By Andy Kroll, Tomdispatch.com

Posted April 4, 2011

Mitch Daniels, Republican Governor of Indiana. Like many of his counterparts at the gubernatorial level, out to smash the remaining self-defense organizations of working Americans. A government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.

Crosspost: http://www.alternet.org/story/150456/

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

None of us on the ground could really say. We were too close to the action, too absorbed by what was directly in front of us.

could end up before the state Supreme Court. But that didn’t stop the state’s Legislative Reference Bureau from publishing Walker’s bill anyway, touching off another round of arguing about the tactics used to make the bill into law. As of this writing, its actual status remains unclear. If a judge does force a new vote, it’s unlikely the outcome will change, though even that’s not certain.

Either way, the meaning of Madison, and also of what similar governors are doing amid similar turmoil in Columbus, Indianapolis, and other Midwestern cities, remains to be seen. Without the ability to bargain collectively, unions may indeed be fatally weakened.  So, you could argue that the wave of attacks by conservative governors will gut public-sector unions in those states, if not wipe them out entirely.

On the other hand, those same efforts have mobilized startling numbers of ordinary citizens, young and old, educated and not, in a way none of us have seen since perhaps the 1930s. I know this for a fact. I was there in Madison and watched hundreds of thousands of protesters brave the numbing cold while jamming the streets to demand that Governor Walker back down. The events in Madison radicalized many young people who kept the flame of protest burning with their live-ins inside the Wisconsin State Capitol.

proposing to curb bargaining rights for all public-sector unions  — Walker’s exempts firefighters and cops — and even outlaw strikes by public workers.

locked and blocked the doors. They brought megaphones and signs saying “Protect Workers’ Rights” and “Daughters of Teachers Against SB 5.” And in response, like Scott Walker, John Kasich has shown not the slightest willingness to negotiate; earlier this month, he promised to sign the bill into law as soon as the legislature approves it.

passed its own law in March gutting collective bargaining rights for public-sector unions. The measure, nearly identical to Wisconsin’s, would have made it to the desk of Republican Governor Terry Branstad, who backed the bill, and into law had the state’s Democrat-controlled Senate not killed it on the spot.

voted to eliminate most bargaining rights for public school teachers, not to mention tossing out tenure and seniority. Two separate anti-union bills are wending their way through the Tennessee legislature — one in the state House that resembles Idaho’s, and another in the Senate that aims to outlaw collective bargaining for teachers altogether.

introduced a measure nearly identical to Wisconsin’s that would strip most public-sector unions of the right to collectively bargain on health-care and retirement benefits. By one estimate, more than 20 state legislatures are considering bills to limit collective bargaining for unions.

returned to Indianapolis on Monday to cheers from supporters, their protest having killed a bill that would have made Indiana a “right to work” state while undermining support for other anti-union measures.

New York Times reported, was significant savings for the state, but skyrocketing health insurance payments and a pay freeze for state workers. Management fired more experienced employees who would have had seniority under old union rules. And union membership among state workers dwindled by 90%, with one former labor activist claiming workers, fearing repercussions from their bosses, were afraid to pay union dues.

put it recently.

Indeed.  So, in one sense, the intensifying assault on unions across much of the nation may represent an ending for a labor movement long on the wane and at least 30 years under siege by various Republican administrations, national and state. It is visibly now in danger of becoming a force of little significance in much of the country.

said recently. “If democracy has a future, then so, too, must trade unionism.”

The Radicalization of Tom Bird

If the events in Wisconsin and elsewhere do signal an end, they may also mark a beginning. I saw it in the outpouring of protesters in Madison, the young and old who defied convention and expectation by showing up day after day, weekend after weekend, signs in hand, in snow or sun, to voice their disgust with Scott Walker and his agenda. For me, the inspiration in that crowd came in the form of a tall, string-bean-thin 21-year-old with a sheepish smile named Tom Bird.

Autonomous Solidarity Organization, an outfit now determined to continue the fight for workers’ rights and social justice.

No one can say for certain what Wisconsin, or Ohio, or Iowa will look like if organized labor is whacked at the knees. Will public-sector unions find a way to reinvent themselves, or will they slide into irrelevance like so many unions in the private sector?

Solidarnosc.“

That, of course, was the labor movement that, after a decade-long struggle, helped bring down the Soviet Union. Who knows what could happen here if Bird and his compatriots, awakened by the spark that was Madison, were to keep at it for 10 years or more? Who knows if Wisconsin wasn’t the beginning of the end, but the beginning of something new?

Andy Kroll, an associate editor at TomDispatch, is a reporter for Mother Jones magazine. He lives in Washington, D.C.  To listen to him discuss the geometry of delusion in the Ponzi Era on the latest TomCast audio interview, click here, or download it as a podcast by clicking here.

© 2011 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.

They’re Poor, Scared, Less Educated, and Left Behind: New Polling Data from Gallup on Conservatives and Red State America

By Chauncey DeVega | 4.4.11

IN COLLEGE one of my sociology professors observed that the real divides between red and blue state America weren’t necessarily ideological. He joked that you can look at the rise of Meth use and rates of church attendance on a state by state level and that will predict voting patterns just as well as party identification. Funny, it seems that he may have been onto something.

“sorting out” by party affiliation and ideology. The results of this are plain: the noxious tone of our political discourse; the naked appeals to eliminationism by the Right; and a sense that the other side isn’t just wrong, no, instead they are evil.

Using Gallup’s information, The Atlantic’s Richard Florida generated some great graphs which showed that the march of Conservatism across America is correlated with a number of variables including religiosity, poverty, education, and the income level of a given state. All in all the data is compelling. But it is not surprising. Moreover, there are also a few qualifiers to Gallup’s findings that America is becoming a more “conservative” that need to be highlighted.

1. Primarily, it has long been noted that Americans are not very ideological–here meaning a coherent schema of political values and beliefs that is internally consistent. While the American electorate is certainly passionate (the ear damaging shrill tones of the White populist Tea Party being people’s evidence number one), they do not necessarily hold beliefs that are stable across issue positions.

New Right Tea Party GOP are increasingly unpopular.

“Red State versus Blue State”, the real action is occurring on the county and regional level where the central cities are becoming more blue and the suburbs and rural parts of many states are becoming more red. Hence the notion of a “purple America.” Quite simply, Americans are living in communities where their values are reinforced. Thus the irony that in an increasingly globalized world, with instantaneous information available at one’s fingertips, a good number of people are seeking similarity and confirmation, as opposed to a richness of diversity in ideas, values, and beliefs.

However, the Atlantic’s analysis is spot on and frighteningly prescient in the following observation.

Conservatism, at least at the state level, appears to be growing stronger. Ironically, this trend is most pronounced in America’s least well-off, least educated, most blue collar, most economically hard-hit states. Conservatism, more and more, is the ideology of the economically left behind. The current economic crisis only appears to have deepened conservatism’s hold on America’s states…

Liberalism, which is stronger in richer, better-educated, more-diverse, and, especially, more prosperous places, is shrinking across the board and has fallen behind conservatism even in its biggest strongholds. This obviously poses big challenges for liberals, the Obama administration, and the Democratic Party moving forward.

But the much bigger, long-term danger is economic rather than political. This ideological state of affairs advantages the policy preferences of poorer, less innovative states over wealthier, more innovative, and productive ones. American politics is increasingly disconnected from its economic engine. And this deepening political divide has become perhaps the biggest bottleneck on the road to long-run prosperity.

This is the formula for a reactionary politics that does not serve the collective good. Here, the tail wags the dog and the most frightened, least resourced, and most backward voices rise out of the polity. Elites who have long been disconnected from the masses manipulate this anxiety into a politics that serves to gut the social safety net and chase down the chosen bugaboos of the Right–the “evil” unions, “liberals,” “intellectuals,” teachers, Muslims, immigrants, racial minorities, gays and lesbians, “overpaid” public employees, and/or anyone who is not a “real American.”

the authoritarianism infused White reactionary Tea Party AstroTurf politics of the New Right are the road to inverted totalitarianism–an order that rises out of a failure of democratic politics, a collapsed and exhausted economy, a triumphant corporatism, and the false promises of popular Conservatism.

Conservatives and the Right-wing echo chamber will be crowing about their success in light of Gallup’s findings. They will scream that Conservatism is on the march and that Gallup’s polling data is a vindication of their ideas. Those who live in the reality based world can easily foil those claims. But, the cries of victory will appeal to the true devotees nonetheless. Sadly, the foot soldiers of Conservatism do not understand that they are winning a Pyrrhic victory, one which indicates a deep and systemic rot in this country, as opposed to a triumph of ideas and values that can lead us through the decline of empire and towards a brave new future.

CBS 60 MINUTES SEGMENT 4.3.11
With select original comments

Mortgage paperwork mess: Next housing shock?

Scott Pelley reports how problems with mortgage documents are prompting lawsuits and could slow down the weak housing market

April 1, 2011

Who really owns your mortgage?
Scott Pelley explains a bizarre aftershock of the U.S. financial collapse: An epidemic of forged and missing mortgage documents.

So many in the country are desperate now that they have to meet in convention centers coast to coast.

In February in Miami, 12,000 people showed up to a similar event. The line went down the block and doubled back twice.

Video: The next housing shock
Extra: Eviction reprieve

But what the bank may not have known is that Szymoniak is a lawyer and fraud investigator with a specialty in forged documents. She has trained FBI agents.

She told Pelley she asked for copies of those documents.

Produced by Robert Anderson and Daniel Ruetenik

____________

C O M M E N T S

by Whalehead April 4, 2011 4:34 PM EDT
Reply to this comment
by keepyourslfincheck April 4, 2011 3:11 PM EDT
What these institutions have done, and are likely still doing, is committing forgery and fraud, plain and simple. For the sake of the country and the economy, we need a day of reckoning and people need to see that this kind of behavior is not only inexcusable, but criminal.

Until high ranking people in the guilty financial houses go to jail, our country has no hope of being restored.

This Is What Resistance Looks Like

They left us no choice.

Youths run past an overturned car in a street in Lyon, central France, Thursday Oct. 21, 2010. The oligarchy headed by Sarkozy cunningly waited them out. Europe's problems, as well as Japan's are similar to ours, having the same source, but differ in degree. The cynicism of the US ruling class is in a league of its own.

By Chris Hedges | From Truthdig | April 4, 2011

The phrase consent of the governed has been turned into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. Civil disobedience is the only tool we have left.

We will not halt the laying off of teachers and other public employees, the slashing of unemployment benefits, the closing of public libraries, the reduction of student loans, the foreclosures, the gutting of public education and early childhood programs or the dismantling of basic social services such as heating assistance for the elderly until we start to carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience against the financial institutions responsible for our debacle. The banks and Wall Street, which have erected the corporate state to serve their interests at our expense, caused the financial crisis.

website, and there’s more information on their Facebook page.

The 10 major banks, which control 60 percent of the economy, determine how our legislative bills are written, how our courts rule, how we frame our public debates on the airwaves, who is elected to office and how we are governed. The phrase consent of the governed has been turned by our two major political parties into a cruel joke. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. And the faster these banks and huge corporations are broken up and regulated, the sooner we will become free.

The big banks and corporations are parasites. They greedily devour the entrails of the nation in a quest for profit, thrusting us all into serfdom and polluting and poisoning the ecosystem that sustains the human species. They have gobbled up more than a trillion dollars from the Department of Treasury and the Federal Reserve and created tiny enclaves of wealth and privilege where corporate managers replicate the decadence of the Forbidden City and Versailles. Those outside the gates, however, struggle to find work and watch helplessly as food and commodity prices rocket upward. The owners of one out of seven houses are now behind on their mortgage payments. In 2010 there were 3.8 million foreclosure filings and bank repossessions topped 2.8 million, a 2 percent increase over 2009 and a 23 percent increase over 2008. This record looks set to be broken in 2011. And no one in the Congress, the Obama White House, the courts or the press, all beholden to corporate money, will step in to stop or denounce the assault on families. Our ruling elite, including Barack Obama, are courtiers, shameless hedonists of power, who kneel before Wall Street and daily sell us out. The top corporate plutocrats are pulling down $900,000 an hour while one in four children depends on food stamps to eat.

Author’s Bio:

One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists.”