Divide and Conquer in Wisconsin and Beyond
Divide and Conquer in Wisconsin and Beyond
http://www.rall.com/rallblog/2012/06/07/divide-and-conquer-in-wisconsin-and-beyond
(snip)
Here’s another story: A friend of mine who is a Wisconsin state worker told me back during the protests in 2011 that her neighbor, with whom she’d previously had good relations, had informed her that he sided with the governor. State workers were draining the taxpayers and the cuts to their pension and health care benefits were justified. The protests were just spoiled Madisonians throwing a tantrum.
My friend was bewildered. “I never begrudged him all the money he made during the housing bubble,” she said. “I thought, ‘Good for you!’” Her neighbor is a plumber who made money hand over fist during the go-go days of the latest housing boom. After the crash, however, work has been scarce. Does he blame the banking industry and Wall Street – the folks who engineered the whole thing, got rich at our expense, and tanked the economy? No, he thinks his neighbor deserves a pay cut. “I’ll never make the kind of money he [the plumber] made,” my friend told me. “But I was okay with that. I needed a steady job and good health care benefits for my family.”
The problem is deeply entrenched, extends beyond Wisconsin, and includes people who are not stereotypical right-wingers. For example, when the protests were going on, I had long conversations with an out-of-state relative, a college-educated woman who generally votes Democratic. She sided with Walker and even invoked his rhetoric, calling state workers the “haves” and taxpayers the “have nots” – as if state workers are not also taxpayers. (This framing had also been adopted in her state and a number of other states. Clearly it was a national strategy of the Republicans.)
I explained about the furlough days; I pointed out that the state fiscal bureau had projected we would finish the year in the black – before Walker took office and gave over $100 million in tax breaks to corporate and other interests. I explained that the “crisis” was, in part, manufactured by Walker to justify his agenda and that it wasn’t that big of a “crisis” anyway. We’d faced bigger deficits and come out of them without this kind of drastic action. I argued that this was about larger issues, about union-busting, making ordinary workers pay for the economic problems created by elites, and a privatization agenda. I invoked Pulitzer Prize-winning financial writer David Cay Johnston to explain that state workers weren’t getting “free” health insurance and pension benefits. These were instead part of a total compensation package, where negotiated wages were divided among current and deferred income and benefits. Walker had framed the issue as making state workers pay a little something toward the “free” benefits they were receiving.
None of this seemed to penetrate her skull. Her 401k had taken a beating due to the economy; why shouldn’t state workers also take a hit in their pensions? She was paying through the nose for health insurance; why should state workers get a better deal? We can’t afford these generous benefits now, she said. Beginning teachers where she lived received better compensation than she did when she was starting out as an accountant. Ergo, teachers are overpaid.
(more at link)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interesting article. How do we combat this?
= new reply since forum marked as read
