“Wisconsin is the model”: Grover Norquist’s Tea Party scheme to crush his union enemies

[DonViejo]

At CPAC panel, RNC Chair Priebus touts "total and complete unity" between GOP, Tea Party, and Glenn Beck acolytes

JOSH EIDELSON

“How did we do it in Wisconsin?” RNC Chair Reince Priebus asked Saturday morning. “The simplest way I can tell you is we had total and complete unity between the state party, quite frankly, Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party groups, the Grandsons of Liberty. The [Glenn Beck-instigated] 9/12ers were involved. It was a total and complete agreement that nobody cared who got the credit, that everyone was going to run down the tracks together.”

Priebus made his comments on a Saturday morning CPAC panel addressing how conservatives could fight and defeat organized labor state by state. Moderator Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, opened the panel by suggesting that conservatives had been neglecting the union issue in recent years out of a mistaken sense that private sector union demise was inevitable, and that public sector union decline was impossible.

Rather, argued Norquist, a raft of National Labor Relations Board appointments by Obama – who he said had made a strategic error by prioritizing Obamacare over a pro-union “card check” bill – would make this “the time for the other team to cheat” and hike private sector unionization. (Pro-labor scholars have questioned how much impact proposed rules from the NLRB, a body which lacked a quorum for some stretches of Obama’s presidency, will have on union efforts.) Meanwhile, said Norquist, Republican victories in the states offered a chance to “fix a lot of the abuses that we thought we’d have to live with” in the public sector. “Wisconsin,” Norquist later told the crowd, “is the model.”

Scott Walker’s 2011 “budget repair” law, passed amid a high-profile multi-week protest occupation of the state capitol, severely reduced the right of public employees to collectively bargain, effectively imposed public sector “Right to Work,” and required regular “re-certification” elections among employees on whether to retain their now-narrowed form of union recognition.

more
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/08/wisconsin_is_the_model_grover_norquists_tea_party_scheme_to_crush_his_union_enemies/

[Blue Owl]

1. Take one google-eyed homonculus...

Add a corrupt election board, throw in some dirty out-of-state Koch money, and presto! There you have it.

[louis-t]

2. How does anyone who makes less than $200,000 a year vote for these bastards?

[socialist_n_TN]

3. This actually is good to know.......

I certainly hope that organized labor understands this and prepares for it in the next place it's tried. And I DON'T mean recall elections. I'm talking about militant labor actions in both the public and private sector and involving communities as well as the unions themselves. Rotating strikes, culminating in a general action up to and including an indefinite general strike.