the "America is not broke" speech

link is here

http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/america-is-not-broke

just in case they had you fooled.

should you, perhaps, want to support Wisconsin unions....

I have a website for you.  Wisconsin AFSCME is seeking donations.

https://afl.salsalabs.com/o/4002/wi-response

they cookie you, so the site should know who you are if you go back.  the Workers Rights Emergency Response Fund is dedicated to funding the fight against the despots of what passes for the "GOP" in Wisconsin.  they are also going to have a dog in the race on recall actions.

go for it.  trust Union Family.

Wisconsin. The Fourth Reich.

It should fall to Federal and State courts to show the Wisconsin Senate how wrong they were to pull a legislative trick to violate legal negotiated contracts with their employees.

At that time, the state is going to have to close down huge swaths of programs and perhaps a few jails to make up their budgets.  because no Democrat will ever trust the Quislings in that legislature again.

"we said, they said." cheesy Wisconsin excuses.

Herr Walker has released some emails that he says shows he's bending over backwards to make the Madtown 14 happy.

one... that's not what he's ever said publicly.  he's always been "I'm not changing."  which lie are we supposed to believe from this guy?

two... his caucuses in the houses of state government will not support that deal.  they're trumpeting elephants that don't think, just stampede.

three... if he had the magic answers on his desk, and didn't mosey out for the photo-op at the border in Milwaukee to Illinois, shaking hands with the Madtown 14 in the middle of the bridge, he'd lose major face.  the guy was talking as if he wanted to hit the Presidential race for 2012 on the weekend, and he's throwing away a perfect photo-op faster than "crackpipe Charlie" tossed a TV franchise away.

fact is, Herr Walker is just a blowhard who hates people who band together for their rights.  in the end, he's with the billionnaires who don't want anybody beyond the serfs and pool boys they need to keep the plantation spotless.

oh, if only I had a thought on the matter... .

On Wisconsin... on your knees, ya bums...

Forbes blogger Rick Ungar proves the drool that passes for policy from Herr Walker is lying nonsense.  Those killer pensions of union workers, bankrupting the poor, innocent state?  Deferred compensation as part of the negotiated pay for the workers.

If you ever sat in on a negotiating session of any kind... school board, local plant, union rep... or read a civics book, you would know that.  There is one pot of money.  The squabbling covers both quantity and labels on this stack, and that stack.

By the way, if you cut 1.2 billion (current story says 1/2 billion directly) dollars out of school funding,  the occasional civics class that is still being given will go away.  How convenient is that for the new plantation masters?

your link, please...

http://blogs.forbes.com/rickungar/2011/02/25/the-wisconsin-lie-exposed-taxpayers-actually-contribute-nothing-to-public-employee-pensions/

The Madison Journal-Statesman noticed today that Koch Industries has opened up a new lobbying office a block and a half away from the state legislature.  Fancy that.

And the Madison police chief and mayor wants to know which of Herr Walker's aides was in on the plan to disrupt public order hinted at when Wilson told the prank caller from New Jersey that they had thought of putting some troublemakers on the street under false flag.  Cause the cops would like to seriously interview that punk.  Or punks.

http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/govt-and-politics/article_40c3dfbe-402c-11e0-8c68-001cc4c002e0.html

Of course, the court ruled the capitol must be open to the public at all hours there is business in there.  Our dictatorial friend had Administration shut the thing down to 'clean up' before the budget address.  I'm sure to rip down all the banners saying, "Welcome to the Plantation, Massa!"

I am reliably informed by an AFSCME official that was in Madtown last week that pizzas were being ordered for the protestors in the capitol over the weekend from as far away as Egypt.

Mideast freedom fighters supporting protestors against new dictatorship in a US state.

Funny how liberty shows up in awkward places, isn't it?

// edit 3/8... fixed name... Walker not Wilson. //

On Wisconsin... and it's a fight song, sure enough

I am going to filch an article from the CWA7200.org union website, which was written by Joshua Holland.  my source link is

http://www.cwa7200.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=201:12-things-you-need-to-know-about-the-uprising-in-wisconsin&catid=50:general

because worn out old journalists come from a time when you referenced your sources.

King Walker is laid bare here.  ain't a pretty sight.  Unlike many rightie sites, if you see a blue hyperlink, it will open the source of the statement.  No anonymous lies here.  Trust Union Family!

>>

What's happening in Wisconsin is not complicated. At the beginning of this year, the state was on course to end 2011 with a budget surplus of $120 million. As Ezra Klein explained, newly elected GOP Governor Scott Walker then " signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health-care policy experiment that lowers overall tax revenues (among other things). The new legislation was not offset, and it turned a surplus into a deficit." (Update: please see this note for more detail on the cause of the budget gap.)

Walker then used the deficit he'd created as the justification for assaulting his state's public employees. He used a law cooked up by a right-wing advocacy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC likes to fly beneath the radar, but Idescribed the organization in a 2005 article as "the connective tissue that links state legislators with right-wing think tanks, leading anti-tax activists and corporate money." Similar laws are on the table in Ohio and Indiana.

Walker's bill would strip public employees of the right to bargain collectively for anything but higher pay (and would cap the amount of wage hikes they might end up gaining in negotiations). His intentions are clear -- before assuming office, Walker threatened to decertify the state's employees' unions (until he discovered that the governor doesn't have that power).

But he's spinning the measure as something else -- a bitter pill state workers must swallow in order to save Wisconsin's government. So the first things you need to know are:

1. Wisconsin's public workers  have already "made sacrifices to help balance the budget, through 16 unpaid furlough days and no pay increases the past two years," according to the Associated Press. The unions know their members are going to have to make concessions on benefits, but they rightly see the assault on their fundamental right to negotiate as an act of war.

2. There are already 13 states that restrict public workers' bargaining rights and it hasn't helped their bottom lines. As Ed Kilgore notes,  "eight non-collective-bargaining states face larger budget shortfalls than either Wisconsin or Ohio," and " three of the 13 non-collective bargaining states are among the eleven states facing budget shortfalls at or above 20%."

3. This isn't just about public employees. What even a majority of the protesters don't know is that Walker's law would also place all of the state's Medicaid funding in the hands of the governor.  State senator Jon Erpenbach, D-Middleton -- one of the Dem law-makers who fled the state to block a vote on the bill -- told local media that this amounted to "substantial Medicaid changes" that put "the governor, all of a sudden... in charge of Medicaid, which is SeniorCare, which is BadgerCare ...and he has never once said what he intends to do" with those programs. But the provision led journalist Suzie Madrak to conclude that "the end game for all this is to defund state Medicaid programs and make it impossible to serve as part of the new health care safety net."

4. Health-care costs, rather than workers' greed, are what has driven up the price of employees' benefits. But generally speaking, those public sector health-care costs have grown at a slower clip than in the private sector.

5. Public employees' pensions account for just 6 percent of state budgets.

This has nothing to do with the state's fiscal picture. Aside from potentially undermining Wisconsin's public health-care system, it's really about destroying the last bastion of unionism in the American economy: public employees. As Addie Stan wrote on AlterNet's front page:

Walker is carrying out the wishes of his corporate master, David Koch, who calls the tune these days for Wisconsin Republicans. Walker is just one among many Wisconsin Republicans supported by Koch Industries -- run by David Koch and his brother, Charles -- and Americans For Prosperity, the Astroturf group founded and funded by David Koch. The Koch brothers are hell-bent on destroying the labor movement once and for all.

Consider these facts:

6. Last year, more working people belonged to a union in the public sector (7.9 million) than in the private (7.4 million), despite the fact that corporate America employs five times the number of wage-earners.  37 percent of government workers belong to a union, compared with just 7 percent of private-sector employees.

7. Whether in the public or private sector, union workers earn, on average, 20 percent more than their non-unionized counterparts. They also have richer retirement and health benefits -- the "union compensation premium" rises to almost 30 percent when you include those bennies.

That workers can still negotiate from a position of strength somewhere in the US is simply unacceptable to the right, and that's what this is about. As you might expect, the tool they're using in their campaign is a pack full of lies and distortions about public employees. Here are some answers to those falsehoods:

8. Public sector workers have, on average, more experience and higher levels of education than their counterparts in the private sector (they are twice as likely to have a college degree).

9. When you adjust for those factors, they make, on average, 4 percent less than their private-sector counterparts.

10. Like any group of workers with a high union density, they have better benefits, on average. But even including those benefits,   state and local employees still make less in total compensation than they would doing the same work in the private sector.

11. In 2007, the average pension for a public sector worker was $22,000. Not exactly caviar dreams.

12. Many public employees are not eligible for Social Security -- those pensions, and whatever they can put away on their own, is all that they'll have in their golden years.

(Unless otherwise indicated, you can find links to the data for all of the above in my piece: "Right-Wingers Using Public Employees as 21st-Century Welfare Queens.")

The Right has made great political progress getting Americans to ask the question: "How come that guy's getting what I don't have?" It's the crux of the politics of grievance. Progressives need to get Americans to ask a different question: "What's keeping me from getting what that guy has?" At least part of the answer is the Right's decades-long assault on private sector workers' ability to organize, and the latest battle is being waged in Wisconsin.

and now that's out of the way...

somebody respectable had a news story up today that said the kids are using that twitter thing now instead of blogging.

well, I am perfectly HAPPY to be entering these scraps by my Teletype 11.  hmph.  get off my lawn!

the whole society is acting like they're on their last pail of electrons.  "It doesn't matter if you make mistakes, as long as you act fast enough to make a lot of them" -- Evil Joey Nachos, as he was taking Qwest down from $82 a share to $1.67, circling the drain worldwide.

us old cranks, goldangit, we even sort through the 1s and 0s that fall on the floor.  use 'em again.  loose connectors don't bother us, no sirree.

get off my lawn.