WHY DO WE ORGANIZE?

As we approach the fall of the year when budget hearings are about to get underway, it behooves our state employees to pay close attention to what the budget recommendations from the LBO Committee will be.  Over the last two years, the governor has been cutting state budgets with no regard for the ability of agencies to fulfill their missions.  There are fundamental services that are the duty of the public sector to provide.  For instance, running prisons, was once a longstanding function of the state.  By privatizing this function out has raised the possibility of incompetent care and profits to corporate executives and shareholders, most of whom live and spend monies out of state, paid for by Mississippi taxpayers.

 

During the 2017 legislative session, there was an attempted power-grab by the governor to introduce legislation, empowering him to gain more control over state government.  During the session, Gov. Bryant crafted legislation to concede control of MDMH, Rehabilitations, and MSDH to him, adding to the other nine agencies under his control. These efforts were defeated with bi-partisan support, gendered up by MASECWA, and their members’ coalitions.  Cutting government has been the rallying cry among most republicans.  While reading the book, “The Fox in the Henhouse, How Privatization Threatens Democracy” by Si Khan and Elizabeth Minnich,” the efforts of the super-majority leadership in MS as well as the nation, is spelled out in the words of Grover Norquist.  Grover Norquist is considered the brain behind the presidency of George W. Bush.  In an interview with El Mundo, a Spanish newspaper in 2004, he stated that the Democratic Party will be forever doomed when we take control of the legislative and the executive branch and reinforce control over the judicial branch.  No truer words have ever been spoken because when you limit the ability of the people to initiate lawsuits against corporations, accelerate the decline of the unions, cut funding to groups of public employees, like teachers, you then destroy any descending views and doom the Democratic Party.  At this time, the majority-party will move the welfare state toward a private system to include pensions and healthcare.

 

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH:

We as public employees, must educate, organize and mobilize against these privatizing foxes, the greatest danger to democracy, hungrily feeding off the public sector while deploying the rhetoric of what is best for the hens.  We’ve witnessed this first hand in the recent herculean fight-back by Nissan to persuade its workers that unionization and having a voice at the table wasn’t in their best interest.

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