Teabggers want to shut the government down while trying to blame Democrats

U.S. House Republicans, egged on by their masters the teabggers, are refusing to comprise on the current budget and are angling for the first government shutdown in 15 years as of midnight tonight while trying to blame the Democrats for it.

Congressional leaders are negotiating around-the-clock negotiations, but clearly Republicans are not negotiating in good faith. Republicans are insistent in including pie-in-the-sky policy provisions in a budget agreement, known as riders that would strip funding for Planned Parenthood and neutering the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

There is little doubt Republicans want a government shutdown no matter who it hurts, and their masters, the small minority known as the teabaggers, are urging them not to compromise. Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., has repeatedly said “shut it down” while in the same breath trying to blame Democrats.

Pence and other rightwing Republicans spoke before a small rally of teabagges on Thursday where teabaggers were chanting “shut it down,” yet they are still going to try and blame Democrats for the shutdown.

Besides the ridiculous, unrealistic and harmful policy riders the Republicans want in a budget bill, it is less than 1 percent of the budget that is being haggled here. It’s as if they don’t really want to reach compromise.

That’s what you get when you put people in charge of something they hate. Compromise is what created this country, but Republicans refuse to do it. Actually, their masters, teabaggers, refuse to let them.

Good news for progressives: Kloppenburg win and Beck demise

In a preview of the 2012 election, JoAnne Kloppenburg was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Tuesday over the incumbent in a backlash to the union-busting attempt by teabagger Governor Scott Walker.

In a usually slow March election, voter turnout was very high, and Kloppenburg unseated incumbent David Prosser, a Walker pal who made it very clear how he will vote when the hastily passed union busting bill makes its way to the court.

The election was a clear referendum on the union busting efforts by Republicans in the Midwest states, and it was the first election since last November; allowing people to turn protest into action.

Going into the race after the primary election in February, incumbent David Prosser was the hands on favorite, having pulled in 55 percent of the vote over Kloppenburg, his second highest leading opponent, who received just 25 percent of the vote. After Walker’s union-busting legislation that would kill collective bargaining rights for state workers, the race became a focus for the energized Democratic base. However, A recount is expected.

The Wisconsin State Journal is reporting that the high voter turnout, double for a normal March election, has been a boon for the recall attempt of eight Republican Senators. The Journal is reporting that recall leaders got plenty of signatures outside of polling places on Tuesday, so much so that they have enough signatures to put them over the top for a second Republican recall.

The close vote indicates that not all eight will be successful, but it can change the makeup of the body, as well as keep the energy going until next year’s election. A recall of two Michigan Senators for a tax vote in 1983 gave Republicans control of the Senate they have never lost, despite more people voting for Democratic Senators in 2006 than Republicans.

I am not normally a fan of recalls for a single vote, but when that vote required you violate the law, sneak in and out of the Capitol under armed guard to make the vote and lock people out of their Capitol to do it then I would make an exception.

There is also recall attempt against a couple of the heroic Wisconsin 14 Democratic Senators who left the Capitol to deny a quorum, but it does not appear to be much of a threat. In fact, the recall against Sen. Lena Taylor, D-Milwaukee, has only two signatures so far; the organizer and his wife, and the 60-day window to gather signatures runs out April 25.

I can’t wait for next year’s election, and we only need to limit the damage Republicans can do in the next 16 months.

Yesterday saw even more good news. Faux “news” madman Glenn Beck announced he leaving his show; a victim of falling ratings and disgusted advertisers. It’s unclear if it is voluntary.

The ratings for the first quarter of 2011 showed Beck's show had lost close to a third of its audience, especially among advertiser-prized viewers ages 25 to 54, where he was down almost 40 percent. But, it was the advertisers that really did him in, and they were leaving in droves because they did not want to be associated with his crazy end-of-world conspiracy theories and racist rants.

I expect his ratings to make a surge for next couple of days and maybe weeks because people want to see what conspiracy theory he whips up and who he blames for this.

Median CEO pay jumped 27 percent in 2010

While teachers, police officers, firefighters and public employees are being blamed for the Bush recession that has state and local governments struggling to balance their budgets, and public employees have made large concession of pay and benefits, there is some good news: median CEO pay jumped 27 percent in 2010.

According to a USA Today analysis of data from GovernanceMetrics International, they found that median CEO pay jumped to a mere $9 million a year, but workers in private industry, meanwhile, saw their compensation grow just 2.1 percent in the 12 months that ended in December 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I have not met any workers in the private or public sector who has gotten a raise in the last couple of years, and some Michigan state employees have taken a pay cut twice so far in the past three years, as well as taking unpaid furlough days to help balance the budget.

American workers are taking home less in real weekly wages than they took home in the 1970s.

The only people doing well in this economy are the superrich and now, apparently, CEOs. In fact, in 1965 the average CEO was earning 24 times what the average worker was making, but that has jumped to 263 times at a time when workers are making concessions in wages and benefits to make a company solvent.

The superrich have gotten spectacularly richer over the last four decades while their fellow citizens either treaded water or lost ground. The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation’s pretax income in 2007 — up from less than 9 percent in 1976. From 2002 to 2007, that top 1 percent’s pretax income increased an extraordinary 10 percent every year. But the boom proved an exclusive affair: in that same period, the median income for non-elderly American households went down and the poverty rate rose.

In addition to a 27 percent pay increase, CEO bonuses are up a whopping 47 percent. It can and will be argued by right-wingers that they earned that large raise by increasing profits 47 percent, but, as USA Today points out, they boosted those profits by cost-cutting – AKA outsourcing - and layoffs. In fact, CEOs who slashed their payrolls the deepest and laid off the most workers took home 42 percent more compensation than the year’s chief executive pay average for S&P 500 companies, according to the 17th annual executive compensation survey by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).

But the gravy train does not end with a boost in pay and bonuses. CEOs saw the estimated future value of stock and options awards take off in 2010, with the median value gaining 32 percent to $5.6 million. These stock and options, many of which were granted when stock prices were much lower than they are now, stand to create a shower of wealth when CEOs cash them in.

The right has to stoop to imposters to try and paint unions as violent

The right is spinning out of control trying to paint your neighbors, friends and relatives as “union thugs” simply because they are standing up for their civil right of collective bargaining.

The massive crowds protesting the right's assault on public sector unions have been peaceful, and it is driving the right crazy that no one is buying their lie that they are violent. The leading rightwing blog in Michigan is going berserk trying to portray firefighters, police officers and teachers as “animals. In fact, a few Michigan teabaggers have been at the protests trying to provoke a confrontation so they can get it on tap to try and make the claim that they are violent. Kind of like what went on from the regime in Egypt.

It has been driving them crazy that they have not been able to elicit a violent response, so now they are trying to plant imposters to incite a riot. Extremist Republican Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin said he considered planting some “troublemakers” into the huge crowd of pro-worker protestors that have flooded into Madison. The only thing that stopped him was that he was afraid it might force him to bow to the majority of people who support collective bargaining rights, not that it would endanger people.

But Walker and teabagger Republican Grand Traverse County Commissioner Jason Gillman are not the only Republicans who feel that way.

Republican Johnson County, Indiana deputy prosecutor Carlos Lam resigned last week after the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism traced an e-mail he sent to Walker urging him to fake an attack to make it look like the pro-union protested had did it to in order for Walker to gain sympathy.

The e-mail was one of the tens of thousands of e-mails released in an open-records settlement the Walker administration reached with a local paper and the Associated Press after Walker lied and said he had thousands of emails supporting his union busting attempt.

“I've been involved in GOP politics here in Indiana for 18 years, and I think that the situation in WI presents a good opportunity for what's called a "false flag" operation,” Lam wrote. “ If you could employ an associate who pretends to be sympathetic to the unions' cause to physically attack you (or even use a firearm against you), you could discredit the public unions.”

When confronted with the evidence, Lam initially lied and said he had not sent the e-mail, claiming that he had been the victim of identity theft before he confessed.

This is not the first Indiana Republican thug to lose his job for advocating violence against peaceful, working class citizens. Indiana Deputy Attorney General Jeff Cox lost his job after tweeting that the protesters should be dealt with using “live ammunition,” following that up with “against thugs physically threatening legally-elected state legislators & governor? You’re damn right I advocate deadly force.”

Tell me again who the thugs are?

Some idiot over at the Detroit News even went so far as to compare working people that are our friends, neighbors and family with the murderous, Detroit prohibition-era Purple Gang because they support those who support them. If you want to know why newspapers are barely surviving, you just need to know that this guy is what passes as an editor today.

This idiot named Jeffrey Hadden is comparing a legal boycott with murder and vandalism.

Please.

Anniversary of MLK assentation also a day to show support for collective bargaining

Organized labor has long marked the anniversary of the senseless assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King on April 4 1968 in Memphis, Tenn. Because he long recognized collective bargaining as a civil right and risked his life to protect it, but this year the anniversary has special meaning with the all-out attempt by Republicans to roll back that important civil right.

Beginning with worship services on Sunday, and continuing through the week of April 4,unions, people of faith, civil and human rights activists, students and other progressive allies from all over the country will host a range of community and workplace focused actions, from a teach in at the University of Michigan to a vigil at 6 p.m. today on the Capitol steps in Lansing.

The respected and revered civil rights leader who preached non-violence and civil disobedience to further civil rights was gunned down on a motel balcony, shot in the neck as he was preparing to lead a march of sanitation workers in that southern city protesting against low wages and poor working conditions. The workers had been granted a charter by AFSCME in 1964, but the city refused to recognize it.

King had long supported the civil right of collective bargaining, like his 1961 quote about right to work for less were he linked collective bargaining to civil rights, saying, “"In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as 'right to work.' It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights."

Working condition had gotten worse for the sanitation workers with the election of a new mayor in Memphis in 1968. He had refused to take dilapidated trucks out of service or pay overtime when men were forced to work late-night shifts. Sanitation workers earned wages so low that many were on welfare and hundreds relied on food stamps to feed their families, according to the King Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. That is currently the direction we are heading today.

On Feb. 11 more than 700 men attended a union meeting and unanimously decided to strike. The strike might have ended a few weeks later on Feb. 22, when the City Council, pressured by a sit-in of sanitation workers and their supporters, voted to recognize the union and recommended a wage increase, but Mayor Henry Loeb rejected the Council’s vote, claiming that only he had the authority to recognize the union and refused to do so.

The following day, after police used mace and tear gas against nonviolent demonstrators marching to City Hall, Memphis’s black community was galvanized. Meeting in a church basement on Feb. 24, 150 local ministers formed Community on the Move for Equality (COME), under the leadership of King’s longtime ally, local minister James Lawson. COME committed to the use nonviolent civil disobedience to fill Memphis’s jails and bring attention to the plight of the sanitation workers. By the beginning of March, local high school and college students, nearly a quarter of them white, were participating alongside garbage workers in daily marches; and over one hundred people, including several ministers, had been arrested.

King arrived in Memphis on April 3, 1968 to support the workers, and he was persuaded to speak by a crowd of dedicated sanitation workers who had braved another storm to hear him. A weary King preached about his own mortality with the speech that has become famous, telling the group, “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life--longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now… I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”

The following evening, as King was getting ready for dinner, he was shot and killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. The struggle did not end with the murder of King, and on April 16 a deal was reached that allowed the City Council to recognize the union and guaranteeing a better wage.

Go to the official “We are One” web site, and you can just type in your zip code to find an event near you.

Governor Snyder's First Three Months on the Job

Snyder ignores thousands of residents to meet with aging Texas rock star

Thousands of Michigan voters have been in the Capitol to try and get their voices heard on the disastrous budget proposal by Gov. Rick Snyder and his union-busting efforts, but he can’t find the time for them. It’s seems ironic that a non-resident can then get a personal audience with him.

Draft-dodger, philanderer and Texas resident Ted Nugent got a one-on-one private meeting with Snyder to talk about hunting issues on Thursday. I suggest you call the Governor’s office at (517) 373-3400 and ask for a personal meeting with the Governor. Good luck.

Many of those people protesting his budget proposal that balances the budget on the backs of children, senior citizens and the working poor voted for him, but I guarantee they will not get an audience.

Nugent, who moved to Texas during the Bush Administration, endorsed Snyder during his campaign of little more than slick TV ads and bumper stickers. Snyder’s bumper sticker saying of “Job One is jobs” appears to be job three behind union busting and meeting with aging Texas rock stars.

Rightwing Republican think tank continues to use FOIA for intimidation

You have to wonder if it's a case of the chicken or the egg with the use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the rightwing Republican think tank “Mackinac Center for Public Policy to intimidate and to dig up dirt on opponents.

The partisan Republican think tank, financed by right-wingers like the rightwing billionaire Koch Brothers, submitted a FOIA request last week to the labor studies departments at Wayne State University, Michigan State University and the University of Michigan aimed to intimidate pro-labor dissenters and stifle academic freedom.

The FOIA request is seeking emails in which the terms "Scott Walker," "Wisconsin," "Madison" or "Maddow" are being used. This is very similar to the Howell Public Schools infamous E-mail case that began four years ago, and, in fact, it has some of the same players.

In May of 2007 anti-union activist Chet Zarko, who passed away last summer, filed a massive FOIA request with the help of teabagger and former Howell School Board member Wendy Day seeking union emails in a fishing expedition to embarrass the Howell Education Association that were in tough contract negotiations with the school district. It was never determined who was paying Zarko, and he denied anyone was. But it was the Mackinac Center that ended up bankrolling his long court fight.

The district released some emails, but an injunction was issued stopping Zarko from receive any more of the 5,500 emails. However, he published the ones that put the union president in a bad light.

In January of 2010 the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled that the emails sent and received on Howell Public School computers between union members were not public record, and they concluded that under the FOIA statute the individual teacher’s personal emails were not rendered public records solely because they were captured in the email system’s digital memory. The three-Judge panel said it was a question that must be resolved by the Legislature.

After the death of Zarko, the Mackinac Center continued with the case, but the Michigan Supreme Court has refused to take up the case.

It begs the question if Zarko was being paid by the Mackinac Center, or if the Mackinac Center copied Zarko to use the FOIA as an intimidation tactic against teachers with their bottomless money pit. There is no reason they should get any of the emails based on this case.

It’s ironic that MSNBC host and Rhodes Scholar Rachel Maddow is a target of the rightwing think tank. The Koch Brothers bankrolled the union busting attempt in Wisconsin, and Maddow exposed the fact that they are also bankrolling the stealth union busting attempts in Michigan.

The Koch brothers are financing the Mackinac Center, and it was the Mackinac Center that basically wrote the anti-democratic and anti-union emergency financial managers (EFM) package of bills pushed and signed into law earlier this month by Gov. Rick Snyder, also a former wealthy CEO.

It’s well past the time Mackinac Center loses its non-partisan and nonprofit status so we can see who is funding them. They are not nonpartisan.