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That am I thankful for this year? I am thankful the conservative movement has stopped trying to pretend to be something that they are not.

Instead of masquerading as “compassionate conservatives” who want “clear skies,” “personal retirement accounts,” protect Medicare” and “tax relief” for all, today’s conservative just lays it on the table:

Tax the poor. Deregulate the rich. Drill Baby Drill. Filibuster the jobs bills. And to hell with Social Security and Medicare.

Before we enter the sweeps month of the “GOP 2012″ reality TV show — when the crazy will be turned up to 11 — let’s pause before Thanksgiving, and give thanks for the many wonderful crazy moments conservatives have shared with us so far this year, so we all know exactly what conservatives would do to America if given the chance.

“So Be It.” One month into his speakership, John Boehner lets us know — with inaccurate numbers, of course, — what he feels about having our government help create jobs: “In the last two years, under President Obama, the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs. If some of those jobs are lost, so be it. We’re broke.”

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Every other Wednesday evening for the past few years I’ve been offering commentary on a spritely show on public radio called Marketplace. On alternative Wednesdays David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, has been airing his views.

This past Wednesday, Frum called it quits. He explained to the show’s host, Kai Risdal, that he could no longer represent Republican views.

I think that there’s a kind of expectation that when you do it that you represent the broad point of view of your half of the political spectrum. And although I consider myself a conservative and a Republican, and I think that the right-hand side of the spectrum has the better answers for the long-term growth of economy — low taxes, restrained government, less regulation — it’s pretty clear that facing the immediate crisis — very intense crisis — I’m just not representing the view of most people who call themselves Republicans and conservatives these days…. And it’s a service to the radio audience if they want to hear people explaining effectively why one of the two great parties takes the view that it does — it needs to have somebody who agrees with that great party.

I respect David’s decision but I disagree with his understanding of his job on Marketplace. And I find his decision to leave a sad commentary (no pun intended) on what’s happening to public discourse in America.

Why exactly was it necessary for David Frum to “represent” the views of conservative Republicans? (more…)

The battles against anti-worker laws across the country have turned to the ballot boxes and courtrooms. As voters go to the polls next week in high profile recall elections in Wisconsin, workers in other states and their lawyers will argue before judges that some anti-worker laws should be struck down.  

In New Jersey, Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 1033 filed a lawsuit this week over the failure by Gov. Chris Christie to make payments to the state’s pension funds. The suit claims that the failure by Christie and his predecessors to make payments to the funds violated a constitutional prohibition against the “impairment of contracts” a lawyer for the union said.

Working men and women also are suing to stop new laws in Idaho. One would prohibit project labor agreements (PLAs). These pre-hire agreements between labor and management require all construction jobs to be filled by local workers, include diversity requirements, establish wages and work rules covering overtime, working hours and dispute resolution and ensure that safety guidelines on the job site are enforced. They protect taxpayers by eliminating costly delays due to labor conflicts or shortages of skilled workers

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By Isaiah J. Poole
Executive editor of the blog site OurFuture.org

Just in time for Easter, the movie version of “Atlas Shrugged” is poised to be shown in an expanding number of theaters. And, as Ayn Rand would be the first to admit, you could not set up a sharper clash of world views.

There is Jesus Christ, who, the apostle Paul writes, “died for the ungodly.” Then there is the atheist Rand—”by all accounts … one of the central intellectual and cultural inspirations for the base of the Republican Party,” Think Progress writes this week—who once told Alvin Toffler in a Playboy magazine interview that  ”nothing could make me more indignant” than the idea of a “man of perfect virtue” dying for the ungodly, “the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the non-ideal.”

Rand is very clear: walking in the path of Christ and walking in the path of “Atlas Shrugged” hero John Galt will take you to two very different places. Which ought to give pause to political leaders who claim to embrace the values of Christ but adopt the politics of Rand.

Before Congress went on its Easter recess, the House of Representatives passed a 2012 federal budget blueprint drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who credits Rand for inspiring him into entering politics, and who reportedly encourages his staff members to read “Atlas Shrugged.” The budget unabashedly bears the trademarks of Rand’s thinking: its glorification of individualism and private enterprise not as a companion to the collective pursuit of the common good but as a replacement for it; the gradual elimination of anything that compels the haves to share with the have-nots; the presumption that have-nots are “moochers” or “looters” and must be treated accordingly.

It is this view of how America should work that is at the root of such schemes as turning Medicare into weakly subsidized private insurance, shifting increasing health care costs onto seniors as well as the burden of negotiating a predatory insurance market. (more…)

During the general election campaign last fall, conservatives and right-wingers promised to create jobs. Now, however, just a few months later, they want to cut services essential to working Americans and “stop talking about jobs.”

By Leo W. Gerard
United Steelworkers International President

The nightmare for far too many is Cyborgs. The public fears HAL, the 2001 Space Odyssey computer that killed astronauts rather than forfeit its objective.

So terrified of the sentient machine, citizens overlook the allegory. The soft-spoken, reasonable-sounding HAL behaves exactly like a greed-driven, multi-national corporation. The corporate mission is profit. With 29 workers massacred in a Massey mine explosion and 11 slain in the BP oil rig explosion in just one month last year, greedy corporations have shown they’re willing to kill rather than forfeit their profit objective.

In America, the UK and Europe, the entities that should be feared — greedy corporations — are pulling politicians’ strings. Reckless speculation by multi-national financial corporations took down the world economy, creating the worst recession since the Great Depression. Governments – in the UK, Europe and America – used worker tax dollars to bail out the banks. Now those big banks are granting outsized bonuses and pay packages to their executives while demanding that governments balance recession-ruined budgets with cuts to social services, education, pay and pensions for government workers and worker’s rights to collectively bargaining for better lives.

Workers, students and pensioners in the UK and Europe have protested these measures for a year, from general strikes in Greece to national strikes in France. In the U.K. students, in the largest numbers since the 1960s, protested education fee increases. Last weekend, the U.K.’s Trades Union Congress (TUC) organized the March for the Alternative in which a quarter million demonstrators walked for five hours in London to protest austerity imposed on workers while corporations get breaks.

The diamond-crusted rich on both sides of the Atlantic have determined that workers and the vulnerable will pay the consequences of the bankster-caused recession. And they’re exploiting the financial crisis to strip workers of collective bargaining rights, preventing them from ever regaining what they’ve lost.

That is what’s going on in Wisconsin — and in a half dozen other American states where right-wing legislatures and governors are passing or pressing for legislation decimating workers’ rights to collectively bargain, even after workers accepted pay cuts to help balance budgets.

The disingenuousness of these right-wing governors in blaming public employees is clear. First of all, many of the state leaders granted huge tax breaks to corporations, lowering the states’ anticipated revenues, then demanded state workers bear the brunt of filling budget deficits.

Second, many of these governors didn’t stop at demanding public workers accept pay cuts. They also insisted on terminating workers’ rights to bargain for better pay, benefits and working conditions in the future. In addition, these right-wingers are meddling in the relationship between private sector unions and corporations. They want to forbid private employers from subtracting union dues from paychecks and remitting the money to the union. And they want to pass legislation intended to bankrupt unions and to prevent them from supporting progressive candidates who would treat workers fairly and protect their rights.

This is how it played out in Wisconsin: The governor, right-winger Scott Walker, gave corporations more than $100 million in tax cuts then decreed that public workers, such as teachers, nurses and librarians, take wage and benefit concessions. And Walker threatened to send out the National Guard, a state-run militia despite the name, to quell protests. This raised the specter of the May 4, 1970 massacre at Kent State when Ohio National Guardsmen called out by the governor gunned down unarmed students protesting the Vietnam War.

Contrary to Walker’s expectations, his threat energized opposition. Repeatedly, tens of thousands of workers, students, retirees, environmentalists, religious leaders and children poured into the streets and occupied the state capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin to protest the right-wingers’ plan.

Walker’s proposal passed in the state Assembly and needed a vote in the state Senate before it could get to his desk for final signature. To prevent a quorum needed to vote on the measure, all 14 Democratic senators left the state. They became known as the “Fab 14” as they remained holed up in hotels in Illinois for weeks, trying to negotiate a less draconian measure with the governor.

Although public opinion polls showed 60 percent of Wisconsin citizens opposed cutting collective bargaining rights, although workers already had accepted the pay reductions Gov. Walker had contended were vital to balance the budget, although protestors occupied the capitol building with a sit-in and sleep-in for weeks, the right wingers devised a scheme, in a secret meeting behind doors locked to the public, to vote without a quorum to deny government workers their collective bargaining rights.

In the midst of the dispute, Gov. Walker revealed his puppet masters – the Koch brothers, owners of the Georgia-Pacific paper company, with plants in the United States and the U.K. While contending he had no time to talk to progressive leaders or union officials about his union-busting legislation, Gov. Walker jumped on the phone for 20 minutes when told the caller was billionaire David Koch. The billionaire was Walker’s second largest campaign contributor; he provided $1 million to a fund to attack Walker’s opponent, and he bankrolls the right-wing’s right-wing, the Tea Party.

Events in some other countries show it doesn’t have to be this way. Brazil just passed a law giving unions a director’s seat on each board of a state-owned company. And in Australia, progressive labor legislation has enabled unions to increase membership by 20 percent in the past two years.
There are some signs of success in U.S. workers’ struggle to stop the corporate-backed right-wing campaigns. A Wisconsin judge has halted implementation of the union-busting measure because the way conservatives passed it appears illegal. And progressives are working to recall – or remove from office – eight right-wing Wisconsin senators who voted against worker rights. They’ve pledged to mount a recall campaign against Gov. Walker as soon as it’s legally possible.

In addition, labor activists and their supports have derailed proposed anti-union legislation in Indiana and Missouri.

That’s an indication of what coordinated coalitions of citizen protesters can do. That’s an indication that organized workers with their allies can take on global capital and win.

The difference between HAL and corporations is that HAL is fictional while greedy multi-national corporations are real threats.  In the end, a human defeated HAL. In democracies, workers united with their allies can take on corporations and win as well.

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Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute.  He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union.

By George Lakoff
Author, “The Political Mind,” “Moral Politics,” “Don’t Think of an Elephant!”

The Wisconsin protests are about much more than budgets and unions. As I observed in “What Conservatives Really Want,” the conservative story about budget deficits is a ruse to turn the country conservative in every area. Karl Rove and Shep Smith have made it clear on Fox: If the Wisconsin plan to kill the public employees’ unions succeeds, then there will be little union money in the future to support democratic candidates. Conservatives will be effectively unopposed in raising campaign funding in most elections, including the presidential elections. This will mean a thoroughly conservative America in every issue area.

The media, with few exceptions, is failing to get at the deeper issues.

Let’s start with the case of the Lincoln legislators. As is well known about Lincoln, and as the Political Wire reports,

On December 5, 1840, Democrats “proposed an early adjournment, knowing this would bring a speedy end to the State Bank. The Whigs tried to counter by leaving the capitol building before the vote, but the doors were locked. That’s when Lincoln made his move. He headed for the second story, opened a window and jumped to the ground!”

Lincoln would be, and we all should be, proud that the Wisconsin state senators have courageously crossed the state line to Illinois to avoid a quorum in Wisconsin that would have a disastrous effect, not only on Wisconsin, but on America for the indefinite future. (more…)

By Terrance Heath
Online Producer, Campaign for America’s Future

Whatever you may think of him, you’ve got to give Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) credit. He said he would present his own budget, and now he’s done it. He’s even taken to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to defend it, and challenge Republicans and Democrats to: find other places in the budget where cuts can be made, to replace particular programs; consider whether it is worth “borrowing billions from foreign nations,” to fund programs “that could be administered better at the state and local level, or even taken over by the private sector.”

Paul’s challenge underscores the dishonesty of his budget, as well as those proposed by other conservatives. Paul and other conservatives wear their proposed budget as badges of honor, but they lack the courage to state clearly the human impact of their budget cuts, and the candor to confess the unreality of their proposals.

Dr. Paul budgets with a meat cleaver, hacking some government agencies out of existence. Others are all but eliminated, and simply sliced within an inch of their lives. A few more are left on life support (for now) and in the care of the agencies that still stand (for now.) (more…)

By Bill Scher
Executive editor of LiberalOasis.com

It’s increasingly clear that Republican leaders are bluffing when they threaten to destroy the full faith and credit of the American government by allowing the debt ceiling to be shattered unless draconian budget cuts are made.

And a clear bluff is a bad bluff. There is no need to concede to any of their demands to protect American credit and the global economy.

Last year, the now-Speaker John Boehner said Republicans would have to deal with the debt ceiling like “adults.”

And this week, the House Budget Chair Paul Ryan admitted that: “You can’t not raise the debt ceiling. Default is the unworkable solution.”

Leading conservative strategist William Kristol called Rep. Michelle Bachmann’s petition to break the debt ceiling
“silly” and “irresponsible.”

Most notably, conservative pundit and strategist Charles Krauthammer flat out admitted the threat is a bluff, on Fox News: (more…)

By Bill Scher
Executive editor of LiberalOasis.com

Don’t let 30,000 Delaware teabaggers fool you. America has not shifted to the right.

The latest New York Times/CBS poll shows that whatever frustrations votes have with the President and Congress, it has not prompted a shift towards anti-government conservatism.

The poll asked if “Barack Obama has expanded the role of government too much, not enough, or about the right amount?”

Only 37% said government has been expanded “too much.” While 56% said government has been expanded “the right amount” or “not enough.”

Similarly, only 34% of respondents said the “stimulus package” was “too large.” The rest of respondents were split between “about right” and “not large enough.”

That is in line with the basic ideological composition of the nation, which has barely budged in years. This poll has 36% of Americans describing themselves as “conservative,” 40% saying “moderate” and 19% “liberal.” (more…)