Main Street

Must Reads – Monday, July 18, 2011

Good morning everyone, hope you got some time to relax this weekend. Here’s what you need to be reading today:

Rick Ungar at Forbes.com blogs about how last week’s “fake Democrat” primaries in Wisconsin reveal just how little Scott Walker and Co. care about the state’s finances:

We can also recall Walker statements like “I don’t have anything to negotiate. We are broke in this state. We have been broke for years.” and ” We’re broke. We don’t have any more money.”

Apparently, he did have a spare $400,000 laying around after all and chose to spend it on a purely political gambit that stood only to benefit his own party.

I can’t think of a better reason for Wisconsin voters to question the true purpose of the Walker agenda in the coming recall elections.

While there has long been a dispute over whether or not the Wisconsin budget crisis was anywhere near as dire as the Governor has suggested, Walker’s willingness to blow taxpayer money in so cynical a fashion– money sent to the Wisconsin treasury by Wisconsinites of all political stripes and beliefs – speaks far more to Mr. Walker’s true character and convictions than this writer could ever hope to reveal.

We’ve got some bright news out of Ohio – it’s looking increasingly likely that the anti-working families Senate Bill 5 will be put to a statewide vote. From the Columbus Dispatch:

Based on preliminary numbers provided to The Dispatch by county boards of elections, the petition to place the referendum on the Nov. 8 ballot has enough valid statewide signatures from just two counties, Cuyahoga and Franklin.

Collectively, these two counties have validated more than 235,000 signatures. Fewer than 232,000 signatures are needed to place the item on the ballot.

Finally, an incredibly honest and poignant column about the lives of working folks in the South from New York Times’ Charles M. Blow:

Last week I spent a few days in the Deep South — a thousand miles from the moneyed canyons of Manhattan and the prattle of Washington politics — talking to everyday people, blue-collar workers, people not trying to win the future so much as survive the present.

They do hard jobs and odd jobs — any work they can find to keep the lights on and the children fed.

No one mentioned the asinine argument about the debt ceiling. No one.

Life is pressing down on them so hard that they can barely breathe. They just want Washington to work, the way they do.

They are honest people who do honest work — crack-the-bones work; lift-it, chop-it, empty-it, glide-it-in-smooth work; feel-the-flames-up-close work; crawl-down-in-there work — things that no one wants to do but that someone must.

Got a suggestion for a Must Read? Leave a comment here, or send us a message on Twitter at @WorkingAmerica.