Friday, August 24, 2012

This is a fantastic essay. It provides a useful framework for interpreting the bullshit rhetoric that gets thrown around in political circles and in the media.

With that essay in mind, I will focus on one piece of this article, Broke cities: What's next?:

"The best option is to empower the local control boards we already have: the local government that was elected," said Peter Baynes, executive director of the New York Conference of Mayors. "But they don't have sufficient power to manage their workforce costs, and what we've seen in municipalities is that this lack of power leads to such a problem that the state has to come in with a control board."

I happen to agree with that first sentence, being a fan of democracy. But that's beside the point. On to the rhetoric: "[...] they don't have sufficient power to manage their workforce costs [...]"

I think it would be fair to read that sentence as: administrations don't have the legal right to break negotiated contracts. But, that doesn't have the muddled and middle of the road and reasonable-like tone that this person is going for. So it gets changed to sufficient power and workforce costs.

And there is the rhetoric that can move the discussion to ways in which to put the screws to working folks, while sounding nice and reasonable. See?

No comments:

Post a Comment