Need for serious recall

So the campaign to recall Scott Walker is now underway, and there will be others yet to come, making for a wild political year. It's Recall Season in Wisconsin. Some of my friends and colleagues know I have at times expressed a certain skepticism - not because I don't think Walker needs recalling - he played politics of deception to get elected and politics of exclusion once in office, and the trail of money supporting him over the years has yet to be fully explored - but because of concerns about its prospects for success.

If this does not succeed, please, Wisconsin friends, do not become demoralized. This is a hard thing to do when even many Walker opponents are uncertain about using recall as an expression of political disagreement, however profound. He was elected, the wisdom goes, so let him serve his term and oust him in the next election.

But then others say, but just look at all the damage after only one year in office...

So we'll see how this goes. Most news pundits continue to focus their coverage on the elimination of collective bargaining rights for public sector workers and the undermining of the union recertification process itself. We do have a fiercely anti-union politics in this country right now, and this really ought to have surprised no one. Follow the path from Reagan to now. The politics of the corporate right has been taking over our national politics from the bottom up and using slick media tools to ramp up this anti-labor sentiment - along with bogus emotional issues like gun rights, abortion rights, and gay marriage, great tools of manipulation that hide the real agenda of the corporate right.

But if this remains the heart of the public debate, I fear this will not only not succeed but erode the politics of the state further. Because what is really needed is a politics of solidarity that centers on the situation of our state's most threatened populations - the poor, the discriminated against, the disabled, the elderly, immigrants, students, and all sorts of 'marginal' populations (only marginal because our culture puts them on the margins - not only Repubs do this). The advocacy work of the unions themselves needs to be about this solidarity, not only about protecting the interests of their members. The more labor joins with others in that solidarity, the more positive impact this campaign might have on Wisconsin's political culture.

Let's remember, please, that most public sector workers actually work on behalf of these very populations. That's why their demands matter. It's a question of putting the interests of those they serve at the top of their publicly expressed concerns. Many people think of these workers as spoiled or over-compensated, rather than providing vital services that meet the needs of the populations that, you know, have those needs.

The problems this state faces are abundant and frightening. Our state is in the hands of people who have little regard for the majority of us, especially workers and poor people, or for the lands, forests, and waters that make up the beauty and wonder that is Wisconsin. Collective bargaining rights may be the least of our worries if we allow mining companies, developers, and corporate polluters like Georgia-Pacific and immense industrial dairy farmers, to run our state politics, to write our laws and then hand them to the Fitzgerald brothers for passage in the statehouse. Think about the clash between environmental groups and unions over the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline extension. Unions want jobs for their members. Ecologists and climate scientists see the pyrrhic nature of this demand, knowing how the oil tar sands pose a threat to the planet whose consequences are beyond imagining - though we are beginning to imagine it.

There won't be any good union jobs in a world facing ecological collapse.

Or, closer to home, think iron ore mine in the Hurley area - unions also see good jobs while the Bad River Band and environmentalists see the imminent ruin of land and forest, and grave threats to a watershed relied on by many for drinking water.

We need a serious recall - a recalling of values and principles, a recalling of a social contract that understood that inequity and injustice is built into the capitalist system and therefore a strong publicly funded social safety net is required to keep those injustices from tipping into social unraveling and chaos.

We need a recall of the interrelationship between humans and their eco-communities, and how if you unravel those communities, if you ruin and toxify them, you threaten the future of the human as well.

I hope this campaign will focus on the corruption of our politics by billionaires like the Koch brothers who use Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and their vast wealth as tools of deception and manipulation of our people. I hope the campaign helps people realize that all this passionate focus on issues like gun rights have been part of that manipulation, great distractions that keep the public focus away from the concentration of wealth and erosion of democracy itself that is what is really at stake here (I get to carry my gun in my belt, who cares if my water is giving me and my children cancer?).

I hope the recall is a recall of what democracy really is and that it will promote a renewal of democratic culture by helping people realize what is really happening here, and how Wisconsin has become a political center for the most anti-democratic tendencies in the country, a testing ground, if you will, for how far these people can go.

I hope it is a recall of the value of dialogue, mutual respect, cooperation and compromise, the supremacy of the right to human well-being within healthy eco-communities over the right to wealth generation and corporate profit-making, the importance of neighborhood and community if we are to return to a social and cultural sanity that is being lost amidst the noise being fomented by these rightists to keep us from caring about one another.

Yes, we need a recall - a really profound one.

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All photos: Margaret Swedish

The week that will change Wisconsin

Debate on the budget begins this morning and by the end of the week Wisconsin becomes, well, something else. Using their 'tyranny of the majority' powers, their anti-democratic maneuvers (because they know what they are doing is fiercely unpopular), and intransigence and stubbornness which they think virtuous, the state Repubs are about to implement blow after blow to Wisconsin's citizens as they pass the biennium budget.

We are not being governed; we are being ruled by Scott Walker and the Fitzgerald brothers and, folks, there is nothing at all democratic about that. This is a handful of rightist politicians who are trying to gleefully rule the state for the benefit of a narrow constituency of affluent white business types who want to open my state even more than it already is to their narrow interests. They and their followers are social conservatives for whom it is not enough to hold socially conservative beliefs but who believe that government's role is to empower social conservative 'values' while closing democratic spaces and political rights for those who disagree with them.

What will happen this week: voting rights will be narrowed and made difficult for the poor, elderly, students; social safety net programs will be slashed and thousands of people left unserved and vulnerable; lower taxes will be replaced by higher fees (which sounds like raising taxes to me, whatever you call them); university tuition will be raised putting higher education even more out of reach for poor and working families than it already is; more public money will be transferred into the hands of corporations; government will become less transparent as legislators try to hide some of the business connections that affect how they vote; public education will take extreme hits lowering the quality of the classroom experience for our kids; good paying public sector jobs will become less so as these white business guys (Ron Johnson, too, and Paul Ryan) commit to gutting this source of middle class stability as their business guys have already done in the private sector, destroying unions, ripping up contracts, driving down wages and benefits.

Oh, and, watch for it: using an unprecedented 'extraordinary session' to pass a budget (see yesterday's post), look to see the gutting of collective bargaining rights language restored to the bill at the last minute. They are not waiting for the Supreme Court to decide on something of such high priority in their rightist agenda.

And the protests - fervent, passionate, an awakening much needed in this state - will not affect the outcome.

The week that will change Wisconsin.  We are losing a lot. Adding to the loss is that these guys, not just here but all around the country, use divisive, polarizing language and strategies to try to render us even less effective in struggling for our rights. By intention, they raise the emotion in the divide and hope like crazy that we will not be able to talk to each other, to reach across the divide to reclaim a political culture of democracy. That is in their interest, too.

The week that will change Wisconsin.

But - and it is a big 'but' - sometime movements are built on what is lost. Sometimes they are built on what brings people together. What the protests have done - not only in Madison, but all across the state - is wake up my people, or at least more of us. The US is sadly known for the extent of political disengagement of its citizens, low participation in democracy, which has opened a space ripe for the Karl Rove big money types to move in and take it over.

This week will change Wisconsin not only because of what Walker and the Fitzgerald brothers are imposing on this state, but because of what happened in the streets in response, a popular democracy resurgence that could, if nurtured right, become a real force for progressive politics in this state.

That is where we need to rest our hopes. But this also depends on what we have insisted on here over and over again - a movement that is not about different sectors trying to protect their own rights and way of life, but about a solidarity that is broad and deep - public sector workers with private sector workers, threatened middle class folks with the poor of our cities, African-Americans especially loathed by these guys with, well, all the rest of us, immigrants doing our hard labor with, again, the rest of us, suburban social progressives with urban communities struggling for survival.

If that is born out of this political debacle, then what these rightist people are doing will be painful but short-lived. The best payback will not be screaming in their faces or going home demoralized after the losses we are about to endure, but defeating them by way of democracy, over the long haul. The best payback would be a rejuvenated citizenry reclaiming its place in democratic governance.

100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire - and we're losing our memory

I've been sitting at my computer trying to get some work done with a live stream of the commemoration events at the site of the fire 100 years ago today in the background grabbing my attention over and over again - 146 young women whose lives were snuffed out in a moment of incomprehensible horror because their bosses thought of them as machines for their use and exploitation.

Wonderful website for the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition.

How quickly we forget. How quickly we relax into inertia and complacency believing that rights once won can never again be lost, as if the very fact that they were hard won doesn't mean that their defense calls always for vigilance.

I think now of eroding worker rights in the private sector (here in Wisconsin most recently with contract concessions at Harley-Davidson, Kohler, and Mercury Marine) and now in the public sector all across the country.  Bosses and bureaucrats want us to forget what working conditions were like before unions, and they hope that forgetfulness translates into apathy when 'other people's' rights are taken away.

The big surprise in Wisconsin last month was that this is not what happened. When the assault on the collective bargaining rights of 350,000 public workers (a number that means all of us know someone impacted by the threat) happened here, tens of thousands and then well over a hundred thousand people poured into the streets of Madison and many other communities around the state.

It is crucial now that public workers pay this back in support for the factory workers whose livelihoods have been gutted, in support for the unemployed and the poor, those who have diminishing hopes of ever again having a decent job to support their families. Without solidarity of great breadth and depth, the forces with endless resources to support them - corporations, CEOs, investors, politicians bought and paid for by corporate campaign donations - will steamroll over all of us.

The crowd in Manhattan is huge. This is gratifying. We are waking up. We are beginning to remember. We are beginning to reclaim this history.

Terrific essay in the Journal Sentinel today connecting the Triangle Factory fire to our struggles today, written by Nan Enstad, UW-Madison, The Triangle Fire and Its Lessons. She explains clearly what has happened to the evolution of the corporate world in this country and the connection between this and our swiftly disappearing worker rights:

People in Wisconsin now find themselves embroiled in this 100-year-old battle, opened on a new front. The Citizens United 2009 Supreme Court decision expanded the rights of corporate personhood in our political life, removing caps on corporate - and union - spending in elections.

The crisis in Wisconsin is occurring at just this junction of government, corporate power and workers' rights. Republican leaders respond strongly to distant corporate donors and ignore local polls of voters' views. The proposed budget threatens to privatize education and utilities while cutting benefits and programs that serve the poor, shifting profits to corporations and distributing costs downward.

The Triangle era provides us with an important insight: Corporations on their own lack local accountability. Politicians in the service of corporations will be tempted to betray their constituents. Local people have an investment in local accountability. Schools, faith communities, townships, workers, farmers and small business owners all must empower themselves and each other to participate meaningfully and creatively in guiding our path into the future.

Gratifying to see in today's crowd in the streets of Manhattan signs proclaiming, "We Are All Wisconsin."  That makes me proud to be a citizen of this state. But it is also a challenge to us all - to live up to those hopes and expectations.

Rep. Charles Schumer from New York just gave a stirring speech at the commemoration, and he held up Scott Walker as someone prepared "to undo your loved ones' legacy," speaking to garment workers and their union. We are at the heart of this struggle here in Wisconsin. We are being lifted up across the nation as an example of the threat and the hope that is in that struggle.

Busting public sector unions is violation of international labor law

The International Commission for Labor Rights (ICLR) may not be a favorite of Republicans - who hate the UN, International Criminal Court, and other international bodies that might put any legal constraints on this country's behavior - but still, this is an important statement.  It is an assertion that collective bargaining rights are human rights, and that public sector workers are being denied legally recognized rights in our state - and in Ohio, and in Michigan, and in Indiana...

Collective Bargaining Rights Are Fundamental Human Rights-Denying Them is Illegal

Statement of the International Commission for Labor Rights.

As workers in the thousands and hundreds of thousands in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio and around the country demonstrate to protect the right of public sector workers to collective bargaining, the political battle has overshadowed any reference to the legal rights to collective bargaining. The political battle to prevent the loss of collective bargaining is reinforced by the fact that stripping any collective bargaining rights is blatantly illegal. Courts and agencies around the world have uniformly held the right of collective bargaining in the public sector is an essential element of the right of Freedom of Association, which is a fundamental right under both International law and the United States Constitution.

 To read the entire statement, go here.

Republican assault on democracy - and workers

I understand about having a 2-party system, with fairly big tents joining together folks around a certain orientation across widely divergent viewpoints. I understand the need for respect for the opponent, for decorum, for rules that allow for open debate on legislation, even when we get frustrated with the process. I appreciate that when you reduce democracy to a 2-party system, those large tents are bound to fail some of their constituents most of the time.

But when one party, frankly, begins to undermine democracy itself, this becomes extremely worrisome. When one party dispenses with laws, rules, and procedures to rule by ambush and subterfuge, seeking to brush the competing party aside as so much detritus, things have gone seriously wrong. Then we are not talking about democracy, we are talking about power grab.

This is happening in Wisconsin right now - as has been happening with the power of big money nationally, the Supreme Court vote on Citizens United, the unseemly money plays of Karl Rove, the influence of Goldman Sachs contributions on Barack Obama, or the decisive influence of Koch Industries money on Wisconsin governor Scott Walker.

But what happened tonight in the Wisconsin legislature is without precedent - a blatantly illegal move on the part of Republican leaders that busts the unions of public sector workers.

What happened a few hours ago is this: violating the Open Meetings law of the state, Republican Senate Majority leader Scott Fitzgerald pulls a power play to take a vote on a bill unseen by Democrats, not clearly understood, and for which notice was not properly given. All it does is destroy 50 years of collective bargaining rights for public sector workers under Wisconsin law. What they did was take out the controversial union-busting language from the budget repair bill and pass it as a separate piece of legislation. Having argued previously that eliminating collective bargaining rights for public sector workers was definitely a fiscal issue, therefore requiring a quorum of 20 senators, suddenly Republicans said it was not a fiscal issue at all and a simple majority will do.

You 14 Democrats who left the state to prevent the quorum they once said was necessary to pass fiscal-related bills? Stay in Illinois as long as you like; we just busted the unions.  And guess what? that's what we wanted to do all along - just like you said.

If this stands, if the state attorney general and the state's courts do not block this vote from taking force, democracy in my state is in big, big trouble.

Check out the video of this hostile anti-procedure:

http://wiseye.org/Programming/VideoArchive/EventDetail.aspx?evhdid=3885

Are all legislators subject to the laws, or just not Fitzgerald, Scott Walker, and the others who work for corporate interests? Have we really arrived at a point where one party in the majority can violate rules and laws and then prevail?

Protesters began pouring in to the Capitol as this atrocity took place. If you are anywhere near Madison this weekend, especially Saturday, join the masses in the streets.

Many public workers heading for the door

It is becoming obvious that one of the immediate impacts of the Scott Walker power move against unions is that the state is about to lose the skills and experience of thousands of its most veteran public sector workers. Many of them face a decision to retire right now in order to get the full benefits of the pensions promised them over the course of their careers.  If they wait to see what happens to the budget debate over the next months, they could end up losing big money for their retirement.

But even this won't guarantee that pension funds won't be raided over time, as the Alternet article linked here indicates. And as Walker & Co. (like the groups funded by the Koch brothers who are stoking anti-union sentiments all across the country) continue their media assault on labor, the flames of resentment among private sector workers who have lost jobs or seen wages and benefits fall as a result of corporate power plays (you know, the take-it-or-leave-it approach to labor negotiations - take what we offer as we gut your livelihood or we'll move to Oklahoma or Mexico) are bound to rise. Folks like the Kochs and their Club for Growth buddies will be happy to fan those flames because it works so well...

...as you can see today if you read the 'letters to the editors' page in the seemingly anti-union Journal Sentinel.

Doesn't matter if you say that these angry folks going on and on about communists and socialists (say what?!?!?) and privileged lazy public workers have got it all wrong, that they don't know who the real 'enemy' is or why, really, their standard of living is sinking into the burgeoning class of working poor. The corporate guys with all the money and power are very happy to see us turn on one another in a blame game that has no good outcome.

You know, you can let Walker try to rule like that - or not.

But my challenge to public sector workers and their unions is this: taxpayers do indeed pay your salaries and finance your benefits, and private sector workers, especially those without college degrees, are getting hurt in a global economy that has less and less room for them - and no concern for them at all. If you want to maintain and build support for the cause of worker rights, it is crucial that you begin active, persistent, constructive solidarity with private sector workers. They are not up against elected officials that we voters can turn out of office. They are up against companies that operate solely for the bottom line and have no democracy at all, only a commitment to quarterly profit reports for their stockholders.

It is time for a massive reeducation in this state in regard to labor history and the decades-long struggle for worker rights, of why collective bargaining is crucial in a democracy. What it does is balance the power of corporate money with the power of organized labor. Without that, each worker is at the mercy of these powerful bosses.

Solidarity is the only way out of this mess. Many of us who are not public sector workers have been out in support of the folks in the rotunda and on the streets of Madison. The support must go both ways, otherwise this struggle for worker rights cannot be won.

Photos: Margaret Swedish

CHARLES WOODSON ADDS HIS VOICE IN SUPPORT OF WISCONSIN WORKERS

Here it is - and thank you, Sir Charles.  You are a champion on the field - and off.

STATEMENT FROM GREEN BAY PACKER CHARLES WOODSON IN SUPPORT OF WORKING FAMILIES IN WISCONSIN

Last week I was proud when many of my current and former teammates announced their support for the working families fighting for their rights in Wisconsin. Today I am honored to join with them. Thousands of dedicated Wisconsin public workers provide vital services for Wisconsin citizens. They are the teachers, nurses and child care workers who take care of us and our families. These hard working people are under an unprecedented attack to take away their basic rights to have a voice and collectively bargain at work.

It is an honor for me to play for the Super Bowl Champion Green Bay Packers and be a part of the Green Bay and Wisconsin communities. I am also honored as a member of the NFL Players Association to stand together with working families of Wisconsin and organized labor in their fight against this attempt to hurt them by targeting unions. I hope those leading the attack will sit down with Wisconsin’s public workers and discuss the problems Wisconsin faces, so that together they can truly move Wisconsin forward.

"Wisconsin is fine" - Maddow uncovers the budget cover-up

Last night, Rachel Maddow brought the Scott Walker scam to light on her show [see below]. Wisconsin has no budget crisis. The state is not bankrupt. The budget shortfall was made into a crisis by the amount of tax breaks given to business interests. What we have here is a trade-off. To balance the budget, public money is being taken from workers, children, public school kids, elderly, unemployed and given to companies with the argument that, magically, good-paying jobs will be created which, magically, will make all those workers' and kids' and seniors' lives better - how?

250,000 jobs, Walker promised. In your dreams, Scott. It ain't real, and the jobs you're trying to create will not help if they come with poverty wages and no way for a family to support itself. Gut public sector workers' income and benefits? Right, or fire them. That's what Harley-Davidson, Kohler, and Mercury Marine offered, and we saw the result. Now this union-busting strategy has come to the capitol in Madison, and one result will be more and more workers falling into poverty just as these same folks shred the social safety net.

A major structural shift is happening to the US economy right now, being played out here in Wisconsin. It is no longer in the financial interests of corporations to have a large middle class, to have a core of high-skilled, well-paid workers manufacturing things and making enough money to buy them.  Now fortunes are made in financial investment, and if you are still making things (like Harley-Davidson motorcycles), the best way to increase your financial return is to cut labor costs - fewer workers at far lower wages and little or no benefits - certainly no collective bargaining rights.

Now this era has come to the public sector big time.  The only way to resist such a massive shift in power is through precisely what is being attacked by the Walker government right now - collective action, strong people-based organizations, including unions, with a commitment to an enduring solidarity across various sectors of workers, the poor, community organizations defending rights and dignity of those under attack by these corporate interests and the politicians they put in office with lavish campaign funding.

It's an old tried and true refrain - united we stand, divided we fall. The other side has endless resources to buy elections, to buy and/or influence votes, with paid professional lobbyists and money for TV ads and more. What we have is our organized collective voice. If we don't have that, they can continue to pick us apart.

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