Abele Threatens Recalls In Latest Tantrum

Chris Abele is upset.  He is very upset.  He is stomping up and down angry.

The reason he is so upset is that because another one of his plans to make Milwaukee County a right to work county was foiled again.

A couple of months ago, I told the gentle reader about Milwaukee County Ordinance 17, otherwise known as the Status Quo ordinance.

Long story short, when Scott Walker was dropping his Act 10 bomb on the state, most unions were scrambling to get new contracts drawn up and ratified while the unconstitutional law was tied up in the courts.  However, when it became apparent our own cohorts in unethical conduct - Chris Abele, Lee Holloway and Joe Sanfelippo - were never going to bargain in good faith, AFSCME switched gears and started pushing for the status quo ordinance, which more or less codified the contract, with the exception of things that fell directly under Act 10.  The county board passed the resolution creating this ordinance and Chris Abele willingly signed the resolution into law.

A couple of years later, Emperor decided that he no longer cared for the law that he had originally agreed with.  He found it too cumbersome to allow workers to keep their rights.  He wasn't able to act on every whim and fancy as he systematically dismantled the county.

So Abele developed this elaborate scheme to do his own version of "Divide and Conquer."  He called his plan "Cross Walk".  I'm more than a little surprised that he didn't call it Cross Walker after his hero and mentor, Scott Walker.  I won't go into details, but the general gist of his plan was to try to play the unions against each other in an effort to keep cutting rights and protections from all of them, in an effort to "make things equal."  In other words, he was seeking the lowest common denominator for county staff, making it a right to work county.

But there were two things Abele didn't count on.

One was that the Milwaukee County Board wasn't as ignorant or as hateful as he is.

The other was a thing called Solidarity.  He must not have thought unions spoke to each other much less worked together.  The unions quickly sniffed out what Abele was scheming to do and joined forces to fight against it.  The best solution was immediately obvious.  To incorporate the other unions into Ordinance 17.  That way the unions would be on an equal level and still have their rights intact, as much as possible under Act 10 anyway.

On Thursday, all the sides met for the first time on this issue at a meeting of the Finance, Personnel and Audit Committee.   The Board saw what a really, really bad idea it was right away.  Then again, Abele's staff didn't help themselves much by arrogantly insulting committee members:

Things got testy during the board's finance committee meeting Thursday over a proposed set of work rules that Human Resources Director Kerry Mitchell said she'd been trying in vain to get supervisors to discuss.

"I don't think any of you have any comprehension" how difficult and complex the work rule project was, Mitchell said. She said she could tell supervisors also didn't understand a complicated salary study.

Supervisors said they were insulted by her remarks.

"Maybe I'm just too much of a bumpkin to get it," Cullen said.

Needless to say, the committee did not go along with Abele's plan to make Milwaukee the first right to work county and to further his agenda of making the county into a plutocrat's playground.

This caused Abele to jump up and down in fury and throw yet another temper tantrum, making threats to eliminate anyone who would dare say "no" to his Imperial Self:

Abele even suggested the board's failure to listen to the advice of county lawyers on those issues could provoke a recall effort against supervisors.

"When your legal adviser tells you this isn't legal and you do that anyway, the word that usually comes to mind is recall," Abele said.

Now he's taking a page from his good buddies and fellow Walker supporters at Citizens for Responsible Government.  (You'd think that someone with as much money as Abele would show a little more class than that.)

Abele keeps forgetting that he isn't really the Emperor of Milwaukee County and his whims are not the law of the land. When he doesn't get his way, he throws these tiresome tantrum, but this one goes beyond the pale.

After Abele was called out on this, he backed down, saying that this wasn't personal. Yeah, right. We know what he means when he says something is not personal. He means it's personal as hell.

Does anyone remember when Abele kept saying how he wanted to work with the county board?  Me neither.

All we get from him now is how he wants to work over the county board - as well as the county employees - in his ongoing plutocratic agenda.

Hint to Abele: That is not what leadership, accountability or maturity looks like.