Here in Michigan we are that sleepy old state that no one is paying attention to while everything seems to be going on in Wisconsin. However, it seems like a coordinated battle plan has been drawn by many of the Republican governors in some very key political states all at the same time. I don’t think this is a coincidence. The main battles are taking place in Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, and Florida but of course there is also New Jersey as well as other states that I’m not watching as closely as my own. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/11/us-usa-unions-states-idUSTRE7295QI20110311
One of the things I find really interesting is how close these states have been in recent national political elections. It seems that all of these governors are hell bent on destroying unions, teachers’ unions especially. The NEA is the biggest of all. It is the largest professional organization and labor union in the United States. Republicans have criticized it for years as being a big supporter of the Democratic Party. In Michigan the MEA has supported more Democrats but has also supported a few Republicans.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUpO1QFMDtM
Here is more showcasing the sneaky underhanded tactics being used by these governors to push through their ideology much like Wisconsin’s Governor Walker pushed through his plan in the dead of night.
The obvious goal is about taking away the financial support to the Democratic Party and to create an environment where business can have whatever they want. A few years ago at our school everyone read a book entitled, Whatever It Takes. Of course that book was about educating students. These governors are using techniques that embody that spirit of whatever it takes to destroy the middle class. John Edwards always said he wanted to be the voice for the voiceless. Well, we know John has been permanently derailed because of the choices he made with Rielle Hunter and the fact that the Democratic Party, much like the Republicans, really don’t care about the poor and the voiceless. However, I must mention here that Newt Gingrich can double down on being bad to his many wives and still gets respect from the Republican Party. The reason I mention John here is no one is speaking for the voiceless, the poor and the disenfranchised. President Obama is working as hard as the Republicans at thinking up new ways to screw the poor and the middle class. Just keep this tidbit in your mind as you read on because no politician is really speaking for the disenfranchised today. All we hear from politicians is how we have to have a “shared sacrifice”. I don’t want to get too sidetracked from things but I wonder why these politicians in the following post aren’t sacrificing. They want everyone else to sacrifice. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/08/wisconsin-state-senate-republicans_n_833058.html
The first time I heard about farm subsidies is back in the seventies when I was young. I was watching the Johnny Carson show. Johnny had John Wayne on his show. John Wayne was laughing about how the government pays him not to farm. Now that’s class warfare! The current Republican governors all seem to want to give massive tax breaks to corporations; you know those entities that the Supreme Court fully recognizes for their “corporate personhood”. It seems to me that for years I’ve heard Republicans chastising Democrats for creating “class warfare”. The Democrats are always pointing out the massive divide between the rich and the poor. Unfortunately, this only seems to happen around election time, but it’s enough to get the Republicans crying for mercy. However, truthfully the Republicans have declared a sort of war on the middle class and the poor in this country. The class warfare of today is created through governmental policies that cater to the whims of the wealthy and big corporations while slashing everything from education to any assistance to the poor or disenfranchised. I have always believed the one thing that can help to elevate a society is a good education. It is getting harder and harder to obtain that education when policies are in place to ensure that it fails. Budget cuts to education are designed really to keep the poor and middle class where they belong, dumb and uneducated. If enough people were truly educated in this country, they might do something about the sorry state of our democracy. We hear all about how education is broken but truthfully if you want a good education in this country you better fix poverty. I know right now there will be some narrow minded person sitting here reading this and thinking how the poor will always be with us. That’s uncreative, small minded thinking in my book. The great leveler in society is education because it opens many doors that would be otherwise closed.
If you will remember back to when President Bush was in office you will remember that we had all of those color coded alerts about potential terrorism in our country. We were constantly kept in a state of fear and panic at the thought that a terrorist might be living next door to us. These terror alerts were manipulating us during the 2004 election. Whenever John Kerry would go up in the polls, a new terror alert would be announced and like the sheep we are we would do whatever we were alerted to do. Today the constant drumbeat has been about those lousy pubic unions and how they are screwing up our society. Yes, it’s the lousy teachers that suck the blood and life from our society. Even though some of them may give hope to the hopeless, they are the new enemy of the poor. If it wasn’t for those greedy teachers, the poor would have money. Sometimes you know the enemy of your enemy is your friend. Those Republicans have called for a moratorium on spending for anything that will help you or me. However, if there is some new subsidy or tax break they can give to corporations and the wealthy they’ll get right on it because they still pretend to believe in Reaganomics where that “trickle down” theory was invented. Truthfully, our society is becoming one of the wealthy and everyone else that are left to “attend” to the wealthy. I’ve never been able to figure out why enough isn’t enough for the wealthy. How many billions do you need? That trickle down theory just doesn’t work because the richer someone at the top gets, the richer they want to be. They don’t let it trickle down and the only way you are going to get it to trickle down is through government policies that ensure that it does. Our “desperate times” are created by policies designed to make the rich get richer and screw the poor. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Unfortunately, we don’t truly know how desperate we all are until we get a Republican governor to show us! I’ll leave you with the desperate people in Wisconsin that have done everything they can to make our country wake up to what’s really going on. This clip includes Michael Moore on the Rachel Maddow show.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYrv65HufIs
Here’s part 2 of that show!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvqQ_olFJ2U&feature=related
