Below is from:
http://www.sj-r.com/article/20150525/OPINION/150529731
I applaud your story about Gov. Rauner's attempt to prop up his
wrong-headed, anti-working-families agenda by buying the votes of state
legislative Republicans with his war chest of political
contributions.
Unfortunately, Illinois is saddled with a governor whose ideas are
so preposterous and mean spirited — in addition to many of them being illegal
and unconstitutional — that this legal bribery is the closest he has come to do
doing his actual job since he took office. The rest of his time has been divided
between touring the state to campaign for illegal attacks on workers and shaking
down wealthy donors who pay to participate in business round tables and other
fundraisers.
I was disappointed in one aspect of the story, however. It repeats
Rauner's disingenuous description of his attacks on unions, as opposed to the
reality that no one can be "compelled to pay union dues." Workers who are
represented by unions but choose not to join receive all the contractual and
representational benefits of the union's negotiated contract, and they pay a
fair-share fee for those benefits.
Rauner's right-to-freeload plan would not change the current legal
requirement for unions to represent nonmembers equally. Instead, it would weigh
down unions with unfunded mandates and thus lower wages and benefits. It would
decrease worker spending, slow local economies that depend on working customers,
and decrease tax revenues. This is the real "turnaround agenda."
Ricky Baldwin
Urbana
By Kim MacCloskey
Posted May 26, 2015 at 5:43 PM
Updated May 26, 2015 at 5:46 PM
Rockford Republican Joe Sosnowski recently wrote a guest column
praising the Rockford City Council for voting to support Gov. Bruce Rauner’s
“Turnaround Agenda.” What do you expect? Republicans have been out to destroy
unions and eliminate worker and consumer rights for years. They don’t care that
this is destroying the middle class. They ought to call this the “Billionaire
Welfare Agenda,” because the obvious goal is to make billionaires like Rauner
richer while stripping more and more benefits from workers and
consumers.
Here’s what this “agenda” proposes:
1. Cut workers' compensation benefits so profits will be increased.
But Corporate America has been incredibly profitable for the last 30 years or
so, and corporations are literally sitting on trillions of dollars in cash that
they won’t invest to actually be the “job creators” they claim to
be.
2. Raise the minimum wage to $10 per
hour by 2022. That’s right, it’ll take seven years for the minimum
wage to get to $10 per hour. Had the minimum wage kept pace with inflation and
productivity, it would be $22 per hour NOW.
3. “Reform” the unemployment insurance system. It actually mentions
reducing pressures on the “job creators.” The real job creators are consumers,
who buy the products corporations sell. Corporations are not job creators. They
only want to increase profits the easy way, by cutting worker benefits. When
corporations get richer, they don’t create jobs. If they did, we would have had
millions of jobs available in the 2000s. The “job creator” mantra is a lie, just
like “trickle down” economics. Its goal is to get gullible people to support the
Republicans against their own best interests.
4. “Lawsuit reform,” which would make it harder to sue corporations
that engage in wrongful conduct or sell known dangerous products. They still
spout their “free market” propaganda that the market will fix any problems. How
many people will be killed before the market forces a corporation to stop
selling a dangerous product? With corporate-owned media and an unlimited
advertising budget, I suggest that won’t happen unless the corporation kills and
maims an awful lot of people. And if they did, what happens to a corporation
that does that? They get a fine. No one is jailed, no one is
prosecuted.
Our once great country is being taken over by billionaires like
Rauner, who just aren’t rich enough. They are being assisted by Republicans like
Sosnowski, who apparently think that if they stand next to a billionaire long
enough they might get some of that money.
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- We had it right under Republican President Eisenhower, who raised
taxes at the top (the equivalent of raising taxes today on income above a
million dollars per year) to pay our bills and build our interstate highway
system, which created millions of jobs and, in turn, created a middle class of
well-paid workers. Republicans today don’t want a middle class. They demonize
unions and other groups who tend to vote for Democrats to increase their own
power and wealth. Their policies have created the new billionaire class and
destroyed the middle class.
And they still aren’t rich enough. If Rauner and Sosnowski want to
help Illinois’ citizens, they should pass a graduated income tax and raise
Rauner’s and his cronies’ income taxes. After all, we’ve been blackmailed into
giving corporations like Caterpillar more welfare, and they move their factories
to Mexico anyway.
FDR said that when corporations become more powerful than our
government, that is Fascism. That’s what Rauner and our state Republicans want,
a Fascist society with them in charge. Is that what you want?
Kim MacCloskey, an attorney, is a Duran
resident.
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