A CMD Special Report: Scott Walker Runs on Koch Money

Thing is Republican, TEA Party, Conservative, Ring Wing Rhetoric goes against the precepts of the Constitution of the United States, the Doctrine that has enabled our Nation to become the Great Nation it is. Those ideas that are embraced in the Rhetoric are the concepts that are in fact tearing the Nation apart, creating a climate of decline, contributing to making America a Third World Nation with increasing levels of poverty, political and racial inspired incidents of violence, murder and mayhem.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Under the views held by today's Conservative, TEA Party, Republican, Right Wing Rhetoric this Preamble to the Constitution is defined as Socialist, Communist and Marxism.
We the People is a collective society that sanctions, ordains the Constitution for the United States of America, not individuals nor the most powerful Private Sector Institutions. It is true that you work harder for your own goals but the Constitution and the Government are set up to work for the goals of the collective of United States Citizens.
Charges of Communism, Marxism, Socialism are a subliminal call to arms for otherwise complacent Patriotic American types imbued with bigot, racist and/or cultural stereotypes. The very mention of either of those words blinds them to the major issues and crisis facing the United States.

March 4, 2011

Turn the inspiring defense of Midwest workers into a national offensive against the profit vultures!

In the state Capitol buildings and streets of the Midwest, unionists, other workers, and students are heroically resisting the attempt by politicians and employers to resolve the economic crisis at a deadly cost to working people.

Protesters lit the flame in Wisconsin, where they have continuously occupied the Capitol since February 14 in a fight to preserve the bargaining rights of public workers. At times, teachers, firefighters, nurses, childcare workers, university students, and unemployed and private sector workers have swelled the number to 100,000. Teacher sick-outs have closed school districts in Madison and Milwaukee. The Wisconsin South Central Labor Federation has even announced they are considering a general strike!

Volunteers, donations, and support statements are flooding in from all over the world - including Indiana and Ohio, whose workers are in the middle of their own similar battles. Solidarity rallies are blooming across the country.

At stake: workers' rights and living standards for generations to come
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker boasted about the broad aims of his assault in a phone conversation with a caller pretending to be notorious libertarian billionaire David Koch. Walker declared that his goal is to emulate Ronald Reagan's destruction of the 11,000-member air traffic controllers' union, PATCO, in 1981.

Walker wants to eliminate collective bargaining for benefits and working conditions, make paying union dues optional, force unions to be voted in again each year, increase employees' share of healthcare and pension costs, and cap negotiated wage increases at no higher than official inflation. His proposed bill would also privatize public utilities and give the governor sole authority to sell them - without competitive bidding.

That would be music to the ears of Walker allies David and Charles Koch, energy industry capitalists and top funders of efforts to gut social services, resist government regulation, and slash taxes. Huge promoters of misinformation about climate change, the Koch brothers bankroll the Tea Party, the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, and rightwing electoral candidates.

Democratic legislators left Wisconsin in a bold move to forestall Walker's union-busting attack. The Democrats depend on unions as a crucial base of popular support, and they can't afford to see them destroyed.

But this does not mean that Democratic politicians can be relied upon to halt the anti-worker tide. Like the Republicans, they refuse to lay the responsibility for the budget crisis where it belongs, at the door of corporate rip-off artists and warmongers. In states where Democrats dominate politically, they too are pushing hard for massive cuts in jobs, working conditions, and services. The program of austerity for workers is bipartisan.

Workers need militant leadership and their own independent labor party
In a terribly misguided attempt at compromise (which Walker soundly rejected), some Wisconsin union leaders offered to make concessions on pay and benefits in exchange for keeping the right to bargain collectively. But other union leaders and rank-and-filers are organizing for a policy of "no concessions," thanks to workers' increasing awareness of their own power. Nurses and others are discussing the need to reach out to nonunion workers, educate about the real corporate causes of budget gaps, and put forward an alternative budget that closes those gaps by taxing big business and the rich.

It's no surprise that nurses are in the forefront of pointing out that Walker and his crowd are not just union-busters, but enemies of the poorest and most vulnerable. These include women, people of color, immigrants, the very old and the very young, and the sick and the homeless, who are suffering the most financially and who desperately need the safety nets that public workers provide.

Labor's strongest weapon is the general strike. Now is the time to use it, not after Walker's bill passes. The labor movement can defeat his anti-humane legislation. But for the battles ahead - and to get off the defensive and fight to regain lost ground - workers need their own political party, completely independent of the Democrats and Republicans, a serious vehicle for running candidates on a program that advances thoroughly working-class solutions.

The Wisconsin mobilization could be the opening act of a long-awaited resurgence of the U.S. labor movement. For that resurgence to take hold, the movement needs a powerful strategy and bold demands:

-No concessions on pay, benefits or collective bargaining! Wage a general strike!
-Increase taxes on corporations, close loopholes, and redirect war spending to human needs.
-Demand job creation through a shorter workweek with no cut in pay and a public works program at union wages.
-For a national union summit to plan strategy for protecting workers' rights and securing education, jobs, pensions, and healthcare for all.
-For an independent workers' party - unbought and unbossed!

Issued by:
Freedom Socialist Party
U.S. Section
4710 University Way NE, #100
Seattle, WA 98105
USA
socialism.com

Yes thank you Lisa for your selfless effort to help build a better society and fuel public effort to restore democracy. I can't help but wonder about voters and what they must have been thinking to elect a republican governor. After 8 years of total pillage ending in financial disaster on a world wide scale how could anybody in their right mind vote in any republican for any office whatsoever? I know the anger Americans had watching the democrats do nothing good despite having a majority and a mandate. But I don't believe for a minute that voters are that stupid. Does Wisconsin have electronic voting machines? Is the software protected by proprietary rights upheld by the courts? Then the election results could have been easily manipulated without any possibility of anyone being able to prove it. That is how republicans are winning all around the U.S.A. It has been happening ever since Bush stole the presidency in 2000 and the Supreme Court backed up the theft. Bush went on to appoint how many judges? So, judges decide who wins elections, elected officials decide who sits on the bench. Where is the voter? I don't think there are any real elections any more, just a dog and pony show to keep the serfs fooled.

I am a municipal attorney, and very much believe that local government is the bedrock of our democracy.

Further gutting the regulatory ability of government is the real goal of the attacks upon state and local government employee pensions, I believe. It is the career government employee who, at least once in a while, has the knowledge, institutional memory, relationship networks and will to stand up and take on the most powerful of the regulated companies and people. It takes some experience and maturity to regulate effectively when it really matters.

The defined benefit pension is a very important tool in retaining skilled employees in government despite lackluster salaries. Without the pension benefit--which in North Carolina is pitched toward 30 year careers--government would be a training ground where more highly skilled employees would serve 3-4 years before leaving for more lucretive private industry jobs.

Without the pension benefit, I probably would have left government long ago for private enterprise. As a municipal attorney for over 15 years, I see each day how valuable my institutional memory is. Many times those we do business with and regulate make the assumption that no one remembers the history on a matter, and that they can slide around on the facts. My memory and my files save the tax payers money.

Open, accurate information is so important as the basis for true democracy. Honest disagreement and debate are a tonic to democracy. But as is attributed to Patrick Moynihan, "You’re entitled to your own opinions. You’re not entitled to your own facts."

Thank you to CMD, and in particular to Lisa Graves, for providing us with facts. I appreciate your work very much.

I am grateful that organizations such as yours exist to tell the truth which isn't being covered by corporate media.

One thing is for sure: these rich fascists will not rest until they own everything (no, labeling the Kochs & their ilk "fascists" isn't "name calling;" fascism is the merger of corporate and state interests, which is exactly what we're seeing today in America).