Wisconsin Matters

tomdispatch.com — The spark for Wisconsin's protests came on February 11th. That was the day the Associated Press published a brief story quoting Walker as saying he would call in the National Guard to crack down on unruly workers upset that their bargaining rights were being stripped away. Labor and other left-leaning groups seized on Walker's incendiary threat, and within a week there were close to 70,000 protesters filling the streets of Madison. Six thousand miles away, February 11th was an even more momentous day. Weary but jubilant protesters on the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, and other Egyptian cities celebrated the toppling of Hosni Mubarak, the autocrat who had ruled over them for more than 30 years and amassed billions in wealth at their expense. "We have brought down the regime," cheered the protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square, the center of the Egyptian uprising. In calendar terms, the demonstrations in Wisconsin, you could say, picked up right where the Egyptians left off.

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nytimes.com — Here’s a thought: maybe Madison, Wis., isn’t Cairo after all. Maybe it’s Baghdad — specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than experience and competence. As many readers may recall, the results were spectacular — in a bad way. Instead of focusing on the urgent problems of a shattered economy and society, which would soon descend into a murderous civil war, those Bush appointees were obsessed with imposing a conservative ideological vision. Indeed, with looters still prowling the streets of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, told a Washington Post reporter that one of his top priorities was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises” — Mr. Bremer’s words, not the reporter’s — and to “wean people from the idea the state supports everything.”

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alternet.org — Union-busting gives employers the means to manipulate the labor market in order to squeeze out more profits by paying workers less than what a free and fair market would bear. It's wage theft of another kind — perfectly legal, but just as costly for working people. As the drama playing out in Wisconsin shows, union-busting is not only a weapon in the class war being waged by the richest Americans — it's also a means of waging political war on Democrats and progressive organizations.

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alternet.org — Conservative think-tanks and politicians like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker have been leading an attack on public-sector workers. The crux of their argument is that the economy is a mess and a large part of the reason is that public employees are overpaid. On closer inspection, the evidence suggests a different culprit: private-sector employers. The problem is not that public-sector pay and benefits are out of control. The problem is that pay in the private sector has been stagnant or falling, health insurance coverage has been dropping, and traditional pensions have all but disappeared.

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blog.aflcio.org — This past weekend, between 80,000 and 100,000 people gathered outside the state Capitol building in Madison, Wis. I lived in Madison for 16 years and can tell you that for that many people to gather on the Capitol grounds for several winter days is remarkable: a sea of humans stood inside and outside the Capitol building and filled the streets that make up Capitol Square. Something else is going on, too. Over and over again, protesters are raising an important discussion about democracy: in a time of important debate about how the state of Wisconsin should confront its budget deficits, there must be at least two sides to the debate. This is where the defense of the right of public employees to be in strong unions gets to the heart of democracy.

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