Wisconsin - Some Things to Think About

Before making any quick judgments, please look at the studies and ask if what you've held as true is actually reflected in the numbers. If you think there's something that was missed, biased, or not factored into the analysis, please mention it. Then read the article below that for a historical account to see if there's something you didn't know that might affect your opinion.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/150018/ ... _can_help/

4. Public Employees Are Not The Problem: Study http://www.cepr.net/documents/publicati ... 010-05.pdf after study http://www.epi.org/analysis_and_opinion ... earn_less/ shows the public employees do not receive extravagant compensation, and that the problems with state public pension systems are largely overblown. http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3372 State budgets are reeling from an economic recession caused by reckless Wall Street speculators, top end tax cuts and corporate tax avoidance. The projected shortfalls in public retirement benefits derive mostly from skyrocketing health care costs thanks to private insurers, and poorly performing pension investments thanks to deregulated Wall Street firms.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02 ... on-decline
Plutocracy Now: What Wisconsin Is Really About
How screwing unions screws the entire middle class.
— By Kevin Drum
March/April 2011 Issue

American politicians don't care much about voters with moderate incomes. Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels studied the voting behavior of US senators in the early '90s and discovered that they respond far more to the desires of high-income groups than to anyone else. By itself, that's not a surprise. He also found that Republicans don't respond at all to the desires of voters with modest incomes. Maybe that's not a surprise, either. But this should be: Bartels found that Democratic senators don't respond to the desires of these voters, either. At all.

ABOUT A YEAR ago, the Pew Research Center looked looked at the sources reporters used for stories on the economy. http://www.journalism.org/analysis_repo ... 80%99t#fn1 The White House and members of Congress were often quoted, of course. Business leaders. Academics. Ordinary citizens. If you're under 40, you may not notice anything amiss. Who else is missing, then? Well: "Representatives of organized labor unions," Pew found, "were sources in a mere 2% of all the economy stories studied."

It wasn't always this way.

When the news sources start becoming biased, then the news itself becomes slanted toward a specific agenda.

Why should we care?

This matters, as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue in one of last year's most important books, Winner-Take-All Politics, http://www.amazon.com/Winner-Take-All-P ... 1416588698 because politicians don't respond to the concerns of voters, they respond to the organized muscle of institutions that represent them. With labor in decline, both parties now respond strongly to the interests of the rich—whose institutional representation is deep and energetic—and barely at all to the interests of the working and middle classes.

This has produced three decades of commercial and financial deregulation that started during the administration of a Democrat, Jimmy Carter, gained steam throughout the Reagan era, and continued under Bill Clinton. An unwillingness to regulate financial derivatives that led to enormous Wall Street profits and contributed to the financial crisis of 2008. At nearly every turn, corporations and the financial industry used their institutional muscle to get what they wanted, while the working class sat by and watched, mostly unaware that any of this was even happening.

Organized labor, for all its faults, acted as an effective countervailing power for decades, representing not just its own interests, but the interests of virtually the entire wage-earning class against the investor class. As veteran Washington Post reporter David Broder wrote a few years ago, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar ... 4Sep8.html labor in the postwar era "did not confine itself to bread-and-butter issues for its own members. It was at the forefront of battles for aid to education, civil rights, housing programs and a host of other social causes important to the whole community. And because it was muscular, it was heard and heeded." If unions had been as strong in the '80s and '90s as they were in the '50s and '60s, it's almost inconceivable that they would have sat by and accepted tax cuts and financial deregulation on the scale that we got. They would have demanded economic policies friendlier to middle-class interests, they would have pressed for the appointment of regulators less captured by the financial industry, and they would have had the muscle to get both.

I hear time and again that conservatives/Tea Party members want smaller government. I contend that it's not smaller government needed, per se, but smarter government. Prioritized government - government that is for the people and by the people, not by special interest groups, or corporations, or foreign influence. If you want the government to be less intrusive, less cumbersome, less taxative, and for the little guy, it seems to me that supporting the union protests in Wisconsin is the side to be on. Feel free to disagree with this analysis, but please expand upon why - I'd like to know what I'm missing in my analysis.

I'll end with this. There are 8 charts, but this one drove it home to me:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02 ... hart-graph
It's the Inequality, Stupid
Eight charts that explain everything that's wrong with America.
March/April 2011 Issue

If we're in such economic dire straights, why are Wall St. profits, the guys who got us into this recent downturn, doing so well? Why are our home values still shrinking, job stability non-existent, and debt rising? I saw another article that I can find now that said something like $2.3 trillion in cash is being held in reserve by businesses across America - how many people could they employ with just some of that money? How better off would the economy be already if they weren't just hoarding because of continued rainy days? It seems self-defeating to me. If you have any better explanations, I'd love to hear them.