On the same day that Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-public employee law takes effect in Wisconsin, public workers in Ohio can celebrate a victory in the battle for democracy.
We Are Ohio, the group leading the effort to repeal Ohio Senate Bill 5, the anti-collective bargaining bill, delivered a record number of nearly 1.3 million signatures to the Ohio Secretary of State today, backed by a “Million Signature March” parade of more than 6,000 people, retired fire trucks, motorcycles, a drum line and bagpipes.
“This is the people’s parade,” said We Are Ohio spokesperson Melissa Fazekas in a news conference after the parade. “You are truly one in a million.”
Ohio’s Veto Referendum
Both Ohio and Wisconsin have had union-busting legislation forced on them by Governors John Kasich and Scott Walker in the name of fiscal austerity, and both states saw massive protests in response to the attacks on workers’ rights and public services. The electoral methods of recourse, however, differ between the states.
Ohio is one of 21 states that allow for veto referendums. A veto referendum is a unique mechanism that allows a new law to be placed on a ballot for voters to either ratify or reject if enough signatures are collected within the statutory timeframe.
About 231,000 valid signatures are required to put the collective bargaining law on the November ballot as a referendum. The 1,298,301 signatures were delivered in 1,502 boxes carried by a 48-foot semi-truck. The Ohio Secretary of State’s office must now sort the signatures by county, count them and distribute them to county boards of elections for validation.
According to the Toledo Blade, “Just the filing of the petitions Wednesday will keep Senate Bill 5 from taking effect on Friday as scheduled. If at least 231,149 of the signatures are determined to be valid, the law will remain on hold until the results of the election are known. If voters reject the law, it will never take effect.”
Wisconsin’s Recall Elections
In Wisconsin, six Republican state senators face recall elections over their vote to abolish public employees’ collective bargaining rights. Three Democratic state senators have also been targeted for recall, in response to their decision to leave the state during the battle that ensued over the controversial legislation. Primary elections for the recalls will take place July 12 for the Republicans and July 19 for the Democrats, with general elections following in August. If the Democrats hold onto their seats and three of the six Republicans are recalled, the state Senate will flip to a Democratic majority, loosening the Republican stronghold on the state.
While papers cannot be filed to recall Walker until January 2012, United Wisconsin, the grassroots organization behind the gubernatorial recall movement in Wisconsin currently lists 189,321 pledges for recall. To prompt a recall election, 540,206 signatures would be required.
“What we saw today in Ohio was a response of millions of people saying ‘no’ to Gov. Kasich’s agenda and standing up for bargaining rights and workers’ rights, because we don’t have the ability to remove him,” said Kris Harsh, spokesperson for Stand Up for Ohio.
Both Mechanisms from the Progressive Era
Ohio does not have a recall provision, thus the referendum drive. But both referendums and recalls are progressive tools that date back to the early 1900s. According to the Ohio Historical Society, “Progressives argued that the referendum made the American political system more democratic.” Referendums were approved as an amendment to the Ohio Constitution in 1912, and the Wisconsin Constitution was amended to allow for the recall of elected officials just one year after Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette’s death, in 1926.
La Follette fought for progressive ideals — such as recalls and open primaries — to empower average people at a time when corporate bosses ruled the political scene. La Follette’s fight was against railroad barons and agricultural monopolies, while Ohio battled the Standard Oil Trust.
The overwhelming outpouring of people standing up for their rights and for their communities in Wisconsin and Ohio today indicate that the progressive tools given to Americans by fighters like La Follette are just as relevant and necessary now as they were more than 100 years ago.
By: Jessica Opoien, Center for Media and Democracy, June 29, 2011
June 30, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Class Warfare, Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Constitution, Democracy, GOP, Gov John Kasich, Gov Scott Walker, Governors, Ideologues, Middle Class, Politics, Republicans, Right Wing, State Legislatures, States, Union Busting, Unions | Anti-Union, Melissa Fazekas, Million Signature March, Ohio, Open Primaries, Progressives, Protests, Public Workers, Recalls, Stand Up For Ohio, Veto Referendums, We Are Ohio, Wisconsin, Workers Rights |
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Mitt Romney is just like you: He doesn’t have a job. And that’s hilarious!
Mitt Romney sat at the head of the table at a coffee shop here on Thursday, listening to a group of unemployed Floridians explain the challenges of looking for work. When they finished, he weighed in with a predicament of his own.
“I should tell my story,” Mr. Romney said. “I’m also unemployed.”
According to Jeff Zeleny, the room full of unemployed people laughed at this, which would make it the first recorded instance of someone laughing at something Mitt Romney intended to be funny.
But should they have laughed at poor Mitt Romney? Like so many Americans, the longer Mitt Romney has gone without a job, the worse his chances of finding new employment have become. There are not very many openings in his chosen field, and he has no other marketable skills. Poor Mitt Romney is in many respects a modern-day “forgotten man.”
Should Mitt Romney just rest on his laurels, waiting for some government handout? No! In fact, his insistence on getting another job in government is exactly what is preventing him from swallowing his pride and taking any work that is available. He’s too good to work at Walmart now? He should stop looking to Washington for a solution to his problem, get some part-time minimum wage work, and consider going back to school. There are many fine for-profit institutions that offer night courses for adults just like him.
Mitt Romney needs to pick himself up by his bootstraps and quit complaining.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon War Room, June 16, 2011
June 17, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Class Warfare, Conservatives, Economy, GOP, Government, Governors, Income Gap, Jobs, Middle Class, Mitt Romney, Politics, Public Employees, Republicans, Right Wing, Unemployed, Unemployment, Wealthy | Florida, Government Workers, Job Retraining, Minimum Wage, Politicians, Public Workers, Social Safety Nets, Walmart, Workers |
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The current assault on collective-bargaining rights shows that ideology and smash-mouth politics can triumph over economic reality.
Unions did not cause our economic mess: Greedy bankers drove the financial system to the brink of collapse. Moreover, public workers’ desire for decent wages and benefits is not busting state budgets: The same recession is starving states of essential revenue.
Destroying unions will do nothing to create more jobs or balance budgets, but it will further impoverish millions of American workers.
Yet, with the national union membership rate barely more than 10 percent, why should the rest of the work force care about unions? There are three reasons everyone who works for a living should want to rebuild the American labor movement.
First, if you want a job with a living wage and decent benefits, then you want a strong labor movement. When unions decline, many workers — whether organized or not — see a drop in their standard of living. And driving down wages does not help the American economy, which depends on strong consumer spending.
Second, if you like spending time on the weekends with your friends and family, then you want a strong labor movement. Unions struggled for many decades to get laws mandating an eight-hour day, a minimum wage and a ban on child labor. Given what is happening across the country today, with basic rights being heaved out the window, working people need unions to preserve the gains they have made.
Finally, if you believe in a healthy democracy, then you want a strong labor movement. Many unions work for more than just good wages and benefits; organized labor has also campaigned for access to affordable health care and for protecting the rights of immigrant workers.
So regardless of whether you belong to a union, every working American should be worried about the current open season on workers’ rights.
If the labor movement is weakened further, we will lose one of the last bulwarks against unbridled corporate greed and one of the last champions for dignity at work and a decent standard of living.
By: David Zonderman, CommonDreams.org, Originally published in The Providence Journal, May 26, 2011
May 27, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Banks, Collective Bargaining, Democracy, Economic Recovery, Economy, Gov Scott Walker, Governors, Health Care, Ideologues, Ideology, Immigrants, Income Gap, Jobs, Labor, Lawmakers, Middle Class, Politics, Public Employees, Republicans, State Legislatures, States, Union Busting, Unions | Benefits, Minimum Wage, Politicians, Public Workers, Wages, Workers, Workers Rights |
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“I Am a Man” read the sandwich board posters worn by public sanitation workers in Memphis. Their strike in 1968 came at a time when African American men were still called “boy” to their faces. Their fight for dignity, fair wages and the hope of a better future for their families drew the support of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated in that city 43 years ago today.
The critical services that public employees provided in our communities then and now range from the most humble, such as garbage collectors, to the most dangerous (police officers and firefighters) to the most profoundly influential on the lives of our children.
Yet in state after state, the collective bargaining rights of dedicated teachers and other public employees have been denied or are in serious jeopardy just as they were in the civil rights era. The same politicians pushing these laws are attacking affirmative action, assailing voting rights and pushing laws to block any path to citizenship for millions of hardworking immigrants in this country.
King made clear connections between what he called “our glorious struggle for civil rights” and collective bargaining rights. He called the labor movement “the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress . . . [and] gave birth to . . . new wage levels that meant not mere survival but a tolerable life.”
Heirs of King’s legacy who serve our communities see similarities between the struggle in Memphis then and the struggles in Madison and Columbus now.
Dian Palmer, a public health nurse in Milwaukee whose family moved to Wisconsin from Mississippi for better jobs and greater opportunity, starkly remembers the days when her family faced housing discrimination in their new home state because of the color of their skin.
Palmer is “disgusted” by the ways that what is going on today reminds her of those times. Last month Wisconsin state legislators stripped away collective bargaining rights, wages and benefits from nurses like Palmer, teachers and other public workers and made cavalier comments about how they should all just “get over it,” she says.
Lynn Radcliffe, an administrative assistant in the Cleveland schools’ special education program, testified to Congress last month that today’s public employees are facing the same harsh treatment the Memphis sanitation workers did — “being treated as less than, disrespected and economically deprived of earning a decent wage to take care of their families.”
The powerful business interests that align today against working people hearken back to the “downtown business improvement association” that opposed justice for the striking Memphis sanitation workers. Today’s shadowy 527 groups funded by the Koch brothers and their oil conglomerate — and other bad-actor corporations and executives — would destroy our nation’s last real defense against unrestricted corporate power and Third World wages and working conditions for all.
The Memphis city workers in 1968 tapped into the spiritual power of our common humanity — a source of power that seems to be gaining traction as people stand up for state and local workers today. A key part of King’s theology was the stranger on the Jericho road, which turned around conventional thinking about uniting with people who we perceive as not being like us.
We saw this spirit reflected in the tens of thousands of people who rallied in Wisconsin, Ohio and other states to fight for a vibrant middle class for all workers. Protesters from all walks of life accepted King’s challenge: “The question is not, If I stop to help the [sanitation workers], what will happen to me? The question is, If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?”
In today’s jobless recovery, people of color and women are being hit hard. As public services are cut along with collective bargaining rights, women are disproportionately among those laid off and facing income cuts. The “underemployment” rate of discouraged and part-time workers is roughly 15 percent for whites but 25 percent for black and Hispanic workers.
This week, at pulpits, synagogues and other locations nationwide, ordinary people will commemorate King’s death by standing together to tell the powerful interests and the politicians who carry out their wishes that enough is enough.
We are uniting to stand up for the dream of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “a tolerable life.” In today’s terms, that translates as “a middle class life.” A path into the middle class for millions of Americans — black, white, Latino, Native American and Asian American — is not a dream that we will allow to die.
By: Benjamin Todd Jealous and Mary Kay Henry, The Washington Post, April 3, 2011
April 4, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Class Warfare, Collective Bargaining, Congress, Corporations, Democracy, Equal Rights, Governors, Human Rights, Immigrants, Income Gap, Jobs, Labor, Middle Class, Politics, States, Union Busting, Unions, Wisconsin | Civil Rights, Martin Luther King, Memphis, Ohio, Public Workers |
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“We’re broke.”
You can practically break a search engine if you start looking around the Internet for those words. They’re used repeatedly with reference to our local, state and federal governments, almost always to make a case for slashing programs – and, lately, to go after public-employee unions. The phrase is designed to create a sense of crisis that justifies rapid and radical actions before citizens have a chance to debate the consequences.
Just one problem: We’re not broke. Yes, nearly all levels of government face fiscal problems because of the economic downturn. But there is no crisis. There are many different paths open to fixing public budgets. And we will come up with wiser and more sustainable solutions if we approach fiscal problems calmly, realizing that we’re still a very rich country and that the wealthiest among us are doing exceptionally well.
Consider two of the most prominent we’re-brokers, House Speaker John Boehner and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
“We’re broke, broke going on bankrupt,” Boehner said in a Feb. 28 Nashville speech. For Boehner, this “fact” justifies the $61 billion in domestic spending cuts House Republicans passed (cuts that would have a negligible impact on the long-term deficit). Boehner’s GOP colleagues want reductions in Head Start, student loans and scores of other programs voters like, and the only way to sell them is to cry catastrophe.
Walker, of course, used the “we’re broke” rationale to justify his attack on public-worker collective bargaining rights. Yet the state’s supposedly “broke” status did not stop him from approving tax cuts before he began his war on unions and proposed all manner of budget cuts, including deep reductions in aid to public schools.
In both cases, the fiscal issues are just an excuse for ideologically driven policies to lower taxes on well-off people and business while reducing government programs. Yet only occasionally do journalists step back to ask: Are these guys telling the truth?
The admirable Web site PolitiFact.com examined Walker’s claim in detail and concluded flatly it was “false.”
“Experts agree the state faces financial challenges in the form of deficits,” PolitiFact wrote. “But they also agree the state isn’t broke. Employees and bills are being paid. Services are continuing to be performed. Revenue continues to roll in. A variety of tools – taxes, layoffs, spending cuts, debt shifting – is available to make ends meet. Walker has promised not to increase taxes. That takes one tool off the table.”
And that’s the whole point.
Bloomberg News looked at Boehner’s statement and declared simply: “It’s wrong.” As Bloomberg’s David J. Lynch wrote: “The U.S. today is able to borrow at historically low interest rates, paying 0.68 percent on a two-year note that it had to offer at 5.1 percent before the financial crisis began in 2007. Financial products that pay off if Uncle Sam defaults aren’t attracting unusual investor demand. And tax revenue as a percentage of the economy is at a 60-year low, meaning if the government needs to raise cash and can summon the political will, it could do so.”
Precisely. A phony metaphor is being used to hijack the nation’s political conversation and skew public policies to benefit better-off Americans and hurt most others.
We have an 8.9 percent unemployment rate, yet further measures to spur job creation are off the table. We’re broke, you see. We have a $15 trillion economy, yet we pretend to be an impoverished nation with no room for public investments in our future or efforts to ease the pain of a deep recession on those Americans who didn’t profit from it or cause it in the first place.
As Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) pointed out in a little-noticed but powerful speech on the economy in December, “during the past 20 years, 56 percent of all income growth went to the top 1 percent of households. Even more unbelievably, a third of all income growth went to just the top one-tenth of 1 percent.” Some people are definitely not broke, yet we can’t even think about raising their taxes.
By contrast, Franken noted that “when you adjust for inflation, the median household income actually declined over the last decade.” Many of those folks are going broke, yet because “we’re broke,” we’re told we can’t possibly help them.
Give Boehner, Walker and their allies full credit for diverting our attention with an arresting metaphor. The rest of us are dupes if we fall for it.
By: E. J. Dionne, Op-Ed Columnist, The Washington Post, March 14, 2011
March 14, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Budget, Deficits, Economy, Federal Budget, Ideologues, Politics, States | Al Franken, Crisis, GOP, Gov Scott Walker, Head Start, House Republicans, John Boehner, Public Workers, Spending Cuts, Student Loans, Tax cuts, Unions |
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