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.