Greetings Of The Season!

Thursday was the darkest day of the year. From now on, it only gets brighter. What a time for a holiday full of light! And the right time to put the seam between old year and new. A friend wished me happy holidays the other day, and I'll tell you what I told him: "Merry goddam Christmas!"

More About Wisconsin

Bridgid:

I hadn't considered what the flying saucers would do. But, I am expending considerable energy to trying to figure out what WE can do.  I think the answer must be in getting 3 Republicans to agree that the goals right now are reasonable....in addition to being necessary to move forward. Rewrite what collective bargaining means if ABSOLUTELY necessary but DON'T take away the VOICE. I keep trusting that people smarter than I who are also at the core of what's happening, are doing everything possible to resolve.  (The problem of course if that's what everybody is doing...waiting for someone else to find an answer (albeit, temporary)).

Hey....you may want to either remove Denny or change her address.  You probably know that she switched jobs.  Her email is now: droark@uwsa.edu.  I wonder whether taking her off for at least a while would be the wiser choice.  Her job is a definite possible hit.  If Walker is spying and his layoffs strategic, she is vulnerable.  (God, are we back in the era of McCarthyism in Wisconsin?!)

Keep up the good fight.

Tom:

Good tip about Denny. Spies. People like Walker and his benefactors have more in common with the Soviets than with the 19th century libertarians like our great grandfather that they pretend to be.

What I was getting at with the flying saucers was the notion that we need to cultivate a comprehensive, compassionate, and strategic point of view. I don't believe in flying saucers -- or the second coming for that matter. I do believe that somebody who's trying to eliminate collective bargaining has a larger agenda than saving money for his state.

But... I also believe that the ground troops among the tea party are correct, if only in believing that the American economy is screwed. If you're going to agitate for your right to collective bargaining, it's incumbent upon you to articulate a larger plan. Otherwise you're just the flip side of the idiots that elected Walker, and my state's legislative majority.

Those people who are supposed to be smarter than you and me seem to be playing their cards pretty close to their chests. I caught a PowerPoint presentation on energy a couple of weeks ago, and I facetiously asked the presenter whether or not our leaders know "all this stuff." Of course they do, but a) they don't want to scare us, b) our economy is so complex and interrelated that they don't know how to correct problems in one sector without throwing the whole thing into turmoil, and c) the inertia of interest and massive ignorance limits what a well intentioned politician or CEO can do -- maybe more than it does you and me.

An Exchange With My Sister

Sister:

I think this site is very helpful (and somewhat addictive). There is so much going on here in Wisconsin, that it is hard to keep up.  I keep it open and find myself refreshing it regularly.

 

http://budget.wispolitics.com/

 

Me:

I suppose there's a parallel site here, but I haven't gone looking yet. Nice find, Bridgid!

The thing that impresses me about current Badger State (and Ohio) union busting is that the things that our side is trying to protect are just patches that sort of compensate for systemic inequity, while the other side is using Naomi Klein's shock-and-awe capitalism, selling a genuine crisis as justification for yanking the patches without mending the tears.

Feudal motherfuckers.

Speaking of which
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRESDzvmfZ0

The sound is a little muddy, so
http://www.metrolyrics.com/sex-with-your-parents-part-ii-lyrics-lou-reed.html 

 

Sister:

Nice way to summarize Tom (i.e., "selling a genuine crisis as justification for yanking the patches without mending the tears")!

 

Pretty amazing stuff going on in the Badger State right now.  This morning I felt the smallest of glimmers of concession in Walker's hard ball game.  (I'll have to talk to Denny and Colleen to see if they are feeling it. (Both are my "feet on the street" BEST sources because they both are experiencing the movement professionally and personally every day)).

 

Me:

I'm trying to figure out what the flying saucers would do -- you know, compassionate, all-knowing outsiders with incredible computers who can take in the entire system, and prescribe the shortest course toward every living human's having the means to survive and work meaningfully. We don't have that now, but cheap oil has made us complacent: about the starvation of remote people and the absurdity of our own well fed existences. Leaders like Walker -- but not necessarily every freshman Republican guv or cong -- are corrupt. The prank phone call should have sent any honest tea partier scrambling for the exit, but the tea partiers themselves only intuit the crisis, and don't understand it. They know trouble's brewing, but they're scared and, like the rest of us, can't help but think of it as a mere -- though dramatic -- disturbance within the context of "everything's okay, if only liberals/hippies/reds/blacks/foreigners/bleeding hearts/etc. would stop trying to manage the market and take more than their share."

These are the people at work who loan you a copy of Spencer Johnson's Who Moved My Cheese, and their own cheese is inexorably disappearing. The party's over, and they don't want to hear it.