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The People Revolt: Reverse Robin Hood Visits Banks Near Wisconsin Capitol

This afternoon, the People’s Rights Campaign, a coalition of labor and community organizations, organized a community action on Madison’s Capitol Square. Activists scrounged for their last pennies and taped them to “deposit slips” so that they could be deposited directly into the accounts of the CEOs of M&I Bank, Bank of America and JPMorgan ChaseBank.

“Why should they have to pay any taxes at all when grubby peasants and working stiffs still have a few pennies left in their pockets?” asked the group’s press release.

Kim Grveles of Wisconsin Resists”What we’re trying to do here is call a spade a spade,” National Nurses United organizer Pilar Schiavo said. “Walker’s budget takes from the poor, seniors, students and workers at a time when people most need help. Walker is taking our last pennies and giving them to the rich and to corporations.”

Kim Grveles of Wisconsin Resists added, “We’re demonstrating Walker’s agenda to transfer money from people to corporate sponsors of the governor and other GOP members of the legislature. Every bill is making us poorer and making the big corporate campaign contributors wealthier just like a reverse Robin Hood– stealing from the working class poor and giving to the rich.

“The corporations aren’t paying their fair share in taxes, they’re getting bailout money and they’re making millions in profits every year.”

Organizers referenced a May 1st article in the Wisconsin State Journal that pointed out that “changes to a corporate tax law proposed in Walker’s budget may mean businesses would pay the state about $46 million less in taxes over the next two years– and $40 million less each year after that.”

Reverse Robin Hook Mike Amato speaks in front of M&IGroups of protestors spread out and took their pennies and deposit slips to the branches of M&I Bank, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase Bank closest to the Capitol.

At M&I, security guards locked the front door as soon as the group of a dozen or so approached. Mike Amato of the Teaching Assistants’ Association, who was dressed as a Reverse Robin Hood, tried giving his deposit slip to a guard, saying, “They want to create a peasant system, so we’re helping them out by being reverse Robin Hoods, stealing pennies from the poor to give to the rich.”

The security guard seemed unimpressed, later blocking off the entrance to the drive-thru teller window as well, saying that it was “private property” and making deposits to the CEO’s account would not be allowed, but he was later seen with a bank manager, discussing the text of one of the deposit slips the group had left behind.

Reverse Robin Hood’s BandAccording to Schiavo, a group of protestors succeeded in getting into the local Bank of America investment branch, where they deposited their pennies into CEO Brian Moynihan‘s account. Protesters were locked out of JPMorgan Chase Bank’s branch but were able to deposit their slips through the slit between the glass doors and leave them in a pile in the entryway.

Schiavo noted that the People’s Rights Campaign seeks, through this action, to call attention to their platform, which calls for “restored rights to living wage jobs, access to healthcare and retirement security rather than giving back to corporations that have already received money from the government and continue to give huge bonuses to their CEOs.”

By: Rebecca Wilce, Center for Media and Democracy, May 11, 2011

May 12, 2011 Posted by | Bank Of America, Banks, Businesses, Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Consumers, Corporations, Financial Institutions, GOP, Gov Scott Walker, Ideologues, Ideology, Income Gap, Jobs, Middle Class, Politics, Public Employees, Republicans, Taxes, Union Busting, Unions, Wealthy, Wisconsin, Wisconsin Republicans | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The “Serious Republican Candidate”: Mitch Daniels Suddenly Discovers Planned Parenthood Funding

About a month ago, Time’s Joe Klein noted his disgust with the Republican presidential field, lamenting the fact that the candidates are “a bunch of vile, desperate-to-please, shameless, embarrassing losers.” The whole lot looks like a “dim-witted freak show.”

But, Klein said, the field may not be set. The columnist pleaded with Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) to run. “I may not agree with you on most things, but I respect you,” Klein said. He added that Daniels seems to respect himself enough not to behave like a “public clown.” This is an extremely common sentiment. Daniels, the former Bush budget director who helped create today’s fiscal mess, is supposed to be The Serious Republican Candidate For Serious People. He has no use for culture wars — Daniels famously called for a “truce” on these hot-button social issues — and despite his humiliating record, the governor at least pretends to care about fiscal sanity, earning unrestrained praise from the likes of David Brooks.

Perhaps now would be a good time for the political establishment to reevaluate their opinion of Mitch Daniels.

Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana said Friday that he would sign a bill cutting off Medicaid financing for Planned Parenthood, a move that lawmakers in several states have begun pondering as a new approach in the battle over abortion. Indiana becomes the first state to go forward.

Abortion rights supporters condemned the decision, saying it would leave 22,000 poor residents of Indiana, who use Planned Parenthood’s 28 health facilities in the state, with nowhere to go for a range of women’s services, from breast cancer screening to birth control.

Daniels, who apparently no longer has any use for his own rhetoric about a culture-war “truce,” said his decision was dictated by the fact that Planned Parenthood provides abortion services, adding that the health organization can resume its state funding by refusing to help women terminate their unwanted pregnancies.

That only 3% of Planned Parenthood’s operations deal with abortions, and that public funding of abortions is already legally prohibited, apparently didn’t matter.

What’s especially striking about this is how cruel and unnecessary it is. Daniels has been governor of Indiana for more than six years, and he’s never had a problem with Planned Parenthood funding. He was Bush’s budget director for more than two years, and he never had a problem with Planned Parenthood funding.

But now that he’s thinking about running for president, and has hysterical right-wing activists to impress, now Mitch Daniels has suddenly discovered Planned Parenthood funding — which has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades — is no longer acceptable to him.

It’s not as if Planned Parenthood, its mission, or its menu of health services has changed. The only thing that’s changed is the radicalism of new Republican Party and those who hope to lead it. The real-world effect of Daniels’ cruelty is unmistakable: fewer working-class families will have access to contraception, family planning services, pap smears, cancer screenings, and tests for sexually-transmitted diseases. Indiana has 28 Planned Parenthood centers in the state, and most of its patients live in poverty.

Also note that this was as clear a test of Daniels’ purported principles as we’ve seen to date — he had to choose between fiscal considerations (millions of dollars in federal health care funding) and culture-war considerations (cutting off a public health organization to satisfy rabid conservatives). As of late yesterday — Daniels made the announcement late on a Friday afternoon, probably out of embarrassment — the governor prioritized the latter over the former. To prove his right-wing bona fides, Daniels decided to put politics ahead of women’s health.

Ironically, the Republican who claims to oppose abortions is going to make it more likely more women will have unwanted pregnancies.

It’s indefensible. Daniels should be ashamed of himself and the pundits who praised Daniels’ “seriousness” should feel awfully foolish right about now.

By: Steve Benen, Political Animal, Washington Monthly, April 30, 2011

April 30, 2011 Posted by | Abortion, Class Warfare, Conservatives, GOP, Governors, Lawmakers, Medicaid, Planned Parenthood, Politics, Republicans, Right Wing, States, Women, Women's Health, Womens Rights | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Midwest’s New Class Politics And The Political Irony Of The GOP

The battle for the Midwest is transforming American politics. Issues of class inequality and union influence, long dormant, have come back to life. And a part of the country that was integral to the Republican surge of 2010 is shifting away from the GOP just a few months later.

Republican governors, particularly in Wisconsin and Ohio, denied themselves political honeymoons by launching frontal assaults on public employee unions and proposing budgets that include deep cuts in popular programs.

Democrats in the region are elated at the quick turn in their fortunes. A few months ago, they worried that a region President Obama dominated in 2008 was turning against him. Republican triumphs in Wisconsin and Ohio, as well as in Indiana, Michigan and Iowa, all pointed to trouble for the president.

Now, for reasons having more to do with decisions by GOP governors than with anything the president has done, many voters, particularly in the white working class, are having second thoughts.

“We certainly addressed the issue of Reagan Democrats,” said Mayor Tom Barrett of Milwaukee, referring to the blue-collar voters who began drifting Republican in 1980. Barrett lost to Gov. Scott Walker in November by 52 percent to 46 percent, but recent polls suggest he would defeat Walker if the election were rerun. In Ohio, the approval rating of Republican Gov. John Kasich, who won narrowly in 2010, has fallen to as low as 30 percent in one poll.

In telephone interviews last week, Democratic politicians across the Midwest avoided premature victory claims. “I don’t think we’ll know until November of 2012,” Gov. Mark Dayton of Minnesota replied when asked if the Republican moves against public employee unions would turn out to be a major error.

It’s a political irony that Republicans clearly believed unionized public employees were so unpopular that taking them on would play well with voters.

“It was part of an intentional strategy on the part of the right-wing Republican ideological machine to split private-sector workers from public-sector workers,” said Dayton, a Democrat who beat back the 2010 Republican tide. After decades involving “a giant transfer of wealth to the very top,” Dayton said, the campaign against public unions was “a way to distract attention” by creating “a fight over who is getting a dollar an hour more or less.” The effort, he added, “has not worked as well as they thought it would.”

Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, said that even union sympathizers were surprised at the degree to which the Republicans’ approach “blew up in their faces” and that “the poll numbers of support for collective bargaining for public-sector workers are stronger than even most labor supporters expected.”

Another surprise: the extent to which Democrats, long wary of being accused of “class warfare,” are now more eager than ever to cast the GOP as the party of the privileged.

Barrett recounted a parable making the rounds among Wisconsin Democrats, telling of a room in which “a zillionaire, a Tea Party person and a union member” confront a plate of 12 cookies: “The zillionaire takes 11 of the cookies, and says to the other two, ‘That guy is trying to steal your cookie.’ ”

Still, Democrats are aware that the flight from the Republicans is also a reaction against ideology. Dayton saw the GOP’s heavy-handed methods in Wisconsin as playing badly in a region proud of its tradition of consensus-building and good government.

And Brown said that while joblessness was the most important issue in last year’s election, one of the most effective Republican arguments was the claim that “Obama was governing by ideology.” That charge has been turned on its head because “now, they are so overdoing governing by ideology.”

Sen. Al Franken said he saw this reaction against ideology playing out in Washington’s budget battle as well, citing the example of leading Minnesota business people, including Republicans, who have been appalled at cuts in effective job-training programs.

The first electoral tests of the new class politics will come in Wisconsin. David Prosser, a conservative state Supreme Court justice, is facing a surprisingly tough challenge April 5 from JoAnne Kloppenburg, who has strong backing from anti-Walker forces. Later this year, several Republican state senators could face recall elections.

The tests for the longer run will be whether echoes from the heartland’s struggles over economic justice are heard as Congress debates budget cuts — and the extent to which Obama, who has already benefited from fights he did not pick, decides to join the battle.

By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 27, 2011

March 28, 2011 Posted by | Class Warfare, Collective Bargaining, Conservatives, Gov Scott Walker, Governors, Ideologues, Jobs, Middle Class, Politics, Populism, Republicans, Right Wing, State Legislatures, States, Unions, Wisconsin | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

What Wisconsin Democrats Can Teach Washington Democrats

Consider the contrast between two groups of Democrats, in Wisconsin and in the nation’s capital.

Washington Democrats, including President Obama, have allowed conservative Republicans to dominate the budget debate so far. As long as the argument is over who will cut more from federal spending, conservatives win. Voters may think the GOP is going too far, but when it comes to dollar amounts, they know Republicans will always cut more.

In Wisconsin, by contrast, 14 Democrats in the state Senate defined the political argument on their own terms – and they are winning it.

By leaving Madison rather than providing a quorum to pass Gov. Scott Walker’s assault on collective bargaining for public employees, the Wisconsin 14 took a big risk. Yet to the surprise of establishment politicians, voters have sided with the itinerant senators and the unions against a Republican governor who has been successfully portrayed as an inflexible ideologue. And in using questionable tactics to force the antiunion provision through the Senate on Wednesday, Republicans may win a procedural round but lose further ground in public opinion.

Here’s the key to the Wisconsin battle: For the first time in a long time, blue-collar Republicans – once known as Reagan Democrats – have been encouraged to remember what they think is wrong with conservative ideology. Working-class voters, including many Republicans, want no part of Walker’s war.

A nationwide Pew Research Center survey released last week, for example, showed Americans siding with the unions over Walker by a margin of 42 percent to 31 percent. Walker’s 31 percent was well below the GOP’s typical base vote because 17 percent of self-described Republicans picked the unions over their party’s governor.

At my request, Pew broke the numbers down by education and income and, sure enough, Walker won support from fewer than half of Republicans in two overlapping groups: those with incomes under $50,000 and those who did not attend college. Walker’s strongest support came from the wealthier and those with college educations, i.e., country club Republicans.

Republicans cannot afford to hemorrhage blue-collar voters. In a seminal article in the Weekly Standard six years ago, conservative writers Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat observed: “This is the Republican Party of today – an increasingly working-class party, dependent for its power on supermajorities of the white working-class vote, and a party whose constituents are surprisingly comfortable with bad-but-popular liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding clumsy environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a health care entitlement.”

Put aside that I favor the policies Douthat and Salam criticize. Their electoral point is dead on. In 2010, working-class whites gave Republicans a 30-point lead over Democrats in House races. That’s why the Wisconsin fight is so dangerous to the conservative cause: Many working-class Republicans still have warm feelings toward unions, and Walker has contrived to remind them of this.

Which brings us to the Washington Democrats. Up to now, the only thing clear about the budget fight is that Democrats want to cut less from discretionary spending than Republicans do. Quietly, many Democrats acknowledge that they have been losing this argument.

Thus the importance of a speech on Wednesday by Sen. Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, intended to “reset the debate.” As Schumer noted, the current battle, focused on “one tiny portion of the budget,” evades the real causes of long-term budget deficits.

Schumer dared to put new revenue on the table – including some tax increases that are popular among the sorts of blue-collar voters who are turning against Walker. Schumer, for example, spoke of Obama’s proposal to end subsidies for oil and gas companies and for higher taxes on “millionaires and billionaires.” Yes, closing the deficit will require more revenue over the long run. But right now, the debate with the House isn’t focusing on revenue at all.

Schumer, who spoke at the Center for American Progress, also suggested cuts to agriculture subsidies and in unnecessary defense programs. He proposed changes in Medicare and Medicaid incentives that would save money, including reform of how both programs pay for prescription drugs. The broad debate Schumer called for would be a big improvement on the current petty argument, which he rightly described as “quicksand.”

To this point, Washington Democrats have been too afraid and divided to engage compellingly on the fundamentals of what government is there to do and how the burdens of deficit reduction should be apportioned. Wisconsin Democrats have shown that the only way to win arguments is to take risks on behalf of what you believe. Are Washington Democrats prepared to learn this lesson?

By: E. J. Dionne, Op-Ed Colunist, The Washington Post, March 10, 2011

March 10, 2011 Posted by | Class Warfare, Congress, Deficits, Democrats, Federal Budget, GOP, Middle Class, Politics, Unions | , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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