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| Source: Mother Jones |
Republican Governor of Wisconsin Walker has said he has considered using agents provocateur to stir up trouble in the peaceful marches and demonstrations in Wisconsin. Madison police chief condemned the governor for this saying it would endanger the lives of the marchers and his members. Walker too should take his place alongside the tyrants who stir up trouble to get an excuse to put down citizens of their own countries.
Both these statements are an indication of how far the us bosses are prepared to go in this present battle. Use live ammunition against American workers? This in line with the traditions of US capitalism. they shot US workers many times in the past until they were stopped by the rage and power of the workers. The union leaders have to recognize what is going on. The bosses have launched a war against the US working class. This war will only be defeated if it is met with a workers movement which launches its own war against the bosses.
We have hundreds of millions of people in our workers movement and potentially on our side. With the right program, that is one which improves wages, benefits and conditions for all workers, not just this few or that few, but all workers, and to be paid for out of what the Wall Street Journal says is a country "awash with cash," that is the wealth of the rich, a massive movement can be built. The working class are enraged at what has been done to them over the past years, at how the rich have got away with criminal swindling on a gigantic scale, at how Wall Street and the banks were bailed out while working people were left to their own devices, if this reality is built upon the greatest movement of US workers ever seen can be built.
But there is one condition. The union leaders must put forward an offensive program in front of the working class which can improve the living standards of all workers, not just one section or the other and link this to a strategy and tactics which take on the capitalists at their point of weakness, the point of production. Stop the economy unless the working class wins a good living standard. This has to be the approach when bosses mouth pieces are talking about shooting workers and using provocateurs to discredit the movement.
The Wisconsin state assembly passed a controversial bill that will eliminate public sector bargaining rights for the state’s 170,000 state workers. The assault that the private sector has faced is now being waged with a vengeance against those of us in the public sector. Rallies and protests sprang up 17 Wisconsin cities yesterday afternoon as well as in Pennsylvania, Ohio and other areas of the country.
In Pittsburg PA, workers carried signs reading, “Labor Solidarity has no borders” as they rallied against similar attacks. According to the Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel, the bill passed in the Wisconsin state assembly would:
• End unions' ability to bargain over anything except their salary. The changes would not apply to local police, firefighters or state troopers.
• Require local governments that don't have civil-service systems to create an employee grievance system within months. Those local civil-service systems would have to address grievances for employee termination, employee discipline and workplace safety.
• Require state employees to contribute 5.8% of their pay to their pensions. The proposal also requires state workers to pick up at least 12.6% of the cost of their health-care premiums and trims overall benefits in health plans.
• Give the state Department of Health Service sweeping powers to change the state's Medicaid health programs for the poor such as BadgerCare Plus to address sharply rising costs for those programs. Members of the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee would have a chance to object to those provisions and force a vote by the committee on the changes.
If the income thresholds are changed to drop participants from the program, the current thresholds would be restored on Jan. 1, 2015.
• Allow for the sale of state heating plants after a review by the Joint Finance Committee, with the net gains from any sale to be put in a budget reserve fund.
• Make about 35 political appointments out of what are now civil service positions in state agencies such as chief legal counsel. This move would roughly double the number of political appointees in the administration and could potentially allow Walker to fill positions held by holdovers from the Doyle administration with Walker's own picks.
According to the Wall Street Journal the “Assembly Democrats, sent Republican Gov. Scott Walker an alternative to his budget proposal that includes economizing measures of his bill but strips provisions that would eliminate most collective-bargaining rights of the state's 170,000 public workers.”
As we have said repeatedly, the Democrats and the Labor hierarchy are doing their very best to ensure that no demands of an economic nature are raised. Both these forces, the Democrats as representatives of Wall Street and the capitalist class and the Labor bureaucracy that is ideologically wedded to capitalism and the market want to assure the bankers, hedge fund managers and other swindlers who brought us the great economic meltdown that their economic interests will not be threatened; workers and the middle class will pay for it.
“Republican Senate Leader Scott Fitzgerald, in an interview, called the Democratic proposal ‘showmanship’” the WSJ states, and he’s correct. "Shame! Shame! Shame!" the Democrats shouted. "What a sad day for this state when we are willing to ignore the traditions that people died for in this state, that people fought bitterly for.” said Peter Barca, the Democratic minority leader. “We ignore our forefathers who made this a great state." And what about the living standards, pensions, wages, and benefits that the Democrats and Labor leaders are offering up to the bankers on a platter in order for a seat for them at the table? Did our standard of living not come through bitter and heroic struggles against the bosses and their two parties? And what about the future generations?
The trade Union leaders are only opposing those demands that will threaten their income, the ending of the dues check-off and automatic union recognition. The Democrats are opposing them because they have received billions of dollars in Union member’s dues money handed to them at election time by these very same Union leaders.
The right wing bourgeois mean business. Jeff Cox, the Republican deputy attorney general of Indiana recently told the liberal magazine Mother Jones that he favored “live ammunition” as the response to the protests in Wisconsin. Obama doing a photo op and walking a picket line will be a Democratic ploy to win votes in the 2012 elections. Democrats walk picket lines quite frequently and it hasn’t done a thing for us except prevent us from relying on them rather than on our own independent power and strength, on the street and in politics.
I spoke to a Union activist in Madison this morning and she described the mood and how exciting it is; that there are so many young people involved and people who have never done anything like this before. This is a very positive development without a doubt and has the potential to change the balance of forces between capital and Labor here in the US. But it can only do that and avoid going down in defeat if we go on the offensive and place some demands on the table that we have raised in previous blogs. It is also important that mass meetings be held in areas where there are protests and rallies and committees set up to build the movement and take it forward. Links have to be built between the areas in order to build momentum and coordinated action between states.
Organize the unorganized. Jobs for all, a $15 an hour minimum wage or $5 an hour wage increase whichever is greater, a livable pension for all, a shorter workweek free education, transportation and medical care, these are all demands worth fighting and sacrificing for and the money is there for them. Political committees can be formed to run independent candidates for political office at the local and federal level based on this movement and around such a program. The Democrats are not the friends of working people.
The idea that society can’t afford these things is nonsense. Are we to accept that this has been the end of civilization? The best capitalism and the free market can offer? Do we honestly think that things will get better? They will not. If this movement doesn’t break from the Democratic Party and kick out the present Labor leadership who are collaborating in the destruction of our living standards, we will continue to go backwards. The graphs below from Mother Jones give some idea of the financial situation. then there's the wars etc.
We have the power to stop this but we have to fight for something, stand for something, and we have to reject the idea that we have to pay for it. Make the rich pay for it. In a previous blog we explained that to support our brothers and sisters in the Arab uprisings the Labor leaders should call for the refusal to handle all goods from regimes that are suppressing uprisings, we should build on such a tactic including stopping the flow of goods here. Here are some more examples of where the money is from the liberal magazine, Mother Jones.
In Pittsburg PA, workers carried signs reading, “Labor Solidarity has no borders” as they rallied against similar attacks. According to the Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel, the bill passed in the Wisconsin state assembly would:
• End unions' ability to bargain over anything except their salary. The changes would not apply to local police, firefighters or state troopers.
• Require local governments that don't have civil-service systems to create an employee grievance system within months. Those local civil-service systems would have to address grievances for employee termination, employee discipline and workplace safety.
• Require state employees to contribute 5.8% of their pay to their pensions. The proposal also requires state workers to pick up at least 12.6% of the cost of their health-care premiums and trims overall benefits in health plans.
• Give the state Department of Health Service sweeping powers to change the state's Medicaid health programs for the poor such as BadgerCare Plus to address sharply rising costs for those programs. Members of the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee would have a chance to object to those provisions and force a vote by the committee on the changes.
If the income thresholds are changed to drop participants from the program, the current thresholds would be restored on Jan. 1, 2015.
• Allow for the sale of state heating plants after a review by the Joint Finance Committee, with the net gains from any sale to be put in a budget reserve fund.
• Make about 35 political appointments out of what are now civil service positions in state agencies such as chief legal counsel. This move would roughly double the number of political appointees in the administration and could potentially allow Walker to fill positions held by holdovers from the Doyle administration with Walker's own picks.
According to the Wall Street Journal the “Assembly Democrats, sent Republican Gov. Scott Walker an alternative to his budget proposal that includes economizing measures of his bill but strips provisions that would eliminate most collective-bargaining rights of the state's 170,000 public workers.”
As we have said repeatedly, the Democrats and the Labor hierarchy are doing their very best to ensure that no demands of an economic nature are raised. Both these forces, the Democrats as representatives of Wall Street and the capitalist class and the Labor bureaucracy that is ideologically wedded to capitalism and the market want to assure the bankers, hedge fund managers and other swindlers who brought us the great economic meltdown that their economic interests will not be threatened; workers and the middle class will pay for it.
“Republican Senate Leader Scott Fitzgerald, in an interview, called the Democratic proposal ‘showmanship’” the WSJ states, and he’s correct. "Shame! Shame! Shame!" the Democrats shouted. "What a sad day for this state when we are willing to ignore the traditions that people died for in this state, that people fought bitterly for.” said Peter Barca, the Democratic minority leader. “We ignore our forefathers who made this a great state." And what about the living standards, pensions, wages, and benefits that the Democrats and Labor leaders are offering up to the bankers on a platter in order for a seat for them at the table? Did our standard of living not come through bitter and heroic struggles against the bosses and their two parties? And what about the future generations?
The trade Union leaders are only opposing those demands that will threaten their income, the ending of the dues check-off and automatic union recognition. The Democrats are opposing them because they have received billions of dollars in Union member’s dues money handed to them at election time by these very same Union leaders.
The right wing bourgeois mean business. Jeff Cox, the Republican deputy attorney general of Indiana recently told the liberal magazine Mother Jones that he favored “live ammunition” as the response to the protests in Wisconsin. Obama doing a photo op and walking a picket line will be a Democratic ploy to win votes in the 2012 elections. Democrats walk picket lines quite frequently and it hasn’t done a thing for us except prevent us from relying on them rather than on our own independent power and strength, on the street and in politics.
I spoke to a Union activist in Madison this morning and she described the mood and how exciting it is; that there are so many young people involved and people who have never done anything like this before. This is a very positive development without a doubt and has the potential to change the balance of forces between capital and Labor here in the US. But it can only do that and avoid going down in defeat if we go on the offensive and place some demands on the table that we have raised in previous blogs. It is also important that mass meetings be held in areas where there are protests and rallies and committees set up to build the movement and take it forward. Links have to be built between the areas in order to build momentum and coordinated action between states.
Organize the unorganized. Jobs for all, a $15 an hour minimum wage or $5 an hour wage increase whichever is greater, a livable pension for all, a shorter workweek free education, transportation and medical care, these are all demands worth fighting and sacrificing for and the money is there for them. Political committees can be formed to run independent candidates for political office at the local and federal level based on this movement and around such a program. The Democrats are not the friends of working people.
We have the power to stop this but we have to fight for something, stand for something, and we have to reject the idea that we have to pay for it. Make the rich pay for it. In a previous blog we explained that to support our brothers and sisters in the Arab uprisings the Labor leaders should call for the refusal to handle all goods from regimes that are suppressing uprisings, we should build on such a tactic including stopping the flow of goods here. Here are some more examples of where the money is from the liberal magazine, Mother Jones.
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