RE Walking all over WI Workers

A few Thoughts on Krugman's piece in the NY Times...
Dateline: Stolen Treasure, FLA-Duh

PK: "What’s happening in Wisconsin is, instead, a power grab — an attempt to exploit the fiscal crisis to destroy the last major counterweight to the political power of corporations and the wealthy. And the power grab goes beyond union-busting. The bill in question is 144 pages long, and there are some extraordinary things hidden deep inside.

For example, the bill includes language that would allow officials appointed by the governor to make sweeping cuts in health coverage for low-income families without having to go through the normal legislative process."

Krugman points to the hidden nasty nuggets in the WALKER draconian agenda - passed without the clumsy encumbrances like the stumbling block of a democratic debate or pesky journalists.  Another hot one is this PRIVATIZATION HO!

PK: "And then there’s this: “Notwithstanding ss. 13.48 (14) (am) and 16.705 (1), the department may sell any state-owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state. Notwithstanding ss. 196.49 and 196.80, no approval or certification of the public service commission is necessary for a public utility to purchase, or contract for the operation of, such a plant, and any such purchase is considered to be in the public interest and to comply with the criteria for certification of a project under s. 196.49 (3) (b).”

Sounds like the selling off of state enterprises to their favorite cronies, like the Russian economy - does this fall into the category of "you become what you hate?" Or is it just old fashioned greed and corporate over-reach.

PK: "The language in the budget bill would, in effect, let the governor privatize any or all of these facilities at whim. Not only that, he could sell them, without taking bids, to anyone he chooses. And note that any such sale would, by definition, be “considered to be in the public interest.  If this sounds to you like a perfect setup for cronyism and profiteering — remember those missing billions in Iraq? — you’re not alone.

It interesting to see in "The Times" what many of us, have known for sometime now. The deficit, and the tax cut mantra, that we've been receiving like the benediction from the KOCH juiced up Murdock mouthpieces, is part and parcel, of the old Gingrich/Norquist fable where they said, the plan is "to make government small enough to drown it in a bathtub" ... as long as it can still underwrite International Bankers and Stock traders and bail out Mortgage Brokers and Insurance Emperors... They just insist on keeping the public away from the Federal teat, and to make room, for just a few more RED BLOODED-CAPITALISTS. 

Pass ME... that welfare check Jeeves. We be, too big to fail!

WI Union Workers call for National Work Stoppage!

Friends there is no longer time to dress like a progressive,  look like progressives, discussion time has passed. In the party, out of the party, it's irrelevant. It's time to work together. We must support each other they are out to smash the last solid unions left in America it is a unified campaign to finally destroy what remains of the middle class.

They are in it to WIN, and your wages, your jobs, your pensions and healthcare are just so much collateral damage as they finalize their plan to gut the middle class. I feel sorriest for the bozo's who blame the teachers those underpaid sobs, and the inspectors who protect their food supply their workplaces, and garbage men who clean the streets. They are not the enemy.

They want you confused and blaming the immigrants, the poor, the unions; everyone who like the middle class are victims of the class warfare they have cleverly disguised with their advertising and the faux news spokes models.

THE WALL STREET BANERS with their double dealing Insurance and Mortgage buddies who write unreadable contracts, so carefully crafted in such tiny slippery print, that an army of lawyers and an electron microscope couldn't protect you.

Rapacious rates on your credit cards after you already paid to bail out the companies? Mortgage bankers who only write deals that would be theft, if the law wasn't twisted into a pretzel to protect them. (Don't choke Georgie) Wall streeters master criminal - all walking around scott free with bonuses that you couldn't ear in thirty lifetime. Criminals so outside and above the law, that they each have their own pet legislators to write laws that can grab your future swing it around over their heads until your dizzy, then wring every penny out of it.

Your wallet and your children's future is definitely on the table, and their not using scalpels their using chain-saws.

Walk like an Egyptian

My Egyptian Brothers and Sisters

Congratulations my fellow freedom fighters

You stood alone and unarmed with only your dreams for a democratic future to protect you.  Led by ideas and hope not despots or generals or business tycoons, or bankers or dangerous men and women armed with plastic explosive and infrared glasses, dropped from gunships in the dark of night.

I can see, Thomas Jefferson and the proud General Washington looking on in admiration even Thomas Paine, looked up from his pamphleteering to smile for a moment before he went back to his work of reminding men and women that they must be free of despots.

You said, no to the security state, you turned away in horror, from the whips, and iron bars and electrodes of those secretive butchers down below in the dark forcing screams from the innocent. You didn't need martial law, you didn't need special security rules and terrorist bombs.

You just said no, and no further. You were braver than the enforcers, you were braver, than the secret men who pulled the despots' strings.

We don't need such bravery in these fair lands, we have the pATRIOT aCT. We don't need the sinew to face down a charging band of secret service cavalry on horses and camels, we take our shoes off at the airports. We don't need the kind of brave hearts that can hold a town square like Tahrir, we have universal surveillance on our streets and the internet. 

We don't need no democracy down home, we have lobbyists and purchased legislators, and bankers here in the land of the free. We're too busy inserting enforcing democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan and sending in via cruise missiles into Pakistan. 

We don't need the kind of inconvenience of camping out in Tahrir Square. We have Homeland Security and a Constitutional Scholar to keep us safe from Habeas Corpus. But Good Luck Egyptians... We don't need your kind of new fresh citizen activists. We have pre-owned political parties to choose the faces who are purported to be in-charge on TEE VEE.  

HANDS OFF THE WOMBS - Republicans

In Support of L2E by Vicki Impoco
"Focus On Jobs, Not Violating Women's Constitutional Rights" 

How can these "legislators" say with any seriousness that a government mandate for health care is an unconstitutional but that these same republican lawmakers can decide what medical care insurance companies can cover. They seem to think they have been empowered to remake every Floridians' reproductive choices, in their own image.
"HB 321 by Rep. Trujillo (R-115) would ban abortion post 20 weeks unless necessary to save the life of the pregnant woman. Rep. Trujillo's bill would force a woman to carry an anechephalic fetus (no brain) and other horrific fetal anomalies even when a fetus is not viable to term.

HB 415 by Rep. Charles Van Zant (R-30) This legislation would ban abortion in Florida with limited exceptions for the life of the mother (certified by two physicians). Survivors of rape, sexual assault and incest would be forced to carry a pregnancy to term against their will."

These legislators, these Government Bureaucrats, (for those of you who need this translated into Tea-Party language.) They seek to overrule a woman's judgment. They think they know better, than every woman in Florida. They seek to IMPOSE their personal religious judgment on every Floridian, born and unborn.

This hypocrisy is a perfect example of standard republic "thinking". Whatever they disagree with is unconstitutional, but whatever over-reach, excess, and judicial activism suits them, is just fine.

Ms. Impoco is if anything too polite. Imagine for a second, how these men might react, if some government official decided, that it suited their private judgment, they must cultivate a spare kidney for harvest and put their own life at risk, in some STATE MANDATED MEDICAL PROCEDURE?

I can see the misspelled signs even now.

Florida Women, tell these Legislators they do not OWN your WOMBS, and they cannot Constitutionally control your reproductive life. TELL THEM - HANDS OFF MY WOMB!

RW Spisak
www.AveryVoice.com