Tag Archives: Scott Walker

‘Monumental Victory’: Wisconsin Judge Axes Walker-Era Attack on Union Rights

“All Wisconsinites deserve the opportunity to live in a state that treats all workers with respect and dignity,” one state representative said.

By Olivia Rosane. Published 12-3-2024 by Common Dreams

Screenshot: WISN

More than a decade after it sparked massive protests in the state capital, a Wisconsin judge on Monday struck down a controversial law that effectively ended public sector collective bargaining in the state.

In his final judgement, Dane County Circuit Judge Jacob Frost crossed out 85 sections of the 2011 law known as Act 10, which was championed by then-Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Frost’s ruling restored the union rights of teachers, sanitation workers, nurses, and other public sector employees.

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Teamsters President Urged to Cancel Republican Convention Speech

One Teamsters official warned the union leader’s scheduled appearance “only normalizes and makes the most anti-union party and president I’ve seen in my lifetime seem palatable.”

By Jake Johnson. Published 7-12-2024 by Common Dreams

Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien testified at a hearing held by the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) in 2023. Photo: Teamsters

Teamsters general president Sean O’Brien is facing mounting internal pressure to cancel his planned speech to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee next week, with the union’s vice president at large accusing the labor leader of kowtowing to a viciously anti-worker party and a GOP presidential hopeful whose first four years in the White House were marked by open attacks on the labor movement.

John Palmer, the Teamsters’ vice president at large, wrote in an op-ed in New Politics earlier this week that O’Brien’s scheduled appearance at Donald Trump’s invitation “only normalizes and makes the most anti-union party and president I’ve seen in my lifetime seem palatable.”

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Ending Reign of GOP Gerrymandering, Evers Approves Fair Maps in Wisconsin

“Wisconsin, for the first time in over a decade, we will not have some of the most gerrymandered maps in America,” Evers said.

By Olivia Rosane. Published 2-19-2024 by Common Dreams

Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers. Photo: Wisconsin National Guard/flickr/CC

For the first time since 2011, Wisconsin has state Assembly and Senate maps that do not unconstitutionally favor Republican candidates.

Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, signed new legislative maps into law on Monday that were crafted by his office and approved by the state Supreme Court.

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Emergency Protests Planned to Stop Scott Walker and Wisconsin GOP’s “Shocking and Naked Power Grab”

“This is straight out of a banana republic and should be a huge national story.”

By Jake Johnson, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 12-3-2018

“Warning to our friends across the country: what happens in Wisconsin doesn’t stay in Wisconsin,” MoveOn.org Washington director Ben Wikler wrote. (Photo: Indivisible Madison)

As Wisconsin’s GOP-controlled legislature and outgoing Republican Gov. Scott Walker seek to thwart the will of voters by ramming through a sweeping slate of legislation that would drastically curtail Democratic governor-elect Tony Evers’ authority and ability to implement his agenda, progressive advocacy groups announced emergency rallies on Monday to fight back against the GOP’s latest “shocking and naked power grab.”

“This is straight out of a banana republic and should be a huge national story,” Mother Jones reporter Ari Berman said of the GOP plan, which would strip Evers’ power to approve decisions by the newly elected Democratic state attorney general and hand this authority over to the Republican legislature. Continue reading

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#DayWithoutLatinos: Thousands Protest Anti-Immigrant Bills in Wisconsin

‘Wisconsin needs Latino and immigrant workers, and today everybody knows it,’ says Voces de la Frontera

By Nadia Prupis, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 2-18-2016

Photo: Twitter

Photo: Twitter

Workers, students, and activists walked off the job and out of their schools for a massive action in Wisconsin on Thursday, protesting two anti-immigration bills currently advancing through the state legislature.

Thousands of Wisconsinites converged at the State Capitol in Madison for A Day Without Latinos and Immigrants, organized by the grassroots rights group Voces de la Frontera, among other organizations. The action is being updated on Twitter with the hashtag #DayWithoutLatinos. Continue reading

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‘Dark Cloud’ of ALEC Converges at Annual Corporate-Political Lovefest

This week, San Diego hosts ‘a festival of closed-door deal-making by politicians, corporate executives and lobbyists’

Written by Deirdre Fulton, staff writer for Common Dreams. Published 7-23-15.

Photo via YouTube

Photo via YouTube

Fighting to protect dark money. Attacking federal efforts to rein in carbon pollution. Undermining local democracy.

These are just some of the “hot topics” on the agenda this week as conservative lawmakers, corporate lobbyists, and top GOP candidates from around the country gather in San Diego for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)’s annual meeting.

“A dark cloud is headed our way in the form of a shadowy lobbying organization that buys loyalty from state legislatures with untraceable corporate dollars and threatens the very fabric of our democracy,” San Diego County Democratic Party chair Francine Busby wrote in advance of the conference.

ALEC, Busby explained, “is a ‘bill mill’ funded by corporations and billionaires. It creates ‘model legislation’ by and for industries, which right-wing legislators then take back to their statehouses and enact into law.”

Miles Rapoport, president of the grassroots advocacy organization Common Cause, described the meeting as “a festival of closed-door deal-making by politicians, corporate executives and lobbyists,” at which “[t]hey gather to do the public’s business in private, fashioning legislation that undercuts the public interest in things like clean air and water, quality public schools, economic fairness and participatory democracy.”

It was with these charges in mind that more than 1,000 labor, social justice, and environmental advocates rolled out the unwelcome mat for the ALEC legislators and lobbyists on Wednesday, saying they didn’t want the corporate-backed group in their city.

“This is a no ALEC zone. I mean, we don’t want ALEC in our city or, quite frankly, in our state,” Mickey Kasparian, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers, said at the rally in downtown San Diego. “This is California. We fight for workers’ rights. We fight for affordable healthcare.”

But as the Center for Media and Democracy’s Brendan Fischer pointed out this week, “[i]n many ways, San Diego is an appropriate setting for ALEC’s conference.”

The city has served as a “petri dish for ALEC’s agenda,” he said, citing a successful and corporate-backed campaign that forced the city council to rescind a popular minimum wage measure.

Meanwhile, environmentalists warn that the draft conference agenda indicates that ALEC will pursue a familiar course in the coming year. According to Aliya Huq, climate change special projects director for Natural Resources Defense Council, the group is pushing measures to “defend polluters, hinder clean energy development, and obstruct climate solutions.”

Model bills up for discussion this week, Huq wrote, include the “State Power Accountability and Reliability Charter (SPARC),” which seeks to chip away at the EPA’s carbon pollution limits on power plants; the “Act Providing Incentives for Carbon Reduction Investments,” aimed at weakening and delaying existing state renewable energy standards; and the “Resolution Concerning Special Markets for Direct Solar Power Sales.”

This final bill, Huq writes, “is a real gem in ALEC’s long-running strategy to subvert solar markets.”

But “[r]ooftop solar gives consumers choice; shouldn’t we be working to make it available to more people not fewer?” Huq asked. “Furthermore, Econ 101 taught us that the hidden costs of fossil pollution is a market failure, and solar incentives level the playing field for clean energy to protect public health and the environment. These attacks are most likely coming from vested polluter interests (including some ALEC members who are actual regulated monopolies) that want to protect their profits.”

In a separate blog post on Monday, CMD’s Fischer noted that ALEC’s new offshoot focused on local government, the American City County Exchange (ACCE), will also meet in San Diego this week.

“Local democracy has led to some significant policy wins in recent years, with cities like Philadelphia guaranteeing workers paid sick days, and places like Denton, Texas banning fracking,” Fischer wrote. “ALEC’s response to cities and counties acting as laboratories of democracy has traditionally been to crush it, through state ‘preemption’ laws that prohibit local governments from raising the minimum wage, or regulating GMOs, or building municipal broadband.”

With ACCE, Fischer charged, “ALEC and its corporate backers are taking the fight directly to the local level, urging city and county officials on the one hand to give up their authority to protect the health and economic well-being of their constituents, and on the other to push policy measures to advance corporate interests.​”

According to news reports, two Republican presidential hopefuls—Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Mike Huckabee, the ex-Arkansas governor—are scheduled to speak at the conference on Thursday. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) canceled his scheduled Friday appearance.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

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From Wisconsin to Baltimore: which lessons learned?

By Juan Conatz. Published May 7, 2015 by ROAR Magazine

Post image for From Wisconsin to Baltimore: which lessons learned?

The Wisconsin uprising of 2011 provides valuable lessons for the Black Lives Matter movement across the US, especially about the directions not to take.

Photo: Black Lives Matter protesters occupy the Wisconsin Capitol after the police killing of the unarmed black teenager Tony Robinson, March 2015.

In response to the police killing of Tony Robinson in Madison, Wisconsin, a movement appears to have taken root in the state. This happened around the same time as the movement against the ‘right-to-work’ legislation — a continuation of what started in the spring of 2011, with the occupation of the state’s Capitol building and massive rallies contesting the abolition of public sector collective bargaining as proposed in the controversial Act 10 legislative bill — has grown exhausted and dejected. Continue reading

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An Even Bigger Drafting Error

One of the more amazing (and amusing, if we’re to be honest about it) stories in national politics so far this year has been the rise of Scott Walker as a player in the GOP presidential race. We’ve written about him on numerous occasions; the last time we took a look at what he was up to, we compared what he claimed in his inaugural speech to what was actually happening in the state.

A couple weeks ago, another of our crazy neighbors (Representative Steve King from Iowa) hosted the Iowa Freedom Summit. Shunned by the “moderate” GOP establishment, the event was basically an audition for the Iowa primary. Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Donald Trump; the list of potential and pretender candidates speaking was enough to send a shiver of excitement down the typical Iowa Tea Party supporter’s leg. Two speeches attracted most of the attention, though; Sarah Palin’s incoherent word salad that had some of her most ardent former supporters throwing her under the bus, and Scott Walker’s speech. Continue reading

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Running Walker – Separating Fact And Fiction

It’s 2015, which means that the presidential campaigns are just beginning to get under way. This time around, the field’s particularly unsettled on the Republican side. One person who’s been mentioned as a potential candidate on more than one occasion is Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker.

By Gage Skidmore [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

By Gage Skidmore [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

We’ve written about Scott before; we’ve always considered him to be the crazy neighbor next door. He’s become one of the darlings of the right with his attacks on public employee unions and aggressive tax reduction policies, among other ALEC approved initiatives. Today was the start of his second term, and he gave an inaugural speech at the State Capitol in Madison. We like to take what he says and compare it to what’s actually happening in the state: the last time we did this, Walker didn’t fare that well. But what about this time? Continue reading

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