Keith Olbermann: Wisconsin and “The Union”

[babylonsister]

Anecdotal and fun to read; more of this, Mr. Olbermann!

http://foknewschannel.com/wisconsin-and-the-union/

Wisconsin and “The Union”
Posted on February 25, 2011


When I was 21 years old I had a great boss. The problem was, he had a terrible boss.

He’d hired me, cold out of college, the year before. It was a strict union shop – United Press International, Wire Service Guild – and so it paid on seniority and I didn’t have any, so that first half-year all he had to pay me was $8,710. Six radio sportscasts a night on a network serving a thousand stations, and a two-minute commentary and I had to write breaking updates and reports and call up players for interviews, and I had to take in the “feeds” of interviews from our stringers at the ballparks and edit them by hand with a razor blade and splicing tape, and on the weekends I also had to ‘engineer’ a newscast or two, and every once in a long while I’d get back-to-back days off.


Photo is from about 8 months later

snip//


Watching Wisconsin unfold is like watching Tahrir Square earlier this month, and last. Well, it would be, except the television networks – for whom this is a) far too complicated, and b) far too troubling to their corporate bosses – are treating it like it was a dispute over which Green Bay Packer really should’ve gotten the Super Bowl MVP award, or not treating it at all. Even the news that the Wisconsin Republicans tried to lure the Democrats back in-state by threatening to vote on a heinous voter-caging bill has been ignored for a little more on Charlie Sheen or his Libyan counterpart.

You’ve seen the lengths to which the Corporatists/Tea Partiers will go to manipulate the media and pervert the coverage of the protests by pulling something straight out of the Mubarak playbook and shutting down internet sites. Maybe you’ve seen the scheme to actually infiltrate the Wisconsin protests with Tea Partiers pretending to be violent, hateful union members. But maybe you haven’t seen the larger plan to “bot” web comment boards and even Twitter and Facebook with computer-generated right wingers with sufficient back stories to make them seem real.

I’d call it “Artificial Intelligence” but I’m only confident that the first word applies.

But for the big picture about the Right Wing’s desire to take a dollar out of everybody’s pocket, one hour, one day, one pocket at a time, I refer you to this wonderful essay from earlier this week by Marty Kaplan at TruthOut which not only correctly identifies Wisconsin as the start of the attack on – well, on practically everybody – and as the augur for a long-dreamed of societal rollback – but also does so by invoking one of the great touchstone moments of early television history, the Rod Serling “Twilight Zone” masterpiece, “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street.”

Truthout essay here:
http://www.truth-out.org/the-monsters-are-due-maple-street67972

[Major Hogwash]

1. The tea baggers are wearing anchors around their necks and drag us down with them.

Complete stupidity!!

Down with wages!
Down with unions!
Down with our paychecks!
Down with our bank balances!

But, they support Walker and Koch Bros?!?!??

[Major Hogwash]

2. Lowering the wages of the public employees will lower tax revenue in Wisconsin.

But Walker hasn't figured that out yet.
He's still trying to figure out how to give the corporations another tax cut!!

What a fucking moron!