Category: Class War
Solidarity
And this is why I love Athenae:
I’ve seen a lot of comfortably situated loudmouths today asking, “Why should you be protected from losing your job, if I’m not?”
I wish they asked the question, “Why don’t I have protection from the most capricious employers, from the whims of shareholders, from bosses who would rather steal than steward?”
I wish they asked the question, “Seeing these people united, how can I go on alone?”
I wish they asked the question, “Who will be there for me when someone rips the world out from under me?”
They say, you shouldn’t be safe if I’m not.
Thirty thousand people in Wisconsin say, I am not safe if you’re not.
NASCAR
Anyone who doesn’t want the Pentagon to put out the money to sponsor it is a Marxist and should be killed.
And really, who can argue with that logic?
Flown the coop
Wisconsin’s Democratic Senators have decamped to Illinois, denying the Republicans and the governor a quorum. They say they won’t come back until union-busting’s off the table.
These are real Dems! God bless ’em all.
Kabuki
This is happening in every state with a Republican governor. You’d think some reporter would connect the dots:
Wisconsin’s new Republican governor has framed his assault on public worker’s collective bargaining rights as a needed measure of fiscal austerity during tough times.
The reality is radically different. Unlike true austerity measures — service rollbacks, furloughs, and other temporary measures that cause pain but save money — rolling back worker’s bargaining rights by itself saves almost nothing on its own. But Walker’s doing it anyhow, to knock down a barrier and allow him to cut state employee benefits immediately.
Furthermore, this broadside comes less than a month after the state’s fiscal bureau — the Wisconsin equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office — concluded that Wisconsin isn’t even in need of austerity measures, and could conclude the fiscal year with a surplus. In fact, they say that the current budget shortfall is a direct result of tax cut policies Walker enacted in his first days in office.
“Walker was not forced into a budget repair bill by circumstances beyond he control,” says Jack Norman, research director at the Institute for Wisconsin Future — a public interest think tank. “He wanted a budget repair bill and forced it by pushing through tax cuts… so he could rush through these other changes.”
“The state of Wisconsin has not reached the point at which austerity measures are needed,” Norman adds.
Bernie on the budget
The follower
Even though cable news shows and political pundits swoon all over NJ Gov. Chris Christie, Dean Baker is exactly right: Christie displays “follow-ship”, not leadership. He is completely a creature of the Republican establishment. Yet he likes to paint himself as a regular guy — and even an outsider.
“Outsider”? Don’t make me laugh.
Married to an investment banker, he worked as a securities lawyer and then as a lobbyist representing the Securities Industry Association, Wall Street’s trade association.
Appointed as a U.S. Attorney with no prosecutorial experience, his appointment was approved by Karl Rove because Christie, his stockbroker brother Todd and their wives donated a half-million dollars to Bush’s campaign. Todd also spread some cash compost around the Republican Governor’s Association, which used to money to run ads supporting Christie’s gubernatorial race.
Oh yeah. About Todd: He was one of 20 specialist stock traders charged with civil fraud for cheating customers. Funny thing, though: 14 of those traders were also charged criminally, many for lesser infractions than Todd Christie. But we can rest easy, since Gov. Christie assures us his brother got no special treatment — even though he awarded a lucrative, no-bid state contract to the federal attorney who investigated his brother after his brother was cleared. Christie insists there was no connection, and I’m sure he wouldn’t lie, right?
You got a problem with that?
POLITICO’s blog, The Arena, recently asked:
In a Wednesday afternoon speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C., New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie called for raising the retirement age on Social Security. His willingness to tackle politically delicate entitlement programs follows his approach in New Jersey of taking on teachers’ unions and other groups. Can Christie portray himself as a teller of difficult truths and become a credible White House candidate in 2012 or 2016? Or will his YouTube-friendly shtick soon wear thin and render him largely irrelevant in Democratic-leaning New Jersey?
The fact that Gov. Christie is willing to do whatever Wall Street and the elite media tell him does not suggest that he has strong leadership qualities. If he had strong leadership qualities, he might take a moment to look at the Social Security trustees report himself, or at least talk to someone who had.
He would discover that the program can pay 100 percent of all scheduled benefits through the year 2037 and nearly 80 percent of scheduled benefits after this date for the indefinite future. After 2037 retirees would always get a larger benefit than current retirees even if Congress never does anything.
Continue reading “The follower”
Of course he did
In the old Knight-Ridder ethics code, there was something about sources taking you to lunch: It was “assumed” that your level of integrity was such that is wasn’t for sale “for the price of lunch.” Hah! Reporters love free food, and of course the flattery that goes along with it can certainly smooth things along; they’re human beings, after all:
A former health insurance insider turned whistleblower says that he was not only surprised at how “easy” it was to manipulate members of the news media over the years, but also reveals that he routinely “wined and dined” reporters from major news outlets – including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal – in return for favorable coverage.
In his new book Deadly Spin, Wendell Potter describes how his chief function as a senior public relations officer at two of the largest for-profit health insurance companies in the United States – Humana and Cigna – was to “perpetuate myths that had no other purpose but to sustain those companies’ extraordinary high profitability.”
But in an extended interview with Raw Story last week, Potter went further, revealing that he lunched with reporters at major media outlets for years – including journalists at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal – as well as those from local and regional media, in most cases picking up the tab, which he says directly resulted in positive coverage of the companies he represented.
In an email to Raw Story Sunday night, New York Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha responded, “The claims are unsubstantiated and absurd since no names of reporters, examples of stories or other pertinent facts are provided to support these claims.”
Wall Street Journal spokeswoman Ashley Huston declined comment.
As expected
Teevee news is doing very little coverage of the union pushback in Wisconsin.
Russ Feingold
A politician who not only didn’t cash in, he’s taking it to the people:
WASHINGTON — When some senators retire, they decide to take lucrative lobbying jobs. Others go straight to Wall Street. But Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold, who lost his re-election bid in November, is continuing on his principled — and often lonely — path by starting an organization to combat corporate influence in politics, an effort he hopes will spark “a new progressive movement” that will truly hold elected officials accountable.
Launching on Wednesday, Progressives United is an attempt to to build a grassroots effort aimed at mitigating the effects of, and eventually overturning, the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates to corporate spending in the U.S. electoral system. In addition to online mobilization, the political action committee (PAC) will support progressive candidates at the local, state and national levels, as well as holding the media and elected officials accountable on the group’s key priorities.
“In my view — and the view of many people — it’s one of the most lawless decisions in the history of our country,” said Feingold of Citizens United in an interview with The Huffington Post. “The idea of allowing corporations to have unlimited influence on our democracy is very dangerous, obviously. That’s exactly what it does … Things were like this 100 years ago in the United States, with the huge corporate and business power of the oil companies and others. But this time it’s like the Gilded Age on steroids.”