No more innuendos. No more backdoor assaults. No more collateral casualties. This is all out class war and they declared it.

California Gov. Arnold Schwarz-enegger has made his position clear—the enemies of the state are its workers, particularly those organized in unions. All the ballot initiatives he is backing in the Nov. 8 special election share one goal—to stick it to workers and any non-Republicans who have opposed Schwarzenegger’s corporate agenda.

Posing as a moderate Republican, Schwarzenegger is pushing an extreme Bush-like program, shamelessly attacking workers and unions, while raking in millions and millions from his corporate sponsors.

The nurses and teachers have been relentless, stalking Schwarz-enegger at every one of his million-dollar fundraisers, even and especially when he’s been doing his begging outside of California. They continuously staged media events to hammer home the financial status of those backing his "reform" agenda and contrast them with the working people he is blaming.

Schwarzenegger’s poll numbers are way down. So now the media, ever the sheep, are emboldened to finally do their job and point out how he is using dummy front organizations to hide and launder campaign contributions from his corporate pals. What we now have is not just influence peddling, but also blatant lying about it. As Watergate and Iran-Contra showed, it’s not so much the crime but the cover-up that’ll get ya.

The lines Schwarzenegger has drawn could hardly be sharper. The one initiative he had to withdraw was perhaps the worse. It would have eliminated the defined benefit pensions—guaranteed retirement checks—for state public employees such as police, firefighters, teachers, nurses and government workers. Schwarzenegger only pulled the petitions to put it on the ballot once it became clear that in their haste to stick it to all unions, their legal language was so poorly written that it also eliminated the death benefit payment to families whose police or firefighter member perished in the line of duty. The police and firefighter unions raised holy hell over that and even the California Republican Party couldn’t find a spin to defend it.

But his other initiatives made the Nov. 8 California ballot. (See page 4 for the ILWU endorsements.)

Recently, in a desperate move to electro-shock a pulse back into his campaign, Schwarzenegger officially embraced Prop 75. This is the so-called "Paycheck Protection" law that through burdensome bureaucracy would effectively take public employee unions out of the political process.

There’s nothing tentative about Schwarzenegger’s actions now. He’s fighting for his political life. But we’re fighting for our real lives.

We can win this one. We can not only beat back this insane attack—we can deal a mortal blow to the Bush/Republican agenda in California. We just got to do it.

Contact your local, your ILWU District Council and/or your local Central Labor Council to find out what you can do to terminate the Terminator.

—Steve Stallone

Editor