Wednesday, June 15, 2011

The Corruption Of Wisconsin Is Complete -- Or Is it?

If you love Wisconsin, love your freedom, or want a thriving, healthy economy, things look grim indeed.

It would appear that the corruption of Wisconsin is now complete.

We have an uneducated, inept and unethical governor who managed to gain his seat through the massive expenditure of people like the Koch brothers, the road builders, WMC, and other big money special interests. Even though his campaign was about creating jobs, he has done everything but that.  His biggest claim to fame thus far is getting busted out by a blogger as being a kowtowing serf to the Koch brothers.

The Republican legislature, also sponsored by Big Corporation money, actually makes Walker look like a piker by taking his malevolence and expanding it, passing laws which can only be generously described as legalized prejudice and bigotry.  While they claim that the budget that they crafted resolves the alleged deficit and doesn't raise taxes, nonpartisan groups have repeatedly shown this to be patently false.  It spends more money than before and raises taxes and fees on working families and on the poor.  To add further insult to injury, the legislature has taken these higher taxes and fees and used it to suppress or even eliminate the rights of these very same people.

Now word as come out that the "Supreme Court" of Wisconsin has, without apparent deliberation or research of the law, has ruled the open meetings laws to be invalid and that our elected officials (or at least the Republican ones) are above the law and don't need to adhere to the laws that they themselves had passed.  Needless to say, WMC spent tons of money in making sure that Annette Ziegler, Michael Gableman and David Prosser were on the bench, just so that they could shred the Constitution and the law books and make irresponsible decisions like this one.

As a result, it would appear that the Republicans and conservatives of all three branches of the government have assaulted and insulted the state and its citizens in almost every aspect of imaginable.  They have stripped the working class of their very rights and their livelihoods, trashed environmental protections, raised taxes and fees on those least able to afford it while giving magnanimous rewards to their campaign donors (read Big Business), attacked the rights of women, attacked the rights of gays, attacked the rights of minorities and almost every other atrocity to our freedoms and our values.

As I said, it appears that the corruption of the state is complete.

However, the fight is not over. Far from it.

There are still tens of thousands of people pouring into Madison to make our collective voices heard.

There are tens or thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people actively involved in recalling those that have violated all sense of decency and abused the authority of their office.  And that is only the first wave.

People are still anxiously and eagerly waiting for winter to return so that they may finish the job in recalling Scott Walker and the rest of the corrupt senators, as well as work to flip the Assembly as well as the Senate.  There are even some looking at removing WMC's justices and replacing them with justices that love the law and justice.

The "ruling" from the Supreme Court can, I believe (note: I am not a lawyer), be brought back for reconsideration, since it is so blatantly and egregiously out of line with what the law says. Furthermore, at least two separate actions have already been filed against the content of the law, and many more lawsuits are expected, even as early as today, regarding every aspect of this law, from the content to the way it was passed.

And to further strengthen one's heart and one's resolve, it would appear that part of the road to recovery has already been paved for us, with a very powerful ruling that would find the union-busting, rights-stripping, economy-trashing bill itself to be illegal:
In 1935, when Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (also known as the NLRA, or the Wagner Act), it recognized the direct relationship between the inequality of bargaining power of workers and corporations and the recurrent business depressions. That is, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners, the economy fell into depression. The law therefore recognized as policy of the United States the encouragement of collective bargaining.

While the NLRA covered US employees in private employment, the law protecting collective bargaining in both the public and private sectors has developed since 1935 to cover all workers "without distinction."
In summary, while it might very well appear that Big Corporation and their corrupt puppets have won once and for all, that is as far as from the truth one can get and not become a de facto Republican. The union busting bill will be postponed from be enacted or enforced by dint of the lawsuits against it. And even if they try to illegally enforce it like they did with the restrictions to the Capitol Building, the unions are prepared for such a contingency and it will be only a temporary hardship as we continue to take back our state and put mature, responsible and accountable officials in the place of the corrupt ones now misrepresenting themselves as leaders.

So, if some conservative comes up to you to gloat about their "victory," just smile politely, agree with them that the war is all but over, and keep smiling in your knowledge that while the war may indeed soon be over, its not in the way they think it is.  The only real accomplishment that Walker, the WISGOP legislature and the Supreme Court have done is making their recalls all the easier to accomplish.

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