Skip to main content

The Whole World is Watching

Shortly after making enemies of the labor movement and friends of labor nation wide, Gov. Walker of Wisconsin is in the middle of making enemies of Moms and Dads and Kiddies, even Republican ones, because of his draconian cuts of Wisconsin schools.   Many Wisconsin Republicans are wishing they could take back their vote for Walker according to an Associated Press article today.  After creating $82 million in new tax cuts the Gov has a $3.6 billion budget bust to deal with, even after raising "fees" on the poor like a  75 cent fee for 911 service to mobile devices.  So he is planning to cut state aid to schools by 9%,  about $900 million, at the same time as he reduces local property tax revenues for schools by an average of $550 per student.   This has sent parents with school children out to the picket lines, even ones that voted for Walker.  Math teacher Ron Blaha, who voted for Walker for restraint on frivolous spending remarked that "I did not anticipate that he considered education a frivolity."

Perhaps if Walker keeps up his campaign against the people of his state we should consider a measure being taken in Dafur.  In order to make real that "the whole world is watching"  the brutalities in Dafur, a non-profit, Eyes on Dafur, has a satellite trained on the border area between Dafur and Northern Sudan.  Perhaps in order to prevent further assaults on the population of Wisconsin, we need to set up a Eyes on Wisconsin satellite trained on the Gov's mansion to watch his every move!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Serenading the Donkey

Over the years I have had many times when I have had to call out others on their words, behavior, or attitudes on race, class or ethnicity and I have used a variety of means to get my point across.  The first  such incident was when I was 13 years old and my sister and a friend were skipping rope to the rope song that uses the "N_" word.   I said we don't use that word in this place and the girls argued with me about it. I just said that if they used that word I would go tell Grandpa, and they complied.  In a high school the teacher had let the discussion degenerate and the topic of "welfare" came up and a girl stated  an old stereotype that my Daddy says "All the blacks go pick up their welfare checks in Cadillacs."  I wanted that direction of the conversation to end immediately, so I blurted out "Well your Daddy is a racist."  There was silence in the room for a couple of minutes and then the teacher changed the subject.  When people have b
 Striking at Bourgeois Values with "Free Stuff"  Why is it that in middle class neighborhoods no one would think anything of it if you are having a "yard sale"  or a "moving sale", spending your entire day selling your possessions at pennies on the dollar, a tenth of what you could get on E-Bay, making less than the federal minimum wage for your efforts, but they would shrink in horror from a "free stuff pile".  What is the world coming from that  they place so little value on material possessions that they would give it away for nothing.  Someone will surely complain that you are doing "illegal dumping", even if you tend the pile and fold things back up.  Fortunately for me, I live in a neighborhood with a heavy student population, north of Seattle's University of Washington campus, and such a pile is welcome.  Having purged the house of unneeded things that aren't worth my time trying to sell (unlike my art, which I will find