Denial is not a river in Wisconson

Most of the rest of the world, expect for a few far-right wingers like Glenn Beck, are happy for the people of Egypt, Tunisia, and perhaps soon elsewhere, who are getting their first opportunity to have a democratic government in decades. Of course, the right-wing frets that there may be more "terrorism" there, now that the firm hands of the dictators have been loosed from the throats of their people. However, much the same was said about the American Revolution when we overthrew our king. British solidiers thought of American colonists as no better than "terrorists" or "enemy combatants" and many of the regimes in Europe predicted that our liberated nation would quickly plunge into anarchy. People who know anything about history should, at long last, be able to see that the alleged anarchy is often overblown, although revolutions will have their ugly moments. This is one reason why I would caution the far-right to be careful what they wish for, given that, more often than not, they are the ones using inflammatory rhetoric about needing an armed uprising every time they don't get their way on some minor point.

Speaking of uprisings, let's hear it for Cheesehead power. I'm not just taking about the Greenbay Packers finally taking back the Lombardi trophy. They also made a good show in the capital of what it looks like when unionized Cheeseheads get cheesed off.

Of course, much was made of the match up of Steeler versus Packer, with both teams being representative of blue collar, working class people. However, if one wants to get down to it, working in a "packing" plant is way more blue collar than steel work. It certainly pays a lot less, even with unionization. Anyway, our steel industry, or what is left of it, is only a dim shadow of what it was before free traders freely traded much of it away to other nations in exchange for cheap, shiny trinkets.

Anyway, back to sports for a second, I have long been a fan of Greenbay for another reason, which is that it is the only fan owned team, while the others are often owned by a wealthy individual. Every time Greenbay would win a game this season, I would tell my friends that I hoped they finally made it to the Superbowl, because I think it would make a powerful statement, reminding the nation that you do not need economic royalty to have sports teams. The city of Greenbay decided that they wanted a team that one wealthy owner could not move around willy-nilly, so they sold shares to help finance the Packers. We could do the same thing with other teams, but many people have already drunk the Koolaid of conventional thinking that tells us that we need some rich guy, modeled after the pharaohs or dictators of Egypt in order to world-class professional organizations, like football teams.

The topic of dictators gets us back to the current situation in Wisconsin. In a place where unions started, Republicans have finally seized back control of the governorship and state senate, and are determined to decimate public employee unions. You can hate on unions all you want, but when you see a group of political hitmen doing everything they can to strip rights and benefits from public employees, what will stop them from doing the same to other groups next.

As a teacher in another state, I can attest to the fact that EVERY single year, without exception, we are always told that there is ANOTHER crisis and that we will have to expect massive layoffs, paycuts, benefit cuts, etc. In the end, we always discover that there never was a crisis to begin with. It is just the standard method that the state uses to do business with is. The state always seems to want to balance the budget from the bank accounts of teachers.

Right now the governor in Wisconsin claims that there is a fiscal emergency. This is the same governor who turned down over $1 billion dollars in Federal Stimulus money to build rail systems in his state. In the middle of a recession, when they have a budget shortfall in the state approaching $3.5 billion, this guy is turning down a billion dollars of assistance from the federal government, and then telling people there is an emergency.

I can tell you this. The so-called fiscal emergency, which I predict is another manufactured disaster, was not created by teachers, who tend to earn very modest wages. On the federal level we have seem republicans cut trillions of dollar of taxes over the last decade, with the promise that it would "stimulate the economy". Instead we have the worst recession in living memory and now the states are hurting, because (1) the Federal government has much less money to give them and (2) certain republican politicians are turning down the money that is available, when it is being given to them.

They always want us, out of the goodness of our hearts, to voluntarily cut our own throats, and if we have the temerity to ask them to show us the evidence of this latest emergency, they tell us about how our lavish union contracts have bankrupted them. However, when we look at our wages compared to other people with graduate degrees, we already see ourselves paid 20-30% less than comparably skilled workers in other areas. Our pensions are far from lavish. They talk about teachers making 70k or 80k. I know of nobody in New Mexico who makes even close to that. Our top tier in in the low to mid 50k range, after going through a decade of hoops and national board certifications. Teachers here, even under union contract start at $30,0001 per year and cannot earn more than that for three years. That is the lavish salary of the state. My medical contributions run 13% of my gross salary. My state retirement takes another 10% and is an involuntary contribution.

When I finally retire, politicians will call my pension an "entitlement" and sneer at it like I'm collecting welfare. I paid into it every year, and this doesn't count social security, workman's comp, etc which are also taken out before I even get my check. I should be "entitled" to collect something, down the line, for putting money into all those programs.

As I started to suggest in the title of the article, denial is not a river that runs through Wisconsin, but many anti-union republicans there are in a state of severe denial. They believe that the same group of people who systematically strip away pay and benefits from teachers can be trusted not to do that to police and firefighters, and the average working man. They scream about "no new taxes", but this is a tax on the people they are attacking. They are effectively forcing these people to pay thousands more to the state. It is a very unfair and selective form of taxation on working class people, so that wealthy, non-working people don't have to pay higher taxes.

To the working people of Wisconsin, many of whom were brainwashed enough to think that public employee unions are the source of all their problems. You will not see a penny more in your pocket by attacking teachers. In fact, you will see less money than before, because the people who attack teachers today, will attack you tomorrow. They won't call it a "tax", they will charge higher "fees" and cut back the services that you use. This will effectively be the same as a tax hike, because you will have to pay more for your driver's license.

Here is another dirty little secret about public employee's unions too, for all you union haters. Teachers unions are not even real unions. They are forbidden by law to strike, since they are regarded as "essential" service providers, in many cases. This is like a tiger that has been declawed and had all its teeth pulled. You might say, "look at that scary tiger", but the fact is that it's not a real tiger anymore when it has no claws or teeth to do what tigers do. It's a cuddly pet. So people who tell you about those scary public employee unions are either ignorant of the facts, or want you to be ignorant of the facts. Don't believe the hype.

Alarmists might also point to the fact that public employees can do a "sick-out", but we all know that these are just symbolic and can only last a day or two at best. Only a minority of teachers even called in sick in a few districts for a day in Wisconsin. Real strikes last longer than a single day.

In some ways, it is funny that we have such a love/hate relationship with education. Many people love to hate it and are forever complaining about how kids don't learn enough, while simultaneously cutting funding for education and cutting pay to teachers. I'm sure that test scores are just going to shoot through the roof if you start pay teachers less and cutting their benefits. Why, the best and brightest will just be lined up around the block to go through the elaborate state licensing process, just so that they can make substantially less than they could in the private sector.

Propaganda pieces like _Waiting For Superman_ (WFS) make the unions out to be the source of all evil in education because they limit "flexibility", meaning the ability of principals to fire teachers without any kind of due process, and the "flexibility" of the state to constantly lower pay, while raising requirements. I can tell you that the mythical "tenure" given to school teachers is not the same as real tenure, and it certainly is not granted after two years with only trivial requirements, as the film alleges.

The mantra of the anti-union people is that unions protect bad employees. However, myths aside, most teachers have none of the imagined protections. Waiting for Superman claims that only about 1 in 2500 teachers ever lose their licenses, but the fact is that around half of all teachers do not even renew their licenses after they expire (which is in three years in NM). Besides, you don't have to lose your license to be fired as a teacher. They don't even have to say, "you're fired". You just don't get a contract for the next year. It is standard practice in many places to not rehire any first year teachers, for example, and that is even when these teachers are under union contract.

Far from being a cushy arrangement, most union contracts for teachers are extremely stingy about pay raises, which often only come after several years on the job, and don't even give good education benefits for teachers to upgrade their skills. Typically, even in union contracts, it entirely stacked against the newcomers, and this would not change if there were no contracts at all. It would make things even more precarious. The first time a single parent complains about anything, many principals would rather get rid of the teacher than have to deal with unpleasantness. So students end up with three or four different teachers in a single year, including long-term subs who are not under union contract and are paid even less. That is under the current system. I know because I was brought it, in exactly this situation, when several previous teachers had been fired, and the alleged infractions were not even that serious. So the myth that it cannot happen and that schools are stuck with low performing "lemons" or "turkeys" according to WFS can officially be considered busted just based upon personal observation.

I know that people want official studies to "prove" this or that, but you find that, especially in education, the "studies" tend to "prove" whatever the people putting the study together want to prove. They decide what particular agenda they want to prove and then proceed to collect data to "support it". Every year there is some new "scientifically proven" new gimmick system that "can't fail" that promptly fails and we move on to the next one.

For example, a recent justification for denying graduate tuition benefits to teachers is an alleged study that claims that teachers with graduate degrees are not necessarily any more effective than ones with bachelor's degrees. Well I'm sure you can prove that people with PhDs don't necessarily do a better job teaching either, and there are grad students who do a better job at teaching university classes. If universities operated like public schools this would require us to immediately fire everyone with a PhD and replace them all with grad students. But as we just saw, they don't necessarily do a better job either, so many we should replace them with undergraduates, and so on, ad infinitum.

In the end, it may be true that a person with an MBA is not necessarily a better manager than someone without one. It's doubtful that a manager at Burger King is going to sell way more burgers with an MBA under his belt, but I'm sure people can do all kinds of "studies" and prove whatever they want about it.

Generally, however, we have a social contract that says that we value people getting higher levels of education, even if we can't prove that this will instantly make things measurably better in ten different ways. When we stop valuing the process of continually improving levels of education then we start to stagnate and decline as a civilization. We might think that everything you need to know is in a book somewhere, but there are a lot of things that people know about how to do things that must still be passed on to other people and is not something that gets written down. When we stop telling people to go out and get this education because we cannot prove that it instantly makes them more productive, then we will start to lose all this procedural knowledge.

This takes up back to unions. Before there were unions there were skilled craft guilds, and almost every profession had them. Learning to teach is more than one can get from a book. It takes an organization of professions, or a community of practiced individuals with common experiences and common purposes. When we start breaking this apart and saying that every teacher should be out of himself or herself, we will likewise lose a great deal of knowledge and commitment that teachers hold as a group.

It used to be that the word "conservative" meant someone who was cautious and valued time-tested approaches to things. Now we have radicals, calling themselves "conservatives", who want to gut a century of labor practices with a result that is, at best, extremely uncertain. Everyone hopes that the changes he or she puts through will turn out for the best, but the history of education suggests that the vast majority of quick fixes, such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), never accomplish even a fraction of their much-lauded ambitions. More than a decade after NCLB, there are more children being left behind than ever, and the same right-wingers who told us that NCLB would fix all these problems are now putting their faith in union busting. Perhaps this time, at long last, we can tell them that "No, this won't work any better than all the other quick fixes you have proposed".

Just like their trillions of dollars of tax cuts did not stimulate the economy, and instead produced the worst recession since 1929, their union busting efforts will neither improve the economy, nor fix education. Cutting spending in the middle of a recession, many have pointed out, is like deciding to start saving water when your house is burning down. Actually FDR used the metaphor of people wanting to save water only when their neighbor's house is on fire. This ambition to start saving money seems to have been forgotten when Bush was president and Republicans were in charge of congress most of the time. It only seems to have been discovered when Obama is now in office and they believe that continuing to wreck the economy can help them in the next presidential election.

We are back to the issue spoken about at the beginning of inventing crises so that certain political opportunists can ram through their agendas with less opposition. People are tired of government by crisis. We are tired of people who constantly provoke fights that weren't there before they stirred the pot and tried to turn the working class against itself in Wisconsin and elsewhere. People who continually provoke fights are likely to get more than bargained for eventually. In many other countries there are national strikes to show solidarity. Wisconsin is, after all, not the only state considering similar maneuvers. What if educators called their own "day of outrage" in this country? What if we all went to our state capitals. I've heard of accidents where boxes of roofing nails got accidentally knocked off the back of trucks and get scattered across all the streets in these capitals. I've also heard of strange accidents where people get very confused and end up squirting glue into the locks of the doors of important buildings, tragically making it impossible to open them without calling locksmiths. A pair of old shoes with bailing wire for laces sometimes might get accidentally tossed into the air like a bolo and end up wrapped around power lines, which could inadvertantly cause them to short out. I don't know how that could happen or why or who want to do such a thing, but if it did occur, God forbid, I suppose it could give people a little more time to reflect on things, and contemplate if this is a confrontation that needs to take place.

You can't do rage every day and not be consumed

Rage, conspiracy fear-mongering, demonization, and extreme aggression, for hours on end, are staples of right-wing talk radio. You find nothing even remotely this severe on the left-wing of the political spectrum, especially now that Obama is in office and democrats remain in control of the Senate. The closest that liberals might get to this would be people like Keith Olbermann or Mike Malloy. But Keith and Mike have nothing on the ranting, raving lunacy of Michael Savage, or the maudlin fear mongering of Glenn Beck, or the in-your-face bullying of Bill O'Reilly.

I am suggesting that constant anger, fear, and aggression cannot be healthy, either physically and mentally, for people to consume (or to produce for that matter) for hours on end. It has to do something to your mind to constantly be in an agitated state. It is no surprise that most people turning to violence for political reasons in recent years also come, almost exclusively from the right-wing, where they are whipped into a frenzy nearly every day. Rage is all the rage today, with these folks. It is hard to think of an agenda item where they disagree with their opponents calmly. Instead, everything is about death panels, and gays, and immigrants coming here to kill and rob and take our jobs. If vote *for* health care for all you are not simply disagreeing with them. You are called a baby killer, and dark murmurings are made about how the government is planning to round people up and put them in concentration camps.

It may seem that I'm overly attacking the rightwing here, but that's because politics has shifted so far to the right of center in the last several decades that many people have noted that people like Nixon and Reagan would be derided, these days, as liberals by the modern neo-conservative and TEA party movement.

Therefore, a key to returning to centrism is reigning in ultra-extremism on the right. Extremists on the left have long been marginalized, ridiculed, and hold very little power. People like Kucinich or Wellstone or Bernie Sanders are never given the media attention of someone like Sarah Palin, for example. People like Pelosi or Reed, hyperbolic rhetoric to one side, cannot possibly be said to represent anything approaching the extreme fringe of the democratic party. They are firmly in the center.

Liberals do need to work on not allowing some of their vocal extremists, such as gay activists, from dominating the dialog, as they often end up doing on things like Don't Ask Don't Tell, which will probably still remain a liability in 2012 elections. Liberals have paid very little attention to the cost versus the benefits of various positions, like gay marriage, and have instead ended up martyring themselves over so-called principles at the ballot box. I would humbly suggest that, if you are going to choose a hill to die upon, that you choose causes where the payoff is worth the risks electorially, because otherwise, you will be voted out of office and your principles will be defeated anyway. I know that people love to jump all over this sort of thing, but I will share a little tidbit with you. As a real estate agent, you know the deal is over when one side starts arguing "over the principle of the thing". Some people will throw away hundreds of thousands of dollars over $40 curtains. One wonders if people can afford principles like that for long.

Palin Sure Is Full Of Herself

To say that Sarah Palin is self-absorbed is about like saying that water is wet or that Mama Grizzly's are furry. For Palin, it's always "all about me". Therefore, it is unsurprising that, in the aftermath of the massacre in Arizona, Palin would assume that all of this happened just to make her look bad and thus the need for her lame jeremiads and swipes at the "lame stream media".

Her asinine "blood libel" comment is just an example of her planet-sized ego. To anyone with a brain, a clue, or a conscience, it would not even occur to compare some minor kerfuffle to the suffering of millions over centuries, mainly at the hands of her christian brethren. However, in Palin's mind, her ridiculously mild brush with criticism is an earth-shattering affront to her unbridled ambitions. Her speech writers probably also saw it as an opportunity to inappropriately begin the rhetoric of violence anew, just by making reference to such events. One will note, if one listens at all to her comments, that she claimed that holding her responsible for putting crosshairs on Giffords picture could potentially lead to more violence.

I'm afraid that cosmic justice usually ain't that condign, sweetums, though you would certainly deserve to be paid back in kind for the beast that you helped to release.

Palin is certainly behaving like someone who has a guilty mind. Who else would go into full panic mode and hide out for four days, while sending out damage control teams to fight her battles by proxy.

I'm afraid that she takes Diva to a whole new level, at least politically speaking. That may be the only thing she has to contribute to American politics.

Why the violent rhetoric? DUH! Let's see....

This is an example of how far some people are from common sense. Particularly on the liberal side, some of the peace activists I talk to are asking questions like, "What purpose does all this violent rhetoric from people on the right serve?" Yeah, really, they are so far removed from reality that they don't understand the basic purpose of violence and threats of violence, which is POWER. Right-wingers derive power by threatening and attempting to intimidate their opponents. Instead playing the game by the rules, they win by cheating. Duh. It's pretty simple. I know that some people think there must be some more complicated reasoning than this, but THERE'S NOT!

By acting as bullies they put the lie to the fundamental premises of pacifism. You cannot shame a bully who has no shame. Gandhi and MLK Jr. succeeded because some of their opponents had a modicum of shame. But you will notice that both of them were murdered, and the kinds of people who would do that will not be deterred by pacifism. It is a dogma, bordering on religious superstition that there is always a non-violent answer to every problem. The fact is that when someone comes at you with a gun to take your life that you will have to defend yourself or die. Most liberals are in serious denial about this. When your opponents constantly announce their desire to kill you, you cannot afford to just dismiss this all as idle talk. Yes, it's true that most bullies are chicken s**t little cowards who threaten because they are too impotent to act. However, threats do give the threatener power, especially if you never properly answer them or prepare for the worst case scenario. The proper answer to a threat is not to passive-aggressively ignore it, or use some namby-pamby platitude like, "I won't dignify that comment with a response". Remember, you are trying to shame people who may well have no sense of shame. The only intelligent, appropriate response to a threat is to counter the threat with your own promise of all legitimate responses against it immediately. When someone says, "liberals deserve to die" you need to immediately have that person prosecuted for hate speech, while at the same time, taking maximum effort to insure that you are prepared to meet this person's threat with lethal deterrence.

Most liberals don't own guns because they are that deep in denial. They will usually justify it by citing some vague "study" that says having a gun in the house is dangerous and could be used against you. Yeah, if you don't secure the gun. IOWs, if you act like an idiot about owning a gun then it certainly will be dangerous to you. If you're a colossal wussie and know that you will wimp out on pulling the trigger instead of seeing that assailant as a tree stump to be used for target practice, then you will become a victim of your own firearm, and I can't say I feel too sorry for you. You had your chance right in your hand and you refused to take it.

This is the same thing that left-wingers do politically all the time. For a long time these guys refused to fight back against an onslaught of negative attack ads. They said "they wouldn't lower themselves" to campaign that way and they lost and they are footnotes in history that are lower than whale poo. So much for not lowering yourselves.

Now, it's true that people are sometimes turned off by negative ads. But there is a formula that is virtually guaranteed to defuse this. You first attack your opponent, and then at the end of the ad you deny that you attacked the person and say you just want to get along and have a civil debate. Perhaps even accuse your opponent of attacking you first, and THEN announce that you "won't stoop to that level", even when you already have. People will tend to remember the last thing you told them intellectually. But they will remember the first thing they saw emotionally. Republicans use variants of this technique again and again. Fox News claims to be "fair and balanced" at the end of mercilessly displaying their bias. Many people continue to buy it.

Now I know some people might say, "but that's being dishonest". Those kind of people are really not equipped to function in an actual democracy. They are functioning in a perfect fantasy world which has never and will never exist.

So, to recap, the purpose of violent rhetoric is POWER. Whether you are defending yourself personally or your campaign politically, by refusing to meet your opponents threat with adequate stopping power, you become the victim. The key is to disguise your own responses, claiming that you are not attacking your opponent and that you have been wronged, and that you just want to be civil. However, don't drink your own Koolaid. They will come at you with everything, and you have to come at them with everything. The time for being civil is when things are over. Civility is for your friends, not your mortal enemies.

Gun Liberals, Gun Conservatives and Crazy People

I know that current pro-gun fanatics, who are almost exclusively right-wingers, will hate to be called "gun liberals", but that is what they are advocating when they argue that there should be less restrictions on owning or carrying firearms. I know that, to them, liberal just means something derogatory, but to those who know the meaning of words, the term "liberalize" means to be make less restrictive, and this is what they are advocating. On the other hand, "gun conservatives" (gunservatives), who happen to be primarily left-wingers in the US, are those who want to tighten regulations on gun ownership and carrying. I'm sure that this kind of "semantic" argument would drive a person like Jared Loughner even crazier than he already must have been.

That brings me to the common sense, centrist issue of the day. Any person with common sense would agree that a crazy person should not be carrying around a gun with a high capacity magazine. Yet, according to gun fanatics, no regulations can be placed on gun ownership. Their argument that gun regulation is unconstitutional relies upon reading only the second half of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, and purposely omitting the part that says, "a well REGULATED militia being necessary to the security of a free State,". Instead they only cite, "... the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Therefore, it is an inescapable consequence of their pro-gun position that crazy people should be allowed to carry guns. One wonders how "pro-life" the "pro-gun" position is, in this case, since crazy people, by definition, are not going to make sane choices about the use of lethal force.

That is, even if everyone else is armed and is able to kill the crazy person after he or she starts shooting, then at least one person, but probably more than one, will be dead. Granted, it will be self-defense to shoot the crazy person, but allowing that crazy person to have the gun in the first place, knowing that they are mentally incapable of acting responsible, is the reason that multiple lives end up endangered or destroyed. Even if these people just use the gun to kill themselves, making this easy option available to them makes it easier than it has to be to carry out their reckless plans.

Now, I know that a favorite "argument" is that "criminals will break the law". However, in the case of people with diminished mental capacity, we should still be trying to make it as hard as possible for them to carry out their plans. If they are forced to turn to improvised weapons like knives, then the body count will likely be far diminished. Allowing them the convenience of purchasing an "off-the-shelf" professionally-designed "massacre machine" from Walmart should not be an option open to them.

Gun fanatics also like to play the "personal responsibility" card, but the fact is that crazy people are not capable of personal responsibility, by their nature. More importantly, craziness sometimes develops slowly, and can be hard to detect. Often times crazy people don't even know it, or are in denial about it. So I highly doubt that people who are beginning to experience episodes of mental instability are going to say, "Golly gee, I guess I should trot down to the police station and turn in my firearms so that I don't accidentally hurt someone with them".

Now the fact is that there are gun fanatics out there, but the real people who benefit from all this divisive rhetoric are the gun manufacturers. They want to sell as many guns as possible, and requiring a person to undergo a psychological evaluation before being able to buy a gun would reduce sales. Even having to put safety devices on guns makes them more expensive, which again can cut into sales. Gun manufacturers don't want to have any regulations, because it could hurt the bottom line, so they strongly sponsor the pro-gun activism and the abolition of regulations.

So what can common sense centrists do. For one thing, we have to break out of the traditional roles. Liberals have not fared well on the gun-control debate. All the money comes from the gun manufacturers and goes straight to the coffers of groups that advocate gun fanaticism. Money is life-blood in politics. Therefore, for a policy to be successful, it must not cut into sales. I believe that liberals could appeal to gun manufacturers with a policy that says, "we will encourage more liberals to purchase guns and safety locks and concealed permits". This represents a new revenue stream for gun makers, if political leaders on the left can convince their constituents that responsible gun ownership can help make themselves and their community safer.

On the right-wing, perhaps one can appeal to a need for security. We don't want terrorists, for example, many of whom are not always mentally stable either, to have easy access to firearms. Therefore, requiring customers to complete a mandatory psychological evaluation, and periodic evaluations, would probably weed out a few people who shouldn't have a firearm. I know that right-wingers are paranoid about people "trying to take my gun", but if police did come around occasionally confiscating guns from people with lapsed permits this would only create more sales, or at least encourage people to more diligent about keeping the permit current, and paying their fees.

It would also potentially win a new revenue stream from mental health practitioners. They would likely be glad for the extra business, and would throw contributions to whatever politician pushed this kind of agenda. The trick is to balance this with not pissing off the gun makers, by promising to help them get customers who from new demographics, like liberals, and middle-of-the-road people who aren't as paranoid as the average person to which they currently market.