It's gettin a bit testy at the Capitol, hearings are going on and many people are not being let in...
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by seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 10, 2011 1:11 am
by seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 10, 2011 1:35 am
by 2012 Countdown » Thu Mar 10, 2011 2:12 am
by 2012 Countdown » Thu Mar 10, 2011 2:29 am
by eyeno » Thu Mar 10, 2011 3:10 am
by justdrew » Thu Mar 10, 2011 3:18 am
eyeno wrote:Watching the live feed reminds me of the protests I have been to because of the DRUMS. Drums unify a crowd and keep it in sync with purpose. Drums are natural. Drums are raw. Drums are good.
by seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 10, 2011 10:40 am
"Shame! Shame! Shame!"
Lawless Legislators Approve Wisconsin Governor's Anti-Worker Agenda
by John Nichols
Wisconsin State Representative Mark Pocan, the former co-chair of the legislature's powerful Joint Finance Committee, says he is starting to feel as if he lives in a “third world junta.”
The crowd inside the State Capitol after protesters stormed the building on Wednesday night. (MIKE DEVRIES — The Capital Times )
Wisconsin State Senator Bob Jauch, a senior Democrat, says that what he is witnessing feels like “a coup.”
Marty Beil, the head of the AFSCME Council 24, the state’s largest public employee union, said Wisconsin had been turned into “a banana republic.”
And thousands of Wisconsinites, men and women, adults and their children, public employees and private-sector workers, have poured into the state Capitol in Madison, shouting: “Shame! Shame! Shame!”
There were 7,000 people outside the Capitol at some points during night, and thousands inside.
At the close of one of the most remarkable days in American political history, a state once regarded as among the most enlightened and progressive in the nation finds itself ruled by rouge Republican operatives whose disregard for rules – and the popular will – is so extreme that the longest serving legislator in the nation, Wisconsin State Senator Fred Risser, a Madison Democrat, says: “They have not just bent the law. They have broken it.”
Risser is right. After weeks of intense debate inside and outside the Capitol, and at a point when most Wisconsinites thought a compromise was in the offering, Republican legislative leaders suddenly announced that they would pass the most draconian components of Governor Scott Walker’s budget repair bill – including a move to strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights.
They could not do so passing the bill as Walker proposed it. Because Walker’s measure was a budget bill, that would have required a quorum and no quorum could be achieved because of the absence of 14 Democratic senators – who fled to Illinois in order to establish a negotiating position to change the bill.
So the Republican stripped out the supposedly “non-economic” components of the bill, including the assault on collective bargaining, and passed them in a form that did not require the quorum.
They did so without hearings, without debate and without following the state’s open meetings laws.
They did so in less than two hours, without even notifying key Democrats.
They did so over the objections of Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca, a Kenosha Democrat, who repeatedly explained to members of the legislative Conference Committee that moved the bill to passage: “Mr. Chairman, this is a violation of law.”
Barca's point was well taken.
But the Republicans did not listen, or care. They literally walked out of the meeting as they spoke.
Minutes later, the Senate passed the bill by an 18-1 margin. No Democrats were present and only state Sen. Dale Schultz, R-Richland Center, voted “no.”
It was a disgraceful spectacle, and it is all but certain to be repeated Thursday in the state Assembly – even as Barca and his Democratic colleagues prepared for one final fight for workers rights and the rule of law.
When that vote will actually occur remains to be seen, as there were reports at dawn that dozens, perhaps hundreds, of citizens were occupying the Assembly chamber.
A rally scheduled for 9 CST Thursday is expected to bring new crowds to the Capitol Square. And there is no question that they will be angry at what has transpired.
As the Senate voted Wednesday night, cries of “Shame! Shame! Shame!” were audible from outside the chamber.
The people, by the hundreds, and then the thousands, had raced to the Capitol to let their representatives know what all the polls have confirmed: this legislation is opposed by the overwhelming majority of Wisconsinites. Its supporters – billionaire campaign contributors and Washington-based think tanks – may have won a round Wednesday night.
But it was a surprise attack rather than an honest win.
And it will inspire an appropriate response: Protests now, and the recall and removal of Republican senators in short order.
Some of the Republicans may think that “cooler heads will prevail.” They are wrong. The cool heads, the calm and rational Wisconsinites, will be busy in coming days: collecting signatures of recall petitions.
by Jeff » Thu Mar 10, 2011 10:52 am
Fox wrote:Rabid Leftists Storm Wisconsin Capitol After Vote
by 23 » Thu Mar 10, 2011 11:23 am
justdrew wrote:eyeno wrote:Watching the live feed reminds me of the protests I have been to because of the DRUMS. Drums unify a crowd and keep it in sync with purpose. Drums are natural. Drums are raw. Drums are good.
yes
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?p=385954#p385954
by thurnundtaxis » Thu Mar 10, 2011 1:19 pm
by NeonLX » Thu Mar 10, 2011 2:40 pm
thurnundtaxis wrote:The way the Republicans are acting in Wisconsin is exactly the way that the Democrats have needed to act for the last 30 years or so.
by Laodicean » Thu Mar 10, 2011 3:21 pm
by brainpanhandler » Thu Mar 10, 2011 5:55 pm
NeonLX wrote:thurnundtaxis wrote:The way the Republicans are acting in Wisconsin is exactly the way that the Democrats have needed to act for the last 30 years or so.
Damn...Ain't that the Truth?
by vanlose kid » Thu Mar 10, 2011 8:23 pm
Scott Walker's real agenda in Wisconsin
The Republican governor's budget plan would open the state up to a corporate asset-grab not seen since robber baron capitalism
Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers guardian.co.uk, Thursday 10 March 2011 19.00 GMT
On Wednesday evening, in a veritable Night of the Long Knives, Wisconsin's integrity was brutally murdered on the floor of the state Capitol in Madison. On 9 March, integrity and trust built up over a century was obliterated as Wisconsin state senators quickly reversed course and cleaved its budget "repair bill" in half. Financial items require a quorum, thus, collective bargaining was split off from the budget repair bill and voted on separately so as to permit its being voted on now. Even so, this still broke the state's open meeting law requiring 24 hours' notice to ensure transparency. Instead, the Wisconsin senate Republicans pulled out this new legislation without advance notice and began voting, leaving only a stunned Democratic legislator, Peter Barca, to read the open meeting law out loud to prevent the senators from voting. The senate voted over his objections anyway.
The Wisconsin brand has always centered on integrity. This was really about the only distinctive comparative advantage the state could lay claim to. Now, it is gone. With collective bargaining abolished, huge issues remain beyond labour. The privatisation of public assets is now on the agenda, with the yet-to-be-voted-on budget repair bill.
Governor Scott Walker emerges from Wisconsin, a state that invented Progressive Era Republican rule in the 19th and early 20th centuries under such exemplars as Robert LaFollette. Under their tenure, rent-seeking from the public domain and similar insider corruption were checked by a strong public sector anchored in integrity. The state's long history of reforms nurtured a prosperous middle class and made it a model of clean government, solid infrastructure, trade unionism and high value-added industry managed by socialists and the LaFollette Progressives.
Fast-forward to Scott Walker today. Representing a new breed apart from Wisconsin's earlier Republicans, he is seeking to re-open the asset-grabbing Gilded Age style. A plague of rent-seekers is seeking quick gains by privatising the public sector and erecting tollbooths to charge access fees to roads, power plants and other basic infrastructure.
Economics textbooks, along with Fox News and shout radio commentators, spread the myth that fortunes are gained productively by investing in capital equipment and employing labour to produce goods and services that people want to buy. This may be how economies prosper, but it is not how fortunes are most easily made. One need only to turn to the 19th-century novelists such as Balzac to be reminded that behind every family fortune lies a great theft, often long-forgotten or even undiscovered.
But who is one to steal from? Most wealth in history has been acquired either by armed conquest of the land, or by political insider dealing, such as the great US railroad land giveaways of the mid 19th century. The great American fortunes have been founded by prying land, public enterprises and monopoly rights from the public domain, because (to paraphrase Willie Sutton) that's where the assets are to take. Throughout history the world's most successful economies have been those that have kept this kind of primitive accumulation in check. The US economy today is faltering largely because its past barriers against rent-seeking are being breached.
Nowhere is this more disturbingly on display than in Wisconsin. Today, Milwaukee – Wisconsin's largest city, and once the richest in America – is ranked among the four poorest large cities in the United States. Wisconsin is just the most recent case in this great heist. The US government itself and its regulatory agencies effectively are being privatised as the "final stage" of neoliberal economic doctrine.
A peek into Governor Walker's so-called "budget repair bill" reveals a shop of horrors that is just the opposite of actually repairing the budget. Among the items listed in the bill until Wednesday night were selloffs of state power generation facilities – in no-bid contracts notoriously prone to insider dealing. The 37 facilities he wants to sell off that produce heating and cooling at low cost to the state's universities and prisons. Walker's budget repair bill would have unloaded them at a low price, presumably to campaign contributors such as Koch Industries – and then stick the bill for producing this power at higher rates to Wisconsin taxpayers in perpetuity. (And this is all being sold as a "taxpayer relief" plan!) Invariably, this will make its way into new legislation once attention is diverted from the current controversy.
The budget bill also plans to tear down the Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS). This is not New Jersey, where a succession of corrupt governments have underfunded (read: stolen) the state pension system in order to shift resources to pay for budget shortfalls in general revenues caused by tax breaks for the rich. The WRS is one of the nation's most stable, well-funded and best-managed pension systems. Although Wisconsin is not a big state, the WRS has amassed $75bn in reserves, and pays out handsome pensions to its public retirees, without needing new public subsidy. The Walker bill has language providing for [color=#BF0000]tearing down this system, raiding its assets to pay for further tax cuts for the rich (especially property owners), and then throwing Wall Street a meaty bone as public employees would be shifted to 401k plans handled by money managers on commission.[/color]
In a separate proposal, Governor Walker would start privatising the University of Wisconsin's two flagship doctorate-granting campuses. Ironically, the land grant universities – of which Wisconsin has long been among the best – were created by protectionist 19th-century Republicans as an alternative approach to British free-market doctrine, which dominated the prestigious and largely anglophile Ivy League universities. These universities, like their German counterparts, taught a new economic policy of state management and public enterprise that formed the basis for subsequent US and German development. Walker would kill off this tradition, and return intellectual production to the highest bidder.
Other proposals suggest selling off Wisconsin's public northwoods lands with their cornucopia of mineral and timber wealth. And much more is said to be in the works.
So Walker's war is not only against the Democrats and labour, it is against Wisconsin's Progressive Era institutions. His policy threatens to pauperise the state and deal a coup de grace to Progressive Era institutions and impoverish the state's middle class. Contra John Maynard Keynes's gentle suggestion of "euthanasia of the rentier", it is the middle class that is being euthanised – throughout North America and Europe.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... CMP=twt_fd
by NeonLX » Thu Mar 10, 2011 9:14 pm
brainpanhandler wrote:NeonLX wrote:thurnundtaxis wrote:The way the Republicans are acting in Wisconsin is exactly the way that the Democrats have needed to act for the last 30 years or so.
Damn...Ain't that the Truth?
Really? I'd say rather that the way the democrats are acting in Wisconsin is exactly the way that Democrats everywhere and at every level have needed to act for the last 30 years or so, which is, standing in solidarity with the less than criminally wealthy classes.
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