Meanwhile, At MCF

Just a reminder, especially for readers from the Milwaukee County area, I've been getting back to addressing issues over at Milwaukee County First.

This past few days, we've looked at:

Abele playing games with residency rules

That the county is willing to throw working men and women under the bus so developers can make their millions.  It's almost like Walker never left!

And budgetary déjà vu  - cut services and gouge the workers, claim a surplus, then claim a deficit for the next year so you can  cut more services and gouge the workers again.

Are You A Fascist?

Gee, this certainly describes a certain governor we all know and dislike:

2. You believe in the rule of the few, election rigging, political decisions being made by a select group of officials behind closed doors, embrace the informal and unregulated exercise of political power, arbitrary deprivation of civil liberties, and little tolerance for meaningful opposition.

4. You use the media as a political propaganda machine to target a specific audience and to push your agenda on others. You make sure the media demonizes your opponents and takes your side on nearly every issue. You use your propaganda machine to play on the fears of others.

6. You are driven to indoctrinate others into your way of thinking. So much so, that you try to re-write history, change the way school children are taught and you brainwash the ignorant. You use your propaganda machine as a tool to achieve this.

7. You fear and demonize intelligent people who have a higher education because they are the ones who can thwart your effort to brainwash people. You then attempt to prevent others from achieving a higher education because you want the people as ignorant as possible so you can convince them that your way is the right way.

9. You disrespect women and think their place is in the home. You believe women are weak and cannot do things that men do. You believe that sexual harassment or assault is no big deal and that the only thing women are good for is cooking meals and having babies.

10. You strongly align yourself with corporations and you support corporate money and influence in government. You despise government regulations that keep corporations honest because you believe everything should be controlled by the free market and that corporations should be allowed to do whatever they please.

13. You absolutely despise unions. To you and those like you, labor unions represent the empowerment of workers. Since you believe corporations can do whatever they want, you see organized labor as a threat because they fight for higher wages, health care, safety regulations, less hours, vacations, sick days, and holidays off. This obviously threatens the amount of money corporations can give to you and your cause so you brand unions as proponents of socialism and make laws that severely weaken them so that corporations can have a cheap, mindless labor force.

14. You are obsessed with crime and a major supporter of punishing those who commit crimes. So much so, that you don’t care about the concept of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ You are proud of executing people and aren’t bothered if an innocent person is killed. You seek to make harsher laws, especially laws that target specific groups of people such as immigrants, women, and people of color. You also oppose Miranda rights and using humane interrogation tactics and you seek to undermine the independent judiciary.

15. You believe every election should go your way and to reach that goal, you push voting laws that disenfranchise those who traditionally vote for opponents such as people of color, the elderly, college students, and the poor. You even stoop to fixing elections in some cases and complain when your opponents challenge the vote counts.

16. You believe in rewarding your friends with positions when you gain power and you reward those who support you with government contracts and money, especially corporations. You also do your best to aid your supporters in any way you can, such as repealing undesirable pieces of legislation and regulations. You often have something to gain financially from this.

17. You create scapegoats to blame when problems arise. Whether it’s communists, liberals, minorities, homosexuals, the poor, or non-Christians, one thing is for certain. You and your propaganda tool will blame each and every one of those groups for bad things that happen even if you were the cause of the problems in the first place.

He becomes more like Nixon every time you look at him.

Three Economists!

1. Paul Krugman was on the Colbert Report recently explaining that if you want to see Romney Economics in action - check out Ireland

The Colbert Report
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2. Dean Baker wrote a column recently stating that he does not understand why the liberals keep stating that all republicans want is to leave the market's alone, when in reality what the right wants is very big government(tilted in their favor).

Pick an issue, any issue, and you will almost invariably find the right actively pushing for a big role for government. However, for conservatives the goal is not ensuring a decent standard of living for the bulk of the population. Rather the goal is ensuring that money is redistributed upward. And, of course, the conservatives are smart enough not to own up to their use of the government.

Just to take a few easy ones, why would any market-oriented opponent of big government support the existence of too-big-to-fail banks (TBTF)? These TBTF banks operate with an implicit subsidy from the government. Lenders expect the government to step in to back up these banks debt if they fail, as happened on a massive basis in 2008. As a result, TBTF banks can borrow money at lower interest rates than would be possible in a free market. The amount of money at stake is substantial, possibly more than $60 billion a year. This is more money than is at issue with the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy. This $60 billion is money that is redistributed from the rest of us to the biggest banks in the country, their top executives and their shareholders, all courtesy of big government.

To take another easy example, drug patents raise the price of prescription drugs by close to $270 billion a year above their free market price. This is roughly five Bush tax cuts to the wealthy. Patents are government-granted monopolies. Since prescription drugs often are necessary for a person's health or even life, people will pay almost anything for a drug if they can afford it or can get their insurance to pick up the tab. Patents imply very big government since the government will imprison anyone who produces a drug without the patent holder's consent.

In recent years the big government has been actively working to extend Pfizer and Merck's patent monopolies to the rest of the world through NAFTA, CAFTA and other recent trade deals. Patents are currently used as a mechanism to finance prescription drug research. But there are other more efficient mechanisms, such as the prize system suggested by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz. Alternatively, we could simply increase and redirect the $30 billion in public money that goes to support biomedical research each year through the National Institutes of Health.

3. Jared Bernstein asks "What part of Austerity doesn't work do you not understand"?

First, some facts. By austerity I mean attacking recession by cutting spending and raising taxes – the opposite of Keynesianism, which dictates that if the private sector isn't spending enough money to get the economy moving, the government needs to temporarily step in and supply the juice (aka "stimulus").

Europe and the UK are committed to austerity, and – But that doesn’t explain the U.S., the U.K., and most others who continue to blithely go down this bumpy road. For that, I think we need to reflect on what the great economist Joe Stiglitz refers to in his new book on inequality (I recently interviewed Joe for these pages – should be up soon) as deficit fetishism, the prime symptom of which is the inability to distinguish between good and bad deficit spending

• For Republicans, deficit reduction is a cudgel to bash government. They are ideologically opposed to social insurance, stimulus, infrastructure investment, and everything else, but they gussy this up as an economic argument about markets and debt burdens on future generations. Worse, for them it’s mostly rhetoric. Since Reagan, it’s the Republicans who’ve run structural deficits (Obama’s deficits are largely cyclical—very much a function of the recession).

• Drawing the wrong lessons from the Clinton surpluses: The last time the federal budget was in surplus was at the end of the Clinton years. Economic growth was strong, unemployment very low (below 4% for a few months in 2000!), and financial markets were booming (due, in no small part, to the dot.com bubble, but that’s a different story). These were the years of the alleged bond vigilantes, bond traders who would punish governments by dumping their bonds if they thought their fiscal policy was irresponsible. I’m not sure there ever was such a menace—what led to the late 90s surpluses were a reasonable set of tax rates and strong (albeit bubbly) growth. But whatever…the main point is that fiscal policy during the Clinton years made sense: deficits fell as the recovery gained strength. By no measure does that imply that austerity makes sense in recession.

Common Council Blasts False Reporting From Journal Sentinel

It's about time and then some that our elected leaders take a stand against the corporate media.  From a joint press release:

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s recent investigations into the police department have misled the public about important facts relevant to the safety of our community. That misleading information – whether deliberate or just sloppy – needs to be corrected by someone. And because there is no other daily paper in town, we have no choice but to explain these mistakes directly to the public.

It should be noted that before issuing this statement many of us have pleaded with the reporters and editors at the Journal Sentinel to correct their own mistakes. They have refused.

The articles that they started printing two weeks before the June 5 recall election contained three assertions, two of which were explicitly stated as facts and one of which was strongly implied.

Only one of these three assertions is true.

[...]

But it went beyond the facts, and it used poor methodology to get there. In statistical jargon, it “failed to set a baseline for comparison” when it asserted that crime was up, not down. This was immediately obvious to anyone with any statistical background who reviewed its coverage. This was also pointed out to the paper repeatedly – but it stuck with the story as told.

Now that Police Chief Flynn has presented the results of his targeted audit to our Public Safety Committee, this story has been proven not just speculative, but wrong.
The public should know what we know. In brief, here are the real facts:

1) There are thousands of coding errors in the data that our police department reports to the FBI about crime categories, and most of those errors involve classifying aggravated assaults as simple assaults (just like the paper said).

2) Those bureaucratic coding mistakes happened at similar rates going back as far as we have comparable records (six years) and, once all the mistakes are factored in, violent crime actually went down by .1% more than we thought from 2010 to 2011.

3) There is no evidence that any of those miscodings were done on purpose, and there is now a conclusive and convincing trail of evidence revealing consistent, accidental errors which can now be corrected retroactively and will not be repeated going forward.

We will not speculate as to why the paper of record in this town has spent weeks misleading the public. But the facts are that it has, and the public should know.
It is our sincere hope that the Journal Sentinel will respond effectively to this information, so the public is not forced into a crisis of confidence in regards to this important institution.

We all want to live in a city with a great, responsible, and trusted newspaper.

A Message From AFSCME President Lee Saunders

From the inbox:

Dear Sisters and Brothers,

Yesterday, delegates to the 40th International Convention of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO (AFSCME), elected us to serve as the next president and secretary-treasurer of our great union. And today we were sworn in to office.

This was a proud week for AFSCME, as more than 4,600 delegates, alternates and guests from across the country came together in Los Angeles to elect new leadership and help chart our future. The Convention held the first debate among candidates for union leadership in the history of the labor movement in the United States. We’d like to thank Brother Donohue and Sister Goff for a vigorous and energetic campaign and for all they have done for AFSCME. We look forward to working together with them in the days and weeks ahead.

Indeed, we are committed to working with every council, every local, every member—everyday. Because now is the time for us to pull together to win victories for working families and our members all across this great country. We know that Wall Street and their allies are engaged in an all-out assault against us and the services we provide. They know that AFSCME stands in the way of their efforts to destroy the middle class.

We have much work to do and big shoes to fill. Gerald W. McEntee retired today after 31 years as AFSCME president. We will honor his legacy by leading tirelessly, and with heart and resolve.

We are AFSCME — we care for America's children, nurse the sick, plow the streets, collect the trash and walk the beat on the streets and in our prisons. We make America happen — and together we will build our strong union even bigger and stronger.

In solidarity,

LEE SAUNDERS  President		LAURA REYES  Secretary-Treasurer

Private Prison Riots: Coming Soon To A Wisconsin Town Near You?

Scott Walker has a long standing love affair with privatization, which is to be expected given the fact that he is nothing more than a corporate stooge, a figurehead of a governor while his corporate masters pull his strings.

As a state legislator, Walker was a cheerleader for privatizing the state prison system.

As Milwaukee County Executive, Walker privatized many parts of the county.  He also developed a modus operandi to do so.  He would arbitrarily claim a fiscal emergency, which was usually contrived if not an outright falsehood.  Then to "balance the budget," he would lay off several workers, usually focusing on one department.  This would leave said department so understaffed that they were doomed to start failing.  He would then use their failing performance as a rationale to privatize said service, usually to a campaign donor.

He did this when he privatized the janitorial services at the courthouse, giving the contract to Edward Aprahamian, a campaign donor.  He laid off hundreds of parks workers and gave that work to KEI, another campaign donor (and one tied up in Walkergate).  He did the same thing with security guards, giving that contract to GS4, otherwise known as Wackenhut.

Now we are seeing the same thing in the Wisconsin Department of Corrections.

I have already written how he is shortchanging the state prisons, cutting the corrections officers pay, stripping them of their civil rights and making the prisons inherently more dangerous by taking away any chance for early release for good behavior.

Because of Walker's attack on the workers, many experienced corrections officers retired.  This left a staffing shortage which meant ramped up overtime costs.  The increasingly unsafe conditions caused there to be more injuries to officers, putting them on FMLA, leaving the prisons even further understaffed and running up costs ever higher, much more than Walker ever claimed to be saving.

This might shock the gentle reader, but when Walker made his pre-recall claim that he had actually knocked down the overtime costs, he was lying through his teeth.  The reality is that the prisons are still very much short-handed and are still racking up overtimes costs

Waupun Correctional Institution is down at least 40 officers.  At the Columbia Correctional Institution, they have 34 officers out on FMLA and have more than 30 vacancies on top of that.  Word is at CCI, you can count on automatically being forced to work a 16 hour day.  At the Jackson Correctional Institution, many of the younger people they had just hired are already leaving in droves, taking jobs at Ashley Furniture, Bush Beans or the brewery.  Stanley Correctional Institution also are losing lots of people for private sector work.

The state is unable to keep up with the vacancies.  They budgeted extra money to hold three separate jailers training courses, but couldn't get enough applicants to fill even one of them.  All three training sessions have been cancelled due to lack of interest.

And it's not just the corrections officers that are coming up short.  In Jackson, the state sent out 70 letters for three positions as Office Operations Assistant.  They got only three responses.  Likewise, at the New Lisbon Correctional Institution, they had three social worker positions open, but only got three responses.

With the high level of unemployment in the state and the way that the right wing has described public workers as having such high salaries and luxurious benefits, one might have thought people would have been pounding on the doors demanding a chance for these jobs.

But the fact is, people know the truth.  They know that the they would get treated like dirt and get paid less than dirt.  They also know that the few remaining benefits that might have made the job tolerable, if not appealing, will soon be under attack as soon as the legislature reconvenes in the new year.  And that's only if Walker doesn't call a special session to try to get it done before is arraignment and indictment.

So we have the recipe for disaster, a vast shortage of trained and experienced staff and an ever escalating overtime cost.  This fits right into Walker's formula for privatization.  Especially if a tragedy occurs, such as what happened in the Milwaukee County House of Corrections when Alexander Orlowski died due to staff being burnt out from too much overtime.

And we know that Walker has been thinking about this very thing.  Private prisons, even though they have a very poor track record regarding safety, abuse and neglect, are still very popular among Republicans.  Most likely this stems from the fact that private prisons is a goal of ALEC.

As a state legislator, Walker was key in getting inmates shipped out of state to private prisons owned by Corrections Corporation of America (how's that for an ominous name in Corporate Fitzwalkerstan), a company with a very bad track record in regards to safety and treating its workers fairly or even decently.  CCA still has a lobbyist in the state and is surely licking their chops at the thought of getting another helping of our tax dollars.

Earlier this year, CCA got a contract with the State of Ohio, and sent out a similar proposal to all of the other states.  The terms of their contract with Ohio is absolutely vulgar and appalling (emphasis mine):

In mid-January the corporation, which once handled some 5,000 overflow inmates that Wisconsin shipped out of state, sent out a letter to corrections officials in 48 states offering to buy and operate their prisons. The offer comes on the heels of a deal in Ohio where the state used $72.7 million in proceeds from the sale of one of its prisons to CCA to patch a budget hole.

To uphold its part of the deal, Ohio has promised to keep the prison at 90 percent capacity for the duration of the 20-year contract.

The CCA letter invites governments with "challenging corrections budgets" to consider the benefits, including the payment of property and sales taxes, potential for further job growth and vitality to the local economy. Ohio officials say they will save $3 million a year in prison operating costs.

Ohio just guaranteed to have a quota of people that will be arrested and jailed for 20 years?! How much do you want to bet that the targeted population to help them meet that quota will be the minorities and the poor, both of which are usually disproportionately incarcerated already? What if there is a drop in crime and they can't meet that quota? Will they have police start arresting people for jaywalking and slapping them in jail? Or will they just up the racial profiling and get more arrests for driving while black?  Maybe they'll outlaw public display of affections for homosexuals. It's utterly frightening when the government is guaranteeing a minimal amount of incarcerated persons.

We also know, via Cory Liebmann at Eye on Wisconsin, that Walker's top aids have been meeting with officials from Wackenhut, another big name in the private corrections business and a favorite of Walker's for years.  They must be very generous with their campaign donations.

There are, sad to say, a lot of people out there that think privatization is a great thing and are under the false assumption that it actually saves taxpayers money without cutting services. This is, of course, utter hogwash and as far from reality as one can get.

The Corrections Project has done a study into the "benefits of private prisons. Needless to say, the come up pretty damn short:

Some claim that private prisons really don't save money, but like any for-profit business, attempt to maximize their own profit. This results in a reduction of essential services within the prison -- from medical care, food and clothing to staff costs and security -- at the endangerment of the public, the inmates and the staff.

Other critiques are concerned with the power and influence of for-profit prisons. At a time when much of public discourse is questioning the war-on-crime and the war-on-drugs being fought as wars, critics claim that the incentive of profit skews public discourse away from reasoned debate about viable solutions to social problems.

And finally, grasping the demographic make-up of today's prisons in the US and the history that's produced this make-up (roughly 50% African-American, 35% Latino and 15% White), the privatization of prisons threatens to re-institute a link between race and commerce that has not been seen since the 1800's.

And that is not all:

Although the predominant myths about PRIVATIZATION (whether of prisons or anything else) claim that privatization means tax savings for the public, it actually costs us more. Even though on paper a private agency or corporation may present a lower figure to do the same job, once that money has been taken out of the public's hands, it no longer remains ours.

In the public sector, tax money tends to make more of itself, meaning that each public dollar paid through one social service will spend itself four to eight times more elsewhere within the public sector. Once public money goes into private hands however, that money stays there and is gone for good. This is especially true if we consider that privatization corporations are usually given handsome tax breaks and "incentives," in the form of what some people call "corporate welfare," which means we are even less likely to see that money again.

And finally, if we remember that the people who privatize are generally wealthy, this reminds us of an old story where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer -- where the hard earned tax money from each of us is funneled into the hands of the wealthy few for their own personal gain. While we each like to think we don't live in a society like that, today this is justified to us through the myth that "free markets" are the same thing as democracy; that if everything is privatized and ruled by the law of the dollar then democracy will be ensured.

Add this to the fact that prisons do not make us safer and are by far the most expensive way of dealing with what we call "crime," we suffer other costs as well. Social costs of broken families and communities -- of both victims and perpetrators; hidden financial costs like paying for the foster care of prisoners' children; what we will only pay again when a prisoner re-emerges more desperate, addicted, uneducated and disenfranchised than they went in; the vengeance our society seeks through prisons and punishment will cost us twice the price of ensuring true equality, opportunity and social health at the roots of our society.

The PRIVATIZATION OF PRISONS is but one case in which a few people exploit our society's larger problems for their own gain, at a cost we all bear and get little in return.

Just last month, there was a prison riot in Mississippi. The prison was one owned by CCA.  One guard was murdered and a number of inmates were injured. If the gentle reader were to Google private prison riots, they would find scores of examples of this sort of thing happening.

And just to drive the point home, here is a video taken from another riot, this one in Eagle Mountain, a private prison in California.  During the riot, two people were beaten and stabbed to death:



Reports show that the riot was only quelled when state corrections officers came in to stabilize the facility.

The New York Times has been reporting about the problems that have been happening with privatized prisons in New Jersey.  Wouldn't you know that the private prison company as ties to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

Paul Krugman lays out the reasons that private prisons are so popular, especially among Republicans, despite the obvious failures that they are:

So what’s really behind the drive to privatize prisons, and just about everything else?

One answer is that privatization can serve as a stealth form of government borrowing, in which governments avoid recording upfront expenses (or even raise money by selling existing facilities) while raising their long-run costs in ways taxpayers can’t see. We hear a lot about the hidden debts that states have incurred in the form of pension liabilities; we don’t hear much about the hidden debts now being accumulated in the form of long-term contracts with private companies hired to operate prisons, schools and more.

Another answer is that privatization is a way of getting rid of public employees, who do have a habit of unionizing and tend to lean Democratic in any case.

But the main answer, surely, is to follow the money. Never mind what privatization does or doesn’t do to state budgets; think instead of what it does for both the campaign coffers and the personal finances of politicians and their friends. As more and more government functions get privatized, states become pay-to-play paradises, in which both political contributions and contracts for friends and relatives become a quid pro quo for getting government business. Are the corporations capturing the politicians, or the politicians capturing the corporations? Does it matter?

Now, someone will surely point out that nonprivatized government has its own problems of undue influence, that prison guards and teachers’ unions also have political clout, and this clout sometimes distorts public policy. Fair enough. But such influence tends to be relatively transparent. Everyone knows about those arguably excessive public pensions; it took an investigation by The Times over several months to bring the account of New Jersey’s halfway-house-hell to light.

The point, then, is that you shouldn’t imagine that what The Times discovered about prison privatization in New Jersey is an isolated instance of bad behavior. It is, instead, almost surely a glimpse of a pervasive and growing reality, of a corrupt nexus of privatization and patronage that is undermining government across much of our nation.

In summary, even though the privatization of prisons is a bad idea and always has been, this is something that Walker and the Republicans are likely to try at the beginning of the next legislative period, presuming they don't try to call a special session.  They will do so because they were told this was a good idea from ALEC and even if they have qualms about it, there is a great likelihood that they are getting their palms greased enough that they can suppress their doubts.

We know what they are going to do. The question is how to stop it.  The best way is by not letting them get started on it, and that means we have to work are tails off to make sure we maintain a majority in the State Senate and work to get enough seats in the State Assembly.  Then we can work on getting rid of Walker.

That is if John Doe doesn't do it for us before 2014.

Guns Don't Kill People...

Extreme Right Wing Gun Nuts Do!!!!!

In Arizona, J.T. Ready,  a right wing neo-Nazi extremist, strapped on the body armor and guns and went out and gunned down four people.  While the NRA and the republican party would have you believe that this is just some random nut, but there is so much more to J.T. Ready than they like to let out.   First of all he was running for Pinal County Sheriff at the time.   Ready had a long interest in politics and like all people who do,  he had a hero he modeled himself after and that hero was Arizona republican Russell Pearce. 

In case you were wondering how you have heard the name Russell Pearce before, he was also the author of the racist and controversial  SB1070 immigration bill. So this crazy loon snapped, grabbed some gun and went out and used them.   By the way, some other background during his shooting spree a  toddler died.

Now let's bring this to Wisconsin and how it effects you. Ever since the republicans, during their jobs session, passed one of the least restrictive concealed carry laws in the US,  firearm purchases are  at an all time high.

Americans are arming themselves like never before, and Wisconsin is smack in the center of the trend. 

Firearms-related businesses in the state say they are hard-pressed to meet demand, which they say is being generated by factors ranging from Wisconsin's concealed carry law to presidential politics.

"It's incredible," said Steve Lauer, owner of Lauer Custom Weaponry, a manufacturer of firearms, firearm coatings and accessories in Chippewa Falls. "We can hardly keep up."

Precise figures on firearms sales don't exist. But based on the number of calls made to the FBI and Wisconsin Department of Justice for background checks related to firearms purchases, more guns are being sold this year than ever.

The number of calls to Wisconsin's handgun hotline set a record in February, with nearly 16,000 calls. So far this year, the hotline has handled more than 53,000 calls. That's on pace to far eclipse 2011, when the hotline handled just shy of 90,000 calls for the full year.

People in Wisconsin can not get guns fast enough.  The republicans are responsible for arming our population and now we will see where that leads us.   The one thing we know is that they  will take the accolades but none of the blames.    We saw this in action when an unarmed Bo Morrison was gunned down in Slinger.   We all know it will not stop there,  We have right wing hate groups, who the Bush administration itself labeled as domestic terrorists, in Wisconsin now legally armed.

There was a tremendous amount of violence and intimidation, during the last 18 months directed at people who disagree with the far right and  Governor Scott Walker.  Let's also not forgot the closest parallel  case we have here in WI, the case of Phil Dziki.

Of course our politicians are the adults in the room and exulting calmness and calling on their followers to do the same right??




So now we have a very enthusiastically armed populace, an angry  electorate and a group of politicians who will play into that fear as much as thy possibly can.   You do the math!  

The Cult of the Almighty Dollar

An alert reader tipped me off to a post at the Democratic Underground. It's about an overheard conversation at an airport, between a man and woman who cannot see past their noses and a young woman who tried to speak rationally with them.

It reminds me of hundreds, maybe thousands, of conversations that I've had over the past ten years.

I can't remember how many times I've been told that I'm some kind of $%#^@&*! lefty that needs to die or how many times that I have been "diagnosed" with "Walker Derangement Syndrome."

It does become more than a little frustrating and baffling at times.  The facts are plain as day.  Walker's policies are driving jobs out of the state by the tens of thousands.  The jobs that remain are low-paying and offer overpriced benefits because no one wants to truly fix health care.  People have less rights than they did two years ago. The state has become notably much less safe due to neglect of the infrastructure and the increasing number of hot heads allowed to carry a gun.

So why are right wingers are so obstinate and refuse to see what's going on?

Well, that's something else that's been discussed hundreds, maybe thousands of times.

Well, in my humble opinion, it's because they hold their beliefs with a pseudo-religious, or cult-like faith.

Catholics are instilled from childhood to believe the teachings of the Church, and that the Pope is infallible.  This is reinforced weekly at mass and if they stray, well, guilt is a wonderful tool to bring people back in line. The more devout have this ingrained with them and will not bide with any sort of dissension from that faith.  That is why history is filled with things like the Inquisition and witch trials.

Similar things can be said about most other religions as well.  A prime example of how insane the extremists are would be Osama bin Ladin and all of the terrorist attacks he had masterminded in the name of Allah.

And don't even get me going on the cultists.

The right worship at the alter of the Almighty Dollar and the high priests are the Koch Brothers, WMC and other Big Businesses that wish to rule the world.  They hold forth promises of their version of heaven, "an opportunity" to be rich if they just work hard enough, save enough and invest wisely.  They lead through fear-mongering, false promises and made up parables.

And these messages are reinforced daily, through talk radio, Fox News and the newspapers.

And when their agendas fail, as they are destined to do? Well, they have an app for that.  They just blame the sinners - in this case, liberals, 99%ers, unions, Democrats, and free thinkers.  Sort of like Pat Robertson blaming every natural disaster on the left or the Westboro Baptist Church blaming everything on homosexuals.

When Scott Walker takes money out of the economy and gives it to the wealthy and the corporations, to them, that's a blessed and holy act.  And when the resulting lack of demand causes smaller businesses to shut down and people to lose their jobs, well, that's because the Democrats raised taxes to feed the "big union bosses."  Never mind that corporate taxes are as low as ever and spending is down and that the public sector workers had always made less than their private sector counterparts. That is not what High Priest Big Business taught them.

When people can't afford their homes, food and/or medicine because their insurance rates went up by 15% each and every year, the power company needs yet another rate hike and the oil companies raise prices because they barely netted a half a trillion dollars in the last quarter, well, obviously it's the tax hike of $10 that's forcing them out.  Big Business taught them so and so it must be true.

And so on and so forth. Amen.

And when you present a conservative with a fact that is irrefutable and does not jive with their world view, like that young lady at the airport did, you will find conservatives will get very personal and very insulting.  Don't take it personally.  Look at it from where they are coming from.

When a person has their worldview challenged to its very core, and there is no way for them to deny it, it is very, very difficult to deal with.  That's like telling a Catholic that the Pope is fallible, telling a Muslim that Muhammad ate pork sammiches all the time or a Chicago Bears fan that, after further review, the call stands.

The more open minded might be able to accept it, or at least give it serious thought.  The more adamant will try to explain it away as a fluke or using some far fetched bit of rationalization.  The truly devout will merely attack you, hopefully only verbally, with all sorts of name-calling and irrational accusations.

You see, it causes a person great psychological and emotional angst to confront the fact that they might have been wrong all this time and helped cause so much damage, albeit unintentionally.  This discomfort and pain, the feeling of having all they believe in being set on its end, produces a fight or flight response, causing them to emotionally withdraw and/or attack the perceived threat.

But it's too late. The seed of thought has been planted and now they will either have to double down on their beliefs, no matter how much cognitive dissonance it might cause (see Tea Parties and Koch employees), or they will come around to the realization that they've been wrong, and while not embracing liberalism, they will be more willing to work to find a solution everyone can live with.

Our job, my friends, is not to control our conservative brothers and sisters, since that is not we are about.  We must continuously point out the errors of their ways and help them understand that the things they've been taught are false and are actually harmful to themselves and others.  With patience and self-control, we will be able to get through to most of them.

Sadly, we won't be able to save everyone from themselves.  Sometimes their need to believe is stronger than their sense of self-preservation, like the alcoholic who can't stop drinking or the cultist who believes so strongly that they are willing to drink the poisoned Kool Aid.

But to paraphrase the famed union leader, Mother Jones, we must mourn those that won't change and fight like hell for the rest.

Bush Knew

Over 120 new documents were released by the CIA regarding 9/11 and they are not flattering to the Bush Administration. Here are some highlights (emphasis mine):

The material contains much new information about the hunt before and after 9/11 for bin Laden, the development of the drone campaign in AfPak, and al-Qaida’s relationship with America’s ally, Pakistan. Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks.

The National Security Archive and the person who edited these documents points out this is not good for the Bush Legacy.  

 “I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released, because they paint a picture of the CIA knowing something would happen before 9/11, but they didn’t get the institutional support they needed,” says Barbara Elias-Sanborn, the NSA fellow who edited the materials.

Do not worry, it gets even worse for the Bush Administration:

 Many of the documents publicize for the first time what was first made clear in the 9/11 Commission: The White House received a truly remarkable amount of warnings that al-Qaida was trying to attack the United States. From June to September 2001, a full seven CIA Senior Intelligence Briefs detailed that attacks were imminent, an incredible amount of information from one intelligence agency. One from June called “Bin-Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” writes that “[redacted] expects Usama Bin Laden to launch multiple attacks over the coming days.” The famous August brief called “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike the US” is included. “Al-Qai’da members, including some US citizens, have resided in or travelled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure here,” it says

 Of course know that clearing brush and taking pictures took priority over any attempt to keep Americans safe:

During the entire month of August, President Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Texas — which tied with one of Richard Nixon’s as the longest vacation ever taken by a president. CIA Director George Tenet has said he didn’t speak to Bush once that month, describing the president as being “on leave.” Bush did not hold a Principals’ meeting on terrorism until September 4, 2001, having downgraded the meetings to a deputies’ meeting, which then-counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke has repeatedly said slowed down anti-Bin Laden efforts “enormously, by months.”

3000 + innocent American Lives and trillions of dollars are gone because of the incompetence of the Bush Administration and now Karl Rove and his Anti-American group Crossroads GPS are trying to influence elections and bring us back to the days when terrorists ran unchecked.  

Are we going to let them?   

The Walker Budget Keeps On Working! Part CXVIII

Just another example of Scott Walker's "job creation" and "open for business" agenda:

Dana Holding Corp. informed the state Department of Workforce Development that 150 people will lose their jobs when company closes its Milwaukee operations in early 2013.

The company announced last year that it planned to close the plant, located at 11500 W. Brown Deer Road.

Dana said it will consolidate its Milwaukee operations into its existing plant in Danville, Ky.

Yes, Wisconsin, you have chosen poorly, twice.

And I Know What Song He Hopes To Hear

The corporate media's still gushing over Scott Walker, covering his every little move as something glorious.  The latest example is the Milwaukee Business Journal getting all excited about Walker going to Summerfest to see the Steve Miller Band.

And I know what song he is hoping to hear.  After all, it's his theme song:

Eric Hovde - Humble Hero

Its been an interesting week for Washington DC resident, turned Wisconsin US Senate hopeful, he went from whining about people caring about the poor, to pretending he did not say what we have on video to telling us what a humble hero he actually is! 

"I have done more for people that are economically disadvantaged than probably — and I've never talked about it publicly because I keep it very low-profile — than all but for a very few people in our society," Eric Hovde  told a forum at the Madison Club

 Hovde then was so impressed with himself, that he "choked up" explaining all of the good he has done

You get a little emotional sometimes because, you know, you've put enormous amounts of your life work (into something) and I've given beyond what anybody normally does — time, money, effort — and to have someone make this kind of attack?"

 

Congratulations, President Saunders!

AFSCME is holding their national convention in Los Angeles this week.

It was of significance because the union voted for their first new president in 31 years.  The winner of Thursday's election was the current Secretary/Treasurer Lee Saunders:

The country's largest union of state and local government employees, which faces big challenges to members' jobs, benefits and bargaining rights, elected Lee Saunders on Thursday as its first new president in 31 years. 

Saunders, the union's current secretary treasurer, will be sworn in on Monday to succeed longtime President Gerald McEntee as head of the 1.6 million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. He will be the first African-American to lead the 75-year-old union.

While Saunders' opponent, Danny Donohue, had many supporters, and made it a tightly contested battle.  But the Donohue people, from the reports I've received from LA, were being very disruptive and confrontational, which turned many people off.

I know that one of the reasons some people supported Donohue over Saunders what Donohue's focus on the more local races.  And I agree that this is very important.

However, I have little doubt that President-elect Saunders is also aware of this.  Heck, he's even aware of little old bloggers like myself, Blogging Blue and blue cheddar:

I look forward to the future and have confidence in President Saunders' ability to lead us through the struggles ahead.