Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
Warning: You are about to enter the Twilight Zone.
Imagine, if you will, that you live in a state where a governor wields extraordinary power over its residents. Imagine, if you will, that your governor has the legal
authority to appoint an “Emergency Manager” to oversee the local government in the town where you reside. Imagine that the monetary compensation for the Emergency Manager of your community has no cap. Imagine that your Emergency Manager declares that there’s a financial emergency in your town and then takes over control of it. Imagine that the Emergency Manager can break contracts, seize and sell assets, eliminate services—and can also fire duly elected public officials who serve your community. Imagine, if you will, that the Emergency Manager empowered by your governor to run your town has the right to dissolve your school district and to disincorporate your town. AND imagine that you and your fellow residents have no say about what is going on! Just imagine how you might feel if you lived in a state where that kind of thing was going on. Well, the people who live in Michigan may not have to imagine much longer.
Who, you might ask, will be responsible for transforming the state of Michigan into a Rod Serlingesque otherworldly undemocratic Twilight Zone right here in the United States? Why, Governor Rick Snyder and his bold band of Republican state legislators–that’s who. In January, Governor Snyder called for “Emergency Manager” legislation—and the Republican state legislators were more than happy to comply with his request.
This all seems hard to believe, doesn’t it? I’m not making it up. Karen Bouffard of The Detroit News reported the following: Legislation that would allow emergency financial managers to throw out union contracts and overrule elected officials in financially distressed municipalities and school districts was approved Wednesday by the state Senate. Similar legislation passed in the House in February, and the two chambers are working on a final version to send to Gov. Rick Snyder.
In an article published in The Michigan Messenger, Eartha Jane Melzer wrote:
Under the law whole cities or school districts could be eliminated without any public participation or oversight, and amendments designed to provide minimal safeguards and public involvement were voted down.
An amendment to require Emergency Managers to hold monthly public meetings to let people know how they are governing was rejected by Senate Republicans, along with proposals to cap Emergency Manager compensation and require that those appointed to run school districts have some background in education.
Critics say that Republicans are manipulating concerns about budget problems in order to consolidate power by undermining unions.
According to E. D. Kain: Snyder’s law gives the state government the power not only to break up unions, but to dissolve entire local governments and place appointed “Emergency Managers” in their stead. But that’s not all – whole cities could be eliminated if Emergency Managers and the governor choose to do so. And Snyder can fire elected officials unilaterally, without any input from voters. It doesn’t get much more anti-Democratic than that.
Mark Gaffney, Michigan State President of the AFL-CIO said: This is a takeover by the right wing and it’s an assault on democracy like I’ve never seen.
Do you agree with Mark Gaffney? Do you think what’s going on in Michigan is an assault on democracy?
SOURCES
Rachel Maddow Exposes Michigan Republicans Secret War On Democracy (Politicus USA)
Michigan Governor Plays Fast and Loose with Democracy, Invokes Radical New Powers (Forbes)
Michigan Republicans Use Budget Crisis to make Outrageous Assault on Democracy (AFL-CIO)
Michigan Senate passes emergency manager bills (Daily Tribune)
Emergency managers bill sweeps toward final approval (The Michigan Messenger)
Conyers: Emergency Manager bill ‘raises serious constitutional concerns’ (The Michigan Messenger)
Financial manager bill passes Michigan Senate (The Detroit News)
Michigan bill would impose “financial martial law” (CBS News)
@Maury: But I have this on my side: “The only problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
That isn’t true either. It assumes that socialism is taking some finite resource that belongs to people, and that simply isn’t true.
While it is true that individuals are finite beings with finite property, one of the things that people do is create new people. In fact they do it so often, they have a name for it; I think it is “Parenthood.” Anyway, call it what you will, the more interesting point is that for about 200,000 years there have always been some of these modern humans living on the planet, and these people have been doing something they call “work” not only to feed themselves and their “children” in these finite lives, but to generate new wealth. Often modestly; but particularly in the last few centuries they have gotten better at it. This wealth is fairly robust and can accumulate; one form of it is understanding of the physical world and how to manipulate it, and this understanding has frequently been used to increase the rate at which wealth can be generated.
Those rate increases also accumulate; and that translates into an exponential growth of wealth accumulation. There is no reason to believe any of that will stop in the next hundred years or so; barring natural disasters like a runaway greenhouse effect.
So the truth is that as long as we scale our taxation to the rate of increase, we would never run out. To put it in more simplistic terms: If we taxed income at 50% forever, we would never run out; both the income and the taxes would grow in lockstep forever. Two hundred years from now adults will be working and generating new value and doing it far more efficiently than we do today; and thus generating far more wealth than we do today, and if we taxed it at 50% they would still have a far higher standard of living than we do today, and so would the poorest sectors of their economy.
Stampfor Liberal:
Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy all good progressives.
I should through in George H. W. Bush as well since he is a liberal country club republican. Then we decimated Yugoslavia becuase Clinton had a certain stain on a certain blue dress.
Why would you even ask that question? You must be a simpleton, even more so than the rest of your red friends.
And yes, you were making fun of the troops Hanoi Jane.
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Maury, et al,
You make this too easy, son.
Wilson didn’t start WWI. Serbia did.
FDR didn’t start WWII. Germany did.
Truman didn’t start the Korean War. North Korea did.
Kennedy inherited Vietnam from Eisenhower, a Republican.
Oh, no, you don’t. Both Bush Boys are all yours, sport.
Clinton didn’t start the Bosnian conflict. The Serbians did.
Simpleton? Me? Project much, boy?
Once again, you display your utter and complete lack of reading comprehension. I’ve given you two chances, yet, you still do not have the ability to comprehend. Okay, retard. I see I have to point it out to you – I was making fun of you, boy. You. For as much as you’ve deluded yourself that I was making fun of the troops, facts say otherwise. I was making fun, not with you, but at you. Jesus H. Christ, you are stupid.
Hanoi Jane? Nope. I’m far too young. But I like her as an actress so thanks for the compliment.
It is hard to be understood when you don’t understand yourself. Life is a imitator or immoral perfection.
You in central WI who give out phone numbers in suburban Chicago?
Obfuscating troll is as obfuscating troll does.
Brain, jokes and snark are supposed to be funny. You are not only not funny, you are not even mildly amusing.
Sockpuppet accounts are not funny either. In fact, on most blogs if you get caught making sockpuppet accounts you get banned.
I am Auntee Soical. I have a good deal of study in the social phenomenal of dissuading logicalness arguments. As you can see I am 3 degreed. It was one pile on the other until I was forced to leave due to other antisocial supercritical people surrounding me. I have a sister that was not married and had a child out of wedlock which made me an aunt. We in the central part of Wisconsin prefer to go back to our roots and be called auntee. We were going to make a movie but saw that it one had been made about roots. We are all white and we saw that it was about a black family. We could not be seen with people like that as we are of Norwegian Ancestry. Not many of my relatives were seen hanging in trees. I am sure that is not true for other people. Before my family came to the US they fished in the Norwegian Sea and search high and low for the Norwega Fish. It is like salmon but its is Norwegian so you know it is better. You know those Norwega people. They are very industrious. Thank you, I must go back to call my other cousin Brian as the cousins Darryl and Darryl are busy today. The found a cousin in the woods. Well you know what they say about cousins and a woodpile.
Brian sez:
“Because I am not of the authoritarian sort, I neither expect, nor do not expect, anything I do to be understood by anyone else.”
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It appears that our friend Brian has about the same level of understanding of what ‘authoritarian’ means as our other trolls understand the concept of ‘socialism’ or ‘communism.’ Based on context, such as I can dig out from among all the verbal diarrhea you produced, you do not understand the word. Authoritative appears to be what you meant, although there is no way to be certain, since your reasoning, as Buddha says, is circular to the point of being incoherent.
Brian, you create a conundrum for yourself that attaches directly to your lack of social skills. You say that you do not expect to be understood by anyone else. If that is the case, why do you persist in shoving long, rambling incoherent (and by your own admission, meaningless) comments into the discussion? The only effect they have is to derail meaningful discussions other people may be having. It is the equivalent of coming into one of our office meetings and insisting on discussing things that are not on the agenda, should not be on the agenda, never will in this lifetime be on the agenda, and will be disregarded by others–while at the same time, pissing everyone off.
There is a clinical name for that: Narcissism. Look it up.
What you are is a troll promoting antisocial bullshit based on circular logic and your personal vendetta against the legal system, Brian.
Adversity does not arise from the system, but rather the adversarial process arises from the inherent adversity in the conflicts it is designed to address. It is a superior model to the inquisitorial courts as it allows all sides to have their arguments heard and to present their evidence while putting the judge in a neutral position outside the evidentiary gathering process.
This will remain a fact no matter how many times you bleat to the contrary, oh long winded one.
Also, it is not an invalidation of your person to say you are completely and utterly full of shit. That’s an invalidation of your statements. If you take that personally? That’s your problem. Just one among many it appears.
RE: Otteray Scribe, March 22, 2011 at 12:11 am
BIL, welcome back. Hope you do not have any relapses. I am relieved to have you back to help with the tag team.
I suppose you noticed that Brian is back, as obtuse and irrelevant as ever. One would think he might eventually get tired of studying his own navel lint.
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What is obtuse and what is irrelevant may happen to be a function of how a person has adapted to or eluded particular forms of child abuse which are endemic in contemporary world society.
As a member of the ordained clergy in Wisconsin, I am a mandatory reporter of child abuse. I have done psychoanalytically-oriented, bioengineering-based pastoral counseling with adults who were severely abused as children, some of whom developed severe forms of mental illness as a direct result of having been abused as children.
My work is, as best I can yet discern, obtuse and irrelevant only to people whose child abuse was such as to be so severe that it is too painful to remember and too catastrophic to forget.
The essence of the process of child abuse is the social mechanism of teaching a child to be dishonest and then deceived regarding what is, and what is not, child abuse.
Psychological defenses, in the sense of mental mechanisms which distort reality in the service of the (Freudian?0 ego are the evidence of child abuse, for it is being abused as a child that creates the need for distorting reality in order to effectively pretend away (or deny?) such abuse.
I do not get tired of studying my own navel lint for the simple reason that I do not study my own navel lint. What I do is study the way psychological defenses which are the result of child abuse and the cause of child abuse in the subsequent generation function to generate forms of addiction in people who become well-adjusted to the distortions of biophysical reality which allow brain-damaged people to be as though oblivious to their brain damage and, in being oblivious and addicted to such abuse, to perpetrate abuse on the subsequent generation, as has, it appears to me, been happening for longer than the written historical record.
The breaking of a child’s will to be honest happens when, typically at about 18 months of age, a child is coerced into falsely confessing to having been disobedient or defiant or otherwise having not done as told to do.
However it happened, I have been given a will to be honest which has been impossible to break, even though I have been subjected to shattering torture for not being dishonest while a second grade student in the class of Miss Josephine Hanson at Marshall School in Eureka, California, during the first circa three-fourths of second grade.
Simple random chance genetic mutations can plausibly explain my having a will to be honest which simply does not break.
It is one thing to have an unbreakable will to be honest and quite another to be able to communicate effectively with people whose will to be honest has been broken.
It grieves me to observe the banter of put-downs which seem to me to be the essential mechanism of comments many folks post here. All I find such banter accomplishes is reinforcing the trauma of which such banter is the overt evidence.
Not once in my whole life have I come to believe that anyone ever does anything except as life both requires and allows. Not once in my whole life have I found any person to truthfully be at fault or to blame for anything whatsoever.
Why do I not tire of the work I do? Perhaps it is because I wait upon the Lord, as in Isaiah 40:31, “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk, and not faint.”
Please recall that I reside in Wisconsin and that, in accord with the Wisconsin Constitution, my right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of my conscience shall not be abridged.
My doctoral dissertation, in essence, is a demonstration that the teachings of Jesus, interpreted through sufficiently rigorous biophysics, are impossible to refute. Sufficiently rigorous biophysics have only recently arrived on the scene of actual existence.
There are a few particularly significant events in my life which I here choose to mention. I expect no one to believe what I here write save as a particular person’s conscience asks for belief.
Before I was a year of age, taken to church every Sunday, with my dad as the minister, a minister who believed that a newborn baby was fully a complete person, and who planned his sermons to be no less meaningful to a young infant as to anyone of any older age, and a minister who deemed science and religion to be one and the same, thus inseparable, in fact and truth, I was exposed to religious teaching that always made sense to me because it was my dad’s understanding that any religious notion not intelligible was likely false.
Every Sunday, certain aspects of church repeated, and, in particular, the “Lord’s Prayer” early garnered my attention. The original understanding of that prayer has never changed for me, though the words I use to tell of my understanding have changed somewhat as I learned more word-use skills.
Put in the words I now find best describe my understanding of the Lord’s Prayer ever since I first understood it, to me, the Lord’s Prayer is, “Lord, God, Almighty, give to me that which I need that I may best serve you. Nevertheless, not my will but your will be done. For this, I pray through Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior. So be it. May my whole life be this prayer. Amen.”
I have no evidence that my life is not the fulfillment of that prayer, for, in praying it as an infant, I withheld nothing of my life from it.
When people treated me with shattering cruelty, I forgave them instantly. Forgiving instantly did not take from me the trauma of having been terribly abused; it did, however, allow me to never, never ever, retaliate.
On Monday, March, 14, 1960, after lunch, I went to my swimming class in the Carleton College pool in the basement of Sayles-Hill Gymnasium. I had, with Red Cross Water Safety Instructor supervision, been practicing underwater swimming, and could swim three lengths of the pool without coming up for air.
During the eve and early morning of March 14, 1960, I had been helping time lunar occultations of stars during a lunar eclipse at the Goodsell Observatory at Carleton. Perhaps I was somewhat tired after spending much of the night at the observatory. Perhaps I hyperventilated, lost too much carbon dioxide and blacked out because of that. At the very start of the time in the pool, I pushed off from the shallow end, and got to near the middle of the pool and my body sank to the bottom of the pool. The class had in place a proper buddy system and all the usual precautions; nonetheless, after the class had ended, no one was aware that I had been in the class. The last student to leave the pool, one who walked slowly because of a vision issue, had turned off the lights and walked into the adjacent shower room when, as he later told me, he was turned around, something about the pool did not look right to him, he called out, and some of the students took my body from the pool and notified the college physician. One student got dressed and hurried to my dorm room and told one of my roommates about the swimming pool incident. This roommate got to the pool about five minutes after my body had been taken from the pool, and I was not breathing and the college physician could detect no heartbeat. The physician had asked the college nurse to get a syringe of epinephrine, and, there being nothing to lose, injected it directly into my heart as my roommate watched. My heart started beating, according to my roommate, I coughed up a little water and some of my lunch, and began to breathe. When my heart started, I had not been breathing for at least 35 minutes.
Expecting drastic brain damage, the physician had an EEG machine brought from the Twin Cities, and was rather astonished to find my EEG to be quite normal, with no evidence of brain damage, although total brain death is usual in a fraction of the time I had not been breathing and the swimming pool was warm and nothing close to the near freezing temperature at which people sometimes survive more than half an hour without breathing.
What I remember (memory can be false memory) was my finding myself (sans body) as though in the presence of all the power there will ever be, in the place from which the biblical god was made, and from which I could observe the seventh heaven described by the Prophet Mohammad in his night ascension. I remember (or falsely remember?) describing, not in words, the difficulties of my life as an autistic person who had not gone through the infant-child transition and who had met with shattering abuse time after time in my efforts to connect with human society. At the end of my describing the difficulties of my life up to then, I asked, not in words, if it was a time when I might be free of a life of such difficulty. In return, all the power there will ever be asked me, not in words a question, which, in words may seem not like a question, words being, “There is more that you may do?” To which I replied with, not in words, but put into words to write this, “All right?” I understand that it was then that the last student to leave the pool was turned around.
If your life experience does not include not breathing and not in cold enough water to prevent brain death, for more than twice what ought to cause totally irreversible brain death and come out of the experience without a hint of a trace of any brain damage, then perhaps your life experiences do not adequately qualify you to properly judge my life experiences and my life work.
If you have not been a chronic psychiatric inpatient, whose psychiatric care led to a profound, oriented-times-zero dementia and recovered from such dementia (similar to very advanced Alzheimer’s), then perhaps your life experiences are sufficiently different from my life experiences as to not allow you to adequately judge my life and my life work.
I judge no person, I find no fault with any person, and I care about the children of the future, that there may be children of the future, and in so caring, choose to do everything I can possibly do to understand child abuse well enough that effective prevention of child abuse, social conventions and social traditions notwithstanding, may become achievable while it is yet possible for children to be born.
What I have here written, I have written without my using deception in any way, form, or manner whatsoever. Whether what I have here written will be accurately understood by anyone other than myself is outside my locus of control.
I have a faith in what is, to me, “God,” that simply does not break. I trust existence and the process of existence absolutely, perfectly, and without any limit of any sort.
My life is not about me.
Every moment of my life in which I have been presented with the choice between the narrow path that leads to integrity and to life, I have chosen that narrow path. For this I take neither blame nor credit.
If humanity ever learns to walk away from hatred and its ilk, such as war and crime, someone will have to walk the path well enough to demonstrate its being achievable. Toward such possibility, I have asked that my entire life be directed.
And I am not alone in doing this, yet each person doing as I do does so in unique ways.
For me, the path I have asked to be allowed to take is the path of being as though a little child whose ability to learn and understand is unfettered by deception and dishonesty, and thereby to lead only by example those willing to learn to walk away from hatred how it may be accomplished by first doing it for real in my own life. And I am not alone in this, either.
Thus, I describe the life I live as I am able to describe it, and I allow whosoever can make any use of what I describe to make such use as anyone finds useful.
The irony of deception is that those who have been overcome by deception cannot believe that someone like me can actually exist, and that is the nature of the vicious cycle of the dance of deception itself.
Deception teaches those it deceives that they have not been deceived.
It is not better to be not deceived than to be deceived, for each individual life, regardless of situation or circumstances, has the same value, the value being that of one person’s life.
What may really be obtuse and irrelevant is playing king of the mountain as in the bantering of epithets for which this blawg may be particularly noted, as though there is a mountain in need of a king.
Because I am not of the authoritarian sort, I neither expect, nor do not expect, anything I do to be understood by anyone else.
It is not my present purpose to be understood by other people, but to better understand other people.
And the legal theory question in my mind about adversarial law being deceptive by merely being adversarial lingers on.
BIL, welcome back. Hope you do not have any relapses. I am relieved to have you back to help with the tag team.
I suppose you noticed that Brian is back, as obtuse and irrelevant as ever. One would think he might eventually get tired of studying his own navel lint.
OS,
Great video!
OS,
ROFLOL
I thought I had seen almost all of Abbot and Costello’s routines, but that one was a new one for me. And by the way, some outstanding troll wrangling you’ve been doing on this thread. Good show.
Maybe this will help our trolls understand…….something.
Otteray,
What rafflaw said.
Great job, OS!
You keep talking about socialism as if you know what you are talking about. Mike, Tony and others have tried to get that across but you obstinatelly keep coming back to the socialism stuff.
Paying your fair share to keep the government going and upkeep of the infrastructure is not socialism. It is simply paying your way. Currently, the infrastructure is falling apart. If you do not paint your house and keep the roof repaired, it will eventually fall in, just like those housed and barns you see along country roads that have been abandoned.
There are kids right now whose only decent meals of the day are the free breakfast and lunch they get at school. Many go hungry on weekends because their parents cannot find work. Several thousand jobs in our rural county have been sent abroad, leaving a stripped tax base for the county. However, the wealthy industrialists who sent the jobs overseas wail about taxes and resent having to help pay to feed hungry kids. Apparently it is cheaper to buy a politician than to pay taxes to carry their fair share. Your lack of compassion and obvious disdain for your fellow humans is stunning. Do not forget, Greed is one of the seven deadly sins.
Check out Matthew 19:24
There is a lesson in there for you.
Dr. Scribe:
You do understand your views are just as canned as you say mine are. It is rather funny dont you think? I see things one way and you see them exactly in reverse.
But I have this on my side:
“The only problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
It is the truth. It is an axiom, it is not a hypothesis or a premise which needs to be proved. It already has been proved, everywhere. So I do not argue, what is the point? How can I argue that truth is not truth?
Otteray Scribe,
That was Obama’s Inauguration Concert.
Blouise, what a wonderful performance. I wish I could have been there. Also, I like Pete’s hat. I want one.
Otteray Scribe,
Man, Pete Seeger loves this song. Here is a performance with the 2 extra verses