Anti-Democratic is Fine; Anti-democratic, Not So Much

The fact that the Republican Party doesn’t really believe its own rhetoric about “getting government off people’s backs” has been demonstrated too many times to truly be in doubt. The GOP wants to intercede in our sex lives, our private medical conversations, and our most harrowing end-of-life decisions. But until recently, most of their promotion of local control rang true.

True, there has been more than a little hypocrisy about the horrors of federal spending from Republican governors who quietly accepted billions of dollars of stimulus money, balanced their books because of it, and now are cursed by having received what they pretended to wish for: a significant curtailment of federal spending programs. But while GOP disingenuousness may be a little more qualitatively outrageous than normal, it is not quantitatively abnormal: politicians lie. Often.

Moreover, while there has certainly always been a smack of selectivity in the right’s much-touted belief that local governments are “closer to the people” than the feds are—funny how the presidency and Congress weren’t such bad places to invest with power when the GOP was in control—there was also an apparently sincere invocation of the libertarian spirit that is indeed part of the American psyche. The fact that such local control tended to manifest itself in resistance to, say, civil rights legislation may have been less than a coincidence, but that isn’t an inherent indictment of Republican motives: it would be unfair even for one as cynical as I to pretend to know with certainty that arguments purporting to be grounded in states’ rights or local control are in fact hypocritical.

That said, it is impossible—not merely problematic, impossible—to reconcile many recent actions of the GOP with any real interest in localized control of the political process. One of the first indications of a sea-change came in the form of the totally cynical, totally phony furor over the Park51 project. Apart from the protestors’ utter disregard for the U.S. Constitution, a document which to them takes on the attributes described in Mark Twain’s definition of a “classic” as “a book which people praise and don’t read,” there was the completely disingenuous citation of national polls opposing the construction of the “Ground Zero Mosque,” which of course isn’t a mosque and isn’t even within sight of Ground Zero. As I pointed out in an August post, Manhattanites actually approved of the project; it was the folks in Gopher Gulch who didn’t like the idea. But you’d never have known that from listening to the right-wing media, or, frankly, the corporate media in general.

More interesting, to me at least, is what is going on in Texas, especially with respect to education. For some time there has been a mandated state curriculum, complete with assigned textbooks and high stakes standardized testing that structurally encourages teach-to-the-test strategies and memorization. But the new “standards” in social studies, rammed by a cabal of ideological storm-troopers through a state board of education whose arrogance is matched only by their ignorance, are a prime example of how not to conduct educational policy. The principal cause of the Civil War? Sectionalism (whatever the hell that is); slavery is third, behind states’ rights. See what I mean about arrogant and ignorant? And local school districts where people might actually care about real education are powerless to do their jobs in the face of state mandates to the contrary.

I’ve written about this at least twice before, in March and May of 2010. But let’s add on another layer. Governor Perry, in his State of the State address this year, euphemistically offered “to help school districts reduce their expenses in these tight budgetary times.” Translation: we’re unilaterally cutting your budgets. And that inevitably means firing teachers: in a good analysis by Peggy Fikac and Gary Scharrer of the Houston Chronicle, the authors point out that Texas schools could cut

every school superintendent, all principals and assistant principals, every school counselor, every librarian, every school nurse, all cafeteria workers, custodians and bus drivers—all 329,574 non-teacher jobs—and still not save the [mandated] $11.6 billion in public education cuts.

An AP article says that “Independent experts have estimated as many as a third of Texas school teachers could lose their jobs if lawmakers adopt the budget Republicans put forward with the support of Gov. Rick Perry.”

Perry, of course, wants to shift the blame for any layoffs to local school boards, while his proposed budget provides nearly $10 billion less in education funding than current formulas require. Given the fact that Texas is currently is well into the bottom third of states (as high as 36th or as low as 44th, depending on how you figure it) in terms of per pupil spending already, that’s not good news. The headline to an editorial in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram characterizes Perry’s assertion as originating in an “alternate reality.” But the fact remains that nothing that Perry could do budgetarily could have the huge negative impact that his short-sighted and pig-headed policies will in fact precipitate were it not for the fact that the state exercises enormous control over education funding, projected to be about 42%, down from over half just a couple of years ago.

Of course, the ratio of state to local funding is in large part the result of a complex balancing act between ensuring adequate educational opportunities for students in poorer districts on the one hand with allowing local municipalities to spend their locally-collected revenues on whatever projects they like, including, of course, education. My purpose here is not to argue that the state’s role ought to be greater or lesser than it is, but rather simply to note that real local control doesn’t exist—not in Texas, at any rate.

But, for once, the ultimate inanity by a politician isn’t committed by a Texan (I should probably downplay this, lest they get any ideas… and it is certainly true that in any normal week our own Louis Gohmert would be a strong contender for Most Embarrassing Politician of the Week). Even Wisconsin’s ample supply of miscreants on both sides of the aisle can’t compare.

No, this week the most awesome, stupendous, outrageous case of political hubris comes from the great state of Michigan, where Governor Rick Snyder and the GOP-dominated legislature have colluded to expand the powers of appointed emergency financial managers (EMFs) to exercise a terrifying range of options, from voiding contracts to removing elected officials. EMFs would be appointed by the governor, and would not be answerable to local communities, only to the state legislature; even an amendment that would have limited their salaries to the $159K the governor himself makes failed after Lieutenant Governor Brian Calley broke a tie with a “no” vote.

Wow.

Don’t get me wrong. I know that there are municipalities (and especially school systems) that have been mismanaged, but this is a colossal over-reach. Perhaps the stipulation that EMFs can only be appointed if other measures fail is sufficient to prevent abuse, but frankly, I doubt it. This certainly seems to be really frightening legislation. An unscrupulous governor and state legislature (as the incumbents sure as hell appear to be) could deny funds to struggling cities (this is, in fact, happening), force them into “financial martial law,” appoint the governor’s cronies at unlimited salaries (note that the rejected limit on EMF salaries was more than double the average income, including benefits, of those mercenary teachers that Fox News keeps yammering about), wipe out city councils, and basically turn Michigan into that socialist dystopia the GOP has been warning us about. All power, both political and economic, would then reside with the state.

All this, ladies and gentlemen, is brought to you from the party of local control. I understand that the Republicans are feeling their oats after considerable electoral success last November. But their unwillingness to adopt reasonable tax policies has left them with no possibility of intelligent or even ethical governance. Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power pales in comparison to Republican politicians, who are, needless to say, übermenschen only in their own minds. I try to stay clear of “slippery slope” arguments, but this power grab for the politically powerful and connected is more brazen and more audacious than anything any so-called “big government” Democrat has ever contemplated.

Last fall, Texas sued the US government because Rick Perry and his cronies used stimulus dollars earmarked for education on something else, and the feds don’t want to have them do it again, so they’re insisting that any future education funding be spent on, you know, education. As Representative Lloyd Doggett (D, Austin) says, “Federal aid to education should actually aid education in our local Texas schools. It is almost as if the Governor felt he was entitled to his own blank check federal bailout and now he has the lawsuit to prove it."

You see, according to the King of Texas wannabe, actually expecting a governor to obey the law represents an egregious manifestation of top-down interference. Ah, but you see that situation is about the bigger entity insisting that money it provides be used for its intended purpose. In Michigan, it’s about literally displacing the smaller government from above. That’s OK, you see, because… uh… the bigger government would be Republicans.

The Michigan bill has been described as an attack on unions. It no doubt is. But it is also an attack on teacher tenure, on anyone with government contracts, on the very notion of elected government. I have no problem with the Republicans being anti-Democratic, but this is actively anti-democratic. Capitalization matters.

Teachers Unions and the Flight from Ambivalence

Teachers unions are much in the news of late. I confess to a profound initial ambivalence. On the one hand, the anecdotal evidence of incompetent teachers being retained largely due to union agitation is both compelling and troubling. I’d have to agree that in that particular area, the unions are more part of the problem than of the solution. But the problems faced by the American education system are hardly attributable to a single cause, and the situation is at least as bad, if not worse, in states and municipalities with no unionization at all.

First off, just as the Koch brothers may exercise far too much influence on elections in this country, they do so because the rest of us let them. We elected Ronald Reagan and the Bushes, who in turn nominated to the Supreme Court such corrupt idiots as Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, who gave virtually unfettered power to their cronies in the Citizens United case. The Kochs and their ilk can now pour millions of dollars into the political process, and to do so anonymously! So can I, by the way; it’s just that $1 million checks from me aren’t likely to be honored.

And when the Democrats, hitherto champions of the little guy and transparency (in their rhetoric, at least, if not in their actions) had a chance to make a major campaign issue out of the situation, they punted. One speech by the President, and then back to cowering in the corner when the lazy and compliant corporate media—who, after all, were making mountains of money on those anonymously-funded and seldom honest campaign ads—didn’t immediately grant “traction” to the story. (Hey, the check cleared, why should they care about anything else, right?)

Similarly, it wouldn’t matter what outrageous things the unions demanded if the folks on the other side of the negotiating table—school boards, city councils, state legislatures—would show the ability draw themselves up on their hind legs and utter that most damning of indictments: “No.”

It is reasonable that teachers be paid better than soda jerks. (My first teaching job, at the college level, when I had an MA and an honors undergrad degree from an Ivy League school, worked out to less than minimum wage once you counted up all the time spent in prep, grading, advising, committee work, rehearsal, etc.) It is reasonable that teachers have protection against being fired by a principal who didn’t like the fact that the bumper sticker on their car supported the “wrong” candidate. (This actually happened, by the way, in a right-to-work state a couple of years ago. The courts upheld the dismissal and, legally, were right to do so.) It is reasonable for teachers to have a brief respite sometime during the school day when they’re not surrounded by 30 or 40 (or more) of somebody else’s misbehaving children. It is reasonable for a benefits package—insurance, a retirement plan, etc.—to be part of a teacher’s contract. All of these things are the product of negotiation, whether it is an individual or a union who is doing the negotiating.

So are things like sabbatical leaves, tenure procedures, and sick leave guidelines. And so are standards for dismissing “bad” teachers. If a school board or whoever is on that side of the negotiating table doesn’t like some provision in a union contract, negotiate a better deal. If the union threatens some sort of job action, let ‘em. If what you’re fighting for is the right to dismiss an incompetent teacher, you’ll win the rhetorical battle in the minds of the public, and the situation will be resolved fairly quickly.

But because the negotiators on the other side failed to do their jobs, unions have been demonized. Don’t get me wrong: there are a lot of procedures in place right now, procedures wanted by unions, that work against the common weal, both in the classroom and on the bottom line. It’s difficult to blame a union, however, for seeking to provide the best possible deal for its members. And the current furor about teachers' not paying into their own retirement systems is just silly, even on the rare chance that it’s technically true. What’s the practical difference between a). a salary of $40,000 a year with $4000 going into a retirement fund, $2000 paid by the state and $2000 by the worker, and b). a salary of $38,000 with a $4000 retirement contribution all paid by the state? Both cost the state $42,000; both give the employee $38K in pre-tax income. (I suppose there might be a small but extant difference in states with income taxes if salaries are taxed and benefits not, but surely this isn’t a significant issue, right?)

I have never been a member of a union; I’ve turned down the opportunity twice, and I’ve also resisted (but been tempted by) the Union-Lite American Association of University Professors. Because I perhaps arrogantly believe that I’m at least average at my job, I’d like to think that I might make out better with merit pay increases than with something across the board. But I also realize two things: merit pay can very easily go to those who are the most compliant to the administration (or who are good friends with someone on the Board of Regents, or who teach the “right” subject, or who go to the “right” church, or…), not necessarily the best people; and, especially in a field like theatre, merit pay militates against the cooperation and teamwork that ultimately make the whole operation run—the lighting designer should be my colleague, not my competitor for a couple hundred bucks in merit money.

But what is happening to union workers across the country right now is scary. In Wisconsin, the budget problems are real, but just as the recently-instituted corporate tax breaks are irrelevant to the current crisis (they don’t kick in until next year), so, too, the savings generated by cutting into the de facto wages of thousands of state employees won’t solve the problem, for precisely the same reason. The goal is—must be—just as the union leaders are telling us: to break the unions, who have, after all, long since agreed to wage and benefits concessions. The current battle is all about collective bargaining rights: nothing more, nothing less.

Cue the Ronald Reagan quotation about Solidarity: “one of the most elemental human rights—the right to belong to a free trade union.” Or cue the Ronald Reagan quotation about PATCO, declaring that union’s strike “a peril to national safety,” and then proceeding to have under-trained air traffic controllers installed at many of the country’s largest airports. That he got away with it doesn’t change the cold-blooded disregard for… erm… national safety just so he could earn some machismo points. Good thing about ol’ Ron, he could be pretty much counted on to have no core values that required any intellectual consistency: he could wrap himself in the flag as well as any man who ever lived, but the 21st-century conservatives who kneel at his graven image would be sore disappointed if they really had any sense of history.

Perhaps not so coincidentally, unions tend to endorse (and write checks to) Democrats, whereas business groups and corporations tend to back Republicans. Note: I know this is an over-simplification, but it is only that, as opposed to an untruth. And while if I were a union member I wouldn’t be thrilled that some of my dues were going to candidates I wouldn’t necessarily support, I can’t say that I’m jumping for joy that my cell phone company is supporting Rand Paul, either.

Of course, in states where there are no teachers unions, teachers are still the enemy, both underpaid and essentially despised. How dare that mere teacher give my little cherub a richly deserved failing grade that might keep him out of the big game? I’d better call the principal to get that bitch fired. [I am, by the way, becoming increasingly convinced that principals are, as a group, the single most craven and stupid group of people this side of the demolition derby.]

And no, we can’t possibly expect Billy Bob the oil trust baby to pay a few extra bucks in taxes. It’s those damned teachers (and cops, and nurses, and similar blights on society) who are destroying the state’s budget balance. Well, that and the fact that the federal stimulus money I screamed about (but took, in abundance) ran out. It’s all Obama’s fault. Well, his and the teachers’ who voted for him. They only work, like, 30 hours a week for 30 weeks, right? [For the record, because some people are stupider than skunk shit irony-challenged, I am fully aware of the absurdity of the foregoing.] The one thing everyone agrees on is that there are too few good teachers at every level. Gee, I wonder why…

I have a friend, also an educator, who is convinced that the real goal of Scott Walker and his ideological brethren isn’t to destroy teachers unions, but to destroy public education altogether. I really wish I could argue with him.

Madison ≠ Cairo

I’ve been reading a lot about events in Wisconsin lately. What is clear is that Governor Scott Walker is making a concerted effort to economize by reducing the overall pay packages of state workers, from teachers to prison guards to nurses at public hospitals. That’s about as much as we can say with certainty. But both the left and the right want to talk about recent events in Cairo.

From the left, Michael Moore tweets that “Madison is the new Cairo! Wisconsin teachers, nurses, firefighters—shut the state down! All of working America is with u!” AlterNet’s Rose Aguilar wonders “Is Wisconsin Our Egypt?” and cites a high school senior in the affirmative. Alex Moore sniffs on the Death and Taxes site that “Where Madison became like Cairo was when, at the behest of Governor Scott Walker, Wisconsin turned into a police state threatening force against citizens and lawmakers alike.”

From the right, Rep. Paul Ryan complains that Walker’s “basically saying ‘I want you public workers to pay half of what our private sector counterparts’ and he's getting riots—it's like Cairo has moved to Madison these days.” Right-wing commentators like Sean Hannity and Michelle Malkin were quick to pick up on Moore’s tweet and try to use it to enflame their own base.

The left would like to envision the protesters as some sort of freedom fighters struggling valiantly to prevail against a brutal and oppressive regime. There are protest signs reading:

Hosni Walker
WI Dictator
Must Go

The right is more concerned with a false sense of law and order. To them, any protest, no matter how restrained or non-violent (unless, of course, orchestrated by the Koch brothers or their minions) is, by definition, a riot. The idea that thousands of people would object to being asked to shoulder what they believe to be a disproportionate load of so-called austerity measures while fat-cats get more tax breaks: this is heading into dangerous mob territory in the eyes of the GOP. There are reports, apparently accurate, that state police were dispatched to round up the Democratic lawmakers who were boycotting the legislative session in order to prevent, or at least delay, passage of Governor Walker’s cost-cutting measure. Maybe it’s just me, but that doesn’t strike me as a particularly appropriate use of tax-payer money, especially during a budget crunch, even if the representatives in question were behaving petulantly at best.

The bottom line: to both sides, I say the following: Shut up. Madison isn’t Cairo.

Wisconsin State Journal cartoonist Phil Hands (that’s his cartoon at the top of this entry) has it right:

I'm sorry, but Walker is not a despot or a dictator. He, and the rest of the republican clowns serving at the State Capital were elected, by a wide margin, by the people of Wisconsin. I find it ironic that the same day that thousands of people skipped work to rail against our “undemocratic” leader, fewer than a quarter of the registered voters in Madison bothered to vote in an actual election.

Preach it, Phil.

There has been some good reporting from PolitiFact Wisconsin on many of the disputed issues here. Supporting the Governor’s position are their findings that claims by progressive pundits Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow were “false”: Schultz for exaggerating the extent of the proposed cuts, Maddow for not “reading the fine print” and suggesting there’s really no budgetary crisis at all.

Moreover, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee’s claim that Gov. Walker had threatened to call out the National Guard if state employees protested his cuts earned a “Pants on Fire,” PolitiFact’s harshest rating, reserved for actual lies as opposed to mere untruths. The AFL-CIO ad that says that Walker’s bill would, “for thousands of teachers, nurses, and other trusted public employees… take away any say they have in the workplace” rated a “Half True.”

That said, the liberals fared better than the conservatives on the Truth-o-Meter. Representative Ryan’s claim about riots earned a “Pants on Fire.” State Senator Alberta Darling’s claim that “collective bargaining deal[ing] only with wages… is how it is, for the most part, in the private sector” was declared “False.” The Club for Growth’s claim that “state workers haven’t had to sacrifice” received a frankly rather generous “Barely True.” And the governor himself merited a “False” for offering the false option of “look[ing] at 1,500 layoffs of state employees or close to 200,000 children who would be bumped off Medicaid-related programs” (given the fact that he couldn’t have done that, legally, if he wanted to) and a “Pants on Fire” for spewing the absurd notion that “civil service protections” would “remain fully intact” under his proposal. In short, there’s a fair amount of disinformation out there: neither side has covered itself in glory here. One could I suppose, make the case that the Republicans are probably a little more egregious, given the fact that a good deal of their outrageousness stems from political leaders rather than pundits, but forgive me if I don’t find “we lied less than they did” a compelling rallying cry for Democrats.

The purpose of this piece isn’t to take sides on the debate—besides, if you read my stuff with any regularity, you already know where I stand. State employees do get excellent, union-negotiated, benefits that are probably better than those of most of their counterparts in the private sector. But I have seen no refutation of the claims that state workers in Wisconsin actually get lower salaries than private sector employees with equivalent education, or that their salaries are in fact lower than those of state workers in neighboring states. Still, this doesn’t make state employees exempt from having to shoulder some of the burden of what appears to be a real budgetary shortfall.

Ultimately, state workers have a right to be upset, even angry. If, as some have suggested, Governor Walker gave misleading indications of his budgetary intentions in order to get elected, then those who voted for him can rightly feel a little betrayed. The protesters aren’t a mob, and there is little indication of even minor violence, although President Obama’s recent call for civility of discourse has often gone unheeded by his political allies.

But a pay cut isn’t repression (I say this as a state employee whose next contract may well show a pay cut), and Walker is a duly elected official, not a dictator. Is he a hypocrite? Almost certainly. Corrupt? Possibly. Would I vote for him? Never. But he isn’t Hitler. He isn’t even Mubarak. In fact, he isn’t even close, Chicken Little’s testimony to the contrary notwithstanding.