AnonNews: David and Charles Koch have long attempted to usurp American Democracy

this is good...

Dear Citizens of the United States of America,

It has come to our attention that the brothers, David and Charles Koch--the billionaire owners of Koch Industries--have long attempted to usurp American Democracy. Their actions to undermine the legitimate political process in Wisconsin are the final straw. Starting today we fight back.

Koch Industries, and oligarchs like them, have most recently started to manipulate the political agenda in Wisconsin. Governor Walker's union-busting budget plan contains a clause that went nearly un-noticed. This clause would allow the sale of publicly owned utility plants in Wisconsin to private parties (specifically, Koch Industries) at any price, no matter how low, without a public bidding process. The Koch's have helped to fuel the unrest in Wisconsin and the drive behind the bill to eliminate the collective bargaining power of unions in a bid to gain a monopoly over the state's power supplies.

The Koch brothers have made a science of fabricating 'grassroots' organizations and advertising campaigns to support them in an attempt to sway voters based on their falsehoods. Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and Citizens United are just a few of these organizations. In a world where corporate money has become the lifeblood of political influence, the labor unions are one of the few ways citizens have to fight against corporate greed. Anonymous cannot ignore the plight of the citizen-workers of Wisconsin, or the opportunity to fight for the people in America's broken political system. For these reasons, we feel that the Koch brothers threaten the United States democratic system and, by extension, all freedom-loving individuals everywhere. As such, we have no choice but to spread the word of the Koch brothers' political manipulation, their single-minded intent and the insidious truth of their actions in Wisconsin, for all to witness.

it does my heart good to know there are folks like this operating out there... i'm energized to know there's an active resistance to the insidious, creeping takeover by our super-rich elites...

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"People here have acted lawfully and responsibly. There's no reason to consider arrests."

this is extremely cool...

The occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol by protesters fighting efforts to strip public workers of union bargaining rights carried on Sunday after police decided not to forcibly remove demonstrators and end a nearly two-week-long sit-in.

Roughly three hours after a deadline to vacate the building had passed and as police officers continued to look on quietly, protest coordinator Erika Wolf took to a microphone and announced: "There's really awesomely good news — that we're going to be able to stay here tonight."

A cheer went up from the several hundred protesters who had ignored a request from the state agency that oversees the Capitol to leave by 4 p.m. so that the normally immaculate building could get a thorough cleaning.

[...]

Wisconsin Capitol Police Chief Charles Tubbs said demonstrators who had occupied all three floors of the Capitol would have to relocate to the ground floor overnight. Anyone who left the building was barred from returning until Monday morning, although police did allow union officials to bring food into the building for the protesters.

No demonstrators would be arrested as long as they continue to obey the law, Tubbs said. By late evening, the air smelled of pizza and lemon-scented disinfectant as demonstrators quietly ate dinner and several janitors worked around them to clean the Capitol's marble floors.

"People here have acted lawfully and responsibly," Tubbs said. "There's no reason to consider arrests."

simple, quiet, peaceful determination... gives me goose-bumps...

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Odds & ends, Tuesday, 15 February - read 'em and weep...

yeah, i know, i talk a good story but i sometimes don't follow through... back in early january, i said i was going to "post links to things i've come across in my day's reading that i think might be worthwhile to share with others but don't quite grab me enough to bother putting up a dedicated post"... yeah, well... < cough, cough > i think i managed to put up two or three posts along those lines and then i sorta drifted away...

well, today, as i'm getting ready to depart for africa on friday, and given the increasing number of stories that are pointing to the imminent dissolution of the country i've known and lived in all my life, i am wondering just what i will find when i come back at the end of may... it's looking really grim, i gotta tell ya...

GOP Sending Women Back to the Back Alley

South Dakota Wants to Legalize Murdering Abortion Providers

Missouri GOP Wants to Repeal Child Labor Laws

Tuscon Minuteman Found Guilty of Murdering 9-Year-Old Mexican-American Girl

Wisconsin Governor Launches Attack on Public Sector Employees and Unions; Threatens to Deploy National Guard to Quell Labor Protests

President Obama to award George H.W. Bush the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Obama's Budget Betrayal

what THE FUCK, he asked, is going on here...? oh, never mind... we're all being hung out to dry... silly me...!

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State bankruptcy as a tactic to destroy public sector unions and eat their pension plans

it's a terrible thing to feel ashamed of your own country, but after watching private sector unions, pension plans and jobs being lobotomized by the corporate strategy of declaring bankruptcy, i don't have the stomach for this...

Path Is Sought for States to Escape Debt Burdens

Policy makers are working behind the scenes to come up with a way to let states declare bankruptcy and get out from under crushing debts, including the pensions they have promised to retired public workers.

Unlike cities, the states are barred from seeking protection in federal bankruptcy court. Any effort to change that status would have to clear high constitutional hurdles because the states are considered sovereign.

oh, yes, it's perfectly ok to toss trillions of dollars to the banks to bail them out after they lost big in the wall street casino, it's perfectly ok to throw trillions of dollars at a war in iraq waged under false pretenses, it's perfectly ok to keep throwing trillions of dollars at the war in afghanistan while watching billions of it fly out of kabul in the satchels of corrupt warlords to be deposited in their personal accounts in dubai, it's perfectly ok to allow homeowners to lose their homes in fraudulent foreclosure proceedings, it's perfectly ok to let u.s. employers continue to export jobs overseas while our real unemployment hovers above 15%, but is it ok to bail out our cities and states and the people who serve them, the people who are reaping the ass end of the financial rape and pillage of our economy...? hell, no...! let the bankers keep their stratospheric salaries and bonuses but when it comes to a public employee and his pension...?

i'm so fucking disgusted with my country...

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After lobotomizing private sector unions and reducing American workers to slaves, public employees are next on the chopping block

it's the perfect set-up and the nyt is the perfect forum for showcasing it...

now that workers in the private sector have been demoted to being the slaves of our super-rich elites by having any collective power they might have wielded effectively neutralized by corporations, politicians and the judiciary working in tandem (remember bankruptcy as a union-busting technique?), the next logical targets are public employees who have so far been spared the ravages of our capitalist overlords... the beauty part is that support for emasculating public employees and their unions will come from those same private sector workers who will unthinkingly buy the argument that public employees should be required to make the same "sacrifices" they are being "called on" to make...

what an enormous load of grade "a" shit...

State officials from both parties are wrestling with ways to curb the salaries and pensions of government employees, which typically make up a significant percentage of state budgets. On Wednesday, for example, New York’s new Democratic governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, is expected to call for a one-year salary freeze for state workers, a move that would save $200 million to $400 million and challenge labor’s traditional clout in Albany.

But in some cases — mostly in states with Republican governors and Republican statehouse majorities — officials are seeking more far-reaching, structural changes that would weaken the bargaining power and political influence of unions, including private sector ones.

For example, Republican lawmakers in Indiana, Maine, Missouri and seven other states plan to introduce legislation that would bar private sector unions from forcing workers they represent to pay dues or fees, reducing the flow of funds into union treasuries. In Ohio, the new Republican governor, following the precedent of many other states, wants to ban strikes by public school teachers.

Some new governors, most notably Scott Walker of Wisconsin, are even threatening to take away government workers’ right to form unions and bargain contracts.

“We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots,” Mr. Walker, a Republican, said in a speech. “The bottom line is that we are going to look at every legal means we have to try to put that balance more on the side of taxpayers."

that last paragraph is the vile core of the set-up... is there anyone in our pathetic journalistic elite who can call b.s. on this stinking example of oligarchic manipulation...?

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Welcome to the next pogrom - public employees

you can always tell when our super-rich elites have issued the latest instructions for talking points to their political and media puppets... it seems the catfood commission didn't do its job of trashing what's left of a social contract that's already shot full of holes... with unions in the private sector barely holding on in icu, next up are public employee unions... setting the stage is the quintessential stage-setter, george will, who never fails to shill for the super-rich elite agenda...

George Will joined a chorus of conservatives Sunday blaming unions for New York City's lackluster performance in the wake of a recent snow storm.

"In New York City, the issue is tangled up with the question -- and it's an open question -- whether the public employees union, to make a job action point, sabotaged street collection," Will told ABC's Jake Tapper.

"I believe -- and this is entirely tangled up with the state bankruptcy -- that the issue of public employees in their dominance of blue states, is going to be the biggest issue in this country for the next several years," he added.

but why don't we take a look behind the scenes...

from truthout...

The stage is set and the main actors in Congress and in the corporate establishment are ready to perform after rehearsing behind closed doors for the coming assault on organized labor's most powerful sector: public workers.

The final preparations were smoothed out in Obama's tax "compromise" with the Republicans, which gave details of the drama's first act. The tax plan purposely did not include a critical element for state funding, called the Build America Bonds program (BAB), which allows recession-sunk states to easily borrow money from the federal government. In the face of enormous deficits, the states would be left to drown. Reuters blogger James Pethokoukis explains:

Congressional Republicans [and Democrats] appear to be quietly but methodically executing a plan that would a) avoid a federal bailout of spendthrift states and b) cripple public employee unions by pushing cash-strapped states such as California and Illinois to declare bankruptcy. This may be the biggest political battle in Washington, my Capitol Hill sources tell me, of 2011.

Public employee unions would be crippled by bankruptcy because union contracts are notoriously easy to shred in the court system, where "nonpartisan" judges always decide against unions.

To further ensure that states will become bankrupt, yet another law was recently proposed that, if approved, will keep money out of states' pockets by making it harder for states to sell public bonds. This law demands that states use overly strict accounting methods when reporting their debts to public workers' retirement accounts, so that the state's "credit worthiness" will shrivel. (Reagan used the same trick to destroy the pensions offered for private-sector workers.)

Two birds are killed with one stone: public employees will find their pensions under further attack, while states will be refused credit because of the new accounting methods. The New York Times explains:

The bill gives local governments a choice: they can report [pension obligations] the way the [Congressional] members want them to report, or they can give up the ability to issue tax-exempt bonds. That is, of course, no choice at all.

and:

In the end, I suspect ways will be found to abrogate some pension promises. But even if that does not happen, the trend away from defined-benefit pensions is likely to affect most younger public employees, as it already has their counterparts in the private sector. The retirement safety net will thus become a little more frayed.

In summary, pensions for state workers are on the cutting board, to be replaced by the 401(k) scam, while state bankruptcy will "abrogate" [abolish] union contracts. But as it stands now, states cannot legally declare bankruptcy. This minor obstacle is being handled quickly for showtime, as Pethokoukis explains:

Some Republicans hope the shock of the newly revealed [state] debt totals will grease the way towards explicitly permitting states to declare bankruptcy. Indeed, legislation amending federal bankruptcy law is currently being prepared by congressional Republicans.

The current Congress and President Obama are intentionally creating a nationwide anti-union atmosphere. The Democrats' silence over the above issues is, in fact, a signal of approval. In the same way that Obama announced a federal pay freeze for federal workers, federal actions towards labor quickly set the tone for how states deal with labor. Right-wing forces are consequently given the green light, and Democratic and Republican state representatives will do their best to implement their own anti-labor laws to ingratiate themselves to the feds in the hopes of promotion. The feds act as a music conductor and the states respond as an orchestra.

you can only imagine how much our greedy elites covet public employee pension plans... they drool over them in the same way they drool over social security and they're not going to quit until they've vacuumed up every last cent from the bottom of the pockets of the last working-class citizen left standing...

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