Koch Whore Pays the Vig

If there was any doubt that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is anything other than a bought-and-paid-for thug for the parasite class, this and this should put those doubts to rest.

If he was arguing in good faith, that Wisconsin's budget troubles necessitate some collective belt-tightening and that public-sector unions have to do their fair share of the tightening, that would be one thing.  Those unions have said over and over that they'd be willing to sit down with the governor, and would even make many of the concessions he's asking for in order to strengthen Wisconsin's budget picture.  But that's not what he's asking for.  In fact, he's not asking for anything, he's playing Big Daddy and telling them what he's gonna do, and what he's gonna do is strip away the public-sector unions' collective bargaining rights.

So why does Scott Walker hate working people?

Make no mistake, this is not an assault on big government.  This is an assault on the working middle class of Wisconsin and of the United States at large.  Lots of other governors have similar rules changes in the pipeline, waiting only to see if the unions in Wisconsin, which has a long and storied history of labor activism, can be broken.

The middle class as we know it was born of labor activism.  It doesn't take a genius to figure it out.  I'm willing to bet that everybody reading this has at one time or another worked for a company or a boss that wanted to screw you out of all the work, time, and productivity they could while paying you the least they could possibly get away with for it.  It's not even their fault; it's in the DNA of capitalist enterprises.  And unless you're some kind of irreplaceable rockstar genius, when you sit down to negotiate your compensation and benefits, the power dynamic involved is going to be weighted against you.

So how do you equalize that power dynamic?  Collective bargaining.  Collective bargaining is why we have things like child labor and workplace safety laws, why the 40 hour workweek is standard, why we have things like weekends off and vacation time and pensions for when we're too old to work.  Take that away and we're all at the mercy of our plutocratic overlords.

Which is exactly how Scott Walker and his parasite-class puppet-masters want things.  Because it makes it easier for them to keep all the money.  After all, there's only so much to go around, and in any sane society the inequalities Americans take for granted and even cheer on, some of them, would be cause to rethink the whole damn system.

In a way, you almost have to admire the brilliance of Walker's agenda.  First, pass upper-income tax giveaways that take your state's small surplus, which was the result of hard choices made by the previous legislature, some of whom probably paid the price for their prudence at the ballot box last November, and turn that surplus into a deficit.  Then, take the resulting deficit, which you have created through irresponsible giveaways to people and industries that supported your political campaign, and use the resulting 'crisis' to justify not only taking money out of the pockets of working people (it doesn't matter who their employer is; in this case it just happens to be the state), but to take away their right to a seat at the table when the terms of their employment are negotiated.  It's absolutely fawking brilliant in its malevolent nefariousness.

And now that the people have risen up, and protested for eight straight days, what's Walker's response?  Well, he's going to start laying people off.  Not that he needs to for budgetary reasons, but to teach those lousy proles a lesson about who they're messing with.

But I guess when you are a tool of the Koch brothers and the other members of the parasite class, that's just the vig on the money they loan you to get elected in the first place.