Wisconsin GOP pushing law to spy on and seize bank accounts of unemployed

[midnight]

A law is advancing through the Wisconsin state legislature that would double the job-seeking requirements for people collecting unemployment and which would allow the government to peer into their bank accounts and freeze them if they believe the account holder has received overpayments in their benefits. According to the Wisconsin State Journal, the co-authors of the bill, which was introduced in the state Assembly and Senate on Friday, insist that the changes would be for workers’ own good.

“This is to protect the workers and lessen the burden on employers who are paying all the bills,” said state Rep. Dan Knodl (R-Germantown).

The bill also addresses the concerns of businesses which say that the state has not done enough to train judges on how to rule in disputes between companies and employees.

Democratic state Rep. Christine Sinicki (Milwaukee) said that the law is another salvo by Republicans against working people and the middle class. She also worried that Republicans would make the bill even more intrusive and draconian during the legislative mark-up process.

Knodl said the aim of the legislation is to move the state’s unemployment fund to solvency. Wisconsin is one of 31 states that had to borrow from the federal government to pay out unemployment benefits. At its highest point, Wisconsin’s debt to the federal government was nearly $1.5 billion, although in April of 2013, the amount was significantly less than that, $476 million, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/06/01/wisconsin-gop-pushing-law-to-spy-on-and-seize-bank-accounts-of-une

[DCKit]

1. Second amendment rules....

give 'em guns (automatic weapons, too boot) then fuck 'em over.

Yeah, that's going to end well.

[midnight]

2. Many jobs for the High Speed rail were lost... because they could not accept the free money? The

agency to create jobs is defunct because they gave away the money without recording where it was going..

Wisconsin jobs agency failed in tracking taxpayer money, audit find

shttp://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/wisconsin-jobs-agency-failed-in-tracking-taxpayer-money-audit-finds-9a9pl8g-205595881.html

[blkmusclmachine]

3. FASCISTS

[Squinch]

4. And Wisconsin didn't recall this administration when it had the chance.

I will never understand people.

[Jackpine Radical]

5. You don't have to understand "people" to understand what happened here.

All you have to understand is the power of big money & relentless propaganda to control political results.

The following is a foreword to Edward Bernays' Propaganda (1928), written by Noam Chomsky. The book is available for free access online at http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/bernprop.html

(Thanks to Ichingcarpenter for bringing this to my attention)

The American business community…had a problem at that time. The country was becoming formally more democratic. A lot more people were able to vote and that sort of thing. The country was becoming wealthier and more people could participate and a lot of new immigrants were coming in, and so on.


So what do you do? It's going to be harder to run things as a private club. Therefore, obviously, you have to control what people think. There had been public relation specialists but there was never a public relations industry. There was a guy hired to make Rockefeller's image look prettier and that sort of thing. But this huge public relations industry, which is a U.S. invention and a monstrous industry, came out of the first World War.

The leading figures were people in the Creel Commission. In fact, the main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of the Creel Commission. He has a book that came out right afterwards called Propaganda. The term "propaganda," incidentally, did not have negative connotations in those days. It was during the second World War that the term became taboo because it was connected with Germany, and all those bad things.


But in this period, the term propaganda just meant information or something like that. So he wrote a book called Propaganda around 1925, and it starts off by saying he is applying the lessons of the first World War. The propaganda system of the first World War and this commission that he was part of showed, he says, it is possible to "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies." These new techniques of regimentation of minds, he said, had to be used by the intelligent minorities in order to make sure that the slobs stay on the right course. We can do it now because we have these new techniques.


This is the main manual of the public relations industry. Bernays is kind of the guru. He was an authentic Roosevelt/Kennedy liberal. He also engineered the public relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup which overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala.

[midnight]

6. Public Relations units telling us what to think and why.... Lots of info. here... I just

skimmed through it and will save for reading later... thank you and Ichingcarpenter!