Gingrich Dreams of State Bankruptcy

[Simon_Jester]

Ultimately, what makes it difficult for systems like this to remain stable indefinitely is sheer brute force: the point at which the public becomes uncomfortable enough to get tired of being dumped on. They may not react correctly to the problem, but the resulting upheaval is usually very bad for the oligarchs on top of the system.

And who is to enforce these fines or jail them?

The military, if necessary.

As I said, there was precedent during the Great Depression. You can scream "illegal!" and "Unconstitutional!" all you want but the fact remains it was done.

I honestly don't know that this would work in America today. There was a certain basic... I don't know what to call it, call it 'solidity' to the US during the depression that made it possible for soldiers to be sent in to break strikes and for the entire government to be operated under conditions of near-martial law, without paranoid loons causing things to fly off the handle to an unmanageable degree.

Today, if that happened, the result would be a whole new round of collapses. With the stock market and financial sector being a gigantic confidence game, the fortunes of the American rich depend very heavily on the perception that everything is basically okay in America: that yes, we're a great country and we're strong and we'll continue to be strong, and pay no attention to the homeless guy behind the curtain.

If we start seeing the army breaking up strikes, and entire government agencies being effectively dissolved and reconstructed, that is going to break down.

You yourself often point out that no one stands to gain from a round of major social unrest. I would say in turn that this applies to the far right (or its backers, at any rate) as much as to anyone else. And this is why I doubt the Republicans are serious. Newt Gingrich can babble all he wants; he is not in a position of power and there are reasons for that. No financier with several million dollars in municipal bonds is going to want to see the states suddenly allowed to declare bankruptcy, whether it allows the states to break the unions or not.

Not only was that act illegal, if Barack Obama tried to do that the tea bagger fruitloops would be in open revolt. You've turned a general strike into something that's very close to becoming civil war. Care to try again?

Yes. It was illegal. It was done ANYWAY! You do not seem to grasp that essential point. At a certain point legality will not matter. The government will exert force in order to maintain order.

Again, I think it's questionable whether the current social order in the US can survive the process of an armed crackdown. That exerts stresses on the pro-government side of the line too, not just the dissenting side. The government could do that in the '30s and earlier without fear of things falling apart to the point where the political order collapsed, because you could break striking coal miners or a riot without provoking nationwide lunacy (teabaggers blaming Obama, everyone opposed to the idiotic political move that brought you to this point freaking out, and so on).

At the time we had a representative democracy. Today, our government bears less of a resemblance to such a democracy, and more to a kleptocratic oligarchy- so far as the power and fiscal relationships go, anyway. And kleptocracy depends heavily on people not getting desperate enough to question the system. Its ability to draw popular support is too unreliable to be confident, and its ability to govern, to provide meaningful solutions that will shut the people up, is relatively poor.

I think that the people in a position to call the shots on this know that. My fear is that the Tea Party element will become strong enough to break through and impose bad government against the will of the people on the right who actually have something to lose and know they can lose it. I don't quite believe that's happened yet, though.
__________

To be honest, I've never seen why public unions are supported so much. I mean I support private unions but I always felt that the point of a union was for the average worker to have representative in his business, if the business works for an elected government, don't they already basically have representation? Additionally it always seems like any benefit unions have (healthcare, paid sick leave) isn't something should be fought for just union members but for everyone. I mean someone feel free to educate me because they just seem counterproductive in a sense.

[puts on educator hat]

Reason #1:
When public employees lack confidence in their financial future, you tend to get a lot more corruption. We see this in nations where public employees are not well paid or where their pay is not secure. For most of human history, that was the norm; civil service reform in the West is one of the big things that made it go away.

Reason #2:
We in the US live in a country where, for whatever reason, many basic reforms essential for modern civilized life are unpopular. People do not want the state supplying health care or old age pensions. They can afford to not want this and still get health care and pensions in large part because of the unions. This includes the public sector. Remove the unions, and the people as a whole wind up worse off.

Reason #3:
Public sector employees often become political footballs for elected officials who are trying to gain some short-term advantage by doing something that is to the long-term disadvantage of the state. Unions give them some ability to dig in and resist this: to point out that no, it is a bad idea to subject the public sector to the same destructive policies that have gutted the American private sector. Examples of such policies include rapid hiring and firing, harassment of workers by frequent changes in the administrative rules of the organization, demands that workers spend a large fraction of their time performing tasks to justify their jobs rather than actually doing their jobs, and so on.

In the name of optimizing the bottom line, the private sector has done great harm to the American people, and ultimately to the morale and efficiency of the American workforce. If this kind of rot spreads to the public sector, it's going to hurt us. Except, of course, that we may not notice that we're being hurt, on the infamous principle that "fish have no word for water;" Americans seem not to have words for the difference between the laissez-faire fundamentalist model of employment in America and the more regulated model found elsewhere in the world.

Oh, how cute - nice to know that the U.S. Army did it's part in crushing organized labour. Thanks for the trivia, Shep, I didn't know that the USA used the staple of worst Third World dictatorships - when labour strikes, use the Army! Yeaaahaw! I love that mural. Streikbrecher - more often than not it was uttered as a swearword. Here, Streikbrechers are hailed as heroes.

Yep, that's about the size of it.

Honestly, the whole "let the blood of the aristocrats flow!" attitude on the part of early 20th century communism did not help; we wound up with the Red Scare and from there to this it was just one steady progression of anticommunism fueling self-congratulatory pro-capitalism, which then evolved into laissez-faire fundamentalism, which then evolved into "strikebreakers as heroes."

It's fucking despicable, it's a terrible system... it's also the inevitable antithesis of what the far left in the West evolved into circa 1900.

[JME2]

It does seem to me, talking about how it is this situation is a prime opportunity to ram home the ideological masturbatory fantasies of the Right , that in taking this path Newt & Pals aren't trying to return the United States to some idealized 1950s glory land that never actually existed. It seems to me, frankly, that what they're dreaming of goes back much farther than that - they're interested in recreating the Gilded Age, with themselves as the new Astors, Rockefellers, JP Morgans and the rest. The creation of a truly dual tiered society where the wealthy have everything and the poor can drop dead so long as they're productive doing it is the endgame- without things like pesky regulations of any kind that would fetter all that glorious capitalism. Someone mentioned earlier in this thread that the middle class in the United States has already lost a war they didn't even know they were fighting, and that statement rang very true - I believe its not even a question of "is it too late" anymore, its simply a question of "how long will this new reality be allowed to continue". My fear is that the answer to the latter question may well be "indefinitely" - the new elite have learned well the lessons of the past, and this time seem to be taking steps to rig the game in their favor with an eye toward subtle, (but no less ironclad) statutory, institutionalized permanence. Just my opinion.

Cue Elitist Plot theme.

Seriously, I think your points are valid. I'm just as worried that we're headed down this road. The reality of a destroyed American Middle Class...is unsettling.

[Uraniun235]

Again, I think it's questionable whether the current social order in the US can survive the process of an armed crackdown. That exerts stresses on the pro-government side of the line too, not just the dissenting side. The government could do that in the '30s and earlier without fear of things falling apart to the point where the political order collapsed, because you could break striking coal miners or a riot without provoking nationwide lunacy (teabaggers blaming Obama, everyone opposed to the idiotic political move that brought you to this point freaking out, and so on).

There's one other major difference, and it's the advent of video recording and instantaneous long-distance communication. A blurb in the paper about how a coal strike occurring somewhere a week's travel away is much more abstract than a video graphically depicting brutal, excessive violence against workers. Additionally, it's now possible for people all across the country to immediately coordinate with one another (and, if they're smart about it, to do so with unbreakable encryption) in response to such actions.

[Alphawolf55]

Reason #1:
When public employees lack confidence in their financial future, you tend to get a lot more corruption. We see this in nations where public employees are not well paid or where their pay is not secure. For most of human history, that was the norm; civil service reform in the West is one of the big things that made it go away.

Reason #2:
We in the US live in a country where, for whatever reason, many basic reforms essential for modern civilized life are unpopular. People do not want the state supplying health care or old age pensions. They can afford to not want this and still get health care and pensions in large part because of the unions. This includes the public sector. Remove the unions, and the people as a whole wind up worse off.

Reason #3:
Public sector employees often become political footballs for elected officials who are trying to gain some short-term advantage by doing something that is to the long-term disadvantage of the state. Unions give them some ability to dig in and resist this: to point out that no, it is a bad idea to subject the public sector to the same destructive policies that have gutted the American private sector. Examples of such policies include rapid hiring and firing, harassment of workers by frequent changes in the administrative rules of the organization, demands that workers spend a large fraction of their time performing tasks to justify their jobs rather than actually doing their jobs, and so on.

In the name of optimizing the bottom line, the private sector has done great harm to the American people, and ultimately to the morale and efficiency of the American workforce. If this kind of rot spreads to the public sector, it's going to hurt us. Except, of course, that we may not notice that we're being hurt, on the infamous principle that "fish have no word for water;" Americans seem not to have words for the difference between the laissez-faire fundamentalist model of employment in America and the more regulated model found elsewhere in the world.

See all that makes sense on why private unions are alright. But none of that other then the first supports why public unions are considered sacred. Like I said it seems counterproductive for a country. The point for a union is to take as much money and benefits as possible, the point of a private corporation is to keep as much money as possible. Those two things provide at least a sort of balance, since if the unions become so undealable, that people can just choose to stop working with them (granted it's not perfect, there is no perfect invisible hand to keep everything perfect), the thing is because a private business ultimately has to have balanced initiatives and everything, unions in the private sector can ask for alot but if they go too far they will ultimately fall.

But with a public union, they have a government backing them. It's very hard for a government to go bankrupt, and thus the unions can just take more and more at the detriment of the public, additionally they can provide incompetent service and pretty much do what they want and still not get fired, while getting wages that don;t fit criteria (like 23 dollars an hour plus benefits to clean out subway cars). Or benefits that are ridiculous like overtime pay during vacation (an actual MTA benefit). I'm just saying, we shouldn't let private corporations do our countries vital services because their interest is to get as much money out of the state as possible, why should we trust unions that have the same goals to do the same?

And your last sentence is kind of my point. It seems rather then fight for public unions, it seems we should fight more for the basic rights that they've been able to get like healthcare, ss, and paid sick leave for everyone while letting public union benefits and power go down.

Like I said, I'm curious how many people who adamently support public unions live in the cities where just getting to work relies on their work.

[aerius]

There's one other major difference, and it's the advent of video recording and instantaneous long-distance communication. A blurb in the paper about how a coal strike occurring somewhere a week's travel away is much more abstract than a video graphically depicting brutal, excessive violence against workers. Additionally, it's now possible for people all across the country to immediately coordinate with one another (and, if they're smart about it, to do so with unbreakable encryption) in response to such actions.

On the other hand, do people these days have the balls & motivation to do something about it? We have gays & other minority groups getting oppressed by State governments, there's a ton of unconstitutional things going on, a bunch of illegal things too and I've yet to see any mass protests or riots.

Then add in the fact that there's a lot of unemployed people who are growing resentful of public sector workers, Joe Sixpack who's on his 40th week of unemployment is not going to be feeling a whole lot of sympathy for some government worker who's pulling in $70k with full benefits. If the recession goes on long enough I wouldn't be surprised if the average citizen is 100% willing to sit on his ass and watch the public sector workers get thrown under the bus.

[D.Turtle]

I think its amazing how common people in the US are attacking unions, regulations, taxes, universal health care, and other things that are designed to help the common people.

Instead of looking at what other people have, and going: "We want that too!", they instead attack them and say: "Since we don't have that, they shouldn't either!"

Those who could benefit from government action the most, instead do their damnedest to stop any and all government action that would help them.

Really amazing.

There isn't a class war in America, there is class suicide.

[Simon_Jester]

See all that makes sense on why private unions are alright. But none of that other then the first supports why public unions are considered sacred. Like I said it seems counterproductive for a country. The point for a union is to take as much money and benefits as possible, the point of a private corporation is to keep as much money as possible. Those two things provide at least a sort of balance, since if the unions become so undealable, that people can just choose to stop working with them (granted it's not perfect, there is no perfect invisible hand to keep everything perfect), the thing is because a private business ultimately has to have balanced initiatives and everything, unions in the private sector can ask for alot but if they go too far they will ultimately fall.

But with a public union, they have a government backing them. It's very hard for a government to go bankrupt, and thus the unions can just take more and more at the detriment of the public, additionally they can provide incompetent service and pretty much do what they want and still not get fired, while getting wages that don;t fit criteria (like 23 dollars an hour plus benefits to clean out subway cars). Or benefits that are ridiculous like overtime pay during vacation (an actual MTA benefit). I'm just saying, we shouldn't let private corporations do our countries vital services because their interest is to get as much money out of the state as possible, why should we trust unions that have the same goals to do the same?

Because left to themselves there is very

And your last sentence is kind of my point. It seems rather then fight for public unions, it seems we should fight more for the basic rights that they've been able to get like healthcare, ss, and paid sick leave for everyone while letting public union benefits and power go down.

If we don't fight to defend the public (and private) unions, they die before they are replaced with nationwide systems to ensure the public welfare. Unions have powerful enemies; single-payer health care does not have powerful friends.

This is important: if there is to be any effort to resist the takeover of America by kleptocrats, it must include a certain amount of defensive entrenchment. The public has to protect the gains made by the lower and middle classes in more civilized, better-governed times. Otherwise, the kleptocrats will be able keep using a particularly vile trick: screw over certain sectors of the population, then exploit the fact that those sectors resent the people who are better off than they are. Wal-Mart workers whose fathers worked on assembly lines don't get a union, and the pro-kleptocracy propaganda machine works very hard to get them to resent the fact that teachers do... rather than think about the fact that their fathers did.

Immiserization is bad enough by itself. It's worse now that the rich have learned to point the anger of the immiserized classes at those not yet immiserized, and using that to whip up popular support for dragging them down too.

Like I said, I'm curious how many people who adamently support public unions live in the cities where just getting to work relies on their work.

I don't know. But a lot of Americans live in places where getting an education for their children relies on their work, or where not getting robbed and beaten relies on their work, or where having a bureaucracy to keep track of the many, many regulations that protect them relies on their work...

Specific grievances with people who perform manual labor for the government should not be used to trick us into allowing all government workers to wind up dragged into the same pit that the private sector has been busily dragging us into since the 1980s.

[Alphawolf55]

But see the problem is, the talk of kleptomacy and all these big businesses are legitimate grievances for big businesses. We're not talking about letting private businesses take care of vital government services and then paying the workers ten dollars an hour. We're talking about letting the government give decent wages to workers without letting said workers manipulate the system at large.Unions are vital for the private because there's no other mechanism in place for workers to get a voice in the business process. But public workers have legitimate representation and are a sizable voting bloc, is there actual evidence to show that if public union power was slightly curbed, that the state would instantly treat them like shit?

Most people don't mind car factory workers getting 25 dollars an hour while also getting healthcare because they don't directly pay for it. They do mind the fact that there are public union members whose education are sometimes less then college level having jobs that allow them to manipulate their work schedule to get paid 50% more money an hour while working the same hours a week, or get overtime while on vacation, or manipulate pension rules to get pensions that are higher then the national household income at times, while still being allowed to collect SS and getting to work part time jobs because they're paying for it. The question is, unless we allow public unions to lose some power, how do we honestly deal with the excesses or are you arguing that we should just accept the excesses as a price of keeping the few jobs that have legitimate benefits for their workers? Because unless we curb those, cities will go bankrupt and bigger backlashes against workers will happen.

[Simon_Jester]

But see the problem is, the talk of kleptomacy and all these big businesses are legitimate grievances for big businesses. We're not talking about letting private businesses take care of vital government services and then paying the workers ten dollars an hour. We're talking about letting the government give decent wages to workers without letting said workers manipulate the system at large.Unions are vital for the private because there's no other mechanism in place for workers to get a voice in the business process. But public workers have legitimate representation and are a sizable voting bloc, is there actual evidence to show that if public union power was slightly curbed, that the state would instantly treat them like shit?

Public sector workers aren't nearly enough of a voter bloc to influence the decisions of the government. There is no place where the number of public sector workers is large enough for them to enforce anything on politicians, not when those same politicians can immiserize the public sector and then herald their cost-cutting measures to the private sector.

Without collective bargaining, government employees have effectively no more leverage over their boss than private sector employees do.

Most people don't mind car factory workers getting 25 dollars an hour while also getting healthcare because they don't directly pay for it...

Do they not buy cars?

The question is, unless we allow public unions to lose some power, how do we honestly deal with the excesses or are you arguing that we should just accept the excesses as a price of keeping the few jobs that have legitimate benefits for their workers? Because unless we curb those, cities will go bankrupt and bigger backlashes against workers will happen.

The right policy answer is to stop promoting the taxation scheme invented and favored by kleptocrats. Employers do not have a right to squeeze their employees as a way of making up for their own poor business practices, not when perfectly legitimate means of making up the shortfalls in their budgets exist.

That does not change when the employer is a government.

[Alphawolf55]

In NYC, the unions are indeed a power group, and in fact go against what you say. Last year, there was a bill that would allow each NYC worker to get 5 sick days a week, it had the votes to get pass a veto by Mayor Bloomberg. Now it didn't pass because the Speaker refused allow the committee to vote on it. There was no solidatary, there was real support. The fact is, public unions aren't some ally of progressive issues, they care about themselves and keep what they can get

Also the thing about cars is, you can buy them from different groups. Don't like Toyota? Buy Honda. There's a feeling of choice, not so with most public unions.

The right policy answer is to stop promoting the taxation scheme invented and favored by kleptocrats. Employers do not have a right to squeeze their employees as a way of making up for their own poor business practices, not when perfectly legitimate means of making up the shortfalls in their budgets exist.

I agree that taxes should be raised, but there's a difference between squeezing your employess and getting rid of insane policies like allowing workers to accumulate overtime pay off the clock, or allowing them to work 3 12 hour shift instead of 5 8 hour shifts so to let them collect on overtime pay or allowing them to doubledip in pension funds. Do you honestly think each and every benefit those unions have accumulated are sane and make sense for the city?

Again can you show instances where public union power was rolled back and it resulted in said workers getting horrible treatment?

[Uraniun235]

There's one other major difference, and it's the advent of video recording and instantaneous long-distance communication. A blurb in the paper about how a coal strike occurring somewhere a week's travel away is much more abstract than a video graphically depicting brutal, excessive violence against workers. Additionally, it's now possible for people all across the country to immediately coordinate with one another (and, if they're smart about it, to do so with unbreakable encryption) in response to such actions.

On the other hand, do people these days have the balls & motivation to do something about it? We have gays & other minority groups getting oppressed by State governments, there's a ton of unconstitutional things going on, a bunch of illegal things too and I've yet to see any mass protests or riots.

Then add in the fact that there's a lot of unemployed people who are growing resentful of public sector workers, Joe Sixpack who's on his 40th week of unemployment is not going to be feeling a whole lot of sympathy for some government worker who's pulling in $70k with full benefits. If the recession goes on long enough I wouldn't be surprised if the average citizen is 100% willing to sit on his ass and watch the public sector workers get thrown under the bus.

I'm really not sure how much illicit violence the average citizen would be willing to tolerate at this point. But then, how much of a shit did the average citizen actually give when civil rights protesters were being hosed down and attacked with dogs? How much of a shit did the electorate in general actually give when students were murdered at Kent State? Was the response to those incidents actually from the public, or was it from a government who was afraid that it was too much free propaganda material for the Soviet Union?

Put another way, if the government response had been to "stay the course" on Vietnam, and crack down even more brutally on protests and riots, would the country have revolted, or would the populace have approved the silencing of a vocal minority? If it's the latter, can we really say things were any better back then in terms of public "balls and motivation"?



I'm also aware of the deep resentment towards the public sector. Whenever the local newspaper's website posts an article about education, the discussion section is full of comments about how terrible it is that the public sector hasn't been completely stripped of wages and benefits yet. The average citizen is already quite willing to throw the public sector under the bus. I wouldn't be surprised to see the unions totally broken in the next couple of years. Then we can start a real race to the bottom. That should have a happy conclusion.



But my post wasn't really aimed at the public sector unions specifically. The differences I noted do exist: a brutal crackdown would almost certainly be videotaped in some sense, disseminated and provoke a more visceral response (whether that response would be of approval or disapproval is up for grabs); and any resistance or retaliation would be far easier to organize today, regardless of whether sufficient interest, manpower and resources could be mobilized for such.

[Uraniun235]

I agree that taxes should be raised, but there's a difference between squeezing your employess and getting rid of insane policies like allowing workers to accumulate overtime pay off the clock, or allowing them to work 3 12 hour shift instead of 5 8 hour shifts so to let them collect on overtime pay or allowing them to doubledip in pension funds. Do you honestly think each and every benefit those unions have accumulated are sane and make sense for the city?

Again can you show instances where public union power was rolled back and it resulted in said workers getting horrible treatment?

I listened to a math teacher rant a couple of weeks ago about how one of her colleagues got verbally abused by the administration for failing too many students. They even called her into the office for meetings to let parents yell at her, without so much as a warning, let alone any sort of moderating of the meeting. This is while the school district and school were loudly trumpeting that they were "increasing rigor in our schools" or something. They then held up as examples two other teachers: one who basically coached his kids on how to pass his exams on the day of the exam (oh wow his kids do AWESOME on his tests, he's such a great teacher!!), and another who put in an average of at least ten hours of unpaid overtime a week staying after school to help kids.

I'm sure this sort of thing was already happening even before budget cuts, but we're probably going to see a lot more of it, as people demand "more accountability" from public schools that have fewer teachers to work with more students with less attentive parents than in the past. None of the top public school officials are going to say "can't happen", they're going to say "yes we'll do what it takes!" and put pressure on building administrators who will then put pressure on teachers to show results or else.

But, hey, as long as there's fresh meat willing to burn out for a few years of mediocre pay, we can literally abuse the workers as much as we need to, for the sake of "making ends meet".



That said, that overtime rule you listed does seem (on the face of it) to be in need of reform. Although, if I was a retiree who heard that the state was thinking about going after my pension, you'd better fucking believe I'd doubledip as hard as I could while I could.

[JME2]

I'm sure this sort of thing was already happening even before budget cuts, but we're probably going to see a lot more of it, as people demand "more accountability" from public schools that have fewer teachers to work with more students with less attentive parents than in the past. None of the top public school officials are going to say "can't happen", they're going to say "yes we'll do what it takes!" and put pressure on building administrators who will then put pressure on teachers to show results or else.

I have an aunt and cousin-in-law both involved with their local education system as teachers. According to them, this is the norm and likely to increase over the next few years.

[Uraniun235]

Yeah, it'll be morbidly interesting to see if Detroit actually packs 60+ kids into a classroom, and what the political results of that are.