Yet Another Not-So-Good Thing For Mr. Walker.

[filkertom]

The Wisconsin governor, that is. He sent the police in yesterday to evict the protesters. Instead, the police joined them. The video is two minutes of distilled awesome.

Comments

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

What would you expect? Sending officers from the Police Union to break up another union?

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

Especially after he was talking about endangering the cops (and protestors) by engineering a riot earlier this week.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Well, one of the things is, this particular police union was apparently exempted from the collective-bargaining revision Walker's trying to shove down the other public unions' throats. They aren't affected by this. I guess he thought they'd be much more willing to remove the protesters, given that they themselves weren't at risk. But they saw themselves in that crowd, and... hey. :)

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

Note: the four unions exempted (including police and firefighters) are the four unions who supported Walker in his 2010 campaign...

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

What are the other two unions?

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

Don't have the reference on hand, and I'm working a dealer's table at a con, so research ability is limited.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Yep, and it seems they've found their buyers' remorse....

[roane.livejournal.com]

That's, like, Hollywood movie awesome.

[pandoradeloeste.livejournal.com]

This entire budget debacle/walkout/protest is movie material. I'm serious - I expect a TV movie in a few years, at the very least, if not an actual Hollywood movie. (Maybe starring Edward James Olmos? This is totally up his alley.)

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

I'm not. I really wish I could look forward to this. Similar to stories like Silkwood, unions never show up in movies except as the drag, the bad guys, the problem, and not interesting ones at that--in spite of the fact unions have all kind of dramatic history and lots of current hairy stories to tell.
I wonder why the folks who finance movies seem to think we'd rather hear much more boring accounts about gangsters, who are actually much less common.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

So many great positive union films could be made. First idea that pops in my mind: Woody Guthrie's song Union Maid done as maybe a 30 minute animated children's film. Anyone out there in Hollywood? Come on. Great idea.

[roane.livejournal.com]

Watch "Matewan". And "Harlan County, USA". What about "Norma Rae"?

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the refs--none of which I've seen, and I've only heard PR or comments for Normal Rae. Granted, I don't watch many movies, and am not expert, but don't you find the relative rarity weird, since Hollywood is very unionized, it's always accused of being incredible liberal. You'd think there'd be all kinds of PR for movies about them.

[roane.livejournal.com]

They're all great movies in their own right. "Harlan County" is a documentary of a coal miner strike in the 70s, and it really knocked my socks off.

I think you're right that it is rare nowadays, but I don't know if that has as much to do with the political climate as the fact that no big studio seems to want to make a movie that makes people think.:P

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Yes, very true. But of course you can make *anything* into a big chopsocky blow 'em up, not much thinking involved. I'm also wondering how they're going to react to the revolutions in the Middle East, as people's revolts. I can see the Koch Brothers spending money in their usual distinctive ways on this topic, for instance.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

I should add that I regard this as a *huge* market gap, a great opportunity for some filmmaker to jump in there with an unexpected winner. Given the current atmosphere, this may be much more possible now than it was just a few years ago.
I've seen that happen with newspapers, too, where a new independent would open up because previous papers drifted increasingly rightward to suit their advertisers and narrowing readership.

[admnaismith.livejournal.com]

Spoken like someone who never saw Matewan.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

As I noted above, yes, you are correct.

[shrewreader.livejournal.com]

You might very well think that I might have startled three cats and a miniature pinscher off of the couch in my shout of glee at this post.

I could not possibly comment.

Further, Mr. Walker, seriously? After the prank Koch call, you actually expected cops to break up a bunch of people lawfully exercising their first amendment rights when you admitted on the whole internet that you'd contemplated putting policemen in danger just to score political points? Where do you think you are, Tunisia Egypt Libya Syria?

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Looks like the cops, thankfully, Get It...and the cop with the bullhorn is *precisely* correct, oaths of office in this country are not oaths of fealty to any one individual, but to uphold the Constitution, and to protect and serve We The People.

And I think We the People are finally starting to Get It, that we cannot depend upon anyone else to Save The World, that we - ourselves - must *be* the change we wish to see.

[hitchkitty.livejournal.com]

...oaths of office in this country are not oaths of fealty to any one individual, but to uphold the Constitution, and to protect and serve We The People.

Damn right.
As one of my associates is fond of remarking, "Laws, dammit, not Men."

[boywizard.livejournal.com]

Right on, officer! Power to the people!!

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

I've been jousting with some TPs (did you know Quilted Northern, the brand with the obnoxious ad "It's time to get real about what happens in the bathroom" is owned by Koch industries?) on Facebook, attempting to create cognitive dissonance and get them to think for themselves. Thus far, they've called me a paranoid troll who needs psychiatric help, among other things. I have, to be fair, referred to Walker as a nazi, and his state trooper as gestapo. Personally, I think that view has a lot of merit. The nazis sent trade unionists off to concentration camps before Jews, according to Pastor Niemoller's poem. You probably think now I'm going to ask for advice on how to deal with these wackos, but no, I'm not. I just wanted to say, for those of you not already doing it, take these fools ON! It is SO MUCH FUN!

[zibblsnrt.livejournal.com]

I ... really don't think it's worth comparing professional sports unions - especially baseball! - to, well, just about any other workers.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Corrupt unions are bad. Corrupt management is bad. But without unions, there's no check on management corruption at all. It's the responsibility of the union rank-and-file to rein in corruption in their upper levels, but there is no corresponding responsibility in the corporate structure.

And yes, bringing in professional sports players is a WTF here.

[nshoe.livejournal.com]

The problem is the union rank-and-file have no incentive to rein in those corrupt unions.

Just like it is the responsibility of the voters to rein in corrupt government officials - not enough of the union rank-and-file or voters care enough about their responsibility to actually do something about it.

[caraig.livejournal.com]

Well, my thoughts are thus: Unions HAVE been hotbeds of corruption and mob ties. However, in the 80's Reagan et al took a lot of power away from unions. Whether how he did it -- the air traffic controller strike/firing, for example -- is good or bad... I don't know enough. I can sort of see both sides. But today, the power unions had is broken, They don't have nearly the stranglehold that they used to. They're on much more dangerous ground, and are much more willing to negotiate in good faith. In fact, you hear more about unions voting to accept pay and benefit cuts much more than you hear about individuals and executives accepting pay and benefit cuts.

For example, with regards to Wisconsin, the union has been willing to negotiate everything except for collective bargaining. This is also the one thing that Walker has refused to negotiate. Essentially, unions live or die by collective bargaining. I can see the desire for regional bargaining, sub-collective so to speak, since not every area has the same financial conditions. But completely abolishing collective bargaining will pretty much remove the one thing that makes a union, well, a union. It's become the one thing that can protect many jobs in unionized fields. Otherwise, it becomes a race to the bottom.

There are legitimate concerns about unions -- ensuring quality of service, ensuring that bargaining is done in good faith on both sides, ensuring that they don't dictate terms to the employers. They're not quite so desperately needed in prosperous times when the unemployment rate is a few percentage points. It's a balancing act, and we may not be there exactly yet. But in the meantime, unions are and have been preventing the wage continuum in the US from becoming a race as to who can pay people the least; think of them as brakes on the race to the bottom when people are desperate for ANY kind of work.

Also, I realize this is rather petty of me, but Walker is coming off as a complete tool throughout this. I'm... disinclined to give him the benefit of the doubt anymore.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Back in Reagan's era, unions did not have a stranglehold at all. There weren't even 35% or some of the workforce, nobody was in any danger of getting overrun by unions. And yes, there were some really corrupt top structure in several powerful unions--corrupt in that they were firmly in bed with *management*. The workers didn't like that, but as now, what were the choices?
Reagan's apparent solution? Break the legal structure against corporate takeovers, and break all unions. didn't touch the corrupt unions--he didn't need to.
We've been living with the consequences of allowing consolidation of corporations--including consolidation of media ownership--ever since then.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

By god, I do believe the revolution has started!

It seems The People have finally gotten pissed off enough at The Powers That Be and started to stand up to the crooks and remind them that they rule by their consent, not the big businesses. [Walker and the Kosh bro's being the most flagrant example]

[his-spiffyness.livejournal.com]

Anybody notice the sign behind the speaker? "Walker is a Koch Whore"

[pandoradeloeste.livejournal.com]

That's an insult to hardworking sex workers (regardless of drug use) everywhere. They, at least, generally pay attention to what their employers want, which Walker is definitely not.

[bayushisan.livejournal.com]

Personally I think that Walker should be recalled, especially after that phone call debacle. Its good to see the police standing up with the other workers though and it is alarming that the governor would send them in to break up a peaceful protest.

[bigbumble.livejournal.com]

There were a lot of "Go Badgers!" cheers at the Michigan rally in Lansing today. I'm glad I was able to make it.

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Clearly they know how to protect and serve. I hope those cops get a raise.

Re: Yes...

[nshoe.livejournal.com]

If the state had the money to give them a raise none of this ever would have come up...

Re: Yes...

[starmalachite.livejournal.com]

The state *did* have the money. Until last month, when Walker gave away the surplus & then some in business tax breaks -- and then claimed the *unions* were the problem.

[tarrestrial.livejournal.com]

THAT makes me "proud to be an American!"

[annearchy.livejournal.com]

This makes me proud to be a Wisconsinite :D I work 2 blocks from the state capitol. Believe me, it is a freaking amazing time to be here.