This Will Help Us: Hitting Scott Walker Where It Hurts
by L. S. Carbonell
There are two things I don’t normally advocate – boycotts that hurt innocents and Walmart. Hopefully, the pain won’t last long and the slight increase in Walmart’s income won’t haunt me.
Walmart has a distribution contract with a Vermont co-operative called Cabot Creamery. Cabot makes awesome cheeses, as well as a great line of other dairy products. They use only milk that comes from farms in the co-op in Vermont and the border area of upstate New York. While living in Georgia, I bought only a things in our town’s Super Walmart – the Cabot products. The prices are competitive and the quality is award-winning. You can also go on-line and order Cabot’s cheeses directly. I highly recommend the Tuscan. Try your favorite supermarket first, but I know for a fact that Helluva Good Cheese outbid Cabot for shelf space in a New England chain, so I’m not holding out too much hope outside of Vermont.
I’m telling you all this for a reason. One of the fastest ways to stop Scott Walker’s assault on collective bargaining, local budgets, education and everything else that the Koch brothers have told him to devastate is to hit the state of Wisconsin in its collective pocketbook. Stop buying Wisconsin dairy products. The immediate impact will be on those Wisconsin company that manufacture the products, and not on the farmers. They will be the second-tier victims of a boycott. Hopefully, we can get it through Walker’s dense cranium that hurting children and unions in order to give massive tax breaks to bazillionaires is unacceptable.
There’s something else at stake here as well. We New Englanders don’t tend to shift our problems off to the rest of the country, so we’ve just trudged along under the weight of the loss of the New England Dairy Compact since the Bush administration killed it to punish our late Senator Jim Jeffords for jumping parties. We don’t get farm subsidies in the same way other states do. Our dairy farms are not allowed to participate in “guest worker” programs. That’s part of the reason Vermont has this quiet conspiracy to protect the illegal immigrants working on our dairy farms. Switching to Vermont-made products helps send the message that our farmers have been treated as unfairly as the teachers and public workers in Wisconsin. Ignore New Hampshire and Maine. They have idiots for governors.
The argument is constantly being made that the members of public sector unions have better benefits and salaries than the private sector. That’s not what’s wrong with public sector unions. It’s what’s wrong with the private sector. As unions have shrunk, as big corporations like Walmart have poured millions into fighting unions, our private sector workers have suffered. We have lost decent pay, decent benefits, decent work schedules, decent working conditions. If we can’t completely stop Wisconsin, we can at least slow them down while we spread awareness that forcing public sector union members to give up what they have fought for is not fair. Forcing private sector employers to match public sector union contracts is fair.
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