If there was any doubt that Scott Walker is but a tool of money, cast it aside and read what follows. This is from the bill he is pushing, the one that also outlaws collective bargaining for public employees:
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).
In other words, crony capitalism.
If Walker succeeds here, expect to see him on a national ticket. Palin/Walker? Bush/Walker? Romney/Walker? Whoring for money is usually rewarded here in the land of the free.
The above photo appeared in my inbox this morning, courtesy of family members, a brother in Montana and a cousin in Wisconsin. The caption was “How the Senators escaped Wisconsin.” You probably don’t want to hit me with something like that after I’ve had nightmares about hail storms and my son being arrested (in my dream, OK?). I responded
Wow, this is impressive. A new low for you guys! You are at once insulting mentally challenged people and the brave men and women in Wisconsin who are fighting a fight for you. You don’t even know that it’s for your rights that they are fighting. If I were so low as to use your crude form of humor, I might suggest that there are seats reserved on that bus … for you.
As usual, you guys remind me of prisoners in an unlocked cell. The jailer is not worried about you. You’re not going anywhere.
Yeah, we’re one big happy family, and I wish I could take that response back. The part about seats on the bus, anyway. That was bad. That bus represents a crude slur of mentally challenged kids, and is part of this culture in which we live. Have you seen that show Tosh.O on Comedy Central? We are backsliding. It’s OK now to ridicule people in public based on race, personal appearance and handicaps. That show is extremely offensive, but common fare. We’re decadent and in precipitous decline.
The battle in Wisconsin is not Armageddon. Not by a long shot. Governor Walker says he’s in it for the long haul. He’s intent on busting that union. Club for Growth was running ads in Wisconsin urging people to contact their representatives to support the bill even before Democratic representatives in Madison were given a copy. Walker is connected to the national money, and his efforts are part of a larger thrust. This is the new right wing. The true fanatics, the wild men – the Koch Brothers and John Birchers – are out of their cages. They were freed by 9/11, and after Citizens United, smell blood. They are going for the jugular.
Crazy times! But they won’t win. It’s been decades now since Americans understood class warfare. My cousin and brother who sent that awful email are unaware of it still, or are so deluded as to think that they are on the side that is fighting for the rights of ordinary people.
The folks in Madison might lose. As surely as we sit here, the moles of the back rooms of the national security apparatus are looking into the lives of those fourteen senators, searching for dirt, for ways to extort them back into Wisconsin. One or two will fold, seeing his or her life and reputation threatened. And that particular battle will be lost.
"Fighting Bob" La FolletteBut out of it will come a newly energized set of “Fighting Bob’s”, and a smart and tough minority of people will realize that the stakes are real, and high. There will be more protests, and the more violent the right wing becomes, the more likely will be victory for regular people. Scott Walker might have thought that his Koch-Brothers support made him invincible, but all he has done is awaken the slumbering beast.
So as bad as it looks, as bad as it is going to get, it is going to get better.
And most importantly, all of those people in Madison who are sleeping outdoors and eating pizza (paid for by supporters all over the world)* know that it all happened because of Scott Walker. Two lessons will not be lost on them: one, that the national and state Democratic Party apparatchiks are not there for them, and two, solidarity. Those pizzas are not being supplied by Obama and Company. They are coming from their real friends.
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*To make a donation to feed the hungry strikers, visit the “Welcome” page on Ian’s Pizza’s Facebook account.
“The first duty of the press is to obtain the earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the time, and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the common property of the nation … The Press lives by disclosures … For us, with whom publicity and truth are the air and light of existence, there can be no greater disgrace than to recoil from the frank and accurate disclosure of facts as they are. We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences — to lend no convenient shelter to acts of injustice and oppression, but to consign them at once to the judgment of the world.” (Robert Lowe, editorial writer for The London Times, 1851
Mr. Lowe He had been asked by his editor to refute the claim of a government minister that if the press hoped to share the influence of statesmen, it “must also share in the responsibilities of statesmen.” (h/t: Creators.com, Alexander Cockburn)
When I talk to senior government officials on the phone, it’s my own policy — our conversations are confidential. If I want to use anything from that conversation, then I will ask permission. (Tim Russert)
(Hint: If you were a journalist and hundreds of government officials attended your funeral to honor you, you probably didn’t do your job.)
I’m not going to look this up. I laughed when I heard it, as it is apparently straight news, which makes it even funnier. What I heard was this: “Democratic party organizers have arrived in Madison this weekend.”
I swear – it is not from the Onion.
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Do you suppose they are there to talk them down, urge the protesters to give it up and go home? Are they carrying a message from Obama that says “I said hope for change. I did not say to actually do anything. Now go home!”
CNN”s Parker-Spitzer last night had interesting coverage of the protests in Madison, Wisconsin. Elliot Spitzer was absent, and in his stead was CNN’s Ali Velshi.
Fourteen Wisconsin Democrats have fled the state rather than face certain passage of of a Republican bill that strips benefits and collective bargain rights from state public employee unions. Their absence means no quorum, and no vote. Velshi was visibly upset about this, and confronted John Nichols, a journalist from the Capital Times, a Madison newspaper. He said that the voters had spoken last year, that there were no surprises going on, and that it was time for the Senators to come back and face the music.
John Nichols of Capital TimesNichols said not so fast … he had followed then gubernatorial candidate Scott Walker, and nary once during the campaign did he even hint that he had such plans for public employees. The whole thing is a surprise, introduced in a bill last Friday with passage demanded yesterday. Democrats had asked for a slow-down, if only to have some debate on the issue, and Republicans said no – up or down vote only. Now!
Wisconsin is not facing a budget crisis, which makes all of this even more interesting. They are running short about $150 million, all produced by bills passed by the legislature this year to give tax breaks to businesses and wealthy people. It’s almost as if they are following the Bushies’s game plan, which is to create massive deficits through tax breaks and military spending, and then demand a crackdown on social programs to make up for the resulting deficits. It is all Kabuki theater right now in DC, but this also appears to be Obama’s game.
Anyway, I am proud of the Wisconsin Democrats, as they are playing dirty. They are Democrats, of course, and as I’ve often noted, being a Democrat is much like sitting in the center of a bowl of Jello. Will they fold? Most likely. They are, after all, Democrats.
But their gesture also exposes the lie of the Democrats in DC, 2006-2010, that they could not get anything done due to mean old Republicans. They always had plenty of available weapons, among them the ability to play dirty. They chose not to fight hard. This is because, in my view, the leaders of the Democratic party are complicit with Republican ideals. Up at the top, it’s really only one party.
Governor Scott Thompson of Wisconsin has set off huge demonstrations and blowback with his state budget cutbacks. There are throngs of state workers who object to his cuts in benefits, his anti-unionism, and especially his threat to call out the National Guard to disperse the crowd.
In Colorado, Governor John Hickenlooper has proposed similar cuts, but there’s not outrage, no demonstrations, nothing.
Both Thompson and Hickenlooper are radical right wingers who are afraid to challenge wealth, hold unions and workers in contempt, and are smitten by the anti-gubbmint neurosis so effectively marketed from 1980 forward.
Why is it that one encounters such resistance, the other not? Could it be that Thompson is a Republican, and Hickenlooper a Democrat?
Could it be that Democrats, as usual, are asleep at the wheel when a guy with a “D” after his name holds office?
Of course. Democrats are, after all, the problem.
____________________ PS: Years ago, not too long after Bush took office, Karl Rove talked about building a “permanent Republican majority.” I scoffed a little bit, knowing Republican’s proclivity to self-destruct. Little did I understand back then that the road to that permanent majority was going to be through the Democratic Party. It’s easy to see looking backwards, however. Merely change the “R” to a “D”, put them in office, and they do your work for you while the base sleeps.
Project Censored’s top censored story of 2009 was the death toll in Iraq, said to be close to 1.2 million dead in the wake of the 2003 invasion. It was a poll done by Opinion Research Business, a British polling group whose results are generally thought to be reliable when they do not contradict official truth. The true number of dead in Iraq will never be known, just as we now only speculate about the casualties of the Vietnam War. It’s considered bad taste – we do not investigate our own crimes. Only those of others.
I’ve been round and round with that at a number of sites over the years, and am familiar with the mindset/reaction that follows. The only research-based studies put forward are by groups like Lancet and ORB, and there are no counter-studies. Instead, there is hostile denial, and accusations that I wear a shiny hat. So all of the research is on one side, and only denial on the other. It is a classic emperor’s new clothes environment.
I’ve long accepted that the death toll is much, much higher than anyone acknowledges. (And note the ease with which hand-over-heart patriots accept lower tolls like only 65,000 or 100,000 – as if that was acceptable!).
But the mechanics are troubling – American bombs are not nearly as accurate as the Pentagon says, and targeting is not only at “combatants,” as in counterinsurgency, the domestic population is the enemy. So death from the sky accounts for quite a bit of carnage. But even Lancet said that such deaths were a minority of the casualties.
Surprise raids on Iraqi householdsOthers merely presume to know that crazy Iraqis are killing each other (we are neither crazy nor killers, you see), but Lancet attributed 56% of the casualties to American violence. How is it happening?
[ORB] points out that the logic to this carnage lies in a statistic released by the US military and reported by the Brookings Institute: for the first four years of the occupation the American military sent over 1,000 patrols each day into hostile neighborhoods, looking to capture or kill “insurgents” and “terrorists.” (Since February 2007, the number has increased to nearly 5,000 patrols a day, if we include the Iraqi troops participating in the American surge.) Each patrol invades an average of thirty Iraqi homes a day, with the mission to interrogate, arrest, or kill suspects. In this context, any fighting age man is not just a suspect, but a potentially lethal adversary. Our soldiers are told not to take any chances.
According to US military statistics, again reported by the Brookings Institute, these patrols currently result in just under 3,000 firefights every month, or just under an average of one hundred per day (not counting the additional twenty-five or so involving our Iraqi allies). Thousands of patrols result in thousands of innocent Iraqi deaths and unconscionably brutal detentions.
Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars. The house-to-house aspect of the war is hardly mentioned here in the land of the free, but My Lai-style face-to-face killing is the essence of counterinsurgency. Rebels have to be rooted out of their communities, exposed, imprisoned and made examples, tortured and killed. It is a truly remarkable feat of propaganda that we know so little of the violence that we have inflicted on that country. From 1991 forward, from the initial bombing and destruction of civilian infrastructure to the sanctions and bombings of the 1990s’ to the 2003 invasion, the toll is staggering. Iraq ranks somewhere between Rwanda and Pol Pot in casualties, and who knows – we may top old Pol before we are done. The country is not yet pacified.
And then there is the exodus:
Iraqis’ attempts to escape the violence have resulted in a refugee crisis of mammoth proportion. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency and the International Organization for Migration, in 2007 almost 5 million Iraqis had been displaced by violence in their country, the vast majority of which had fled since 2003. Over 2.4 million vacated their homes for safer areas within Iraq, up to 1.5 million were living in Syria, and over 1 million refugees were inhabiting Jordan, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, and Gulf States. Iraq’s refugees, increasing by an average of almost 100,000 every month, have no legal work options in most host states and provinces and are increasingly desperate.
Yet more Iraqis continue to flee their homes than the numbers returning, despite official claims to the contrary. Thousands fleeing say security is as bad as ever, and that to return would be to accept death. Most of those who return are subsequently displaced again.
The underlying tragedy is that those who flee are those who can afford to flee. Iraq’s educated classes are leaving, the professionals, the doctors, civil engineers and other professionals who had turned Iraq into a burgeoning and wealthy country by 1989. If the object of the U.S. attack, 1990 forward, was to return the country to the stone age, then indeed George W. Bush was right: Mission Accomplished.
My apologies to Black Flag and Max, but that was just not what I wanted this blog to be. They each have a unique perspective, and each should have his own blog where I can come harass them.
To my other reader, comments are free and open again.
I’ve been reading a paper presented in 1999 by Peter Orszag and Joseph Stiglitz called “Rethinking Pension Reform: Ten Myths About Social Security Systems.” It’s over my head, of course. It deals with five “macroeconomic” and five “microeconomic” myths, and treats the matter of pensions from very high above in addition to ground level.
If I may, I’ll assemble my strawmen right off: The thrust of the far right is the idea that without the link between contributions and individual pension payments, retirement benefits amount to nothing more than welfare. And anytime we give money to non-bankers and non-corporatists (who are immune to corruption), we destroy individual character.
Orszag and Stiglitz deal with the matter with much more subtlety, comparing and contrasting defined benefit versus defined contribution, and equating savings rates under both – that is, defined contribution plans displace savings in one area and replace them in another, but so do defined contribution plans.
The other strawman is the idea that government is too inefficient and corrupt to run a pension plan. Set aside the fact that the American Social Security system negates that contention, and remember the lesson of the recent crash: Government failed to regulate Wall Street, and Wall Street went crazy. If we turn our pension system over the Wall Street, someone is going to have to regulate them. If government is corrupt and inefficient, then we need another mechanism.
Good luck on that.
This one is a "Republican"Here’s a passage from the paper that struck me as holding out raw meat bait for Wall Street fund managers:
… even in industrialized economies with relatively efficient governments and well-developed financial markets, the scale of the regulatory challenge should not be underestimated. For example, according to Arthur Levitt, Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States, more than half of all Americans do not know the difference between a stock and a bond; only 12 percent know the difference between a load and no-load mutual fund; only 16 percent say they have a clear understanding of what the Individual Retirement Account is; and only 8 percent say they completely understand the expenses that their mutual funds charge. The investor education and investor protection measures required to ensure that an individual account system operates well despite these knowledge gaps seem substantial.
Take a sophisticated fund salesperson, give him an easy mark, and expect that he will behave. What could possibly go wrong?
Take two examples of countries that experimented with privatizing their public pensions: Chile and the United Kingdom.
An alternative approach would be a decentralized system of individual accounts, in which workers held their accounts with various financial firms and were allowed a broad array of investment options. Under such an approach, costs tend to be significantly higher because of advertising expenses, the loss of economies-of-scale, competitive returns on financial company capital, and various other additional costs. The Advisory Council estimated that administrative costs under such a system would amount to roughly 100 basis points per year. Such costs would, over a 40-year work career, consume about 20 percent of the value of the account accumulated over the career.
Experience from both Chile and the United Kingdom is consistent with these predictions and indicates that a decentralized system of individual accounts involves significant administrative expenses. Both Chile and the United Kingdom have decentralized, privately managed accounts, and administrative costs in both countries have also proven to be surprisingly high. … Taking into account interaction effects, Murthi, Orszag, and Orszag estimate that, on average, between 40 and 45 percent of the value of individual accounts in the U.K. is consumed by various fees and costs. Given the fixed costs associated with individual accounts, furthermore, costs for smaller accounts (e.g., in developing economies with lower levels of GDP per capita) would be even higher relative to the account size if the U.K. experience were replicated in such countries.
This one a "Democrat"In a public retirement system in a well-developed country like ours, the incentives to advertise and bilk clients is virtually nonexistent. The cost of running such systems is more like 20 basis points, which over the life of an annuitant, consumes maybe 2% of his pension. So in real practice, government-run pensions systems are neither inefficient nor dishonest. The private sector? About 20X more expensive? The honesty factor? Given recent events, it appears undefined, but enormous.
There is a drive to privatize Social Security in this country that goes back to 1980, when Reagan took office. When Republicans have tried (Reagan in 1983, Bush in 2005), they have failed miserably. (Reagan parlayed the failure into an opportunity to raise middle and working class taxes, giving us the largest tax increase in history in exchange for that failure. Which of his faces does the right wing want to put on Mount Rushmore?)
Because we live in what is essentially a one-party state, with private corporate wealth financing the “two” parties, the thrust for privatization is two-pronged. On one side, the Republicans brazenly confront the system, and unify support for that system. As seen, that approach is not effective.
On the other side, the “enemy in our camp” approach, Democrats appear to support the current system but are its deadly enemies. By luring supporters to comfort, they can launch a surprise attack from within, and gut the system before opposition crystalizes.
This indeed was the approach that was taken by Bill Clinton, who before leaving in office in 2001 had in place an elaborate plan to privatize Social Security. He was only derailed by the Monica scandal, after which he became the program’s biggest supporter in order to rally support and save his sorry-ass presidency.
Such plans must surely be in the works now with DLC Democrat Obama as under Clinton. Without eternal vigilance (and Democrats are not vigilant when Democrats are in office), the program will not survive, and we will join the Chileans and Brits in seeing our pockets picked while Wall Street lines its own off of our private retirements.
Piece of Mindful 