The people are frightened by what has happened. They see their future and the future of their children threatened. Unions, as well, see their future threatened. The former represent the nation. The latter represent a small portion of a nation. Obama and the Democrats are vocally supporting the latter while few politicians support the former.
The unions don't care one damn what the nation wants or what is right for the nation. They want what they have and want more and the public better get on board or they will stomp their feet and do their best to cripple anything that might threaten their strangle hold on public services. In their mind we work for them. In their mind we should fall to our knees and bless the day that they, the unions, love our children, love America and protect and serve us all for the goodness of being a union member. What a crock. They want money, benefits and the right to pontificate just how much they deserve both. If the state and federal government is broke it's not their fault because they deserve every extra they get. Besides, there are still boatloads of millionaires that haven't been financially broken yet, so get to them first.
Webutante has some excellent insights into this phenomenon.
Combine the self-serving ‘rights’ of union members with the self-serving ‘obligations’ of community organizers such as Obama and his never ending campaign staff at Organizing for America and one sees a brotherhood for a dysfunctional America. Purposely so, but it brings all of the dysfunctional naïve partisans for their better America together in one smug self righteous campaign of feigned intellectualism that cannot allow reality to interfere with their political goals.
We are broke. Broken. In debt. And none of them care one whit because they have goals that suit them.
Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party.
Which is why the Democrats/Libs/Progs are fighting with everything they have including the cadre of stooges they have compiled to stop any righting of the ship in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana. Their political life depends on public unions because without them their political life is over.
Roosevelt's reign certainly was the bright dawn of modern unionism. The legal and administrative paths that led to 35% of the nation's workforce eventually unionizing by a mid-1950s peak were laid by Roosevelt.
But only for the private sector. Roosevelt openly opposed bargaining rights for government unions.
"The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service," Roosevelt wrote in 1937 to the National Federation of Federal Employees. Yes, public workers may demand fair treatment, wrote Roosevelt. But, he wrote, "I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place" in the public sector. "A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government."
And if you're the kind of guy who capitalizes "government," woe betide such obstructionists.
Roosevelt wasn't alone. It was orthodoxy among Democrats through the '50s that unions didn't belong in government work. Things began changing when, in 1959, Wisconsin's then-Gov. Gaylord Nelson signed collective bargaining into law for state workers. Other states followed, and gradually, municipal workers and teachers were unionized, too.
Even as that happened, the future was visible. Frank Zeidler, Milwaukee's mayor in the 1950s and the last card-carrying Socialist to head a major U.S. city, supported labor. But in 1969, the progressive icon wrote that rise of unions in government work put a competing power in charge of public business next to elected officials. Government unions "can mean considerable loss of control over the budget, and hence over tax rates," he warned.
There was "a revolutionary principle rather quietly at work in American government," he wrote.
The principle was working at about 100 decibels in Wisconsin's Capitol last week, once the union drum-beaters got going. What worked them up was the money they'd concede, they said, but even more that Walker would make their unions surrender the control they'd gained over every government budget.
Control. Power. Self gratification.
The message about what it calls the "Summer Organizing Fellowship" adds: "Effective organizing doesn't happen in a vacuum. It takes commitment, time, and hard work to build a movement around a cause." It does not specify what the "cause" is, other than promoting Obama and his agenda.
News of the community organizer drive went out in an e-mail to millions of supporters and past donors Tuesday night by the ongoing arm of the Obama campaign, Organizing for America.
It appealed for workers of all ages to volunteer to undergo professional organizational training this summer for stationing in communities all over the nation to drive President Obama's social and political agenda.
The cadres "will be assigned to a specific community," the message informs, "where they'll work to organize supporters street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood."
"In the end," the Obama campaign appeal says of the community organizer corps, "their work will take our grassroots power to an impressive new level."
An impressive new level. Indeed. An impressive new level for whom? The nation, actually the world, has made it clear what they think of the Obama agenda and they don’t like it. Team Obama, the unions (who are profiting from their 100s of millions in campaign donations), public sector unions, progressives and socialists don’t care about those they say will have to fund their goals. That those don’t have a say means their opinion doesn’t matter.
Welcome to the new and changed United States of America. Your opinion is not important and if you persist in disagreeing with our new leaders you are a racist which automatically makes you suspect and irrelevant.
After all, they believe their rights supersede our rights.
Our children are being taught by unions? How's that working out?
Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Lets look at the educational achievement in those non-union states by their ranking on ACT/SAT scores:
South Carolina -50th
North Carolina -49th
Georgia -48th
Texas -47th
Virginia -44th
Oh, in case you are wondering, Wisconsin is currently ranked #2 - one of the best achieving states in education in America.