Wisconsin

I know it seems a little callous to write about anything other than Japan right now, but a) I think this remains a crucial issue for Americans, even amid the catastrophe overseas and b) I'm always about a week behind the curve, so just hold your horses for my thoughts on Japan.

Forget for a moment all of the particulars - wages, health insurance deductions, collective bargaining, etc. There's only one thing you need to know about Governor Walker's corporatist coup d'état (under the auspices of a budget repair bill): Not one person impacted by the legislation is getting rich by working for the state of Wisconsin. To hear people talk, you'd think teachers and other state workers were living high on the hog, making big bucks for no work, spending summers and holidays at lavish second homes in the French Riviera, throwing cocaine-fueled Christmas parties, and retiring in luxury at the ripe old age of 52. They are not.

This all comes back to something I talked about during the healthcare reform debate. For decades, Republicans have worked tirelessly to convince a certain segment of the population that the bulk of their tax dollars are being given away for free to a bunch of lazy, undeserving, freeloading minorities. It started obviously enough with the war on welfare. They found that it was remarkably easy to raise the ire of working class whites with the image of black welfare queens popping out babies and cashing government checks. It didn't matter what tiny fraction of national spending was directed toward aid to poor individuals and families, nor did anyone care to understand the circumstances that led people into difficult situations. All that mattered was that some black nogoodnick might be getting something for free. 

They took this a step further during the healthcare reform debates of the 90's and 00's by pretending that Hillary and Obama were attempting to give healthcare away to derelicts. They were so successful in making this case that millions of people were willing to turn down better, more affordable health care for themselves in order to ensure that no lazy, undeserving, freeloading un-white people would get something for free. They were more concerned about that horrible prospect in 2009 than they were about the trillion-plus dollars we had just handed out to a handful of rich, corporate bankers who had just forced the entire world into a recession. In fact, Republicans are still fighting tooth and claw to repeal the final, shitty, compromise bill while a motley crew of white collar criminals continue to enjoy their own personal fortunes (hundreds of millions each), which they may as well have taken directly out of our pockets as payment for hand-delivering us to our current state of financial calamity.

Now they're determined to rid the world of the scourge of unions. Those pesky public employees, with their mid-five-figure salaries, dragging the U.S. into a black hole of debt. Don't they understand that we're broke and that we simply can't afford to pay mediocre wages AND the deferred compensation they were promised in exchange for taking thankless jobs with mediocre wages? They should be grateful to have jobs at all and thank us all for stagnant, mediocre wages and decreasing benefits - at least until bankers are back to making record profits on Wall Street. Oh wait...they are.

The most surreal part of this Wisconsin fiasco has been the attempt to paint teachers as greedy bastards. Apparently, the existence of a few sub-par and downright poor teachers among the tens of thousands of excellent, hardworking ones is enough to taint the whole profession. Apparently if ONE bad teacher is making more than he or she deserves, they're ALL making more than they deserve. And the link to minorities no longer needs to be the least bit explicit. Republicans have so successfuly trained a certain type of American to have a Pavlovian response to these class war tactics that race can be totally irrelevant and it still works. When they talk about idle, unfireable teachers, their target audience will picture a sassy, insolent black person collecting three times the salary of a McDonald's employee. That same audience won't bat an eye at the ties between Scott Walker and the billionaire Koch brothers.

Forget the race aspect for the time being. Walker's actions are just as repellent without it. In an attempt to bust unions, avoid raising taxes on his wealthiest consituents, and further his own political and ideological ambitions, Walker is taking advantage of an unfortunate little misconception Americans have - namely, that our public schools suck. Here's what's interesting about that: A quarter century of polling consistently shows that while Americans generally rate the nation's school system poorly, parents rate their own kids' schools very favorably. We've bought into a myth that flies in the face of our own experience. Imagine that. Walker is cynically propagating and amplifying this unfortunate fallacy to the detriment of the hardworking people who are responsible for educating our children. He is essentially saying "Yes...teachers suck and we're overpaying them!"

Consider these fun facts: Millionaires now believe that $7.5 million dollars is the threshhold for being truly rich; 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined (more on wealth disparity here); Compared to other nations, U.S. teachers teach more for less pay (and before you complain that they have summers off, please explain what you'd like them to do about that). What do all of those apparently unrelated bits of information add up to? The simple fact that it's outrageous to pretend that teachers are sucking America dry. It's even more outrageous to demand that they be the ones to sacrifice [more than they already do] at this moment. It's not only outrageous, it's dangerous. These are the people we entrust our children to on a daily basis. If we actually believe, as Whitney Houston does, that the children are the future, we need these people to be invested in that future. We cannot pile indignity upon insult upon pay cut and expect them to give a shit about our little shits.

In Michigan, Republicans refuse even to put a salary cap on the "emergency managers" that they hope to be allowed to install, by fiat, in place of elected municipal governments. But teachers...well, teachers are a different matter altogether. Yes, there are many more teachers than, say, "emergency managers." Yes, that means that it would be super easy to balance the budget by simply reducing the overall compensation of all teachers. That doesn't make it right. That makes it lazy. And wrongheaded.

Wisconsin has been the focus of the headlines, but the elections of 2010 put Republicans in a position to pull this shit all over America. It's happening. It looked like we might be on the verge of a revolution of sorts until the crisis in Japan. We must multitask. We must not allow our rage to subside. Do not think for a moment that Republicans will hesitate to take advantage of this distraction. However tragic it may be, they will seize it, they will capitalize on it, and they will reorder the country as they see fit...if we let them.

Comments

[Simon Jester]

If you want me to agree that teachers deserve more money, Sure, I agree. If you want me to agree that Republicans are jerks who are using this situation to their advantage, Sure, I'll agree with that too. But you will never get me to agree that ANY Government employee deserves to be in a Union and posses collective bargaining. We are the government, they are collectively bargaining with themselves. If you don't like the way things are being run by the current administration, then vote them out!

Unions work with big corporations, The people say give us more money or we will strike, if they strike, the corporation looses money and must decide whether to give them what they want or go out of business.

Is it wise to put your government out of business? Or in this case, put yourself out of business? You are the government!

If we privatized out schools it would be some companies job to teach our kids, if they were not doing that, they would not get paid and lose their business forcing our government to hire someone different that would do a better job, it would be in their best interest to keep their teachers happy and make sure their students get the best education that can be provided.

[CP]

Well look, I don't have a particularly well-formed opinion about the philosophical and political implications of government employees being unionized. My piece was primarily about Walker & Co's treatment of Wisconsin's public employees. I will say this: I think non-unionized multi-national corporations have proven themselves to be spectacularly adept at bilking the government for dollars through no-bid contracts and fraud, while the teachers of Wisconsin, for example, have been perhaps overly reasonable, earning less than many U.S. teachers and less than most teachers in the industrialized world - so it does seem to me that the system has worked pretty well. I don't really see why they don't "deserve" the same right to collectively bargain as anyone else. Would you argue that a government contractor ought not have unionized employees?