Brett is overpaid.
Probably not, in every respect. Brett’s employer has already done the cost/benefit analysis of trying to find someone who can do the job better and cheaper. Further, you don’t know the new “someone” can do the job better until you put them on the job. I’ve been disappointed many times with new hires who looked good on paper and talked a good game and couldn’t or wouldn’t cut the mustard.
There’s always somebody out there hungrier than you are. Watch your backs, y’all.
Yes, but ‘hungry’ is only part of the equation. If they have the chops, it’s because they are already doing something somewhere in an exemplary fashion. That person’s boss has two choices: increase pay to meet competition for the employee’s services or lose the bidding war.
A job is worth what someone is willing to do it for.
Define “worth”.
What a willing employer is willing to pay and what a person desiring employment is willing to accept.
However, on the employer side, you get what you pay for.
Aha! The penny drops. We begin to examine the meaning of “value”.
Of course. Any successful business offers a product or service that its market values and is willing to pay for. An employee’s value is the qualitative incremental enhancement to the company’s product that employee brings to the table adjusted for that employee’s ability to leave and get better work somewhere else.
Some lines of business can treat certain classes of labor as fungible, others can’t.
In real life, damned few. I’m hard pressed to think of one.
That’s because you are preoccupied with what’s going in Wisconsin. 🙂 In reality, you recognize this fact everyday. You pick your car repair shops by who does the best work for the best price and the shop that delivers keeps its better people by treating them right. Ditto restaurants, dry cleaners, etc. When you buy a car, you look, I am assuming, at safety and maintenance costs. These are a function of a quality work force.
There but by the grace of God go I, sucker.
Indeed.
Not sure what you mean by “etc.” russell. According to the source study , if education is left out of it, public employees make almost exactly the same ($33 more per year).That’s because those without a high school education do really, really good in public employment.
Wait, which public employees are we talking about without HS diplomas here? Because I know we are not talking about teachers, which is the group being put up on the sacrifical fire in Wisconsin.
Brett’s employer has already done the cost/benefit analysis of trying to find someone who can do the job better and cheaper.
Presumably, while Brett is actively employed and productive, his employer is not actively looking to replace him for someone cheaper. Nonetheless, as russell suggests, the person who can do Brett’s job as well as Brett can, and will do so for less money, exists. Should his/her resume happen to fall across the right person’s desk, or should she/he happen to meet the right person at a networking or social event, the question of whether Brett is over- or underpaid will suddenly become much less abstract.
More to the point: the way my employer does this is, approximately as follows. They poll the entire industry (which is fairly broadly defined as our competition, plus some ancillary industries) to see what they’re paying their engineers, categorized by position, years of service, etc, and then compare me to that standard.
Our raises, and whether we get raises, are dictated in this way to a great extent.
The question of whether someone is willing to be hired to do my job for less is irrelevant. What’s relevant is whether people of my approximate education and level of skill are compensated, on average, more or less than I am. If that answer slides, year over year, into the “less” column, my pay would get frozen. I’m not sure if we’ve ever been in a situation where a pay cut would be called for, so I’m not sure if the potential for pay cut is even part of the process.
I’m not saying this is how the market works, in general, but it seems to be more proactively market-driven than waiting until all of your talent has been hired away before you consider adjusting compensation upward, and the converse of all that.
MckT:
“atlatl” it is.
Thank you, and Gesundheit.
McKinney, you seem to be confusing the idealized model of labor markets, which many economists use, with actual labor markets, as they function, less than ideally.
And there are some pretty crappy auto-repair places, drycleaners and restaurants getting by, even doing well, by the grace of imperfect and incomplete information, not to mention less than perfectly rational consumer behavior.
More to the point: the way my employer does this is, approximately as follows. They poll the entire industry (which is fairly broadly defined as our competition, plus some ancillary industries) to see what they’re paying their engineers, categorized by position, years of service, etc, and then compare me to that standard.
So you mean there’s a metric that professional HR people and executives use to determine payment for particular positions that has absolutely nothing to do with what Brett claimed is “The only legitimate way to determine whether you’re underpaying a position?”
Color me shocked.
I urge everyone to check on the link that Phil has above, noted by Countme-in. I really hope we can agree that bad faith is the most generous term we can call this.
HSH
You forgot to add the final point of Henry Ford’s action of doubling the average daily pay to his employees.
When he was asked: ?why double wages for your workers?” He answered:
“So they can buy my cars!”
Those who understand Economics 101, know what that means and how important is for economy. For others: It means that by raising their wages he got more customers who will by his product and he got more profit.
Then in play comes economies of scale, initial investment and labor cost to explain how it works.
In short, even they do not understand it, republicans are pushing for RACE TO THE BOTTOM by asking for other groups to earn less. Over enough of given time EVERYBODY earns less, hence race to the bottom, where there is less and less consumers.
Another point that republicans completely miss is they are looking at people that occupy jobs instead on jobs. People can move from job to job and achieve better living, but the jobs (pay level) they used to occupy stay at same pay level. That’s why their mantra: “If I succeeded, you can too”, completely fail to understand the economic fundamentals.
Looking at the moral side of things, which republicans are invoking all the times,: Why do you republicans want other people to earn less? Why do you want others to work for slave wages? Would you like for yourself to earn less?
And now that link down with a database error. I hope it will return.
Not sure what you mean by “etc.” russell.
“not just education but also age, experience, gender, race, etc.”
According to the source study , if education is left out of it, public employees make almost exactly the same ($33 more per year).
If you’re referring to the EPI study, I don’t see that. We must be looking at different stuff.
Looked at another way, what would be the value to you, russell, of having for cause employment? Maybe you already have that.
I do not have that. Hard to quantify what the value would be. There isn’t a huge public sector market for what I do, so I’ve never really thought about it.
I did recently see a Monster posting for 8 positions opening in a field sorta-kinda like what I do. Top salary offered was about 2/3 of what I make. I can tell you that I would not give up 1/3 of my compensation for “for cause” employment.
If I worked in a totally different job market than I do, it might be more tempting. Hard to say.
You are arguing with me (I think) over something I’m not trying to argue over.
Noted.
Probably not, in every respect.
To be honest, unless Brett is an extremely rare beast in his local job market, I’m pretty comfortable standing behind my claim.
Brett’s employer has already done the cost/benefit analysis of trying to find someone who can do the job better and cheaper.
Neither you nor I have any idea if this is true.
Further, you don’t know the new “someone” can do the job better until you put them on the job.
What you’re saying is that labor is not fungible. Which is not only something I agree with, it’s sort of my point.
Define “worth”.
What a willing employer is willing to pay and what a person desiring employment is willing to accept.
Thoroughly inconsistent with the idea of labor non-fungibility, as espoused by you one paragraph earlier.
You pick your car repair shops by who does the best work for the best price and the shop that delivers keeps its better people by treating them right. Ditto restaurants, dry cleaners, etc. When you buy a car, you look, I am assuming, at safety and maintenance costs.
Once again, demonstrating the non-fungibility of labor. A principle I not only agree with, but which is basically my point.
A market model is not a good model for determining the value of what people do.
It’s *a* way to establish a price, but like all purely market mechanisms, it may do so at a point that is socially harmful.
Markets only consider an extremely narrow set of parameters.
I did recently see a Monster posting for 8 positions opening in a field sorta-kinda like what I do.
Sorry, s/b “8 public sector positions” etc.
And, of course, those public sector positions were with the department of unemployment compensation and job training.
There’s always growth somewhere.
McKinneyTexas: You pick your car repair shops by who does the best work for the best price and the shop that delivers keeps its better people by treating them right. Ditto restaurants, dry cleaners, etc.
Mostly true, although there are those people who just go for the lowest price [can’t put my finger on the quote about “legitimate prey”].
Alas, on the larger scale, the people who run large companies nowadays typically are not the owners, but hired hands, often motivated solely by the next quarter’s results.
In my own field (software engineering) I have often seen poor decisions, including hiring decisions, lead to lower quality, higher costs, even total project failure. When the people making decisions don’t comprehend the problems or are rewarded based on poorly chosen criteria you get bad results. This extends to government too.
Now you can say that in the long run the market will take care of this, it will all shake out. But, “in the long run, we’re all dead.”
“Are there some pretty crappy …… etc?”
Well, we have no rational basis on which to judge how crappy the market would be in an unencumbered world, so we can’t answer the question.
Get government and those pesky gummint employees out of the way and we’ll be able to define crappy downwards by ridding the country of licensing, restaurant inspections, dry cleaner chemical disposal rules, not to mention minimum wage and working standards, and, heck, let’s get rid of the public schools altogether to encourage child labor at the car repair shop, the restaurants, and the dry cleaners, etc, and then we can judge how crappy, crappy can get and what crap the market will bear.
I suspect if American wages keep getting lowered across the board for all of the myraid reasons McManus will tell us, we’ll learn more about the minimum crap line.
Until the lead is put back in paint and little kids are free to consume the lead without government warnings and intervention, I don’t see how we can make an informed judgment.
We used to do more for more. Now we do more for less. When we reach maximum “do just about everything for nothing”, maybe crap will seem sublime, to those on the “nothing” end of the equation.
Until the lead is put back in paint and little kids are free to consume the lead without government warnings and intervention, I don’t see how we can make an informed judgement.
If you sing the “until the lead is put back in paint…” as a blues lyric, you’ll understand why it bears repeating.
Countme–in, I should have guessed! [you say you want …]
Thank you, and Gesundheit.
Au grauten, amigo.
And there are some pretty crappy auto-repair places, drycleaners and restaurants getting by, even doing well, by the grace of imperfect and incomplete information, not to mention less than perfectly rational consumer behavior.
Agreed. You can’t fix stupid or lazy or ignorant. Long term survival of substandard products and services is questionable. Individuals with sufficient motivation and innate ability who aren’t short term stupid and who are honest will do fairly well. Of course my model is somewhat idealized, but I see it hold true day in and day out. I see the other too.
Neither you nor I have any idea if this is true.
I think I do have a pretty good idea, unless Brett’s company is run by dummies. I do ongoing performance analyses of everyone of my employees. I bet you’re reviewed too. Some people get raises after reviews, some get pointed suggestions on areas of improvement, some get sent on to other opportunities. Add to that Slarti’s comment about industry wide surveys, which lawyers also have, and you get a pretty good feel for averages. My point about “value” is that on either side of average is “above” and “below”. People who perform at those levels are, over the long haul, compensated accordingly.
Thoroughly inconsistent with the idea of labor non-fungibility, as espoused by you one paragraph earlier.
Not at all. I hire in at one price and increase or maintain depending on performance. My law partner started off as one of six law clerks. To keep her after she’d been my lead associate for 5 years–in the face of a superior offer–I promised here a job as long I practiced law and to make her my partner as soon as that was in my power. However, he entry level pay was $10/hr, just like everyone else.
A market model is not a good model for determining the value of what people do.
Market determines value on fungibles, i.e. jobs that virtually anyone can do. It also determines entry level and, eventually, maximum value for most common callings.
But, “in the long run, we’re all dead.”
True enough, but what companies stay in business who consistently lose money, other than certain banks and auto manufacturers who are too big to fail?
Slarti: I’m not saying this is how the market works, in general, but it seems to be more proactively market-driven than waiting until all of your talent has been hired away before you consider adjusting compensation upward, and the converse of all that.
Wrenching this back on topic for a moment: as employees of the state, professor’s salaries at UW-Madison are available to the public. Interestingly, they were also online until about four years ago when they mysteriously vanished and became accessible solely to those who went to the appropriate state office and submitted a formal request. I’m told that this was because UW-Madison — a Tier 1 research university and (formerly?) one of the best public universities in the United States — was paying its professors so atrociously that other universities’ departments were using the online salary listings to poach our faculty; and they were so successful that the administration felt they had to hide the salary listings or face decimation.
True enough, but what companies stay in business who consistently lose money, other than certain banks and auto manufacturers who are too big to fail?
The New York Post and, even worse, the Washinton Times.