January 3, 2022 at 1:14 p.m.
Standing up for vulnerable children in the Northwoods
Standing up for vulnerable children in the Northwoods
Once, way back in the caveman - ur, caveperson, ur, cavethey, ur whatever floats your boat - days of the 1960s, the left was pretty much united it its loathing of big business. Big business and multinational corporations preyed on the middle class and the poor, the left said (correctly).
These days, those big businesses are the biggest financial sponsors of the left, from Coke to Monsanto to Pfizer to McDonalds to Amazon to State Farm to Chase, and more. Somewhere along the way, globalist corporations and globalist collectivists realized that the globalist part was all that mattered, and became partners in oppression.
Not that the left doesn't still portray itself as haters of big business. Democrats love to yell slogans like "Tax the Rich," while lathering them with all sorts of subsidies and tax favors, and they love especially to call the GOP the party of "millionaires and billionaires," even though most billionaires are firmly riding the donkey's backside.
If you don't believe us, just look at the last presidential campaign and the amount of money given by Wall Street and big business to each party.
Of course, the ultimate irony is that the policies of the party of social justice, the Democratic Party, are eviscerating the working class and the poor. They did that with big-business trade deals during the Clinton and Obama years (Bush was no better) and with no-growth elitist environmental policies, and this has become startlingly evident with their pandemic policies.
Massive school and societal closures have wreaked havoc on our children's education and mental health - and physical health too - not to mention the economic misery heaped on the backs of small businesses and the middle class.
Interestingly, the Democrats don't even try to hide their elitism and motives any longer, parading around unmasked at parties for their elite rich donors while being served by the subservient and masked working class. And, in New York and in similar places with vaccine passport requirements, there is a new apartheid, for it is the working class and minorities and poor who are disproportionately locked out of mainstream society's public venues.
In many ways, these passports are the cultural equivalent of single family zoning districts, a way to lock out the contemptibles and the lower class - from "respectable" neighborhoods in the latter instance and from "respectable" restaurants and theatres in the former.
All this is social oppression and economic misery, courtesy of the Democratic Party. Out-of-control inflation, also courtesy of the oligarchical Democratic Party, only adds to the misery.
One of the most glaring examples of how these policies - specifically, the vaccine mandates, should they take effect - would hurt the poor is the nation's Head Start program. Head Start programs deliver services through 1,600 agencies in local communities, and provide services to more than a million children every year.
Its purpose is to "promote the school readiness of low-income children by enhancing their cognitive, social, and emotional development."
But guess what? Joe Biden has ordered all Head Start staff to be fully vaccinated by January 31, or resign or be fired. That order has already started a wave of closures, denying poor children these services, and many more are expected to close if the order actually kicks in.
On top of the vaccine requirement, all children over the age of 2 have to be masked.
If this isn't insanity, we don't know what is. Even The Washington Post's reliably hysterical Covid panic-monger, Jennifer Rubin, threw in the towel last week, tweeting: "As we recognize that Covid-19 is not a deadly or even severe disease for the vast majority of responsible Americans, we can stop agonizing over 'cases' and focus on those who are hospitalized or at risk of dying."
We've been saying that since the beginning of the pandemic. And those at risk would be the obese and the diabetic and especially the elderly, not Head Start children and most staff or even most Americans. And the Omicron? It's a cold.
Fortunately, at least 25 states have filed lawsuits to challenge the Head Start mandate, Texas in one and 24 states have joined together in another led by the state of Louisiana. Naturally, with the Democrats and Josh Kaul in charge of the Department of Justice, Wisconsin isn't a party to either lawsuit, and won't be.
In the Louisiana-led lawsuit, the plaintiffs say the consequences could be devastating.
According to HHS, the lawsuit states, the Head Start mandate targets 273,000 staff, up to 1 million volunteers, and up to 864,289 children at America's 20,717 Head Start Centers, and it applies to the staff regardless of whether they work in-person or remotely.
"HHS's 'baseline scenario' estimated that 55,121 staff were unvaccinated," the lawsuit states. "On that assumption, combined with HHS's estimate of 29,953 staff who would submit to the mandate, 25,169 staff would remain unvaccinated. Even with HHS's assumption that 13,650 staff would receive an exemption, the mandate would cause Head Start programs to fire 11,519 staff."
And if those proportions held as to volunteers, the mandate would cause Head Start programs to banish 42,000 volunteers, the lawsuit stated. (Meanwhile, a National Head Start Association survey provides data suggesting Head Start programs may lose 50 percent of their staff, or up to 60,000 people.)
No matter the assumptions used, the Head Start mandate would prohibit tens of thousands of staff and volunteers from providing critical services to vulnerable children.
In Kentucky, a recent survey of 28 Head Start grantees showed that approximately 35 percent of those grantees reported that they had 89 percent or less of their full staffing levels, and anticipated firing approximately 17 percent of the staff who they believe will refuse to be vaccinated and not qualify for an exemption.
Neither Wisconsin as a whole nor northern Wisconsin is immune from this looming disaster, as our local lawmakers, Rep. Rob Swearingen (R-Rhinelander) and Mary Felzkowski (R-Irma), pointed out in a December 22 letter to attorney general Josh Kaul.
In that letter, Swearingen and Felzkowski pointed to a looming impact in Florence County, which they observed has only one licensed child care center throughout the entire county.
"If this mandate goes into effect at the end of January, they will either lose four of their six-and-a-half staff members - putting the childcare facility as a whole in jeopardy, or be forced to end their Head Start program - leaving our young children with less resources to be successful in the future," Felzkowski and Swearingen wrote.
The two lawmakers wrote that policymakers in both parties were working with community leaders on solutions, but by allowing the mandate to go through without challenging it, Kaul was helping to tighten "the belt on our communities that simply have no more to give."
They correctly urged Kaul to join Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in his lawsuit against the federal government over the Head Start mandate.
Of course, this attorney general has no intention of siding with the state of Texas in anything. While Kaul happily climbed on board the Biden administration's lawsuit challenging Texas's new abortion law, he isn't any more willing to come to the aid of older children as he is to unborn children.
In fact, by sitting on the sidelines and in effect endorsing the Head Start mandate, he is helping to do very real damage to vulnerable children - damage that is already occurring.
So we thank lawmakers Felzkowski and Swearingen for engaging this battle, and we urge citizens of all parties to get behind their call.
We close with two observations. The first is, these mandates are not just harmful macroeconomically, that is, broadly and generally speaking. They will hurt not the millionaires and the billionaires but average Americans struggling to make do, especially the poor and vulnerable populations. We must not lose sight of vulnerable populations as we fight the broader battle for liberty.
Second, while most eyes are on next year's governor's race, the attorney general's race should not be overlooked. For one thing, while the attorney general is the state's "Top Cop," the AG is much, much more. Not least, the attorney general issues both formal and informal opinions to guide state agencies in the implementation of the law.
In his tenure, Josh Kaul has repeatedly sided with the administrative state over the will of the people as expressed through their elected representatives. Rather than challenge the overreach of the Biden administration into the powers of states, Kaul has backed it up. He has breathtakingly embraced endowing unelected public health officials with the pure power to take control of our lives.
He has turned his back on the need to investigate the willful violation of state elections law and tried to shut down investigations that do so independently. He has joined the Evers administration in supporting brazen censorship through the denial of access to conservative journalists covering him and by opposing transparency generally.
The attorney general also plays an outsized role in shaping and influencing proposed legislation, as Kaul did with his support of new gun control legislation and red flag laws that strip law-abiding citizens of their due-process rights.
And while he refuses to litigate on behalf of vulnerable children, he has served as the reliable litigation handmaiden to the governor and his big-government dreams.
We'll have more on this race later in the year, but for now it's enough to say Kaul must be ousted. It's time that we put Wisconsin's politics right side up again, and the attorney general's office is a good place to start.
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