Greetings from Walkerville
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Phil Neuenfeldt, Wisconsin State AFL-CIO president, sends an update on the actions around Wisconsin’s Walkerville.
Day six of the Walkerville tent city protest has seen overwhelming support from Wisconsin workers, students and community members. Over the course of the week, thousands of Wisconsinites have gathered on the cement blocks lining the Capitol Square in order to call attention to Gov. Walker and his legislative allies’ destructive budget proposals—proposals which will cripple Wisconsin’s schools, health care system and communities.
Many have said that they are surrounding the Capitol to bear witness to their elected officials’ decisions and to let their Representatives know that the people of Wisconsin are preparing to take back their government back this summer.
“Walkerville is a way to focus the spotlight on Gov. Walker and Sen. Alberta Darling’s budget that will devastate higher education, public education and Wisconsin as we know it,” explained Michael Rosen, President of AFT Local 212, and professor at the Milwaukee Area Technical College. Rosen traveled to Walkerville on Wednesday to spend the night.
Unions Say No to Tea Time in Alaska Senate Race
Alaskan voters couldn’t be facing two more different candidates for the U.S. Senate—Scott McAdams, endorsed by the 49th state’s working family unions, and Joe Miller, backed by the Tea Party and endorsed by Sarah Palin.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says McAdams is a union person.
He understands what union workers go through, he understands what workers go through, period. And I think that he’d be a great voice and a great asset to workers, in Washington, D.C.
Thanks to our friends at The Mudflats for providing this video.
Miller, on the other hand, reports TPM’s Christina Bellatoni:
wants to eliminate the Department of Education, believes the government shouldn’t pay for unemployment insurance and says of climate change on his campaign site that it “may not even exist.”
Trumka Takes It to Palin in Her Back Yard
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Last night, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said what many Americans believe but won’t say: Sarah Palin’s rhetoric is poisonous, dangerous and strikes of McCarthyism.
In a much publicized speech to the Alaska State AFL-CIO, Trumka said:
In this charged political environment, her kind of talk gets dangerous. “Don’t retreat…reload” may seem clever, the kind of bull you hear all the time, but put it in context. She’s using crosshairs to illustrate targeted legislators. She’s on the wrong side of the line there. She’s getting close to calling for violence. And some of her fans take that stuff seriously. We’ve got legislators in America who have been living with death threats since the health care votes.
As usual, Palin tried to dodge the issues by writing on Facebook and Twitter—far easier than facing reporters—and calling on her “union brothers and sisters” to join “our commonsense movement.”
Lie of the Year: ‘Death Panel’ Attack on Health Care Reform
This year, opponents of health care reform hit new lows in promoting misleading, inaccurate or flat-out dishonest information. The worst of these lies was the scam that health care reform would create “death panels” whose members would judge whether to end seniors’ lives.
The website PolitiFact called the death-panel myth the “Lie of the Year,” and the watchdog group Media Matters named its originator, Betsy McCaughey, as “Health Care Misinformer of the Year.”
The vicious, absurd fairy tale of “death panels” got its start in July, when McCaughey, a former New York lieutenant governor, claimed on the air that, in a reformed health care system, seniors would be mandated to attend counseling sessions where they’d be told how and when to end their lives.
Six Republican Governors Rather Play Politics than Aid Jobless Workers
With U.S. unemployment at the highest level in more than a quarter century, six Republican governors would rather play politics with the lives of their citizens than help them make ends meet.
President Obama’s economic recovery plan provides $25 more per week and extends benefits for those who are jobless and struggling to feed their families. But as Karen Nussbaum, director of Working America, the AFL-CIO community affiliate, writes on Huffington Post:
If you live in Alabama, Alaska, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina or Texas, you are laid off and left out.
When AIG defrauded investors and the government, employees there took home millions in bonuses. Elsewhere, people are living unemployment check to unemployment check through no fault of their own, laid off because everyone is tightening their belts and job growth is nonexistent. Shoring up the unemployment insurance safety net is fundamental fairness.
