Unsurprising: Scott Walker, the Tea Partying, Koch brother-bank-rolled, Big Oil loving governor of Wisconsin lies about his intentions to crush unions, in order to starve the ONLY real money the Democratic Party has to compete (thanks to the failure of the Supreme Court in Citizen’s United) with the corporations underwriting his party—and his aspirations. Surprising: that he thought he could get away with his false “Wisconsin’s broke” claim.
As the protests at the State House in Madison make clear, fear-mongering union members isn’t easy.
Good.
Unions—public and private sector—make possible a middle class; without them there’d be no minimum wage, child labor laws, work-place safety laws, access to health insurance, or protection from discrimination and unjust firing.
Why do union members often vote Democrat? Because Democrats stand for the working class.
Why do union members (like the police and firefighters Walker sought to exempt as a strategy to divide the unions) stand together even when they don’t vote Democrat? Because whatever their other political beliefs, they know that fairness in conditions, wages, and benefits is the American way.
Bizarre, then, that the foot-soldiers of the Tea Party would counter protest, especially since Walker’s bill harms them: “the tax breaks and other goodies that Walker and the Republican legislature passed…dramatically increased the deficit” (motherjones.com/mojo/2011).
Walker’s Republicans are more interested in advantaging their wealthy patrons than in acting in the best interest of Wisconsin.
Ending the right to collective bargaining won’t close this gap.
What it will do is empower corporations to control wages and conditions, thereby widening the wealth-gap, further entrenching America Inc’s stranglehold on labor.
Walker’s bill would insure that “[the union’s] ability to bargain benefits for their members is reduced…their ability to collect dues, and thus spend money organizing members or lobbying the legislature, is undercut…workers have to vote the union back into existence every single year” (motherjones.com/mojo/2011/).
Walker is Big-Corporation’s union-busting dream come true: “The Koch's PAC…helped Walker via a familiar…political maneuver designed to allow donors to skirt campaign finance limits. [They] gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which in turn spent $65,000 on independent expenditures to support Walker” (motherjones.com/mojo/2011/).
Who drove busloads of Tea Partiers to Madison? Koch.
How can folks be so suckered as to agitate against their own best interests and for those of corporatists who’d curtail their access to the American dream?
Plain old titillation.
As I write this, the insane Glenn Beck is busy on his chalkboards laying out a paranoid vision of an America given over by the unions to “radicals” and “Islamacists” who “bear the mark of the beast,” and whose leader, Barack HUSSAIN Obama, is preparing to deliver America to the infidel. It doesn’t matter that not a shred of evidence supports his beyond-nuts claims.
The Tea Partiers are turned on by the spectacle of the violent world FOX lavishes on them.
It’s either this, or they’re stupid.
Walker’s claims about budget shortfalls have been debunked, his real aims exposed.
Tea Party anti-union slogan: “I stand with Walker because I care about making sure the Koch brothers and their BFFs are happy. Real happy.”
Or: “Decent wages and working conditions? Hell no!”
Or (Beck): “Who needs collective bargaining when the end times are coming?!”
Can Governor Corbett cash in on Walker’s gambit? Only if Pennsylvanians would rather be suckered by paranoid conspiracy fantasies about how only Tea Party corporatists like Walker can save them from Communist/brown/Muslim/feminazi/environmental whacko union members.
Does anyone really believe this junk? Or do they just get off on the spectacle?
I wonder.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu (591 words)
Showing posts with label Wisconsin Tea Party. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wisconsin Tea Party. Show all posts
Monday, February 21, 2011
Friday, October 22, 2010
Voter Suppression and Intimidation: Is There Anything More Anti-Democratic?
There’s nothing new about voter suppression, and while it’s no surprise that its current incarnation comes from the far right, it’s nonetheless startling to see what lengths its Republican Tea Partiers will go to intimidate, discourage, and fear monger folks into not voting—especially when those folks are African and/or Hispanic American and more likely to vote for Democrats.
Consider a campaign ad run by a conservative front group, Latinos for Reform, urging Latino Nevadans not to vote: "Don't vote this November. This is the only way to send them a clear message. You can no longer take us for granted." It’s hard to imagine a more baldly cynical manipulation of the voting electorate—though no wonder at all that Tea Party candidate Sharon Angle, as of this writing, remains silent. She benefits from this racist maneuver.
Whether you’re white, brown, black or blue, if this doesn’t drive you to the polls in November, nothing will; and it should drive you with equal vigor away from the party willing to resort to any strategy to win.
This same group “shook up the 2008 elections, when they cropped up in Pennsylvania, Colorado and New Mexico with an ad campaign that sought to drive racial divisions using a supposed allegiance of then candidate-Obama to African-Americans over Latinos.” It’s the old divide and conquer strategy adapted from the Republican book of dirty tricks. Whether the tactic is to divide the working class poor from the indigent, blacks from browns from whites, men from women, gays from straights, the goal’s the same: keep the citizens who have the most to lose by a Republican majority in Congress whose middle aged white male wealthy employ them at survival wages—black, brown, female, non-Christian, young, and gay—from voting.
Unconvinced?
Consider the Wisconsin Tea Party’s (astro-turfed by Americans for Prosperity-Wisconsin) documented plan for the November ballot: “The Republican Party of Wisconsin will use its “Voter Vault” state-wide voter file to compile a list of minority and student voters in targeted Wisconsin communities. Americans for Prosperity will use this list to send mail to these voters indicating the voter must call and confirm their registration information, and telling them if they do not call the number provided they could be removed from the voter lists. The Tea Party organizations will recruit and place individuals as official poll workers in selected municipalities in order to be able to make the challenges as official poll workers. On Election Day, these organizations will then “make use” of any postcards that are returned as undeliverable to challenge voters at the polls, utilizing law enforcement, as well as attorneys trained and provided by the RPW, to support their challenges.”
Need to see any more?
The Tea Party Republicans are not a party—they’re an organized hit squad for their corporate controllers at America, Inc. My critics are right—it’s no longer sufficient to call this party racist. With despicable strategies like this, they’re in fact corporatized fascists whose primary operatives clearly know one thing: If THE PEOPLE voted, the Tea Party would be exposed as the front for corporate greed it is, their true-believers left empty-pocketed, their ill-got power history.
Voter suppression: brought to you by your Tea Party Republican (and fake Libertarian) friends whose defense of the Constitution is nothing but a ruse to sucker your attention while they make millions—on your foreclosures, your credit defaults, your need of a living wage, and your inability to recognize the difference between blind loyalty to their profit margins and genuine patriotism.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu (589 words)
Consider a campaign ad run by a conservative front group, Latinos for Reform, urging Latino Nevadans not to vote: "Don't vote this November. This is the only way to send them a clear message. You can no longer take us for granted." It’s hard to imagine a more baldly cynical manipulation of the voting electorate—though no wonder at all that Tea Party candidate Sharon Angle, as of this writing, remains silent. She benefits from this racist maneuver.
Whether you’re white, brown, black or blue, if this doesn’t drive you to the polls in November, nothing will; and it should drive you with equal vigor away from the party willing to resort to any strategy to win.
This same group “shook up the 2008 elections, when they cropped up in Pennsylvania, Colorado and New Mexico with an ad campaign that sought to drive racial divisions using a supposed allegiance of then candidate-Obama to African-Americans over Latinos.” It’s the old divide and conquer strategy adapted from the Republican book of dirty tricks. Whether the tactic is to divide the working class poor from the indigent, blacks from browns from whites, men from women, gays from straights, the goal’s the same: keep the citizens who have the most to lose by a Republican majority in Congress whose middle aged white male wealthy employ them at survival wages—black, brown, female, non-Christian, young, and gay—from voting.
Unconvinced?
Consider the Wisconsin Tea Party’s (astro-turfed by Americans for Prosperity-Wisconsin) documented plan for the November ballot: “The Republican Party of Wisconsin will use its “Voter Vault” state-wide voter file to compile a list of minority and student voters in targeted Wisconsin communities. Americans for Prosperity will use this list to send mail to these voters indicating the voter must call and confirm their registration information, and telling them if they do not call the number provided they could be removed from the voter lists. The Tea Party organizations will recruit and place individuals as official poll workers in selected municipalities in order to be able to make the challenges as official poll workers. On Election Day, these organizations will then “make use” of any postcards that are returned as undeliverable to challenge voters at the polls, utilizing law enforcement, as well as attorneys trained and provided by the RPW, to support their challenges.”
Need to see any more?
The Tea Party Republicans are not a party—they’re an organized hit squad for their corporate controllers at America, Inc. My critics are right—it’s no longer sufficient to call this party racist. With despicable strategies like this, they’re in fact corporatized fascists whose primary operatives clearly know one thing: If THE PEOPLE voted, the Tea Party would be exposed as the front for corporate greed it is, their true-believers left empty-pocketed, their ill-got power history.
Voter suppression: brought to you by your Tea Party Republican (and fake Libertarian) friends whose defense of the Constitution is nothing but a ruse to sucker your attention while they make millions—on your foreclosures, your credit defaults, your need of a living wage, and your inability to recognize the difference between blind loyalty to their profit margins and genuine patriotism.
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu (589 words)
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