Posted by British unions failure in the 70s on Fri, 09 Mar 2018 08:53 | #

I have maintained that the concept of unionization and the loyalty that comes with demonstrable responsibility and accountability to one’s circumscribed people can in fact be too powerful - it is a concept that has to be managed intelligently; whatever factors went into the labor unions’ deleterious part in the British economy of the 70s are not elaborated in Academic Agents’ video - more or less a pronunciation that “socialism doesn’t work and Austrian school economics does.”...I (DanielS) doubt that enough ingredients of the story are being taken into account….

Posted by Trump's union-busting bench appointees on Thu, 22 Mar 2018 13:44 | #

...with Adelson and Koch Bros. money backing Trump, he’s been busy appointing union busting judges:

In line with their aspirations and policies..

Trump has appointed a record number of judges - lifetime appointments

...union busting, environnmental disregarding…

Posted by Oklahoma teachers strike on Thu, 05 Apr 2018 16:01 | #

This time its the Oklahoma public school teachers, also predominantly White, who are demonstrating the power of unionization: More than 100 Oklahoma teachers have set-off on a one hundred mile, seven day march from Tulsa, Oklahoma to the capitol building, where they’ll join tens of thousands more teachers….

Kentucky teachers are striking as well…

Posted by Assault on Wisconsin's pubic employee unions on Wed, 18 Jul 2018 09:19 | #

NPR, Fresh Air “How Dark Money, Gerrymandering And Democratic Complacency Altered Wisconsin Politics”, 17 July 2018:

Dan Kaufman, author of The Fall of Wisconsin, says the state’s experienced a conservative transformation in recent years — despite a tradition of progressive politics dating back to the 19th century.

The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics

by Dan Kaufman

Hardcover, 319 pages

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton was so confident of carrying Wisconsin that she never made a single campaign appearance in the state. But our guest, journalist and Wisconsin native Dan Kaufman, talked to labor leaders at the time who were worried she could lose the state to Donald Trump. Kaufman says Trump’s narrow win in Wisconsin marked the completion of a dramatic change in the political culture of the state, which had a long tradition of progressive leadership dating back to the 19th century. Six years before Trump’s win, the state’s voters elected conservative populist Scott Walker governor. With the help of a Republican-controlled legislature, Walker waged an unprecedented assault on public employee unions in the state and later signed a right to work bill, which undermined private-sector unions.

Dan Kaufman has written for The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker. He spoke to FRESH AIR’s Dave Davies about his new book, “The Fall Of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest Of A Progressive Bastion And The Future Of American Politics.”

DAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: Well, Dan Kaufman, welcome to FRESH AIR. You know, we often think of cities as the centers of progressive, democratic politics, but Wisconsin was a leader going way back, you remind us. What did that have to do with those who settled Wisconsin in the first place? This is interesting.

DAN KAUFMAN: In the 1840s, waves of Scandinavian immigrants started settling in Wisconsin. They brought with them a kind of communitarian ethos, many of them. They were fleeing a very harsh environment in Norway. For example, only 3 percent of the land is arable. So they had to bond together, and this forged a kind of egalitarianism, communitarianism that impacted the state’s politics.

DAVIES: Robert La Follette was perhaps the most influential figure in state politics, at least historically. Tell us about him.

KAUFMAN: He was a very interesting man. He grew up on a farm, partly, in Dane County, which is where Madison is located. And he was surrounded by Norwegian immigrants. There was a movement at the time in the 1860s called the Grange - 1860s and 1870s. And they were battling the railroad interests, which were dominating Wisconsin politics, along with the timber interests. The railroad and timber interests controlled - effectively controlled the Wisconsin state legislature, and they would gouge the farmers on the - shipping their crops. So there was a kind of agrarian populist movement that rose up against them.

La Follette was influenced by this movement, and there was another key influence on him. This was the chief justice of Wisconsin, a man named Edward Ryan, and he gave a speech in 1873 to the University of Wisconsin Law School. La Follette would enroll in that law school the following fall. But he said the question will arise and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, which shall rule, wealth or man? Which shall lead, money or intellect? Who shall fill public stations, educated and patriotic free men or the feudal serfs of corporate capital? And this was the spirit of Wisconsin progressivism, the idea that corporate power needed to be contained.

They weren’t necessarily socialistic, although there were some Milwaukee socialists, but they believed that unfettered, laissez faire capitalism was damaging to society as a whole. In that spirit, La Follette, who went on to become governor and senator of the state, was channeled into policies that limited, for example - banned corporate donations to candidates, instituted direct primaries to limit the influence of, for example, the railroad companies, things like this to open the government up to normal, everyday citizens. And that was the spirit of Wisconsin progressivism.

DAVIES: And then in the early 20th century, there were a number of reforms that we kind of are used to everywhere nowadays.

KAUFMAN: Right.

DAVIES: But they were really revolutionary at the time. Talk about that.

KAUFMAN: They really were, and this was another aspect that was very unusual, in particular to Wisconsin. It became called the Wisconsin Idea, and La Follette was very much a champion of the state university, the flagship university in Madison. And the Wisconsin Idea was a kind of ethos that placed on the University of Wisconsin a moral obligation to serve the citizens of the entire state. And this would entail crafting legislation, drawing on the faculty to help draft legislation. For example, the first workers’ compensation bill was passed in Wisconsin in 1911. That then became a model for the entire state. Much of the New Deal was crafted by Wisconsinites loyal to this notion of the Wisconsin Idea, people that had served with La Follette and his successors.

For example, the unemployment insurance program was first drafted in Wisconsin, and then it was made national. The Social Security Act was drafted by a professor at the University of Wisconsin. Even Medicare, 30 years later, was drafted by a Wisconsinite named Wilbur Cohen who was loyal to the Wisconsin Idea. And this was an exemplification of this humanistic philosophy that influenced the entire country.

DAVIES: So how many of these social changes were actually enacted in Wisconsin? They did establish - what? - a workers’ compensation law, which helped compensate workers for injuries on the job. What else?

KAUFMAN: Another key one was the first successful progressive state income tax. Before that, I think it was 16 states had tried and failed. They had been stymied because politicians were reluctant to enforce it because people would become very angry. So even though an income tax might be instituted, they would collect very little revenue, and then it would be overturned in a court decision. And Wisconsin was facing the same troubles. So this man named Delos Kinsman drafted a successful state income tax, and he did it by instituting numerous changes that made people see the benefits. In other words, the tax money would be used for - mainly for local communities so they would see the benefits of it. And he made it very progressive, so it hit the wealthier harder, and other things that made it successful. And then it became a model for states to collect revenue to do good things like invest in libraries, schools, roads, other things that were needed and useful to the community as a whole.

DAVIES: It’s interesting that in the early 20th century the state of Wisconsin granted workers’ comp insurance, a progressive income tax, a couple of decades later unemployment insurance. And, you know, nowadays, when a state proposes something like that, business interests say, wait a minute, this is going to be a job-killing tax or regulation. Employers will move out of the state if you impose these burdens on businesses that other states don’t carry. Was that done at the time? How did they deal with that?

KAUFMAN: Well, I think the reason it was able to be successful in Wisconsin is La Follette had really limited the influence of corporate money into the public sphere, into the government sector. So they were able to do some of these things. And it was reflective of the time. I think you’ve seen changes since 1976, Buckley v. Valeo and on into Citizens United, that has very much opened up the flood of corporate money. And that can really influence policy. And you’ve seen that very strongly in Wisconsin recently where a lot of these reforms have been overturned.

DAVIES: But - so when these reforms were enacted in Wisconsin, the railroads, the manufacturers didn’t leave. I mean, the state really developed fairly robust manufacturing economy, right?

KAUFMAN: They did. And they were able to find a balance. I mean, there was also the skill in which these laws were crafted. For example, John Commons, the economics professor who drafted the workers’ compensation bill, he consulted with the corporations. They worked out something that was both vastly beneficial to the workers but also took into account the concerns of industry. It was a pragmatic idealism is how I characterize it. It lifted everyone up or attempted to but also looked at balance. And in order to be workable, it had to be accepted by everyone, and it was at that time, more or less. That began to shift.

But for a time, that was the norm, and it was accepted by both sides that this is better than - you have to remember, during the workers’ compensation era, workers could be killed on the job, and they were frequently. And then you had the problem of a widow and her family that were destitute. Well, that became a problem for society as a whole. So even though companies at times resisted it, there was also an acceptance eventually that they had to address this problem, this human problem that was costing society very greatly.

Posted by White union strikes on Wed, 26 Sep 2018 17:04 | #

Again, please pardon the news source, (((Democracy Now))), and he who’d they’d present the issue through, with his spin on it - Michael Moore. However, the demographic and subject matter of their striking union remains interesting.

Posted by Jennifer Garner teaches West Virginia talk on Sat, 05 Jan 2019 21:56 | #

Jennifer Garner teaches West Virginia dialect

Posted by Karen Silkwood on Tue, 05 Mar 2019 16:26 | #

The Mystery Of Karen Silkwood

Posted by Appalachian English on Thu, 20 Jun 2019 18:12 | #

Appalachian English

Posted by doubling down in stupidity on Sun, 23 Jun 2019 17:46 | #

The Alt Right legacy identitarians (as rightists against the left) double down in their manipulated reaction to Jewish international leftism (to the detriment of the unionization which would be ethnonationalism).

Devon Stack (“Black Pilled”) is interviewed by Ramzpaul and does us the “favor” by explaining how “Jewish” the concept of unionization is - citing the example of the obnoxious movie, Norma Rae, about a Southern White woman shown labor unionization by a Jewish union organizer from New York.

He adds, “this unionization of industry is why America fell behind international competition”....

Now then, unionization of industries must be handled deftly, so that an obsolete or outmoded means of production is not intransigently unionized. Rather, we are looking to unionize our people, particularly as ethnonations.

Once again, Jewish interests take good ideas for social organization and weaponize them against Whites - and get Whites to react to these good, social organizing ideas.

One day, there will be White people who are not so stupid as to be blind to this blatant strategy.

......

You would expect Greg Johnson to be intelligent enough to recognize this but he isn’t.

.....

Nazophile Rodney Martin is at it more than ever, ...just loves rolling in the mud with Luke Ford and his Jewish anti-Left cadre.. but well, what can you expect from him.

.....

Meanwhile these old America right wingers are still whining about America being on the “wrong side” of WWII. You would think that they would be intelligent enough - but they are not - to make an inference on behalf of good relations between Europeans: While expressing wishes in 20/20 hindsight, why not wish that Hitler had not attacked 13 sovereign European nations? And had recognized that with skilled negotiation, that those nationalisms were anti semitic enough and anti-soviet enough to form a coalition of European ethnonations in cooperation with an ethnonationalist Germany (as opposed to imperialist / supremacist).

You would think that they would be intelligent enough but they are not.