This is a quick diary to give my two cents worth on the rally in Albany, NY. A day after the latest winter storm came through and dumped about a foot of snow on us, public employees had the roads open and safe so we could gather in the park between the State Capitol building and the Alfred E. Smith State Office Building. Kodiak54 has a diary of rallies which include a couple pictures from Albany. Hundreds of people showed up, including both private and public sector unions and other groups with allied interests.
Update - devtob provided a link in comments to dozens of pictures from the rally.
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The weather had settled down - above freezing and with little wind. The people organizing did a great job; there was a PA system in operation, music to get the crowd pumped up before the noon kick-off, and plenty of signs and noise makers to help make our point.
Some of the high points: people who'd been to Madison reporting on the incredible things happening there; the turn out by people from all kinds of groups coming together, strong condemnations of Walker and his true agenda, cheers for the blogger in Buffalo for his inspired phone call, Joe Seeman from MoveOn hailing Marx and Lennon (Groucho and John) before getting serious about the need to get out and get to work...
There were several news teams there with cameras - until the police suddenly appeared and told them they had to move their trucks because of 'public safety issues.' The message is still getting out - but a quick sample of the evening news shows the Republican talking points about 'generous' benefits, wages and pensions breaking state budgets are getting more attention than the effects on the middle class of decades of union busting. Around a dozen states are reported to be looking at Wisconsin and Walker's strategy.
The network news on ABC and CBS (NBC is still showing golf as I type this) had visuals, sound bites from demonstrators - but little depth and certainly no chance for union people to explain what's really going on at any length. CBS tracked down a Wisconsin Democratic state senator, but did nothing but hit him with a GOP talking point - shouldn't he be back at work in his state? And that was it.
Sunday is going to be a real test. Will any of the talking head shows have any guests from a union of any kind? You'd think with people rallying all around the country they could find somebody to speak for them.
We are Americans. We are taxpayers. We are fighting for the middle class, just about the only group still doing so. We are exercising our freedom and working for democracy. We will not be broken. We will not be silenced. We're not done yet.
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I had some words ready to say if given the opportunity, but there were plenty of speakers and I had to leave to go work with parents and teachers giving of their own time to help the high school drama club work on a musical for May. FWIW, here's what I had to say.
I’d like to make a few remarks today in support of Wisconsin workers. I have some personal connections. Not only am I a NY State public employee with a real stake in this fight, I have a cousin who is a state worker in Wisconsin. I can tell you he is amazed and grateful for the support they are getting from around the world - not just the U.S.
He tells me they’ve been getting messages of support (and the occasional pizza) from people in Egypt. They understand what’s at stake - some of them have photoshopped Governor Walker wearing a Pharaoh's headdress. They know a tyrant when they see one.
There have been a lot of lies told about Wisconsin workers. My cousin tells me they’ve been doing their part for some time now. They haven’t had a raise in the past two years. They’ve been forced to take unpaid furlough days. They’ve already offered to negotiate on wages and benefits.
It doesn’t matter - Walker is not dealing in good faith here. Thanks to a blogger in Buffalo, we have him admitting in his own words this is all about breaking the unions, not balancing the budget or making the state work better. It’s about filling the pockets of him and his supporters, looting the public treasury and making unions the scapegoat.
My cousin is ready to do his part with the other members of his union to stand fast against this naked assault on them, their families, and the people of the state. While putting in his own share of personal time at the state capitol building, he’s also got to find time to get his taxes done (yes HE pays taxes like everyone else) and try to get financial aid to put a kid through college. Walker would have you believe this is a waste of taxpayer money. Some people complain about their tax money supporting state workers - but you never hear them complain when those workers use that money to pay them for goods and services.
How many people have heard the reason Wisconsin has a budget gap is because Walker and the Republicans in the legislature shoved through big tax breaks for business within days of taking office? My cousin tells me a Republican budget official admitted the state could balance the budget for everything - not just workers - even with those giveaways just by raising the state sales tax by half a percent - it’s only 5% now. He was quickly silenced.
How many people have heard the bill stripping workers of their rights also gives Walker the power to privatize state assets without bids or review of the process, and also to rewrite the state’s medicaid program without legislative input? How many know he’s slashing the ability of Wisconsin to protect its air and water, and crippling efforts to move away from imported oil? Odds are, most of you have not heard one word about this from the press.
How many people have heard about the bill Walker and the Republicans in the legislature pushed through which makes it impossible to raise income or sales taxes with less than a two thirds majority? The practical effect is that a handful of people can block the ability of the state to pay its bills, no matter the need or the circumstances. The effect will be to slash services or extract money by other means from people who can least afford to bear the burden, while the rich are protected. It’s a race to the bottom.
Walker and the Republican party are not out to reform government as they claim - they’re here to destroy it. Grover Norquist has stated the conservative aim is to get government down to size where it can be drowned in a bath tub - starve the beast. The Republican party has signed on to this - you will not find anyone in the party who disavows Norquist. Yet you still find too many people who think the Republicans are trying to fix things - and a solid minority among them who WANT to see government destroyed. As goes Wisconsin, so goes the nation and the Republican agenda.
Now maybe billionaires can convince themselves they don’t need government - but it’s not such a great deal for the rest of us. Safe food, safe streets, good schools for everyone, toys that won’t poison our children, air we can breathe, water we can drink - all of this and more is in jeopardy.
I’m going to reference some Terry Pratchett here. For those who don’t know Pratchett he writes fiction of the kind dismissed as fantasy and fairy tales. It’s appropriate to quote him because a lot of the arguments we hear are nothing but fantasy.
Try this one: Government should be run more like a business. Hah! Business is easy - government is hard. To be successful in business, it’s only necessary to do one thing: make a profit, right now. Nothing more, nothing less. That doesn’t mean it’s not a real challenge, but it’s nothing compared to running a government.
Government has to take on all comers - it can’t pick and choose customers. It has to try to serve everyone, of all ages, races, creeds, political beliefs, etc. and do so fairly.
Government is damned if it takes in one more penny than it needs - and damned if it doesn’t have reserves to deal with unanticipated events like natural disasters or external attack. It doesn’t just have to succeed now - it has to plan for next month, next year, next century. Government has to have enough power to do all of this while also protecting the freedoms and rights of its citizens. Business is hard? Don’t make me laugh.
Then there’s this one: Government is not the solution to our problems; government IS the problem. That particular piece of spin is right up there with all the arguments about government getting too big.
Look - government is neither the solution OR the problem: government is a tool. What matters is who is using the tool, how well they use it, and to what ends. You can build with a hammer and saw - and you can also destroy. It’s a poor workman who blames his tools. As for size, it’s NOT whether its too big or too small - it’s a matter of whether its the right size to handle the job that needs to be done - and deciding just what that job should be.
Now government is not the only tool available to help people solve problems - but it’s one that can be incredibly useful in trustworthy and competent hands, and there are some problems that no other kind of tool can handle half so well. Anyone who swears up and down that it should be never used is either trying to sell you something, or has no idea what they’re talking about.
Terry Pratchett wrote an entire novel around a particular observation: A lie can go halfway around the world while the Truth is still putting on its boots. A lie can go even faster when it’s propelled by a fake news network, a vast assemblage of right wing radio and newspapers, and an entire archipelago of think tanks, institutions, and foundations dedicated to crafting those lies and turning them loose on the world.
Try this one you may have heard recently: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the greatest statesmen ever to come out of the Empire State, was opposed to public employee unions. Here is the quote used to make that claim:
“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”
FDR did say that - but he also said something more in the same letter that quote was cherry-picked from, a letter sent to the National Federation of Federal Employees congratulating them on 20 years of existence. It’s something that the people are trying to trash public employee unions do NOT want you to know:
“Organizations of Government employees have a logical place in Government affairs.
The desire of Government employees for fair and adequate pay, reasonable hours of work, safe and suitable working conditions, development of opportunities for advancement, facilities for fair and impartial consideration and review of grievances, and other objectives of a proper employee relations policy, is basically no different from that of employees in private industry.”
What FDR meant by “as usually understood” is the right of workers to use strikes as part of the collective bargaining process when the employer is the government. Strikes in the private sector are between employers and workers; a strike in the public sector is a challenge to government authority and the interests of a third party - the public. That is light years away from FDR saying public employees did not need collective bargaining or unions to represent their interests.
Contrast that with the attitude of fanatic Republicans preparing to shut down the Federal Government regardless of the consequences to the country. They have absolutely no concept of the public interest.
Here’s another Pratchett observation: Being poor is expensive. It comes from his character Sam Vimes - a public employee, hah! Vimes is head of the city watch - a copper in other words. As a beat patrolmen, he was constantly buying and wearing out cheap boots, the only ones he could afford on his salary. A rich person could afford to buy very expensive boots that would last for years. Vimes realized that in the time it took those expensive boots to wear out, he would have had to buy so many more pairs of cheap boots, he’d end up spending a lot more money. Only the rich can spend enough to be really frugal. (This principle is now referred to as “Vime’s boots.”)
The penny-wise, pound foolish approach by conservatives to government is just as self-defeating. The rabid budget-slashing now going on everywhere may save money now - but the costs down the road will be far greater. It’s that ‘running government like a business’ mentality at work. Show a ‘profit’ now and let the future worry about itself. That’s why there will be no future if Walker and his cronies have their way.
I have one more Pratchett metaphor to pass on: “It’s all crab bucket.” Pratchett observed that if you go to a fish market, you can find crabs for sale in open buckets. The reason they don’t have to be covered is because the moment one crab tries to climb out - the others all grab on to it and pull it back down.
Walker, the Republicans, and the billionaires behind them have done their best to turn America into a crab bucket. They pit one group against another, and walk away with the profits while we scrabble over crumbs. It’s an old trick, but it still works. Again, it’s a race to the bottom, using scapegoats and envy to keep us from realizing how we’re being conned by them.
I’m going to close by passing on something odds are none of you have heard about. It’s something that strikes terror into people like the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch. It validates everything unions stand for, and everything government could be doing to make life better for everyone, not just those at the top of the economic heap.
In 2009, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson released a book entitled “The Spirit Level” They are researchers who have spent decades studying epidemiology - looking at information around the world on things like crime, mental illness, educational failure, teen pregnancy - the numbers about the whys and hows of the human condition. What they concluded after going through mountains of data has huge implications.
It is a simple observation. They looked at developed countries around the world, countries as different as Sweden and Japan, Portugal and Canada, and the U.S. What they found after comparing data on problems such as overall health, mental health, crime, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, mobility within society, longevity, and so on, is this: there is one measure that correlates with how well or how badly those countries do dealing with those problems. The greater the inequality within a country, the greater all of those problems are. Countries with less inequality do better on all of those measures - and it’s true for those both at the top and the bottom of those countries.
This is not based on wishful thinking. It’s based on hard data that can be examined by anyone. Of two countries with equivalent wealth but differing equality, the one where everyone is closer together is the one where the quality of life will be better for all. A richer country can have lower quality of life than one not as wealthy but with more equality. And it doesn’t just hold true between countries. The same phenomena can be seen in America by comparing these indices between the fifty states.
It’s not just about Wisconsin today. As unions fight for a fair share of the pie, and fight for government policies and programs that close the gap between the top and the bottom of society, we are NOT the problem. We are part of the solution!