We Got a Thing We Call the Madison Blues

I never thought I'd see a class of people long oppressed and taken for granted rise up, take over a public space in their capital city, and declare that they've had enough abuse and that they're not going to take anymore.

Protesters in Egypt? No, public employees in Wisconsin!

Facing a $3.6 billion budget deficit, Republican governor Scott Walker needs to cut costs, so in order to facilitate his task, he's decided to run roughshod over the state's public employees - teachers firefighters, you know, people like you and me (well, you, anyway) - by having them pay 50 percent more for their pensions and 12 percent more for health insurance. Oh yeah, and he wants to eliminate the right of public employee unions to engage in collective bargaining, theoretically allowing him to hold all the cards in dealing with the workers.

Walker's heavy-handed tactics have brought public employees from across the state into the capital, Madison, where they have demonstrated outside of and inside the state Capitol building. Tommy Thompson, at his most extreme in his efforts at welfare reform and school choice in his fourteen years has governor, never perpetrated the kind of backlash that Scott Walker has after only a month and change in office.

Reports of the demonstrations - from Fox News, mostly - spoke of civil unrest, but Ed Schultz went to Madison for himself and saw only Middle America types peacefully chanting slogans and carrying homemade signs demanding that Walker allow collective bargaining to resolve a budget issue that some observers believe is less serious than the state's Republicans insist. Although anyone has a right to be skeptical when Wisconsin public employees say it's not about the money (H.L. Mencken famously said that when someone says it's not about money, it's about money), many of them are happy to discuss pension and health insurance issues with Walker - but not in bad faith and with their own rights gutted to the point of irrelevance. Wisconsin Senate Democrats are siding with the people, having fled the state to avoid voting on Walker's proposal and to prevent a quorum in a Republican-controlled chamber.

Domestic policy in the United States has placed a greater economic burden on workers for thirty years, and people are finally beginning to rise against the status quo. I don't know how long Wisconsin public employees plan to hold out in Madison, but they're inspiring others to take action elsewhere; similar protests have sprung up in Ohio against the similar anti-union proposals of the similarly reactionary Republican governor John Kasich. And in Florida, noted Medicare ripoff artist Rick Scott, having sunk Alex Sink in the 2010 gubernatorial election, has indicated a desire to torpedo public employees there.

How insensitive are these guys? Kasich betrayed his attitudes toward public workers by calling a Columbus policeman who gave him a traffic ticket in 2008 an idiot. (He did so in remarks to, believe it or else, public employees - Ohio Environmental Protection Agency workers. Kasich has since apologized.) And Scott compared budget cutting to cleaning out an attic.

A lot of people are surprised, though, that Wisconsin is where the backlash against reactionary Republican labor policy has started. I don't know why. Yes, Wisconsin is where the Republican party was founded. And yes, Wisconsin did go overwhelmingly Republican in last year's elections, and the state has produced right-wingers like Joseph McCarthy as well as Thompson and Walker. But it's also the state where the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union was founded. It's the state of Gaylord Nelson, the U.S. Senator who founded Earth Day; of William Proxmire, who served with Nelson in the U.S. Senate and fought against government waste and for campaign finance reform, and; of Russell Feingold, who helped continue the fight for campaign finance reform in the Senate and continues the fight for liberal causes with his new group Progressives United.

Wisconsin is also the home of Robert LaFollette, the early-twentieth-century governor and U.S. Senator who championed, among other things, municipal home rule, open government, the minimum wage, non-partisan elections, the open primary system, and progressive taxation . . . and who also signed the first state worker's compensation bill in the country into law. I think LaFollette would have been pleased with what's going on in his home state right now.