I wish the people of Michigan good luck. They’re going to need lots and lots of it.

I’ve been working in a “Right to Work” state for the last 12 years and here are some of the gifts we workers have received:

1. pay cuts every year for the last 9 years, even during the “good” times, just because they could.

2. It’s illegal to strike or even talk about any action to protest working conditions so anything goes as long as it benefits management. Workers are told to accept it or look for work elsewhere. Nothing is ever done about hazardous working conditions or employer exploitation of working hours.

3. Massive benefit cuts for 6 straight years then massive increases in employee-share payments of the reduced and near useless benefits we managed to retain. Most employees avoid hospitalization and preventive care knowing that a serious illness will bankrupt them. It did me and at least 7 co-workers in the last 5 years, including my boss.

4. Despite year after year of productivity increases the first thing to go whenever there is a financial crisis (and management produces many of them) is employee pay, work days, and bonuses. Haven’t seen any of these three things for over a decade despite balance sheets in the black every single year.

5. Serfdom is the only option if you have to work. You put up with sadistic, stupid, cruel management and suffer abuse after abuse and barely making enough to survive is your reward for putting up with all this abuse. You are trapped because no one will hire senior, experienced workers and you don’t make enough money to move anyway.

6. Pension plans that were negotiated and paid in good faith by long-time employees shrink and then vanish and there’s absolutely nothing that you can legally do about it. Tough luck for you, worker!

Someday, before I die, I want to see the United States of America return to the days when workers are valued for keeping the country running and rewarded for their work. It won’t happen until we topple every single one of these ALEC-controlled governors and legislatures and elect a president and congress who aren’t totally owned by Wall Street and the banksters. I know, I know. I’m not holding my breath.

I have to agree with goNPA and juliania. As a public school teacher for the last 16 years I have experienced firsthand the results of corporate “reform” and while it certainly has its roots and origins in the Republican party, which has opposed public education since its inception, it has made far greater progress with the imprimatur of the Democratic party centrists.

Once Bill Clinton and his triangulators used his “Goals 2000″ program to usurp the conservative positions on school reform from Reagan’s “A Nation at Risk” the official positions of the two parties began to converge into what has become the corporate party’s dream team. Democrats for Educaiton Reform, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan and the rest have simply cashed in on the back room deals between the Democratic party and the titans of corporate America.

Once the Democratic party stood side by side with the teacher’s unions between the corporate titans and the billions of dollars spent on public schools. Now they act as door openers and for their efforts the current president and his education administration have received the praise of the likes of Newt Gingrich, Jeb Bush, and many other corporate takeover titans.

Diane Ravitch and Anthony Cody have started The Campaign For Our Public Schools letter writing campaign which seeks to have as many Americans as possible write letters to President Obama asking him to rethink his corporate, conservative education positions before public schools go the way of the dodo bird in America. If you are so inclined, here is a link telling how you can join this movement:

This also explains why Gov. Rick Scott has been working overtime this year to disenfranchise as many of the voters who favor Obama as he can. Florida still has deep pockets of racist white men, wealthy retirees, and they always vote. Women, hispanics, and young voters will join African American voters on the rolls of the disenfranchised in great numbers in Republican-controlled areas of the state.

Wikipedia has a good overview of how the Republican party turned against Harris during her run against Nelson. (I said Rubio mistakenly above) in 2006. She’s hard to track down nowadays but I’m sure she’s rolling in the corporate welfare dough. She really wanted that Senate seat though and she was shocked at the lack of support. I live in her former congressional district and a coworker worked for her campaign for senate.

From the Ledger.com 2 days ago:

“TALLAHASSEE | Gov. Rick Scott’s approval rating among Florida voters has risen above the 40 percent level for the first time since he has been elected as governor, a new Quinnipiac University poll shows.

However, Scott remains “underwater,” meaning more voters disapprove of his job as governor, 46 percent, compared to those who approve of his actions, 41 percent.

“Although Gov. Rick Scott’s numbers aren’t that impressive, they are a step up for him _ the first time he has gotten his approval rating out of the 30s since taking office,” said Peter Brown, a Quinnipiac pollster. “His best previous score was 50-38 percent disapproval in January.”

Yet he runs the state as a personal kingdom with little challenge and not a lot of scrutiny from the national media outside of a few progressive/liberals learning outlets. Go figure.

Scott companies were found guilty of defrauding Medicare and they paid a record penalty. He himself seems to have been coated in Teflon and is held blameless for the atrocities, at least by the feds and a very slim majority of Floridians. His unpopularity, even among his voters, is amazing to watch yet he is convinced he will win re-election easily.

He probably will because the Democratic party will not want to get involved and the old party machine will put forward another conserva-dem to try to out republican the republicans. This is one crazy state! Poor old Katharine Harris was run out of town on a rail to republican welfare territory during her senate race against Rubio. No loyalty or payment for stealing the election for the Bush junta. The corruption is unbelievable, the gerrymandering laughable and now approved it seems with nary a whimper from the democrats.

Remember America, we are America’s 3rd largest state economy and we are circling the toilet. A bellwether that doesn’t seem to concern the current democratic party in the least.

If only we had a Democrat in the White House or the Democrats controlled say the senate. Then a Justice Department investigation could be initiated and the senators and president could take to the airwaves decrying this foul deed, stirring up hostility to a governor who has one of the lowest approval ratings in the nation. He’s gone from the teens to the low twenties here in FL. Oh wait! That’s the old, divisive kind of politics that makes Corey Booker have a sad. Can’t have that!

Scott was a known criminal when he rode the Tea Party express into the governors mansion. The man is more than an embarrassment — he literally can’t put together a coherent sentence. He just pulled a GWB move in Spain, ridiculing the royalty like an idiot. He’s evil, dumb, and totally under the control of the plutocracy.

Yet the democratic party didn’t see fit to involve itself much in the election against Scott even when a conserva-dem from Christ’s administration won the primary. Scott ran constant ads on radio and TV decrying Obama and all his policies for a full year before the election; Alex Sink started her ads about 6 weeks before the election and many voters didn’t know who the hell she was. She also spent a lot of time distancing herself from Obama and his policies. In the end she came damn close to defeating Scott anyway as many voters were uncomfortable with his shady Medicare-scamming past. Wonder what might’ve happened if the party and the president had actually worked with and for her? We’ll never know.

Now we may very well lose Nelson’s senate seat leaving the once democratic state a perpetual Tea Party/republican disaster area. The crazy that comes out of Tallahassee is a national shame for the state but all the racist retirees from up north keep voting in the worst of the worst. We’re doomed here and it’s a damn shame since it’s such a lovely place to live.

Pam lives there. What’s your point?

As a person who participated in one of those contract negotiations that resulted in a sweet pension plan many years ago here’s how it works in most cases. Public employees are paid less (usually much less) than those in the private sector. They are excluded from making extra money by freelancing in many locations. So the municipalities, cities, counties, states, etc. put this on the table: “If you stay with us (we don’t want to lose the best workers to private sector jobs) and accept much lower pay we will guarantee you good benefits and a nice pension when you retire.” That has been the agreement for a couple of generations now.

Then Christie Todd Whitman, as governor of NJ, decided to try something new — not paying the state’s share to keep the pensions funded and call it balancing the budget. She succeeded in getting by with that legerdemain so it spread like wildfire across the country. Reagan changed the game also, allowing pension funds, which had previously been untouchable and fully-funded by law, to be used as bank accounts and the enforcement and monitoring became lax to non-existent.

Way back then many of us warned that eventually they would claim poverty and insist that the pensions would be done away with, leaving the workers who fulfilled their part of the bargain holding an empty bag as they became to old and infirm to return to the workforce. And here we are.

Sadly, some progressives, as seen on this very thread, have bought into the conservative stealth pension destroying logic by claiming that we simply “can’t afford to meet our obligations” anymore.Yeah, that’s because we stood by and let them not pay their bills to the pension funds for the last 25 years, not because the workers didn’t do the work or add their contributions. The greedy bastards counted on the stock market and housing bubble to make up their stinginess and deadbeat approach to funding pension plans through record interest payments but we all know how that turned out.

Nice to see your comrades ready and willing to stick in the knife in the backs of all these dedicated public workers who spent their lives in public service and now are facing the possibility of an impoverished and frightening old age, all to prove a point for the conservative goons. Nice.

And once again the Nuance Nannies come to disarm the progressives and liberals to ensure that they go to the knife fight of today’s Republican politics armed with limp noodles of nothing. Kind of deflates the whole point of a IOKIYAR post, doesn’t it?

Republicans like Christie let fly on their opposition without hesitation, spewing the most foul invective they can imagine. Democrats, on the other hand, aren’t allowed to return fire — that makes some on our side embarrassed and uncomfortable.

Instead of defending ourselves in kind, we are told, we must be factual, nuanced, careful of feelings, and avoid any kind of personal hurt so we automatically lose the war of words before the battle is even engaged.

My advice to sonofthedude and Margaret is to stop taking your battle plans from shooter242 and let your skin thicken a little bit and allow the front line troops some viable ammunition that the opposition understands and respects because it’s what they use.

If we lived in a just world where political fights were conducted in a fair manner and being above the personal attacks gave you any chance to make a difference then the pearl-clutching worries that some on our side aren’t being very nice might sense.

As it is it just makes us look weak and unable to defend our own no matter how personally superior it may be to rise above the fray. This ain’t high tea people nor is it an academic discussion held in an ivory tower. These conservatives fight to the death and we want nuanced fairness and kindness. Good grief!

Someonw posted on Facebook today that if Tebow takes the Broncos to the Super Bowl then Bill and Gloria Gaither will replace Madonna as the halftime entertainment. I threw up in my mouth. A lot. And I am a person of faith. The adulation and idolatry of these people is deeply troubling to me but I guess Tebow is the last great white evangelical Christian hope for a dying demographic. Or something. Yuck.

It’s actually worse than you imagine, Pam. School cafeterias here in Florida, where I teach, are forbidden to cook fresh food. Everything must be heat and serve and purchased from the mega corporations whose lobbyists own congress and the state legislature.

A few years ago they were still making grilled cheese sandwiched. That’s not even allowed now. Pre-made microwavable grilled cheese sandwiches in plastic wrappers only. Because of the short funding they pay the corporations to process the fresh foods they get under FDA guidelines since they don’t have the capacity or money to process the foodstuffs into actual edible food.

A far cry from my own school cafeterias from 40 years ago where local farmer’s wives made homemade biscuits and hot rolls, fresh spaghetti sauce, freshly fried fish fillets, pinto beans and cornbread, fresh desserts, etc.

We do have a grant now that provides a snack 4 days a week of local produce so the kids can try new and unusual vegetables and fruits in a small portion. When the grant runs out that will be the end of that. All vegetables served in the cafeteria are from cans. Fruit is the only fresh food that is actually processed in the cafeteria itself rather than reheated or microwaved nowadays.

Sad and disgusting but perfectly acceptable to Tea Bag America where the idea of poor children (both of the brown and white varieties) should be thankful for whatever disgusting stuff is served them because most are on free and reduced lunch. USA! USA!

Autumn, I felt the same way. It brought back that horrible day in 1979 when Dan White got away with the cold-blooded murders of Moscone and Milk. I never would have dreamed that 32 years later we would have made so little progress in the American justice system. I have now been asecond class American citizen for 50 years and I despair of ever achieving equality in my lifetime.

Treat them as animals and see what happens. Your smug assurance in laws and protections is sad. When the social contract goes down anarchy reigns. What you choose to ignore is that they don’t care how you treat them anymore. They’re long past that. They have nothing left to lose while you have everything to lose from your steadfast belief in the System. Good luck with that!

I have no reason to shrink anywhere. I stand by my words. This is an animalistic side of human nature. Is it warranted or just? The historians will make that call. But some of us have seen this coming for quite a while and have warned about the dangers. Unlike you, I don’t pretend that were I in the same circumstances that I could rise above it all by natural superiority.
I’ve been around for a long while and seen this ugly face of humanity before many times and I’ve seen it in preety much every class and group there is so I know it’s human nature and that means all humans.

I watched a History Channel show today about the French Revolution. So a propos. You know who shared this clueless person’s attitude and indignation? The first ones to head to the guilloyine. Not a good time to be self-righteous and condemnatory right now, I believe.