Tag: Wisconsin

Will Wis. Gov. Scott Walker reap the whirlwind?

These happenings on Madison’s Capitol Square are exhilarating — and exhausting.

They are both inspirational and emotionally draining.

Saturday, March 5, was just another day in Madtown. Not much planned, just a little rally. The formal part, with speakers and musicians, was just announced about 24 hours before it began.

So my expectations were low, having seen last Saturday what the biggest demonstration in Wisconsin history looked like, 100,000 strong.

There weren’t 100,000 again today. Maybe there were 40,000 or 30,000 or something in between. It really doesn’t matter at this point. It’s now in the third week, with no end in sight.

The movement lives, and it is growing. Every time Gov. Scott Walker and his Republican cronies commit another outrage, the coalition grows and the opposition gets stronger.

Yesterday, and Tomorrow


The extraordinary events in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya are the initial high tides of an eventual tsunami that will impact the world that globalists have so fervently promoted for decades, in ways not necessarily to their liking. The first wave has struck and is now retreating from the shore, but will shortly return with redoubled force, and what and who will be swept away and what will be left standing is anyone’s guess.



[snip]

In the United States, 48 years after Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his stirring “I have a dream” speech at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, 45 percent of young African-Americans have no jobs and the top hedge fund managers are paid, on average, $1 billion a year, a thoughtful American can only expect the mass protests against cuts in services and jobs in Wisconsin to spread.

And America’s propensity for eventual chaos is far higher than the Middle East, demonized in the press as a violent region, when one considers that America’s 300 million citizens have between 238 million and 276 million privately owned firearms.

As a prescient 23-year old from Hibbing, Minnesota, Bob Dylan warned an earlier generation 47 years ago about to embark on its misguided mission to safeguard and democratize in Vietnam, “There’s a battle outside and it is raging, It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls, For the times they are a-changin’.”

America has older prophets on the current situation – as Thomas Jefferson observed, “A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government.”

Take heed, Governor Walker of Wisconsin and all the rest of you political leaders in Washington DC – or fuel up your learjets and head for the Cayman Islands.

The Extraordinary Events in the Middle East and the Coming Global Tsunami

By John C.K. Daly for the Global Intelligence Report

Let’s Stand With Wisconsin’s Workers Today!

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The AFL-CIO has called for another massive demonstration today in Madison, Wisconsin.

If you’re too far away from Madison to participate in person, please stand in Solidarity with the demonstrators by doing something to show your support.  Buying pizza is always good.  Posting on a blog is good. Organizing your own demonstration is great.  You get the idea.  Let’s do it.

Go to Wisconsin, President Obama

Dear President Obama,

I’m glad you’ve opposed the attacks on Wisconsin’s public workers, but you need to do more. You need to go there and speak out, or at least speak out again and more strongly, because Americans need to understand what’s at stake, and those who are standing up there and elsewhere need to see you standing beside them. If you speak out powerfully enough, you might not only help stop Scott Walker’s raw power grab and the similar actions of Walker’s compatriots in other states. You might even help revive the long-demoralized spirits of those whose volunteer efforts carried you to the presidency.

You could talk, if you went, about the value to America of the teachers, nurses, firefighters, crisis counselors, and other public sector workers who are under attack, and of the hypocrisy of a governor whose corporate tax breaks launched this supposed fiscal crisis to begin with. You could make clear the stakes for all of us–that if Walker or other Republican governors can end the ability of public workers to join together for a common voice, ordinary citizens will end up with far less power to shape the course of our democracy, and predatory corporate interests will have even more.  You can talk in your in style. You can be calm and reflective. You don’t have to scream. But you have to show the American public and your discouraged supporters just how high the stakes are.  You have to do your best to draw the line.  

Obama: Get Out Your Comfortable Shoes

h/t to Sam Pratt:

I invited you to please go to Wisconsin. You apparently declined.  Or didn’t get the invitation.  Ok.  I guess you forgot about this.

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from The Dream Antilles

Anonymous Strikes Again

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

While we were all watching the Academy Awards, making predictions and ogling over fashion, the hacker group, Anonymous struck again, hacking into the Koch brother funded web site, Americans for Prosperity (sorry, no link, I won’t give them the honor of a page hit). The Koch brothers own the Georgia-Pacific paper manufacturing plant in Green Bay, Wisconsin and, obviously, have a vested interest in seeing the union right of collective bargaining ended.

The AFP site is back up. This is the entire message that was left by Anonymous:

Dear Citizens of the United States of America,

It has come to our attention that the brothers, David and Charles Koch–the billionaire owners of Koch Industries–have long attempted to usurp American Democracy. Their actions to undermine the legitimate political process in Wisconsin are the final straw. Starting today we fight back.

Koch Industries, and oligarchs like them, have most recently started to manipulate the political agenda in Wisconsin. Governor Walker’s union-busting budget plan contains a clause that went nearly un-noticed. This clause would allow the sale of publicly owned utility plants in Wisconsin to private parties (specifically, Koch Industries) at any price, no matter how low, without a public bidding process. The Koch’s have helped to fuel the unrest in Wisconsin and the drive behind the bill to eliminate the collective bargaining power of unions in a bid to gain a monopoly over the state’s power supplies.

The Koch brothers have made a science of fabricating ‘grassroots’ organizations and advertising campaigns to support them in an attempt to sway voters based on their falsehoods. Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and Citizens United are just a few of these organizations. In a world where corporate money has become the lifeblood of political influence, the labor unions are one of the few ways citizens have to fight against corporate greed. Anonymous cannot ignore the plight of the citizen-workers of Wisconsin, or the opportunity to fight for the people in America’s broken political system. For these reasons, we feel that the Koch brothers threaten the United States democratic system and, by extension, all freedom-loving individuals everywhere. As such, we have no choice but to spread the word of the Koch brothers’ political manipulation, their single-minded intent and the insidious truth of their actions in Wisconsin, for all to witness.

Anonymous hears the voice of the downtrodden American people, whose rights and liberties are being systematically removed one by one, even when their own government refuses to listen or worse – is complicit in these attacks. We are actively seeking vulnerabilities, but in the mean time we are calling for all supporters of true Democracy, and Freedom of The People, to boycott all Koch Industries’ paper products. We welcome unions across the globe to join us in this boycott to show that you will not allow big business to dictate your freedom.

In case you want to boycott Georgia Pacific products here is a list: Quilted Northern, Angel Soft, Brawny, Soft N’ Gentle, Brawny Industrial, Vanity Fair, Sparkle, Dixie and Mardi Gras.

To identify these brands, please look for the following logo anywhere on the packaging:

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Popular Culture 20110225: Van Susteren to the Rescue!

It is not often that I have such a ripe opportunity to combine TeeVee, politics, the FOX “News” Network, the horribly biased Governor of Wisconsin, and my own parody songwriting skills into a post.  As a matter of fact, it has never happened before.  Please allow me to explain.

I usually do not do purely political pieces here, there, or anywhere, because so many other are much more talented than I am at it.  But I do keep an eye out for popular culture, and this opportunity just hit me in the face.  I do not have to explain how Governor Scott Walker, a Tea Party wingnut, has probably disqualified himself for holding a position of trust, but I will!  

American Unions are a compliant, selfish disgrace, compared to European Unions

This video needs little comment. I post it because some people think that public service unions, such as the WI teachers’ union, should get supported by American workers, no strings attached, even though (by my reckoning), American unions are quite selfish. See, e.g., my discussion in Solidarity With Wisconsin’s Union Workers. See also my diary Why are there no MLK’s of Labor?

So this is what the Green Party’s got to say about Wisconsin

Before I start, just so you know, the Green Party is airing their first weekly podcast tonight at 10 PM EST, focused all around Wisconsin and WI Greens.  More info here – as usual, you can chat and interact and stuff like that.

Interestingly, Madison, Wisconsin is actually one of the better cities in the nation to be a Green in.  They’ve got 8 elected officials there and one of their strongest state representative candidates in the nation ran and got over 30 percent of the vote there in 2010.  His name is Ben Manski and he’s now taking a leading role, with his organization Liberty Tree and a new one called Wisconsin WAVE, in the resistance to this new trend of hardcore union-busting.

The Green Party of Wisconsin and the Green Party of the US have also put out press releases (available here and here, respectively) on the matter, but Ben’s debate on CNBC today with a Republican state legislator shows really some of the best the Greens have to offer and some of what’s really missing from the Democratic Party.  Enjoy.  (The debate starts a bit before 6:30)

Obama: Please Go To Wisconsin

Well, here I go again, oversimplifying, being idealistic, possibly ranting.  To all of these I plead guilty.  In advance.

President Obama’s made a few statements about the demonstrations in Wisconsin.  The most widely disseminated one is this one, reported in TPM:


Well I’d say that I haven’t followed exactly what’s happening with the Wisconsin budget. I’ve got some budget problems here in Washington that I’ve had to focus on. I would say, as a general proposition, that everybody’s gotta make some adjustments to new fiscal realities. And I think if we want to avoid layoffs — which I want to avoid, I don’t want to see layoffs of hard-working federal workers.

We had to impose, for example, a freeze on pay increases for federal workers for the next two years, as part of my overall budget freeze. You know, I think those kinds of adjustments are the right thing to do.

On the other other hand, some of what I’ve heard coming out of Wisconsin — where you’re just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain, generally — seems like more of an assault on unions.



And I think it’s very important for us to understand that public employees, they’re our neighbors, they’re our friends. These are folks who are teachers, and they’re firefighters, and they’re social workers, and they’re police officers. You know, they make a lot of sacrifices, and make a big contribution, and I think it’s important not to vilify them, or to suggest that somehow all these budget problems are due to public employees.

So, I think everybody’s gotta make some adjustments, but I think it’s also important to recognize that public employees make enormous contributions to the well being of our states and our cities.

Sounds, feels, smells and looks like a politician.  It’s balanced.  It’s cautious.  It looks over his shoulder to wonder which side might ultimately win the Battle of Madison.  It sounds like he’d like to be on the winning side for 2012.  What it doesn’t sound like by any means is leadership.

Leadership would be going to Madison and linking arms and standing in solidarity with the demonstrators and union members against the reactionaries and would-be union busters.  It would be standing up to the Koch funded “movement.”  It would be explaining clearly to all who would listen that these unions are important to sustained high pay in Wisconsin and the nation, and that the antedeluvian effort to kill these unions must be defeated.  The Wisconsin football stadium might be a good place to hold the rally.

The President, however, hasn’t shown any signs that he’s ready to lead a fight for labor, his largest supporter.  It looks like he might still want to invoke politesse and refer to these union busters as “the right to work” advocates with whom he has a small disagreement.

These people don’t deserve that kind of deference.  They have ginned up a plan to destroy public unions and are inflexible about it.  They will not modify it or back off from it.  They plan to destroy public unions.  Period.  They have begun by trying drive a wedge between public workers’ unions. The teachers and highway workers and bureaucrats are ok to beat up on and they won’t be able to bargain, but those the cops and firefighters, which are more traditionally Republican, will.  

Today’s mock phone call with “David Koch” proved beyond all cavil that Scott Walker is the lead dog running a national union busting movement.  He doesn’t care at all about the state’s budget.  This is another item entirely.  This for Walker is only about destroying public unions.  Yes, it’s happening through the state legislatures, but this is a manifestation of an organized, well funded, nationwide movement to emasculate public workers’ unions.

That’s why the unions can’t afford to lose this battle.  And it’s why President Obama needs to organize an appearance in Wisconsin.  The unions have already conceded on the economic issues in this confrontation by agreeing to pay more for their health insurance and to contribute more to their pensions.  Those issues are not what’s keeping 14 Wisconsin legislators under cover in Illinois (or elsewhere).  No.  They are outside the state solely to protect collective bargaining.  It bears repeating.  What makes the confrontation persist is only one thing: the governor’s adamant refusal to drop his plan for withdrawal of collective bargaining rights for certain Wiaconsin public workers.  Plain and simple: the Governor insists on destroying these unions.

That’s why the national democratic leadership in Washington needs to go to Wisconsin.  And they need to go now.  This is a confrontation that can and should be won.  Obama and the national leadership have to stop playing Bert Lahr.  They have to show up in numbers, and they have to roar.

cross-posted from The Dream Antilles

Naomi Klein On Why Wisconsin Matters: A Classic Example Of ‘Shock Doctrine’



February 19, 2011

LAST CALL: SUPPORT RUSS FEINGOLD OR LOSE EVERYTHING!

LAST CALL: SUPPORT RUSS FEINGOLD OR LOSE EVERYTHING!

Senator Russ Feingold needs our help folks. It is time to put our money where our keystrokes are and really support this guy in his hour of need.

Russ Feingold has been the only consistent profile in courage in the U.S. Senate, and the only firewall against the wholesale legalization of criminal mass looting, mass corruption, and mass tyranny by the Elites against the common people for the last 10 years.

  • He voted against the U.S. Patriot Act (in fact, the only U.S. Senator to ever do so).
  • He voted against the Iraq War.
  • He voted against the Bailouts.
  • He was the only Senator to try to censure Bush & Cheney.
  • He stood by the HC Public Option all the way to the very end.
  • He wants Obama to stop the futile Afghanistan War and criminal racket.
  • He has been a leader on Campaign Finance Reform issues.
  • He opposed NAFTA.
  • He opposed the filthy Bush Tax cuts for the rich.
  • He opposes all the efforts to “privatize” Social Security.
  • He voted against the confirmation of Timothy Geithner!!
  • He voted against Bush’s Corporatist Supreme Court  judges.

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Now try to name any other U.S. Senator in all of government with that record of Integrity on all of the great defining issues? You can’t find another U.S. Senator with even a roughly comparable record on each one of these issues.

This is the only guy in the U.S. Senate that has actually put his public votes and advocacy where his mouth is, and has actually been helping the Middle-Class (in this screwed-up Country) instead of participating in its destruction.

We need him. This is the one guy we cannot lose!

Support Russ Feingold!!

Feingold Campaign Site Link:   Our Best U.S. Senator: Russ Feingold

Contribute Link ==>:       Support Senator Russ Feingold

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