Today, my friend Shannon Burke posted on FB:
» Tolerant Left Wishes Death on Governor Scott Walker - Big Government
You may remember President Obama’s recent call for civil discourse this past January. Well, it appears that the Left is still very much struggling with the #newtone online. Unless, of course, you consider a persistent stream of steady death threats against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker a display..
Although I find fault with someone on Twitter wishing death upon Walker, some of the comments from Shannon's followers are incredibly dumb. Like the guy who responded to my post that today's NYT column by Paul Krugman* was worth a read:
Wow. Full of marxist terminology and viewpoints. In fact, with most of the unions' valid functions being absorbed by federal agencies such as OSHA, MSHA, etc, unions really only serve to drive artificially high wages, and therefore high product and service prices.
*Part of Krugman's words since the NYT is now subscription only):
In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. Billionaires can f...ield armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers did in the case of Mr. Walker). On paper, we're a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we're more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate.
Given this reality, it's important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions.
You don't have to love unions, you don't have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they're among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans, as opposed to the wealthy. Indeed, if America has become more oligarchic and less democratic over the last 30 years -- which it has -- that's to an important extent due to the decline of private-sector unions.
And now Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to get rid of public-sector unions, too.
There's a bitter irony here. The fiscal crisis in Wisconsin, as in other states, was largely caused by the increasing power of America's oligarchy. After all, it was superwealthy players, not the general public, who pushed for financial deregulation and thereby set the stage for the economic crisis of 2008-9, a crisis whose aftermath is the main reason for the current budget crunch. And now the political right is trying to exploit that very crisis, using it to remove one of the few remaining checks on oligarchic influence.
More later when Shannon gets here.
