Awesome things still happening in Wisconsin

This video is remarkable. Wisconsin Republicans barrel through committee a revised union-busting bill over the Democrats claim of illegality of procedure. I find these procedural fights in legislatures incredibly interesting and this one is up there with the best, complete with folksy Midwestern accents.  

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After weeks of insisting the union provisions were there for fiscal reasons - although evidence shows the existence of collective bargaining rights has no fiscal impact whatsoever, and after having virtually no public support for these provisions, the Republicans decided to agree with the rest of us that stripping collective-bargaining was a non-fiscal issue. Therefore, they pulled all the union-busting provisions into one bill and voted on it within minutes. Problem is a) they violated Wisconsin's open meetings laws and b) there are those unsure whether this bill had some fiscal provisions -- for example the benefit changes.  If the bill does have fiscal implications, they do need a quorum and the vote was improper. So it looks like this is going to court, which bodes well for  JoAnne Kloppenburg, a Dem (?) running for Supreme Court Justice, April 5th. She's running against the incumbent.  This may be a good test of whether there is truly enough electoral support for successful recalling of the eligible Republican senators. Ah, democracy.

Of course, this could all just be a trick to get the senate Democrats to come back to the state: so far it seems they're staying firm, somewhere in Chicago, knowing that if they return before this bill is signed into law they can get locked into the state capital and forced to vote. Ah, democracy.

This Land Is Your Land: the lost verses

Tom Morello (Rage Against The Machine/The Nightwatchman) and friends sang This Land Is Your Land at a rally in Wisconsin last week for the protesters, public and private employees, who want to kill the union-busting bill.  The whole video is worth it, but if you're in a rush start at 4:20.

Mahlon Mitchell, President of the Wisconsin Professional Firefighters Association on Democracy Now Friday morning, talked about himself and 60 firefighters sleeping in the capital rotunda alongside 600 protesters, even though their union is exempt from the bill: 

"Well, it just shows how important union work is and how important the union is to the middle class. There is not one employee, public employee, state, municipal, local employee, firefighter, police officer teacher, that does their job to get rich. We don’t do our job to get rich. We do our job to have a decent life, to have a decent middle-class family and not have to struggle like a lot of our other people do. Well, what this bill will in essence do is bring the middle class back down lower. And that’s really where the Governor wants and the corporate backers want us, so that we’d have less power and we have less influence on elections. So this is not about just unionism. This is about an attack on the middle class. This is about Wisconsinites, and this is a hard-working Midwest state, and we need unions to help take care of our middle class."

 Video Interview, which I highly recommend.  I think we'd all be better off if we reminded ourselves that we must share this country, it belongs to us all, "us" being a very general term; and we need to make room for everyone to retain their individual potential.  It's not a race to first place, it's a society.  The bottom-line is that you (meaning everyone) should be worried about the middle-class shrinking. How are we doing with that?  Glad you asked.

More about the song, after the jump (because originally this was a music post).

Liberate!*

S is the political/current events junkie of this blogging partnership.  My google reader is filled with fashion blogs, and the only section of the New York Times website I read is the "most emailed" box.  So, for example, I had no idea that dozens of Chilean miners were trapped (and then rescued) until I saw a documentary on it.  But it hasn't escaped even me that the world is changing right now, and rapidly.  In the words of a good friend, "I got the flu, I went to bed for a week, I woke up and the world is different."

In an effort to catch up, I've been reading Al Jazeera's live blog on Libya and came across this neat visual representation of the last couple of months:

*The exclamation point in this post's title is brought to you by Wellstone!

Dictators who care more about their video sets than their people

Al Jazeera English, Live Blog

7.34pm: In case you missed it - the backdrop to Gaddafi's speech - a piece of artwork showing a clenched fist crushing a US fighter jet, in front of the words "Allahu Akbar" [God is the greatest]. 

The man is crazy, a nut.  But a very well armed nut; who's vowed to continue using these weapons to massacre his own people.  This is going on in the world right now. People are fighting it.  And I am still awe-struck by the horror and bravery.  As I have been since mid-January.


As always, the definitive source for all things revolution this winter is the NPR twitter curator, @acarvin

I promise I'll blog about music and sneakers next week...

Just words on cardboard, sure. But wouldn't it be cool if all citizens were more empathetic and less suspicious of other peoples and cultures; instead of seeing them as subjects of leaders and extensions of polices?

Another at SOURCE.

Happy Friday

It's Friday so let's focus on Wisconsin, which is surprisingly giving me the warm and fuzzies.

The video below shows firefighters - LEAD BY BAGPIPERS!!! - walking into the state capital building to join their fellow public workers, who have taken over the retunda. Why is this so important? The voice explains:

"The bagpipers and the uniformed men you are seeing coming into the rotunda right now are firefighters, they are getting huge applause because in this bill they are technically exempt from [Gov.] Walker's proposals. But there has been a huge showing of firefighters in this area."

If you didn't catch that, it's important because the Governor exempted these unions.  These unions, however, protested in solidarity nonetheless.  

SOURCE 

If you are confused about the bill, here's one quick article.  But to understand what's actually going, this may help 1) a month ago Wisconsin was set to have a $120 million budget surplus for the year and 2) watch this (after the jump)