Scott Walker, Public Servant

[lektrode]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

And yet a counterweight to all of the above - unions - is somehow seen as the big problem? That makes absolutely no sense to me, especially since, as the chart above shows, their power has been destroyed.

in the private sector perhaps - but certainly NOT in the public sector.
tho the autoworkers appear to be down, but not out - and i dont have a problem with private sector unions negotiating with the robber-baron exec suite, since if management forks over too much, its _their_ money (mostly the shareholders) that gets burnt up vs OURS in the public sector.

with that said, i was once a united steelworker and we had the best paying jobs in that county - we watched helplessly as the union work rules _destroyed_ the profitability of the company - so we all paid the price of stupidity/greed of both parties

so again - i dont think its rank n file members/workers who are creating the problem in the PUBLIC SECTOR.

and i dont believe that the private sector unions pull any harder to the left than the execs are pulling to the right - usually there's an equilibrium at some point (if only temporary, before the MBA whizkids gut the biz, sell off the profit making pieces and then ship whats left of the production to china...) - but the 'equilibrium' never seems to happen in public sector 'negotiations' - esp in the bluestates - its always MORE, never less - the rest of us have had to tighten out belts (any tighter and i'd be blue in the face) - WHY SHOULDNT THEY?

another aspect/question in this is: due to the advances/dramatic reduction in price of computer technologies; the application of it by private sector enterprise - to the extent that MILLIONS of jobs involving paper-pushing, filling file cabinets etc - have been eliminated - totally eliminated, whole buildings full of people GONE - right?

none of this jaw-dropping increase in productivity seems to have been transferred to the .gov buracracy - its always MORE people, at HIGHER pay with never any layoffs (at least at the fed level) - EVER WONDER WHY?

The final irony is that we have people like Andy Grove calling for a massive re-investment in education to facilitate the kind of re-tooling to a TECI economy that will be required since the current "crack up boom" is likely the "last hurrah" of the bullshit finance mirage-economy we've all grown used to.

and been _screwed_ by it and the political class - at least those of us who've been unable to profit from it all, as we watch helplessly while decades of backbreaking work are _stolen_ out from under us by INFLATION, excess taxation caused by bracket-creep and re-distributionist politix that reward irresponsible behavior, subsidize ill-advised/risky lifestyle choices, etc etc etc.

again - 50 years of the liberal/progressive 'vision of paradise' and its unintended consequences are barreling along straight-dead ahead, coming right at of us and most seem to be frozen, deer-in-the-headlights in denial about it all - esp the chattering class and the corporate crowd.

And yet here we are hating teachers and begrudging them their generally quite meagre salaries...

NOBODY HATES TEACHERS!
its their self-serving union bosses - that even most of the teachers themselves dont like, who are screwing them along with the rest of us (tho it gets old listening to them bitch about their being overworked/underpaid for their 8month/year, 6hour/day at 'the office' and if they wanna work 6 more on 'homework' WHOS FAULT IS THAT?)
but i wouldnt really want to trade places with any of em - given the state of 'parenting' today

altho why should they get to retire with a full secure-guaranteed pension after working 20 years or so, that ends up paying them _way_ more than they ever paid into it? i know some who are getting nearly 50grand a year in a pension? when during most of their careers, they didnt earn any where near that much (for their 8-9month/year jobs)

i can only sympathize with residents of california who are groaning under the weight of the burden their out of control political class and the out n out GIVEAWAYS some have gotten - 100grand a year or more in a PENSION?

and the rest of us (who wontbe getting anything for workin our asses off the past 30years) are supposed to work til we drop to pay for it all????
because the political aristocracy doesnt have the backbone to stand up to this bullshit/corruption?

while not a single indictment has been made against any of those who ensured many of these same teachers would lose their homes to foreclosure or looted their pension funds by selling them crap MBS and CDOs.

Des this make sense to anyone here?

nope.... cant say i disagree with you on most of this either.

sigh.... (white flag goes up, some you guys are too much for me, a 2fingah typest, to keep up with ;)

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

http://www.tax.com/taxcom/taxblog.ns...S?OpenDocument

David Johnston of Tax.com: "Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin's pension and health insurance for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.”

If this is true, then all you are arguing over is salaries. Should tax payers pay a teacher with ten years experience X, or 1.5 X?

The debate sure isn’t being framed this way. I have no idea if the above assertion is true and I’m sure it is true for some states and not others.

Personally, I’m stuck on the potential public utility give away. That is shades of Russia. Green Bay Packer stock is up. Maybe Walker should seize and sell em.

[oddlots]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

and i dont believe that the private sector unions pull any harder to the left than the execs are pulling to the right - usually there's an equilibrium at some point (if only temporary, before the MBA whizkids gut the biz, sell off the profit making pieces and then ship whats left of the production to china...) - but the 'equilibrium' never seems to happen in public sector 'negotiations' - esp in the bluestates - its always MORE, never less - the rest of us have had to tighten out belts (any tighter and i'd be blue in the face) - WHY SHOULDNT THEY?

From my understanding the unions in Wisconsin are willing to take cuts. What's pushed the crisis over the edge is the roll back of bargaining rights. Again I think this is telling evidence of a desire on Walker's part to, first, precipitate a fiscal crisis by bringing in ill-timed tax breaks and then use the resulting problem to attack union power. When the unions object to this he can claim they are not willing to sacrifice.

If that's a fair description of what's going on then I think the man is abusing people's genuine concern over fiscal problems in a very, very cynical way.

another aspect/question in this is: due to the advances/dramatic reduction in price of computer technologies; the application of it by private sector enterprise - to the extent that MILLIONS of jobs involving paper-pushing, filling file cabinets etc - have been eliminated - totally eliminated, whole buildings full of people GONE - right?

none of this jaw-dropping increase in productivity seems to have been transferred to the .gov buracracy - its always MORE people, at HIGHER pay with never any layoffs (at least at the fed level) - EVER WONDER WHY

Canada has an almost completely unionised public sector and yet we have been able at times to realise large re-organisations that eliminated a lot of jobs and probably in the end achieved some big efficiencies. As I noted above, there were big cuts in the 90s. There was also, in Ontario, a large consolidation of small local government entities into larger ones with, again, big layoffs and redundancies. The unions of course hated this but went along. They wouldn't have if these policies had been, instead of an attack on an objective resource-management and fiscal problem, an attack on their very existence.

I don't know why this hasn't occurred in the states as you suggest but I somehow doubt that it has a lot to do with unions given the extremely low rates of unionisation.

[jiimbergin]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

http://www.tax.com/taxcom/taxblog.ns...S?OpenDocument

David Johnston of Tax.com: "Out of every dollar that funds Wisconsin's pension and health insurance for state workers, 100 cents comes from the state workers.”

If this is true, then all you are arguing over is salaries. Should tax payers pay a teacher with ten years experience X, or 1.5 X?

The debate sure isn’t being framed this way. I have no idea if the above assertion is true and I’m sure it is true for some states and not others.

Personally, I’m stuck on the potential public utility give away. That is shades of Russia. Green Bay Packer stock is up. Maybe Walker should seize and sell em.

This is simply not true. This man simply takes words like "The fringe benefits offered to State of Wisconsin employees are significant, and are a valuable part of an individual's compensation package. " and then says the employees are paying for the benefits. Every employer says the same thing.

[jiimbergin]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...share_facebook

How can fringe benefits cost nearly as much as a worker's salary? Answer: collective bargaining.

The showdown in Wisconsin over fringe benefits for public employees boils down to one number: 74.2. That's how many cents the public pays Milwaukee public-school teachers and other employees for retirement and health benefits for every dollar they receive in salary. The corresponding rate for employees of private firms is 24.3 cents.
Gov. Scott Walker's proposal would bring public-employee benefits closer in line with those of workers in the private sector. And to prevent benefits from reaching sky-high levels in the future, he wants to restrict collective-bargaining rights.
The average Milwaukee public-school teacher salary is $56,500, but with benefits the total package is $100,005, according to the manager of financial planning for Milwaukee public schools. When I showed these figures to a friend, she asked me a simple question: "How can fringe benefits be nearly as much as salary?" The answers can be found by unpacking the numbers in the district's budget for this fiscal year:
•Social Security and Medicare. The employer cost is 7.65% of wages, the same as in the private sector.
•State Pension. Teachers belong to the Wisconsin state pension plan. That plan requires a 6.8% employer contribution and 6.2% from the employee. However, according to the collective-bargaining agreement in place since 1996, the district pays the employees' share as well, for a total of 13%.





•Teachers' Supplemental Pension. In addition to the state pension, Milwaukee public-school teachers receive an additional pension under a 1982 collective-bargaining agreement. The district contributes an additional 4.2% of teacher salaries to cover this second pension. Teachers contribute nothing.
•Classified Pension. Most other school employees belong to the city's pension system instead of the state plan. The city plan is less expensive but here, too, according to the collective-bargaining agreement, the district pays the employees' 5.5% share.
Overall, for teachers and other employees, the district's contributions for pensions and Social Security total 22.6 cents for each dollar of salary. The corresponding figure for private industry is 13.4 cents. The divergence is greater yet for health insurance:
•Health care for current employees. Under the current collective- bargaining agreements, the school district pays the entire premium for medical and vision benefits, and over half the cost of dental coverage. These plans are extremely expensive.
This is partly because of Wisconsin's unique arrangement under which the teachers union is the sponsor of the group health-insurance plans. Not surprisingly, benefits are generous. The district's contributions for health insurance of active employees total 38.8% of wages. For private-sector workers nationwide, the average is 10.7%.
•Health insurance for retirees. This benefit is rarely offered any more in private companies, and it can be quite costly. This is especially the case for teachers in many states, because the eligibility rules of their pension plans often induce them to retire in their 50s, and Medicare does not kick in until age 65. Milwaukee's plan covers the entire premium in effect at retirement, and retirees cover only the growth in premiums after they retire.





As is commonly the case, the school district's retiree health plan has not been prefunded. It has been pay-as-you-go. This has been a disaster waiting to happen, as retirees grow in number and live longer, and active employment shrinks in districts such as Milwaukee.
For fiscal year 2011, retiree enrollment in the district health plan is 36.4% of the total. In addition to the costs of these retirees' benefits, Milwaukee is, to its credit, belatedly starting to prefund the benefits of future school retirees. In all, retiree health-insurance contributions are estimated at 12.1% of salaries (of which 1.5% is prefunded).
Overall, the school district's contributions to health insurance for employees and retirees total about 50.9 cents on top of every dollar paid in wages. Together with pension and Social Security contributions, plus a few small items, one can see how the total cost of fringe benefits reaches 74.2%.
What these numbers ultimately prove is the excessive power of collective bargaining. The teachers' main pension plan is set by the state legislature, but under the pressure of local bargaining, the employees' contribution is often pushed onto the taxpayers. In addition, collective bargaining led the Milwaukee public school district to add a supplemental pension plan—again with no employee contribution. Finally, the employees' contribution (or lack thereof) to the cost of health insurance is also collectively bargained.
As the costs of pensions and insurance escalate, the governor's proposal to restrict collective bargaining to salaries—not benefits—seems entirely reasonable.
Mr. Costrell is professor of education reform and economics at the University of Arkansas.

[Raz]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

dcarrigg's cartoon is inaccurate - it assumes that prior to recent times it was only Repukelicans who received lobbyist money.

Really? I just thought it was a play on what Obama's "Change" message meant. I did not read into it the way you did. Regardless, my point was simply that you can pick your poison. It's 6 in one hand; half-dozen in the other. Either way, monied interests win; everyone else looses.

Good point. And in retrospect, that's certainly one way to see it.

I suppose I'm just weary of the endless refrain from CNBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, The New York Times, The LA Times, St. Petersburg Times, and on and on and on and on and on and on (from everyone except Fox, The Wall Street Journal and "evil talk radio") how "Republicans bad, Democrats good".

They are BOTH dysfunctional - and the Democrats are every bit as corrupt as the Republicans.

[Raz]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

From my understanding the unions in Wisconsin are willing to take cuts. What's pushed the crisis over the edge is the roll back of bargaining rights. Again I think this is telling evidence of a desire on Walker's part to, first, precipitate a fiscal crisis by bringing in ill-timed tax breaks and then use the resulting problem to attack union power. When the unions object to this he can claim they are not willing to sacrifice.



Canada has an almost completely unionised public sector and yet we have been able at times to realise large re-organisations that eliminated a lot of jobs and probably in the end achieved some big efficiencies. As I noted above, there were big cuts in the 90s. There was also, in Ontario, a large consolidation of small local government entities into larger ones with, again, big layoffs and redundancies. The unions of course hated this but went along. They wouldn't have if these policies had been, instead of an attack on an objective resource-management and fiscal problem, an attack on their very existence.

I don't know why this hasn't occurred in the states as you suggest but I somehow doubt that it has a lot to do with unions given the extremely low rates of unionisation.

Public Employee Unions should not exist. Their creation brings into being an inherent conflict of interest: how can an elected official like John Corzine of New Jersey promise to look after their interests, while at the same time look after the taxpayer's interests?
He can't. It's a perverse "dual agency" that eventuates in the elected official looking after his own interests (re-election) at the expense of the general public's interests.


Even FDR Understood: No Collective Bargaining for Public Servants

There is no legitimate role for government unions.
February 23, 2011 - by Peter Ferrara

Public servants — meaning government employees — don’t work for greedy miscreants exploiting them for personal profit. They work for democratically elected officials representing the will of the people. This is just one reason why there is no legitimate role for government unions, and there should be no collective bargaining rights for public servants.

Since public servants work for the people, their wages, benefits, and working conditions are set in accordance with the will of the people, as determined by the democratic process. This is why it is not legitimate to ask the people to compromise with public servants in collective bargaining. And this is why the pay, benefits, and working conditions for federal workers are set by acts of Congress, not through collective bargaining.

If public servants do not like the pay, benefits, and working conditions offered to them by the people as determined through the democratic process, nothing requires them to be public servants. This is why public servants are not slaves without collective bargaining, as soon-to-be-unemployed collective bargaining agents have suggested.

Since public servants work for the people, any strike by them would be a strike against the people. The government cannot allow the essential public services it provides to be shut down while it negotiates the pay, benefits, and working conditions for public servants through collective bargaining.

The right of collective bargaining for private sector workers is not at issue in Wisconsin, though the government unions, the Democrats, and President Obama want to confuse the public on precisely that question. Under current law, there are plenty of market and legal checks on private sector unions to keep them from abusing the public. The ultimate limit if they push too far is that their company will be driven out of business. Though that does happen sometimes, it only happens when management fails to do its job in resisting excessive union demands. Otherwise, within current market and legal checks, private sector unions actually perform a helpful market function in ensuring that employers keep up with market wages and working conditions as expeditiously as possible.

Not so for government unions, as governments cannot be driven out of business. They gain their revenue forcibly through taxes. As a result, there is no market limit to how much such unions can milk the public.
Moreover, government unions themselves can choose who negotiates with them on behalf of the people, through their votes and political support. In return for lavish pay and benefits far exceeding private compensation, the unions provide a kickback in campaign contributions and muscle to their political benefactors, financed by the taxpayers. This inherent conflict of interest involved in government unions leads to oppressive political corruption, where there is no political limit as well as no market limit to the plunder of the public by government unions.

What is at stake in Wisconsin is whether public servants work for the American people, or whether the American people work for a “public servant” aristocracy enjoying far greater pay and benefits than the taxpayers who are forced to subsidize them through the above-described political corruption.

These are the reasons why even an ultimate liberal like Franklin Delano Roosevelt agreed with me that there should be no collective bargaining for public servants. As quoted by Michael Walsh in yesterday’s New York Post, Roosevelt said:

All government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public-personnel management. The very nature and purposes of government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people.*

What we are witnessing in Wisconsin today is the total breakdown of democracy, and the collapse of the rule of law. The Democrat Party in the state has refused to abide by the results of the election last November, and so has shut down the state legislature. The government unions are breaking the law by going out on strike. The anti-democracy protestors in Madison are breaking the law by continuing to occupy the state capitol. Doctors are breaking the law by writing fraudulent “sick notes.” The remaining Democrat state senators after last fall’s election have fled the state to hide from the law.

The only people expected to obey the law in Wisconsin now are the taxpayers.
Governor Walker and the Republicans are trying to pass a moderate bill to the left of FDR that still maintains some collective bargaining rights for government workers. Moreover, their bill would greatly benefit state and local workers by terminating government collection and payment of their union dues. This gives power to each worker to voluntarily decide if they want to pay those dues. That is like a tax cut of as much as $1,000 a year for state and local government workers. That policy needs to be adopted in every state, as taxpayer money going to government union dues is the root of political corruption in America.

Moreover, it is Governor Walker and the Republicans in Wisconsin who are protecting the interests of working people in the state, as it is these working people who must pay the taxes for the lavish pay and benefits of public sector aristocrats, and suffer their own lost jobs and wages resulting from high taxes.

Peter Ferrara is Director of Policy for the Carleson Institute for Public Policy, a Senior Fellow for the Heartland Institute, and Director of Entitlement and Budget Policy for the Institute for Policy Innovation. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/even-fdr-understood-no-collective-bargaining-for-public-servants/?singlepage=true

* The full text of FDR's letter can be found here: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=15445

[oddlots]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

Thanks Raz. That is a great reply.

This does not sit right with me...

Governor Walker and the Republicans are trying to pass a moderate bill to the left of FDR that still maintains some collective bargaining rights for government workers. Moreover, their bill would greatly benefit state and local workers by terminating government collection and payment of their union dues. This gives power to each worker to voluntarily decide if they want to pay those dues. That is like a tax cut of as much as $1,000 a year for state and local government workers. That policy needs to be adopted in every state, as taxpayer money going to government union dues is the root of political corruption in America.

The idea that union dues are the key influence in the political corruption of America strikes me as hilarious, though I'd agree from my perch that money in politics is the key corrupting influence. When you have the banking lobby actually writing the regulation that governs them or the SEC playing middleman between the justice department and potential defendants there are surely bigger problems.

Rather, what seems conspicuous to me in American politics is, on the one hand, the lack of representation of the interests of the middle class and, on the other, the "full spectrum dominance" of wealth. If we put the two beside each other, say a lobbyist for the finance industry and a teacher's union rep, one is at least somewhat interested in the quality of services provided to taxpayers. The other has no such interest at heart to justify his influence. And yet the power of the financial lobby is seemingly without limit while that of the teacher's rep was always meagre as far as I can see.

The article is well argued and convincing, but conspicuously ignores the larger context of the influence of wealth in politics. The references to union "aristocrats" being the main problem and not politicians beholden to financial interests just strikes me as absurd, especially given that the middle class has just sustained an almost fatal mugging by corporate interests.

[Raz]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

Thanks Raz. That is a great reply.

This does not sit right with me...

Governor Walker and the Republicans are trying to pass a moderate bill to the left of FDR that still maintains some collective bargaining rights for government workers. Moreover, their bill would greatly benefit state and local workers by terminating government collection and payment of their union dues. This gives power to each worker to voluntarily decide if they want to pay those dues. That is like a tax cut of as much as $1,000 a year for state and local government workers. That policy needs to be adopted in every state, as taxpayer money going to government union dues is the root of political corruption in America.

No kidding.

I believe the author wins the overall argument, but he makes a fool of himself with this "reasoning".
Shall we say he pushed the envelope a bit too far? Perhaps over a cliff?

[oddlots]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

The point I was trying to make:

http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2011/...ps-not-unions/

The Housing Bubble and Negative Equity are a Major Predictor of State Budget Gaps, Not Unions.

Amidst all the public debate about how states are being bled dry by militant public unions, you wouldn’t know that we just had a major housing bubble across the country followed by a financial system near-collapse and the most prolonged downturn since the Great Depression. Chris Hayes addressed this opportunism, the ignoring of the housing crisis to push long-standing right-wing priorities, in the opening segment of the Rachel Maddow show last night, and I think it’s worth throwing a graph together.

John Side posts some graphs of state budget shortfalls against public union density on his site The Monkey Cage:

[See here.]

A commenter summarized the general finding:

I just coded the data “TheRef” posted to distinguish between states with no collective bargaining law and states with some sort of law (0=no law, 1=anything else) and used this to predict the 2011 shortfall as a percentage of budget. I have no idea if this coding is appropriate, but it should provide a rough estimate.

While the relationship was positive (like the r coefficient in the post) it explained less than 2% of the variance (R^2 = .017). This is actually less explained variance than that explained in the above post (.19*.19 = .04), though this could be due entirely to the linear compared to categorical nature of the predictors. Just to note, the unstandardized beta was 3.08.

Interesting, if that not significant. You know what is interesting, significant and recent? A multi-trillion dollar housing bubble.



Rest here.

[Raz]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

Thanks Raz. That is a great reply.

This does not sit right with me...



The idea that union dues are the key influence in the political corruption of America strikes me as hilarious, though I'd agree from my perch that money in politics is the key corrupting influence. When you have the banking lobby actually writing the regulation that governs them or the SEC playing middleman between the justice department and potential defendants there are surely bigger problems.

Rather, what seems conspicuous to me in American politics is, on the one hand, the lack of representation of the interests of the middle class and, on the other, the "full spectrum dominance" of wealth. If we put the two beside each other, say a lobbyist for the finance industry and a teacher's union rep, one is at least somewhat interested in the quality of services provided to taxpayers. The other has no such interest at heart to justify his influence. And yet the power of the financial lobby is seemingly without limit while that of the teacher's rep was always meagre as far as I can see.

The article is well argued and convincing, but conspicuously ignores the larger context of the influence of wealth in politics. The references to union "aristocrats" being the main problem and not politicians beholden to financial interests just strikes me as absurd, especially given that the middle class has just sustained an almost fatal mugging by corporate interests.

The author does not say or imply that "union dues are the key influence in the political corruption of America". But to deny
that they are a powerful force of corruption is, as you say, "hilarious". The author wasn't attempting to address the totality of political corruption - only the one facet that is the topic of the day - the Public Employee Union in Wisconsin. And I submit that he is absolutely right.

The Democrats had the political power and the opportunity to reinstate Glass-Steagall and prosecute the criminal psychopaths from Angelo Mozillo to Dick Fund to Henry Paulson. Thanks to the idealogical slavery, inexperience, and just plain lack of political saavy of Barry Obama, they sold out. (With a lot of help from those great statesmen, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, and the incompetency of Eric Holder.) But, what the hell did people expect from the wonder child of the Chicago political machine - Honest Abe? They had a chance to punish the criminals and restore balance to the American economy, while easily laying most of the blame for the necessary pain on the Republicans - but they sold out. So we are left with a red brothel and a blue brothel.

Now to the larger issue: the Plutocracy. It is the essence of naivete to believe that the RepubliCrats are - or even capable of - providing a fix to this problem. It's going to take a crisis so big that it necessitates the emergence of a viable Third Party within the United States.

I just hope we don't end up with a Huey Long - or something far worse.

[oddlots]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

The author does not say or imply that "union dues are the key influence in the political corruption of America"

I don't know how you characterise this statement otherwise:

"Governor Walker and the Republicans are trying to pass a moderate bill to the left of FDR that still maintains some collective bargaining rights for government workers. Moreover, their bill would greatly benefit state and local workers by terminating government collection and payment of their union dues. This gives power to each worker to voluntarily decide if they want to pay those dues. That is like a tax cut of as much as $1,000 a year for state and local government workers. That policy needs to be adopted in every state, as taxpayer money going to government union dues is the root of political corruption in America."

Regardless, I think there is a legitimate question of "dual agency" that he argues for well here, though I think it is far more evident in corporate funded campaigns and in the dominance of corporate interests through lobbying than in teacher's unions. That the author sees one and not the other seems to me a little suspect.

As for the Dems versus republicans, absolutely agree. They are both equally captured as far as I can see.

[Raz]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

I don't know how you characterise this statement otherwise:

"Governor Walker and the Republicans are trying to pass a moderate bill to the left of FDR that still maintains some collective bargaining rights for government workers. Moreover, their bill would greatly benefit state and local workers by terminating government collection and payment of their union dues. This gives power to each worker to voluntarily decide if they want to pay those dues. That is like a tax cut of as much as $1,000 a year for state and local government workers. That policy needs to be adopted in every state, as taxpayer money going to government union dues is the root of political corruption in America."

Regardless, I think there is a legitimate question of "dual agency" that he argues for well here, though I think it is far more evident in corporate funded campaigns and in the dominance of corporate interests through lobbying than in teacher's unions. That the author sees one and not the other seems to me a little suspect.

As for the Dems versus republicans, absolutely agree. They are both equally captured as far as I can see.

I concede your point. Had he said "...is one root of political corruption in America" he would have carried the day. But if he's so blind that he doesn't see (or won't see) the entire Congress as being owned by the F.I.R.E. interests, then while he might be correct about not allowing Public Employee Unions the same bargaining rights as unions in the private sector, he's really just part of the bigger problem.

Let this be a lesson to everyone that the only truly honest and impartial man left is Raz.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

The article you site is written by Peter Ferrara. Ferrara works for David Koch (the real one). In addition...

Peter J. Ferrara is an American policy analyst and columnist.

His proposal to privatize Social Security was championed by the George W. Bush administration.[1]

Ferrara took money from erstwhile lobbyist Jack Abramoff to write op-ed pieces favorable to Abramoff clients. (Ferrara did not disclose which pieces he was paid to write, but Business Week noted that he wrote favorable articles in the Washington Times about the Northern Marianas Islands and the Choctaw Indian tribe, both Abramoff clients.) Ferrara argued those writings were entirely consistent with his independently held views, remained unrepentant, and intended to pursue the practice in the future: "I do that all the time. I've done that in the past, and I'll do it in the future."[2]

Ferrara is a senior policy adviser at the conservative Institute for Policy Innovation and has worked for the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation. He was a Senior Fellow of the Free Enterprise Fund ("FEF"), a free market advocacy group.

Peter Ferrara is known[3] for his essay, "What Is An American?", published September 25, 2001, just after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.[4] In the essay, he claims that "there are more Muslims in America than in Afghanistan."

wikipedia

[oddlots]

Re: Scott Walker, Public Servant

Let this be a lesson to everyone that the only truly honest and impartial man left is Raz.

I await your Green Book O peerless one. (We'll need a new version soon inshallah.)