Thursday, February 24, 2011

Is It Live Or Is It Memorex?

So, Scott Walker goes on to have his daily appetite suppressant of having a press conference at the dinner hour (I always thought the idea was to have them so they made the news not be ignored because of the news).  In his finite wisdom, he again rattles his little hatchet, warning that if the world doesn't capitulate to the Kochs' his demands, he was going to make sure that thousands of public workers on every level of government were going to get laid off.

It's worthy to note that he is up to 12,000 workers getting to feel his mighty hatchet, when just a couple of days ago it was under 6,000.  Personally, I'm hoping that it goes on long enough for him to hit one billion.

But as I saw this, it reminded me of an incident of the not too distant past, when Walker was county executive, and he wanted something really bad from the County Board:
Today, JSOnline reported that Scott Walker did not just admit to using lay offs* as a malicious manipulative tool, but actually bragged and joked about it
This is completely reprehensible. 
Walker actually issued lay off notices to 180 workers last week due to a sudden fiscal crisis which was the direct result of his administration’s incompetence. As the County Board scrambled for ways to fix the problem that Walker and his staff created, he issued a statement rescinding the notices. He made a grandiose statement on how nice it was to be able to work together with the County Board to resolve this problem. 
And now it turns out he was lying about the lay offs all along, and that it was just his malicious way to try to manipulate the County Board. 
Most of us, especially in this rough economic stretch, has either been laid off or at least furloughed, at some time or another. I don’t know many people that would say it was fun to be laid off and having to instantly worry about how to make all the bills, much less what to do about health insurance and other stressors that go with being unemployed or underemployed.
For Walker to just unfeelingly take 180 people, their families and the clients that rely on the services that these workers provide and so malevolently manipulate them in order to score some cheap political points is inexcusable.
Is Walker simply using this as a manipulative tool to get what he wants, since his temper tantrums obviously didn't work?  If so, this will fail as well.  It does remind me a lot of a little kid threatening to hold his breath in order to get his way.

Fortunately for the state, among the Wisconsin Fourteen is Senator Chris Larson, recently of the Milwaukee County Board.  He is almost as savvy to the way of Walker as I am, and he is full aware that one simply cannot trust anything that Walker says or does.

The other factor that Senator Larson and I each have in common is that we both know that even if Walker did get his way, there is no guarantee that he still ins't going to lay off those thousands of workers.  So where's the incentive to budge an inch?  Why should they give up anything if it won't help save any jobs?

The only thing that Walker said that you can believe is that he doesn't want to lay anyone off.  Not because he is a compassionate man, because he's not.  He's a manipulative weasel that knows laying anyone off is about the only thing that could make him even more unpopular.  There is so much instability in our economy and he has refused to do anything to create even one job that wasn't crony-related that people are more volatile than ever before.

The Brawler also touched base on this with the best line of the day:
Scott Walker makes threats of layoffs like he makes calls to Charlie Sykes: all the time.
But it is really disappointing that Walker has apparently plateaued on his learning curve. It's like he's not even trying anymore to come up with some new trick.

2 comments:

  1. FYI--What's just as disgusting is Dad29 allowing some anony poster who advocates raping you. Check out "It's The Money, Honey", "A Bit Of Philosophy Regarding Live Action", and "Politicians Vs. The Real World".

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  2. That's just one of the CRG guys. They're imbalanced and just don't like me much.

    ReplyDelete