By Cliff Montgomery – Feb. 20th, 2011
Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin plans to strip public workers of their Natural Right to assemble–specifically, their right to collectively ask for anything but the slightest pay hikes.
This is no surprise. Before becoming governor, Walker had planned to decertify Wisconsin’s employee unions. He discovered the governor cannot make up the law to suit his whims–hence the pending legislation.
Governor Walker is fond of pretending he is only trying to balance an out-of-control state budget. And the corporate media all too often is more than happy to help him sell the charade.
Let’s make this clear. America’s economy is not hurting because a handful of working Americans still make enough money to afford their mortgage payments, food and gasoline. We’re suffering through the greatest economic meltdown since the Great Depression because of Casino Capitalism on Wall Street and a 30-year-long decline in the number of decent-paying jobs on Main Street.
That knockout combination has shattered our private–and public–finances. But Gov. Walker and his deluded supporters scream that more of this sickness is the cure for our ills.
Wall Street is again riding high. Banks again appear to be posting record profits. And yet the U.S. economy remains crippled, for one reason: Main Street consumers don’t make enough money at their jobs to buy products anymore.
Now Walker and his friends tell us America will be better off when it rids itself of the few actual consumers it has left…
They are like the quack doctors of a bygone age, who would come upon a person dying of blood loss and declare that the patient should be bled of what little blood he had left, in an effort to ‘get rid of the bad blood’.
In any case, similar laws currently are being considered in Indiana and Ohio. A Missouri Republican Senator, Jane Cunningham, has introduced a related bill which would strip that state’s law of all limits on child labor.
We thus offer a few things to consider:
- Governor Scott Walker is little more than the paid errand boy of his owners, the Koch Brothers.
Koch Industries is headed by David and Charles Koch. The Center For Responsive Politics (CRP), which according to its mission statement is “the nation’s premier research group tracking money in U.S. politics and its effect on elections and public policy,” has offered a number of very interesting facts on the Koch Brothers’ antics:
“The second-largest private company in the United States… Koch Industries is also a conglomerate, whose subsidiary businesses operate in some of the world’s most profitable markets,” states CRP.
Thus “it’s no surprise that the company has spent millions of dollars lobbying the federal government this past decade on a range of issues,” continues the Center, “from defense appropriations to financial regulatory reform.”
“Koch’s biggest industry, however, is petroleum refining…and the bulk of their lobbying is related to energy issues.
“The company’s lobbying totals sky-rocketed in the two years [after] Democrats swept to power in 2008,” declares CRP. Perhaps Koch Industries’ sudden spike in civic interest was due to the fact that the relatively liberal Democrats brought “with them a packed reform agenda” that included legislation which would have established certain limits on carbon emissions.
For instance, “the Kochs’ oil refineries and chemical plants stand to pay millions to reduce air pollution under currently proposed EPA regulations,” according to a recent article from The Los Angeles Times.
“Koch is also one of the Republican Party’s most reliable donors,” adds CRP.
“In every election cycle since 2000,” the Center continues, “people and political action committees associated with the company have donated at least 83 percent of their cash to Republican candidates and committees.”
Indeed, “during the 2010 election cycle, people and political action committees associated with Koch Industries heavily favored Republican candidates,” states a related entry from the CRP’s daily blog. According to the blog, entities associated with Koch Industries donated “more than $1.4 million to Republicans, or about 92 percent of all [Koch-related] contributions.
“Koch-founded [astroturf organization] Americans for Prosperity (for a few) also spent millions of dollars on various races across the country, with the ads primarily supporting Republicans or opposing Democrats.” Of course, the Wisconsin governor was one of those politicians bought by the Koch Brothers.
- Walker’s actions openly reject what has been the standard legal relationship between employers and working people since the worst days of the Great Depression.
In 1935, The Wagner Act–perhaps better known as the National Labor Relations Act–created a U.S. labor policy which recognized the rights of private-sector workers to organize and to engage in collective bargaining.
Some of the Wagner Act’s stated reasons for the law are telling:
“The inequality of bargaining power [for] employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract…substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners in industry and by preventing the stabilization of competitive wage rates and working conditions within and between industries.”
Over time, these rights were no longer seen as only pertaining to private-sector workers. In 1962, an executive order signed by President Kennedy recognized the right of public-employee unions to collectively bargain with federal agencies for better wages, benefits and working conditions.
