The excuse that Wisconsin was broke and taking the right to collective bargaining from public employees was just false.
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.”
Rallies and teach-ins in hundreds of cities. Not one cash-sucking, carbon-spewing, mass demonstration in D.C. or New York that will be soon forgotten, but a grassroots effort that can inspire and energize millions. And, instead of being over when the protesters drive or fly back home, this can lay the groundwork for a continual, local, decentralized, nationally networked movement whose organizing goes way beyond electing better leaders (although that remains a key element of any practical effort at fighting the rightist juggernaut and its enablers).
Wisconsin could have avoided this financial crisis if they had not given away the store; the Republican way…that everlasting idea to give to the rich and take from the poor because somehow, by some miraculous fluke it will percolate down to the majority of the people. At work here, once more is that TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS concept that Reagan championed…it didn’t work then and it will not work now.
But we should all be thankful to Governor Walker. The Labor Movement before all this was at best anemic, in some places it was on life support. Unions have seen a steady decline in the past decades. Once more it was Reagan who began the erosion, the attack on unions that has culminated in a nation-wide effort to decimate them altogether. So that if you had any doubts…now there exists the enthusiasm, the public support and a renaissance of Labor Unions is sweeping across America as Republicans veer more and more to the right and try to solidify their PLUTOCRACY.
