Friday, July 17, 2015

Governance by spite

You can draw a straight line from Walker's dropping the Act 10 bomb on public employees through four-and-a-half spite-filled years of divide-and-conquer power politics - - the long, fuller story here - -  to this week's ideologically-petty-but-purposeful prohibition by Walker's "chamber-of-commerce" DNR against a few of the fact-driven experts still darkening agencies halls and struggling against official, special interest goals from attending a close-by, open-minded science conference about wolves and conservation - - topics of broad, commonsense public interest in Wisconsin.

Life is really too short for such debilitating spinelessness that every day degrades our collective history and the true Wisconsin Idea that Walker tried to erase from state law.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Everything Scott Walker touches turns to crap.

Anonymous said...

Has he washed WisCAHNsin from his mouth yet?

:)

mad as hell said...

This goof will never get elected president. Go a ahead and take your anti-union schtick across the country and see how many votes you gain. What bothers me the most is once he gets booted off the national stage he'll make millions in some insignificant roll working for the koch brothers.

Anonymous said...

He has, and he spit it out the window as he drove out of town in his Winnebago.

Anonymous said...

mad as hell

You fail to recognize that union membership is incredibly small and shrinking even without the assault by Republicans. You also fail to recognize that a significant number of union folks are teabaggin' Republicans that scream "SOLIDARITY" when they are under attack, but otherwise don't give a damn about economically oppressed people.

How about you channel that anger into something other than proclamations that the man who has totally dominated Wisconsin for 4+ years now, a guy that is leading or near the top of every GOP poll, can't win elections. Rather than post objectively inaccurate information, why not carry the truth:

Scott Walker is a formidable opponent because of the power-elite that is behind him and we will need to do more than casually dismiss his chances of being placed in the White House if we want to defeat the multinational corporate interests he represents.

Anonymous said...

The current U.S. labor movement is dysfunctional and has been for decades. Top-down, union-leaders-know-best is demonstrably a failure. Scott Walker may have proclaimed he would use "divide-and-conquer" to flip Wisconsin to a republican dreamland, but it is organized labor that did the dividing that he took advantage of.

Trade unions, organized exclusively along limited and arbitrary job duties, are not capable of standing up for workers. Labor divided itself and now repugs are cleaning up.

First it was: union vrs nonunion

Then it was: public union vrs private union

And then it was: private union members vrs mislabeled "right to work" pitting members/nonmembers against each other within the same employer.

Organized labor doesn't get it and probably won't because the big unions can restructure themselves to be profitable to their management cabal instead of the rank-and-file. Over the past 40+ years, unions in America have not been capable of standing up for workers.

I don't support Scott Walker. I don't think divide-and-conquer is an appropriated way to govern. I think it violates the oath of office Walker took to serve all of Wisconsin.

But we need to remember who really did the dividing. There will be no turning this around until the American labor movement is reorganized to be inclusive instead of pitting various trade groups and professions against themselves.

Was anyone else at the Right to Work rallies in Madison & Milwaukee organized by big labor? Shockingly, some of the speakers called for meaningful action, a general strike, but anyone in attendance with a sign that said this was harassed by paid union goons to ditch the sign or leave.

No one should actually support today's labor movement which decided to collaborate with multinational corporate interests and divide workers into winners and losers a long long time ago. Why did so many union members vote for Scott Walker? Because there unions actually supported his entire agenda, as long as it was some other worker being attacked.