The Anti-American Worker Republican Origins of Michigan’s Right-To-Work Law

The Anti-American Worker Republican Origins of Michigan’s Right-To-Work Law

As police held back thousands of protesters near the state capital building, Michigan, the birthplace of the modern labor movement, became the 24th state to enact so-called “right-to-work” legislation. Earlier today, Governor Rick Snyder signed two bills preventing public and private sector unions from requiring workers to pay union fees.

The Detroit News reports that after requests from Grover Norquist and others, Snyder switched sides on the issue. United Auto Workers President Robert King said in an interview, that the Koch brothers and Amway owner Dick DeVos “bullied and bought their way to get this legislation in Michigan.”

In an editorial headlined “Drinking the Kochs’ Kool Aid,” the Detroit Free Press was unable to account for the governor’s change of heart, but offered some theories on the motivations of State Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville. He may have been under pressure, the newspaper said, from the anti-union Americans for Prosperity and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), both financially supported by the Koch brothers. ALEC’s model right-to-work bill “mirrors the Michigan law word for word.”

    Word is the groups threatened Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville’s leadership post, and promised him a primary challenge in 2014, if he refused to move right-to-work forward.

    But none of this explains why the seemingly pragmatic Snyder would hitch his wagon to an organization that has already demonstrated more interest in its own ideological objectives than in Snyder’s priorities. What have the [American Legislative Exchange Council] ALEC’s sponsors done for Michigan, and how did a governor who seemed dedicated to the middle path …end up in bed with them?

(Although it isn’t known how many Michigan state legislators are members of ALEC, the Detroit Free Press reports that at least one of the lawmakers who introduced the bill has been associated with ALEC.)

Some have speculated that the governor’s decision was born out of frustration with the UAW, which earlier this year pushed through a ballot initiative to write collective bargaining rights into the state constitution. The proposition was voted down in November by a margin of 58 to 42 percent. Greg McNeilly, who runs Michigan Freedom Fund, a PAC that supports the right-to-work law, told The Washington Post that the measure’s failure emboldened Republicans.

    “Bob King put this on the agenda,” McNeilly said, referencing the UAW president. “He threatened this state. He tried to bully and intimidate the state with this disastrous proposal that was so bad a majority of his members didn’t even back it. The whole state had a conversation. They lost.”

Last week, the governor and the state’s House and Senate majority leaders suddenly moved on the legislation, announcing their plans in a group press conference in which they said the issue is about fairness: workers should have a choice.

In fact, workers already do have a choice. Federal law guarantees that they can’t be forced to join unions, that they can’t be made to pay dues or fees to causes they don’t support. A worker hired today in a Michigan union shop already can refuse membership and pay only a fraction of a union member’s dues to cover the cost of workplace bargaining. The new law — aimed at weakening unions even further — effectively puts organized labor into a position where workers can pay nothing and still receive the benefit of collective bargaining.

As President Obama noted on Monday, “These so-called ‘right-to-work’ laws, they don’t have to do with economics, they have everything to do with politics. What they’re really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money.” Research backs the president up. Last year, the Economic Policy Institute released a report estimating that right-to-work laws decreased hourly wages for all workers by 3 percent. When businesses make a profit, the beneficiaries are typically CEOs and owners, not workers.

The conservative movement has always held the average American worker in contempt. The think that businesses should be run much like prison road gangs with workers as servants who shut up and do what they are told. Republicans hate the idea of workers having any rights, a legacy of the white male voters of red states. hearing Republicans talk about freedom is always good for a laugh - its jingoism - they mean the freedom to trample over Americans like they just so much trash. That is not freedom, that is the way the totalitarian monarchs of Medieval Europe thought about the serfs. Michigan Adopts the ALEC Model for Diminishing Democracy

Rupert Murdoch's Anti-American Fox News Uses Falsehood-Based Poll Questions To Back Up Its Phony Benghazi Scandal

Union Man Stands His Ground When Attacked by Fox News Anti-American Thug Steven Crowder

Union Man Stands His Ground When Attacked by Fox News Anti-American Thug Steven Crowder

A video of Fox News contributor Steven Crowder getting punched by a Michigan union protester was selectively edited, and that editing was revealed during Crowder’s appearance on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News.

The original video shows Crowder getting punched by a protester on Tuesday while Crowder was trying to stop an Americans For Prosperity tent from being torn down. The video, which is approaching a million views on YouTube, was picked up by the right as evidence of “union thuggery”:

 Katie approaching@KatiePavlich
Note to union thugs: don't punch new media people or threaten to kill them. Smile, you're on camera! ow.ly/g19uC
11 Dec 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite
 Monica Crowley@MonicaCrowley
My pal @scrowder survives attempted union beatdown in MI. This is the Left. Violent & outrageous, but not a big mystery. It's who they are.
11 Dec 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite
 Michelle Malkin
?
@michellemalkin
Oh dear Lord. Did you see vid of @scrowder assaulted by bloodlusting union mob as he tried to protect AFP tent? youtu.be/u_F3oev06i0
11 Dec 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite
But on Wednesday, Eclectablog’s Chris Savage argued that Crowder’s video “actually a composite of things that happened over the course of the day, many of them hours apart.”
Crowder defended himself on Twitter:
 Steven Crowder
?
@scrowder
All editing is selective by definition. Try the hours of raw footage all over the net. RT @aus_cull: @scrowder SELECTIVE EDITING. #dirtbag
12 Dec 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite
He added that the full footage was shown on Sean Hannity’s show the night before.
As Robert Mackey of the New York Times’ Lede Blog points out:
Unfortunately for Mr. Crowder, a look at the video broadcast on the Sean Hannity show appears to show quite clearly that he left out an important section of the footage when he put together his edit. A section of the Fox News broadcast preserved by the Web site Mediaite shows that Mr. Hannity’s producers at Fox News started the clip five seconds earlier than Mr. Crowder did. What the extra footage reveals is the man who punched Mr. Crowder being knocked to the ground seconds before and then getting up and taking a swing at the comedian.
Mackey adds that there’s another problem: “The still frame he used for the clip’s title image on YouTube, which offers a much clearer image of the man punching him, was obviously shot by a second camera, from an entirely different angle than the rest of the footage he presented of the man hitting him.”

There is video at the link. Anti-American conservatives really love stand your ground laws. Well, this union guy and others felt threatened, they stood their ground. Don't want to get punched, then don't get up in someone's face and act threatening. More here, Fox News' Conservative Anti-American Thug Steve Crowder Absurdly Challenges MI Protester To Duel In The Octagon

Notice how he uses the word "provoke"? Guys like Crowder have been with us forever. They rooted for the strikebreakers in the 1920s and '30s, and they delighted in going to civil-rights protests in the South in the '60s and pouring sugar on lunch-counter protesters. They aided and abetted the worst of American politics then, and now, with their provocations.

Gov. Snyder lied to the voters of Michigan when he said he would not get involved in the right-to-work debate because it was too divisive. He passed it in a blink of an eye in a lame-duck session. This is going to have a ripple effect on the lives of these working-class people -- people that guys like Crowder and his pal Sean Hannnity hold in contempt. The absurdity continues when he issued an idiotic ultimate challenge to his would be attacker on F&F and then repeated it to Hannity.

Violence is not a good way to handle things, but if you preach violence like conservatives do. If you act violently towards someone and engage in a form of baiting, than generally such people are aware of the possible consequences. The police in Lansing said that protesters were generally well behaved for such a large and sometimes angry crowd. Michigan Republicans just stole some basic human rights from workers like the Taliban does to average citizens in Afghanistan. That is how conservatives define freedom. Anti-American Conservative Media Like Steve Doocy and Fox News Are Wrong About Worker Contributions For Unions' Political Spending

Liberal Media? You Must Be joking. Wall Street Journal More Interested in Caviar and Foie Gras Than Employee-owned Firms

Liberal Media? You Must Be joking. Wall Street Journal More Interested in Caviar and Foie Gras Than Employee-owned Firms

Social pain, anger at ecological degradation and the inability of traditional politics to address deep economic failings has fueled an extraordinary amount of practical on-the-ground institutional experimentation and innovation by activists, economists and socially minded business leaders in communities around the country.

A vast democratized “new economy” is slowly emerging throughout the United States. The general public, however, knows almost nothing about it because the American press simply does not cover the developing institutions and strategies.

For instance, a sample assessment of coverage between January and November of 2012 by the most widely circulated newspaper in the United States , the Wall Street Journal, found ten times more references to caviar than to employee-owned firms, a growing sector of the economy that involves more than $800 billion in assets and 10 million employee-owners — around three million more individuals than are members of unions in the private sector.

Worker ownership — the most common form of which involves ESOPs, or Employee Stock Ownership Plans — was mentioned in a mere five articles. By contrast, over 60 articles referred to equestrian activities like horse racing, and golf clubs appeared in 132 pieces over the same period.

Although 2012 was designated by the United Nations as the International Year of the Cooperative — an institution that now has more than one billion members worldwide — the Journal‘s coverage was similarly thin. More than 120 million Americans are members of co-operatives and cooperative credit unions, 30 million more people than are owners of mutual funds. The Journal, however, devoted some 700 articles to mutual funds between January and October and only 183 to cooperatives. Of these the majority were concerned with high-end New York real estate, with headlines like “Pricey Co-ops Find Buyers.”

The vast number of cooperative businesses on Main Streets across the country were discussed in just 70 articles and a mere 14 gave co-op businesses more than passing mention. Together, the articles only narrowly outnumbered the 13 Journal pieces that mentioned the Dom Pérignon brand of champagne over the same time frame, and were eclipsed by the 40 Journal entries that refer to the French delicacy foie gras.

Another democratized economic institution is the not-for-profit Community Development Corporation (CDC), roughly 4,500 of which operate in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Such neighborhood corporations create tens of thousands of units of affordable housing and millions of square feet of commercial and industrial space a year. The Journal ran no articles mentioning CDCs in 2012 and only 43 over the past 28 years — less than two a year. Meanwhile, the word château appeared in 30 times as many articles, and luxury apartments received 300 times as much coverage over the same period.

Not surprisingly, the growing “new economy movement” championing democratization of the economy has itself received even less coverage, despite growing citizen involvement on many levels. Over the past year, major national, state and other conferences focusing on worker-owned companies, cooperatives, public banking, nonprofit and public land trusts, and neighborhood corporations were oversubscribed, reflecting the growing interest in these forms. The Journal, however, gave scant coverage to the movement.

Thousands of other creative projects — from green businesses to new forms of combined community-worker efforts — are also underway across the country but receive little coverage. A number are self-consciously understood as attempts to develop working prototypes in state and local “laboratories of democracy” that may be applied at regional and national scale when the right political moment occurs. In Cleveland, Ohio, for instance, a complex of sophisticated worker-owned firms has been developing in desperately poor, predominantly black neighborhoods. The model is partially structured along lines of the Mondragón Corporation, a vibrant network of worker-owned cooperatives in northern Spain with more than 80,000 members and billions of dollars in annual revenue.

Since 2010 legislation to set up public banks along the lines of the long-established Bank of North Dakota has been proposed in 20 states. Several cities — including Los Angeles and Kansas City — have passed “responsible banking” ordinances that require banks to reveal their impact on the community and/or require city officials to do business only with banks that are responsive to community needs. But municipally led responsible banking initiatives appear to have received no attention in the Journal, whereas the newspaper published seven articles this year discussing President Obama’s birth certificate.

The limited nature of the coverage can also be seen in particular cases. Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) is a highly successful consumer co-op with $1.8 billion in sales for 2011, allowing it to share $165 million of its profits with its 4.7 million active members and 11,000 employees. Organic Valley, a Wisconsin-based cooperative dairy, generated more than $700 million in revenue for nearly 1,700 farmer-owners. From January through October 2012, the Journal referred (briefly) to REI in just three articles; Organic Valley rated just one mention. In combination, REI and Organic Valley appear in the Journal only as often as the Cavalier King Charles spaniel, a breed of dog that turned up in four entries in the Journal‘s pages this year.

Further perspective on the coverage is offered in the way in which “hot topics” are presented, and others of greater economic significance played down. Co-ops in the U.S. generate over $500 billion in annual revenues. The global market for smartphones is estimated by Bloomberg Industries at $219 billion — less than half as large. Furthermore, there are 20 million more co-op members than smartphone users in the United States. The Journal, however, published over 1,000 print articles that included the terms “smartphone” or “smartphones” from January through October this year — more than five articles for each piece mentioning co-ops (many of which, as noted, were about upscale Manhattan apartments.)

The print coverage of the Journal was analyzed by the Democracy Collaborative of the University of Maryland through the online database ProQuest. Although the assessment focused on the Journal, the nation’s preeminent source of news for economic and business affairs, a preliminary review suggests that other national media outlets devote a similarly miniscule proportion of space to the exploding “new economy” sector. This highlights the need for greater media exposure regarding important developments toward a more democratic, sustainable and community-based economy.

By Gar Alperovitz and Keane Bhatt.

Gar Alperovitz is the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland and co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative.

The reason the Wall Street Journal or any other major media outlet does not cover co-operative type businesses is because they do not want the average American workers to get any crazy ideas about empowerment. About having more control over their lives. They also do not want the people to start pondering the idea that employee owned businesses generally make better products and provide better services because some bean counting elite CEO is not the one deciding what is good or bad.

Conservative Libertarian plantation owners don't want labor to get too uppity - David Koch Admits Big Spending to Help Scott Walker Bust 'Union Power'

Conservative Libertarian plantation owners don't want labor to get too uppity -David Koch Admits Big Spending to Help Scott Walker Bust 'Union Power'

Billionaire campaign donor David Koch, heir to a fortune and a political legacy created by one of the driving forces behind the John Birch Society, makes no secret of his enthusiasm for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

“What Scott Walker is doing with the public unions in Wisconsin is critically important. He’s an impressive guy and he’s very courageous,” Koch explained in a recent conversation reported by the Palm Beach Post. “If the unions win the recall, there will be no stopping union power.”

That’s no surprise. What is surprising is that Koch is now appears to be bragging about how he and his brother Charles are using their vast fortune to fund an independent campaign aimed at “helping” Walker. Even in an era when billionaires such as the Kochs are emerging as key financiers of Super PACS and other campaigning vehicles Koch’s admission will raise eyebrows—and questions about whether inappropriate coordination of by a candidate, his campaign and a supposedly independent group might be the stuff of “scandal.”

Like their father before them, David Koch and his brother Charles are longtime champions of extreme right-wing causes. And Walker’s militant anti-labor policies coupled with a willingness to cut funding for public education and public services have made him a hero of conservative hardliners like the Kochs. At the same time, Walker’s extremism has inspired a movement to recall him from office, which recently filed petitions with more than 1 million signatures calling for an election to remove the governor.

The governor has already spent a fortune trying to block the recall drive, with millions of dollars in television advertising, as well as expensive legal efforts to block a new vote. Both have been strikingly unsuccessful so far; at least in part because Wisconsin has steadily lost jobs since Walker’s budget was enacted—a dismal record that has caused a loss of confidence in the governor and his agenda.

Even as Walker struggles to explain why Wisconsin is shedding jobs while the rest of the country is gaining them, conservative groups funded by Charles and David Koch, such as Americans for Prosperity, are filling the state’s television airwaves with ads that claim Walker’s policies are “working.” According to Reuters, “a $700,000 advertising campaign sponsored by Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a foundation funded by conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch of oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries, hit the Wisconsin airwaves, the latest phase of its ‘Stand with Walker’ campaign.”

These ads are supposedly independent expenditures by a not-for-profit organization that operates under tax rules established to benefit the work of “Religious, Educational, Charitable, Scientific, Literary, Testing for Public Safety, to Foster National or International Amateur Sports Competition, or Prevention of Cruelty to Children or Animals Organizations.”

Coordination between candidates and their campaigns and “independent” groups operating under the Internal Revenue Service code as 501(c)3 operations.

The IRS is explicit in this regard: “Under the Internal Revenue Code, all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) made on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity. Violating this prohibition may result in denial or revocation of tax-exempt status and the imposition of certain excise taxes.”

Similar, though slightly less strict rules, apply to campaigning by other co-called “501” groups that the Koch’s have funded.

So, while David Koch’s stated enthusiasm for Scott Walker was not surprising, his explanation of how that enthusiasm is being expressed politically was.

According to the Post, Koch said of Walker: “We’re helping him, as we should. We’ve gotten pretty good at this over the years. We’ve spent a lot of money in Wisconsin. We’re going to spend more.”

The Post added: “By ‘we’ he says he means Americans for Prosperity, which is spending about $700,000 on an ‘It’s working’ television ad buy in the state.”

Governor Walker’s defenders, a group that now officially includes the Koch Brothers (thanks to David Koch’s pronouncement), will surely suggest that the billionaire is merely expressing his right to fund independent activities that just happen to be “helping” Walker.

But it is notable that, during last summer’s Wisconsin state Senate recall campaigns, the Republican Party of Wisconsin issued statements pointing out that “coordination between…political campaigns and independent groups is specifically outlawed.”

Such coordination might be denied by the parties involved. But, argued the Republicans, reasonable people should recognize coordination as a “scandal.”

In some ways America is still fighting the Civil War and this time, unless ordinary working Americans speak up, the plantation owners like the Koch brothers will win. They hate that ordinary people - firefighters, office workers, nurses or anyone should have any power or say over their working conditions or even their fate in life. One thing these conservative libertarians are not about is freedom - except for the freedom to tyrannize the working class.