About that battle over public employee unions in Wisconsin, the governor's ture colors become more visible, fascist. His true prupose is just to destroy unions and move toward corporate fascism. The Teap Party stupidity sells out the state to corporate feudalism. Life Im America reduces to a dull tedious series of psychological and financial raping of all who are not rich and powerful.
The Nation:feb 11, 11
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s proposal to strip public employees of most collective bargaining rights, cut pay and gut benefits without any negotiation represents the most radical assault yet by the current crop of Republican governors on the rights of workers has inspired outrage in a historically progressive and pro-labor state.
With unions calling on members an allies to “fight back” against a “blatant power grab,” tensions are running so high that the governor, who took office in January, is threatening to call out the National Guard in case of industrial action by state, county and municipal employees. “Even if you don’t like unions,” says Rich Abelson, executive director of AFSCME Council 48, the union that represents Milwaukee County workers, “surely we all can agree that anti-freedom attacks that deny public employees the right to negotiate a fair contract…are outrageous and wrong.”
Even Republicans are unsettled, with a senior GOP legistator, state Senator Luther Olsen, describing the governor’s announcement a “radical” move that threatens “a lot of good working people.”
Walker never discussed ending collective bargaining during a campaign in which he promised to work across lines of partisanship and ideology to create jobs.
Instead, he has chosen to play political games.
The governor’s budget repair bill, which includes the plan to gut collective bargaining protections for public employees, does not seek to get the state’s fiscal house in order.
Rather, it is seeks a political goal: destroying public employee unions, which demand fair treatment of workers and hold governors of both parties to account when they seek to undermine public services and public education.
Former US Senator Russ Feingold decried the move, declaring that “Governor Walker’s request to the State Legislature to eliminate nearly all of the collective-bargaining rights for thousands of Wisconsin workers is big government at its worst. No private employer can do what the governor proposes, nor should it. For decades, Wisconsin has protected the rights of workers to collectively bargain with their employer on wages, benefits, workplace rules, and many other aspects of their employment. The governor is wrong to suggest that public workers are responsible for the state’s budget woes, and he is wrong to use that bogus excuse to strip them of rights that millions of other American workers have.”
Feingold’s reference to “American workers” is notable, as the attention to what happens in Wisconsin is about more than the wrangling between one governor and public employees in one state. If Walker succeeds, his strategy is all but sure to be adopted by other Republican governors in other states.
The claim in Wisconsin—as it has been nationally— is that overwhelming fiscal challenges require public employees to take a hit.
But the hit Walker proposes has sewn the seeds of political, social and economic instability in a state that has traditionally enjoyed good relations between government and unions.
The economic threat may well be the most significant especially at a time when Wisconsin needs to create jobs, as opposed to political fights.
CBS.news.comby Plumbline89 March 10, 2011 1:41 PM EST
"Despite long claiming that the purpose of the bill was to balance the budget, the GOP stripped all fiscal provisions out of the bill."\
There you go. That says it all. Shep Smith over at that network that shall remain nameless was correct, this is 100% about breaking unions, period. It has not one speck of sand to do with anything related to the budget. Governors of both parties across the country have balanced their budgets without stooping to score some political points with their business donors. I can cut most congressional Republicans some slack most of the time, because they at least attempt to score cheap points with the voters form time to time. Not so with Mr. Walker. As the prank call so wonderfully exposed, he is out for one interest and one interest only. Those in business who gave him money. He does not represent the voters of his state, but rather an oligarchy of elite business interests who want to control the markets and the political class. He and those who aided him in the Statehouse need to be put on trial for their actions.
Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/8601-500202_162-20041524-2.html?assetTypeId=30&blogId=#ixzz1GxLACETZ
The NationMarch 17,2011
Wisconsin Republican state Senators, fresh from passing draconian anti-labor and privatization legislation, jetted into Washington, DC, Wednesday night to collect tens of thousands of dollars in contributions from the one constituency group that approves of what Governor Scott Walker and his GOP allies are doing: corporate lobbyists.
But if Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and Joint Finance Committee co-chair Alberta Darling thought they could get away from the mounting campaign to remove Republican state senators and shift control of the chamber to the Democrats—creating a check and balance on Walker—they were mistaken.
Outside the offices of the BGR Group—the “B” stands for Barbour, as in Mississippi Governor and potential GOP presidential candidate Haley—as many as 1,000 workers, students, union activists and allies filled the streets of downtown Washington. Many surged into the building where the senators met with lobbyists who paid as much a $5,000 to “host” the gathering to thank the Wisconsin Republicans.
The DC protesters chanted many of the same union slogans that have been heard at mass protests in Wisconsin. And they picked up a political slogan as well: “Recall!”
Across Wisconsin, citizens are gathering petition signatures to force recall elections that could remove as many as eight GOP senators who backed the governor’s anti-union bill. If just three seats (including Darling’s) flip to the Democrats, Fitzgerald will no longer be majority leader and Walker’s agenda will suddenly face serious legislative hurdles.
Mocking the Tea Party rhetoric about gunplay and “Second Amendment Solutions,” one protester in DC held a sign that read: “We Don’t Reload, We Recall!”
The fact that Fitzgerald has made the linkage between the Senate vote for Walker’s bill and his party’s corporate benefactors, was not lost of those who gathered outside the BGR offices.
Jonathan Backer, who came to Washington from Kenosha, Wisconsin, hailed the protests in DC, saying, “It’s such a good representation of what’s wrong with our democracy right now. There’s so much corporate power in our democracy where literally seconds after one of the worst anti-labor decisions that’s ever happened in the Midwest, you’ve got a big fundraiser going on here, right here in DC. What we’re doing here is all about trying to fight for unions so there is a way to combat this corporate power going on in democracy right now.”
Former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold was more blunt:
“Today, Wednesday March 16th, Republican state senators from Wisconsin are in Washington, DC, attending a big fundraiser at the headquarters of a corporate lobbying firm. That’s less than one week after Republicans rammed through an anti-worker bill that polls showed was heavily opposed by Wisconsinites—but was heavily favored by corporate lobbyists,” said Feingold. “If your senator is Scott Fitzgerald of Juneau, Glenn Grothman of West Bend or Alberta Darling of River Hills, your senator is at the fundraiser. But no matter where you are in Wisconsin, your interests just got sold out to big corporate interests.”
also by John Nichols:
