Politics
Why Not You?
(From Union Labor News, December 2017 You can follow Union Labor News on Facebook.)
It’s time for workers to run for office. Someone like you would be best.
Why? Because the culture wars are soon going to wrap up and we are going to need some common sense candidates with a track record of good judgment, friendliness, hard work, and community participation.
The Republican candidate for governor of Virginia embraced the Trump cultural agenda of division, distrust and dysfunction and was thoroughly trounced in a state that regularly elects Republicans. One of his ...
AMERICA’S NEW GREATNESS
It’s been a crushing year. One after another, hard-won social advancements have been blocked or dismantled in the rush to “Make American Great Again.” But what does that even mean?
Exactly when was America greater? When everyone used outdoor toilets? When women couldn’t work outside the home? When skin color decided who could marry whom, or vote, or eat at a lunch counter?
Is ‘great again’ a worthy goal, the best we should expect? Is the conservative mantra right, that free enterprise and individual liberty “under limited government” was and ...
CITIZEN ACTION: REVIEWING THE YEAR OF 2017
REVIEWING THE YEAR OF 2017
People are flocking to Citizen Action of Wisconsin groups across the state because they have a proven strategy for making Wisconsin a progressive state again.
Here is what has been accomplished in 2017.
Cutting-Edge Local Organizing Statewide: Citizen Action’s new Organizing Cooperatives (Co-ops) are rapidly spreading across Wisconsin in the places that we need to shift the balance of power. We have built 6 Organizing Co-ops across Wisconsin which give us a large deeply engaged membership and a truly state-wide reach. This includes the ...
SPEED AND ACCURACY LEAVE THE PUBLIC OUT IN THE COLD
In the past eleven years, I wrote 64 times about the problems of speed and secrecy in the legislative process. However, I never saw a calendar as broad and deep in controversy as the most recent one before the State Senate.
For weeks, we heard that the Senate would vote a hodge-podge of highly controversial bills. “Horrid,” one staffer called the expected Senate Calendar. None of us, including the public, knew what bills would come up for a vote.
The cloak of secrecy raised a bit on Friday when we received the tentative list of bills. But even the day before the ...
THE ANSWER IS BLOWING IN THE WIND
To the man-child who would be king the rebuke and contempt is coming fast, hard and clear when on November 7, 2017 elections loudly stated that the people of the country finally began to answer, "Hell NO, we won't take it any more". No to the Alt Right puppeteers, to those who wish to invalidate our Constitution and Bill of Rights and the words of the Declaration of Independence. For, as his main guide to the Dark Side, Steve Bannon stated, "I want to dismantle our administrative government", because he and those he represents feel our Constitutional democratic ...
TEN HEALTHY SIGNS THAT DEMOCRACY WILL PREVAIL OVER TRUMP
The Women’s Marches
The Women’s March on Washington and in other cities on January 21 constituted a powerful shot across Trump’s bow.
The Airport Protests
The protests that erupted on January 28 at JFK, O’Hare, and other airports to defend refugees showed that Trump can’t get away with scapegoating.
The Judges’ Orders
One federal judge after another has ruled against Trump’s Muslim bans.
The Marches for Science and the Earth
Trump has galvanized scientists and environmentalists: “There is No Planet B.”
The Press Gets a Spine
A...
TREASON
Suppose a small group of extremely wealthy people sought to systematically destroy the U.S. government by:
Finding and bankrolling new candidates pledged to shrinking and dismembering it;
Intimidating or bribing many current senators and representatives to block all proposed legislation, prevent the appointment of presidential nominees, eliminate funds to implement and enforce laws, and threaten to default on the nation’s debt;
Taking over state governments in order to redistrict, gerrymander, require voter IDs, purge voter rolls, and otherwise suppress the ...
First Annual Wausau Grassroots Festival
The first Wausau Grassroots Festival will be held on October 7, 2017 at the Wausau Labor Temple. Click on the image below to download the PDF.
FOXCONN DEAL MUST RESPECT WORKER FREEDOM
(Phil Neuenfeldt is president of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO. You can read more labor news at www.facebook.com/UnionLaborNews.
You find more labor news at www.scfl.org
Kevin Gundlach is president of the South Central Federation of Labor. The SCFL is an umbrella organization, consisting of 100 private and public sector unions representing thousands of workers in south central and south west Wisconsin.)
As Wisconsin shells out $3 billion to subsidize the private corporation of Foxconn, legislators will hand over an incentive package that is both the largest in state ...
WHO ELECTED THIS WHITE MAN?
Who elected this white man to the office of the POTUS?
In her much discussed book The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker, political scientist Katherine Cramer locates voters' discontent in the disconnect between rural and urban worlds.
She says very little about racial resentment, focusing instead on rural citizens' perceived lack of power and resources (those goodies flow to the larger cities of Madison and Milwaukee) and their perceived lack of respect from the elites in power.
No doubt her research has some ...
