Twelve Times Scott Walker Was Terrible

Twelve Times Scott Walker Was Terrible

Oh, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, how are you terrible? Let us count the ways….  

posted on October 23, 2013 at 6:33pm EDT

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1. When he signed the mandatory ultrasound bill into law

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Walker signed into law a bill that will require “women seeking abortions to undergo an ultrasound and ban doctors who lack admitting privileges at nearby hospitals from performing the procedures.” Essentially, it would make it harder for a woman seeking a safe, legal abortion to get one. His law could force clinics to close and is being challenged by reproductive health advocates.

2. When he repealed the law that made it easier for victims of wage discrimination to press charges

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So basically, if you’re one of the women in Wisconsin who earns $0.75 for every dollar that your male colleagues make and you want to do something about losing that $4,000 every year, Scott Walker has made it more difficult. THANKS.

3. When he eliminated collective bargaining rights for all of Wisconsin’s public employees

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Scott Walker is no friend of unions. In 2011, he signed into law a bill that abolished collective bargaining rights for 175,000 public union employees in Wisconsin, leading to an attempt to recall him.

4. When he specifically targeted women workers while sticking it to unions

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As we mentioned, in 2011, when Scott Walker was stripping unions of their right to collective bargaining, he did exempt some groups: firefighter, police and state trooper unions. The majority of Wisconsin public workers are actually women, (teachers, nurses, child care workers, home health care workers, etc.) but the exempted groups were overwhelmingly male.

5. When he banned abortion coverage for policies in the ACA’s new health insurance exchange

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This is just another example of Scott Walker’s extreme, anti-woman agenda.

6. When he ruined Wisconsin sex education

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Scott Walker signed legislation that required teachers in schools that offered sex education to “stress abstinence as the only sure way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.” The legislation also declared that sex ed teachers were not required to address contraception. So that’s helpful.

7. When he eliminated all state funding for family planning services

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In 2011, Scott Walker proposed a budget that would have eliminated all state funding for family planning services for low-income residents, putting 50 clinics in jeopardy. 52,000 women in Wisconsin who received contraceptive care from those clinics would have to find alternative means.

8. When he forced 92,000 people off their health insurance and cost the state $119 million

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Scott Walker could have accepted federal money under the Affordable Care Act that would have expanded BadgerCare Plus insurance, which covers adults with children under 19 in households with incomes up to 200% of the federal poverty threshold, or $47,100 for a family of four. Instead, he rejected the money, kicked 92,000 people off their health insurance and forced them to buy a more expensive plan.

9. When he led Wisconsin to below-average job growth rates

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The Republican Party says they’re about jobs jobs jobs - except when Scott Walker runs things and the state ranks 34th in job growth. And consider this: Walker’s #1 campaign promise was to add 250,000 private-sector jobs by the end of his term. At last count, nearly three years later, he’s only about 25% there.

10. When he signed an unconstitutional voter ID law

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This law would require poll workers to immediately begin asking voters to show state-issued IDs before they vote - even though voters wouldn’t be required to show them until the next year. Yeah, we’re not sure either - but basically, Walker wanted to make it harder for people to vote.

11. When he was BFFs with the Koch Brothers

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The Koch Brothers are long-time Scott Walker supporters. With a $43,000 donation, their PAC was the second highest donor to Walker’s 2010 campaign. They also gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which streamed spending into Wisconsin on behalf of Walker. Ew.

12. When he wanted to pay teachers less

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Not only did Scott Walker nix the collective bargaining rights of Wisconsin teachers, but he capped future pay raises. Under Walker’s administrative rule change, he changed the pay schedule for experienced teachers. Some teachers could lose as much as 30% of their current salary under Walker’s targeted attacks.

So, in short, Scott Walker is the worst.

Luckily, EMILY’s List has endorsed Mary Burke for governor of Wisconsin

Mary Burke is an insightful problem solver who has worked in the private, government, and nonprofit sectors to grow Wisconsin’s economy and increase educational opportunities. Mary has an impressive commitment to economic justice and improving the lives of children and working families. Her intense and selfless commitment to her community will make for a striking contrast with Governor Scott Walker’s extremist agenda. Mary’s been quietly changing the world for the better for years - by breaking barriers herself and by making opportunities for others to get ahead.

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Wisconsin Governor Defends Ban On Same-Sex Marriage As ‘Healthy Balance’ Of LGBT Rights

By Zack Ford on November 25, 2013 at 9:17 am

 

"Wisconsin Governor Defends Ban On Same-Sex Marriage As ‘Healthy Balance’ Of LGBT Rights"

This weekend, Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) talked to Bloomberg TV’s Al Hunt about the mix of protections and limitations on LGBT rights his state offers, telling the host that the Wisconsin has struck a “healthy balance.” He lauded the state’s nondiscrimination protections for LGBT workers, suggesting the U.S. House should consider the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), because there have only been “limited problems” with it in Wisconsin. He simultaneously, however, defended its ban on same-sex marriage:

WALKER: In Wisconsin, we’ve had anti-discriminatory laws that are very similar to [ENDA] for more than 30 years and they work quite effectively. We’re also a state that has a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as one man and one woman…
HUNT: So, similar to the Wisconsin bill, the House bill should be something that…
WALKER: Yeah, I mean, we’ve not had problems. We’ve had no problems — I should say, limited problems — with that. At the same time, we still have a constitutional amendment that defines marriage. There’s a healthy balance there.

Watch it (via Raw Story):


In 1982, Wisconsin was the first state to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment, housing, education, credit, and all public accommodations — a law signed by Republican Gov. Lee S. Dreyfus. Upon signing it, Dreyfus remarked, “It is a fundamental tenet of the Republican Party that government ought not intrude in the private lives of individuals where no state purpose is served, and there is nothing more private or intimate than who you live with and who you love.” Despite these protections, one of Walker’s appointees to the state’s Labor and Industry Review Commission ruled that an employee who’d repeatedly been called “fag,” “maricon,” and “my little bitch” in the workplace was not protected from such harassment under law.
In 2004, the state legislature followed Republican precedent across the country to advance a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, which eventually passed in 2006. That amendment banned recognition of any “identical or substantially similar” legal status for same-sex couples, but Wisconsin maintains a domestic partner registry and provides some benefits to same-sex partners of state employees. Walker suggested in March that conservatives have lost the fight against marriage equality.

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No thanks to Walmart

No thanks to Walmart

by Mark Sumner for Daily Kos

I think we can all agree that 2010 wasn’t the best of years. After all, unemployment at midyear was still bordering on 10 percent, home foreclosures were at a record high, and profits per employee at US corporations only rose 24 percent. Now, go back and read that last one again. As it happens, U.S. corporations were on their way to record profits in 2010, raking in more money at the same time as they were cutting both staff and benefits. Think that’s a fluke? Profits per employee jumped another 22 percent in 2011. That’s as layoffs reached record heights and 312,000 jobs were eliminated. The year 2011 also marked another record year of profits for U.S. companies. Not only did Fortune 500 corporations pocket a record $824.5 billion, they generated earnings at a rate 23 percent percent higher than the historical average. By the end of that year, Apple alone had $76 billion in the bank, after generating a profit amounting to half a million dollars per employee.
Tell me again that this was a hard year. The economy is bad only in that we've allowed the economy of corporations and the economy of real, living human beings to become totally disconnected.
It’s one thing to say that middle class wages are stagnant while those of the top 1 percent are continuously growing, but there’s a deeper, more fundamental flaw in our current notion of capitalism: Everyone understands that profit is good, but no one seems to understand what profit is for. We’ve constructed a set of standard practices that would not only make Gordon Gekko blush, they’re self-destructive. American capitalism is profiting itself to death.
Few companies are as emblematic of the New American System as is Walmart. The company that in 2011 generated more revenues than any other, the company that is now the largest food retailer in the world is the same company that recently encouraged donations of food to its own employees. It’s also a company that, putting aside any losses generated when it replaces smaller, local stores, causes a net loss to every community it enters in the form of increased tax revenues needed to support the underpaid employees. Walnart not only counts on taxpayer dollars to subsidize its “low cost” stores, it counts on that same taxpayer dollars to drive its business. Walmart employees not only need food stamps to get by, Walmart is the largest place where those food stamps are redeemed. It’s a cycle that grinds employees (and communities) relentlessly down, while driving Walmart revenues just as consistently up.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way.

While Walmart may be the corporate expression of the darkest timeline, Costco shows that it’s not required to be a corporate ass to be profitable. Costco workers start at a salary of over $11 an hour—a modest amount, certainly, but an amount that most Walmart employee never attain even after years of labor. The average Costco worker makes almost twice that amount on an hourly basis, and Costco workers also tend to work normal work weeks, with all the benefits that implies, rather than the truncated working hours Walmart imposes to keep employees just shy of such extravagances as health care or paid leave. Costco executives also make a much more reasonable sum compared to the corporate profits. Put it all together, and the CEO of Costco makes as much as 48 workers earning the median wage—a rate that’s high by historical standards, but downright Spartan compared to the situation at Walmart where the CEO pulls in the pay of 796 average workers (a shameful rate that is closely matched by the 645 employees it would take to reach the pay awarded the CEO of Target).
Walmart's unending quest to inflate its profit by any means is such that it scrambles to find elaborate schemes to deny the wages promised to workers who sacrifice their holidays to the corporate coffers.
The most shameful thing out of all these numbers may be this: Walmart could quite easily afford to pay its workers a living wage.  It could do so without threatening its ability to operate. It could do so without slowing its relentless expansion. It could do so without residing its prices one dime. Walmart has ample ability to pay its workers more, because it's not just profitable, it's massively profitable.
If Walmart were to pay all of its employees a living wage—not a poverty rate, but something more like the $45k average that Costco workers earn—if it did that, Walmart's corporate profits would have declined last year from $17 billion, to a mere $12.5 billion.
But this isn't just a Walmart story, it's an American story. Not so long ago, American corporations accepted the idea that they had obligations to their stockholders, but also to their workers and the communities where they did business. They understood that profit was a tool, a fuel that powered the corporation to achieve its goals. But now profit is the goal. It's been fetishized beyond all reason. Many people will even tell you that there's a law requiring companies to generate as much profit as possible. There is no such law. There never was. And the only thing more insane than believing that such a harmful law might exist, is that many seem to think it's a good idea.

Originally posted to Daily Kos on Sun Nov 24, 2013 at 06:00 AM PST.

Also republished by In Support of Labor and Unions.

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7 signs America has regressed — to the 19th century

Workers aren't unionized, and some pols are now advocating child labor. It's like the U.S. has gone back in time

RJ Eskow, AlterNet

This article originally appeared on Alternet.

Of course they shut the Federal government down. Tea Party Republicans long for the days when there were no government authorities to enforce laws and restrain the power of unchecked wealth, the days when there was no Justice Department, no SEC, no other agencies protecting Americans from the misdeeds of bankers and corporate titans.

But it already seems as if our entire country has secretly been transported back in time. We may think we’re living in the 21st century, but all the signs suggest we’re living in an earlier and harsher era.
Here are seven signs the United States of America has returned to the 19th century.
1. Wall Street can “send your man around to see my man” again.
Shocked by newly elected President Teddy Roosevelt’s moves against Wall Street, J. P. Morgan went to the White House. “If we have done anything wrong,” said Morgan, “send your man to my man and they can fix it up.”
“That can’t be done,” said Roosevelt. “We don’t want to fix it up,” his Attorney General added, “we want to stop it.” The year was 1902, and 19th-century privilege was over for Wall Street. Now it’s back, and so are the “men”—and as the recent foot-dragging over female Fed chair candidate Janet Yellen highlights, they almost always are men.
The chief architects of deregulation in the 1990s included Sen. Phil Gramm, President Bill Clinton and Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. That deregulation cost millions of Americans their jobs and millions more their life savings. But the parties behind it did just fine.
Gramm went to work for UBS bank immediately upon leaving the Senate in 2002, and is now vice-chairman of its investment banking division. Robert Rubin eventually headed up Citigroup, the megabank whose creation was made possible when his Treasury Department pushed for a then-illegal merger between Travelers and Citibank. Rubin was to become deeply implicated in the fraud and scandal which led to the 2008 crisis, although he claimed ignorance of his own bank’s doings and never faced prosecution.

Larry Summers has made millions from Wall Street banks. Bill Clinton made tens of millions “advising” two investment funds belonging to billionaire Ron Burkle. Exactly how much isn’t known, but a very public falling out involved Burkle’s alleged “stiffing” of Clinton on a final $20-$25 million payment. Clinton went on to serve as an advisor of Teneo Capital until February 2012.
Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs was George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary. Barack Obama’s first Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, is now collecting huge fees on Wall Street. Obama’s second Secretary, Jack Lew, was an executive at Citigroup. His former economic advisor, Peter Orszag, has traded places with Lew and is now at Citigroup. Obama’s former Chief of Staff, Bill Daley, broke the Democratic mold by working at JPMorgan Chase.
White House visitor logs, which are woefully incomplete, show that Wall Street’s top dogs were frequent guests, especially at the height of the bank bailout. Despite massive fraud and tens of billions in fines and settlements, not one senior banker has been indicted for the crimes which brought down the economy.
Teddy Roosevelt’s legacy has been undone. Bankers can “send their man” to see the president’s man—and he’s frequently the same man.
2. Workers aren’t unionized.
The horrors of working life during the Industrial Revolution led to the rise of the American union, beginning in the year 1860. The US State Department estimates that 3 percent of the workforce belonged to a union by the close of the 19th century. That number rose to roughly 7 percent by 1930, and to more than one worker in four by 1954.

The percentage of working people in unions has now dropped to roughly 7 percent again for private-sector workers. That’s roughly the early-20th-century level. When you add in government employees, who are more heavily unionized, the number rises slightly, to 11.5 percent. Our national and state capitals remain in the grip of an ill-advised round of cost-cutting that’s bringing the total number of government employees down quickly, which adds to the decline of these numbers.

Thanks to a four-decade-long campaign against them, unions—and workers—are more likely to be vilified than praised. It’s almost impossible to imagine today’s United States Congress passing the 1895 law that created Labor Day.
3. Our rights end at the workplace door.
Our individual rights are being steadily eroded in the workplace. As employment lawyer Mark Trapp told Business Week, “the freedom to speak your mind doesn’t really exist in the workplace.” A series of court cases has shown that Americans can be fired for expressing political opinions outside their place of employment, too, on social media like Twitter or Facebook.
One of the unions’ first demands was for a shorter workday, which in the 1800s meant a 10-hour maximum. Now we’re moving back toward 19th-century standards. As the Washington Times reports, “Americans are working approximately 11 more hours per week now than they did in the 1970s, yet the average income for middle-income families has declined by 13% (when adjusting for inflation).”
Here’s a 19th-century image, from the New York Times: “ …employees at lower rungs of the economic ladder can be timed with stopwatches in the bathroom; stonewalled when they ask to go; given disciplinary points for frequent urination; even hunted down by supervisors with walkie-talkies if they tarry in the stalls.”
4. They’re advocating child labor again.
What’s the matter with kids today? According to a number of conservatives, they’re not being put to work in factories and farms. Child labor, one of the moral blights of 19th-century America, is increasingly popular on the right again.
Child labor laws do not permit children under the age of 14 to work in non-agricultural settings. That is “truly stupid,” Newt Gingrich said last year while running for the Republican presidential nomination. Children aren’t learning the proper “work habits,” said Gingrich, who proposed firing most school janitors and giving the jobs to underage minority children instead.
Republican Senator Mike Lee has called for abolishing federal child labor laws (although he says he isn’t opposed to state laws). Lee said that labor and manufacturing are “local activities,” not “interstate commercial transactions.”
“This may sound harsh,” said Lee, “but it was designed to be that way. It was designed to be a little bit harsh.”
Arkansas congressional candidate Tom Cotton also believes in child labor. “We need more young people who’ve worked all day in the fields, not less,” said Cotton during his 2012 campaign. Cotton won his race and now serves in the House of Representatives.
5. It’s practically legal to shoot people down in the streets again.
At least 22 states have some version of the “Stand Your Ground” law, which permits people to shoot and kill another person if they feel in danger, even when it’s possible to escape safely.
A nonpartisan political group called Mayors Against Illegal Guns is part of a coalition whose recent study showed that states which passed Stand Your Ground laws between 2005 and 2007 saw a 53 percent increase in “justifiable homicides.” As the coalition notes, “this increase is not simply the result of more homicides being classified as ‘justifiable,’ but also of an overall increase in firearm-related and overall homicides in Stand Your Ground states.”
The report notes that prosecutors in these states had greater difficulty convicting violent offenders.
“The findings in this report aren’t surprising, given that these laws give anyone with a gun more permissive rules of engagement in America’s communities than our troops have on the battlefield,” said Jon Soltz, a two-tour veteran of the Iraq war and chairman of VoteVets.
The laws are also more permissive than 19th-century law, despite the fact that dueling remained legal until 1859, when most states outlawed it. Unlike Stand Your Ground, both parties in a duel were armed and had an equal chance of success. Duels were also voluntary, whereas a person who is shot under Stand Your Ground has no choice in the matter.
6. The rich have more of our national wealth than they did in colonial times.
As Jordan Weissman demonstrated in the Atlantic last year, the top 1 percent and the top 10 percent capture more of our national income now than they did in the 1700s, before we won our nation’s independence. Inequality was worse by 1860, but is even worse today than in either century.
This country enacted a series of laws which enabled Americans to achieve social mobility. But in the wake of cuts to everything from education to childhood nutrition, and with the decline of the American middle-class, those opportunities are fading too.
Here’s one of the main reasons the middle-class is declining: With no strong counterforce representing employees, corporations are also amassing more wealth than ever. The charts Henry Blodget made last year remain essentially unchanged: as corporations amass more and more wealth, they’re sharing less and less of it with workers in the form of wages.
As G. William Domhoff shows, by the end of the Reagan era the percentage of national wealth going to the top 1 percent had returned to pre-1929 levels. It has continued to climb since then. A recent review of 2012 economic data shows, among other things, that the top 1 percent saw their incomes rise by a staggering 32 percent in one year—and that the top 10 percent captured more than half of our nation’s income for the first time since they started tracking this data a century ago.

7. Political debates are getting rough again.

It starts with the rhetoric, and politicians were rough on each other in the 1800s. Sen. Charles Sumner spent hours calling an opponent a “pimp” and mocking his limp and speech impediment, both of which were caused by a stroke. The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, when they ran against each other for the Senate, included racial slurs and other insults (although Douglas graciously held Lincoln’s hat while he was sworn in as president, after losing to him in the 1860 election).
In the days of duels and fights of honor, political rhetoric quickly escalated into violence. Perhaps the most famous incident of pol-on-pol violence was the caning of abolitionist Sen. Sumner on the floor of the Senate by pro-slavery Rep. Preston Brooks, as another Southern congressman held a pistol on observers to prevent them from intervening.
Representatives were seen carrying guns on the floor of Congress in 1836. One representative drew a gun on a witness during a hearing that year.  In 1842 a Whig Party congressman from Tennessee was threatened with a knife by fellow party members.
Today a new era of incivility has dawned in the capitol building. Its watershed moment may have been the day Republican Rep. Joe Wilson shouted “You lie!” at President Obama as the President addressed a joint session of Congress. While Wilson was eventually admonished by the House, the vote was almost entirely along party lines. (Only seven Republicans joined with Democrats on the vote.)
Wilson was able to beat his nearest primary challenger by nine points the following year, and to run unopposed in the general election. He received 96 percent of the vote.
The gloves are off, and the new harsh rhetoric is coming almost exclusively from a party that refuses to sanction its members for it. Rep. Michele Bachmann has been a one-person factory for inflammatory quotes. And in a very 19th century—and very crude—letter, Republican Rep. Allen West wrote to Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz: “You have proven repeatedly that you are not a Lady, therefore, shall not be afforded due respect from me!” West has also said that Nazi leader Josef Goebbels would be “very proud” of Democrats, and that liberals should “get the hell out of the United States.”
Fortunately, government leaders have yet to turn on one another physically. But that day may be coming. Michael Schwartz, Chief of Staff for Sen. Tom Coburn, said this: ““I’m a radical! I’m a real extremist. I don’t want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!”
Rep. Peter King has been a one-man hate campaign against Americans of the Muslim faith, and he has not been censured or reprimanded by his party in any way for his hate-filled rhetoric.
In 1884, the spokesman for Republican presidential candidate Hal Blaine accused the Democrats of being the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” This anti-Catholic slur caused Blaine to lose the state of New York, giving the presidency to Grover Cleveland. Democrats may be hoping that comments like King’s will help to reproduce such election results in coming years.

More RJ Eskow.

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Law Does Apply to the Rightwing and Koch Brothers

Law Does Apply to the Rightwing and Koch Brothers

Americans for Prosperity (AFP) of Wisconsin - AFP
Is the main the main political group run by the Koch brothers.
AFP is 501(c)4; The regulations about IRC 501(c)(4)s provide
that promotion of social welfare does not include participation
or intervention in political campaigns, reads an IRS document.

The MacIver Institute, Wisconsin Reporter, MediaTrackers and the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute are an effective party press for the Wisconsin Republican Party, as they lawyer up.

Hey, just chat, cooperate and talk straight and you won't even need lawyers unless you really went bent the law the last two years, or are a part of politcal dark money.

• MacIver Institute - 501(C)(3)
• The Wisconsin Reporter - a protect of the  Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to promoting rightwing propaganda
• MediaTrackers  - a 501(c)(3( devoted to rightwing propaganda
• Wisconsin Policy Research Institute - a 501(c) Non-Stock Corporation

I care about the people of the Republican Party too much to see them lives of dependence on legal funds and their destiny controlled by attorneys.

So, some free info:

"Under the Internal Revenue Code, all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) made on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity," reads an IRS guide.

Palm Beach Press Reporter said in Feb. 2012 interview with David Koch that he took credit
for Republicans maintaining control of the state Senate Wisconsin in recall elections

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Wal-Mart's Employee Food Drive

As the greedy underclass continues to demand a living wage, Wal-Mart generously hosts a food drive for its own employees.  (02:40)

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Video Archive

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I Punk’d Scott Walker

And now he’s lying about it.

By IAN MURPHY

November 18, 2013

I never thought Scott Walker’s people would be dumb enough to put me through. It was February 2011—the height of the Wisconsin governor’s battle with the public unions, with thousands of protesters filling the streets of downtown Madison—when I called his office posing as Tea Party sugar daddy David Koch.
I told Keith Gilkes, who was then Walker’s chief of staff, that the governor couldn’t return my call because “my goddamn maid, Maria, put my phone in the washer. I’d have her deported, but she works for next to nothing.” (In reality, I was calling with a free Skype number and couldn’t receive calls from a land line at the time.)
In my business, that’s called tipping your hand. All ethical liars do it. It’s the ridiculous, implausible hints that separate the ethical prankster from the confidence man, the satirist from the unrepentant political hack. But they didn’t get the joke, and soon Walker and I were comparing notes on how he could break the backs of those pro-union demonstrators.

On Tuesday, Walker unleashes an epic gag of his own, the book Unintimidated: A Governor’s Story and a Nation’s Challenge. Aimed at duping future historians and contemporary wonks, the 255 pages of political PR—co-authored by former Dubya speechwriter Marc Thiessen—read at times more like Stalin than Sacha Baron Cohen, given their sheer propaganda quotient. But some passages are pretty funny, like the chapter where he says my prank call—which I recorded and posted on YouTube, much to the governor’s dismay and embarrassment at the time—was all part of God’s plan to teach him humility.
If anything, the lesson of Unintimidated seems to be that God is terrible at teaching humility.

***

I had no idea whether Koch and Walker had spoken before, but it was plausible that Koch would call the governor. Americans for Prosperity—the conservative advocacy group Koch founded with his brother Charles—had thrown millions of hard-to-track dollars into pro-Walker advertising and was presently “standing with Walker” via an expensive PR blitz.
I expected Gilkes to question why Koch would personally call the number on their website, suffering through busy signals and endless ringing like a common plebe, and then cavalierly trashing his undocumented maid. “I’m calling from the VOID—with the VOID, or whatever it’s called,” I said, thinking I’d strained credulity too far. “You know, the Snype!” But Gilkes just laughed and told me to call back at 2.
At the appointed hour, Walker and I enjoyed a friendly chat during which I suggested that he physically intimidate his Democratic opposition with a baseball bat, whip up a good counter-protest by dressing hobos in suits and most disturbing: that he ought to plant troublemakers to discredit the pro-union demonstrators.
“[W]e thought about that,” Walker replied, and eventually added, “My only fear would be if there’s a ruckus caused is that would scare the public into thinking maybe the governor has to settle to avoid all these problems.” So it wasn’t morality, but a cynical calculation, that saved the public from that particular ruse.

My most successful gag before the call to Walker had been covering the grand opening of Ken Ham’s Creation “Museum” as a reporter afflicted with “Asperger’s Syndrome By Proxy.” An associate and I set up a fake news website called the Special Times, wherein my alter ego professed his abiding love for cookies, the Transformers, investigative reporting and Our Lord Jesus Christ—daring Ham’s PR hacks to catch on. But the people who believe the universe was pulled from God’s magical arse 6,000 years ago never got wise. Go figure. And I ended up in their midst, clad in sweatpants, Velcro sneakers and fanny pack, crudely mocking everything they consider sacred.
I learned the pranksters’ code—giving the mark a sporting chance—from Matt Taibbi. Before becoming Rolling Stone’s resident scourge of Wall Street, Taibbi founded a biweekly rag in Buffalo, my hometown, called the BEAST. He abandoned the project before I came aboard as a delivery boy. It took me nearly a decade to claw my way to editor-in-chief. Only recently did I step down to spend less time with my family. But the BEAST ethic will always guide me. Its inaugural issue back in 2002 featured a prank involving Buffalo’s then-Mayor Anthony Masiello accepting a poetic, gangster-fraternizing cameo in an episode of The Sopranos. The tell came in the form of a purported HBO producer’s promise to send Masiello a porcelain unicorn signed by James Spader. A highly amusing plan.
The Koch call, though, was totally on the fly. No plan. No chance of success, I thought. I’d been awake for more than 24 hours, delirious, chasing my coffee with scotch and fairly stoned. My only preparation was to scrawl “Coke” on a scrap of paper. On the infinitesimal chance I got through as David Koch, I figured the guy should correctly pronounce his own name.

***

In Unintimidated, Walker says he took the call “after a week or more of insistent pleas” from his staff. False. I called three times in less than three hours.
Walker also writes, “we never—never—considered putting ‘troublemakers’ in the crowd to discredit the protesters.” He now says in his book that he fibbed to appease the co-owner of Koch Industries, parent company to Georgia Pacific Corp., which employs more than 2,000 people in its Green Bay mills. Decent yet disturbing spin. But when the news broke, Walker simply told the local media, “As you’ve heard on the tape, we dismissed that and said that wasn’t a good idea.” It was the same weak talking point he trotted out on Meet the Press. And David Gregory—renowned vanilla sasquatch of the mythological “objective media”—had zero follow-ups, allowing Walker to pivot unchallenged to the “real issue” of the 14 Democratic state senators who’d fled Wisconsin to avoid a GOP quorum.
In fact, it was one of those senators, Tim Carpenter, who’d provided the inspiration for the prank. “He’s just hard-lined—will not talk,” he told Amanda Terkel at the Huffington Post, “will not communicate, will not return phone calls.” Who would Walker talk to, I wondered? My first idea was to pose as Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak, who was in the midst of a mass sit-in of his own. I imagined it as a sort of dictator heart-to-heart. But after three hours of practicing the accent, I still sounded like Borat, not Mubarak, so I gave up and posed as Koch instead.
At a press conference after the story broke, Walker said, “The bottom line is the things I’ve said are the things I’ve said publicly all along.” Much to my astonishment, variations of that blatant lie appeared in headlines without reporters calling bullshit.

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Journalists rarely invent the lie, though that does happen (see: Armstrong Williams, Stephen Glass, etc.), but often unwittingly pass it along. “There’s a whole industry, the public relations industry, that’s all about getting lies into the media—and they never reveal the hoax,” says the pseudonymous Andy Bichlbaum of America’s preeminent prank troupe the Yes Men. “They’ve sold wars (see Counterfeit Coverage), our deaths (tobacco), and now the death of the whole planet, starting with those who live in the poorest countries.”
Countering lies sometimes requires more lies. In other words, putting truth into the mouths of liars. That’s the Yes Men’s M.O. Their entire shtick is about giving the marks a sporting chance—trawling reporters with over-the-top absurd fake websites and press conferences. (I stole from their playbook when I ran for Congress in 2011, and realized my Republican opponent had not registered her own .org. Bwahaha.)
I became aware of the Yes Men in 2004 when, on the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, Bichlbaum appeared on BBC World News posing as a Dow Chemical spokesperson to accept full responsibility for the tragic Indian gas leak that caused thousands of deaths and countless injuries. “Our shareholders may take a bit of a hit,” Birchlbaum told BBC after announcing $12 billion in victim compensation. “But I think if they’re anything like me they will be ecstatic to be part of such a historic occasion of doing right by those we have wronged.”

Since then, the Yes Men have pulled numerous successful media hoaxes to satirically poignant effect—Halliburton’s SurvivaBall to protect the on-the-go businessman from any post-apocalyptic hellscape, Dow’s “Acceptable Risk” death calculator and posing as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to announce the consortium’s noble 180 on climate change, to name just a few.
One of the Yes Men’s best coups was a two-pronged jape aimed at Shell Oil. I teamed up with them for this one. The first prong, a video of a launch party for a new Shell website—during which a miniature liquor-dispensing oil rig sprung an unstoppable leak—blew up the Internet. The second prong, the site itself, ArcticReady.com, offered an interactive function where users generated captions for images of pristine Arctic wilderness and wildlife, sharing them on social media. One example featured an Arctic fox that read: “YOU CAN’T RUN YOUR SUV ON ‘CUTE’. LET’S GO.”
The press initially reported both prongs as massive PR blunders. Business reporters were apoplectic. How could Shell be so dumb? As the man behind the official Twitter account for the fake Shell, I wrote tweets about being drunk and spilling coffee. By the time most journalists caught on, the “damage” was already done. We’d gotten our message across: Drilling for oil in the Arctic is inherently unsafe, a tragedy waiting to happen, not even factoring the release of heat-trapping carbon into Earth’s finite greenhouse. And we had gotten people talking about it in appropriately worried tones.
Birchlbaum once told me that the journalists they dupe usually don’t mind. I suspect that’s because pranksters can force journalists to cover stories they otherwise wouldn’t—or couldn’t—in their capacity as “respected” news people. But I’ve always thought of my pranks as a funny kind of undercover work.
James O’Keefe, the notorious fake pimp who killed the low-income advocacy and organizing group ACORN, doesn’t agree with me on that point. “There is a big difference between pranks and undercover investigative journalism,” he says. “I am and have never been interested in pranks for the sake of trickery or laughs. I am, however, committed to utilizing undercover investigative journalism to expose the truth and improve our society, the goal of most journalists, I believe.”
O’Keefe’s not a credible person. But I grudgingly respect him for his ability to get things done. Well, respect like I do Charles Manson. The undercover videos that led to ACORN’s downfall, wherein O’Keefe dressed as a—totally unfunny, apparently—pimp were deceptively edited, as is much of his work. He never talked to ACORN staffers dressed that way. And he ended having to pay $100,000 in damages to one ACORN worker for completely misrepresenting her as a pimp-loving criminal.
A little snip here, another there, and you can make an NPR executive call the Tea Party “xenophobic” just by leaving out the part where he attributed the description to Republicans he knew. That’s O’Keefe’s M.O. But I felt compelled to ask him some questions for this essay because that’s what I’m told journalists do. Sometimes undercover.
“Sometimes the only way to unearth dirty politicos’ fraud, and more, is to go incognito. This is a tradition with a long history that brings to life very important issues within society,” O’Keefe argues. “Nellie Bly and her famous investigation into mental health is just one example of many famous undercover journalists.”
Undercover reporting aside, the “objective” press asks a guy over here, a guy over there, and they rarely tell the news consumer the factual truth. It’s an institutional sickness. It wasn’t too long ago that the New York Times asked its readers: “Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” Of course it should! That that was a serious question from the “paper of record” goes a long way to understand the coming end of civilization. “Credible scientist A says, ‘Our species is in serious trouble,’ but guy with undisclosed ties to Exxon and the Heartland Institute says, ‘Dude, chillax.’” You decide.
That every malfeasant public figure or PR hack has a valid opinion deserving equal weight next to empirically rooted reality is the deadliest jape of our era—pulling our politics further into the corporate shadows and poisoning our planet beyond repair.
Will God save us, like he did Walker? After taking his “beating” by the press, one of his “toughest days,” he turned to his devotional calendar, according to his new book. That day’s title: “The Power of Humility, the Burden of Pride.” He looked up and said, “I hear you Lord.” Whether that’s honest delusion or just pandering, and whether he truly believes targeting unions is anything other than a way to break the Democratic money base, the governor’s definitely fooling—or trying to fool—someone. And they call me the jokester.
Ian Murphy is a professional weirdo whose work has appeared at AlterNet, Salon, Crooks & Liars, the Daily Beast, Free Inquiry and, most regularly, at the Progressive. Follow him on Twitter @Ian_Murphy.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2013/11/i-punkd-scott-walker-100033_Page2.html#ixzz2l7UFjF2Z

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Volkswagen Union Opposed By Tennessee Republican Officials

by

October 21, 2013 4:56 PM

Volkswagen's car plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., is the company's only one in the U.S. It's also the only VW plant around the world without a workers union.

Volkswagen

When it comes to union organizing at an auto plant, the tension is typically between the workers and the management. But not at Volkswagen in Tennessee. There, the United Auto Workers is attempting to finally unionize the automaker's first foreign-owned plant in the South. And so far, Republican officials are the ones trying to stand in the way.
Just outside Chattanooga, in an idyllic industrial park, surrounded by green hills and even a nature park, Volkswagen built a plant a few years ago. It is still Volkswagen's only car plant in the U.S. and also the only one of VW's plants around the world that hasn't been unionized. The company isn't trying that hard to keep workers from organizing here.
"I just really appreciate the neutrality we're getting from Volkswagen Germany. They have always maintained that it would be our choice," says Lauren Feinauer, an hourly worker in the plant that makes the Passat.
She is just off her shift, a pink bandanna tying back her hair. In her own Volkswagen, she props up UAW signs in the windshield and rear window while she's parked at work. She says the sunshade is to "encourage others in the plant to be comfortable with their support."

Lauren Feinauer works at the Chattanooga plant. She props UAW signs in the windshield and rear window while she's parked at work.

Blake Farmer/Nashville Public Radio

Feinauer has helped collect signed union cards from a majority of the 2,000 employees. Some workers, though, want nothing to do with the UAW. They haven't spoken much publicly, but a few have filed complaints with the National Labor Relations Board, arguing that Volkswagen is coercing them to organize.
Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam has piped up on their behalf. Asked why he feels that's appropriate, he says, "One of the reasons is, we've had several prospective companies say that decision will impact whether we choose Tennessee or somewhere else."
The Republican governor says a slowdown in relocations to his state may be just the beginning. Companies like the region's right-to-work laws. No one has to be part of a union, so there aren't as many. That means fewer strikes and often lower pay. But the UAW is working the South harder than ever, with other campaigns at a Nissan plant in Mississippi and a Mercedes facility in Alabama.
U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican who previously was the mayor of Chattanooga, suggests Volkswagen will be the "laughingstock" of the business world if it doesn't resist the UAW. He blames the union for the troubles at Chrysler and General Motors.
"I mean, look at Detroit," Corker says. "Look at what's happened. Look at all of the businesses that have left there. I mean, it's been phenomenal. It's sad."
UAW President Bob King has resisted raising his voice. "They get pressured by the right wing of the party. Unfortunately, that's a fear that these politicians have that overcomes common sense," he says. King is not an old-school, hell-raising union leader. In fact, he discourages any characterization of this as a "union fight."

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"All the campaigns we have going on currently are being run very differently than we've run campaigns in the past," King says.
No more "us versus them." The pitch is all about cooperation and mutual benefit for workers and the company.
King says Tennessee's top Republicans have a standing offer to meet and discuss the labor movement's role in the 21st century. They haven't taken him up on it.
"You know, the truth is, the governor and the senator, they don't work on the floor at Volkswagen," says Jade Morgan, a single father of two boys who works on the overnight shift in Chattanooga. Morgan points out that both Haslam and Corker are multimillionaires who may never understand.
"It's not anybody who can walk in and work all night. It's tough," he says.
And ultimately, Morgan says, it's those who work in the plant who will get to decide whether the UAW is still worth having around.

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Supreme Court to weigh employer-union organizing deals

By Amanda Becker 8 hours ago

 

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court will hear a case on Wednesday that could have a major impact on the U.S. labor movement as it questions whether agreements often made between unions and private-sector employers over unionization campaigns violate an anti-corruption law.
The court is examining deals known as "neutrality agreements" in which employers agree not to campaign against unionization. The agreements have been in use for decades and the case could change how unions go about organizing.
If the justices find the pacts are a "thing of value," prohibiting employers and unions from entering into them, it would be a major blow to organized labor as it struggles to bolster membership, said those familiar with the practice.
"The stakes could not be higher for the union movement," Harvard University Law School Professor Benjamin Sachs said.
"Almost all of the successful unionizing efforts in the private sector in the last couple of decades have come through the type of private organizing agreements that are at issue in this case," he said.
The case, Unite Here Local 355 v. Mulhall, was brought by an employee of Mardi Gras Gaming, a casino and dog track in Hollywood, Florida.
Martin Mulhall, the employee, said his employer violated the Labor Management Relations Act when it agreed to allow the union Unite Here onto its property to organize workers, and when the company agreed to give the union contact information for employees in exchange for the union's support on a ballot initiative.
"THINGS OF VALUE"
The labor relations statute bars employers from providing "thing of value" to unions and union officials. Mulhall argued that the access Mardi Gras Gaming gave Unite Here was valuable during the union's unionization drive.
A federal trial court dismissed Mulhall's case. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals departed from precedent in two other circuits and reversed, saying that "it seems apparent that organizing assistance can be a thing of value."
If the Supreme Court agrees, employers and unions that enter into agreements with such terms could be committing felonies, legal experts told Reuters.
Arthur Smith, a Chicago-based attorney at Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart who represents employers, said that the agreements between unions and employers today are very different than those used in the 1980s.
Smith said that in the beginning, neutrality agreements were very simple and stated an employer would remain neutral while a union attempted to organize a workforce.
Today, he said, popular add-ons include allowing the union to access the workplace, providing it with contact information and recognizing its position as a bargaining representative if the majority of employees sign commitment cards.
SECRET BALLOT WINS DIFFICULT
Unions have used the press and public demonstrations to wage "corporate campaigns" to convince employers to agree to these provisions in an environment where union density in the private sector has declined and it is increasingly difficult to win secret-ballot elections, Smith said.
Smith filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Mulhall on behalf of the Council on Labor Law Equality, a trade group that represents employers in labor disputes in federal courts.
Craig Becker, the general counsel of the AFL-CIO, the country's largest federation of labor unions, said that in Mulhall one section of the labor relations statute is taken out of context. Congress intended to criminalize the exchange of money and straightforward bribery, Becker said.
"This is about everyday accommodations between employers and unions that take place all the time," Becker said. The AFL-CIO filed a brief supporting the position of Unite Here.
Harvard's Sachs said the Supreme Court could decide that it should not have taken the case for procedural reasons, leaving for another day the issue of neutrality agreements.
(Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Bill Trott)

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Attorney to court: Wis. union plan is burden

Attorney tells Wis. Supreme Court union plan is unconstitutionally burdensome

By Todd Richmond, Associated Press 7 hours ago

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen presents arguments in Madison Teachers Inc. vs. Scott Walker, in the Wisconsin Supreme Court at the state Capitol in Madison, Wis., Monday, Nov. 11, 2013. Van Hollen argued that portions of Gov. Scott Walker's union restrictions are constitutional. (AP Photo/Wisconsin State Journal, M.P. King, Pool)

MADISON, Wis. (AP) -- Labor attorneys pushed the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Monday to strike down portions of Republican Gov. Scott Walker's public union restrictions, arguing the prohibitions are designed to force school district and municipal workers to abandon their unions.
The court's decision could bring to an end one of the last unresolved legal challenges to the contentious restrictions that stripped almost all public workers of nearly all their union rights. Union supporters face an uphill fight, though, because conservative justices control the court.
Lester Pines, an attorney for a Madison teachers union, pressed ahead during oral arguments Monday, telling the justices that Walker's restrictions penalize local public workers who exercise their constitutional right to freely associate with a union. Their organizations can't collectively bargain for anything beyond base wage increases based on inflation or automatically withdraw dues from members' paychecks and must hold annual elections to see if their members want them to continue representing them, Pines said. The measures are designed to be so onerous that people simply quit their unions, he said.
"This isn't benign," Pines said. "These provisions are designed to make it impossible for people to exercise their associative rights."
Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, a Republican, appeared in person to argue for the Walker administration. He said constitutionality isn't an issue because collective bargaining is a benefit granted through state statutes. He maintained union members are still free to associate with one another and ask their employers for higher wages and other benefits. The restrictions simply mean they can't force their employers to listen.
"It is not a constitutional violation to limit the scope of collective bargaining," Van Hollen told the justices.
The case centers on a lawsuit a Madison teachers union and a Milwaukee public workers union filed in 2011 challenging the restrictions. Dane County Circuit Judge Juan Colas ruled last year the restrictions unfairly burden school district and municipal union members by infringing on their constitutional rights to free speech, association and equal protection.
Colas' ruling didn't affect state workers but it was unclear how broadly it applied to local public unions. Insisting the ruling applied only to Madison teachers and Milwaukee public workers, the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission continued to prepare for certification elections for hundreds of school district worker unions that had been set for this month.
Six unions not involved in the case asked Colas to find WERC in contempt of court. Colas granted the request in October, declaring his ruling meant no one could enforce the restrictions against any local public union. WERC stopped preparing for the elections pending the Supreme Court ruling.
State attorneys also tried to persuade the justices Monday to stay the contempt finding, arguing delaying the certification elections creates more uncertainty. Tamara Packard, another attorney for the Madison teachers, countered Colas properly issued the order; without it, she said, unions would have had to spend resources campaigning for unconstitutional elections.
The justices grilled both sides' attorneys for hours.
The conservative bloc appeared skeptical about the contempt order; Justice Michael Gableman mused WERC might have been prudent to continue election preparations given all the legal questions surrounding the restrictions and pointed out the state would have to spend resources setting up the elections as well so it's unclear which side would suffer greater harm.
Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, one of the court's two liberal-leaning justices, questioned whether granting the stay would mean unions that haven't filed notice with WERC that want to hold elections in November would be immediately de-certified.
"It looks as if WERC would say too bad, so sad, you're out of luck," she said.
It's unclear when the court might rule on merits of the case or the stay request. The justices face no deadline for issuing a decision.
A federal appeals court panel has upheld the restrictions, as did a federal judge in Madison in a separate challenge. Dane County Circuit Judge John Markson last month dismissed a Wisconsin Law Enforcement Association lawsuit challenging the restrictions.

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Stop Scott Walker

Stop Scott Walker

Republican Governor Scott Walker is too extreme for Wisconsin.
Since taking office, Governor Walker has waged an ideological agenda focused on rolling back our rights, not moving Wisconsin forward. His agenda: an attack on labor and removal of unions’ collective bargaining rights; a rollback of women's rights, including repealing equal pay legislation and signing a mandatory ultrasound bill; and a voter ID bill designed to disenfranchise voters.
Wisconsin deserves a governor that will stand up for all of Wisconsin, not attack our rights. Use the form at the right to tell Governor Walker to stop his extreme agenda and start standing up for hardworking Wisconsinites.


Go Here:
 http://action.burkeforwisconsin.com/page/s/stop-sw-fb-n

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Obama Gets Behind Democrats' $10.10 Minimum Wage Proposal

Obama Gets Behind Democrats' $10.10 Minimum Wage Proposal

Posted: 11/07/2013 6:16 pm EST  |  Updated: 11/07/2013 6:27 pm EST

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WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama is throwing his support behind congressional Democrats' proposal to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 and peg it to inflation, more than a dollar higher than the $9 proposal he made in his State of the Union address in February.
A White House official confirmed to HuffPost Thursday that the administration backs the legislation introduced earlier this year by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.). The Hill reported Thursday that Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said the White House was willing to get onboard with the measure.
"The President has long supported raising the minimum wage so hardworking Americans can have a decent wage for a day’s works to support their families and make ends meet, and he supports the Harkin/Miller bill that accomplishes this important goal," the White House official said in an email.
Harkin and Miller have said that a minimum wage hike to $9 would be insufficient. The president's support of the $10.10 proposal may help more Democrats rally around the bill as the Senate takes it up in coming weeks.
"We are very pleased President Obama endorsed a $10 an hour minimum wage bill," Aaron Albright, a spokesman for Miller, said in an email. "This action unites all Democrats and minimum wage advocates behind one proposal that addresses income inequality in a powerful way. Congress must move to raise the minimum wage now."
The White House's move was applauded by advocates for low-wage workers, who haven't seen the federal minimum wage raised since 2009, after a series of increases signed into law by President George W. Bush. In states that don't mandate a higher one, the wage floor remains $7.25 per hour.
"The White House got this ball rolling in a big way by putting this in the State of the Union," said Judy Conti, federal advocacy coordinator at the National Employment Law Project. "I think they've come to a point where they realize the economy deserves a robust minimum wage. The jobs we're creating are hourly jobs with low wages. We need to do everything we can to raise it."
The $10.10 figure in the Harkin-Miller proposal isn't arbitrary. Progressive economists like to point out that if the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation since its high in the late 1960s, it would now be above $10. Of course, it's possible the president's original $9 proposal could weaken Democrats' bargaining position with the House GOP. Republicans may seek a smaller minimum wage hike, if they agree to one at all. Republican leaders have already called it a job-killer.
During his State of the Union address, Obama argued that hiking the minimum wage would improve the lives of millions of workers and their families.
"Even with the tax relief we’ve put in place, a family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. That’s wrong," Obama said. "Tonight, let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full time should have to live in poverty."
While the federal minimum wage has held steady, many states and municipalities have continued to raise or implement their own minimum wages. Just this week, New Jersey voters approved a minimum wage bump to $8.25 per hour. Last month, California lawmakers raised theirs to $10, making it the highest state minimum wage in the nation.
The congressional Democrats' proposal would raise the minimum wage to $10.10 through a series of increases, then it would be adjusted each year according to inflation. The minimum wage would also rise for restaurant servers and other tipped workers, whose employers can pay them as little as $2.13 before tips. The minimum wage for those workers would be set at 70 percent of the regular minimum wage.

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