For the last week or so there has been a standoff in Madison, Wisconsin over the state legislature’s proposed withdrawal of collective-bargaining privileges for public sector unions. The issue has inspired a lot of nasty rhetoric from the leftish side of the political spectrum, and union goons have descended on the state’s capitol building, egged on by President Obama and other prominent Democrats. There have been violent incidents, and some thinly-veiled threats on the part of various union leaders and Democrat politicians.
Today the threats have suddenly become less thinly-veiled.
Congressman Michael Capuano (D, Massachusetts) was among the prominent decriers of right-wing hatred and incitement. Now we come to find out that incitement to violence is perfectly OK, as long as a Democrat is doing the inciting. Who would have guessed?
From today’s FOX 25 Boston:
BOSTON (FOX 25 / MyFoxBoston.com) - Throngs of union supporters shut down Beacon Street in front of the Massachusetts Statehouse on Tuesday to show solidarity with public employees in Wisconsin.
The protest grew tense at times as both sides shouted at each other.
U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano rallied the crowd, calling the battle to save collective bargaining rights “a fight for the middle class.”
“They’re not going to back down and we’re not going to back down,” said Capuano, a Democrat.
During the event, Capuano also said “Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary.”
Whoops! Good thing a Republican didn’t say that. For a Massachusetts Democrat, however, it’s no big deal — when you watch the video, you’ll see how much the crowd loved it.
Many thanks to Kitman for Youtubing this news clip from FOX 25 TV:
Rep. Capuano immediately felt compelled to backpedal a bit and regret his poorly-chosen words. According to The Boston Globe:
US Representative Michael E. Capuano, who decried violent political rhetoric after last month’s fatal shooting rampage in Tucson, said today he regrets urging union workers at a rally in Boston on Tuesday to “get a little bloody.”
“I strongly believe in standing up for worker rights and my passion for preserving those rights may have gotten the best of me yesterday in an unscripted speech,” the Somerville Democrat said in a statement released this afternoon. “I wish I had used different language to express my passion and I regret my choice of words.”
[…]
His remark raised eyebrows because Capuano was among the lawmakers who were calling for cooler political rhetoric after his Democratic colleague, Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the Tucson rampage that killed six other people last month.
At the time, Capuano had said the shooting was probably inevitable because of the nation’s increasingly heated political rhetoric.
My intuition says that Mr. Capuano will not face much political fallout for his… umm… indiscretion. He is, after all, a Democrat in the state of Massachusetts. Any Republican who issued such “incendiary rhetoric” would have been forced to resign from Congress by now, but the rules for Democrats are different.
This incident will soon be old news, and anyone churlish enough to bring it up tomorrow will be reminded that it’s time to “move on”.
Hat tip: Tea Party Express.
4 comments:
Baron,
Thanks for posting this and your
commentary. A perfect example of
what liberals usually get away
with and conservatives do not.
We only have to go back to the
last campaign of 2008 and recall
the thuggery and violence the
left and many of the unions used
to try and stomp out any and all
criticism of the liberal.
progressive agenda. I am thinking
especially of the SEIU.
Gov. Walker is correct is what he
is trying to do and many public
unions has bargained away their
honesty and ethics. Many, if not the majority of Americans are sick of these unions and the way they are acting like spoiled brats
and refusing to sacrifice like the rest of us.
I would be thrilled to pay the
small amount that Walker is
asking the union members to pay.
Especially for such generous benefits and retirement!
Just like Labour over here in Blighty, WAZZOCKS.
"Salary spiking" by civil service employees will emerge as one of the most erosive issues with respect to deficit spending and large-scale failures of municipal, state and federal government entities.
Collective bargaining only works when employee interests are balanced by the overall health and profitability of their employer.
No such concerns are thrust upon government employees who are not beholden with regard to ensuring that the Federal structure remains solvent.
Any normal company must remain profitable in order to stay in business. Therefore, its workers are obliged to voluntarily limit the extent of their demands such that they do not force the employer into bankruptcy.
This is an intrinsic system of checks and balances that maintain some sort of tenuous balance between wages and corporate profit in functional Capitalist systems.
When there is no concern over the profitability of an enterprise, then any employees of said venture have no obligation to maintain the fiscal health of that endeavor.
Once any form of "enlightened self-interest" is dispensed with, do not think that there will be even a vestige of restraint displayed by the workers involved.
From this we get budget-restricted California penitentiaries where prison guards are earning well over $150,000 per year.
Emergency services chiefs defer their vacations and, through seniority preference, obtain heavy overtime assignments that conveniently "spike" their pre-retirement salary such that earnings calculations confer upon them pensions in the SIX DIGIT RANGE.
How much longer will America's shrinking taxpayer base support these wolfish demands before the entire system collapses catastrophically?
NO MORE COLLECTIVE BARGAINING FOR GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES.
They already enjoy benefits and retirement policies that far exceed the private sector. Especially our elected politicians. ALL OF THEM must be forcibly wrested from the public trough.
In hoc signo vinces
@Zenster,
"Any normal company must remain profitable in order to stay in business. Therefore, its workers are obliged to voluntarily limit the extent of their demands such that they do not force the employer into bankruptcy."
In the U.K. this principle was destroyed in the nineteen eighties not by socialism or the process of collective bargaining but by pseudo-individulasim and ultra consumerism.
Basically the laissez-faire socio-economics of pseudo-individulasim and ultra consumerism won the political debate and has gone unchallenged for the last 30 years in the U.K. in short salary-welfare both in the private and public sector is laissez-faire socio-economics working within the old collective bargaining substructure.
Due to the political psychology of mass consumerism and inflated aspirations it is doubtful that two English men would know how to or could collectively bargain in a true sense, it is survival of the fittest utilising the post socialist substructures.
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