Posted on 02/18/2011 4:54:48 AM PST by blam
Are The Wild Teacher Protests In Wisconsin A Prelude To The Economic Riots That Are Coming To America?
Feburary 18, 2011
Have you seen video of the teacher protests that are going on in Wisconsin? We haven't seen anything like this in America in quite some time. If you haven't seen video of the protests yet, some very good raw footage is posted below. On the one hand it is good to see Americans coming together and standing up for what they believe in, but on the other hand what these teachers are freaking out about shows just how much America has changed. These teachers are not protesting for liberty, freedom or to change the government. Rather, they are protesting because they want things to remain the same. They simply don't want anyone to mess with their pay. Well, the truth is that none of us ever wants to experience a pay cut. It is not a lot of fun. But sadly, states like Wisconsin are so broke that they have to find cuts somewhere. Someone is going to have to make a sacrifice. The teachers in Wisconsin just want to make sure that it is not them.
In the United States today, state and local governments are facing unprecedented budget crunches. Tax revenues are way down and expenses are way up. State and local government debt has reached at an all-time high of 22 percent of U.S. GDP, and many state and local governments are teetering on the brink of insolvency.
States like Wisconsin have to do something or else they will collapse financially. Wisconsin is facing a $3.6 billion budget deficit (which for that state is huge), and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the Republicans in the legislature are attempting to make some tough cuts.
In particular, they want public employees to pay a little more towards their health care premiums and pension programs. In fact, what the Republicans are proposing would still leave Wisconsin public employees contributing far less to health care and pensions than their private sector counterparts.
U.S. Representative Paul Ryan recently appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program and described what Governor Scott Walker is asking the teachers to do....
Scott and I are very close friends. We e-mail each other quite a bit... He's basically saying that state workers which have extremely generous benefits packages relative to their private sector counterparts, they contribute next to nothing to their pensions, very, very little in their health care packages.
He's asking that they contribute about 12 percent for their health care premiums, which is about half of the private sector average, and about 5.6 percent to their pensions. It's not asking a lot. It's still about half of what private sector pensions do and health care packages do.
So he's basically saying "I want you public workers half of what your private sector counterparts do" and he's getting riots. It's like Cairo has moved to Madison these days.
These proposed changes have caused a massive uproar in Wisconsin. Just check out the following raw video footage from the last few days....
(Go to the site of the article to see the video)
But this is what we have come to as a nation. Almost everyone agrees that reducing government debt is a good thing "in theory", but whenever anyone starts to put forward some specific proposals to cut government spending it makes those that will be affected by the cuts extremely upset.
Just look at what is happening with the federal government. Republicans and Democrats are both frothing at the mouth over extremely small budget cuts that have been proposed. Virtually none of our national politicians are even willing to discuss budget cuts that would actually make a serious dent in our budget deficits.
But we have got to do something. Spending by the U.S. government is spinning wildly out of control. Back in 1970, the U.S. government only spent about 200 billion dollars for the whole year. Well, this year the federal government is going to spend somewhere around 3.6 trillion dollars, and Barack Obama's newest budget proposal calls for U.S. government spending to increase to 5.6 trillion dollars by the year 2021. If the government continues to spend money at such a rapid pace it is going to completely wipe out our entire economic system....
But it is not just the U.S. government that is spending like a drunken sailor. Most of our state governments are complete financial disaster zones at this point as well.
As I have written about previously, the state of Illinois is such a financial disaster zone that it is hard to even describe. According to 60 Minutes, the state of Illinois is six months behind on their bill payments. 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Croft asked Illinois state Comptroller Dan Hynes how many people and organizations are waiting to be paid by the state, and this is how Hynes responded....
"It's fair to say that there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people waiting to be paid by the state."
Something has got to be done about our national addiction to debt.
Government spending has to be dramatically cut. All of us are going to have to make sacrifices. We simply cannot continue to spend far, far, far more than we bring in.
But we are Americans - we do not like to make sacrifices.
Our founding fathers warned us about this. They warned that when the American people figured out that they could vote themselves money out of the U.S. Treasury it would greatly endanger our republic.
Unfortunately that is exactly what is happening today. The vast majority of government spending on both the national and state levels consists of direct payments to individuals of one sort or another.
The American people have become addicted to the bread crumbs that they receive from the hand of their master.
This is not what our republic was supposed to look like.
As the U.S. economy continues to decline, we are going to see a lot more riots like we have seen in Wisconsin. Once the American people realize that the "good times" are over, all hell is going to break loose.
Already the anger and the frustration of the American people is starting to boil over. Unfortunately, that anger and frustration is focused in 1000 different directions. The ruling elite and the establishment media are constantly encouraging us to hate one another. I recently wrote about this phenomenon in an article on another website....
The truth is that the "establishment" is constantly trying to divide us and get us fighting with one another. They pit the Republicans against the Democrats (even as though control both sides). They pit one race against another. They pit one gender against another. We are told that the rich are against the poor, the north is against the south, urban is against rural and that there are even "generational battles" going on. Frustration and hate are rapidly growing in the United States today, and a lot of that frustration and hate is unfortunately aimed at the targets that the mainstream media has programmed all of us to hate. Meanwhile, those at the top of the pyramid who are controlling the whole game love it when we are divided because we can never become united and challenge their control. Unfortunately, America is more divided today than ever. Our extreme affluence has kept the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted from disappearing so far, but once our affluence is gone all of the hate and frustration in society is going to come bubbling to the surface and it is going to be horrifying to behold.
Once the economic collapse happens, most Americans are not going to take it sitting down. Most Americans are going to want someone to blame. Most Americans are going to want to lash out somehow.
America today is like a big, fat spoiled baby that is about to have its favorite pacifier permanently taken away. America is going to whine and cry and complain like there is no tomorrow.
For decades the financial "gloom and doomers" have been warning about what would happen to this country if we didn't get our house in order, but nobody wanted to listen. Everyone just kept piling up more debt as if it would never be a problem.
Well, now our entire country is covered in red ink. Large numbers of state and local governments across the country are on the verge of defaulting on their debts, and they are hoping that the federal government will bail them out. The federal government has already accumulated the biggest pile of debt the world has ever seen and continues to behave as if we can just keep borrowing and spending massive amounts of money forever.
There is no way out of this nightmare under the current system. Taxing people more is not going to solve our problems. Taxing people less is not going to solve our problems.
We have gotten to the point where it is inevitable that the debt bubble that we have created is going to burst. Our politicians can try to delay it for a while, but in the end the whole house of cards is going to come crashing down.
When the U.S. economy does totally collapse, it is going to make the riots that we have seen in Egypt and throughout the Middle East this year seem tame by comparison.
What we are witnessing right now in Wisconsin are just the "birth pains". The American people don't want to "tighten their belts". In fact, most Americans have absolutely no idea what "hard times" would even look like. When things go from bad to worse we are going to see temper tantrums in this country like we have never seen before.
So get ready. Unless there is some kind of dramatic transformation in this country, in the years ahead we are going to see some horrific economic riots.
It would be nice if we had a brighter future to look forward to, but we don't do ourselves any favors by living in denial.
When you think about the coming riots that the left intends to start, it is best to think of them not as ritious crusaders of what is right, but as the subhuman leeches that they truly are. Think about how the British though of Germans in 1941. How Americans thought of the Japanese on December 8, 1941. How the Russians thought of the Germans in the early 1940s. This is how we should think of the left.
They are an unruly mob of freeloaders that seek to use overwhelming odds and intimidation to take from you, that which YOU have earned. The call us NAZIs while they use the very techniques that the NAZIs used in the late 1930s to establish their power network. They are the national socialist party, after all.
And even if he doesn't, some 'Rat-appointed federal judge will strike down the law in favor of the unions.
Wow. That IS a shocker. I can only land on that show now longer than a minute. Mika’s ‘gotta go potty’ wiggling and condescending facial expressions are too much.
At best, and under normal circumstances, most markets have a 72 hour stock. Introduce a wee bit of panic, and that drops to an hour or less. If there are no deliveries, you have effectively run out of food.
In my humble opinion, all court decisions should be ignored until the Obama administration starts respecting them himself.
Eventually the rich will get fed-up and stop producing.
There won’t be any wealth for the lefties to spread.
John Galt
Freakin’ retards. You should see the wild eyes pot smoking teachers at my child’s high school. The parents even stand in line waiting to talk to them on conference night and discuss how much pot the teachers have smoked. It’s absolutely sickening.
Yes, in the sense that the Teachers are the biggest spoiled brats in America, and they are the first ones who experiencing a very small taste of what government fiscal failure is like.
There is a direct line from this even to the larger event of dollar failure and bank collapse.
The riots following that will not be organized or have a point, it will be about looting and getting food to survive.
We have all been warned, and this is yet another warning sign. Hopefully all Freepers are following the Boy Scout Mott: Be Prepared.
Can we repeat this please? Does anyone notice that if you just stop feeding the beast your kids that it just might starve? What if, say, just 10% of WI people pulled their kids from the school system? Would it send a message?
Read John Taylor Gatto's "Weapons on Mass Instruction."
"Teachers Gone Wild" has been going on for a long, long, time. The elephant in the room is the poor kids, who are stuck with this system...but, no, don't touch my "me time."
Silver flirting with $32 supports validity of the article’s premise.
The irony is that by reeling in the huge amounts of money that is being gobbled up by hacks is going to lead to our side losing in the future. You see in the past, 40’s,50’s,60’s even Liberals did not believe that public employees should be unionized and showered with cash. The only thing a public employee might have expected was some job security. This left all that tax money available to buy votes with. The Libs of old would actually build stuff, like buildings and roads. But little by little the Libs decided to divert the public money to public employee benefits. A result of campaign finance reform. This culminated with the Obama stimulus. Now there is no money left to actually build stuff. The porkulus accomplished no economic stimulus at all since most of the money was spent for public employee benefits. Most people in the private sector get nothing from the government, or scraps. Even welfare recipients get little compared to those working in the welfare office. The non-hacks have no incentive to vote for Libs anymore. However, if we are succesfull in reversing this, and the Libs can return to New Deal form, many of our supporters will return to voting for the libs as they or their parents, grandparents did 60 years ago. But you know what, it would be worth it.
The automatic deduction of union dues through payroll would cease also. This is a bigger problem for the unions. When the workers have to write checks the unions will have to become debt collectors.
No, but we are running out of money to give to deadbeats to buy food (& pay rent, buy gas, buy weed, etc.)
It would be interesting for one state to simply end all their welfare programs and see what happens. Of course most of the states that would consider doing this have small welfare rolls, probably including the few legitimate clients, such as the mentally retarded.
In Oregon pretty much an minority youth (which appears to go until at least age 35) can get free money by signing up to go to community college. This is typically combined with rent subsidized housing to provide a decent no-work welfare lifestyle. The required case load is so low that a two year associates degree can be dragged out for five or six with the state paying everything for these "disadvantaged" people essentially endlessly.
At one point in time, roughly 100 years ago, unions were thoroughly necessary to protect workers who lacked bargaining power against companies, where there was child labor and there were horrid working conditions. However, now we have labor laws guaranteeing minimum wages, maximum hours before overtime must be paid, no child labor like we had and lots of safety measures. At this point, unions are a leech on society and, more than any part of society, on the very workers that they claim to represent.
Here we're talking about a public employee union. "Public employee" is another phrase for "civil servant." Where is their desire and willingness to serve? Why, if the military doesn't have them and its members endure far more hardship and danger on the job, are there even allowed to be public employee unions? I think that this question will begin to be asked, now that the WI teachers have begun to act like a bunch of 2-year-olds that just had their lollipop taken away.
But let's get back to that "leech" thing - what is a leech? It is a parasite, it is something that lives off of its host, it produces or contributes nothing to the host (like a sybiote does). You know, the Mafia is also a parasite - it produces nothing, it lives off of the labor of others, and it clearly harms its host, which is us, all of society. But at least the Mafia KNOWS that it is a parasite, and it KNOWS that if it kills the host then it, too, will die. So the older criminal organizations, looking long-term, limit their effect on society to a certain extent. Also, the Mafia knows that if it harms the host too much, the host will fight back, and it will be hurt a lot. The public employee unions haven't yet figured out that they are parasites. No, not the individual members, but the union itself. Hopefully, WI's governor will communicate this idea to the public (and, frankly, to the teachers themselves, who will end up worse off than if they had simply accepted the Gov.'s proposal), and also stand strong like Reagan did against the air traffic controllers and Chris Christie has against the NJ Mafia, errrr, teachers union.
Time for the host to kill the parasite!
I sure hope so ... and I hope they wear their brightest red shirts.
Christie has a lot of flaws, but I gotta give him a ton of credit for one big thing. I never thought I'd see this, but within his first 6-9 months in office public school teachers were effectively reduced in terms of public respect to a level somewhere down around lawyers and arsonists.
This approach should be repeated all over the U.S. What changed the whole tone in New Jersey was the ridiculous expectations of public employees who insisted on getting pay raises and making no contributions to their own medical insurance plans . . . even as more and more of the taxpayers who paid their salaries were losing their jobs, their homes and their own medical coverage.
Yeh God forbid they should have to chip in for their pension and heath insurance. Its just unacceptable. Those poor misunderstood people.
I thought NBC news coverage was very balanced and maybe even leaning to the side of the Republicans. At least they emphasized the deficits.
Where do you live?
These "polite" political cuts on the margins will NOT solve the problem. So we are left to draw one of two conclusions:
A) They are sooo clueless and naive that they really believe the BS they are trying will work
or
B) They are cynical realists that are executing a master plan to destroy America and US sovereignty!
IF you think choice B is just for tin hat wearing, Glenn Beck views and other conspiracy theorists, I would challenge you to disprove it based solely on their actions and not the political rhetoric of the government and their willing accomplices in the media.
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