Throwaway Citizens

There is a report about Margaret Mary Vojtko, a woman who spent her life teaching as an adjunct at a Roman Catholic university, but never received the respect or the pay she deserved, even in her final years:

In the column, Mr. Kovalik, who is also an adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh's
law school, writes that the university reduced Ms. Vojtko's course load to one class per semester last fall, decreasing her annual earnings to below $10,000. Ms. Vojtko, a cancer patient, could not afford electricity in her home, he wrote, which was "literally falling in on itself."

Last spring Ms. Vojtko learned that she was not being rehired for this fall's semester, The Duquesne Duke, a student paper, reported earlier this month.

Ms. Vojtko suffered a heart attack in August after she heard from Adult Protective Services that the agency would turn her case over to Orphans' Court if she did not meet with a caseworker.

Mr. Kovalik says Ms. Vojtko asked him to intercede with the agency on her behalf. He describes his interaction with the caseworker:

"The caseworker paused and asked with incredulity, 'She was a professor?' I said yes. The caseworker was shocked; this was not the usual type of person for whom she was called in to help."

University officials deny that the situation was as described, but it has been verified by too many other independent sources to be denied with any credibility.

And this perilous situation is not confined to just the academe. Far from it.

Look at what is happening here in Milwaukee and in Wisconsin.

Many jobs, from custodial work to personal care workers are paid at poverty level wages which are insufficient to support a family. In Milwaukee, the only employer that paid these worker sustainable wages was Milwaukee County. But Scott Walker privatized the last of the janitorial jobs before becoming governor and Chris Abele wants to lay off all the personal care workers as he abandons his duties to our most vulnerable citizens.

And after the people spend their lives struggling to just live from hand to mouth and check to check, the GOP is trying to cut their Social Security, benefits which they have paid into for decades and which they have earned with their blood, sweat and tears.

In a final insult, Walker and his fellow corporate lackeys have now made it so that the corporate state can swoop in and seize anything they might have had left at the time of their death, whether or nor their spouse still needs it.

Our "leaders" like Scott Walker and Chris Abele have lost the ability to see people as human beings.  To them we are nothing more than expendable units that are to be profiteered off of and then discarded when no longer useful.

Sadly, until people wake up and start organizing, this will continue, but only because we are allowing it.

More Anti-Gay Rhetoric From Walker's Administration

While running for Lieutenant Governor, Rebecca "I don't like the way that table is looking at me" Kleefisch compared homosexual couples to dogs.  People were rightfully outraged at her mean-spirited, hate-filled comments.

Now comes another one of Scott Walker's cronies, the politically connected Laurie McCallum, wife of former governor Scott McCallum, who takes a stance that homosexual people should be treated worse than dogs:

Laurie McCallum, who was recently appointed by Gov. Scott Walker to a six-year term on the state’s Labor and Industry Review Commission, wrote that the Wisconsin Fair Employment Act applies only to sexual harassment. That contention was the basis for her dissenting opinion in a case involving Milwaukeean Chris Bowen, a machine operator who was subjected to years of anti-gay harassment as an employee of Stroh Precision Die Casting.

In a 2-1 decision, commissioners Robert Glaser and Ann L. Crump found that Stroh was responsible for fostering a workplace environment hostile to Bowen because of his sexual orientation. Stroh did not deny that the harassment occurred; nor did the company argue that anti-gay harassment is allowed under state law during the eight years that the case bounced around the court system.

But McCallum, the politically connected wife of former GOP Gov. Scott McCallum, defied nearly 30 years of precedent in state law by asserting that sexual “preference,” as she put it, is not a protected category in workplace discrimination cases.

McCallum’s stance alarmed civil rights advocates as well as her fellow commissioners, who warned that her view could upend legal tradition and “make it permissible to harass an employee based upon race, national origin, religion, age or disability,” as well as sexual orientation.

Scott Walker needs to condemn the vote by his political appointee and state that strongly opposes that decision. If he chooses not to do so, one can only presume that he is in agreement with it.

Then again, by not refuting that hateful stance, he only helps the recall movement. Perhaps he shouldn't say anything after all.