Wisconsin Struggle Is A Teachable Moment: America Ain't
Broke
Mar 9, 2011
12:58 pm
By Roger Bybee
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/7032/promising_signs_emerge_but_wisconsin_must_hang_tough/

MILWAUKEE--Public opinion in Wisconsin over collective
bargaining rights continues to turn more strongly
against Gov. Scott Walker's effort to crush
public-sector unions here. The new Republican governor's
scheme for a Reaganesque PATCO-destroying example has
instead produced a massive "blowback.

Wisconsinites have come to recognize that Walker's
campaign against public-sector unions is just one part
of a larger plan to essentially repeal all 20th century
reforms. Walker isn't just after workers' rights, but
also the environmental protections, quality public
education for all, women's rights, privatization of the
highly-esteemed University of Wisconsin-Madison and fair
taxation of corporations and the rich. 

However, crucial work remains: Activists must go beyond
erecting a massive defensive barrier against the Right's
onslaught to develop a set of coherent themes that can
revitalize a powerful, independent grassroots movement
among labor and its allies. This would also provide
direction to a Democratic Party that has been drifting
aimlessly in recent years. 

The very first task is shoring up the 14 fugitive
Democratic state senators whose absence deprives Walkers
and the GOP of a certain victory against public-sector
unions. They need to be encouraged from Wisconsin and
across the country that the potential for a victory over
the anti-union provisions looks promising--if they stay
strong.

The 14 Democratic runaway senators, taking refuge in
Illinois, are holding firm so far, despite clumsy
efforts by Walker and his allies to divide them. But
don't forget, the Democrats, when it comes to hanging
tough and negotiating hard, have a deplorable role model
in Barack Obama. Obama's ingrained tendency is to agree
to every key Republican assumption and concede on vital
issues even before he reaches the bargaining table. We
have good reason to fear that this has become an
acceptable strategy for Democrats, allowing them to crow
about bipartisan deals--even if they gave away the store.

Fortunately, Gov. Walker is petulantly asserting that he
won't return to the bargaining table because he claims
the Democrats gave him mixed signals on what they would
accept. This stance serves to further isolate Walker.
Fully 65% of Wisconsinites believe that Walker should
compromise, according to a poll by the far-Right
Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. But we need to keep
in mind that labor has already given up everything it
can, and that the right to unionize is not negotiable.

RECALL EFFORT CONTINUES, AS WALKER BUDGET CREATES MORE
ENEMIES

The hundreds of thousands of pro-union protesters at the
State Capitol in Madison have begun to translate their
outrage into very focused and high-energy efforts to
recall 8 of the 19 Republicans in the State Senate, 18
of whom are supporting the anti-union provisions.

For example, in the district just north of where I live,
hundreds of people lined up around the corner this past
Saturday to get into a meeting to chart out the recall
of State Sen. Alberta Darling, who has cynically played
the role of Republican "moderate" while voting with her
party whenever the chips were down.

In a single weekend, the recall campaign gathered 25% of
the signatures that will be needed by May 1 to force a
recall election for Darling. Even at an upper-middle
class suburban shopping strip, the recall petitioners
were greeted enthusiastically. In contrast, right-wing
efforts to recall Democrats have drawn gatherings of 20
to 40 people scattered across otherwise vacant
auditoriums as shown on local TV news programs that
refrained from providing estimates of the pathetic
numbers.

Meanwhile, as if their troubles weren't deep enough,
Walker and the Right have been mass-producing more
enemies.

His complete budget proposal released last week,
premised on shielding the super-rich and corporations
(as previously noted, about 62% of corporations with
revenues of $100 million or more pay nothing in state
corporate income taxes) from any tax increases, contains
$900 million in cuts to public education, vast cuts to
cities and municipalities, privatization of the
Univeristy of Wisconsin-Madison, the removal of
recycling programs in defiance of state law, and cuts
off all funding for family planning and preventive
healthcare for women's reproductive systems, and also
encourages insurers to exclude prescription birth
control from their drug plans.

So local public officials, school administrators and
school board members, university administrators and
faculties, parents of schoolkids, environmentalists,
healthcare professionals, and women--if not previously
infuriated by Walker--are certainly getting fired up now.

RIGHT LOSING MESSAGE BATTLE

The Right, which had been licking its chops a few weeks
back at the prospect of a quick and decisive victory, is
feeling rudderless, powerless and is lashing out
blindly. As UW-Madison political scientist Ken Goldstein
observed with some understatement, "He's [Walker] not
winning the message battle at this point."

So Walker is left to sputtering about "paid,
professional protesters" coming into the state.
Similarly, Republican State Sen. Glenn Grothmann called
the demonstrators "slobs" in a futile attempt to
marginalize them as long-haired 1960s hippies, a myth
belied by the constant TV images of neatly-dressed burly
Middle American firefighters, cops, truck drivers, and
fashionably-dressed teachers, nurses and librarians who
have made up the huge crowds in Madison. 

These kind of attacks not only strengthen the resolve of
the pro-union protesters, but further indicate how
profound out of touch the Republicans are.

On March 12, Midwestern farmers are planning to travel
to Madison for a "tractor-cade" around the State Capitol
to coincide with one of the biggest rallies held thus
far. The entrance of family farmers into the pro-labor
coalition seems like a flash-back from the 1930s when
the Depression produced alliances of dirt-poor farmers
and urban workers in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and other
Midwestern states.

This further diversifies an incredibly broad base of
support that extends from Catholic archbishops to the
Super-Bowl winning Green Bay Packers.

TEACHING PUBLIC THE BIG PICTURE: AMERICA IS NOT BROKE

All good, so far. But I have some concerns over the long
haul.

Labor activists have successfully persuaded most
Wisconsin citizens that public employees are not the
cause of the $3.6 billion budget shortfall, that public
workers did not take away their shrinking health and
pension benefits,  and that the budget cannot be
balanced by depriving public workers of their union
rights.

We have succeeded in persuading the majority that the
Wisconsin budget shortfall is being handled with a
chainsaw by Scott Walker, but most people are not yet
fully seeing the big picture. A majority of Wisconsin
still accepts the notion that the budget crisis is deep
and necessitates cuts in services and inftrastructure,
as well as some reductions in public workers' wages and
benefits.

Filmmaker Michael Moore boldly sketched out the larger
backdrop of the Wisconsin battle last Saturday at the
Capitol when he stressed, "America is not broke." The
problem, he explained, is that income and wealth are so
intensely concentrated at the top. Working people and
the poor afford to spend to get the economic recovery
really rolling, and corporations and the banks refuse to
spend on U.S. job creation, preferring either to sit on
their $2 trillion in reserves or invest in low-wage
nations like Mexico, China and India.

Our crisis is not one of public over-spending, but
largely the result of state and national treasuries
being deprived of tax revenues by corporations and the
super-rich taking advantage of every tax break, subsidy,
and tax haven imaginable.

TIME FOR BOLDNESS

At the same time, the ongoing recession caused by the
Wall Street meltdown--whose perpetrators have all
recovered nicely, with not a single wrong-doer going to
jail--reduces the incomes of working people, harms small
businesses, and deprives the state of tax revenue

The present moment thus provides a very unique
opportunity to popularize that message and begin to turn
around labor's light both in Wisconsin and nationally.
If we are bold and tough enough, it also gives us an
unexpected chance to seize victory from the jaws of a
devastating defeat that would be felt across the nation

____________________________________________

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