Republicans Send American Workers and Middle Class Running for Cover
I know it is certainly the fault of both the Democratic and Republic parties that America is so messed up, but the Republicans are setting out to do more damage in 2011 than we have seen in a while.–KAS
Dear Kevin,
If you needed anymore proof that the Republican Party is going to go attack the pillars of the American middle class, than you don’t need to look any further than Wisconsin. Republican Governor Scott Walker has proposed a bill that would eliminate state workers’ rights to bargain for benefits and better salaries.
He wants to take away the rights of Wisconsin teachers, prison guards, and other state employees to negotiate for a better life. Hundreds of thousands of workers denied their rights. This is union busting at its worst.
21st Century Democrats has always been a proud supporter of workers’ rights and this is one of the most atrocious attacks I’ve ever seen. The governor even threatened to call out the National Guard to prevent state workers from protesting this horrendous bill.
Wisconsin isn’t taking this lying down though. Thousands of state employees, students, and other supporters have come out to protest this assault on workers’ rights. 21st Century Democrats is proud to stand with Wisconsin’s state workers and I know you are too.
Sign our message today
Sincerely,
Jim Scheibel, Chair
Contact Information
Phone: (202) 736-5775
Dear Kevin,
If you needed anymore proof that the Republican Party is going to go attack the pillars of the American middle class, than you don’t need to look any further than Wisconsin. Republican Governor Scott Walker has proposed a bill that would eliminate state workers’ rights to bargain for benefits and better salaries.
He wants to take away the rights of Wisconsin teachers, prison guards, and other state employees to negotiate for a better life. Hundreds of thousands of workers denied their rights. This is union busting at its worst.
21st Century Democrats has always been a proud supporter of workers’ rights and this is one of the most atrocious attacks I’ve ever seen. The governor even threatened to call out the National Guard to prevent state workers from protesting this horrendous bill.
Wisconsin isn’t taking this lying down though. Thousands of state employees, students, and other supporters have come out to protest this assault on workers’ rights. 21st Century Democrats is proud to stand with Wisconsin’s state workers and I know you are too.
Sign our message today
Sincerely,
Jim Scheibel, Chair
Contact Information
Phone: (202) 736-5775
Labels: Republicans Send American Workers and Middle Class Running for Cover
posted by Kevin Anthony Stoda at 7:44 AM
4 Comments:
Dear Kevin,
As we noted earlier this week, we are in the midst of the most significant attack on the Environmental Protection Agency in the agency’s history. Big Oil and Dirty Coal – and their allies in Congress – are attempting to dismantle the commonsense safeguards that protect our environment and public health.
It is against this backdrop that we are releasing the 2010 National Environmental Scorecard, which provides objective, factual information about the most important environmental legislation considered and the corresponding voting records of all members of the second session of the 111th Congress.
How did your members of Congress vote on 2010’s major environmental bills? Click here to view our just-released 2010 National Environmental Scorecard and see how your members of Congress measure up.
The 111th Congress started off with great promise for the environment, most significantly with House passage of comprehensive energy and climate legislation. As the 2010 National Environmental Scorecard reflects, the successes of 2009 were followed by an incredibly disappointing second session in 2010.
Indeed, the most important votes of 2010 are the ones that didn’t happen: first and most importantly, the Senate failed to even begin debate on a comprehensive clean energy and climate bill that would have created jobs, increased America’s energy independence, and protected the planet from carbon pollution; next, the Senate failed to respond to the greatest disaster in our nation’s history — the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Click here to view the LCV 2010 National Environmental Scorecard and see how your members of Congress voted on key environmental issues.
While the lack of progress in 2010 is highly disappointing, we applaud those members of Congress who fought to protect public health and the environment and reduce our nation’s dangerous dependence on oil. Conversely, the 2010 Scorecard clearly exposes those members who put corporate polluters and other special interests ahead of the health and well-being of all Americans by opposing efforts to protect the environment.
Despite the disappointments of 2010, LCV will continue to work for environmental policies that protect our planet for future generations. We will also fight to protect the EPA and hold accountable those who seek to undermine our environmental protections. And we will call on you to contact your elected officials to urge them to support critical environmental legislation and oppose efforts to cripple the EPA in 2011 and beyond.
We also need your help to educate everyone you know about how members of Congress voted on the environment last year. After viewing the 2010 National Environmental Scorecard, please spread the word by forwarding this to your friends and family. And be sure to stay on top of our work by following LCV on Facebook and Twitter.
Thank you for your generous support of LCV.
Sincerely,
Gene Karpinski
President
Dear Kevin,
Everyone wants to cut the budget – but not Pentagon spending.
Tell Congress to "put the guns on the table" and not spend $1 more on war and weapons.
Congress is voting today on an essential bill to keep the country running. And despite what you might have heard about cuts that would hobble the Department of Defense, here is what's really happening: proposed Pentagon spending is increasing.
"[The spending bill] would shave the DOD budget by only 2.8% from Obama's request, which translates into an $8-billion increase in funding over fiscal 2010."
– Los Angeles Times, Feb. 15
That’s why we're launching the Not $1 More campaign – and we want YOU to sign on first. Tell Congress to "put the guns on the table" and make the Pentagon live by the same budget rules as everyone else: Sign here to support Not $1 More.
http://act.truemajorityaction.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=183
It’s just plain silly: Over half of all the money Congress makes decisions on goes directly into the Pentagon’s pocket, and that doesn't even count the money for the actual wars!
The Pentagon's weapons contractors should have to live on a budget just like the rest of us. If we’re already discussing cuts to stuff that Americans really need – like job training, home heating assistance, and research into clean energy – then EVERYTHING needs to be "on the table" for cuts.
Sign now and show your members of Congress that if they’re going to make the whole country live on a budget, they need to include the Pentagon too.
–Darcy
Darcy Scott Martin
TrueMajority / USAction
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/17/democracy_uprising_in_the_usa_noam
AMY GOODMAN: This month is the 15th anniversary of Democracy Now! on the air, and it’s a real privilege to have MIT professor, analyst, world-renowned political dissident, linguist, Noam Chomsky with us. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonzalez, and we’ve been together for this whole 15 years, Juan. It’s really been quite an amazing journey.
As we talk about this revolution that’s rolling across the Middle East, we put out to our listeners and viewers on Facebook last night that, Noam, you were going to be in. And so, people were sending in their comments and questions. We asked, on Facebook and Twitter, to send us questions. Here is one of the questions.
RYAN ADSERIAS: Hello, Professor Chomsky. My name is Ryan Adserias, and I’m a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and also the child of a long line of working-class union folks. I don’t know if you’ve been noticing, but we’ve been holding a lot of protests and rallies here in our capital to protest Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to break collective bargaining rights that Wisconsin workers worked hard for over 50 years ago and have enjoyed ever since. We closed all the schools around here for tomorrow—today and tomorrow, actually. The teaching assistants here at the university are staging teach-outs. The undergraduates are walking out of class to show solidarity. And all of this is because our governor and governors all around the country are proposing legislation that’s going to end collective bargaining and really break the unions. I’ve also been noticing that there’s not a whole lot of national representation of our struggle and our movement, and it’s really been troubling me. So my question to you is, how exactly is it that we can get the attention of our national Democratic and progressive leaders to speak out against these measures and to help end union busting here in the United States?
AMY GOODMAN: That was a question from Ryan Adserias in Madison, Wisconsin, where more than 10,000—some say tens of thousands of people, teachers, students, are protesting in the Capitol building, schools closed, as Ryan said. So, from Manama to Madison, from Manama, Bahrain, to Madison, Wisconsin, Noam Chomsky?
NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s very interesting. The reason why you can’t get Democratic leaders to join is because they agree. They are also trying to destroy the unions. In fact, if you take a look at—take, say, the lame-duck session. The great achievement in the lame-duck session for which Obama is greatly praised by Democratic Party leaders is that they achieved bipartisan agreement on several measures. The most important one was the tax cut. And the issue in the tax cut—there was only one issue—should there be a tax cut for the very rich? The population was overwhelmingly against it, I think about two to one. There wasn’t even a discussion of it, they just gave it away. And the very same time, the less noticed was that Obama declared a tax increase for federal workers. Now, it wasn’t called a "tax increase"; it’s called a "freeze." But if you think for 30 seconds, a freeze on pay for a federal workers is fiscally identical to a tax increase for federal workers. And when you extend it for five years, as he said later, that means a decrease, because of population growth, inflation and so on. So he basically declared an increase in taxes for federal workers
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/02/defunding-democratic-party
Wisconsin, the birthplace of public sector unions, is now ground zero for the Republican jihad to destroy them, with a GOP-sponsored bill to strip Wisconsin’s public unions of their collective bargaining rights now seemingly certain to pass. The cynicism of the bill might not be entirely clear until you hear the details:
[The bill] would require most public workers to pay half their pension costs — typically 5.8% of pay for state workers — and at least 12% of their health care costs. It applies to most state and local employees but does not apply to police, firefighters and state troopers, who would continue to bargain for their benefits.
Except for police, firefighters and troopers, raises would be limited to inflation unless a bigger increase was approved in a referendum. The non-law enforcement unions would lose their rights to bargain over anything but wages, would have to hold annual elections to keep their organizations intact and would lose the ability to have union dues deducted from state paychecks.
Now why would this be? Is it because collective bargaining is somehow less of a problem for public safety employees than for teachers? Because strikes by cops are less hazardous than strikes by teachers? Because public safety employees tend not to be hard bargainers anyway? Because public safety employees are poorly paid?
Or is it because teachers tend to vote pretty reliably for Democrats and public safety employees don’t? Bingo.
The irony here is that when you hear those cherry-picked horror stories of vastly overpaid civil servants (usually the result of overtime abuse of some kind), nine times out of ten it involves a public safety employee. It’s not teachers who get to retire at age 50 and it’s not teachers who end up padding their hours in their last year of work and retiring on 120% of their usual income. Most of the time, it’s police, firefighters, and state troopers.
But they’re the ones exempt from the Wisconsin GOP’s union bashing drive. Go figure.
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