One of the more depressing things about the current fight in Wisconsin is how lousy the national press has been at covering it. The press first swallowed whole the claim by Hosni Walker that he was only trying to fix a budget hole. It took days before the national press picked up on the point that Walker was also trying to shatter the state employees' unions.
Then it took a prank phone call to get the national press to look at the fact that Muammar Walker was also seeking the power to sell off the state-owned utilities to the Koch brothers under a secret no-bid provision. As far as I know, there has been very little press coverage over the points that Walker is trying to re-cronyfy the state government by converting civil service jobs to political appointees or that he is seeking the power to regulate by fiat.
The bitterly ironic thing is that Walker was supported by the Tea party, which, in its often inchoatic platform, has wanted smaller government and more democratic government. What Walker is trying to impose on Wisconsin is more dictatorial government and the Teabaggers seem to be just fine with that.
The whole Wisconsin flap is shining a light on the Republican version of class warfare, which is to set workers against each other so that the rich can become richer. The Republican party is just despicable, but they haven't changed since the day that the GOP's solution to homeless people was to send the cavalry out to saber them.
The national press should be ashamed of itself. They scream that bloggers just aggregate the stories that the reporters print and, while that is often true, it seems to me that it has been a blogger who have pored through Walker's power-grab bill and who have tried to shine the light on it. It has been a couple of radio comedians which shone a harsh light on Walker's ties to the Koch brothers. The only time that they seem to now pay attention to corporate fuckery is either when the evildoers are competitors to their own corporate interests or when the story is just too big to ignore, though in the latter case they try to spin it away.
The national press has become the Corporation's Pravda.
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Of course teabaggers are fine with that--they've been convinced that everything done for monetary profit of individuals is inherently morally good, & everything done for the benefit of the community as a whole is inherently morally bad. What kills me is that they're allowing individuals control of the means for the majority of people to live, & I wonder--would even privatization of the *air* wake them up?
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