There are times when I think our republic has always been this dysfunctional, but I'm just more aware of it today thanks to technological innovation. When I was growing up we had 3 nightly news stations and 2 local newspapers. Cable News, USA Today, and the internet did not yet exist. Of course, I was also a kid and then a teenager. Didn't have time for politics all that much, though I thought Ronald Reagan was the greatest president ever. What did I know?
Then cable news took off. I watched the first Gulf War on CNN. I studied government and history in college. Economics was my favorite subject though I ended up focusing my career in a much different area. The internet slowly grew into my preferred news source. I didn't have to rely on a single source or a few sources. I could search around for "the truth".
Today the internet and cable news provides alternative news positions everywhere you look. This has been a blessing and a curse. Information is at our fingertips like never before. And disinformation is also available in quantities previously unimaginable. News seekers no longer need to see news from a perspective that does not agree with their preconceived biases. Conservatives can run to the Drudge Report, or Breitbart's cadre of websites, or Glenn Beck's page, or Fox News. Liberals can turn to the Daily Kos, ThinkProgress, Crooks & Liars, MSNBC. There is no need for truly fair and balanced reporting anymore. Fair and balance doesn't sell advertising. Fair and balanced doesn't meet the warped demand for profitability from the free press.
But that's not the point of today's post. The point of today's post is that we've entered an era of idiocy. I suspect, though I lack evidence, that the cause of this idiocy is this fractured news environment. We no longer sit down as a country and listen to Edward Morrow explain things we need to know as citizens. There is little demand for unbiased reporting and as such our citizens have their biases confirmed and a wedge is driven further between those who lean left and those who lean right.
Gone are the days when we stood as a nation and understood that we should be rightly judged for how we treated the least among us. Now we have politicians clamoring over each other to eviscerate the safety programs that protect our poor and vulnerable.
Gone are the days when we understood that the strength of our economy was based on our working citizens making a livable wage that allowed them to purchase more goods and services and continue to grow the economy. Now globalization has made U.S. wages much less important to multinational corporations.
Gone are the days when unions were accepted as a necessary protection against the over-reach of the moneyed elite. The unions, grown fat with power, alienated all but union members and have become popular targets for opportunistic corporatist politicians.
Gone are the days when education of our children was the single most important thing we could do to assure our future competitiveness as a country. Now we slash education budgets by billions of dollars while giving billions of dollars in tax cuts to the wealthy.
The absurdity is overwhelming, yet a substantial proportion of our population is never exposed to these ideas, because they seek their news from places that defend these policies as rational or even just.
We're witnessing the Fall of Rome. The conversion of the great United States of America into a Banana Republic in which power and influence are bought and sold and the working people are an afterthought in the greed driven policies of the elite.
Thank your Congressperson.
Showing posts with label organized labor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label organized labor. Show all posts
Monday, March 28, 2011
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Wisconsin - the new front in the War on America
I'm not sure how many of you have been paying attention to the protests by unionized public workers in Wisconsin this past week. Their turnouts have been much larger and more impassioned than most Tea Party events I've seen, but that's not exactly the point.
At issue is the attempt by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) to end collective bargaining by public employee unions. There has been an enormous push by conservative state governments around the country - and an organized national effort by conservative PACs to marginalize public employee unions as being at fault for budgetary shortfalls around the country. This is an outright lie, but that never seems to matter when money is at stake.
This attempt by Governor Walker to to fix his budget (read: austerity measures) comes in the wake of him passing a tax cut for ... you guessed it ... the wealthy. As I've explained before, you don't narrow budget gaps by lowering taxes.
Here's the problem with Governor Walker's plan. If he really wanted to simply lower state expenditures he could do so by negotiating less generous benefits with the state employee unions. They've already offered to reduce their benefits packages to help with the short fall. But he's not taking that offer. He's demanding the end of collective bargaining. Without collective bargaining, unions have no teeth. They can't actually improve the quality of working conditions or compensation for their members.
This is a bald attempt by a conservative governor to kill a union. His supporters claim Wisconsin teachers make too much and have too sweet a deal. I personally don't think teachers make enough anywhere, but I am a strong believer in the importance of improving our educational system and I don't see how that's possible if you reduce the incentives for people to actually become teachers in your community (which is the effect this would have in Wisconsin). Also, putting teachers aside for a moment - this school union includes bus drivers and janitors. Not exactly fat cat bureaucrats, are they?
Why is this so important? Why am I bothering to blog about something that's happening in a single state? Well, its pretty simple. The Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling gave corporations and labor unions the right to spend unrestricted amounts of money on political advertising. If conservative states are successful in busting public employee labor unions, they appreciably weaken the ability of Democrats to raise funds and finance advertising for progressive political issues. In short, if the war against unions takes hold and corporations are successful in ending organized representation of labor, there will be very limited funding for liberal political campaign activities.
Like I said, it all comes down to money, but not in the way you might think. This has little to do with Wisconsin's budget deficit and very much to do with the ability to dominate American politics with cold hard cash.
Corporate interests are already in control of way too much of our daily lives and this will make it even worse. Support the proud public employees of Wisconsin.
At issue is the attempt by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) to end collective bargaining by public employee unions. There has been an enormous push by conservative state governments around the country - and an organized national effort by conservative PACs to marginalize public employee unions as being at fault for budgetary shortfalls around the country. This is an outright lie, but that never seems to matter when money is at stake.
This attempt by Governor Walker to to fix his budget (read: austerity measures) comes in the wake of him passing a tax cut for ... you guessed it ... the wealthy. As I've explained before, you don't narrow budget gaps by lowering taxes.
Here's the problem with Governor Walker's plan. If he really wanted to simply lower state expenditures he could do so by negotiating less generous benefits with the state employee unions. They've already offered to reduce their benefits packages to help with the short fall. But he's not taking that offer. He's demanding the end of collective bargaining. Without collective bargaining, unions have no teeth. They can't actually improve the quality of working conditions or compensation for their members.
This is a bald attempt by a conservative governor to kill a union. His supporters claim Wisconsin teachers make too much and have too sweet a deal. I personally don't think teachers make enough anywhere, but I am a strong believer in the importance of improving our educational system and I don't see how that's possible if you reduce the incentives for people to actually become teachers in your community (which is the effect this would have in Wisconsin). Also, putting teachers aside for a moment - this school union includes bus drivers and janitors. Not exactly fat cat bureaucrats, are they?
Why is this so important? Why am I bothering to blog about something that's happening in a single state? Well, its pretty simple. The Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling gave corporations and labor unions the right to spend unrestricted amounts of money on political advertising. If conservative states are successful in busting public employee labor unions, they appreciably weaken the ability of Democrats to raise funds and finance advertising for progressive political issues. In short, if the war against unions takes hold and corporations are successful in ending organized representation of labor, there will be very limited funding for liberal political campaign activities.
Like I said, it all comes down to money, but not in the way you might think. This has little to do with Wisconsin's budget deficit and very much to do with the ability to dominate American politics with cold hard cash.
Corporate interests are already in control of way too much of our daily lives and this will make it even worse. Support the proud public employees of Wisconsin.
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