Modern Day Pharoahs

If turn around is fair play, if the majority cannot simply clobber the minority into submission in the land of the free and the home of the brave, let’s pass a law that calls for annual election of governors of Wisconsin and not have their salaries automatically deposited. Let’s pass a law that for every dollar a billionaire donates to one party he has to donate 50¢ to the other. Free speech isn’t free, after all. Soon enough it will be Passover and we will be reminded again about Pharaoh’s unfair labor practices. At our table I think we’ll contrapuntally read excerpts of the conversations between Governor Walker and the man he thought was David Koch. (If that fundraiser from NPR resigned after he was caught in a sting; if the woman who was NPR’s CEO resigned after her subordinate was caught in a sting, doesn’t fair play suggest that Walker resign too? When kosher pigs fly. Maybe.)

I’ve been thinking about union busting a lot lately. You can’t avoid it; it’s everywhere: Wisconsin, Ohio, Providence. The old manufacturing unions are pretty well pre-busted. Not because American workers abandoned them but because capitalists decided to close shop up north and move south only later to discover that they could make even more money off the backs of cheaper labor in Asia so they hightailed it across the Pacific. Conservatives and “Right to Work” advocates (= right not to have any say in working conditions or salary) now are after the public unions recruiting the jealous, the ones who used to have a good job but whose livelihood has been snatched away by the recession brought about by the economic activities of the very people now giving themselves huge bonuses and buying politicians, having managed to defeat campaign finance reform. These unfortunates are willing to say, “If I can’t have a pension, why should they?” as if the public employees’ pensions are taking food out of their mouths, as if the suffering should be shared only by all poor people while the wealthiest get tax breaks. But the public workers of Wisconsin were willing to take lower salaries and contribute more to their benefit packages. Their line in the sand was collective bargaining.

Next week we mark the hundredth anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory disaster. Many of us remember the Station Nightclub fire that cost this community 100 lives. If there was anything good to come of that tragedy it was a series of laws to tighten fire codes (I suppose we are still paying fire marshals even though they are public employees). Back on March 25, 1911 600 workers, the vast majority immigrant girls, mostly Jewish, were working on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of the ironically named Asch Building. A match carelessly dropped onto some fabric cuttings set the conflagration going. The fire hose was rotted and fell apart as men tried to extinguish the fire which quickly spread among the materials and cleaning chemicals. Some of the women managed to get to the roof and from there escape to other buildings; a brave passerby manned the elevators until the shaft was engulfed in flame. To prevent pilfering the owners of the business had the doors barred shut. In only 18 minutes a hundred and forty six women were killed, either from burns, from suffocation or from smashing into the pavement as they jumped in their desperate attempt to survive. The owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, managed to escape the conflagration, thank goodness, and later they managed to escape prosecution. Let us all praise devious lawyers. (The owners subsequently lost a civil suit and were required to pay $75 per victim which they could well afford as their insurance company paid them $60,000 more than the reported losses, or about $400 per casualty. In 1913, Blanck was once again arrested for locking the door in his factory during working hours and fined $20.)

Did any good come of the fire? Well, there were new safety regulations, and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, formed in 1900 was greatly enhanced and served for decades to protect workers against the Max Blancks and Isaac Harrises of the world, men who put the bottom line before the lives of the people who made their profit possible. But I forget; we are all anti-union nowadays; we see the unions as self-serving and out of touch with the real working people of America—the ones without jobs.

A Modern Purim Story

Paul Krugman stole my Nobel Prize. I don’t hold it against him, but I think the guy should at least publicly acknowledge the debt. As many of you know we were roommates in college (Yale ’74) who’ve maintained our friendship over the decades meeting each year on Boxing Day to exchange gifts and get hammered (he’s a Jameson’s man, I go for Glenlivet French Oak 15 year old). It was my idea that resulted in the paper that he was cited for in his Nobel ceremony; he just did the statistical analysis. He doesn’t exactly deny this, but he claims that anything written down on a sleazy bar’s coaster dated December 26 any year, doesn’t count as co-authorship. “Nonsense,” I counter, but he rejoins with “Ha!” and shows me his medallion.

But now his guilt feelings have paid big dividends as he’s shared with me in strictest confidence an explosive WikiLeaks revelation that he’s planning to release in his column on March 20, “Just in time for Purim,” he tells me. He thinks I’m going to sit on this, that I’m not going to scoop him, not beat him to the publication punch, that the promise I made last December 26 to keep his confidences holds the same weight as if spoken when sober? He thinks the Nobel is his exclusively? Ha! Read on.

Not content to embarrass American diplomats, the WikiLeaks people have tapped into the (formally) private correspondence of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Walker is nervous that a Cairo-like rebellion is in the making, that public employees, who are rallying at the State House in Madison demanding that he reverse course on his attempt to abolish their collective bargaining rights might soon demand his recall. He’s even sought advice secretly from Hosni Mubark who faced a similar crisis last month. That correspondence is part of the WikiLeaks revelations as are Walker’s concerns that the Book of Esther he’s been reading on the advice of a local rabbi describes a situation uncomfortably like his own, for just as Haman wanted to kill Jews because Mordechai refused to bow to him, Walker is trying to kill public employee unions which did not support him in his election bid. Just as Hosni called in his thugs to beat up the Tahrir Square protestors, Walker has called in the Tea Party to out-shout the Public Employees. Walker knows it didn’t work for his pal Hosni, but is trying it anyway; he also knows what happened to Haman, and he looks with fright at all those three-corned hats the cheeseheads wear to Packers games. The internal memos reveal that he thinks they are mockingly reminding him of Haman’s fate.

In another WikiLeaks revelation there is correspondence between Walker and his former top aid who has the euphonious name of Ima Goodheart. Goodheart, in E-mail correspondence with Walker, points out that “public workers essentially make a deal to get paid less now and collect pensions upon retirement. So we can’t renege on good-faith contractual agreements.” Thus Goodheart is described as a “former aid.”

In public Walker claims there is no other solution to Wisconsin’s debt crises. In private he thinks the solution is two-fold. “First,” as he puts in the WikiLeaks’ revelations, “we kill the unions and then we give big tax cuts to the wealthy.” When Walker sent an E-mail to George H.W. Bush asking what he thought about this, the former president tweeted: “LOL, Voodoo economics in the land of pasteurization. Will you never learn?”

Walker has also been corresponding with other Republican governors. WikiLeaks revealed that he congratulated Governor Rick Scott of Florida for rejecting $2.4 billion in federal money to build a high speed rail connecting Tampa and Orlando which would have created 24,000 new jobs at a cost to Floridians of only $1.25 million. As Scott wrote to Scott “Well, done Scott! Together we can deny public services to all!”

Can the Scotts be stopped, or do we all have to start drinking Scotch to forget some Scotts Welsh on obligations. After all, on Purim, which rapidly approaches, we are enjoined to get so drunk that we can’t tell an Aleph from a Beth. On Purim we tell stories that are not necessarily true in all details, like this one you’ve been reading—actually none of them are—but we tell the essential truth that arrogance in high places has its comeuppance if, like the protesters in Madison and in Cairo, like Mordechai and Esther, we stand up to manipulative oppressors. It’s happened before, Scotts; it can happen again.

Happy Purim.