1. Here's one reason why the whole debate over public employee unions and collective bargaining rights matters: The Rude Pundit's got friends in low places. Specifically, the Rude Pundit's got several friends in low-level positions in local and state governments in the South, in right-to-work states (which means, in case you don't know, "you can work as long as you don't join a union or until you look at your boss funny"). They work in jobs that have nothing to do with politics other than the fact that they are government workers. They are pencil pushers, researcher poins, and office monkeys. Some of them have been in their jobs for a couple of decades.
Yet every four years, when elections come around and the official who runs whatever department these friends are in is running for a new term, they sweat bullets. Because should their elected boss lose, a new boss can come in and fire anyone he or she wants without cause and without any recourse for someone who has done a job well for 10 or 20 years. Or, in other words, the newly-elected official can fire an employee with heavy seniority in order to give his/her nephew a job, and there is not a goddamned thing the employee can do about it.
You know where this doesn't occur? In states where the public employees have union contracts that offer them protections gained through collective bargaining.
Now, in a brief moment of reflection, ask yourself, dear, sick-minded conservatives who don't understand anything about labor/management relations: what is going to make public employees - your courthouse workers, your state tax office staff, your firefighters - more political in their jobs? To feel free to do the job they were hired to do? Or to feel as if they need to please the agenda of someone who can drop them at a whim? (And if your answer is, "Well, why should public employees be special? I can be fired from my job at Almagamated Douchebags if I don't follow my boss's political agenda no matter how good I am," then you should probably unionize yourself.)
By the way, these friends get shitty salaries, in addition to the quadrennial diarrhea. You know why they stay at the jobs? The benefits make up for it. But, hey, let's take that away, too.
2. It's time to fuck shit up in Wisconsin, in Michigan, in fact, all over the United States. In England, public employees are
planning a June general strike over a coming plan to jack up the retirement age by 6 years and to cut benefits while raising the amount of the workers' contribution. The trade unions expect over a million workers to join in.
In Wisconsin last night, the fuckbag Republicans in the state Senate came up with a
possibly illegal way to bypass a vote that required the on-the-run Democrats to be present, and they stripped away almost all the collective bargaining rights of state workers. How? By removing the collective bargaining part of the "budget repair" bill and voting on it separately, thus saying that it wasn't a fiscal matter needing a quorum. Or, in other words, the motherfuckers fucked the workers' mothers. Fucked 'em hard.
In Michigan, the legislature is
about to pass a bill that will allow state-appointed emergency financial managers to take over cash-strapped cities and, if necessary, "cancel employee contracts, fire administrators or declare bankruptcy." Union contract with a teacher? Canceled by the governor's appointee. Legally-elected mayor and city council? Tossed out on the word of one person. That's a golden ticket of motherfuckery, man.
Imagine for one second what would have happened if Democratic-majorities in state legislatures passed bills that allowed a governor to disband local governments. Imagine the imbecilic grunts of "fascism" and "socialism" and "zoroastrianism" or whatever the hell teabaggers are shouting about. As for what happened in Wisconsin, all you have to do is look at what happened when Democrats in the U.S. Senate used budget reconciliation to pass health care reform legislation, a maneuver that Republicans had used numerous times in recent years. Fox "news" practically sold pitchforks and torches. The fucking capital in Madison would have been burned to the ground.
In Wisconsin, it's getting
crazy, with the statehouse literally being
stormed by a mob of protesters last night and with arrests of protesters going on today. Governor Walker (
dubbed a "cross-eyed Kock-sucker" by a gleefully untethered Keith Olbermann) will sign his political death warrant when he approves the bill, as he'll be recalled next year without a doubt. And this weekend in Madison, it's gonna be flat-out nuts.
As it fucking well should be. With so many Republicans in DC talking about a government shutdown as if it's some kind of moral stand against spending, we, the people (we're still here, you know), ought to be talking recalls against Republicans around the country, if not a general strike. The strike's already in the mix for strategies in Wisconsin, except that the bill itself makes it possible for the governor to
declare a state of emergency and fire any state worker (see #1).
Republicans have
declared war on the unions, backed by so much money that you could bathe in it. Let's come up with a war plan to fight back. Let's have at least a fraction of the balls that the original union organizers had back in the day or that British workers have today.
3. Where the fuck is the President? Where the fuck is the President? Where the fuck is the President?
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