dahoea on Mar 12, 2011
Educators and our allies rally at Capitol park in Boise March 9 2011
Educators and our allies protested the passage of legislation to take away teachers' voices.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Is Labor Ready to Fight for Its Life? | Dissident Voice #wearewi #WIunion
Is Labor Ready to Fight for Its Life? | Dissident Voice
Is Labor Ready to Fight for Its Life?
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and his right Republican allies in the Wisconsin legislature might be a bunch of plutocratic, Koch-funded thugs but you’ve got to hand it to them – they’ve got guts. So what if the strategic departure of fourteen Democratic state senators from Wisconsin was followed by an historic popular and labor uprising in and around the Madison Capital Rotunda, bringing hundreds of thousands of union members and supporters from one day to the next to protest Walker’s move to “reverse half-a-century’s middle-class progress in the state by erasing collective bargaining rights for public employees” (the New York Times editors on Friday, March 11) in the disingenuous name of “budget repair”? So what if it is obvious to any serious observer that Walker and the Wisconsin Republicans’ effort to undermine public unions – a longstanding goal of the Republican Party and many of its big business backers (e.g. Koch Industries) – has nothing to do with fixing a state budget crisis that Walker has trumped up and fed with tax breaks for the wealthy and corporate Few? And so what if numerous recent public opinion polls (USA Today, Wall Street Journal, New York Times) show that the preponderant majority of Americans support collective bargaining rights for public (and private sector) workers? So what if most of the nation’s citizens reject Walker’s war (and that of other governors and legislators) on public sector workers – a war that amounts to the largest assault on organized labor’s economic and political power in recent American history?
This is Our Moment
Walker couldn’t care less. He’s a fiercely dedicated right-capitalist ideologue carried away with the sense of his mission to inflict lasting and historic damage on organized labor and the Democrats. One of many hard-right Republicans elected with Tea Party support at the state level in November of 2010, Walker has made little effort
Wisconsin’s Will Is Stronger than Walker’s Bill | Dissident Voice #wearewi #WIunion
Wisconsin’s Will Is Stronger than Walker’s Bill | Dissident Voice
Wisconsin’s Will Is Stronger than Walker’s Bill
Wisconsin’s progressive tradition is a beautiful, inspiring rarity.
It shines not only with Fighting Bob La Follette’s forceful defense of worker and farmer rights against cruel depredation by robber barons at the tail end of the Gilded Age.
It includes, also, the sterling record of efficient, honest municipal governments in Milwaukee and several other cities headed by socialist mayors, mainly of immigrant German origin, who were steadfastly devoted to serving society’s wage-earning majority, its indispensable backbone.
Up north, there were the Finnish-American labor partisans who organized an influential publishing house, consumer cooperatives in communities throughout the region, and collective sports and theater activity even in the smallest rural towns.
Then there’s Wisconsin’s capital, which affectionately came to be known as the People’s Republic of Madison during the turbulent Vietnam years, when
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