'And as much as it hurts to admit this, labor unions just aren’t very popular. In Gallup’s annual poll on confidence in institutions, unions score close to the bottom of the list, barely above big business and HMOs but behind banks. More Americans—42%—would like to see unions have less influence, and just 25% would like to see them have more.' 'Despite a massive financial crisis and a dismal job market, approval of unions is close to an all-time low in the 75 years Gallup has been asking the question. A major reason for this is that twice as many people (68%) think that unions help mostly their members as think they help the broader population (34%). Amazingly, in Wisconsin, while only about 30% of union members voted for Walker, nearly half of those living in union households but not themselves union members voted for him.' Sad... Read the entire commentary here- Walker’s victory, un-sugar-coated.
Tag: Wisconsin
Post mortem for Wisconsin’s election defeat- The Left needs to do more than just organizing inside the Democratic Party to win with the workers
Counterpunch just published a great post mortem about why the liberal Left lost electorally so big in the struggle against union breaking in the state of Wisconsin. One Year Weaker Wisconsin and the Left The part of this commentary where the author underlines that the Left cannot just cede to the Republican Right Wing outside all the usual liberal enclaves is notable, too. In Colorado, the Left tends to hole itself up inside liberal Fortress Boulder just like in Wisconsin they do that inside liberal Fortress Madison. It don't work, Liberal Lefties (talking to the likes of Michael Moore and Norman Solomon here)! You cannot just leave the rest of the states outside the liberal enclaves to the Far Right Republican thing. And you don't go forth while tying yourself down to the Democratic Party political establishment! IT DON'T WORK.
Wisconsin election close, but no cigar, if there was a cigar
The recall defeat in Wisconsin brings to mind Emma Goldman's famous adage: "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." Now we'll never know if a Democrat majority in Madison would have behaved any different than a herd of Republicans. I doubt it. Activists are patting themselves on the back for their partial success, saying the effort was worth it, which is the usual consolation for losers, and ignores the fact that many of Wisconsin's present Democratic Party legislators already betray their constituents. Here's another quote, by a Japanese engineering professor I had in college who used to say in broken English: "You build bridge. It fall down. No partial credit." Imagine what he'd have thought of a bridge to nowhere.
Republicans trying for another vote-fraud power grab in Wisconsin
supposedly, in a last minute miracle, Prosser and Scott Walker and their Corporate Overlords were SAVED by 7200 extra votes, all Republican, misplaced by Human Error. Oh, please. Walker, Prosser, other Koch-worshipers, you're pathetic beyond belief.
THEY can’t afford feudal serfdom any more than US
Meaning the Corporates. Like Bush and Walker. They've sunk their assets and their asses into the credit economy deep. They broke it and expect US to make all the concessions so they can salvage enough of the system to support their luxury lifestyle. It's gone, gone gone... They'll have real estate without tenants or maintenance, cars without gas or drivers, WideScreen MegaUltra-3D televisions without electricity or audiences. roads that nobody could drive on even if they DID have cars and gas, and no way to pay the Working Class people they've hired to guard their palaces. Their "liquid" assets are phantoms, Credit Cards, Mortgages, car loans. Bush is scheduled to ride his ass into town on what, Palm Sunday, Good Friday? I'll have to check the date. Into a town they look upon as being the New Jerusalem, to be lauded by the New Priesthood at the New Temple to their god Mammon. Blasphemy, yes. It is. And I'm sure they are aware of it. Gov Walker is actually from here, you know. They scheduled the "Lion's Heart" award ceremony before Scott Walkers Putsch, although that was probably coordinated too, Maybe Sir Scott of Walker was going to present King George with the head of American Labor on a silver charger. OK so the Royalist and religious metaphors overlap a lot and I, for one, can't help the fact that their corporate church and corporate state are built on contradictions. But I'm placing my bet that Scott Walker is on the scheduled Evenings Entertainment. Mene, mene, tekel upharsim Mene, Mene, tekel peres
Ballot Caging and the real difference between D and R
The R's don't want people to vote. More people politically active, means they lose. Very simple. You might ask yourself Self, what's the worst that could happen? What's the difference between a D and an R? What real difference does it make if large groups of people are disenfranchised? Why not ask the R's? I mean, they're the ones who spend lots of effort making sure people don't vote, right? Like County Clerk Williams and his lapdog Kathryn Young making sure people who didn't vote in Nov can't vote in Apr. Mr Williams was elected in a mudslide last anointed High Priest of Republican Vote Suppression, and made sure as many people as possible couldn't vote. It's his "official" job to do the opposite, but since he only represents Republican Voters the Official Version went out the window. One of the things his term-limited former fuhrer Bob Balink (doesn't that sound a lot like a Quayle?) did was move the Polling Place on the Westside, a strong Democratic district, across the Great Barrier Highway, to a warehouse district as far removed from a bus stop as you can get in this town, the only way you could get to it is up two streets, 21st street and Busch, UP A STEEP HILL with no sidewalks. Does that sound much to you like they actually wanted for instance DISABLED people to vote, especially when they were trying to rig the election in favor of people who want DISABLED Americans to just curl up and die? Hmmmm... How many people who have no difficulty walking actually go by their polling place weeks or days early to make sure that nobody sneaked away with their polling place, which WAS conveniently located in the middle of the population center of the West Side and a short block away from a bus stop? Miss Johnnie and I didn't find out until election day in the afternoon. Fortunately at that point we had just gotten a car. I would have a great deal of difficulty navigating up that hill, Miss Johnnie would never have made it, somebody in a wheelchair would never have made it... somebody just getting off work, going to the West Middle School location and discovering the neat little signs that Boob Balink had put up saying "Ha ha, we SCREWED you out of an opportunity to vote, too bad so sad, you should have been born rich like the only people I represent were!" Elections are held in April and November. Many people unfamiliar to Colorado Springs wouldn't know that there is a strong statistical chance of SNOW in April and definitely in November. Can you imagine trying to get up that hill in the snow, especially with the usual weekday traffic of Redneck Ignorant Asshole Republicans driving by
Recommendations for the Denver rally tomorrow…
Find out if Fox News is finally realizing that their shit ain't flying as well as they thought it would and if they've decided to charter a fleet of Greyhounds to bus in TeaBags for the "grass roots" counter rally, sponsored by Fox and the other Koch-suckers. Then have REAL grass- roots people infiltrate and get a free ride to the rally, courtesy of the Korporate Diktatorship. Tweet and Facebook that around. It's easy to pretend to be a Bagger, just wear one of those stupid "don't tread on me" caps, carry a confederate battle flag and a sign that says "No munky presdnent!" "Unoins are Socalist!" Make sure you misspell every word longer than 5 letters or two syllables. Talk really loud about shooting some more liberals. You'll fit right in. Oh, and don't take a bath first. Make their bus ride as pleasant as possible. The Koch-suckers are now trotting out all their "philanthropic" donations, including to PBS... Remind them that the only reason there's any record of that is because they take every dime of every donation off their taxes. Meaning WE, the worker class, have to pay THEIR advertising budget simply by not cheating on OUR taxes. Finally, Governor Scott Walker gave us a truly inspirational speech that's better, more inflammatory for US (if we use it right) in a prank phone call where he thought he was talking to his Whore-Master and major funding source David Koch.... in which he blatantly admits his allegiance to the rich and against the Workers, threatens the opposition legislators with a baseball bat, ... none of it actually illegal in itself, but if any Union MEMBER far less an organizer or other official, were to say the same things then the Koch-suckers would have the FBI investigating every single Union member on RICO charges. The "justice" department provides equal protection to Every (billionaire) Citizen. Some are more equal than others. The transcript: and note the part about the New York Times Slanted Journalism, where they (printed the) interviews of "every stereotype blue collar worker". They try to hide their contempt for working class people, except when they think they're in private conversations with their Rich-Bitch corporate sponsors. Typical. And they call US "elitists". Walker: Hi; this is Scott Walker. Murphy: Scott! David Koch. How are you? Walker: Hey, David! I’m good. And yourself? Murphy: I’m very well. I’m a little disheartened by the situation there, but, uh, what’s the latest? Walker: Well, we’re actually hanging pretty tough. I mean, you know, amazingly there’s a much smaller group of protesters almost all of whom are in from other states today. The State Assembly is taking the bill up, getting it all the way to the last point it can be at where it’s unamendable. But they’re waiting to pass it until the Senate’s — the Senate Democrats, excuse me, the assembly Democrats have about a hundred amendments they’re going through. The state Senate still has the 14 members missing but what they’re doing today is bringing up all sorts
The Indiana State Legislature is following Wisconsin’s lead.
The R's pushing Union-busting and the D's walking out. Yowza. Our Democratic "Socialist" Governor, Hickenlooper, is looking at cutting public school K-12 budgets. BUT.... Nobody's talking about the R.T. phrase. As in, Really and Truly pay the damn bills. Industry makes beaucoup bux off having educated workers and public transportation and the niceties of a civilized society being available to everybody. Especially the workers who ultimately pay the highest tax, it's called Corporate Profit Margins and it's exacted on us without representation. No Official representation, that is, we still have plenty of police protection from the onerous task of Freedom, actually being allowed to pool our resources, our lives and our labor in collective bargaining in order to assure us an equitable wage, one that allows us to be paid at least what it costs US to produce our labor for the profit of the Rich. In Texas it's already illegal. We have to sacrifice OUR quality of life, OUR retirement, OUR health care and that of our children and grandchildren for generations to come, or so the Tea Party Anti Tax Crusaders tell us. Insuring continued profits for the Parasite Class on the backs of the Working Class, as always. The mill-workers backside fits the office chair far better than the mill-owners hand fits the shovel.
The spreading wave of Democracy… threatens Oil Companies.
To the point that Oil Corporation workers in Bahrain and throughout the Persian Gulf, North Africa and the Indian Ocean are on high alert. The people there know which side of their toast is buttered and they're plenty swoll about being ripped off, enslaved, targeted by Oil Company hired goons like the Blackwater Thug assassins, Drone Operators bombing them from secret rooms halfway around the world: Video Gamers who were recruited from living in their moms' basement with the promise that they can Kill Humans for real and not face any consequences or put their own cowardly lives in danger. Now the oilfields, refineries and shipyards of the world are under security lockdown. The ever-nearby British-American military bases also in danger. The tactics-- IEDs, car bombs, hijacked airplanes? nope. People. There have been reports throughout the long long long Imperial Wars of the Imperial Stormtroopers being fired on by the Imperial-armed Slave Soldiers of the local provinces. BP and the old Standard Oil allegedly broken up, Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Texaco, Gulf.. getting back together again just in time... They've spent trillions of other people's dollars (guilders, francs, marks and pounds too) and hundreds of millions of other peoples' lives and more than a century of time building up their Business Empire or Empire Business whichever term better suits. The Slave Rebellion that can overthrow the Empire, People. Pure and simple. Their fellow slaves in the Provincial Armies and police forces, even in the Home Provinces of the Emperors, like America and England, joining in with their fellow slaves, tired of fighting their fellow Working Class at the orders of the Big Boss Man. Only to be spat upon, despised, and impoverished by their Masters. Such has happened in Wisconsin. And now, in Denver, and Colorado Springs, workers are coming together to support their brethren, across America and around the world. The Imperial Powers love ignorance, they love an uneducated populace, and have fought hard to dismantle Public Education, Public Communications Systems like PBS, NPR, and the Internet. Cut and cut and cut but they weren't fast enough. Now, just when they were close to their goal of privatized access to anything, especially information... from deciding who would be allowed to attend school to who can say what on the airwaves, and even on the Internet, "Freedom of the Press but only for those who own the presses". Wham, Bam, Jan25 comes along, Wikileaks, and the base of the Imperial Wealth, the provinces and satrapies, where the "president" or "prime minister" or even "king" of each, including America and Britain, was just a provincial governor appointed by the Empire and tolerated only as long as he or she did the bidding of the Empire. All these latifundium slaves from beggar to so-called Kings, under the supposedly unbreakable grip of the Empire, have a window of opportunity. The Empire is collapsing under the weight of its wealth and greed, now is the time for everybody to get out from under their landing zone. Let the Giant fall but don't be under
Egyptians support Wisconsin workers
I'll rally to support the Wisconsin unions, AND let's hope they too can rise above what immediately threatens them to see that the oppressed of the world have a common enemy.
Operation Chaos Backfired (also the TeaTard action in Wisconsin)
So, the DumFox leaders became so frightened of the hordes of non-white-anglo-saxons having the majority of the votes, if the representative districts were counted correctly, they thought of a brilliant (in their opinion) plan to skew the results of the census by getting the more ignorant of the White Anglo Saxon Protestant DumFox to boycott the Census, thereby giving them an excuse. Mind you, they're still operating under the fiction that the Republican and Tea parties are somehow separate entities from each other and that NewsCorp is a separate entity from both. The most hard-core TeaBag morons know this, but prefer to lie about it. Now, Bush's anointed replacement as Governor of Texas, Tom DeLay and his ventriloquist dummy Rick GoodHair Perry, forced a redistricting 8 years early after the last census, to insure more Republican dominated districts. They did skew that census, really hard, by spreading a terroristic rumor in minority (but now combined MAJORITY) communities similar to the retarded ones they spread in the Redneck Hoam Skewl Ignorant communities with the current census. GoodHair and Co. ain't barkin' real loudly about redistricting almost a decade early this time. Instead, they're going to make the motion that the Census be disregarded because they themselves broke it. Oh, yeah, that's right, they're still pretending that Fox News and Rush Limbaugh don't actually work for them and Fox is saying they're fair, balanced and have no agenda. They're using the same flawed interpretation of The Pottery Barn Rule "you broke it you bought it" that they used when they "suddenly realized" that their wars against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan were destroying their nations. OOPSIE.. Problem with that is, the rule they cite isn't "you broke it, you can now force other people to pay for it AND force them to pay to fix it and then you can have it for the small price of breaking it". With the Retardican "justices" on the Supreme Court, like Scalia and Clarence "uncle" Thomas, loyal like only really stupid people can be, subservient to the Korporate Klan Kartel, they might have a chance to get it "legally" approved. But that assumes that the victims of their crimes, the American people, will tolerate it and meekly submit. And the stupid bastards often make statements wondering why people would throw airplanes at their Temples to their god Mammon. "Why don't those peasants simply agree with our assessment of them as being Inferior Beings, and bow before our (non-elitist non-Racist) White Supremacy?" Apparently, too, they couldn't get enough TeaBags and other White Wing Freaks (but only in a non-racist non-elitist sense of White Supremacy) to actually go and face the very angry Union workers who they're trying to screw through legislation. Maybe they suddenly pulled their heads out of their collective Arse and realized that they miscalculated how far their Astroturf roots don't really go. Maybe DumFox News didn't plan ahead and rent a fleet of Greyhounds to bus them in. Or D) all of the above.