Right to Work is Wrong For Wisconsin

 

By Jeff Simpson

 Mayor Paul Soglin tells how wrong the Republicans are in trying to rush through Right to Work in Wisconsin.  

MADISON (WKOW)-- Saturday Madison Mayor Paul Soglin blasted plans to pass right-to-work legislation in the senate next week.
The Senate is set to hold a public hearing on the bill Tuesday and take a vote Wednesday. The bill would make it illegal to require a person to join an union or pay union dues as a requirement of their employment.
Mayor Soglin says it will hurt workers and credits unions with boosting the local economy.
“In Madison and Dane County where we have one of the most robust economies in the nation, where we are going contrary to the trend in the rest of the state, which is what really needs to be presented in a legislative hearing process, we have strong unions,” Mayor Soglin said.

The Wisconsin Business Alliance, a business group that actually cares about Wisconsin and has some actual business sense, has found out that Right to work isn't popular in Wisconsin.   

I spent this morning calling local chambers of commerce in Republican state senate districts in an effort to get their take on the so-called “right to work” legislation that is scheduled to be introduced at the State Capitol this week.
Since the State Chamber of Commerce, or WMC, is strongly supporting the legislation, I was curious to learn where local business associations stand on the issue.
Specifically, I wanted to learn the answer to this question: Is WMC really representing Wisconsin’s broad and diverse business community when it claims that businesses want legislators to enact “right to work” laws?The answer was astonishing: I could not find a single Chamber in the districts of senators Fitzgerald, Cowles, Moulton, Petrowski, Nass, Lasee, or Harsdorf that supports “right to work.”In fact, I heard statements like these again and again: “We’re not taking a position on that.” “We don’t take a stand on political issues.” “We only advocate for political issues when there’s a strong consensus among our members — and we don’t have consensus on this.”

Let's see, the Mayor of one of the best cities in the country to live is against it, the Chambers of Commerce in every Republican Senators district will not speak in favor of it, so who is for it.  

O yeah ALEC. 

There is of course a full daily dose of Irony, that the party that was abhorred, by one of Mary Burke's consultants copying his earlier work while writing policy, then introducing as their first bill, one plagiarized word for word from their masters at ALEC.

Of course it would take a media that cared about objective facts and the search for truth to actually bring that up.   It even took one of the Republicans long time donor's and cheerleaders to point out that not a single Republican campaigned on this issue that they are now fast tracking.   

What does a campaign mean when almost none of the major policy departures contained in the budget were proposed or debated during the year-long exchange of policy ideas by Democrat Mary Burke and Republican Scott Walker?
The major issue in that hard-fought and money-drenched contest was job creation. That priority has almost disappeared from the Republican dialogue now coming out of the governor’s office and Republican-controlled capitol. As if to declare victory, the current focus is now about workforce development and filling jobs.
Lest we celebrate prematurely, there are still about a half million unemployed or underemployed adults in the state, many in the central city of Milwaukee; we still have a brain drain of more than 10,000 college graduates; and our wage levels are still in the bottom third of states.

A little digging though and we see exactly where this bill is coming from:

WISCONSIN RIGHT TO WORK COMMITTEE, INC.

MICHELLE LITJENS

3765 MAXWELL RD
PO BOX 296
OSHKOSH , WI 54904 

Hmmmm I wonder if Robin Vos will recuse himself?   

Time Dulls The Memory

John Torinus' weekly diatribe about how tax payers should be subsidizing businesses is nothing really out of the ordinary for him. It is basically the same old "Taxes bad for business, but more than OK for the little guy," type of meme that conservatives have echoed for years.

Predictably, Owen Robinson thinks it's "spot on."

Brewtown Gumshoe is a little more straightforward with his opinion of Torinus' opinion:

Torinus and his ilk want to dismantle social programs, punish public workers, relieve themselves from paying taxes, and have their profits assured into perpetuity (at taxpayer's and worker's expense).

I am just curious on how Torinus would justify his double standard. Throughout the column, as with other columns, he parrots the right's usual anti-tax talking points, but then goes on to champion TOMMY!!:

Tommy Thompson was a governor in the 1990s who understood pro-business policies, but also the value of positive signals and strokes.

It looks like he's not running for office again. But he could add a lot of value to the job creation efforts by setting up a cheerleading school for presidents and governors.

So, according to Torinus, taxes are bad for business, and TOMMY!! was good for business. But under TOMMY!!, taxes were much higher than they are now. Not only that, but TOMMY!! was not afraid of spreading the money around, especially with the road builders and the health care mavens.

I will concede that TOMMY!! could be seen as pro-business though, considering how cozy he was with their CEOs and their lobbyists, and enjoyed much of his life through their generosity to him.

It just would be nice if the conservatives got their talking points straight, and even nicer if they were honest about them.

A Hypocritical Conservative? I'm Shocked!

John Torinus, free market advocate and nationalized health care opponent, is sending his employees to India so that they can take advantage of their more inexpensive, nationalized health care system.

Jay Bullock has the breakdown of Torinus' hypocrisy.