Wisconsin Democrats could stay away for weeks

[SiriuslyLong]

Facts in short supply in debate over union bill

By SCOTT BAUER and PATRICK CONDON, Associated Press
Sat Feb 26, 11:57 am ET

MADISON, Wis. (AP) -- The facts have been overshadowed by rhetoric at the Wisconsin Capitol, where protesters and politicians have been engaged in a tense standoff over the governor's proposal to strip most public employees of their collective-bargaining rights.

Gov. Scott Walker insists the state is broke and must make drastic spending cuts. Unions believe Republican leaders are trying to wipe them out. Two weeks into the debate, The Associated Press assessed the claims in an effort to shed light on what's at stake.

Walker says his plan is needed to ease a deficit that is projected to hit $137 million by July and $3.6 billion by mid-2013.

The budget as it stands now is balanced, and Walker is under no legal obligation to make changes. But by mid-summer, the state could come up short on cash to pay its bills, largely because of a projected $169 million shortfall in its Medicaid program.

Walker's plan comes up with the money for this year by refinancing debt to save $165 million and forcing state employees to pay for half the cost of their pensions and twice their current health care premiums. That is equivalent to an 8 percent pay cut.

Those increases in benefit contributions would raise $30 million by July and $300 million over the next two years.

But the flashpoint is his proposed elimination of collective bargaining rights. Nearly all state and local government workers would be forbidden from bargaining for any wage increases beyond the rate of inflation.

Walker argues the sweeping step is necessary to balance the budget not only over the next two years but into the future. School districts, cities, counties and other local governments need the flexibility, he says, to deal with more than $1 billion in state aid cuts Walker will announce Tuesday in his two-year budget plan.

That's certainly one way to tackle the problem, but it's not the only solution.

Walker has refused even to consider some of the other ways to raise the massive amount of money needed. He repeatedly has said his measures are the only way to fix the state's budget problems now and for the long term as he proposes deep cuts to state and local governments in his upcoming two-year budget.

He also is resolved not to raise taxes - an option used by Democrats who controlled the Legislature when the state faced a deficit that was nearly twice as large as the one Walker inherited. The Democrats also relied heavily on federal stimulus aid, which the state does not have available this time around.

Not raising taxes and not tapping federal aid leaves Walker with few alternatives other than reducing the money the state gives to schools and local governments or reducing Medicaid to the extent allowed under federal law.

Aid to schools and local governments is more than half of the entire state budget. Medical assistance programs are 9 percent, as is funding for the state prison system and money for the University of Wisconsin system. Walker won't make cuts to the prisons, but he's expected to make deep reductions in higher education.

As for Medicaid, Walker gives himself as much leeway as possible under the bill that passed the Assembly early Friday but remains hung up in the Senate because of 14 AWOL Democrats who skipped town to stymie efforts to vote on the proposal in that chamber.

Walker's bill gives his administration the power to make any changes necessary to Medicaid to save money, regardless of current law and without approval of the Legislature. Medicaid is a $1.2 billion part of the budget, but even with the freedom the bill gives him, Walker will be hamstrung by federal law that limits how many cost-saving changes states can make without a waiver.

Walker's new health department secretary, Dennis Smith, is a former federal Medicaid official who has advocated that states drop out of the program entirely. That position and others taken by Smith are worrisome to advocates for the poor, disabled and elderly, who are largely the beneficiaries of the program.

Walker has not released details of what he may cut in Medicaid. At least some of the cuts will be contained in his budget coming out Tuesday.

But the key to that plan, according to Walker, is ending collective bargaining rights. Doing that isn't about busting unions, Walker argues, but balancing budgets.

If he's intent on using cuts in state aid to balance the budget, eliminating collective bargaining does go a long way to achieving one of his key goals - giving local communities the ability to deal with the reductions.

With 3,000 units of government in Wisconsin, all in various stages of contractual negotiations, eliminating collective bargaining may be the only way they could quickly deal with the cuts, said Todd Berry, president of the nonpartisan Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.

Walker has also threatened that if the bill doesn't pass, up to 1,500 people may be laid off by July in order to achieve the savings necessary to balance the budget, with another 6,000 layoffs by the middle of 2013, with an equal number on the local level.

That layoff threat is a real possibility if schools are going to see a large cut in aid and have their ability to raise property taxes restricted, Berry said.

"If 80 percent of your budget is personnel, and you're having state and your property tax revenues reduced while your costs are going up, you can't solve your problem without addressing compensation," Berry said.

In that case, "you only have two choices - reduce the number of people or keep the people and reduce the amount of compensation," he said.

Karen Bloczynski, a fourth-grade teacher in Marshfield, said she expects to be laid off under Walker's plan. With 35 years of experience and a $70,000 salary, Bloczynski said she's more expensive than younger colleagues.

Bloczynski said she's sent letters to a local electrician, a furniture store and several restaurants warning them they're likely to feel the effect.

"Teachers spend money in their communities," she said.

Teachers have been a large part of the protests that have enveloped the Capitol for 11 days, including a massive 68,000 person demonstration. The statewide teachers union represents about 39,000 people.

The central part of Walker's argument is that government workers have long escaped painful cuts that those in the private sector have had to bear. That ignores the fact that under Walker's predecessor, Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle, state workers were forced to take furlough days that amounted to a 3 percent pay cut. State employees have also not had a raise for more than two years.

Even so, Walker has portrayed public employees as the "haves" and private workers as the "have nots," saying government workers can afford trims to their salaries and benefits because on average they earn more than private-sector workers.

This is true as a straight average, but several national reports of public versus private pay say it's also misleading.

In a report released in December 2010, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the average state/local government worker earns $40.10 an hour in salary and benefits. The same report found the average private worker earns $27.68 an hour in salary and benefits.

Read the rest here: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories...MPLATE=DEFAULT

[SiriuslyLong]

And now here's Krugman. I am sure he is handsomely paid, but there's nothing new here. I'm sure his followers nod "yes" as they read this.

Shock Doctrine, U.S.A.By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 24, 2011

Here’s a thought: maybe Madison, Wis., isn’t Cairo after all. Maybe it’s Baghdad — specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than experience and competence.

As many readers may recall, the results were spectacular — in a bad way. Instead of focusing on the urgent problems of a shattered economy and society, which would soon descend into a murderous civil war, those Bush appointees were obsessed with imposing a conservative ideological vision. Indeed, with looters still prowling the streets of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, told a Washington Post reporter that one of his top priorities was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises” — Mr. Bremer’s words, not the reporter’s — and to “wean people from the idea the state supports everything.”

The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book “The Shock Doctrine,” which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.

Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011, where the shock doctrine is on full display.

In recent weeks, Madison has been the scene of large demonstrations against the governor’s budget bill, which would deny collective-bargaining rights to public-sector workers. Gov. Scott Walker claims that he needs to pass his bill to deal with the state’s fiscal problems. But his attack on unions has nothing to do with the budget. In fact, those unions have already indicated their willingness to make substantial financial concessions — an offer the governor has rejected.

What’s happening in Wisconsin is, instead, a power grab — an attempt to exploit the fiscal crisis to destroy the last major counterweight to the political power of corporations and the wealthy. And the power grab goes beyond union-busting. The bill in question is 144 pages long, and there are some extraordinary things hidden deep inside.

For example, the bill includes language that would allow officials appointed by the governor to make sweeping cuts in health coverage for low-income families without having to go through the normal legislative process.

And he goes on wtih more accusations here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/op...25krugman.html

[SiriuslyLong]

Last one that has nothing to do with Wisconsin. There is a big article on NJ Governor Chris Christie who may be known to some as a repuke. Regardless of that creative label, I wanted to capture one paragraph of this long article.

"His strength was explaining to a frustrated public just how simple the state's problems were. That worked well against Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine, a liberal former investment banker whose chief oratorical skill was explaining why everything was so complicated."

Yes indeed, "complicated".

Anyway, in case you are interested: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/02/2...d-carries.html

[Havakasha]

Frank Rich explains why the GOP thinks it can get away with a government shutdown this time around, why they're wrong, and why this has nothing to do with reducing the deficit.

... this battle, ostensibly over the deficit, is so much larger than the sum of its line-item parts. The highest priority of America’s current political radicals is not to balance government budgets but to wage ideological warfare in Washington and state capitals alike. The relatively few dollars that would be saved by the proposed slashing of federal spending on Planned Parenthood and Head Start don’t dent the deficit; the cuts merely savage programs the right abhors. In Wisconsin, where state workers capitulated to Gov. Scott Walker’s demands for financial concessions, the radical Republicans’ only remaining task is to destroy labor’s right to collective bargaining.

[Havakasha]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/op...27rich.html?hp

OP-ED COLUMNIST
Why Wouldn’t the Tea Party Shut It Down?
By FRANK RICH
Published: February 26, 2011

NO one remembers anything in America, especially in Washington, so the history of the Great Government Shutdown of 1995 is being rewritten with impunity by Republicans flirting with a Great Government Shutdown of 2011. The bottom line of the revisionist spin is this: that 2011 is no 1995. Should the unthinkable occur on some coming budget D-Day — or perhaps when the deadline to raise the federal debt ceiling arrives this spring — the G.O.P. is cocksure that it can pin the debacle on the Democrats.

In the right’s echo chamber, voters are seen as so fed up with deficits that they’ll put principle over temporary inconveniences — like, say, a halt in processing new Social Security applicants or veterans’ benefit checks. Who needs coddled government workers to deal with those minutiae anyway? As Mike Huckabee has cheerfully pointed out, many more federal services are automated now than in the olden days of the late 20th century. Phone trees don’t demand pensions.

Remarkably (or not) much of the Beltway press has bought the line that comparisons between then and now are superficial. Sure, Bill Clinton, like Barack Obama, was bruised by his first midterms, with his party losing the House to right-wing revolutionaries hawking the Contract With America, a Tea Party ur-text demanding balanced budgets. But after that, we’re instructed, the narratives diverge. John Boehner is no bomb-throwing diva like Newt Gingrich, whose petulant behavior inspired the famous headline “Cry Baby” in The Daily News. A crier — well, yes — but Boehner’s too conventional a conservative to foment a reckless shutdown. Obama, prone to hanging back from Congressional donnybrooks, bears scant resemblance to the hands-on Clinton, who clamored to get into the ring with Newt.

Those propagating the 2011-is-not-1995 line also assume that somehow Boehner will prevent the new G.O.P. insurgents from bringing down the government they want to bring down. But if Gingrich couldn’t control his hard-line freshman class of 73 members in 1995 — he jokingly referred to them then as “a third party” — it’s hard to imagine how the kinder, gentler Boehner will control his 87 freshmen, many of them lacking government or legislative experience, let alone the gene for compromise. In the new Congress’s short history, the new speaker has already had trouble controlling his caucus. On Friday Gingrich made Boehner’s task harder by writing a Washington Post op-ed plea that the G.O.P. stick to its guns.

The 2011 rebels are to the right of their 1995 antecedents in any case. That’s why this battle, ostensibly over the deficit, is so much larger than the sum of its line-item parts. The highest priority of America’s current political radicals is not to balance government budgets but to wage ideological warfare in Washington and state capitals alike. The relatively few dollars that would be saved by the proposed slashing of federal spending on Planned Parenthood and Head Start don’t dent the deficit; the cuts merely savage programs the right abhors. In Wisconsin, where state workers capitulated to Gov. Scott Walker’s demands for financial concessions, the radical Republicans’ only remaining task is to destroy labor’s right to collective bargaining.

That’s not to say there is no fiscal mission in the right’s agenda, both nationally and locally — only that the mission has nothing to do with deficit reduction. The real goal is to reward the G.O.P.’s wealthiest patrons by crippling what remains of organized labor, by wrecking the government agencies charged with regulating and policing corporations, and, as always, by rewarding the wealthiest with more tax breaks. The bankrupt moral equation codified in the Bush era — that tax cuts tilted to the highest bracket were a higher priority even than paying for two wars — is now a given. The once-bedrock American values of shared sacrifice and equal economic opportunity have been overrun.

In this bigger picture, the Wisconsin governor’s fawning 20-minute phone conversation with a prankster impersonating the oil billionaire David Koch last week, while entertaining, is merely a footnote. The Koch Industries political action committee did contribute to Walker’s campaign (some $43,000) and did help underwrite Tea Party ads and demonstrations in Madison. But this governor is merely a petty-cash item on the Koch ledger — as befits the limited favors he can offer Koch’s mammoth, sprawling, Kansas-based industrial interests.

Look to Washington for the bigger story. As The Los Angeles Times recently reported, Koch Industries and its employees form the largest bloc of oil and gas industry donors to members of the new House Energy and Commerce Committee, topping even Exxon Mobil. And what do they get for that largess? As a down payment, the House budget bill not only reduces financing for the Environmental Protection Agency but also prohibits its regulation of greenhouse gases.

Here again, the dollars that will be saved are minute in terms of the federal deficit, but the payoff to Koch interests from a weakened E.P.A. is priceless. The same dynamic is at play in the House’s reduced spending for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Internal Revenue Service. and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (charged with regulation of the esoteric Wall Street derivatives that greased the financial crisis). The reduction in the deficit will be minimal, but the bottom lines for the Kochs and their peers, especially on Wall Street, will swell.

These special interests will stay in the closet next week when the Tea Partiers in the House argue (as the Gingrich cohort once did) that their only agenda is old-fashioned fiscal prudence. The G.O.P. is also banking on the presumption that Obama will bide his time too long, as he did in the protracted health care and tax-cut melees, and allow the Fox News megaphone, not yet in place in ’95, to frame the debate. Listening to the right’s incessant propaganda, you’d never know that the latest Pew survey found that Americans want to increase, not decrease, most areas of federal spending — and by large margins in the cases of health care and education.....

[SiriuslyLong]

Did Wisconsin governor overreach in union battle?
By Ed Hornick, CNNMarch 1, 2011 9:40 a.m. EST

Washington (CNN) -- Some political experts have said that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, in a battle with public employee unions over the right to collective bargaining, has overreached in his attempts to shore up the state's budget shortfall.

"I think it'd be fair to categorize the proposal (to cut union bargaining) as an overreach," said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor David Canon. "Maybe the biggest reason for that claim is the fact that he didn't campaign on this."

Protesters who have filled the state's capitol are upset with Walker's call to curb collective bargaining rights as part of his effort to balance the state's budget. Union leaders have agreed to pay more for health and pension benefits but have objected to curbing collective bargaining. Walker has refused to budge.

Walker, a former state legislator and Milwaukee County executive before he was elected governor last year, said he looks to Ronald Reagan for guidance in the current battle in which he's engaged. But one critic said Walker's public face conjures up images of a more recent president.

"Walker has been combative and steadfast, reminiscent more of George W. Bush's mystifying and utterly unjustified self-confidence (remember "I'm the decider?") than anything Ronald Reagan ever said or did," wrote Paul Fanlund of Wisconsin's progressive Capital Times.

Opponents have questioned Walker's motives as seeking prominence among like-minded conservatives or pursuing a vendetta against a traditional Republican foe. But another Wisconsin political scientist said while Walker "may, at some level, see himself as a vanguard of this new Republican effort," the governor is motivated by convictions.

"I don't see this as delusions of grandeur or him doing this in any way to propel himself on the national stage," said Thomas Holbrook, a professor of government at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "The type of person he is, these are the things he believes needs to be done and he's got the majorities so he's going to do it."

Holbrook said Walker showed similar convictions when he was Milwaukee County executive from 2002 to 2010.

"He tended to stick to his guns there and say 'This is what I want, this is what I'm pushing for' and maybe he didn't get it in the end," Holbrook said. "But he didn't have a majority by any means."

Canon agreed, saying Walker's style of negotiating and a tough approach to unions is consistent with his time as county executive.

Former U.S. Comptroller Gen. David Walker wrote in the Washington Post that the Wisconsin governor has legitimate concerns about the collective bargaining process.

"However, he seems to have overreached in connection with some of his proposed solutions," David Walker wrote. "While there are many reasons that government workers should not be able to bargain over pension and health benefit levels, it is reasonable for them to be able to bargain over current pay, employee benefit contributions and normal work rules."

Read the rest here: http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/03/...ss_igoogle_cnn