Badgers!
Posted on 02/18/2011 4:18:26 AM PST by Kaslin
Welcome to the reckoning. We have met the fiscal apocalypse, and it is smack dab in the middle of the heartland. As Wisconsin goes, so goes the nation. Let us pray it does not go the way of the decrepit welfare states of the European Union.
The lowdown: State government workers in the Badger State pay piddling amounts for generous taxpayer-subsidized health benefits. Faced with a $3.6 billion budget hole and a state constitutional ban on running a deficit, new GOP Gov. Scott Walker wants public unions to pony up a little more. He has proposed raising the public employee share of health insurance premiums from less than 5 percent to 12.4 percent. He is also pushing for state workers to cover half of their pension contributions. To spare taxpayers the soaring costs of Byzantine union-negotiated work rules, he would rein in Big Labor's collective bargaining power to cover only wages unless approved at the ballot box.
As the free-market MacIver Institute in Wisconsin points out, the benefits concessions Walker is asking public union workers to make would still maintain their health insurance contribution rates at the second-lowest among Midwest states for family coverage. Moreover, a new analysis by benefits think tank HCTrends shows that the new rate "would also be less than the employee contributions required at 85 percent of large Milwaukee_area employers."
This modest call for shared sacrifice has triggered the wrath of the White House-Big Labor-Michael Moore axis. On Thursday, President Obama lamented the "assault on unions." AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union bosses dubbed Walker the "Mubarak of the Midwest" while their minions toted posters of Walker's face superimposed on Hitler's. Moore goaded thousands of striking union protesters to "shut down" the "new Cairo" while the state's Democratic legislators bailed on floor debate over the union reform package.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan spurned the opportunity to condemn thousands of Wisconsin public school teachers for lying about being "sick" and shutting down at least eight school districts across the state to attend capitol protests (many of whom dragged their students on a social justice field trip with them). Instead, Duncan defended teachers for "doing probably the most important work in society." Only striking government teachers could win federal praise for NOT doing their jobs.
Yes, the so-called progressives truly believe that bringing American union workers into the 21st century in line with the rest of the workforce is tantamount to dictatorship.
Yes, the so-called progressives truly believe that by walking off their jobs and out of their classrooms, they are "putting children first."
If ever there were proof that public unions no longer work in the public interest, this is it. Big Labor dragoons workers into exclusive representation agreements, forces them to pay compulsory dues that fatten Democratic political coffers and then has the chutzpah to cast itself as an Egyptian-style "freedom" and "human rights" movement.
Meanwhile, union leaders elsewhere are quietly forcing their low-wage members to share the sacrifice in order to preserve teetering health funds. In New York state, Skidmore College campus janitors, dining service workers and other maintenance employees received late notice from the SEIU that 4.15 percent of their gross earnings will now be deducted from their paychecks to cover the cost of the health plan provided through the behemoth 1199 SEIU Greater New York Benefit Fund. (If the name sounds familiar, it's because this is one of several privileged SEIU affiliates that has received an Obamacare waiver.)
These workers are forced to join the union in order to preserve their jobs, and unlike non-union workers, they are locked into a single health plan. The SEIU has now decreed that they must pay new fees to include spouses on their plans and has hiked employee co-pays for doctor visits and prescription drugs.
What's necessary for New York union workers is necessary for Wisconsin union workers -- and for the rest of the protected union worker class in bankrupt and near-bankrupt states across America. The "persuasion of power" so ruthlessly and recklessly exercised by the SEIU and its thuggish allies must be broken by the moral courage of fiscal discipline. It's now or never.
*** The teachers seem to be squawking the most. ***
Wisconsin has been under the heel of the teachers’ unions for far too long. The largest school district, Milwaukee, in particular, is the hostage of the teachers’ union. The union runs its own candidates for the school board. The failure of MPS is a national disgrace. The teachers in WI are a very militant group and the Milwaukee teachers, particularly so. Today, the Milwaukee teachers join the protest in Madison. (sigh)
Badgers!
Mark!
Hey teacher! leave them kids alone... All and all your just another brick in the wall!!
“Today we are all Badgers.”
Ich bin ein Badgerliner!
Yeah I know, but it flows better.
We don’t need no government education.
BTTT
Democrats are big on the whole "democracy" thing right up until they no longer have the upper hand. Then they whine like the craven little cowards that they are. "Illegal"? They don't care. As long as their temper tantrum produces results.
Hunt them down and bring them back in chains. If they resist, shoot them.
The protests in Wisconsin are right out of the Saul Alinsky playbook, utilizing the fallacious tactic of false choice. Liberals will take a complicated argument and reduce a myriad number of possibilities into just two. And if you don’t agree with them 100%, you are placed into the category that has a very unwholesome connotation.
In Wisconsin, like everywhere else, the citizens have elected officials who have determined that the population believes that public funding for education is necessary. The next question is—how much? The amount could be anything from a dollar per student to a million per student, and anything in between. If the current cost is $10,000 per student, and, by forcing teachers to pay a few dollars more a year for their (generous) health and pension benefits, that cost would be lowered to $9,900, that does not automatically throw the proponents of such a reduction out of the “I support kids” column and into the “I am ruining the education of the children” column. Yet that is essentially what the union thugs are asserting.
I have had many discussions with liberals over the years. They almost always attempt to place you in the “bad” category (of two categories) when there are actually an infinite number of categories available. If you voted for Obama, you are an enlightened multicultural elite. If you didn’t, you are a neanderthal racist pig. They don’t provide the category “I didn’t vote for him because he’s a socialist.”
We don’t need no thought control!
“Ich bin ein Dachs”?
And these selfish Rat infested UNIONS wonder why so many jobs are shifted overseas. These teachers are not losing their jobs but they deserve to be fired instead.
The governor should take the alternative and layoff/fire them. When their union leaders and the outside obama agitators who were bused in are still pulling down six figures and they are left holding a short-term unemployment check maybe they will realize that they were just cannon fodder for the larger socialist cause.
Screw them and FAD
This is why the union leaders are screamimg bloody murder!
The bottom line that if supposed “teachers” were doing what they are intended to be doing our nation would not be in the situation it is now and our children would have some understandings of justice, the constitution, pride in their nation instead of global guilt and would not be more concerned about what Snooki is upto and more concerned with preserving their right as a soul to breathe, enjoy freedoms and have their wealth untaxed instead of believing it is owed to anyone but fire, sanitation, police, courts and military DEFENSE and not empires.
&&&
Well, hey, FRiend, these teachers have been doing exactly what the progressives had planned for them to do. You have got to give it to the commies — they stayed in for the long haul on this one.
My parents were both forced to drop out of high school during the Great Depression. They were not happy to do this, but their families needed their income and could not afford to support them while they attended school. Both of my parents were embarrassed about not having gone past the 9th grade, but I can tell you that they could have held their own with any young college graduate, or post-grad, that I have met in terms of what used be called general knowledge and in spoken and in written communication. They knew American and European history, and they kept up on current events. My father even taught himself conversational Spanish.
It is truly nauseating to see how such dolts are being churned out of our institution of so-called higher learning.
Well said!
As long as those who feed at the public trough can continue to squeal and get sympathy, the tax burden on private workers will just get higher and higher. It's a simple fact.
The parents of the students who are being enlisted to protest in Wisconsin need to get that message loud and clear.
If the teachers influence the kids to demonstrate, then the taxpaying parents of those kids might consider reducing their allowances (cars, entertainment, etc.) to demonstrate what the unions' excessive pension programs are doing to the family budget.
Hey, I resemble that remark!!!
I think the word for them is useful idiots.
Oh I wish I could be there. Me truck is a piece of junk & I don’t have faith in it. I checked out the facebook page, club, thingee and will stay updated. We have to stick together now, staying close and informed as well as possible. Thank you!
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