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Anti-Worker, Anti-Family Laws Rear Up in Florida, Oregon, Colorado |
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With election season heating up, we’re starting to see the same anti-worker, anti-government schemes from the extremist fringe voters repeatedly have turned down.
The first showdown comes this Jan. 29, when Florida voters will decide on a phony property tax “reform” scheme. The proposed constitutional amendment will benefit Big Business, part-time residents and wealthy beachfront property owners rather than working families. It also will force major funding cuts in education, police and fire protection and other essential services.
Meanwhile, in Colorado and Oregon, anti-union fanatics are moving to silence union members’ voices in politics through “paycheck deception” measures they are trying to put on next year’s ballots.
In the Florida battle, the property tax scam was created by extreme conservative Republican lawmakers and blessed by Gov. Charlie Crist (R).
Tax experts estimate the average Florida home owner will save about $20 a month, but the lost revenue to local governments would be in the billions of dollars, including $12 billion in cuts for police and fire departments, local health care programs, road and infrastructure building, senior centers and after-school programs.
Even more alarming, the amendment could cost the Sunshine State schools $3 billion over the next five years—and that would be on top of the $500 million that the legislature cut from the state education budget this year. Keep in mind, Florida ranks 48th in the nation on school spending.
Opponents of the tax amendment, including the Florida AFL-CIO, the Florida Education Association, community, consumer and civil rights groups all say there is a need for comprehensive tax reform in the state, but working families should be the chief beneficiaries. Says the Tampa Tribune in an editorial:
Unlike a suppository, this medicine will swell up, not dissolve. Voters should not bend over and accept it. They should stand tall and demand reforms that help the taxpayers most in need of help.
On the paycheck deception front, the newspaper The Oregonian reports anti-union activist Bill Sizemore once again is trying to put a ”paycheck deception” measure on the November ballot. Oregon voters defeated similar initiatives in 1998 and 2000.
Paycheck deception initiatives take away the right of union members to use payroll deductions for political purposes, which is one of the best ways for union members to pool resources—bit by bit, through our unions. The funds are used to counter the big-money contributors who relentlessly write fat checks for corporate-backed candidates. In the 2004 election cycle, corporations outspent unions by a ratio of 23–to–1.
Oregon AFL-CIO Political Director Duke Shephard told the paper that Sizemore
…doesn’t like unions. He doesn’t like unions participating in politics, and if he can’t beat them, he wants to eliminate them.
The revenge factor is apparently behind another anti-union move in Colorado. Last month, Gov. Bill Ritter (D) signed an executive order granting state employees limited collective bargaining rights.
Last week, Jon Caldara head of a “free market” think tank and long-time Republican activist, filed a petition for a ballot measure that would ban unions from using payroll deductions to collect funds from state workers who choose to join a union.
Caldera has a long record of anti-worker actions. Check out these two posts on Colorado Media Matters for some background. Click here and here, where he debates political commentator David Sirota.
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There are any number of topics under which this comment can be posted, but I’ll post it here. (It could also be posted under the Global Summit on Organizing article)
Capitalists (and their apologists) want it both ways.
They want us to agree that they own the jobs, yet they demand (and enjoy) taxpayer-supported protections against loss.
The protections come in many forms. When United Fruit moved to Guatemala the junta there – with massive gifts of cash and weaponry courtesy of Uncle Sam – brutalized Guatemalan workers for protesting against inhumane working conditions. When the interests of oil companies doing business in Iraq are threatened, U.S. troops become cannon-fodder in order to preserve obscene profits for Exxon’s shareholders. When U.S. Steel decided to close plants here in our country and re-open them in South Korea, they had taxpayer supported insurance against loss.
Get a load of this:
* As a tool of U.S. foreign policy, OPIC (Overseas Private Investment Corporation) provides loans, loan guarantees, and insurance for U.S. companies investing overseas.
* OPIC has helped launch and finance private investment funds that purchase ownership in foreign companies.
* OPIC estimates that it (and ultimately U.S. taxpayers) has billions of dollars in exposure to losses on defaulted loans and insurance claims.
If businesses have sole purview over employment why are they insured by taxpayers? If they want our support they have to be required to let us sit in on decision-making!
If owners of the oil cartel believe they also “own” the jobs, let’s see to it that their kids are the only kids the military sends to Iraq to protect the jobs they claim they own. If corporations choose to move overseas, let them assume 100% of the risk.
OPIC and other traitorous schemes result in taxpayers being required to underwrite moving the jobs at which they work offshore!
Yet the companies (and apologists) demand “ownership” of the jobs.
They want it both ways, and Congress is all too willing to comply. Congressional compliance is purchased with cash donations to campaign coffers, and with other “perks” like free vacations, the use of corporate jets, insider information, and on and on.
Right-wing zanies who rail against “socialism” are ignorant to the fact that corporate socialism is part of America’s brand of capitalism. (The recipients of corporate socialism are, however, well aware of the huge “welfare” checks they receive from taxpayers. And they take great pains to keep that dirty little secret out of any national discussion. Naturally, media outlets they own – like the politicians they own – comply.
An excerpt from the poem “Michael” by Robert W. Service describes both the problem and the solution:
“It’s thim that’s up above, mother, it’s thim that sits an’ rules;
We’ve got to fight the wars they make, it’s us as are the fools. . . .”
“And what will be the end, Michael, and what’s the use, I say,
Of fightin’ if whoever wins it’s us that’s got to pay? . . .”
“Oh, it will be the end, mother, when lads like him and me,
That sweat to feed the ones above, decide that we’ll be free. . . .”
“And when will that day come, Michael, and when will fightin’ cease,
And simple folks may till their soil and live and love in peace? . . .”
“It’s coming soon and soon, mother, it’s nearer every day,
When only men who work and sweat will have a word to say;
When all who earn their honest bread in every land and soil
Will claim the Brotherhood of Man, the Comradeship of Toil;
When we, the Workers, all demand: `What are we fighting for?’ . . .
Then, then we’ll end that stupid crime, that devil’s madness — War.”
OK so having been raised in Oregon and working in Washington, I now dec;are that I’ll carpet bag in opposition to the Mr. Sleazemore. Same goes for Colorado and Florida. Gotta get the people of America to stop looking at the shinny things