Gov. Walker's Union Busting Bill Passes Despite Oppisition

Union Busting Thugs Crush Labor

By Tom Eley

The Republican-controlled Wisconsin Senate on Wednesday evening passed a bill stripping government workers of collective bargaining rights and forcing them to pay much more for health insurance and pensions. The bill was approved in spite of the absence of 14 Senate Democrats who had fled the state, legally depriving Republicans of the required two-thirds majority quorum for the vote to proceed.

The bill is expected to pass the State Assembly Thursday and be signed into law by Governor Scott Walker by the end of the week.

Republicans claimed legal grounds for the move by temporarily removing from the so-called “budget repair bill” its fiscal components. By doing so, Republicans said that the legislation was no longer a finance bill, and therefore not subject to the quorum requirement. It was a moment of baldfaced lying for Walker and Senate Republican leaders, who in every public statement have declared that the attack on collective bargaining rights was a fiscal matter.

The bill was passed without discussion or debate at about 6:30 p.m. by a hastily-convened special conference committee, which normally convenes to sort out differences in competing bills.

“Tonight, the Senate will be passing the items in the Budget Repair Bill that we can with the 19 members [present],” said Sen. Scott Fitzgerald, the chamber's Republican majority leader, in a statement announcing the move.

The vote was in evident violation of the Wisconsin Open Meetings Law, which requires that public notice of a meeting be made “24 hours prior to the commencement of such meeting unless for good cause such notice is impossible or impractical.”

Thousands flooded to the capitol on hearing word of the bill’s passage. Crowds rushed the capitol building doors, shouting “you are cowards” and “let us in.” Chants of “general strike!” reverberated in and out of the building.



A Socialist Equality Party team was present at the scene. Andre Damon, a reporter for the World Socialist Web Site, was able to speak to thousands of demonstrators both inside and outside of the capitol building. He called for the formation of independent workplace committees to build for a general strike to force Walker out. These demands were met by enthusiasm among the workers present. (Download pdf, “Walker must go! For a general strike in Wisconsin”.)

Trade union officials and their supporters also attempted to address the spontaneous demonstration, including John Nichols of The Nation. They desperately sought to bolster illusions in the Democratic Party, praising the actions of the “Wisconsin 14” who had fled the state.

In fact, the bill’s passage reveals the consequences of the subordination of the mass struggle of Wisconsin workers and youth to the Democratic Party and the trade unions. From the beginning, the flight of the Democratic senators to Illinois was designed to take the initiative out of the hands of the government workers, students, and teachers, who had in the days preceding launched a “sick-in” strike wave against the bill that involved tens of thousands.

The Republicans’ legislative maneuver caught the Democrats flat-footed. Senate Democrats believed they were in advanced discussions with Walker to lessen the bill’s blow to union finances, while maintaining intact its cuts to worker benefits and workplace rights. E-mail exchanges between Walker’s office and Senate Democrats, released by the governor to the media, suggested that a deal was pending which would have required union certification elections every three years instead of each year, among other minor changes. This, Democrats hoped, would provide a degree of political cover for their capitulation—which was imminent, according to several media accounts.

Senator Bob Jauch, a recipient of of the e-mails, only yesterday hailed the communications as “the kind of starting point you can get to achieve a compromise.” The entire approach of the Democrats and the trade unions—that supposedly “wavering” Republicans could be swayed by pressure—has been exposed. The Republicans were far more determined than the “Wisconsin 14” Democrats, who always accepted the bill in principle, differing only with its aim of starving the unions of all dues revenue.

In the aftermath of the bill’s passage through the State Senate, efforts to bolster illusions in the Democrats will shift to the recall elections being launched against a number of Republican senators. Whatever the outcome of these elections, it will do nothing to reverse the assault on workers contained in Walker’s “budget repair bill” or his draconian two-year budget, which slashes Medicaid and public education, and moves toward the privatization of the University of Wisconsin.

Western Media Maxim: "Ignorance Is Strength"

This summer, Obama is Big Brother...

By Paul Craig Roberts 

Big Brother Obama, following in the tradition of Big Brothers Bush and Cheney, declared that America and the “entire world” are “appalled and outraged” by Iran’s violent efforts to crush protests organized by US interference in Iran’s election.

The American media’s one-sided and propagandistic coverage of the Iranian election has made an American hero out of the defeated candidate, Mousavi.

This leaves one wondering if anyone anywhere in the US media or US government knows that Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who served as prime minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran from 1981 to 1989, the decade following the overthrow of the American puppet government by Khomeini, has been fingered as the Butcher of Beirut.

He was responsible for the bloody attacks on the US embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut during the Reagan administration that blew to pieces 241 US Marines, sailors, and Army troops.

According to Jeff Stein writing in the June 22, 2009, CQ Politics, Mousavi “personally selected his point man for the Beirut terror campaign, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi-pur,” who presided over the terror cell responsible for the attacks.

The National Security Agency had a tap on the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, according to Admiral James Lyons who was deputy chief of Naval Operations at the time.

Admiral Lyons told Jeff Stein that “the Iranian ambassador received instructions from the foreign minister to have various groups target US personnel in Lebanon, but in particular to carry out a ‘spectacular action’ against the Marines.”

Stein reports that Lyons “also fingered Mousavi for the 1988 truck bombing of the US Navy’s Fleet Center in Naples, Italy.”

Bob Baer, a CIA Middle East field officer at the time, says that Mousavi “dealt directly with Imad Mughniyah,” the person responsible for both attacks.

All of these facts have gone into the Memory Hole. The US media and government have turned Musavi, the bloody butcher of US servicemen, into the would-be liberator of Iran from theocracy.

Only in America and in George Orwell’s fictional population in his predictive book, 1984, can we find such citizen ignorance.

Every day in America, a.k.a. Oceania, we see the growing power of Big Brother’s three slogans: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

From ignorance comes the strength to create a hero out of America’s terrorist enemy, Mousavi.

From freedom comes the protection provided by being constantly spied upon, no longer endangered by privacy which might keep Big Brother from discovering a terrorist plot.

This freedom from terrorists morphs into the slavery of being held in indefinite detention without evidence or charges. Habeas corpus has become the opposite of freedom as it prevents our protection from terrorists.

On June 23, Big Brother Obama, following in the tradition of Big Brothers Bush and Cheney, declared that Oceania and the “entire world” are “appalled and outraged” by Iran’s violent efforts to crush protests organized by Oceania’s interference in Iran’s election.

Meanwhile, Oceania continued its wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, crushing people right and left while gearing up to bring peace to Iran. No one is outraged at the violence. War is Peace.

Those who don’t fight wars can’t bring peace. Peace results when Big Brother’s hegemony extends over those regions that do not understand that War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.


The face of Big Brother seemed to persist for several seconds on the screen, as though the impact that it had made on everyone’s eyeballs were too vivid to wear off immediately. The little sandy-haired woman had flung herself forward over the back of the chair in front of her. With a tremulous murmur that sounded like ‘My Savior!’ she extended her arms toward the screen.

At this moment the entire group of people broke into a deep, slow, rhythmical chant of ‘Big Brother, Big Brother, Big Brother!’ over and over again, very slowly, with a long pause between the first ‘B’ and the second.

A heavy, murmurous sound, somehow curiously savage, in the background of which one seemed to hear the stamp of naked feet and the throbbing of tom-toms. For perhaps as much as thirty seconds they kept it up.

It was a refrain that was often heard in moments of overwhelming emotion. Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and Majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise. [1984]

The drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise sums up well enough the performance of Oceania’s Ministry of Truth.How long do Americans have before doubting Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth is a Thoughtcrime?

“Whether he wrote ‘Down With Big Brother,’ or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it.”

The neoconservatives have set up in America Thoughtcrime watch committees over professors. Academics who depart from or challenge the neocon line are reported and are subjected to vilification campaigns.

Sami Al-Arian, a computer science professor at a Florida University, was destroyed by the US Department of Justice [sic] because he gave the Palestinian side of the story.

The neocon academic spy operation has been given a boost by Dennis C. Blair, director of National Intelligence. Writing in CounterPunch (June 23), David Price reports that Blair has announced plans for a program to train intelligence officers, whose identities and activities would not be known to professors or administrators, to conduct covert missions in university classrooms.

This is as Orwellian is it comes. Thinking independently is rapidly becoming a serious Thoughtcrime. Winston Smith was the only one among Big Brother’s subjects capable of independent thought. His ability to think independently was discovered and terminated.

Already we see that the US media is incapable of independent thought. Independent thought in the universities, where careers are dependent on government grants, is already half dead. Independent thought does not exist in think tanks, which serve the interests of donors. In America independent thought is rapidly becoming an anti-American act, which is itself morphing into a terrorist act.

Newspeak handles effortlessly the morphing and transforming of meaning. New generations born into the new system know no difference and, thus, do not need to be silenced. Once the older generations are brought to heel, truth is whatever Big Brother says.