Protest fatigue? Not in Wisconsin.
Three months after Governor Scott Walker proposed to strip state, county and municipal employees and public-school teachers of their collective bargaining rights, the governor’s agenda remains stymied. Legal challenges,moves to recall Republican legislators who have sided with the governor and the fear on the part of legislative leaders of mass protests have prevented implementation.
That fear is well-founded.
The Wisconsin protests have inspired similar demonstrations in states across the country, including state Capitol confrontations in Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio and, most recently, California and New York.
Yet, the energy in Wisconsin remains unmistakable, and unrelenting.
Three months to the day after the first large demonstration against Walker’s proposal, tens of thousands of Wisconsinites returned to the great square around the state Capitol and to town and village squares across the state to declare: “This Fight is NOT Over!”
“We’ve stopped Governor Walker’s plan to take away workers rights for three months — but he is not done. He has expanded his attack to seniors, college students, local schools and more. And he is still intent on ending collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin,” went the message from the Wisconsin unions and their allies — along with the “This Fight is NOT Over!” battlecry.
Saturday’s mass rally in Madison and other demonstrations came at a time when the Republican-controlled state legislature is weighing Walker’s budget proposal, which seeks to cut more than $1.5 billion from education and local services, while restructuring state government to take power away from elected school boards and local governments.
The fight inside the Capitol over the budget, and the rest of Walker’s economic, social and political agenda will be intense in coming weeks. Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Phil Neuenfeldt warns that Walker and allies are rushing “to ram through their right wing priorities on corporate deregulation, school privatization and voter suppression before recall elections.”
The union leader was referring to special elections, which are expected as soon as July, that will determine the control of the state Senate.
Six Republican state senators face the threat of recall elections that could remove them, while three Democratic senators are similarly threatened.
The political intensity of the moment has kept the state on high alert, as Saturday’s demonstrations illustrated.
Organizers of the Madison demonstration — the We Are Wisconsin and Wisconsin Wave coalitions — estimated that Saturday’s rally drew between 15,000 and 20,000 Wisconsinites. Smaller rallies and events were held over the weekend across the state.
The crowd in Madison extended far beyond the base of public employees and teachers to include farmers, small business owners and students.
The demonstration in Madison took place on the same day as University of Wisconsin graduation ceremonies. A number of new graduates, wearing their caps and gowns, made their way to the Capitol after collecting their degrees.
One young woman stood outside the Capitol with a large sign that read: “UW Graduate — Thanks to Wisconsin Public School Teachers!”
By: John Nichols, Washington Correspondent for The Nation: Editor, Capital Times, Madison, WI.
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May 18, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Class Warfare, Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Democracy, Elections, GOP, Gov Scott Walker, Governors, Ideology, Labor, Lawmakers, Politics, Public Employees, Republicans, Right Wing, Seniors, State Legislatures, States, Union Busting, Unions, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Republicans | Activists, AFL-CIO, Protests, Recalls, Students, University Of Wisconsin, Wisconsin Legislature, Wisconsin Unions |
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Lawmakers in New Hampshire and Missouri are advancing so-called right-to-work bills that would allow private-sector workers to opt out of joining unions, the latest such efforts to curb labor unions in the legislative season that in many states is now entering the home stretch.
The measures, if successful, would mark the first expansion in a decade of right-to-work laws, which are on the books in 22 states.
Lawmakers in New Hampshire, where Republicans took control of both chambers last fall, passed a right-to-work measure last week. Its success will hinge on whether the state House of Representatives has enough votes to override a promised veto by Democratic Gov. John Lynch. If the bill passes, New Hampshire would become the first right-to-work state in the Northeast, historically a union stronghold.
In Missouri, the sponsor of a state Senate right-to-work bill is trying to shape a compromise in the final days of the legislative session.
Right-to-work measures were proposed in 18 states this year, an unusually high number that labor experts attribute to state budget and economic woes, GOP gains in November and influence by tea-party groups that oppose unions’ political clout. Ohio and Wisconsin didn’t pass specific right-to-work legislation but did adopt laws allowing public-sector employees to opt out of paying dues. The laws generally are backed by business groups and Republicans, opposed by Democrats and denounced by labor.
Most of the bills proposed this year likely are not far enough along to pass before legislative sessions end. Others died during negotiations. In Indiana, for instance, where Democrats fled the state in part to protest such a measure, House Republicans abandoned the idea to get them back to the table.
Still, the large number of proposals demonstrate the growing momentum of the idea. Legislators in many states say they will take up similar measures next year.
Right-to-work legislation is typically among the most contentious. A key contributor to the states’ red ink, advocates say, is public-employee benefits and pensions set by generous union contracts. Additionally, advocates say, the slow economy and a desire to create jobs has revived the issue.
“The political equation has changed in a lot of states,” said Michael Eastman, executive director of labor policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Measures that may not have been possible two and four and six years ago now may be.”
But unions view such measures as a political attack, aimed at curbing their influence. The laws threaten unions because they permit workers to opt out of joining or paying dues in unionized workplaces. Dues are a key source of funds for political efforts, and higher numbers of workers give unions more clout during contract talks. Without right-to-work laws, workers covered by union contracts can be required to pay union dues.
The goal of right-to-work measures is to “weaken the labor movement in key states around the country,” said Mark MacKenzie, president of the AFL-CIO’s state federation in New Hampshire. “If you look at the map, it has nothing to do with protecting workers rights but taking over key areas of the country” for the 2012 presidential election.
Right-to-work laws were set by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. They have largely been enacted by states on the Great Plains and in the South. Those states, including Texas and North Carolina, tend to have the lowest unionization rates.
In March, right-to-work states had both the nation’s lowest U.S. unemployment rate, at 3.6% in North Dakota, and the highest, at 13.2% in Nevada, which still has a relatively large percentage of union members.
In Missouri, 9.9% of all workers belong to a union, and in New Hampshire 10.2% of workers do, according to the U.S. Labor Department. Missouri Sen. Luann Ridgeway, who sponsored that state’s right-to-work measure, said schemes to attract jobs with tax breaks haven’t worked. The bill has stalled in the Senate, but Ms. Ridgeway, a Republican, said she and her colleagues were weighing compromises, such as a voter referendum.
In New Hampshire, unions are lobbying the House, where Republicans have a 294-102 majority. The Senate passed the bill with a two-thirds majority needed to override the veto, but the House vote fell short of that mark.
Unions say they are uncertain about their chances. “I would say that we don’t have the votes right now,” said Dennis Caza, political coordinator for International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 633, in Manchester, N.H., which represents workers at United Parcel Service Inc. and Anheuser-Busch Cos., among other companies.
By: Kris Majer and Amy Merrick, The Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2011
May 9, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Businesses, Collective Bargaining, Democracy, Economy, Elections, GOP, Government, Governors, Jobs, Labor, Lawmakers, Politics, Public Employees, Republicans, State Legislatures, States, Tea Party, Union Busting, Unions | AFL-CIO, Gov John Lynch, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, Ohio, Right To Work Laws, Taft-Hartley Act, Wisconsin, Workers |
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Don’t expect to see a lot of newspapers and Web sites with this headline: “Big Government Bailout Worked.” But it would be entirely accurate.
The actual headlines make the point. “Demand for fuel-efficient cars helps GM to $3.2 billion profit,”declared The Post. “GM Reports Earnings Tripled in First Quarter, as Revenue Jumped 15%,” reported the New York Times.
Far too little attention has been paid to the success of the government’s rescue of the Detroit-based auto companies, and almost no attention has been paid to how completely and utterly wrong bailout opponents were when they insisted it was doomed to failure.
“Having the federal government involved in every aspect of the private sector is very dangerous,” Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) told Fox News in December 2008. “In the long term it could cause us to become a quasi-socialist country.” I don’t see any evidence that we have become a “quasi-socialist country,” just big profits.
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) called the bailout “the leading edge of the Obama administration’s war on capitalism,” while other members of Congress derided the president’s auto industry task force. “Of course we know that nobody on the task force has any experience in the auto business, and we heard at the hearing many of them don’t even own cars,” declared Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) after a hearing on the bailout in May 2009. “And they’re dictating the auto industry for our future? What’s wrong with this picture?”
What’s wrong, sorry to say, is that you won’t see a news conference where the bailout’s foes candidly acknowledge how mistaken they were.
The lack of accountability is stunning but not surprising. It reflects a deep bias in the way our political debate is carried out. The unexamined assumption of so much political reporting is that attacks on government’s capacity to do anything right make intuitive sense because “everybody knows” that government is basically inefficient and incompetent, especially when compared with the private sector.
Government failure gets a lot of coverage. That’s useful because government should be held accountable for its mistakes. What’s not okay is that we hear very little when government acts competently and even creatively. For if mistakes teach lessons, successes teach lessons, too.
In the case of the car industry, allowing the market to operate without any intervention by government would have wiped out a large part of the business that is based in Midwestern states. This irreversible decision would have damaged the economy, many communities and tens of thousands of families.
And contrary to critics’ predictions, government officials were quite capable of working with the market to restructure the industry. Government didn’t overturn capitalism. It tempered the market at a moment when its “natural” forces were pushing toward catastrophe. Government had the resources to buy the industry time.
What’s heartening is that average voters understand that broad assaults on government provide better guidance for the production of sound bites than for the creation of sensible public policy. That’s why House Republicans are backpedaling like crazy on their plans to privatize Medicare — even as they pretend not to.
Conservatives really believed that voters mistrusted government so much that they’d welcome a chance to scrap Big Government Medicare and have the opportunity to purchase policies in the wondrous health insurance marketplace. Don’t people assume that anything is better than government?
But there were deep potholes on the road to a market utopia. Put aside that the Republican budget wouldn’t provide enough money in the long term for the elderly to afford decent private coverage. The truth is that most consumers don’t have great confidence in the private insurance companies, with which they have rather a lot of experience.
When it comes to guaranteeing their access to health care in old age, most citizens trust government more than they trust the marketplace. This doesn’t mean they think Medicare is without flaws. What they do know is that Medicare does not cut people off in mid-illness and that its coverage is affordable because government subsidizes it.
It’s axiomatic that government isn’t perfect and that we’re better off having a large private sector. It ought to be axiomatic that the private market isn’t perfect, either, and that we need government to step in when the market fails. The success of the auto bailout and the failure of the Republicans’ anti-Medicare campaign both teach the same lesson: The era of anti-government extremism is ending.
By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 8, 2011
May 9, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Big Government, Budget, Congress, Conservatives, Economic Recovery, Economy, GOP, Health Care, Jobs, Journalists, Labor, Media, Medicare, Politics, President Obama, Press, Pundits, Republicans | Accountability, Auto Industry, Bailouts, Capitalism, Detroit, Extremism, General Motors, House Republicans, Rep Dan Burton, Rep Lamar Smith, Rep Louie Gohmert, Socialism |
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Conservatives seem to have a knack for changing the subject whenever their backs are up against the wall. Over the last several weeks, there has been an orchestrated chorus by the House Republicans in particular to define the so-called “deficit problem” in terms of a wild spending binge by the federal government and the Obama administration. They seem to have easily forgotten who got us into this mess in the first place. That aside, everyone from Speaker John Boehner to Sen Mitch McConnell have been bellowing throughout the halls of Congress and at every available microphone that “We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem”.
It’s amazing how we all have bought into this line. The media, in its usual rush to get a headline or sound bite, immediately picked up this line and has been the waterboys for the GOP by enabling this hoax on the American people. The focus in most circles has been on spending cuts. Well, we need to re-characterize what is actually going on here. We don’t have a spending problem..we have a fraud problem.
This fraud has been played on the American people by an ideologically depraved Republican party for at least the last ten years. They have made everybody believe that if we just make the wealthy wealthier, somewhere down the road, we will all benefit. There would be job creation with full employment, small businesses would thrive, home prices would fall, gas would cost less than two dollars a gallon and there would be a chicken in every pot. And we believed it hook, line and sinker. Now we are back to square one. None of these things have happened except the fact that we have indeed made the wealthy wealthier. In 2010, the 400 Americans with the highest adjusted gross revenue incomes averaged $345 million. The average federal income tax was 17%, down from 26% in 1992. The income gap just keeps getting wider. Why does this continue to happen? Because we let it happen.
Just last week, Standard and Poor’s accentuated the Republican clarion that the sky is falling. This call comes from the same S&P who supported every toxic waste subprime security under the sky, the same S&P who sold its ratings to the highest bidder. Regulators have also assisted the GOP in their fraud. The Office of the Currency has gone out of its way to protect its clients, ie the banks. Efforts to reign in the banks and stop their predatory loan practices have been foiled at every turn. Even the banks are too big to fail. Profits for banks, corporations, CEO’s, Wall St and the wealthy just keep soaring. There is a lot of back scratching going on here, by and for a lot of wealthy people.
Now that the cat is out of the bag, all of these wealthy people are trying to figure out a way to take the spot light off themselves. They are beginning to see that they may not be able to stave off demands any longer that they pay their fare share. People who have been adversely affected for so many years are now demanding that this fraud be stopped. Teachers and other low wage earners, the poor, seniors, students and union members have all come to believe that they have sacrificed enough. Even some tea party members are beginning to see the light.
For too many years, the Republicans and their wealthy friends have had their hands in everybody’s pockets. Your pocket was the revenue stream for them. General Electric and the Koch Brothers were probably happier than anyone. The Republicans were also happy because their happy friends provided the cover that allows them to do whatever they want to in terms of policy. Being the ideologues that they are, this protection gives them unimpeded opportunity to push forward with their agenda, from dissolving women’s rights, overturning the Affordable Care Act, union busting, replacing Medicare with vouchers and completely eliminating any sense of environmental protection just to name a few. With happy and contented wealthy backers behind you for so many years, how could you go wrong. My, how things are changing.
The revenue stream that the Republicans have depended on for so long is now drying up…that stream is you. They are finding that when they put their hands in your pockets now, they are feeling the seam of the sewn pocket. There just isn’t any more money there. They become flushed and filled with extreme panic, finally realizing that they are going to have their taxes raised after all these years. Their backs are against the wall. So what do they do now? Change the debate..”Let’s raise taxes on everybody”. Nice try!
It’s well past time that shared sacrifice mean exactly what it says. It is no longer acceptable that the poor, under privileged, seniors and the disenfranchised continue to carry the load for corporations, Wall St and their deadbeat tax-evading friends. No, let’s not raise taxes on everybody. Let’s end the fraud and insist that the wealthy start paying taxes just like everyone else. This being Easter Sunday, this may be a good symbolic time to increase taxes only for the rich. We should leave that rate in place for oh say, the next 40 years. Besides, they have accumulated a fair amount of wealth over the years and should easily be able to live off that profit during that time. Perhaps take a trip or two or just wander around the world enjoying their spoils. We will pledge to re-visit this issue after that time. If, and only if, the middle class has reached a level playing field, then we can talk about lowering the tax rate for the wealthy. I think Moses and the Pharaoh’s would be happy with this compromise. So it is written, so let it be done.
By: raemd95, mykeystrokes.com, April 24, 2011
April 24, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Affordable Care Act, Banks, Businesses, Class Warfare, Congress, Conservatives, Consumers, Corporations, Deficits, Democracy, Economy, Equal Rights, Federal Budget, Foreclosures, General Electric, GOP, Government, Health Care, Ideologues, Ideology, Income Gap, Jobs, Journalists, Koch Brothers, Labor, Lawmakers, Medicare, Middle Class, Politics, President Obama, Press, Public, Pundits, Regulations, Republicans, Right Wing, Standard and Poor's, Tax Increases, Taxes, Tea Party, Unemployed, Unions, Wall Street, Wealthy, Womens Rights | Fraud, House Republicans, Housing, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Mortage Loans, Shared Sacrifice, Spending Cuts, Tax Revenue |
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Ohio Democrats this week introduced into a divided state legislature a new bill that would allow Ohio citizens to recall Governor John Kasich and other legislatures. The state has been in an ideological upheaval for months after Kasich’s budget bill was introduced, similar to the Wisconsin bill that has received incredible national attention for stripping unions of their collective bargaining rights, and eventually signed April 2nd after some concessions were made by the Republican-held Assembly and Senate.
There are now 17 other states where similar bills have been passed. Democrats in Ohio are now trying to join the ranks of some of those states like Wisconsin, where voters also have the option to recall their elected legislatures.
Reuters reported that State Representatives Mike Foley and Robert Hagan’s bill would allow “Ohio voters to undertake a recall effort if they gather petition signatures of voters equal to 15 percent of the total votes for governor or in a particular legislative district in the last election.”
Recall efforts are already well underway in Wisconsin, where 16 senators have petitions started against them. Governor Scott Walker, in his inaugural term, cannot be recalled until he has served in office for one full year, according to Wisconsin state law.
Kasich’s bill to limit collective bargaining rights of unions and slash funding for many state-funded programs has received passionate opposition by supporters of workers’ rights. Protests in Columbus drew thousands in February, riding the wave of protests started in Madison and that then spread throughout the country.
The hotly-contested Senate Bill 5, or SB5 as it has been dubbed by the media, severely limits the actions of unions, and in conjunction with Kasich’s budget, introduces major cuts to public programs: like a $852 million cut to schools.
The Toledo Blade explains SB5: “It prohibits all public employees from striking, prohibits local governments from picking up any portion of an employee’s contributions to his pension, eliminates automatic step and longevity raises in favor of a yet undefined performance-pay system, and prohibits unions from automatically collecting ‘fair share’ fees from members of a workforce who opt not to join the union.”
Besides the Democrats’ efforts to pass the recall bill, Ohio law also allows for a public referendum of any passed bill. Opponents of the bill need to gather 231,147 signatures 90 days from the official signing of the bill for the statewide referendum to be voted on Nov. 8th.
By: Jennifer Page, Center for Media and Democracy, April 11, 2011
April 13, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Democracy, Democrats, Economy, Elections, GOP, Gov John Kasich, Gov Scott Walker, Government, Governors, Ideologues, Labor, Lawmakers, Middle Class, Politics, Public Employees, Republicans, State Legislatures, States, Union Busting, Unions, Voters | Ohio, Ohio Senate Bill 5, Public Employees, Public Referendums, Recalls, State Budgets, Toledo Blade, Wisconsin, Workers Rights |
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