“Did you see it?”

“Yeah, I saw it, it was awesome!”

“What’s wrong with his voice?”

“Who cares! It’s great! He’s great!  It was a great message!”

Last night, Twitter was ablaze with references [...]]]> The chatter around the water cooler at the office this morning is about the Clint Eastwood commercial from last night’s SuperDooperBowl.

“Did you see it?”

“Yeah, I saw it, it was awesome!”

“What’s wrong with his voice?”

“Who cares! It’s great! He’s great!  It was a great message!”

Last night, Twitter was ablaze with references to The Commercial.  I would say that 80% of it was favorable.  Don’t hold me to that number, it’s very much a guesstimation, but it’s directionally correct.  Most people said they liked it.  They especially liked the quick reference to the Madison protests.  If you didn’t see it, here it is.

I’m in the 20% camp who didn’t like the commercial.  I found the message manipulative, exploitative and, in retrospect, a hollow vision of America as a corporate controlled wasteland.  The rah-rah of Corporate America, represented by the Chrysler automotive group, never referenced the destruction of good jobs in America through an endless series of trade agreements, championed by these corporate hacks, that moved work offshore and destroyed the manufacturing base of the midwest.  With apologies to Saint Ronoldus, patron Saint of Crony Capitalism,

Chrysler isn’t the solution to our problem, Chrysler is the problem!

Forgive me if I can’t get all misty when a gravely-voiced Clint Eastwood tells me how we’re going to come back stronger than before.  I’m sorry.  I can’t do it.  I’m not buying what Chrysler is selling through their High Plains Drifter spokesmodel.  Because that’s what he is.  A spokesmodel for a corporatist vision of America.  The lone gunman.  The guy who can overcome all obstacles.  Except that that’s a lie.  It’s the biggest lie we tell ourselves as Americans.  The lie of the American Dream that anyone can make it.  They can’t.

You see, the deck is stacked against the average American to a degree we haven’t seen in more than 100 years.  Income inequality and intragenerational income rigidity have combined to make America pre-Revolutionary France.  Born Rich – Die Rich.  Born Poor – Die Poor.  It’s now the American Way.

Forgive me for not cheering.

Question: What do Rhode Island, Louisiana, Wyoming, Hawaii, Alaska and Wisconsin all have in common?

Answer: They all have stagnant or shrinking economies according to data compiled by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve.

It’s so not working, Wisconsin!

But what caught my attention [...]]]> Salon has an interesting interview with Arthur Goldwag, author of the new book The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right.  He argues that the racist and conspiracist approach of today’s right-wing nut jobs is “largely the same as it was 50 years ago.”

But what caught my attention was this question and answer because I think it goes a long way towards understanding recent attacks on public workers in Wisconsin.

Why is this resurgence of the “old hate” happening now?

We’re going through a historic shift in this country.  We were on an incredible run of prosperity in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, thanks to the New Deal social compact, thanks to big unions, thanks to very strong regulation – thanks to all the things that Glenn Beck’s followers think are the most evil things in the world.  Fairly unskilled, uneducated people were able to earn a good living, and send their children to college.  And that’s changed.  Income inequality is growing.  If you look at American history, the bottom has dropped out of rural people’s lives every five years, but there used to also be a manufacturing class that made a decent living.  There used to be a route for people that weren’t well educated to make a decent living.  There isn’t anymore. There’s a lot of anxiety about our individual positions in our society, and our country’s position in the world. If you’re not educated to be able to understand it, and you’re trapped in a disadvantaged life, you might become really, really angry. (emphasis added)

I believe that this is, fundamentally, correct.  His assessment of the level of anger and vitriol in the undereducated population is being exploited by the right wing of the GOP in ways that are, ultimately, detrimental to their own interests.  Rather than expressing solidarity with public workers who, while not paid as well as private sector workers in general, certainly retained levels of benefits not seen in the private sector since the 1970s.  And that was achieved, of course, through collective bargaining.

You want to see envy in action, here it is.  If you think the 99% envy the wealth of the 1%, private sector workers, many of whom have ceded more benefits and more compensation to their employers demands, are most certainly envious of the benefits of their public sector brothers and sisters.  You can hear it in their rhetoric.  The rich capitalize on this envy through the omnipresent right wing media who stoke these fires of jealousy into action against working-class Americans.  They’ve even convinced these “useful idiots” that “right to work” laws will benefit workers! As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said,

In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights.Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped. Our weapon is our vote.  (Martin Luther King, speaking about right-to-work laws in 1961)

Instead of standing in solidarity with the public sector and demanding the same benefits from their private sector employers, these cowards resort to jealous tantrums against “pampered” public sector workers.  These class traitors demand that the benefits bargained by public sector workers be slashed to the same meager levels they suffer in the private sector.  All the while, heaping opprobrium onto the very institution, the labor union, that could help raise them up.

Working class people tearing down working class people.  The capitalists have certainly won.

Jay Gould’s dystopian worker’s paradise has certainly come to pass…

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

He could be in Naples, FL or New York with the stimulus king of AIG, or attacking unions in Arizona, OR Colorado secretly getting his orders from the Kochs. The one thing we know is Governor Walker is NOT in Wisconsin and and he [...]]]> Neither do I!

He could be in Naples, FL or New York with the stimulus king of AIG, or attacking unions in Arizona, OR Colorado secretly getting his orders from the Kochs. The one thing we know is Governor Walker is NOT in Wisconsin and and he will not tell anyone where he is.

You have Scott Walker doing this financial tour across the nation, raising money wherever he possibly can, flying over Wisconsin, sort of waving, and getting back on the plane and leaving the state again.
- Sen. Jon Erpenbach

Before we have to put out an APB and use some Wisconsin Milk cartons please help us out. He was last seen wearing a red and white shirt and stocking cap and blue pants! If anyone has seen him please let us know!

By the way for those of you scoring at home:

From madison.com

My first question was a softball: “Will you pledge right now to run the most open, transparent gubernatorial administration in the history of the universe?”

Gov.-elect Scott Walker’s one-word reply: “Absolutely.”

After President Obama’s State of the Union address, Republicans will trot out Republican Governor Mitch “halfway to cadaver” Daniels to give the official Republican response to the State of the Union. You may remember Gov. Daniels from such hits as “Indiana union [...]]]> Tonight’s the night for President Barack Obama’s fourth State of the Union address.

After President Obama’s State of the Union address, Republicans will trot out Republican Governor Mitch “halfway to cadaver” Daniels to give the official Republican response to the State of the Union. You may remember Gov. Daniels from such hits as “Indiana union busting,” “federal budget deficit ballooning,” and “Indiana toll road privatizing,” and here’s a video outlining all the bad that is Mitch Daniels.

He sent links to a couple of posts [...]]]> Yesterday, I wrote a piece called Overheard at the “Celebrating Scott Walker” Rally: The Illinois Jobs Wasteland.I pointed out that, contrary to the GOP talking points, Illinois is not as bad off as they’d like us to believe. At least one rightie was delighted by my post!

He sent links to a couple of posts from the Echo Chamber that make reference to the recent downgrade of Illinois’ debt and the causes for that downgrade.  Matt himself wrote about the reasons for Illinois’ ugly economic circumstance.

The Illinois budgetary record is not pretty.  Heading into 2011, Illinois faced a budget deficit of over $13 billion and passed a massive tax increase both to personal income and corporate income tax rates.  They’re still broke.  With a pension system in shambles, Illinois also borrowed massive amounts of money to make this year’s pension payment.

In September, Illinois laid off 1,900 public employees and closed seven state facilities. Also, much to the chagrin of Wisconsinites who drive to or through Illinois, toll rates in the state have increased on average by 88%.

Illinois, like California, was a victim of the catastrophic CDO disaster on Wall Street.  When the banksters crashed the economy, they took down quite a few public pension funds with them.

And yes, tolls (taxes) on the roads went up.  Oh well.  Illinois was acting responsibly to attempt to increase revenue.

But the public employee numbers are startling (all data comes from the FRED database at the St. Louis Federal Reserve)

Illinois laid off 1,900 public sector workers while in Wisconsin, Walker relied on the so-called “Budget Repair Bill” to do the dirty work for him so he could keep his hands clean.

In September of 2011, Illinois had 856,600 public employees.  1,900 workers represents a mere 0.2% of the total Illinois public workforce.

On the other hand, the so-called “Budget Repair Bill” drove 14,000 Wisconsin public sector workers to quit or retire representing 3% of the workforce.

The impact of the so-called “Budget Repair Bill” was to drive workers out of the workforce and into early retirement was brutal to Wisconsin’s economy.

The effect is the same, it drives workers out of the workforce and drives demand down.  This, in part, explains why the Coincident Economic Index is on the decline for Wisconsin while the Index is on the rise for Illinois.

As to the reasons for Moody’s downgrade, contrary to the nonsense in the wingnut press and op-ed pages,

Run up spending and debt, raise taxes in the naming of balancing the budget, but then watch as deficits rise and your credit-rating falls anyway. That’s been the sad pattern in Europe, and now it’s hitting that mecca of tax-and-spend government known as Illinois.

the rise in taxes implemented in Illinois represented one of the good things the state did to manage their problems. The problems stem almost exclusively from the pension underfunding facing Illinois.  Here’s what Moody’s actually wrote.

SUMMARY RATING RATIONALE
The downgrade of the state’s long-term debt follows a legislative session in which the state took no steps to implement lasting solutions to its severe pension under-funding or to its chronic bill payment delays. Failure to address these challenges undermines near- to intermediate-term prospects for fiscal recovery. It remains to be seen whether the state has the political willingness to impose durable policies leading to fiscal strength, though in the recent past it has reached consensus on difficult decisions, such as temporary income tax increases enacted last year that stabilized state finances and reduced the state’s need for non-recurring budgetary measures. Illinois retains the sovereign revenue and spending powers common to all U.S. state governments. These powers, along with Illinois’ legal provisions giving G.O. debt service priority over other state spending, support the move to a stable outlook.

The state, like Washington DC, is struggling with a crippled political process.  It’s not about increased revenue through taxes, it’s about a broken political system.  Wisconsinites are well on the way to repairing our political system by recalling Scott Walker and the other austerity vultures which should help turn our economy around.

Now I don’t really [...]]]> There’s been a lot of chatter about this article from The New York Times on Apple’s move to China for their manufacturing.  But there is an underreported backstory here involving the management of these factories and the workers whose lives are ruined by Apple, Dell and other American electronics manufacturers.

Now I don’t really care for This American Life.  Ira Glass is a whiner and I don’t have patience for whiners.  But this piece on manufacturing in China really hit home.  Next time you pick up your iPhone to surf the web or make a call, think about this for a minute.

Then the workers start coming in. They come in in twos and threes and fours. They come in all day. It’s an eight, nine-hour day. I interview all of them. Some of them are in groups.

There’s a group that’s talking about hexane. N-hexane is an iPhone screen cleaner. It’s great because it evaporates a little bit faster than alcohol does, which means you can run the production line even faster and try to keep up with the quotas. The problem is that n-hexane is a potent neurotoxin, and all these people have been exposed. Their hands shake uncontrollably. Most of them can’t even pick up a glass.

I talk to people whose joints in their hands have disintegrated from working on the line, doing the same motion hundreds and hundreds of thousands of times. It’s like carpal tunnel on a scale we can scarcely imagine. And you need to know that this is eminently avoidable. If these people were rotated monthly on their jobs, this would not happen.

But that would require someone to care. That would require someone at Foxconn and the other suppliers to care. That would require someone at Apple and Dell and the other customers to care. Currently no one in the ecosystem cares enough to even enforce that. And so when you start working at 15 or 16, by the time you are 26, 27, your hands are ruined. And when they are truly ruined, once they will not do anything further, you know what we do with a defective part in a machine that makes machine. We throw it away.

And the thing that unites all these people is that they are all the kind of people who would join a union in a place where joining a union can destroy your life. I talk with one woman. She’s very birdlike, very nervous. And she just wants to explain to me how it is that she came to be in a union, because she never thought she would ever be in a union. It’s just that she couldn’t get her company to pay her overtime. And she complained and complained. This went on for weeks and for months.

In the United States, unions were forged in the front lines of industrial capitalism.  That fight has moved to China.  When we think about the fight for union rights for public sector workers, we should never forget the struggles of our brothers and sisters around the world who face unimaginable horrors in the workplace just to feed their families.  And their capitalists are as callous as our capitalists.

“Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache,” Gou said, according to the website run by Taiwan’s China Times News Group.

The Hon Hai chairman was reportedly entertaining Taipei Zoo director Chin Shih-chien onstage when he asked Chin “how animals should be managed” and instructed Hon Hai executives present to listen carefully to the zookeeper’s advice.

Disgusting.