Waking up from Horatio Alger

Back when I was your age it seemed like everyone was middle class. Worker’s rights were a necessity of the past and we all could achieve the American dream. When this is the case unions and even government are obsolete and unnecessary. The America of the 80’s, 90’s and 00’s had completely given in to the myth of Horatio Alger, times have changed; history is playing out another one of its cycles before our very eyes. Parts of America are waking up from the fallacy that we can all be millionaires. On the other side the likes of McCarthy and Nixon have been reincarnated in other forms and shot up with a juice concocted from the old union-busters of the 1920’s and 1930’s.

By coincidence I traveled to Madison on the second weekend (or day 8) of the protest that began there following the introduction of the “Budget Repair Bill” and the 14 Democratic senators leaving the state. I arrived with a vague understanding of what was going on, and the point of view that the teachers, nurses, prison guards and other public workers were going to lose eventually; it was just a matter of time before the budget repair bill would be passed. I left 3 days later with the overwhelming belief that somehow, some way, they had to win.

Out-of-State Agitators

For someone like myself who had become politically numb, Walker and his union busting bill was a real kick in the balls. I’ve grown accustomed to being enraged and dismayed by American politics. Up until now I never felt like much of it really affected me, I was not invaded or invading. Yet such an overt attack on things that I hold dear made a cynic realize there is something that even they are compelled to believe in.

Wisconsin has responded. In the last 10 weeks in Madison and all over Wisconsin we have seen an acute arousal of civic engagement at all levels. People are in the streets voting with their feet, and they have started voting with their dollars too by boycotting Walker supporters. If we want to maintain the better parts of our democracy, not just in Wisconsin but in all of the country, we must not let this sentiment wane, instead it must expand.

There is no doubt that something amazing has begun in Wisconsin, but the truth is there’s nothing unique about the actions or the actors that make it an anomaly. The truth is this could happen anywhere, and should be going on everywhere. We are all Wisconsin, and we need to believe that we can make that kind of differences in our lives and societies anywhere if people stay engaged and organize.

Union Thugs

In a way, we should be thankful for what the republicans have done in Wisconsin because it has brought liberals together more than Obama or any other democratic politician ever could. We have grown closer to old friends, families have come together and we made friends that we never knew we had. I have watched news spread from friends in Wisconsin to Wisconsinites all the way from Anchorage to Miami; among people I had no idea had any interest or concern for politics in general. We have come to realize that we have a lot more in common than we ever thought we did, and that more than anything has been the power that Madison has had.

On the other hand we should be furious with Scott Walker and republican legislators as well. Not because we disagree with them, but because they have ignored every function of our democracy - except the one that got them elected in the first place. The have ignored court orders, fought open records requests, violated campaign finance laws, ordered law enforcement agencies to do duties outside of their constitutional responsibilities and perhaps stolen elections. I find it hard to believe Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election was turned on some sort of Daley-esque, Chicago style voting fraud. I also find it hard to believe that in one county they misplaced or failed to count 1% of Wisconsin’s total electorate, an amount that is basically 10% of the total votes in the county. In this case incompetence seems to be a smoke screen for either something sinister or to add to the overall perception that this administration is not transparent; the motive for which I cannot figure out for the life of me.

Perhaps the most disturbing is the overall reaction to and attitude towards the 100,000+ protestors who have marched in the streets of Madison over the past months. Not only have republicans in Wisconsin acted indifferent to the masses and their message, but in many ways they have shown a large degree of disdain for the people in the streets as well. They have written them off time and time again as outside agitators, union thugs and even slobs. This is unsustainable. Those who ignore the voice of the masses, and who continually ignore the rule of law are bound to reap the whirlwind. At this moment recall papers have been filed for 6 Republican senators in Wisconsin. Walker himself has admitted that all this excitement is making it pretty hard to conduct business. And I predict many more days in hearings and court rooms for Walker and his cronies.

I don’t know what ever made this new generation of tea bag republicans think that they could step on working people in the Midwest, but we need to show them that they can’t. From here on we need to keep going. It is essential that people get engaged and stay engaged. We must watch the news and think critically of it, we must all question authority, and for god’s sake we have to vote with our ballots, with our feet and with our dollars.

This is not about Wisconsin, not even to Scott Walker. Nor is it about the budget, layoffs, teachers, NPR, abortion or firefighters. This is about the future of our country, and our opponents already have their vision, now we must fight that vision at all turns and regroup and find our own.

Slobs!

Headlines: 44 years ago and today

Alright, this is probably a bit political for this particular blogspot, but these things are supposed to be a little cathartic, right, and I’m a little bugged. In the building that I currently work in, the only palatable radio station that I receive on my Jensen tape player walkman is Minnesota Public Radio. More often than not, this station will bore me to tears, but better that than the alternative right-wing talk station or the crummy popular music stations. Unfortunately my beloved KFAN’s FM signal does not quite have the juice to make it to my workstation, but so it goes. Today, at least the majority of the day, was thought provoking on MPR. The content was interesting, but the context in which the content was presented was what really struck me and has gotten my hackles up.

Forty-four years ago today, on April 4, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. To honor the man, the Midday program, played a really well done one-hour American RadioWorks documentary titled “Martin Luther King’s last march”. If anyone gets an hour to listen to the program, I highly recommend it. I am by no means an historian on Dr. King, but I will try to sum up the gist of the documentary as I understood it. The program was focused on the last year of Dr. King’s life, and how his ministry’s message had begun to change from strictly advocating for equal political rights for African Americans to becoming more global in scope. Dr. King began speaking out against the Vietnam War. He began emphasizing economic justice and a redistribution of wealth as the means to ultimately address the plight of African Americans at the time. The shift in his ministry to preach about social justice issues led him to go to Memphis to support the city’s striking garbage workers. Dr. King’s initial attempt to organize a general strike of Memphis’s African American workers turned violent, in contravention of his tactic of non-violence. The failure of the initial march led Dr. King to return six days later to Memphis where he was ultimately slain on April 4, forty-four years ago. The radio program played highlights of the sermons that Dr. King delivered during this time, and the power and timelessness of his message still resonates. Had Dr. King only been able to continue his mission of seeking social justice, one wonders how different this country might be today.

One thing about Minnesota Public Radio, they will play remarkable, thought-provoking documentaries, and, if you listen long enough, you’ll also get inundated with the news of the day. Today’s headlines is the prism in which I heard and digested the King documentary. The contrast between the vision and aims of Dr. King and the headlines of today could not be starker. How little has changed! Dr. King spoke about how giving African Americans equal political rights was easy for the government, because it didn’t cost anything. In his mind, to really address the societal ills caused by economic inequality would be hard; it would cost billions of dollars. It has proven difficult. Speaking at Ebenezer Baptist Church on April 30, 1967, Dr. King stated:

And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money, like some demonic, destructive suction tube. And you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor.

Forty-four years later, the U.S. is involved in 3 wars. The latest “kinetic military action” in Libya is against a state that offers no threat to the United States, and is going forward despite no attempt to gain any sort of congressional approval. Spending on these wars since 2001 is over $1,175,000,000,000. The conservative Cato Institute cites federal spending on Health and Human Services programs to be $869 billion in the 2010 budget. No doubt, spending on poverty programs has grown since Dr. King’s day, and the quality of that spending versus simply an increase in the costs of services should be addressed by others far more capable than myself, to me, however, it is simply striking that in forty-four years military adventures and Asia and Africa continue to take primary budgetary importance over services designed to care for Americans who are in the most need.

Budget issues grip federal, state and local governments these days, and they are all over the headlines. There simply is not enough revenue to cover the services that people are used to receiving from their government. The Republican controlled House of Representatives is about to propose $4 trillion dollars in budget cuts over the next ten years. According to the Wall Street Journal “The plan would essentially end Medicare, which now pays most of the health-care bills for 48 million elderly and disabled Americans, as a program that directly pays those bills.” In Minnesota the budget proposed by the legislature “features a plan that forces more than 100,000 people at or near the poverty line from state-funded health insurance and instead provides a voucher to find insurance on the private market.” Transportation funding also threatens to get cut, to such an extent that a bus ticket in Minneapolis could cost $4 more per fare. Oh, and Minnesota’s budget also calls for a tax cut for businesses and individuals. Minnesota is not alone, of course. Residents of nearly every state could point to proposed budget provisions that seek to address deficits by cutting spending on those who rarely contribute to reelection funds.

The final bit of news that struck me today was a story about the institution of the President’s reelection bid.
According to the NPR story that I heard, the President is expected to raise a campaign budget of nearly $1 billion for the 2012 election. I am naïve and I am a projector. When I heard the words of Dr. King today, rightly, wrongly, simplistically or worse, racially, I thought about the President’s first run for office. I am sure that he never claimed to share anything with Dr. King. He did run a “Hope” and “Change” campaign, however. On Election Night, President-elect Obama stated:

This is our moment. This is our time – to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth – that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people . . . .

To be fair, I love what has been done regarding nuclear arms control. I love the steps being taken to provide universal health care. I hope it survives the next budget. In many ways, however, things seem so much the status quo. What is to be expected, though, we’re still faced with issues relating to equality and social justice that were there forty-four years ago.

Methinks We Do Not Protest Enough

Inspired by the extraordinary events happening in Wisconsin, yesterday I took to Pierre for the Stand Up for Education rally, ready to do my damnedest to stop the proposed 10% cut to education funding proposed by South Dakota's Governor Dennis Daugaard (Dewey to his friends). You may have seen my beautiful face on eastern South Dakota's NBC affiliate, KDLT. I'm famous!

The "protest" did accomplish one important goal--it got coverage on all the local news shows, and space in area newspapers. This is no small accomplishment and it deserves respect. However, what the protest did not do, was adequately demonstrate the anger of the electorate over the decimation of our already chronically underfunded schools. It was exactly the sort of polite, coffee and pie in the church basement kind of affair that makes very little impact on policy-makers. Education proponents have been nicely asking for funding for 30 years with no success. I don't understand what makes them think they can ask nicely for these cuts to be undone and get any results.

Here's what we did: sat in committee hearings (though the organizers had us trying to attend hearings that were not even happening on the day of the event), tried to find our local representatives to make our views known (this was close to impossible as legislators have no offices as far as I can tell and you had to simply hope to run into them in the hallways), and, in the one well-orchestrated part of the day, listen to a dozen or legislators that were already on our side.

What we did not do: show up in any kind of impressive numbers. There were about 100 people present, rather than the 1000 that could have started to be heard. 100 people at a protest tells legislators that hardly anyone cares enough to show up. We did not march, have signs, chant or in any way visably demonstrate our displeasure. No one knows how the situation in Wisconsin is going to turn out, but the protesters there, with their relentless application of political pressure, have given themselves substantially better odds of winning their fight than we did. Politicians are under no obligation to respond to well-reasoned argument or a reasonable alternative. The one thing they are obigated to listen to is overwhelming political pressure that they sense impedes their ability to continue to wield power. We are not producing anything close to that right now.

Of particular note was a conversation between Matt Groce and our own District 8 State Senator and fratboy tool Russell Olson. Olson suggested that school districts should have no problem handling cuts because their reserves are too large. When asked to envision how he sees the education funding issue being resolved "in a perfect world" he essentially said that Dewey's proposal in fact represents a perfect world. Deep cuts to education are perfect. At no time during the 10 minute conversation did he express any worry that deep cuts to education funding would result in worse outcomes for students. In committee the same day, he was the only vote against a bill that allow for a public vote on raising taxes to pay for education (he is so anti-tax that he won't even let his idiot constituents raise taxes on themselves, you see). This was the first time I had ever met Olson, but he certainly met the descriptions I had heard of him--dishonest, incurious, unwilling (or perhaps not imaginative enough) to consider proposals other than the one his party has handed him. He is a local George Bush Jr.

The ultimate fate of education funding in this year's budget remains to be seen, and it's still possible that education advocates might rally enough votes to avert disaster. But South Dakotans that care about this stuff need to get over their fear of offending those in power or making a ruckus of any sort. Quietly passing around a petition isn't going to do it. Politics is the clash of powerful interests, and the defeat of anti-education interests will require a lot of South Dakotans standing up and loudly declaring their opposition. I didn't see that yesterday.

Everyone needs a little...

If you have not heard the Detroit is in discussions of building a Robocop statue that is worth close to $50,000. This is not coming from public funds but from anonymous donors. At first glance you think there are a lot of better ways to spend this money, i.e. schools, homeless, public transit, public workers, etc. I, at first, was excited to see this happening then saw the price tag on the statue and thought what a waste of money and resources. One possible way to reduce the cost they could make the statue from recycled cars that came out of the Motor City.

When you think of the movie Robocop, Detroit plays the villian--it is a dirty, crime ridden, death trap hell hole. So why such the push to put up a statue of Robocop? I understand that most of the donors and the pressure is coming from outside of Detroit. When you break it down, Robocop stands for a better brighter future--something Motown could use right now. A man, just like the city, that has been torn to shreds. Now it is in the process of redefining itself in the 21st century by making more eco-friendly cars. Just like Robocop, they look to new technology to turn themselves around.

Any way you lean on this matter is up to you, the reader. It could be something for generations to come to enjoy or it could be a sad reminder of how poorly we spend our money. Robocop is an icon that is not always bright and has had a dark past--just like Detroit--yet, at the same time it gives you hope for a better future.

Thanks for reading,
Joshua

There's something happening here...

Are professional sports next?

I've been unlucky enough to meet my fair share of Wisconians in my life. They use stupid words, can't watch bad drivers without sounding like idiots, have terrible taste in music, like stupid professional sports teams, have terrible hair cuts, and they're worse than Texans. I could go on and on.

One thing they do have, besides Mark Borchardt, it turns out, is balls. Brains...maybe not. These are the same people who got rid of Russ Feingold and a billion other Democrats in the last election for the sake of "shaking things up," according to one protesting moderate. And now, because the majority thinks saying 'Don't Tread On Me' is cool, they have a battle on their hands. Luckily for the rest of the nation, they are willing to take the fight.

If you want to know more about the situation, check out the NY Times. Long story short, Scott Walker and his homeboys want to screw over state employees and know they can't do it in an orderly fashion until they get rid of their collective bargaining rights. They say it's all in the name of balancing the budget, although they refuse to raise corporate tax rates--which are half of what they were in the 1980s.

The major problem for everyone else is that if this goes through in Madison, all the other Republican state houses will follow suit. And it won't just affect state employees--labor talks are looming in the MLB, NFL and NBA. Right? Are they really siding with the ownership?

So, please write your Republican representatives and tell them not to take your professional sports away, unless, of course, it's the Packers. Then, if you are so inclined, visit Help Defend Wisconsin.