Wisconsin protests and the lies about the 'shortfall'
POSTED BY: Niki2
UPDATED: Friday, April 7, 2023 15:36
VIEWED: 5187
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I have a friend in Alexandria - she's happy about the changes but I think still fairly careful about speaking her mind too freely. She called me the other day to day hi, and that she was happy with the way things had gone.
There was a lot of bad - political repression and torture - but also economic dysfunction and corruption. Government workers, unions and students were a large part of the protests, protesting for better wages, better work conditions, higher minimum wage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Revolution_of_2011
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Quote:
Originally posted by mincingbeast:
I am no fan of public employees or their unions. Devil take them.
Yet I fail to see how the changes in Wisconsin are an improvement, so much as an outright assault on the past 100 years of labor. This bothers me.
What bothers me most, however, is that legislators abandoned the political process when they realized they were on the losing side. This is not a desperate, heroic act. I recognize there is a precedent for this (Texas redistricting), but it is an awful one.
Drawing analogies between Egypt and Wisconsin is a bit silly. My Green friends, who often accuse me of apostasy, have stretched for the comparison a lot over the past week. They have riot envy.
Once again I find myself siding with the beast. The devil made those legislators flee the state to shit evil pooh on our political process. The concept of unions dictating what a civil servant recieves in wages and benefits had to have been spawned in hell as well. I would vomit pure joy if the tea party showed up in Wisconsin and beat the parasitic bastards with the gadsden flag. The comparision to Egyptian sand-nigger riots is about as stupid as the creation of the donuthole or light beer. This whole "news event" is being paraded on the television to keep the "real" story from our minds....Mrs. Obama recently shit her pants while coughing really hard.
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What do the rich want?
The ability to suck everyone as dry as possible as quickly as possible, with no wiggling from the victims.
What do the rich hate? Anything that gets in the way of their absolute, unlimited greed:
Taxes.
Government.
The middle class.
Unions.
"For god's sake, don't even DREAM of standing up for your interests!!!! You deserve to be turned into an empty husk, that is your role in life, you stupid insect."
Right now, there is not a quanta's difference between the Tea Baggers and/or the Republican party and the corporate class.
So now for some facts.
COUNTRYWIDE AND THE BANKS BROKE THE PENSIONS. After creating and pushing unrealistically rapacious loans... loans destined to fail... they repackaged them into AAA-rated toilet paper and sold it to insurances (AIG), pensions, and investment banks (Goldman, UBS, etc). After the toilet paper shredded, the big players got bailed out. Bankers? Investors? Doing GREAT! Big bonuses late 2010, champagne parties, private jets, the works, last I heard.
Pensions, mortgages for average Americans? Oh. Well. Got what they deserved for being stupid and especially for being politically unconnected, dontcha see. So, let's stick it to the victims... again. Make THEM pay for bank fraud. Very much like the Enron-created "energy crisis" which looted the CA Treasury of $21 billion. That's what capitalists call a "successful model": rape the poor, and then rape them again.
BTW_ the facts show that public workers get paid LESS and have FEWER benefits than their private-sector counterparts at all levels of education except "less than HS"... and even there, the difference is minimal. I know facts don't get in the way of a lot of folks here, but there they are.
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Quote:
Signym
What do the rich hate? Anything that gets in the way of their absolute, unlimited greed:
Taxes.
Government.
The middle class.
Unions.
Revisit these some day.
The rich are unconcerned with paying taxes, they have no income. Their rich. Only wage earners pay taxes.
Why do taxes even exist? Why doesn't the govt. just print more money when it needs it? Gnaw it over.
Oh, ditto for govt. Why does govt. even exist? The idea that laws and police alter human behavior in a positive manner has been thoroughly debunked here by people more or less on your side.
If there wasn't a govt, how would the rich get richer. Hell. How would they even know they were rich?
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DT, if we all lived at subsistence level and bartered for trade and there was no such thing as wide-scale cooperation or currency we'd all be more equal. But once you introduce ANY of those things.... things even YOU depend on for your existence, much as you try to stay out of it... then a whole host of other organizations come into being.
And what does that have to do with Wisonsin, or any part of the real world? All of the assumptions that you base your opinion on are unworkable on a practical level, and unworkable even in a theoretical sense.
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"The idea that laws and police alter human behavior in a positive manner has been thoroughly debunked here by people more or less on your side."
Not sure that this is true, but I want to point out that SOMEthing alters human behavior. Otherwise, why do we drive on the right hand side of the road or trade work for electronic bits, behaviors that are clearly socially arbitrary.
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GOOD NEWS! The worlds biggest media whore Jesse Jackson is there, now Madison will be on fire in no time! You libs wanted it to get ugly, well the "Civil War 2" is about to begin. I'm going to open an ice cold COORS and watch Madison burn 
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Absolutely, comparing Wisconsin with the protests in Egypt is way out of proportion, and I’m not doing it. It’s a quote. Nonetheless, we DO have some of the same problems they do. Tell me we don’t have Quote:
The Egyptians suffered greatly; the protesters in Wisconsin haven’t “suffered” at all and know they are safe from the army or anyone else attacking them with impunity. Nonetheless, I do not deny the similarities listed.
disenfranchised youth, high unemployment, and a great divide between the elites and the public at large.Quote:
That’s precisely what it is. The Governor deliberately gave tax cuts (in almost exactly the same amount as what he’s moaning about being a “deficit” now) just before he pulled this out of the hat. To deny the correlation is pure...well, denial!
outright assault on the past 100 years of labor
As to the legislators; please tell me what alternative they had when something this egregious is done, given that Wisconsin has no filibuster provision or any other form of redress and they KNOW if they provide a quorum, it goes through. It’s precisely what the Republicans did with the filibuster, and did for two freaking years...so to complain about some legislators actually acting on their consciences being the bad guys doesn’t fly with me. IF the Governor had allowed any debate, any compromise, even any DISCUSSION of the issue it would be different, in my opinion. But he demanded it be forced through to be law in a couple of DAYS, which is pure dictatorialism. The people had already SAID they were quite willing to up their contributions to pension/health care; he wants more than that, he wants to bust their rights to negotiate virtually ANYTHING in the future. It’s an obvious, unquestionably ploy, to me.
I’m confused; how is it the liberals “everyone’s protesting”? I didn’t know union employees were protesting “liberals”. I agree that, if a whozit were created with logic, it would definitely show how broken it is by this statement. But I expect no less, so it’s irrelevant, as is the source
Sig, I see the same thing, especially the war on the middle class. Economist I was watching said the logic is that the rich donate huge amounts to political campaigns, the poor have nothing to give, so the obvious target is the middle class, of whom there many remain, they are still supposedly the largest block of Americans, and that’s what is happening. Not that it started NOW...Quote:
I heard that too...have to look it up, as well as how the healthcare and pensions they receive compare to non-government workers. Will search it out.
the facts show that public workers get paid LESS and have FEWER benefits than their private-sector counterparts at all levels of education except "less than HS"... and even there, the difference is minimal. I know facts don't get in the way of a lot of folks here, but there they are.
It’s pretty predictable to me that the righties are the most vociferous ones defending this issue; it’s not just the rich who hate the things Sig enumerated, it’s the REPUBLICANS, and this is an agenda they’ve had for decades. They are a party of DEstruction, not CONstruction. Everything they’re doing right now is tear down everything they don’t like, as in Planned Parenthood, the unions, ACORN, restrictions on anything business wants, any form of regulation of business, the EPA, Social Security, Medicare, and on and on and on. Seems to me when I look at it that anything and everything that benefits the regular people of America is anathema to them and they’ll do whatever they can to bring it down, while anything and everything that benefits the rich and corporations is their big agenda. Whether what they do is moral, or even legal, doesn’t bother them in the slightest. And a lot of this has been planned for decades and is being implemented because they feel the wave is with them. The Republican Party is very good at being patient, at taking the long view, about using public policy for partisan purposes, to
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Are they flipping cop cars yet? When they start flipping cop cars and setting fire to "Starbucks" that'll be a great sign. I WANT MADISON TO BURN!!
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Sig,
Complex economics way predates govt. That's why you have economic models like yams, cowry shells and gold: If the currency itself is inherently limited, then there's no need for anyone to run it. I know you can name a dozen more economic models just like these, and I dare anyone to counterfeit a sea shell for less than its par value. (I don't think even raising sea creatures would do it, it's not cheap.)
While I'm at it, so does farming. Farming is older than civilization by farm, and even fairly advanced farming is older than written language. Crop rotation and permaculture sustainable farming are more advanced forms than are used on most of the planet are both prehistoric, as is irrigation. between 10,000bce and 5,000 bce, the people of dagistan already had an advanced agricultural system us sustainable ag, while not yet unified ancient egyptians had a whole economy based on it, and pre-literate meso-americans already had advanced bio-engineering the created the GMOs that we think are natural.
As for theories that sound good on paper and don't work out in reality? self proclaimed socialists should throw stones
But seriously, my post had nothing to do with Wisconsin. It didn't claim to. It was a direct response to your post. About the rich. I'm not rich, but I am serious: You should think about this. The questions posed in my response were for you to think about. It's more complicated than you think, I was just pointing out some obvious holes.
The rich have absolute power. If they wanted taxes gone, they would be gone tomorrow.
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