Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
Last week I wrote up a post titled Scott Walker: A Fiscally Responsible Governor or a Politician Who Is Playing Favorites?. Judging from the number of comments left at that post, it appears that people are very interested in what’s been going on in the state of Wisconsin. I think many people may believe that as Wisconsin goes—so goes the nation…and probably the life expectancy of labor unions and collective bargaining.
What got a lot of press attention was the story of the prank phone call that Governor Walker received from gonzo journalist Ian Murphy. Murphy pretended to be billionaire industrialist David Koch. He talked to Walker for twenty minutes. Murphy reportedly told the Associated Press he made the prank phone call in order to show how candid Walker would be in a conversation with Koch at a time when Democrats claim the governor was refusing to return their calls.
The prank phone call appears to show a cozy relationship between Walker and Koch, a top campaign donor who may have a financial interest in fighting unions. Union workers protesting in Wisconsin have already made monetary concessions to help with Wisconsin’s budget shortfall. One has to wonder what is really behind the governor’s demand that public employee unions be stripped of their right to bargain collectively. Is it all part of an agenda to “take unions out at the knees”—a strategy suggested by Scott Hagerstrom at the annual conference of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC)? Hagerstrom is the Executive Director of Michigan’s chapter of Americans for Prosperity (AFP).
In a Mother Jones article, Andy Kroll writes: Walker’s plan to eviscerate collective bargaining rights for public employees is right out of the Koch brothers’ playbook. Koch-backed groups like Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Reason Foundation have long taken a very antagonistic view toward public-sector unions.
And who is Americans for Prosperity? Felicia Sonmez has written that AFP is really two groups—both of which were founded by David Koch in 2004: Americans for Prosperity, a 501(c)4 and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, is a 501(c)3.
Somnez says that both groups are considered “not-for-profit” organizations under the Internal Revenue Service code—and that they do not have to disclose the identity of their donors or the contributions made by those donors. She added that David Koch is believed to be one of the group’s top donors.
In a New Yorker article titled Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama, Jane Mayer wrote about Peggy Venable, the Texas State Director of AFP: She (Peggy Venable) explained that the role of Americans for Prosperity was to help “educate” Tea Party activists on policy details, and to give them “next-step training” after their rallies, so that their political energy could be channelled “more effectively.” And she noted that Americans for Prosperity had provided Tea Party activists with lists of elected officials to target. She said of the Kochs, “They’re certainly our people. David’s the chairman of our board. I’ve certainly met with them, and I’m very appreciative of what they do.”
In August 2009, ThinkProgress said that it had obtained an exclusive memo from a Tea Party group that is supported by Koch’s Americans for Prosperity.
From Think Progress: “The memo outlined various ways for Tea Party activists to intimidate Democratic lawmakers and disrupt their town hall meetings on health reform. ThinkProgress published half a dozen articles exposing the role of Koch-funded groups like “Patients United” in encouraging opposition to health reform. For instance, in Virginia, a Koch-funded operative Ben Marchi assisted a birther who followed Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) around, yelling at him at town hall meetings.”
That’s all I’ve got for now, folks. Talk amongst yourselves. I need a break!
**********
Sources
Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama. (New Yorker)
Who is “Americans for Prosperity”? (Washington Post)
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker: Funded by the Koch Bros. (Mother Jones)
Why did Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker take a call from ‘David Koch’? (Christian Science Monitor)
Billionaire Brothers’ Money Plays Role in Wisconsin Dispute (New York Times)
On prank call, Wis. governor discusses strategy (Yahoo)
Koch Front Group Americans For Prosperity: ‘Take The Unions Out At The Knees’ (Think Progress)
Union Busting: The Real Call from the Koch Brothers (Huffington Post)
Charles And David Koch Exposed For Insidious Role In Crafting The Modern Right (Think Progress)
For Further Reading
Koch-Powered Tea Party Pushes Climate Denial Bill In New Hampshire (Think Progress)
Commentary: Koch brothers and the union-busting Kansas House (The Kansas City Star)
Mike S.: In comparison with our troll, my daughter wrote a paper for one of her classes about Paul Krugman and his Nobel winning theories. Her professor was pleased and she made a A. More important, she says she learned a lot while doing her research. She was the only one in her class to write about Dr. Krugman.
I suspect the professor would have been a lot less impressed had she cited the largely discredited Sowell as a source of solid information on economics.
There is a lot to be said for genuine research rather than spouting Faux news talking points. And BTW, she also knows how to spell.
Blouise and LK,
Re: your discussion on the advisability of striking, my take is that a strike is being pushed for in both cases by Walker and Kasich. It would give them the ability to take the “high ground”
in the public’s eye via publicity engendered and the propaganda barrage by corporate media. The inconvenience to the public would cost them the sympathy they’ve built up and be emphasized by the MSM. I agree with Blouise’s take on strategy and plead for the need to retain public sympathy.
Elaine,
Take any break you want. Besides the Professor, you have become our most prolific/informative blogger and given the abilities of those others (Mespo, Raff & Nal) it’s the best compliment I can bestow on you.
“good for you. I don’t have a degree in economics but I have read the following:
Capitalism and Freedom
Theory of Money and Credit
Causes of the Economic Crises (Crash of 29)
Causes of the Depression (Rothbard)
Volume I of Bastiat’s works (Volume II is in the que)
The Law
The Road to Serfdom
The Communist Manifesto
Das Kapital (in English unfortunately)
Knowledge and Decision (Sowell)
Basic Economics (Sowell)
and numerous essays by some of the above. So I have a nodding acquaintance with the subject.”
As I stated before I do pity you in your ignorance and in you vain attempts to keep up. You haven’t read any of the books you cite and your comments here prove it by the lack of sophistication of your arguments. Just another pathetic wannabe practicing analingus on the privileged, in the hope they’ll pat you on the head. Pathetic.
The Koch brothers inherited quite a fortune.
yes I agree with that. a good many liberal wall street bankers along with Barney Frank and Chris Dodd [didnt he inherit a bunch of money] did screw up our economy.
We can agree on that much.
A lot of rich people inherit their money. A lot of rich people earn money off investments. Look at what some of the rich fat cats on Wall Street did to our economy and how much money they lost for pension funds. Those people don’t create any jobs.
Not all rich people are like Steve Jobs.
“As one protester told me this week … “I’ll eat spaghetti every night for dinner if I’m saving money to send my kid to college. I’l be damned if I’ll eat spaghetti every night so Kasich and his Koch-like bosses can sit on a gold-plated toilet to take a sh*t.””
now if we could only get people to think that way about government entitlement programs. Especially in light of the fact that if the Kochs are sitting on a gold plated toilet seat they actually made the money to purchase it.
rafflaw:
just what deregulations are you talking about, there are thousands of banking regulations on the books.
lottakatz:
tell me who they are and I would be happy to, I dont believe in subsidies for business. Although I dont consider reducing a tax burden a subsidy since the money is rightfully theirs.
Unlike Michael Moore, I dont believe the money earned by the rich is societies. Since rich people typically earn their money by creating a need or a want. Look at Apple, how many jobs did Steve Jobs create? Seems to me he has more than benefited society. Even Michael Moore, how many jobs has he created?
Just out of curiosity, how much of his [Micheal Moore] money has he given to us?
From last nights “The Daily Show”
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-march-3-2011/crisis-in-the-dairyland—for-richer-and-poorer—teachers-and-wall-street
Blouise,
These are the Ohio law details as reported yesterday:
* Eliminates binding arbitration on contract disputes by a neutral third party. Instead, it leaves the final decision to the legislative body, such as a city council.
* Establishes merit as the only basis for pay increases, not length of service.
* Affects 42,000 state workers, plus 19,500 workers in the state’s university and college system, as well as 300,000 local government workers such as firefighters, police officers and public school teachers.
* Offers limited collective bargaining rights for wages based on performance; health insurance benefits subject to state limits on percentages; sick leave and other types of leave capped at the level allowed for non-union employees; certain aspects of performance evaluations; and duration of the agreement. Eliminates collective bargaining rights on numerous other issues, including transfers, staffing levels, hours of work, equipment, privatization of services and discipline. It also prohibits seniority from being the sole factor in determining order of layoff.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/02/us-ohio-unions-factbox-idUSTRE72181N20110302
See above list of lost rights; been there – done that.
I have walked down virtually the same road as the Ohio workers will on most of these items in my last job and it simply killed my union and in a matter of less than 3 years destroyed 20 years of progress on EO law implementation.
It also led to much more work for the same pay, merit pay decisions that were no more than cronyism, and since seniority wasn’t any longer in the picture, a pay system and a training/promotion system (also crony driven) that was so obviously (declared as weighted) weighted toward younger (cheaper, more easily manipulated, more grateful for the job) employees that there was an exodus of workers, either to other jobs, or retirement.
Discrete work groups, where duties could be identified and packaged conveniently by work series, led to rapacious contracting out and the organizations that had the strongest union support and many of the activists were first on the chopping block.
It allowed working conditions to be made very difficult to mostly older, senior employees in hopes of driving them out (big success) and that included transfers to less desirable locations. Most of this stuff wasn’t arbitrable because the local regulations, work rules, were changed either by the new collective bargaining structure or the local regulations which were constructed based on the increased latitude allowed by the decreased bargaining rights.
We did have access to statutory forums such as EEOC but that, for Federal employees was a long, slow process and most of the senior employees that were discriminated against simply left and didn’t look back.
The union had little-to-no work that they could do and lost most of it’s members. If our collective bargaining rights had not been removed entirely, by legal fiat, close to 3 years later we would have simply blown away and eventually been decertified for inactivity. It took less than 3 years to completely destroy the union, the bargaining unit, and virtually every gain made in 20+ years, since the unions certification.
Given a couple of years of such reduced benefits as I see in that list I can easily imagine decert petitions coming from the membership, why pay if there is no product of value in return?
I sincerely hope that the plan is for a repeal of SB5 and it is absolutely successful but between now and then I can envision all of that new latitude management has been given being used to eviscerate the union of its most active local employees as well as senior employees and throw the fear of ghod into the rest. If the plan is to wait until 2012 and elect another, new bunch of politicians that will ‘give’ back rights, well I’ll believe that works when I see it and I’d like to be proven wrong in my pessimism.
Do the Ohio contracts stay in effect until their current terms end and do you know when that is if it does? Can the law be repealed and is that the plan? Special election or regularly scheduled cycle? I’ve been looking around for actual details like that but they are hard to come by and I’m actually very interested. Any info you can provide are appreciated. It’s like deja vue to me, I’m almost morbidly compelled to find out more because timing is very important.
As one protester told me this week … “I’ll eat spaghetti every night for dinner if I’m saving money to send my kid to college. I’l be damned if I’ll eat spaghetti every night so Kasich and his Koch-like bosses can sit on a gold-plated toilet to take a sh*t.”
Lottakatz,
All I can tell you is that there are plans in place and cool, experienced hands on the wheel … I can’t guarantee that I will agree with every decision they make but I know they have the best interests of the hundreds of thousands of people they represent firmly guiding their decision process.
Way back when, the country turned against Unions during a “coal” strike that affected everybody in the heavily populated “winter” areas of the country that relied on coal to heat their homes.
Reagan “fired” the Air Traffic Controllers not so much because of national concerns but because of international pressures from countries fearful of the strike spreading to their workers. The failure of the President of the Air Traffic Controllers to take into account these foreign pressures hurt his membership beyond belief.
Strikes are tricky things and one can lose the vital support of the public with an ill-timed strike … also, in some cases strikes are illegal for public service workers.
That being said … make no mistake … the working women in Ohio and the majority of Ohio’s middle class know the Republican Party, on behalf of its Corporate Masters, has declared war on them and their families … they are and will continue to fight back!
From Madison.com (3/3/2011)
Walker budget bill would effectively kill unions
http://host.madison.com/article_00aaf0ec-460e-11e0-9a32-001cc4c03286.html
Excerpt:
Gov. Scott Walker insists that his plan to remake state labor law isn’t designed to kill unions for teachers and other public employees.
“I really didn’t factor that in one way or another,” Walker said Thursday.
Critics have seized on Walker’s budget-repair bill because it would end nearly all collective bargaining with public worker unions. But national labor experts and union officials say lesser-known portions of the proposal are equally devastating.
The bill greatly narrows the focus of contract negotiations to cost-of-living pay increases. But some of the sleeper provisions include stopping unions from collecting dues with payroll deductions and from requiring members to pay dues.
The bill also would force unions to ask members to vote every year on their certification and win the support of 51 percent of all members – not just a simple majority of those voting – to keep going. Other measures take aim at arbitration and contract lengths.
“It would be virtually impossible to sustain unions under these conditions,” said James Green, a University of Massachusetts-Boston professor of history and labor studies. “Two or three of those things would be pretty fatal by themselves.”
Elaine, What Blouise and rafflaw said, thank you very much.
Elaine,
Great video of my old friend Mortimer Snerd. The scary part is that I remember those shows. Yikes!
Blouise, You’re on the ground and probably, as an activist, connected in Ohio so I presume that you know what you’re talking about. I am confident in that assumption. OTOH I am speculating based on things I have seen and been party to in other times and places.
It is interesting and heartening that you say the eventuality of passage was understood from the beginning and plans have been made. I hope they’re successful.
Thanks, Blouise…and rafflaw.
Elaine,
I hope you had a chance to read my post at 10:22 pm … thank you