Wisconsin is the New Egypt

[KevinG]

That would be awesome if M&I only served the GOP and the firefighters. Hope no one else - you know, like a school teacher - needed to use the bank that day.

 

 

who uses banks anymore?

 

as a side note M&I is in the process of being bought out by the Bank of Montreal anyways.

 

 

[Guest Speed Racer]

who uses banks anymore?

 

as a side note M&I is in the process of being bought out by the Bank of Montreal anyways.

 

Anyways? So, the bank that people have their money in is closed but it will _______ anyways? What does that even mean?

 

You know, mattresses are probably manufactured by assholes who donate to the GOP too. Couches too.

[ih8music]

Maybe the revolution is starting:

 

Wisconsin Firefighters shut down bank that funded Walker

 

Bank shut down

 

That's awesome. Unfortunately, if everyone made this kind of political statement, I suspect there'd be very few places for us to keep our money.

[augurus]

All my friends keep telling me that Michigan is the new Wisconsin.

 

http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/03/what_now_the_next_stage_in_the_public_sector_unions_fight.html

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUpO1QFMDtM

 

I think it may be time to accept that. I suppose I should still care about the people that voted for Rick Snyder. Maybe if they learned how to read,...

[ikol]

 

So basically, we could get rid of all those tax breaks, only barely be able to save those little programs, and still have the impending Social Security/Medicare doom to deal with?

[Sparky speaks]

Augurus, here in Connecticut, a Democratic governor is calling for raising the sales tax, gasoline tax and income tax. He is calling for eliminating the property tax exemption used when calculating your state income taxes and raising liquor taxes and cigarette taxes. He is calling for new taxes on haircuts, pet grooming, car rentals, hotels, yoga, boat purchases, non prescription drugs, manicures and plastic surgery to name a few. Those who earn $100,000 a year jointly, will face a greater increase in their income taxes than those making over $500,000. All of this on top of concessions from public workers totaling $1.8 billion and $800 million in other cuts. The legislature is controlled by Democrats. Hartford will be seeing some protest action soon as well.

 

An American Tsunami(sorry)is on the way. Despite the ad at the end, this sums things up pretty nicely I think...

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q54F8Q5qRHU&feature=player_embedded#at=252

[KevinG]

Anyways? So, the bank that people have their money in is closed but it will _______ anyways? What does that even mean?

 

You know, mattresses are probably manufactured by assholes who donate to the GOP too. Couches too.

 

 

This bank is not small. It is (was) one of the largest banks in WI. The firefighters "shut down" a branch not the bank. The branch shut down because it didn't have the cash funds on hand. Other then the shock value, this is a non story.

 

 

and I ment by who uses banks anymore I ment branches. With ATM, automatic bill pay and the like when was the last time you stepped in a branch?

[Sparky speaks]

I guess the improving economic picture hasn't reached these folks yet. Visit an Obamaville. Places like this are popping up all over the country. Folks who have lost their jobs and homes who now reside in tent cities much like the Hoovervilles of the early 1930's. Someone should tell them about the thousands of new jobs that are available out there...

 

A Visit to an American Tent City

Author: Mac Slavo

 

Reading the headlines over the last eighteen months one would think that the recession of 2008 is all but over. Unemployment, officially, is on the mend, with a reported 9.5% of Americans unable to find work (as opposed to official Great Depression numbers as high as 25%). Foreclosures seem to be stabilizing. Gross domestic product is in positive growth territory, signaling forward progress in the economy. Inflation, according to the latest Consumer Price Index statistics, is under control.

 

“The worst of the storm has passed,” declared President Obama in his 2010 State of the Union address. For all intents and purposes, any threat of a second great depression has been averted.

 

But what is depicted by our media and the official statistics put forth by government number crunchers, and what is happening on the ground on Main Street America, are two wholly different things.

 

Doug Walden, who lost his job during the onset of the recession, and now spends a good portion of his time helping others who are out of work or facing dire economic straits through his loosely-based organization called the Great Depression Enterprise Group...

 

Recently, Doug spent a day in one of the many “tent cities” popping up around America. These modern equivalents of the Hoovervilles of the 1930′s were believed to be relics of a different time – a time where there existed no social support structure or regulatory oversight of financial markets and banking institutions. After the Great Depression, the extreme poverty experienced by millions in post-1929 America was all but forgotten. For most in today’s generation, the thought of living without 21st century amenities like on-demand electricity, sewage, refrigeration, air conditioning, heat, and the other conveniences of suburban lifestyles does not even enter into the sphere of thought. It is a different time, and such a thing can’t happen today.

 

The reality, however, is in stark contrast to the dogma of a debt driven, consumer-based society.

 

Doug Walden has seen it with his own eyes. He’s spent time talking to those individuals who have lost everything and have nowhere else to go. Doug, in his own words, describes his experience below...

Read more:

My link

[LouieB]

Atually Wisconsin is the new Libya.

 

LouieB

[uncool2pillow]

Atually Wisconsin is the new Libya.

 

LouieB

Obviously, that's meant a little to a lot tongue in cheek. I hope a lot because we shouldn't equate passing a law with firing rockets at our political opponents.

[LouieB]

Obviously, that's meant a little to a lot tongue in cheek. I hope a lot because we shouldn't equate passing a law with firing rockets at our political opponents.

The Egyptians met their objective, the Libyians on the other hand....

 

LouieB

[uncool2pillow]

Fair enough.

[Sparky speaks]

Governor Walker is not just targeting the public sector unions. As one can see in this article, the privatization of state power facilities and the raiding of state worker pension plans are also in the works to pay for tax breaks to the wealthy and his big business cronies. He is also planning to privatize the state's two University of Wisconsin college campuses. I guess the fun has just begun.

 

By the way, I don't think what is happening in Wisconsin and other states has any relevant relationship with overthrowing years of dictatorial regimes who have tortured and murdered their own people for decades. At least not yet anyway...

 

“Wisconsin Death Trip.” Mass Privatization as the "Final Stage" of Neoliberal Doctrine

by Prof Michael Hudson and Prof Jeffrey Sommers

 

Most wealth in history has been acquired either by armed conquest of the land, or by political insider dealing, such as the great US railroad land giveaways of the mid 19th century. The great American fortunes have been founded by prying land, public enterprises and monopoly rights from the public domain, because that's where the assets are to take.

 

Throughout history the world's most successful economies have been those that have kept this kind of primitive accumulation in check. The US economy today is faltering largely because its past barriers against rent-seeking are being breached.

 

Nowhere is this more disturbingly on display than in Wisconsin. Today, Milwaukee – Wisconsin's largest city, and once the richest in America – is ranked among the four poorest large cities in the United States. Wisconsin is just the most recent case in this great heist. The US government itself and its regulatory agencies effectively are being privatized as the "final stage" of neoliberal economic doctrine.

 

A peek into Governor Walker's so-called "budget repair bill" reveals a shop of horrors that is just the opposite of actually repairing the budget. Among the items listed in the bill until Wednesday night were selloffs of state power generation facilities – in no-bid contracts notoriously prone to insider dealing.

 

The 37 facilities he wants to sell off that produce heating and cooling at low cost to the state's universities and prisons. Walker's budget repair bill would have unloaded them at a low price, presumably to campaign contributors such as Koch Industries – and then stick the bill for producing this power at higher rates to Wisconsin taxpayers in perpetuity. (And this is all being sold as a "taxpayer relief" plan!) Invariably, this will make its way into new legislation once attention is diverted from the current controversy.

 

The budget bill also plans to tear down the Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS). This is not New Jersey, where a succession of corrupt governments have underfunded (read: stolen) the state pension system in order to shift resources to pay for budget shortfalls in general revenues caused by tax breaks for the rich. The WRS is one of the nation's most stable, well-funded and best-managed pension systems. Although Wisconsin is not a big state, the WRS has amassed $75bn in reserves, and pays out handsome pensions to its public retirees, without needing new public subsidy. The Walker bill has language providing for tearing down this system, raiding its assets to pay for further tax cuts for the rich (especially property owners), and then throwing Wall Street a meaty bone as public employees would be shifted to 401k plans handled by money managers on commission.

 

In a separate proposal, Governor Walker would start privatizing the University of Wisconsin's two flagship doctorate-granting campuses. Ironically, the land grant universities – of which Wisconsin has long been among the best – were created by protectionist 19th-century Republicans as an alternative approach to British free-market doctrine, which dominated the prestigious and largely anglophile Ivy League universities. These universities, like their German counterparts, taught a new economic policy of state management and public enterprise that formed the basis for subsequent US and German development.

 

Walker would kill off this tradition, and return intellectual production to the highest bidder.

 

Other proposals suggest selling off Wisconsin's public northwoods lands with their cornucopia of mineral and timber wealth. And much more is said to be in the works.

 

So Walker's war is not only against the Democrats and labour, it is against Wisconsin's Progressive Era institutions. His policy threatens to pauperize the state and deal a coup de grace to Progressive Era institutions and impoverish the state's middle class. Contra John Maynard Keynes's gentle suggestion of "euthanasia of the rentier", it is the middle class that is being euthanized – throughout North America and Europe.

 

Read more:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23664

 

Diane Ravitch on Jon Stewart...

 

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-3-2011/diane-ravitch

 

The Crisis is Our Unwillingness to Make Rich Pay Their Share

by John Hallinan

 

U.S. corporations are sitting on $2 trillion in cash -- trillion, not billion. The same people who shipped millions of jobs overseas, caused the financial crisis, and pay themselves multimillion-dollar bonuses every year are now sitting on a mountain of cash. Yet both state and local governments feel the need to give them more tax cuts. To what end? So they can create more profits and sit on bigger piles of cash, so they can play monopoly as they buy each other out, or so they can give themselves even bigger bonuses? There is no indication that they are interested in doing anything to spur the economy.

 

In December we heard the Republicans tell us that people making over $250,000 per year couldn’t afford a 4 percent tax increase, and it would be terrible for the economy to increase their taxes. Thirty years ago they were paying 70 percent in taxes. Now they pay half that, but a 4 percent increase is just too much to bear.

 

Now we are told that state workers making $40,000 to $60,000 per year are stealing the state blind. The same workers who for the last two years have taken over a 3 percent pay cut in the form of furloughs are now told they haven’t sacrificed enough. Now they must forfeit 7 percent or more of their pay, and give up their right to negotiate their future. What is appalling is the state workers were willing to give up the money to help out the state. All they asked was to keep their right to negotiate. Yet the wealthiest in our country aren’t willing to give up anything to help our country out of the financial mess they created.

 

My link

[PopTodd]

end times.

[Sparky speaks]

When does the trickle down begin? It looks like these corporations are sitting on their massive profits and not creating new projects, research or jobs for people like the theory claims...

 

Number of the Week: Companies’ Cash Hoard Grows

By Mark Whitehouse

 

$1.9 trillion: Corporate America’s cash

 

U.S. companies’ cash hoard keeps getting bigger, a trend both good and troubling.

 

After hitting new highs in five of the last six quarters, nonfinancial corporations’ cash and other liquid assets reached $1.9 trillion at the end of 2010, according to the Federal Reserve. That’s 7% of all their assets, the highest level since 1963.

 

...the persistent growth of companies’ cash hoard suggests a problem: Businesses appear to lack the confidence in the recovery needed to plow the money back into new projects and hiring. In the final quarter of 2010, capital expenditures amounted to $975 billion, or 6.6% of gross domestic product — up from a low of 5.4% in 2009 but still well below the 10-year average of about 8%. Nonfarm employers added a monthly average of 136,000 jobs in the past three months, just a bit more than required to keep the unemployment rate from growing.

 

My link

[Guest Jules]

Does the article list specific corporations "sitting on their massive profits". If not then it's just generalized bullshit.

 

 

[Smokestack Joe]

The whole world IS watching. From Investors Business Daily:

 

 

Racketeering: Over a dozen Wisconsin state senators have received death threats after voting to remove public union collective bargaining powers. Funny we haven't heard President Obama call for civility lately.

 

When Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., and 18 others were shot, and a federal judge, a 9-year-old girl and four others murdered, the president traveled to a Tucson sports arena to call for "more civility in our public discourse."

 

It is doubtful that speech saved a single life from any of the other psychopaths roaming free in America.

 

If President Obama were serious about preventing violence, he would by now have taken his civility road show to Madison, Wis., where union goons have been sending lawmakers Corleone-esque horse's heads through the mail, the phone lines and cyberspace.

 

State Sens. Pam Galloway, Glenn Grothman and Joe Leibham were among more than a dozen Republicans sent e-mails with messages such as "Death threat!!!! Bomb!!!!"

 

A note shoved under Grothman's door said, "The only good Republican is a dead Republican." He has stories of getting obscene phone calls in the middle of the night.

 

Two Republicans, state Sen. Randy Hopper and state Rep. Jeremy Thiesfeldt, feel so threatened that they backed out of marching in Saturday's St. Patrick's Day Parade in the city of Fond du Lac.

 

On top of that, businesses, such as Milwaukee financial firm Marshall & Ilsley, have received letters from public employee unions threatening boycotts.

 

Grothman says the threats to GOP lawmakers who are committed to restoring fiscal sanity to Wisconsin have "only steeled our resolve."

[KevinG]

On top of that, businesses, such as Milwaukee financial firm Marshall & Ilsley, have received letters from public employee unions threatening boycotts.

 

Grothman says the threats to GOP lawmakers who are committed to restoring fiscal sanity to Wisconsin have "only steeled our resolve."

 

So this article equating a boycott of a business to terrorism?

 

That is nice.

[bleedorange]

So this article equating a boycott of a business to terrorism?

 

That is nice.

 

Huh? I didn't get that.

[Sweet Papa Crimbo]

Huh? I didn't get that.

 

Because no such implication was made.

[KevinG]

Because no such implication was made.

 

Actually if you read between the lines the implication was made. It listed a bunch of terrible things that were done or said to republicans, and then saying oh yeah by the way they are boycotting businesses. It is putting the boycott on the same level as the terroristic threats.

 

There is no reason to mention the boycotts, unless to have a reader make the connection between the terrible things that were done / said and the boycotts.

[bleedorange]

Actually if you read between the lines the implication was made. It listed a bunch of terrible things that were done or said to republicans, and then saying oh yeah by the way they are boycotting businesses. It is putting the boycott on the same level as the terroristic threats.

 

There is no reason to mention the boycotts, unless to have a reader make the connection between the terrible things that were done / said and the boycotts.

 

Wow. That is quite the leap.

[KevinG]

Judge issues temporary restraining order on the collective bargaining law

 

Well this thing ain't ending anytime soon.

 

It is will be interesting how this will play out in the public forums (ie radio, tv et al). The Right will say say it is all about Union thugs trying usurp the duly elected representatives of WI, and the Left will say it is about trying to stop a bill that was passed without following the rule of law.

[Sparky speaks]

On Teachers, Testing and Tenure — An Analysis

Dr. Lawrence Davidson

 

There are number of assumptions that lay behind all these (reform) efforts and here are some of them:

 

1. There is an assumption that the American public school system is performing poorly.

2. There is an assumption that this is the fault of bad teachers.

3. There is an assumption that getting rid of the tenure system will get rid of bad teachers.

4. There is an assumption that using standardized tests will allow you to measure necessary levels of learning for specific ages.

5. There is an assumption that having instituted such tests, the attainment of adequate scores means that both the student has successfully learned and the teacher has successfully taught.

 

It just so happens that all of these assumptions are problematic. Let’s take them one by one.

 

Read whole article:

My link

[KevinG]

Bringing this thread back from the dead of 2011.

 

Tomorrow us folks in WI are going vote wether or not to recall Scott Walker as governor. Historic no doubt. Interesting for sure.

 

Current polls have Scott Walker either tied with his opponent (Tom Barrett) or up by 7 percentage points.

 

Who knows?