Brave dullards anonymously post teacher salary info because teachers cause foreclosures or something

Tags

budget, trolls, unions, wisconsin

Just a short post to tide everyone over while I’m working on a more all-encompassing piece regarding the state of education in Wisconsin under Scott Walker.

In case there was any doubt regarding the extremist element working hand in hand with Walker’s “educational reforms”:

Although these salary figures were obtained perfectly legally through an open records request, the objective of publishing them is both clear and far from noble:  to demean and intimidate those teachers audacious enough to imagine they had a right to participate in politics. Apparently, at least as far as the people who published this list are concerned, taking up teaching is akin to taking your priestly vows.  Imagine the dust-up if word got out one of these teachers was using contraception!

How much harder have these so-called “concerned” parents made the jobs of these teachers?  How much work and effort and time and patience have these teachers spent working with their kids, in some cases dealing with their disruptive behavior fostered and nurtured by their parents utter disdain for education, viewing it as commensurate to brainwashing?  These folks are just another example of the by now familiar emotionally immature, latter-day patriots obsessed with rights but utterly lacking in responsibility.  In this ridiculous screed, their lack of attachment to reality is laid bare: they blame teacher compensation for the 300% rise in foreclosures since 2008.  Because there sure isn’t anything else that happened around then that could explain all the foreclosures.

In what other profession are people so subjected to this sort of harassment?  Movie stars and billionaires, I’ll grant you, but certainly any thinking person agrees that a teacher hardly lives a comparable lifestyle to anyone like that.  They already receive the lion’s share of the blame more rightly reserved for underachieving kid’s parents, and now this ham-handed piece of political theater.  Mind you, it would be such an inconvenience for these people to actually sit down and have a civilized talk with the teachers to air their concerns.  Much more constructive, I’m sure, to anonymously publish personal information in the local newspaper.  I pity the poor children offered this callow example of adult behavior; especially now as their best teachers begin to look toward greener pastures elsewhere.

If only these punters could be troubled to notice their children’s teachers are – very nearly to a (wo)man – hard-working, deeply committed human beings, and not do-nothing fat-cats.  They are people who are part of a union that agreed in principle to every one of Walker’s financial demands.

If only these brave list-makers could hear the facts over their shrill and frantic fear-mongering.

Recalling Walker, Volume 2: Divide & Conquer

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budget, divide and conquer, lies, politics, recall walker, unions, wisconsin

The evidence is clear: Scott Walker lies. A lot. And I’m not referring here to the garden variety brand of lies told by politicians since time immemorial; things like ‘cutting taxes always leads to job growth’, ‘the government has no intrinsic worth’, ‘a quarter of a million jobs will be created by such-and-such point in time’. No, these are lies of a more specific and conspiratorial nature.

Walker has insisted ever since his “Budget Repair Bill” (which, curiously, failed to repair the budget), that he had campaigned all along on curtailing union rights.  While he did mention it in private a few times…

…he kept it hush-hush on the campaign trail; in fact, going so far as to say he planned to negotiate with the unions:

If those who “Stand with Walker” have no qualms about his lying to advance his political agenda, rather than submitting it to reasoned and sober debate in the light of day, it certainly brings into question the moral compass of those supporters, as well as their fitness to participate in a democracy. Rushing through bills, under the auspices that you know what’s better for Wisconsin than the state’s citizens do, amounts to something little more civilized than a putsch.

And his statement to the odious Diane Hendricks – who has at length proved that the death of a loved one does not necessarily impress upon the survivor what the truly important things in life are, and that (at least some) people can never truly have enough money – absolutely begs the question: divide and conquer who?  The individual unions against each other, the nearly half a million union members against each other, union workers against non-union workers?  One can’t help but think of the image of the hapless McCain, shaking his head in bewilderment, as his 2008 running mate traced a swath through the country edifying those Real Americans who were self-evident in their support of her.  Anyone inspired by this style of we-won’t-negotiate-with-terrorists-and-they’re-all-terrorists leadership, I truly do pity, as I imagine they will at some point have found themselves to have spent their lives in service of thankless, self-appointed demi-gods who had not even bothered to notice they were there.

Recalling Walker, volume one

Tags

budget, politics, recall walker, unions, wisconsin

I view it as both a pity and a personal failing that I did not get around to publishing something like this earlier; with the recall election less than a month away, I fear this information will be far too late for many. However, any documentation of the worst and most dangerous Governor of my home state of Wisconsin is surely a good thing.

For this particular article, I won’t go into documenting all of the many, many, many, many, many shortcomings and outright failings of Scott Walker; I’ll take another tack and ask “What good has Walker done?”, an obvious rhetorical question if ever there was one.

I’ve yet to hear – and it’s not from lack of listening – even one reason to support Governor Walker that is both a) articulate, and b) based in reality. No, more often than ought to be tolerated in a representative democracy, Walker-backers will recite with disconcerting word-for-word precision a litany of talking points, unable to be bothered to alter the verbiage even a little bit, at least to give the illusion that they’ve given any serious thought to the matter.

The two most common “reasons” (kind of sullies the root meaning of the word, no?) I’ve heard put forth are: ‘Walker balanced the budget’ and ‘Walker took on the greedy unions’. I’ll take these on in order.

‘Walker balanced the budget’:

This claim is usually, in fact, in my personal experience, always, stated as a self-obvious fact, no evidence to back up the claim need be given. As is usually the case when evidentiary requests are scornfully dismissed, this claim is patently false. In other words, this claim is articulate – it is clear and concise in terms of Walker actually doing something – but it is not based in fact: http://thewheelerreport.com/releases/January12/0118/0118richardslfb.pdf

Yes, in spite of the fact that Walker supposedly “balanced the budget”, surprise, surprise: maths is hard for the WI GOP.  He keeps needing to move money around and redirect funds meant for other things (usually those bothersome and whiny poors, see 3rd ‘many’ above) to plug up holes as his budget continues to be chipped away at by the rigors of reality.

‘Walker took on the unions’:

This claim is sort of the opposite of the first claim: it is based in fact, no one can question the fact that he initiated and conducted a planned attack on collective bargaining rights. But here the claim is not articulate. Ask a supporter to clarify what it means to “take on the unions” and you receive, through much teeth-gnashing and foot-shuffling, little more than the results of a sort of Rorschach test for the conservative individual’s personality – often a rich tapestry of persecution complex, fear of ridicule, anxiety regarding the unknown and/or unfamiliar, and the like. Generally variations of the theme of fear – what a shock, who would have thought it?  That, and the odd certainty that if only employees were willing to settle for much less compensation, their employers would be so touched as to reward them with more.  What a beguiling notion.

A third claim, the talking point all the rage among Wisconsin teabaggers at the moment has to do with Wisconsin adding 20,000 jobs over the past twelve months rather than losing 30,000, as standard metrics indicate.  Even if Walker’s numbers hold true, they are statistics in a vacuum – how do these numbers compare to the numbers from other states?  Who knows; no other state has released these numbers yet.  And that’s point, really; just throwing out a number that can be parroted ad nauseam, context be damned.  Because if most other states added 40 – 60,000 jobs or more in the same time period – and the country seems to be heading in the direction that this is a likelihood – once again Wisconsin’s job numbers don’t look so hot and Walker appears less than competent.  To say nothing of the fact that the numbers Walker is flouting are a measly 10% of the quarter of a million he was promising while being one-fourth of the way through his term; judge him by the economy, he has been rumored to remark (although I prefer to judge him based on his contempt for rules and the company he keeps).  I could also go on about the quality of jobs being “created” under his suspect environmental, pay scale, and giving-away-taxpayer-money-to-corporations-like-it’s-penny-candy policies, but I’ll save that for another day, lest I be accused of ‘moving the goalposts’, as I recently was, for having the gall to desire not only quantity but also quality in the growth of our economy, for insisting upon a solid foundation of sound economic policy upon which the much vaunted “job creators” – these apparently very meek and timid titans of industry, our economic saviors – might construct these jobs, less the edifice crumble and scatter to the shifting economic winds.