#342 – Dick Bernard: Part 12. Dropping in on Madison

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“Dropping in on Madison” was a no-brainer for me on Friday. I was enroute to Chicago, and the car would have steered itself towards the Capitol at the Hwy 151 exit. (Click on photos to enlarge them.)

Wisconsin State Capitol March 4, 2011


It was a gray afternoon, in the low 40s, when I parked near the Capitol about 1:30 p.m. Fifty miles down the road, into Illinois, the rain would begin.
All in all when I visited was a quiet time. A relative few protestors were on the sides of the building.
I had an open shot at some of the now-famous Ian’s Pizza, but passed on the opportunity…I’d just had lunch with Jermitt and Karen a few miles west at Portage (more on them in a following post).
I walked to the Capitol building past a large collection of news vehicles, ready to upload to the world news of happenings in Madison. Some nicely groomed guy, artificially front-lit, with the Capitol in the background, was preparing to do some report from the scene. Another reporter interviewed a solitary AFSCME worker. As I was leaving, some reporter and, probably his producer, were comparing notes on good places to eat in Madison. You can’t work all the time.
Such is how it is in the internet age of instant communications. The protesters know they need the media; the media knows they need protesters, the more unruly the better. Neither is much interested in “fair and balanced”. Somewhere out there is the audience, disconnected from the action by sometimes tens of thousands of miles, but with a front row seat nonetheless.
The next day, Michael Moore showed up at the Capitol while I was in Chicago, and without question he became a media event which I didn’t have the opportunity to see. Full disclosure: I’m a fan of Michael Moore, and he knows the rules of the contemporary communications game. I haven’t seen television since Friday, but I suspect the people in those mobile units, and behind the microphones and cameras got lots of audio and visual on Saturday, thanks to Michael Moore.
In my quite boring time by the Capitol, I became most captivated by a small gaggle of protestors. Their leader, with a bull horn, often supported by the group, was taunting the Governor who apparently was somewhere behind one of the windows in front of them. Everyone was very well behaved, though a bit raucous. Here’s my photo:

March 4, 2011, at the Wisconsin Capitol Building, approximately 2 p.m.


At one point a small roar came out of the assembled protesters. Apparently there was a sighting of someone inside a window of the Governors office. But that soon ended.
That scene defined as well as any the absurdity of such conflicts.
If by some wild chance the Governor had come out just to engage the group in civil conversation, the assembled group would have been dis-armed and probably not know what to do. Similarly, if that same Governor had said to the small group, “Come on up. Let’s talk,” there would have been a similar dilemma. Such is how it is in conflict mode.
When you’ve painted yourself into a corner, as the Governor and his legislature backers have, it is all but impossible to concede on any point, and a death struggle ensues.
Similarly, as the protesters are finding out already, the long haul on the line is very, very boring. Sooner or later you run out of speakers who can motivate; sooner or later the cameras and the people with the notepads and the microphones go on to the next crisis, and there you are, sitting by yourself on a damp, cold uninviting piece of pavement.
No question, I’m with the protestors in this crucial struggle to retain workers rights to organize and bargain. But the support comes with acknowledgment that being with them, even at a distance, requires some kind of formal commitment from me. Words like this are not enough.
Visit over, I headed for Chicago, and an unintended coffee at Wally’s Donuts the next morning…stay tuned.

#341 – Dick Bernard: Part 11. King of the Hill.

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NOTE: This series began on February 17, 2011, and at the beginning I had no plans to continue it to its current extent. I can envision at least one more post before I conclude this thread. Please check back.
When I was a kid in North Dakota, winter offered new and different opportunities for play.
One of these occurred when a snowplow (or a blizzard) created a neat and brand new snow hill.
The town gang of kids would gather and vie to see who could get to the top of the hill and stay there longest.
It was always a futile exercise. Somebody would reach the top and the rest would be out to throw him off his perch. In the end there might be a succession of temporary winners, all destined to lose.
That’s the metaphor which comes to mind with the temporary ascendancy of the Tea Party mentality in Washington and in many state houses. “We won, and we’ll do what we want.” Of course, this is a fool’s declaration.
Winner’s can easily set themselves up to lose the next round. Gov Scott Walker and the Wisconsin Republicans, with the active support of the very rich, have seized the hill but now have to contend with the vexatious task of staying on top. Already there are some things they didn’t anticipate; and there are other things ahead that they likely weren’t expecting either.
Staying on top of the hill permanently is impossible.
While generalizations are always dangerous, I’ve noted that the political conversation in this country very much follows what I’d call the lawyer and litigation model. I respect the profession of law. But the system is set up for one party to win, and the other to lose. Law is an adversary system. Yes, negotiating differences might be tried, but legal bargaining is basically a game of secrets.
Some enlightened lawyers – still a tiny percentage of the whole – have established an entirely new branch of law which leads for open and honest adjudication of differences of even the most contentious divorces. But the general political rule at this moment in our history is not resolution. It is what we see in Wisconsin and other places. One party considers itself to have “won”, and is wasting no time to do all the winning that it can. Given our immense and complex society, sooner or later it will lose, and perhaps lose more convincingly than it won in the first place. Then the abuse cycle begins anew as the battered minority seeks to get revenge.
Abraham Lincoln so famously said at another time and in another situation: “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
That speech, June 16, 1858, was prophetic.
There needs to be a national conversation, in millions of bits and pieces. In times like this, however, national conversations seem wimpy and useless, as they doubtless did when the clouds of Civil War faced the U.S. in Lincoln’s day.
I opt to try.
A place to begin thinking about this business of rational conversation is a new book, “The Art of Convening” by Craig and Patricia Neal and Cynthia Wold.
The book is newly published. Check it out, read it, and try out its principles in your own settings. The Minneapolis’ group website is http://heartlandcircle.com.
In the situation we are in, the only solution is for us to be “on the court”, and not in the stands as, simply, “spectators”. By chance, researching this piece, I came across a quote that seems to fit our current national disruption and divide: “technique without compassion is a menace. Compassion without technique is a mess. Karl Llewellyn.” Seems to sum it up for me….

Patricia and Craig Neal and Cynthia Wold March 2, 2011, St. Paul MN

#340 – Dick Bernard: Part 10. America: "The Land of the [Me]…."

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Earlier this week I was writing some letters and having an afternoon cup of coffee at my local hangout.
The place was quite busy, as usual, and behind me I heard some chatter among three women who were having an animated visit. They appeared to be financially comfortable. They were obviously of the age where Social Security was part of their life.
Talk got around to the pending possibility of a U.S. government shut down on March 4 – the ladies were certainly aware of this. But the banter was jocular…they’d have their Social Security check before then. As for anybody else? Not the ladies problem.
There was no sense, whatsoever, that what was going on in Washington D.C. was of any concern to them.
It was a “What! Me worry?” Alfred E. Neumann, MAD Magazine moment.
Given the inclination, I could list dozens of diverse similar situations, just from my own personal observations in daily life. Conversations had, or overheard, or read about, or seen on television.
We are a self-absorbed society, and it will be our ruin if we don’t expand our definition of community beyond ourselves and our immediate family and associations.
Far too many people define society by their single-focus, often their single issue(s).
People are casual or cavalier about things like voting, whether their vote is informed or not.
We have all of the power granted by being a democracy, but too many of us seem short on a sense of responsibility.
By nature I consider myself an optimist. But my optimism is tested frequently.
Most Americans are, I think, thoughtful and reasonable citizens, well aware that their world includes people with differing needs, capacities and identities, not to mention locations. We are a nation of basically good people.
But as anyone who studies politics knows, a tiny percentage of the potential voters are the primary focus of those orchestrating campaigns. Campaign organizations take people where they’re at, and are not bothered in the least by people who vote uninformed or don’t even bother to vote…in fact, such voters (or non-voters) are nurtured to provide the tiny edge needed to win an election. That small percent who are born to hate, or fear, or cannot be bothered with thinking things through, are major assets in political campaigns.
The face of our democracy is those three lackadaisical women I overheard earlier this week, concerned only with getting their social security check before the government shut down. Let everyone else fend for themselves, the future be damned.
To paraphrase Pogo: “we have met the future, and it is us.”

#339 – Dick Bernard: Part 9. The Rich

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Pretty clearly, the Rich have won, at least temporarily. Not the ordinary rich, but the Filthy Rich.
Take a moment to look at what “rich” means, thanks to a series of charts published in Mother Jones magazine.
Then, there’s an interesting commentary entitled “Koch Dreams” which refers to a David Koch piece in the Wall Street Journal, and some counterpoint. That is here.
There are over 2500 comments to the Mother Jones piece. One can get a flavor by just looking at a few of them.
I am always interested in the apologies/justifications for the Rich folks: they’ve earned it, they deserve it; it’s to their credit, etc. The poor, were they not such dolts, could do as well. The America dream is open to everyone, or so the Ayn Randians suggest. Go for it.
For some of the rich, money does indeed grow on trees…until the tree dies. Ask the supposedly savvy folks who queued up to be accepted as investors by Bernard Madoff. Each of them had heard of the risk pyramid – the greater the return, the greater the risk. But the siren song of guaranteed high returns on investments proved irresistible. And then the crash came and they lost anything, and it is everyone’s fault but theirs. They earned that money, they say. Until it disappeared.
There are lots of followers of Bernie Madoff-likes….
Money does grow on trees, only because it is abundantly fertilized by those of less means. It is the middle and lower classes that fuel wealth in this and other countries. One wonders, then, why the wealthy is obsessed with making the middle class poorer, and weaker, and the lower class destitute. That is what seems to be happening these days.
If I venture outside my suburb to the inner cities, I’ll come across pan-handlers working very hard to collect enough money for their evening delight, whatever that happens to be – or for their very survival.
If I accept the stereotype – that it’s cheap booze they’re after – they have to buy the booze, and in so doing contribute to an entire food chain of wealth, right up to the super wealthy. That panhandler contributes to the wealth of that entrepreneur who markets the cheap wine. It’s legitimate business. But without the addict, it would be a little more difficult for the rich guy.
This doesn’t stop at my communities poor. I have a particular affection for Haiti. If one goes to Haiti these days, the only rice one sees is labeled American rice. That’s because the domestic Haitian rice farming enterprise was deliberately destroyed back in the 1980s by American government policy, giving the long term competitive advantage to American rice growers. Sell cheap rice, drive Haitian farmers out of business, corner the market and increase the prices…. It’s easy.
Haiti is one of the world’s poorest nations. Every time I’d go to a meeting about Haiti someone would ask why there is such an interest in keeping Haiti down. There were a number of different answers.
The one which made the most sense to me was this: there are about 8,000,000 Haitians, and if they have an average resource of $1 a day, perhaps one-fourth of that, a quarter in American dollars, goes for food, usually rice. Doing some simple math, that’s $2,000,000 a day, or $730,000,000 a year – and this in the poorest country in the hemisphere. Low hanging economic fruit.
Bigger picture: the only advantage the rich do not have is the numbers. For every rich person there might be as many as 99 who are not so rich.
This is a known problem for the wealthy, and the strategy is how to keep the vast majority quiet and in chains.
So far they’ve been successful.
But they always live in fear of being found out.
More on that in a following post.

#338 – Dick Bernard: Part 8. Public Servants bearing the burden….

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Before the 2011 MN Legislature had convened, and the new MN Governor sworn in, the news concerned the burden of a $6 billion deficit in the MN state budget.
At the time I did some simple arithmetic, dividing $6 Billion by 5 Million residents of the State of Minnesota. The result was $1,200 deficit per person: large, but by no means insurmountable. The $6B was an artificial mountain constructed to get Minnesotans in an almost desperate budget cutting mood.
Like people in most states, Minnesota’s residents have collectively huge personal savings accounts and we could easily balance the books with a one time very small additional tax sacrifice. But government itself is under attack by elements who have nearly taken over that very government. The desired remedy is shrinking, not restoration, of the role of government in our society. Or if not that, transfer of the burden of paying for government from those who can easily afford the bill, to those who are struggling….
Not long thereafter came Wisconsin. As the information flow has fleshed out the facts in Wisconsin, it appears that an average teacher, just for example, will have to give up about 10% of his/ her previously negotiated pension benefit – a benefit negotiated in lieu of wages – to “help” Wisconsin. A reasonable average take back from the public employee appears to be roughly $5,000. There is no comparable giveback expected of others in Wisconsin, a state roughly the population of its next door neighbor Minnesota, but with a smaller deficit. The take back will be permanent; future ability to bargain severely restricted at best.
Only time will tell how this Wisconsin conflict will be resolved.
As the Issue came to be clear – Pensions for Public Workers – I got to thinking about an advertisement that I had been seeing on television during, it seemed, the entire month of February, long before Wisconsin erupted onto the national or even state screen.
The ad was one placed by the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP).
It was a simple ad, showing an abandoned chicken coop, with the narrator stating that the founder of AARP, Dr. Ethel Percy Andrus, had founded the organization after finding a retired teacher living in a converted chicken coop.
The AARP website was not helpful in filling in the blanks about the ad. Wikipedia was a bit more helpful with an entry about Dr. Andrus.
Dr. Andrus founded her group, initially called the National Retired Teachers Association, in 1947. It seemed that she perhaps discovered that poor teacher around that time somewhere in either California or Illinois. Such was how it all began for AARP which, since its naming in 1958, has since become an immense insurance business in itself. I haven’t seen the ad the last few days. Perhaps the term of the buy has ended; or, perhaps, the ad was pulled…it wasn’t helpful to the anti-teacher mood in Wisconsin.
Until relatively recent history, the public was not kind to public employees. In tough times public employees were first to suffer; In good times, last to benefit.
In the old days, teachers, just for a single example, got a small wage and nothing else.
They were called “public servants” (see February 17 and 18) with scant more legal status than migrant workers.
Basically teaching was ‘women’s work’. Then the teacher married some man who provided decent income and status for the former school marm.
But there are only so many eligible bachelors wandering around to marry poor public workers, etc., and as time went on teachers got a bit uppity, and school boards in various places began to see – not always the result of pressure – that their professional employees deserved more than just minimal wages and annual uncertainty about jobs. Salary schedules were established unilaterally by management, and state’s implemented and then improved pension plans for their teachers and others, to keep them out of the chicken coop on retirement.
It is the old “public servant” attitude – to keep public employees in their proper subservient place – that makes it possible for Gov. Scott Walker and his abundant ilk to act dismissively towards these employees who are really essential to the American “good life”.
There is something even more offensive about today’s “public employees”. They are unusually strongly unionized, a direct outgrowth of yesterday’s oppression. As Henrik Hertzberg so well describes in a March 7, 2011, New Yorker piece, public employees are the last bastion of a declining organized labor movement. Their destruction or at minimum gross diminishment is a goal of the oligarchs who now control the Republican party and the American media conversation.
This is a case where, hopefully, “success” in beating down the public employees will truly be a failure…for everyone who works for a living.
The last chapter has not been written.
Part 1 in this series is found here, with the remaining posts subsequent. There will be further posts.