Scott Walker, megalomaniac or OFB?

Dear  Governor Walker,

There was never any doubt that you would stand by your childish lemonade-stand slogan "Wisconsin, Open for Business."  The only questions were what social upheavals your conservative agenda would include and for how much (was that 25 cents written in crayon?).  From the moment the tort reform bill passed, many of us saw the writing on the wall.  Many others were blind to the idea that you were an extremist bent on gaining power.

Along with your henchmen (other republicans such as the unimaginative and unsympathetic Leah Vukmir, business leaders, and that one guy who claims to be an independent who's only an independent if that means he's not a democrat), who are ostensibly as averse to the public as you, you have passed a series of bills that have set Wisconsin up as the next breeding ground for low wages, enormous public transportation issues, inadequate health care insurance, and far greater income, education, and racial disparity.  It is clear that your administration does not represent the people of Wisconsin but only a few of the people of Wisconsin, namely you.

But one thing you have to get credit for is your plan.  "The main thing businesses are calling for is government to get out of the way," you said in Mount Pleasant on Tuesday.  The statement drew loud cheers according to The Journal Times.com. Congratulations, it's reassuring to know that even for lunatics on the fringe family will still show up in support. You have led the charge to withdraw government from business and turn big government into big business for you and your friends.  Perhaps there is some hope in that aim, for Wisconsinites, that you'll eventually eliminate your own job.

As the "open-for-business" governor (the OFB) you have now gone all in; you've shot your wad, so to speak.  Well, OFB, what are you going to do if the jobs don't return and you've only succeeded in handing over piles of cash to corporate interests who in turn have shipped more jobs to overseas markets and have provided their CEOs with huge raises?

One problem you might run into is that the working people in this country still have anti-trust laws and OSHA regulations.  Those are some nagging regulations that corporations really don't like much.  Corporate interests are not wed to worker safety, union rights, or lunch breaks.  They want profit.  Cheap labor provides profit, Mr. Walker.  Now what are you going to do about our exorbitant minimum wage law?  Wisconsin has a minimum wage that ensures even the lowest paid hourly worker earns a living wage.  That's right in Wisconsin the minimum wage is 7 dollars (that's whole dollars not half) and 25 cents (that's a quarter of a dollar).  That's 290 bucks for a full-time (40 hrs) week's worth of work, which is about 15 (fifteen) thousand dollars a year.  Holy shmit!  What is this China?  When was the last time you earned 7.25 an hour, gov'nor, back when you were pedaling newspapers for the State Journal?  You spend more than that on your daily doses of Rogaine and caffeine and that's before breakfast. 

So basically anyone who works full-time at minimum wage is earning just above the federal poverty rate.  And we're the wealthiest country in the world?  Yikes, I'm glad were not the third wealthiest, who knows what atrocities would be taking place then.

Another sticky issue is sick days - corporations don't like paid sick days at all,  OFB.  Milwaukee voted overwhelmingly in favor of the paid sick day ordinance back in 2008.  In another one of those 'you-told-us-so' moments (like the collective bargaining thing), you planned for that too.  Your current ruling party thwarted Milwaukee's popularly voted-in referendum for businesses to provide paid sick days, thanks to the snarky Leah Vukmir (a nurse, even!  Better hope never to end up in her care she'll pinch the IV, ouch).  It was a legal but sneaky move overruling the populace by claiming the populace didn't know what they were voting for. Hmm... I think we did know what we were voting for on the referendum but we didn't know what we were voting for when we got you.

So with all of your aspirations in your hands, you've given yourself a bit more power this week to fill out state jobs, and to block administrative rules used to implement state laws.  OFB, you're plan for Wisconsin is clear as mud now.  As the state's chief megalomaniac, you plan to ensure that WI is stuck in the middle of 1870, with the exceptions of your dependence on the automobile, because that wasn't invented yet, just wait another 11 years or so, and the size of your salary. You want to save WI some money, how about working for $7.25 an hour?

OFB, you have stuck to your plan much like another politician who stuck to his plans.  As that former president once said, "You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn't it? I mean, that is fantastic that you're doing that."   And he also said, "We have a firm commitment to NATO, we are a part of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe. We are a part of Europe."

Keep it up gov', and you'll live up to those bold words from G.W. when he said, "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."  You'll be another great political leader in the mold of Reagan, Ford, Bush, Clinton, and Nixon (or are those five reasons why we might be screwed).

Sincerely,

Your humble and obliging servant,
Kilgore Spinoza 

Teacher quality and teachers' unions

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international examination that assesses 15 year old students in each of the OECD countries and a handful of others.  The results are worth looking at.  In later entries, there will be more details about how the US performs compared to other nations.  But tonight this caught the eye as it is remarkably relevant to changes proposed in Wisconsin.  This excerpt comes from "Lessons from PISA for the United States."

As PISA shows, in most OECD countries, once teachers are hired, it is very hard to remove them from professional service, irrespective of the quality of their work. The high quality of teachers in those countries appears to be a function of the policies that determine the pool from which teachers are initially drawn, their compensation, the status of teachers, the high standards of entering university-level teacher-preparation programmes, the quality of their initial preparation, and the attention given to the quality of their preparation following their initial induction.

Critics of American education are sometimes disapproving of the teachers’ unions and of how they perceive these unions as interfering with promising school reform programmes by giving higher priority to the unions’ “bread and butter” issues than to what the evidence suggests students need to succeed. But the fact is that many of the countries with the strongest student performance also have the strongest teachers’ unions, beginning with Japan and Finland.

There seems to be no relationship between the presence of unions, including and especially teachers’ unions, and student performance.  But there may be a relationship between the degree to which the work of teaching has been professionalised and student performance. Indeed, the higher a country is on the world’s education league tables, the more likely that country is working constructively with its unions and treating its teachers as trusted professional partners. Witness the reports of Ontario in Canada or Finland.

The report on Canada, in particular, describes how issues of collective bargaining can be successfully separated from professional issues, where teachers and their organisations collaborate effectively with ministry staff in selfgoverning bodies to oversee issues of entry, discipline, and the professional development of teachers. Central to success in this area in Ontario was the signing of a four-year collective bargaining agreement with the four major teachers’ unions. In reaching the accord, the ministry was able to negotiate items that were consistent with both its educational strategy and the unions’ interests, thus providing a basis for pushing forward the education agenda while creating a sustained period of labour peace that allowed for continued focus on educational improvement. That was facilitated because union agreements could be reached at the provincial level, which may be more challenging in the context of the United States, with the more decentralised nature of union-management decision making.

Unless the United States raises the professional status of its existing teaching force as Ontario has done, upgrades the pool from which it selects new teachers, is more selective in admitting candidates for initial teacher training and education, greatly improves the quality of, and includes much more clinical education in, that training, changes the amount and structure of teachers compensation, finds practical and effective ways of raising the status of teachers, greatly improves the process of initial induction and restructures the occupation to provide increased and appropriate responsibilities for the best teachers, and leverages more effective union-management relations at local and state levels, it is unlikely to match the performance of the best-performing countries.

Important beginnings in this direction are under way. For example, the United States has directed new federal

funding for teacher preparation towards more clinical programmes such as teacher “residency” programmes, in which teacher candidates learn to teach in schools under the guidance of experienced teachers while taking classes outside of teaching hours. The Obama administration has also sought, through the Race to the Top programme and other efforts, to encourage states and districts to develop more rigorous systems of teacher evaluation that can inform new approaches to induction, compensation and career advancement decisions. These efforts are consistent with the approaches in the high-performing systems profiled in this volume.

______________________________________

In MPS, morale is extremely low right now.  No one is sure they will have a job in the 2011-2012 school year.  

What do you think?  Are we striving to upgrade the professional status of teachers?  Should we be changing the collective bargaining statute to only allow teachers' unions to negotiate with municipalities over wages and only in comparison to the Consumer Price Index?

Reagan on Collective Bargaining

But restoring the American dream requires more than restoring a sound, productive economy, vitally important as that is. It requires a return to spiritual and moral values. Values so deeply held by those who came here to build a new life. We need to restore those values in our daily life, in our neighborhoods, and in our government’s dealings with other nations of the world.

These are the values inspiring those brave workers in Poland. The values that have inspired other dissidents under Communist domination who have been willing to go into the Gulag and suffer the torture of imprisonment because of their dissidence. They remind us that where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost. They remind us that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. You and I must protect and preserve freedom here or it will not be passed on to our children and it would disappear everywhere in the world.

R Reagan, 1980

Was the passage of the budget repair bill about balancing the state budget?

Today at a press conference in Wausau, Governor Walker pronounced the passing of the budget repair bill.

“This is ultimately about reform and allowing us to move forward,” the Republican governor said during a brief news conference with reporters at the Wausau airport. “And, as we pointed out in the last week, it's about protecting jobs.”

http://wsau.com/news/articles/2011/mar/10/watch-governor-describes-benefits-budget-repair-bi/

That's interesting.  All this time I thought it was about balancing the budget, Governor Walker.  Why would anyone have thought that?  Governor Walker?

March 9, 2011: "This is about balancing the our budget."

March 1: "... balancing the budget through measures that generate savings at the state and local level."

February 18: "I think we’re focused on balancing our budget. It would be wise for the president and others in Washington to focus on balancing their budget, which they’re a long ways from doing,”

February 16: "The bottom line is the State is broke, we're going to balance the budget."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2bdxK7A2kE

And from his fellow republicans:
Rep. Evan Wynn (R–Whitewater) “Today I fulfilled my promises to the constituents of the 43rd Assembly District by casting my vote in favor of balancing Wisconsin’s budget – without job-killing tax increases.”

Leah Vukmir, February: "It's about balancing the budget."

Funny how the the story changed once the committee met to remove the fiscal characteristics of the bill and left only the removal of most collective bargaining rights and all for UW Health employees, created the avenue to restrict Medicaid cutting that will probably be many of the 1.2 million Wisconsinites from receiving health care.

In the end the republicans are forced to admit that gutting collective bargaining rights from public unions was not a budgetary issue.  As Sen. Fitzgerald told Megyn Kelly, "If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the union, what you're going to find is President Obama's going to have a much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin."

As Governor Walker explained in the infamous Koch call, we had to get ready to drop the "bomb".  So there it is then.  Governor Walker in Wausau confirmed what Sen. Fitzgerald had said earlier in the day.  Funny how the rest of us knew this weeks ago (see video below).

Now the question is: how will the people of Wisconsin respond to such deceitful tactics?  What results will come form the recall efforts? http://www.recalltherepublican8.com/

Legislators, lies do not become you.

Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive!
Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, Canto vi. Stanza 17.



This is a video I found on the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation's website.  Although it's designed to show the protesters as ludicrous with the Curb Your Enthusiasmesque music and for their comparisons to Nazi Germany, which they probably are because Hitler busted all of the unions and sent all the labor leaders to prison, they turn out to be far more accurate in assessing the situation than Leah Vukmir (who should always be remembered for her striking comments during a medical marijuana hearing, "You can read all of the research you want, but there's no evidence that it [medical marijuana] is effective.")  Anyway, the video below is worth a few minutes.  (It should be noted that just 2 days ago Sen. Vukmir told a large crowd at the Wauwatosa library, "We are not taking away collective bargaining rights.")  Enjoy the film, Wisconsin Union Protest: Myth vs Fact.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcDnKQul_c8