THE SULTAN: THE THUG OF WAR IN WISCONSIN
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
‘Government workers have become the Second Estate of the American Republic, with most of the population reduced to the Third Estate grubbing through to pay their wages. And the more the Second Estate keeps growing, the more it impoverishes the Third Estate, pushing them down further below the Middle Class line. If this goes on, then the Middle Class will consist entirely of government workers. And America will cease to exist as a free country. Then the class war that the left has been fighting inst the rest of the country will finally end in victory.”
The talking point to those who talk up this thug of war is that instead of “penalizing” unions, we should be penalizing Wall Street. In a column titled, ‘Stop Scapegoating Teachers”, Susan Estrich demands to know, “Where are the Wall Street banks for whom there was no limit to greed?” Well they certainly aren’t in Wisconsin. It’s almost a thousand miles from the gray towers of Wall Street to the overarching dome of the Wisconsin state capitol. And the Wisconsin state budget is not in hock to Wall Street bank bailouts, but to a teacher’s union that runs its own insurance company. Like a store owner who picks out a gift for himself from his own store and then makes you pay for it, the Wisconsin teacher’s union is forcing the taxpayers to buy insurance from them… for them.
If taxpayers are the bosses of public employees– then this is a unique case where the workers live better than their employers do. Unions and their supporters have pretended that their fight is with Governor Walker and with the Koch Brothers, when it’s actually with the taxpayers. Walker isn’t Governor because of a vast conspiracy by Wall Street, but because the public is fed up and wants actual reforms. If that weren’t the case, or if Walker was just a fluke, the Democrats would have the majority they need to block this legislation, instead of resorting to thuggery, vandalism and fleebaggery.
The left insists on casting every one of their fights as a struggle between the powerless and the powerful, the well connected and those on the fringes denied access to political power. But is there any measure by which the unions can be said to be on the fringes, and can public employees who use money harvested from taxpayers to subvert the will of the taxpayers, really be said to be powerless? Their dichotomy demands that we choose either the side of Wall Street or the unions. But what if we choose neither? What if we choose to be equally disgusted by corporate lobbyists who got their bailouts and stimulus packages, and union lobbyists who make sure to get their own piece of the action, and go to war against the will of the voters when they don’t get their way.
What we have are two sets of greedy bastards, and the left expects us to cheer for their set of greedy bastards as if they were the starving children in a Victor Hugo novel. And it’s their greedy bastards that are the problem in Wisconsin right now. It’s their greedy bastards who run their own insurance company, which puts them a lot closer to Wall Street than the poorhouse. And this entire protest circus, that liberal pundits label “class warfare”, has gotten a helping hand from a man who makes the worst Wall Streeters look like plaster saints– George Soros.
For all the posturing about the Koch Brothers, there are far more billionaires on their side, than there are on ours. You know that time when the richest man in America suggested that we could save money on health care by killing sick people? He wasn’t one of the Koch Brothers, he was one of Obama’s own fundraisers. If you wanted a villain to star in a Dickens or Hugo novel, perhaps the one who pushes the dying old lady into the snow, he’s available. Unfortunately he’s actually a liberal hero, eugenics being one of those quirks that many noble progressive souls looking for a way to improve society have embraced in their time.
Eugenics is about making choices. So is forcing taxpayers to pay for health care for public service employees that they can’t afford themselves. When police union thugs march into the capitol and announce that they will disobey the law, because the capitol “belongs to the people”, they only mean certain people. And it isn’t the majority who voted for the governor, but the angry minority of public employees that they happen to belong to. “Our house” is their house. They paid for it with money they extracted from the taxpayers, and now they want it back from the elected representatives of the taxpayers. So they can continue holding the taxpayers hostage.
When all the union songs die down, then all the dirty little secrets come out. Like the nearly half a million dollar salary of the president of the union’s health care service. These are the things that are truly being fought for. The power and privilege of an entitled elite. Public sector unions are not fighting for the right to organize, but for the power to organize the system around them. To keep the flow of money moving from taxpayer pockets into their pockets and into the pockets of their pet politicians. Unions represent an establishment like any other. The difference is that there is no way to opt out of dealing with them.
Liberal columnists have tried to make the rich into the villains, but it is not the billionaires who are losing their homes due to high property taxes, it is not the billionaires who have to cut back so that union bosses can play on their own private golf course, and it is not the billionaires who have to tighten their belts so more government workers can be hired at their expense, and without their consent. And it is not the rich who pack the pockets of politicians, nearly so much as the unions do. Because those politicians are how the unions get rich.
The Koch brothers have become default villains in this Alinsky puppet theater meant to identify all calls for reform with a nefarious cabal of billionaires. All the better to shift attention away from the real villains. Attacking the Koch brothers personalizes the enemy. Better than attacking the 1,128,887 Wisconsinites who cast their ballots for Walker in the hopes of reform. Better than dealing with the hard truths that voters are in no shape to subsidize their privileges anymore.
Calls for higher taxes war with calls for cuts in government spending. That’s the red line that comes up when the money gets tight enough that we can’t just keep letting it ride anymore. And that’s when the tug of war begins. Or rather the thug of war. Political systems being held hostage by the people who run them. As much as the public cries, “Stop”, they bellow “Onward”. Their right to make money off us trumping our right to stop them from doing so.
Who are the exploiters and the exploited. The public has voted. Their representatives have voted. And the unions have brought out their thugs and the politicians have headed for the border. It’s the Middle East but , with the despots and the thugs on the union side. It takes a lot of spin to turn the unions and their pols into the exploited. But minor matters like the color of the sky, the distance between two objects and the nature of reality have never stopped the media from performing their sworn duty as tinpot agitators for their ideological friends. Banging their drums loudly for civil unrest, so long as it’s the right kind of civil unrest by privileged public servants, and not those nasty tea party people who want to pay less taxes and enjoy more freedoms.
The Guardian labels it class warfare, but between which classes? The class of union members who can hold the public hostage for their benefits, and the class of the public which is supposed to pay for it all or get beaten down in the streets when they try to protest.
Government workers have become the Second Estate of the American Republic, with most of the population reduced to the Third Estate grubbing through to pay their wages. And the more the Second Estate keeps growing, the more it impoverishes the Third Estate, pushing them down further below the Middle Class line. If this goes on, then the Middle Class will consist entirely of government workers. And America will cease to exist as a free country. Then the class war that the left has been fighting inst the rest of the country will finally end in victory.
Comments are closed.
