In Madison, Wis., the Republican governor and the Republican-controlled legislature are seeking to strip state workers of the ability to collectively bargain. More than balancing the Wisconsin budget, it is the next calculated political move to weaken the power of middle class and working people.
Last year, the five conservative justices of the U.S. Supreme Court (Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas), in a calculated act of judicial activism, set this process in motion. In the Citizens United case, these five justices changed a century of legal precedent allowing corporations and labor unions to give unlimited sums of money in elections.
The next step is to weaken public unions in order to weaken the power of middle class and working people to organize, to protect their rights.
People in the private sector have largely lost their ability to organize and now have lower wages. The rich and powerful are now manipulating people, through divide-and-conquer tactics, turning middle class and working people against one another, through envy of wages and benefits.
The wealthy can now influence elections to bring into office people who make laws that result in working, middle class, and small business people having a lower standard of living, while the super rich, the large banks, and large corporations gain wealth.
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It is the next step in turning the United States into a plutocracy, with liberty and justice only for the wealthy few.
Greg Hagen
Rochester
