Firefighters in Wisconsin as part of their protests against the government passing a bill to take away workers rights are withdrawing their money from banks that refuse to support the right of collective bargaining and other worker's rights.
"Wisconsin Firefighters Spark "Move Your Money" Moment " by: Mary Bottari | PR Watch | March 12, 2011
On the day that the bill passed the Wisconsin Assembly effectively ending 50 years of collective bargaining in Wisconsin and eviscerating the ability of public unions to raise money through dues, a new front opened in the battle for the future of Wisconsin families.
Bagpipes blaring, hundreds of firefighters walked across the street from the Wisconsin Capitol building, stood outside the Marshall and Ilsley Bank (M&I Bank) and played a few tunes -- loudly. Later, a group of firefighters and consumers stopped back in at the bank to make a few transactions. One by one they closed their accounts and withdrew their life savings, totaling approximately $190,000. After the last customer left, the bank quickly closed its doors, just in case the spontaneous "Move Your Money" moment caught fire.
...Joe Conway, President Madison Fire Fighters Local 311, explained to CMD that the action was totally spontaneous, but that "economic transparency" was going to be a big theme in the fight ahead. "Groups will be sending letters to Walker's major donors giving them the opportunity to support the teachers, firefighters and police in their community." Conway is well aware that new polling shows that 74% of Wisconsin families support collective bargaining rights for public workers.
Two of these letters are already in the mail to M&I Bank and Kwik Trip. "The undersigned groups would like your company to publicly oppose Governor Walker’s efforts to virtually eliminate collective bargaining for public employees in Wisconsin. In the event that you cannot support this effort to save collective bargaining, please be advised that the undersigned will publicly and formally boycott the goods and services provided by your company," the letter says. "However, if you join us, we will do everything in our power to publicly celebrate your partnership in the fight to preserve the right of public employees to be heard at the bargaining table."
The letters are signed by the heads of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin, the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 311, Madison Teachers Inc., Dane County Deputy Sheriffs Association and the Madison Professional Police Officers Association.
and from Ed Schultz on the Wisconsin legislature's anti-democracy vote
Ed Schultz: Actions of Wisconsin GOP "Disgusting"
To be updated and edited later!!!
TODAY's MENU:
*Rachel Maddow : The Republican 's Assault on Democracy and the rights of average American citizens
*Bradley Manning Wants to know why he is being held and abused and tortured -
and more silence from Obama as he insists on making Bradley Manning an example to all those who believe in the dignity of man
and all those who believe that citizens have a right to information so they can make an informed decision about whether or not the actions of its government are to be supported or condemned.
In Wisconsin and Ohio and other states the Republicans want to take away the right to collective bargaining.
They want to lessen the rights of workers and average Americans while increasing the rights of corporations and the wealthy elite .
Meanwhile these Republicans and their wealthy supporters argue that the taxes of the rich should not be raised but in fact reduced or simply eliminated.
Then in order to get broader support they will claim that Average Americans should also have their taxes lowered or eliminated.
But this is part of their shell game as it were for if they can kill the right to collective bargaining for government employed workers then they can go after workers in the private sector.
They believe that businesses should be able to pay their workers whatever they wish and employees have no right to complain or make demands on those who run these businesses.
But they can't say this outright because they need to sell this to the American people.
So as they have done in Wisconsin the Republicans first go after those employed in one way or another by state or federal government .
They believe average Americans are resentful of those who appear to have cushy well paid jobs.
But the workers they are going after include those who are essential to a basic civilized society which includes Firefighters, paramedics, nurses , school teachers, school bus drivers , social workers, prison guards, the police or highway patrol and so on.
These radical conservatives exaggerate the wages of these workers and when the real numbers come out many people realize that these workers are not much better paid than non government workers
These uberconservative free-market place charlatans would private police forces and private fire department who after you have called 911 to get help the first thing the police officer or firefighter asks is will that be cash or credit card. So if your house is on fire and you can't pay then your house burns down or if someone is beating you up the police can not interfere unless someone pays them up from.
This is how corrupt third world countries do business with their own citizens. It may in many cases be referred to as bribes but what's the difference.
I can only surmise that the corporations and other Free-Marketers see a market which they in many instance are shut out of.
The US has to a greater or lesser extent depending on the state privatized medicine , hospitals, schools, fire-departments , penitentiaries .
These Conservatives such as Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck or Newt Gingrich or Governor Scott Walker and so on keep telling their viewers and followers that medical care, education, basic essential services, food , water, shelter are not a right and each person should they contend be responsible for taking care of themselves and their families.
But this ignores the reality of most Americans who faced with a catastrophic illness or other catastrophe or emergency do not have the wherewith all to pay for such services.
But the essence of a government is to protect its citizens and to insure that all are treated fairly .
But the well off do not like the idea that even poorest American citizen should get comparable health care as the well-off.
They prefer the poor to just crawl back under their bridges and die out of sight.
They are working on legislation to make it more difficult for American citizens to vote especially those who usually vote Democrat-first time voters, students. minorities , the poor, immigrants and so on.
Meanwhile they are attacking the rights of women gay rights , rights of minorities and immigrants
Now in Pennsylania the state governmen allows the head of the business department can trash any laws or regulations which may hamper Big Businesses in any way. So environmental issues, health issues , even fire regulations, worker safety issues rights of employees , rights of minorities any law such as minimum wage laws or laws dealing with paid holidays, overtime , the rights of collective bargaining, compensation for work related injuries or even filing grievances can all be over-ruled in the name of protecting companies, businesses or corporations
So for instance if a company has a policy of not hiring non-whites or women or gays or Mormons or self-proclaimed democrats or liberals or socialists that according to Republicans is none of the governments business.
If a company wants to ignore environmental regulations , labor laws or health and safety standards and minimum wage laws that is alo not the business of state or federal governments.
So corporations once again benefit in some ways by being deemed "Persons" according to the Supreme Court of the United State so they can pour money into political campaigns they can claim the same rights as any American citizen but when it comes to responsibility and accountability their Mafia trained legal staff will find a thousand loopholes and other means to escape from responsibility or accountability for their illegal or unethical or immoral actions.
Wisconsin's Nuclear Option unethical and illegal -
MSNBCs Rachel Maddow: States like Michigan throttled by GOPs Shock Doctrine
via firedoglake.com
Rachel Maddow: Michigan's Dystopian (Corporate Republican) Future And Naomi Klein's Shock
In the inner sanctum of the palace of the Empire rumors, paranoia, meglomania , secret and the not so secret agendas have a tendency to obscure and distort reality.to save the inner court The Palace Guards do their best as gate keepers to prevent the truth from passing into the Palace.
Bradley Manning being punished ostensibly for leaking documents to Wikileaks but he is also being punished for trying to report abuse of detainees by US soldiers in Iraq.
So the message to all members of the US armed forces is not to rock the boat and to keep America's war crimes a secret.
Once again we see that this notion of reporting wrongdoing in the military is just window dressing.
It is merely a ruse to appease the public.
Bradley Manning like others before him made the mistake of believing that the military and the US government actually mean what they say.
These are just things they feel required to say to the public at large.
Bradley Manning Now “Catatonic”; Obama ENOUGH! By Ralph Lopez
March 09, 2011 “War Is A Crime” — As Obama’s crime of the destruction of Bradley Manning continues to unfold before our very eyes, Manning friend David House now tells us that over 8 months in isolation with movement and sleep restrictions placed on him have been having their intended effect. House has told MSNBC that by the end of January Manning appeared “catatonic” and that he had “severe problems communicating,” with it having taken House nearly 45 minutes on a recent visit to engage in any meaningful way (video below.) House said Manning’s demeanor was as “if he had just woken up and didn’t know what was going on around him.” Manning was “utterly exhausted physically and mentally…it was difficult to have any kind of social engagement.”
Also, a full month after Congressman Dennis Kucinich formally requested a visit, the Army has stalled on the request.
All for the crime of reporting war crimes and criminal behavior even among the highest-ranking military officials in Iraq.
In 2005, General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: “It is absolutely the responsibility of every U.S. service member [in Iraq], if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to try to stop it.”
Chase Mader writes in HuffPo that soon after deployment to Iraq, Manning:
“soon found himself helping the Iraqi authorities detain civilians for distributing “anti-Iraqi literature” — which turned out to be an investigative report into financial corruption in their own government entitled “Where does the money go?” The penalty for this “crime” in Iraq was not a slap on the wrist. Imprisonment and torture, as well as systematic abuse of prisoners, are widespread in the new Iraq. From the military’s own Sigacts (Significant Actions) reports, we have a multitude of credible accounts of Iraqi police and soldiers shooting prisoners, beating them to death, pulling out fingernails or teeth, cutting off fingers, burning with acid, torturing with electric shocks or the use of suffocation, and various kinds of sexual abuse including sodomization with gun barrels and forcing prisoners to perform sexual acts on guards and each other…
“Like any good soldier, Manning immediately took these concerns up the chain of command. And how did his superiors respond? His commanding officer told him to “shut up” and get back to rounding up more prisoners for the Iraqi Federal Police to treat however they cared to…”
Manning also found a video and an official report on American air strikes on the village of Granai in Afghanistan’s Farah Province (also known as “the Granai massacre”). According to the Afghan government, 140 civilians, including women and a large number of children, died in those strikes.
War crimes? What war crimes? This is the point of view of the Pentagon as it destroys Bradley Manning.
Julian Assange and Thomas Paine Swediah Government Conspiring With Obam & Karl Rove to Get Assange
"How the So-Called Guardians of Free Speech Are Silencing the Messenger" by John Pilger at The Guardian UK via Truthout 12 March 2011
As the United States and Britain look for an excuse to invade another oil-rich Arab country, the hypocrisy is familiar. Colonel Gaddafi is "delusional" and "blood-drenched" while the authors of an invasion that killed a million Iraqis, who have kidnapped and tortured in our name, are entirely sane, never blood-drenched and once again the arbiters of "stability."
But something has changed. Reality is no longer what the powerful say it is. Of all the spectacular revolts across the world, the most exciting is the insurrection of knowledge sparked by WikiLeaks. This is not a new idea. In 1792, the revolutionary Tom Paine warned his readers in England that their government believed that "people must be hoodwinked and held in superstitious ignorance by some bugbear or other." Paine's "The Rights of Man" was considered such a threat to elite control that a secret grand jury was ordered to charge him with "a dangerous and treasonable conspiracy." Wisely, he sought refuge in France.
The ordeal and courage of Paine is cited by the Sydney Peace Foundation in its award of Australia's human rights gold medal to Julian Assange. Like Paine, Assange is a maverick who serves no system and is threatened by a secret grand jury, a malicious device long abandoned in England, but not in the United States. If extradited to the US, he is likely to disappear into the Kafkaesque world that produced the Guantanamo Bay nightmare and now accuses Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks' alleged whistleblower, of a capital crime.
Should Assange's current British appeal fail against his extradition to Sweden, he will probably, once charged, be denied bail and held incommunicado until his trial in secret. The case against him has already been dismissed by a senior prosecutor in Stockholm and given new life only when a right-wing politician, Claes Borgstrom, intervened and made public statements about Assange's "guilt." Borgstrom, a lawyer, now represents the two women involved. His law partner is Thomas Bodstrom, who, as Sweden's minister for justice in 2001, was implicated in the handover of two innocent Egyptian refugees to a CIA kidnap squad at Stockholm airport. Sweden later awarded them damages for their torture.
These facts were documented in an Australian parliamentary briefing in Canberra on 2 March. Outlining an epic miscarriage of justice threatening Assange, the enquiry heard expert evidence that, under international standards of justice, the behavior of certain officials in Sweden would be considered "highly improper and reprehensible [and] preclude a fair trial." A former senior Australian diplomat, Tony Kevin, described the close ties between the Swedish Prime Minister Frederic Reinfeldt and the Republican right in the US. "Reinfeldt and [George W] Bush are friends," he said. Reinfeldt has attacked Assange publicly and hired Karl Rove, the former Bush crony, to advise him. The implications for Assange's extradition to the US from Sweden are dire.
The Australian enquiry was ignored in the UK, where black farce is currently preferred. On 3 March, The Guardian UK announced that Stephen Spielberg's Dream Works was to make "an investigative thriller in the mould of All the President's Men" out of the book "WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy." I asked David Leigh, who wrote the book with Luke Harding, how much Spielberg had paid The Guardian UK for the screen rights and what he expected to make personally. "No idea," was the puzzling reply of The Guardian UK's "investigations editor." The Guardian UK paid WikiLeaks nothing for its treasure trove of leaks. Assange and WikiLeaks - not Leigh or Harding - are responsible for what The Guardian UK's editor, Alan Rusbridger, calls "one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years."
The Guardian UK has made clear it has no further use for Assange. He is a loose cannon who does not fit Guardian-world, who proved a tough, unclubbable negotiator. And brave. In The Guardian UK's self-regarding book, Assange's extraordinary bravery is excised. He becomes a figure of petty bemusement, an "unusual Australian" with a "frizzy-haired" mother, gratuitously abused as "callous" and a "damaged personality" that was "on the autistic spectrum." How will Spielberg deal with this childish character assassination?
On the BBC's "Panorama," Leigh indulged hearsay about Assange not caring about the lives of those named in the leaks. As for the claim that Assange had complained of a "Jewish conspiracy," which follows a torrent of Internet nonsense that he is an evil agent of Mossad, Assange rejected this as "completely false, in spirit and word."
It is difficult to describe, let alone imagine, the sense of isolation and state of siege of Assange, who, in one form or another, is paying for tearing aside the façade of rapacious power. The canker here is not the far right, but the paper-thin liberalism of those who guard the limits of free speech. The New York Times has distinguished itself by spinning and censoring the WikiLeaks material. "We are taking all [the] cables to the administration," said Bill Keller, the editor, "They've convinced us that redacting certain information would be wise." In an article by Keller, Assange is personally abused. At the Columbia School of Journalism on 3 February, Keller said, in effect, that the public could not be trusted with the release of further cables. This might cause a "cacophony." The gatekeeper has spoken.
The heroic Manning is kept naked under lights and cameras 24 hours a day. Greg Barns, director of the Australian Lawyers Alliance, says the fears that Assange will "end up being tortured in a high security American prison" are justified. Who will share responsibility for such a crime?
and so it goes,
GORD.
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