I used to respect Wisconsin. I admired Russ Feingold. He was one of the few senators to be outspoken about the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also worked with Senator John McCain on Campaign Finance Reform. But the spirit of La Follette's Progressives seems to be extinct in Wisconsin. The Tea Party movement that so eloquently swept the country in the Midterm elections has put people in power in Madison who are not only inane, but impervious to any sense of reason.
The egregious actions of Governor Scott Walker against the rights of public sector workers to collectively bargain combined with the tax cuts passed by the Wisconsin legislature for multinational corporations demonstrate the full platform of the modern day Republican Party. This platform is fundamentally based on the dual subjugation of the middle class and further empowerment of the ultra elite in the nation.
The Tea Party Express unlike the movements of unemployed youth in Tunisia or Egypt was not predicated on social change, but on a retrenchment of the status quo, the status quo that was fundamentally delivered by the Reagan Revolution. Deregulation and limited taxation continued to be heralded by the right in this country as the “spoonful of sugar” for the American economy. They deny that Alan Greenspan's and Milton Friedman’s economic policies of limited government had anything to do with the current economic crisis.
Moreover, it is a magician's explanation of the financial crisis based on promoting home ownership for the poor and government regulation of the mortgage market that breeds the reasoning behind ending collective bargaining in the public sector. In other words, it was not the ill-advised business practices of the executives of General Motors that necessitated the government sponsored bailout, but wage, benefits and pension demands of the United Autoworkers Union.
With this reasoning, we can see why Governor Walker and the Republican-controlled Wisconsin State Senate are so impervious to negotiation. It does not matter that the Wisconsin teaching unions are willing to compromise on benefits and compensation, the real elephant in the room is the communistic, socialist workers unions that are weighing down on the Wisconsin budget, not the hundreds of millions in tax cuts passed earlier this year by the State Senate.
Understanding the Republican mentality it is no surprise that the next victims following the ousting of Russ Feingold, the Democratic governor and legislature are the public sector employees. Everyone knows that teachers and other public sector employees serve no purpose in Wisconsin’s society. And what the Republican party has demonstrated is the true nature of their party platform; taking benefits away from the middle class and giving more benefits to the ultra elite. I leave you with Paul Krugman's Op-Ed piece in the New York Times last weekend:
In any case, however, Mr. Ryan was more right than he knew. For what’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.
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