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

Superb Film: "William Kunstler - Disturbing the Universe"

Watched an amazing and heart warming film William Kunstler Disturbing the Universe, at the Fort Lauderdale film festival in the lovely Cinema Paradiso in downtown Fort Lauderdale here is the synopsis from a PBS showing:

Synopsis

William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe examines the life of this radical attorney from a surprising angle. Kunstler’s two daughters from his second marriage grew up lionizing a man already famous for his historic civil rights and anti-war cases. Then, in their teens, they began to be disillusioned by a stubborn man who continued representing some of the most reviled defendants in America — this time accused rapists and terrorists. In this intimate biography, Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler seek to recover the real story of what made their late father one of the most beloved, and hated, lawyers in America. Winner of the L’Oreal Paris Women of Worth Vision Award, 2009 Sundance Film Festival. A co-production of ITVS." 


The film takes the viewer down into the famed freedom fighters life from the perspective of two of his daughters Emily and Sarah. You see his pre-fame life as a soldier as a family man in upstate New York and as an early civil rights attorney until the events that changed his life working to support the freedom riders who support those brave souls who liberated lunch counters and eventually the hearts of many across the south. And while racism, wasn't limited to Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida it was simply at it's open and ugliest display there.


While it might seem trivial to some unimaginative historically illiterate souls that water fountains, hotel rooms, restrooms, and voting booths wee off limits to peoples of color just fifty short years ago. Those of us who lived those years, and saw that slow evolution these were epochal struggles. Watching human rights established as the bloody fingers of oppression were pried off the throats of so many could not but affect many Americans.


Watching Dr. King and so many other brave nameless individuals stand against batons, police dogs, fire hoses and lawful murderous legally sanctioned racism to reclaim their humanity from a power structure  unwilling to grant humanity, much-less civic rights. Watching those scenes replay made all of us in the theatre remember those awful days, and the bravery demanded of so many, in an era that transformed our country from a land that sanctioned open apartheit, to a country that was prepared to work toward a new civic justice. A journey that remains an unfulfilled promise.


The film took us back to a watch a young lawyer transformed from a simple small town lawyer, into a firebrand who stood high atop the barricades to defend civil rights activists, anti-war activists, First American activists. We relived the travails of political show trials like the Chicago Eight, and the tragedy that was the Attica massacre. The story of the his spiritual kinship and awakening attained through the   struggles defending the First Americans at Wounded Knee.  We met his second family and saw, Mr. Kunstler, not just as a freedom fighter who time and again stood with defendants against the voice of the mob, after the press and public had already reached their verdict, but also as a family man with two precocious daughters. 


And we joined the mourners, who gathered at the final ceremony for the freedom fighter who defended the unpopular, the revolutionary, and the politically engaged in a life that mattered. And all of that , through the eyes and the voices of two daughters that honored, challenged and loved him greatly.


"William Kunstler  disturbing the Universe" a film every activist should see.

The Filthy Claw of Corporate Control Clutches Olbermann

MSNBC

I am appalled at the abrupt termination of the Olbermann news and commentary program. Programs are terminated for one of two reasons, either a failure to find an audience or problems with management. Which case we have hear is obvious.

With the change of corporate control, we see just how swift the corporate "leadership" corruption has reached it's filthy claw down into editorial content. [No Content Impact - I can hear the denials even now...]

I must say, even despite the toothless tigers that now sitting in the chairs of the FCC and the corporate lapdogs and freebooter sycophants filling the robes at the Supreme Court this power grab will not go un-noticed among the viewer-ship that  gave Mr. Olbermann the powerful reach he has. He shall retain that viewership - elsewhere!

The Corporate Chieftains may Chuckle today but you will repent at your leisure as the viewership plummets to below CNN's lowest mid-morning numbers. You may think now, that with your vast profits you can casually throw away the most popular show you broadcast. WATCH US as we turn you off.  

FORMER MSNBC REGULAR VIEWER

RW Spisak Jr.

Mad Murders in Arizona, America and the Media

They sang all day long again today of a few futile murders in Arizona.

No talk of Afghanistan, no news of Iraq, nothing about the rain of robot bombs in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. Nothing of veterans care, nothing about the soaring costs of gasoline, driving to stratospheric heights by the soulless speculators. Nothing of the homeless, no news about the silent unobserved foreclosures. Foreclosures crushing families like during the Great  Depression. No mention of the homeless families and the growing dependence on handouts. [We cut welfare - we couldn't afford to feed the poor and unemployed.]

Mental healthcare, a pariah in the land of macho...missing in action... along with access to healthcare for the working and non-working poor. Blame the immigrants you waiting wanting Americans. "What are they expected to do?", asked a visiting Canadian, who asked about the poor - "Die quickly and unobtrusively." I explained.

Blame the immigrants, you Americans struggling at the edge of economic  uncertainty. No surer of any step; than the tightrope walker poised between the Skyscrapers of Banking and Insurance. Your children in crumbling and unfunded schools, who visit the disappearing libraries in smaller and smaller numbers. But now thanks to the GUN LOBBY in Congress WE CAN bring our GUNS to the underfunded National Parks.

But lets focus on a couple deaths in Arizona, not the many deaths in Pittsburgh or Detroit, in New York or Chicago or Dallas and Atlanta no news of the lost and hungry children there. No news about a child shot in an invisible inner city neighborhood nothing worth reporting there. Hardly worth mentioning when we can moan and tear our hair about an important and significant tragedy like the shooting of a photogenic Congresswoman.  

We can even take a moment to nod sagely and briefly mention non-existent Mental Health Services, and the peculiar American custom of holding the mentally ill, apart as if contagious and somehow morally responsible for their own illnesses.

And guns, [gun sales are up praise Jesus] despite the needless deaths of Kennedys and Kings. We must preserve the casual sales of high powered

repeating fire arms, because without the ability to commit bloody mass murder could we really be FREE? Without the free availability of weapons of mass destruction, we could hardly be the distracted indentured servants we are... I mean Americans.

We can hold secret prisoners in BLACK SITES, and call ourselves Americans, we can arm Israel as it drives tanks over children in occupied Palestine and call ourselves Americans. We can send Smart Bombs and foolish Congressmen to Afghanistan and Pakistan while spending palettes of bribes to tribesmen across the deserts of central, and bravely wave our flags.

No news this week from Afghanistan or Iraq, nothing about the secret prisons, no news about Bradley Manning or the nameless unmentionables living in silence in Guantanamo or Bhagram or any of a dozen other unknown BLACK SITES. Where they are being kept like apples, except the apples aren't kept in stress positions. Let's not mentioned the expensive returning wounded vet, the draped coffins, the missing limbs and lost innocence. THAT'S NOT NEWS... we have a wounded photogenic Congress person to discuss, oh, and TODAY's BIG GAME. 

But let's not care for our mentally disturbed, because we can't

afford it. And by all means lets insure that the mentally unstable freely wandering the indifferent streets can still buy, rapid firing weapons. That's what makes America... free?