Pessimistic Politics: Who Needs Jobs? - How to Ruin the Country the Republican Way!

There are other factors that play that exclude blaming a convention for my writing woes. For one, despite my best efforts, I am no longer in my early twenties, a time when young men and women are at their political peak, charging out into the battlefield against The Man, fighting for the rights of Gay Hispanic Wiccans to run naked through the streets, and generally making the world a better place, unlike those crusty old fascist farts in office now, who surely have some kind of Benjamin Button thing going on, except they stopped aging at year one. I’m fast approaching the abominable marker of thirty, and have found I no longer get aroused by every hot young political lunacy that walks by. Let all of you women know (especially, and exclusively I should mention, my wife) that I can still perform politically, I’m just more choosey with what topics I take to bed.

The other big factor is they just don’t make political outrages like they used to. Back in the cynic’s glory days of Nine-Eleven and Bush rule, you couldn’t turn around without smacking face-first into some ridiculous story. Fred Phelps and Jack Chick were also more active earlier in the millennium, adding their manure to the ever-roaring fire. Nowadays, our president spends most of his time either rolling his eyes at idiots who insist he was born in Kenya or staying out of the scene entirely. After eight years of Bushy the Clown entertaining us with his presidential sideshow at the expense of the country, no news is good news has never stood as more of mankind’s greatest wisdom.

I find my political abilities are a bit out of practice. I relate this to a similar affliction after I left high school, wherein I felt a gradual decline in intellectual and motivational functions. I’ve certainly sharpened my skills and feel that me is more smarter since my time in those harrowing corridors, but I can’t shake the feeling I’ve lost a lot of drive since then. I’m sure there are multiple factors involved, but I ultimately blame the lack of idiots, which serviced the natural function of keeping me on my toes and making me seem smarter by comparison.

Like my dealings with dolts, my political ambitions fell into complacency. The Republicans, not so long ago the Enemy of Humankind, seemed to have milded out a bit. We now had a Democratic president, one whose detractors could only point at and scream rhetoric about socialism while drawing little Hitler mustaches on his face and holding two-man protests outside of a post office (this is true). Time to hang up the old musket, the war is done for now.

That’s when I was rudely reminded there are other parts of our government that can get in the way. I’ve never really cared about local politics. To me, the more local the politician, the less they can actually do to make my life miserable. If it was really all that bad, I could just hop to another state to escape their idiocy. I never thought they would ever have a chance to hop up on the discussion table, a diseased rat at Thanksgiving.

Pitching their beanball into the side of the American people now are the conservative senators and governors of Wisconsin and Ohio, with their pet project Senate Bill 5, one of the most insulting, demeaning, and downright anti-middle-class pile of legislation to squirt out of the GOP’s think-tank in quite some time. As you read this, this vile piece of legislative refuse managed to pass its way through the digestive system of our political system with hefty aid from the laxative of a conservative chokehold on state government, leaving the rational citizens of the states affected by this bill are rallying together to oppose this heinous waste of paper.

Senate Bill 5, or Issue 2 as it will appear on the ballots in November, aims to severely cripple unions which support public servants. In the intial version, it would unionscompletely, but I guess the Republicans thought they were being nice and instead changed it so unions would just be useless, but we still get to pay the dues. The goal is to essentially eliminate the unions protecting teachers, police, firefighters, and other public servants from the wrath of bad management. The purported result will be massive savings for state budgets that no longer have to bend to the will of these corrupt unions, which they would have you believe demand things like golden guns for police and dodo feather quills for teachers, or it’s the picket line for them.

In reality, unions are designed to protect middle-class workers from unreasonable attacks by upper management and administration. If all of the supervisors of an organization are competent, fair, and reasonable, there’s really no need for unions. But when has that ever happened?

I’ve seen it personally, wherein a past institution administration acted as a Good Old Boys club, where top level administrators would hire their friends for vacant positions, or, if those didn’t exist, create new positions out of thin air. Relevance was not an issue; these positions only existed to provide administrator’s buddies with upper five-to-six figure incomes without adding value to the institution. Add to the fact the administrators were constantly giving each other raises, and you have a perfect system where everyone gets along on the backs of the people who actually bring in the money. Top it all off with idiotic decisions and failed ventures that literally cost the institution over one million dollars with no perceivable value, and you have the perfect Sundae à la Failure.

Meanwhile, administration demanded on a couple of occasions the union staff take hefty pay and healthcare concessions, likely doing so while smoking Cuban cigars (made from actual Cubans), lit with one-hundred dollar bills. During one incident, a strike seemed the only outcome, until administration gave in because someone up there realized if no one was working, they eventually wouldn’t have any more money to give themselves.

A few years and healthcare concessions later, the administration had made a big mistake by ignoring an important bit of process that caused the public to turn from the institution. The end result was two top tier administrators “retiring” suddenly and a huge sigh of relief was expelled.

It is said that people who most want power are the people who rarely deserve it. Those whose life ambition to take charge of people can hardly be counted on to be doing it to make a difference in any other area but their wallets or egos, moving these in a upward direction. And as always, it’s the grunts that suffer.

The fundamental flaw in an unhealthy portion of management is they can’t properly handle the power the job gives them. For some, feelings of entitlement creep in at their own paces, and before long, the people making the money for the company are fired because said management doesn’t like them and/or wants more money for a new car.

Not all management is motivated by evil. Some are motivated by ignorance. It’s rare for me to come across management who genuinely wants to understand how things work. Far too often, if they can’t figure out the structure immediately, there must be something wrong with it or it must not be important. I cringe to think of all of the changes management has made over the course of human history without consulting with people who know what’s going on. The Red Sea, for example, would have had a lot more of a passive palette if a certain Egyptian monarch had a competent HR rep on hand.

Unions spare the wage slave from the whips of management. By forming a collective of workers, important job elements, from personal (wages, benefits) to professional (equipment, safety) can be dictated by the people who actually know how to do the job. It also keeps management honest and helps prevent unfair terminations.

Collective bargaining was put into Ohio law in 1983, and the policy has kept public servants content for the most part. Strikes (or threats thereof) have been almost non-exist. Worker moral is higher, which in turn helps the public at large.

In 2011, Governor-elect John Kasich and his conservative cronies set out to fix Ohio’s $8 million deficit. Their solution was to rein in on the inflated salaries of Ohio’s management, who are collecting an upper five-to-six figure income, and they’re including themselves in this number. They’re also carefully ensuring that organizations receiving tax-payer funding don’t have any redundant or unnecessary layers of said over-paid management and strive to keep these processes running efficiently.

Wow, what kind of idiot are you? Why would the governor give away his money and the money of his friends? So you and your stupid family who voted for him and pay his salary can continue to sustain a living? Ha! Are you ever dumb!

No, the governor can’t make his friends upset by asking them to take a pay cut. You think being a politician is easy? There are fancy houses, cars, and mistresses to maintain! You expect all of that will be covered with just the kickbacks they receive? Actually, the kickbacks take care of that stuff, but they need some money to fill the bathtub with.

Obviously we’ll need to look elsewhere to make the cuts. That’s when Kasich discovered millions of Ohio workers who were (barely) getting paid a fair wage. When he looked at the these men and women, the drugs he had been taking began taking hold, because he literally saw every Ohio worker, lined up and spread out across a vast plain, grim and desolate, with only a few dead trees and tumble weeds rolling by for effect. Democrats with horns and pointy tails were floating amongst the blacken clouds, hurling lightening bolts at Jesus and the American flag.

Just then, something strange began to happen. The people, those Ohio workers, began to change. It was slow at first, but as the seconds ticked on, Kasich noticed something horrible, something reverse-Orwellian was happening. The people slowly shrunk down, their limbs especially, turning into nothing by stocky sticks of arms and legs. Their fingers fused together; were those hooves? The people slumped over onto all fours as their faces, their noses particularly, rose out from their heads. Their hair began to fall off, and their clothes disintegrated by some unholy force, revealing skin that was a stark pink The people, now transformed, tore into the land, searching, Kasich surmised somehow, for any life that remained in this dead world. They were now as "a pig at a trough"

This was Ohio, HIS Ohio. And also his bank account! Something had to be done!

Just then, the clouds parted, and the Democrats were seared into dust by the brilliant light of the sun. A glowing, marvelous figure descended from the clouds, accompanied by a choir of angels. As the light faded from the figure, Kasich behold the visage of Charleston Heston. One of the angels floated down and handed something to Heston, who in turn handed it to Kasich, who looked down and discovered it was a shotgun. Heston then pointed to the crowd with a smile and said “It’s time for budget cuts.”

At least that’s what I assume is how this went down. I’m sure some of the other senators, as well as his cohort, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker had the same vision at the coke and whore party. I might be way off on this. It could have been and LSD and whore party.

The one definitive truth in all this is Kasich really did use the phrase “a pig at the trough” to describe someone in the argument. I can’t verify who he was attributing this to, so I’m just going to assume it was the union workers demanding living wages that somehow aren’t six figures and leave it at that. I do know when he came into office, he brought in all of his friends with him and gave them ridiculous raises, so chew on that one.

I’ll take a little aside and point I specifically did not vote for Kasich. He wouldn’t have received my vote by virtue of being a Republican, but my resolve became more tangible after hearing he supported school vouchers to allow children to attend private schools instead of public schools, particularly the schools that are “underperforming.” His solution for improving our state and country is to take students (and thereby job security) away from teachers, thus furthering the decline of our public schools. Wow, for a public servant, Kasich sure does hate public servants.

I’ve read reports that the vouchers are already running out. What’s going to happen if public schools shut down and the state can’t fund the vouchers for private schools? Are they just going to turn the kids that didn’t make it to the streets, creating a race of feral children? This is going to help our nation and its future? I suppose Kasich could hunt the feral kids when he's done with the worker pigs. Recreation is important.

I was fortunate enough to attend public schools that worked. For my base of comparison, I’ve known people who went to private schools that didn’t. Just because you have to directly shell out the cash from your own pockets doesn’t make one school better than another by default. For all of the talk of how taxing the rich is equal to welfare and socialism, Republics sure don’t mind giving away free money for private schools that aren’t necessarily better.

The school vouchers seem to be just one step in a larger plan for the GOP to completely gut the public sector and promote privatization and, as a minor consequence for their supposed morality, religious doctrine into what was once the job of the public sector. I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theory nut because I don’t think the people who run our government are smart enough to operate a conspiracy, but the plan seems to be a little too clean to be happenstance:

Step 1: School vouchers make public schools and teachers less valuable. Why try to improve a “failing” public school when you can just send kids to a private school that they tell you is better?

Step 2: Senate Bill 5, which will strip the union protection from teachers, as well as police, firefighters, etc. No protection means management can layoff whoever they want and get bonuses for saving their institutions money. If they can’t justify firing everyone, they wait until…

Step 3: With a promise of massive budget cuts (looming around twenty percent) for some state run institutions, the people who actually make the money will be let go because they’re lower on the ol’ org chart. With no one to actually operate the institutions, they will collapse, leaving the public no choice but to allow the government to pay for private institutions with less accountability.

Step 4: This is not really in the plan, but the government finds out they can’t pay the private intuitions. The solution, as it were, is to raise taxes. There's still not enough money to get the proper education and protection for the citizens, since a large percentage of the workforce is laid off and can’t afford to pay taxes. What’s left is a state where the people are either leaving or struggling even more to keep up and can’t fund the private sector, which has to shut down and can’t give Kasich anymore money. To this, our leader responds “TS!” in a strictly figurative sense, for he died a long time ago with a powdered smile at his last coke and whore party with more money than he knew what to do with.

So in the end, Senate Bill 5 is very beneficial to workers. Assuming those workers are cocaine dealers and prostitutes.

This doomsday scenario may seem farfetched, but regardless of the likelihood things will go down exactly like this (Kasich might use an actual shotgun to take us out), there are some deeply disturbing tastes left behind. I find it alarming that Kasich and his kin have such an utter distain for their fellow public servants. It’s a commentary on how inadequate management views their employees, a spiteful spectacle so obvious it borders criminal no one stops this guy.

I can understand why Kasich and his cronies want the state’s services to all go private. Why not? Private interest groups give their politicians tastier candy and the GOP can push their religious beliefs they tout but rarely perform on an unsuspecting populace (again, this is just a happy extra. The power and money is still tops), and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it. It’s documented that some of the private institutions that stand to benefit from SB5 just happened to have contributed to Kasich’s political coffers. Now how did that happen?

Many union workers breathed a sigh of relief when SB5 was altered to allow public unions to exist, but this just allowed Kasich to strangle them quicker. The change was a Pandora’s Box, with the Hope removed and sold for thirty pieces of silver. Under the revised SB5, the only aspect of a union worker’s job that can be negotiated was wages, something easily denied or under-negotiated. Even a raise that would be good under any other circumstance could be neutralized by filing away at health care, working conditions, or staffing. It's not about keeping the workers in living wages, it's about paying them less and leaving them none the wiser.

Not that it matters, because even if workers aren’t paid a fair wage, they can’t strike because it’s illegal. You read that right: if any workers strike, they can be fined, fired, or even put in jail. If they even encourage, condone, or ignore threats of a strike, similar penalties can be enacted. That’s right, American citizens: SB5 supersedes the First Amendment! If you’re a public union worker, your speech is now legally restricted more than other workers! Seriously, how are these politicians even still in office? And Republicans are accusing liberals of being communists?

Since I’ve been bashing the bill so savagely, let’s actually take a look at it to see how SB5 is “fair to workers.” As with most bills, there are loads of parts to this monstrous machination, so laying out the blue prints would be ineffectual. Instead, we’ll look at the highlights of what’s affected. Please note the bill has been altered several times in an attempt to quell protests (not to fix the problem, mind), so some of the points might be out-of-date:

Pay

Under the current system, pay raises are determined by seniority. Not a perfect system, but if you’re around long enough to reap these rewards, you must be doing something right. I know this isn’t completely true. Many of my fellow state union members haven’t received raises. I know I haven’t. In fact, I’m taking home less than I did when I started. And my health benefits are worse. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The new plan dangles the carrot of a merit based system for raises. This is a really good idea in theory, but how are these merits determined? What if your supervisor doesn’t like you because they happen to be subscribe to the jerk-style of management? What if one of your supervisor’s friends, the one who set fire to the office while trying to make a photocopy, is in the running? This also doesn’t guarantee there will be money for raises, just that there COULD be and you MAY be able to get it if you provide a service at one of your supervisor’s coke and whore parties.

The wrinkle here is the version of SB5 that passed claims wages are negotiable. No word if this supersedes the merit-based system, but if it works like the unions used to, all raises are across-the-board. Since it hurts the worker, I’m sure the powers-that-be will keep this in the rulebook. So now management can claim they can’t afford raises for everyone, so no one gets them. Meanwhile, inflation will continue to expand until we explode.

Health Insurance

Health insurance, at least where I work, was top notch. Then some cuts came, so the union voluntarily agreed help the institution and take an inferior healthcare program that was still good.

Under SB5, the state will only pay 85% of employees’ healthcare premiums. Considering the skyrocketing cost of healthcare, this is not a small deal. While John Q. Six-Pack may be cheering for the reduction, they’ll think twice when their local police officer is too sick to save them from the robber at the liquor store because he couldn’t afford that doctor’s visit.

Pension

The pay may not always be great as a public servant, but the retirement is usually pretty good. A fitting reward for a job serving the community! Not any more.

The bill poses that public employers can’t pay employee contributions to any of the five state retirement systems. So much for retirement.

Job Protection

In the old system, seniority helped determine who stays and who goes during layoffs. Again, not a perfect system, but it can be assumed the senior employee earned this right by obtaining the most experience and performing well the longest. If the employer wanted to get rid of them, they could offer a retirement buyout and slide in a cheaper replacement.

Under the bill, there is no protection for employees with more seniority. Actually, seniority could be a very bad thing. Presumably, they would be the ones that would be making more money, and we know the governor can’t stand for that. It stands to reason the higher paid and more experienced employees would be fired first so they could replace them with newer, less-experienced, cheaper models. So much for a consistent, quality workforce confident their years of dedication will be rewarded. And it will be, with a boot to the ass.

Safety and Supplies

The unions have been putting around information stating that SB5 would make it impossible for the people who actually do the work and know what’s going on to have a say in the conditions they work. They will not be allowed to voice an opinion on equipment, including safety equipment; management alone makes these decisions, and since many of them work (in a theoretical sense) behind the safety of a desk, obviously their lazy, overpaid employees are doing the same thing. Why should that fireman have adequate protection from fire or police have sufficient firearms to protect themselves? That costs money the governor could use for his coke and whore party!

This is one point I don’t agree with. I have serious doubts this, of all things, will be enforced. I really doubt employees will be refused a voice in matters of safety. I also doubt management would send an employee into a life-threatening situation unprepared. If they did, the employee could refuse and receive their pink slip. Obviously an employee shouldn’t have to choice been death or unemployment. I just don’t think this would be a legitimate issue, especially in our society of loose lawsuits.

I need to re-iterate that some of these points may have been changed for the “better,” since Kasich has done so much back-paddling you’d swear he was riding his expectably-short political career in a rowboat. Regardless, the cusp of the Bill still remains to skewer Ohio with its unyielding jagged maw.

Insulting is an understatement for the treatment of Ohio workers. You would expect Ohioans, public and private worker alike, would rise up against the governor and his oppressive project. Yet perusing the internet stream, I found a small percentage of people actually seem to support this bill. For the most part, these are hideous trolls and/or Republican interns trying futilely to create the illusion their masters’ plans are a good idea, as opposed to smoldering pile of wreckage. These are not real people, but husks miraculously animated after their souls had been sucked away by the GOP void.

While researching this article, I came across some nasty sentiments from random internet trolls cheering about killing off unions, throwing around slurs like “union thugs.” These people obviously time traveled from the 1930s, when unions actually hung around with the Mafia. Yep, your kid’s kindergarten teacher who they give hugs to is actually waiting in your back yard RIGHT NOW with a baseball bat and some angry Italians. How easy would things be if that were the case? Just a phone call to Vinny and the troubles are over!

In reality, administrations have filled in the thug role, using threats of termination against anyone who doesn’t agree with them. Not a word from the trolls on this one.

After attending an anti-SB5 rally at the University of Toledo, I noted there was a small group of less than ten people who supported the bill. Their voices were welcome, but not agreed with, a visual aid demonstrating the vast difference in the number of those who oppose the bill over those who don’t. This included young college students, a baffling sight until I considered college students were the cheap labor that would replace their more experienced peers when the bill took hold. These kids would be the future employees that would have their puny wages wretched out of their hands to fund the increasingly needed unemployment services that would be required to sustain all of the great benefits of SB5.

Regardless, there appear to be real humans who support the bill, feeling that it will actually help. I’m not sure how a weakened workforce is going to educate our children or protect us from trouble. I suppose you can use what little extra tax money the governor concedes on some old textbooks from Goodwill and a down payment on a BB gun. Better hurry and spend it before he takes it back for his coke and whore party!

What’s amazing is these trolls are foaming at the mouth about how state workers should be punished for their job security without even thinking who they’re condemning. These aren’t people using your tax dollars to cater to their rich friends or pump up their power levels to over 9000. They’re your friends and neighbors, the people who you go to for a cup of sugar or wave to at the grocery store. By supporting this bill, you’re giving them a cup of arsenic and the finger.

Do some role playing here. How would you like it if your boss told you from now your healthcare would be reduced and your job security exterminated because they needed to save money as he was walking out to the parking lot to fire up that new Rolls Royce? I’d bet you’d be pretty ticked off. Same thing’s happening now.

The fact is the benefits of a union worker aren't as glamorous as their opponents seem to believe. They enjoy pointing at examples of teachers making six-figures, believing they've been sipping campaign out of their coffee thermoses since day one. In reality, union works start off with low salaries compared to their private-sector counterparts and are forced some of that into retirement. This is in exchange for job security, good benefits, and a self-funded retirement. While the private-sector people might take home more at first, are they saving that money, or blowing it? Do they even have jobs anymore, because they never had protection and their managers decided it was time for a new mistress? The state is going to be in great shape when the unemployment line circles the block as a result of Kasich’s brilliance!

Even if they make it to retirement, it's time to live off of Social Security! Yeah, that's been working out fine. Just think, if the private sector management required their employees to put away for retirement (and even paid in a little for it), we would have far less need for Social Security.

This debacle is solid theorem our leadership is completely out of control. They don’t represent you. They represent their own self-interest, using a public servant disguise to trick you into thinking they care. If you were to tear the mask away, you would reveal a slime-encrusted, twelve-foot tall insect-like abomination with thirty legs, a thousand eyes, and a set of fierce-looking pinchers designed to tear you in half and suck out your innards. SB5 is an effort that seemed designed to allow the politicians to rip their disguises off themselves, and yet we pretend not to notice.

Evidence to this is exhibited at every major protest to SB5. Hundreds, if not thousands of people converge on locations around Ohio trying to tell their leaders this is a bad idea. This sort of unity rarely happens, and should be a bright neon sign in the dark to our leaders that something isn’t right. And yet they persist, the SS Ohio steady on course towards the iceberg of economic ruin.

These politicians don’t care about you. What they care about is gathering more power and money before the entire system collapses in on itself. They’ve convinced themselves its impossible to fix, so they’re going to siphon as much money as they can into their accounts before it all goes to Hell, after which they will either go off to ruin something else or are found dead at the coke and whore party.

Thankfully, are political process wasn’t entirely out to lunch. Every Democrat and a few Republicans (a telling sign) tried to vote down SB5 and lost by one vote. The narrow margin should be another telling sign that this bill is controversial, but no matter. It was voted in, signed off, and is in the wings to ruin Ohio.

Had it been put to a vote now, however, I doubt this bill would have passed. After months of public outcry, Kasich found his lifetime allies backing away from this thing like the steaming pile of political action it is. Kasich was stunned that people actually care when you try to maim them, and has since made several concessions to the bill in an effort to smooth it over, yet he still wants to get those unions, and their little job security too.

As public scrutiny wears away the political sheen of his comrades, Kasich will no doubt find himself the only one left supporting this prophecy, which will be written in his feces on a sandwich board sign constructed from a refrigerator carton. This might not have the punch of his previous campaign, as Kasich himself will be forced to wear this sign in a weaken and delirious state brought on by the contempt of his public and his friends. Plus, his long, unkempt, rat bone-laden beard sprung from neglect and the pervasive odor from abandoning the separation of campaigning and restroom breaks will not push people into his camp. Additionally, the nudity, save for the sign, might be a deal breaker.

Though the Bill has passed, the fight is not over. Through an unprecedented petitioning campaign (of which I am proud to say I was a part of), taking place immediately after the SB5 was voted in, 1,298,301 signatures, nearly six times the required 231,149, were collected by hardworking volunteers to get SB5 on the ballot for Ohioans, not politicians, to decide on. Come this November, the people, the “pig[s] at a trough,” will decide if they’re going to remain on the conveyer belt of Kasich’s slaughterhouse plan, or will trust their fellow workers and take a leap in the air to fly above this political deathtrap. If you care about Ohio, vote "No" on Issue 2 and its companion, Issue 3 this November.

I think we'll see pigs fly. This is no miracle. This is being American.

As for Kasich and his kind, they are destined to be on the wrong side of history. They will be looked back on as the Hoovers or the Nixons of this century, failures in their job as leaders, forever looked upon with scorn and shame. This will surely make their coke less potent and their whores less sweet, but don’t worry, they’ll make it somehow with all of the money they’ve weaseled thus far. They’ll be fine.