We Are All Wisconsinites Now

thenation.com — It was, paradoxically, at once a significant loss for the protest movement in Wisconsin and a measure of its extraordinary success that Governor Scott Walker and his Republican allies had to resort to legislative legerdemain to pass their unpopular unionbusting measure on March 10. By separating the attack on collective bargaining from the budget bill, they ensured its passage, but they also stripped the veneer off their own agenda: this was never about budgets, and always about class war. As Michael Moore put it in his rousing speech to the crowd of tens of thousands who had assembled a few days before in Madison, “America is not broke…. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It’s just that it’s not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and portfolios of the über-rich.” To be frank, this is a war working people have been losing for decades without much of a fight. But the pro-worker movement seems at last to have something resembling a battle plan.

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