12/01/11 POINTING TO A REPEAT OF RECENT HISTORY

Thursday, 8:15 AM.  27 degrees, wind NW, light at ground level, but high altitude clouds are scudding along quickly. The sky is mostly clear and the barometer is way up.  We got about two inches of snow last night and the city streets have been plowed and sanded.  I will have a little snow removal to do.
    The trip to Superior went fine, and we got a thorny license issue straightened out at last.  Buddy enjoyed the trip, especially the MacDonald’s hamburger.  He needs to put on about ten pounds and he should probably get one as often as possible.
    Political commentary: the Recall Scott Walker (Wisconsin Governor) campaign has started in earnest. One of the objectives of the campaign is to flood Northern Wisconsin (were welfare, food stamps and other  public benefits are collected by a large portion of the population)  with signs and protests (we saw one cold and lonely  woman holding a sign on Hwy. 2 in Superior).  44 million dollars was spent on the effort to recall several State Senators last fall, which was only partially successful, and they (mostly big unions) will spend far more on trying to recall the governor.  A hundred million or more dollars  will end up being spent trying to overturn the results of  legitimate elections in Wisconsin.  Wouldn’t that money  be better spent  as a give back to the members?  These massive expenditures show how desperately the union bosses want to keep future union dues flowing into their coffers. Wisconsin's union membership has fallen from 17.8% of the workforce in 2001 to 14.19% in 2010, but that is still much higher than the national average, so Wisconsin will be a national battleground.
    Make no mistake; the current struggle is not about employee benefits or “rights.” It is a power struggle between representative government and union power, and if the union bosses win they will join with leftist political forces to lead the country by the nose first towards anarchy, then socialism and  eventually to a classic communist dictatorship of the proletariat, just as the struggle is unfolding in Greece and much of the rest of Europe, and is what has already happened in Venezuela. 

CLOUDY BU T CLEARING

POINTERS POINT AT THINGS

THE  CAMPAIGN HAS BEGUN

 

    What we are seeing  is nothing more or less than a poorly disguised replay of the ideological struggles of the Twentieth Century, which are unfortunately fading from current memory and are not being taught as history.