Maybe the Time Has Finally Come

For years I have been crossing my fingers that the American populace would wake up to what is going on in this nation. Like so many other activists, I have been crestfallen as my fellow citizens have lined up to support imperialistic war after imperialistic war. They have cheered the war on the illegal immigrants who do the work THEY don't want to do and the war against gays, lesbians, Muslims and anyone else who does not fit their stereotypical vision of the "true" American.

Many of these same people have reacted ambivalently to the massive bailouts of corporations to big to fail. They may moan a bit about these huge taxpayer giveaways, but then they turned around to vote for candidates who -- in various shapes and forms -- want to increase the transfer of wealth from the sort of haves to the egregiously rich.

Slowly, however, people are waking up as several state governments try to cripple the middle class by attacking public sector union workers.

Emboldened by November’s election results, corporations and their right-wing allies have launched what they hope will be their final offensive against America’s unions. Their immediate target is government workers’ unions. While New Jersey’s Republican Governor Chris Christie has gained national fame by beating up on public school teachers, the threat to unionized workers is playing out in all fifty states, to the drumbeat in the media about states going broke because of government workers’ wages, pensions and benefits. By late January, with the swearing-in ceremonies complete in the twenty-one states where Republicans have a “trifecta,” controlling the governor’s office and both statehouses, hundreds of bills had been introduced seeking to hem in unions if not ban them altogether. On February 11, Wisconsin’s new Republican Governor Scott Walker made what amounts to a declaration of all-out war on public sector workers in his historically progressive state, moving to deprive them of the very right to bargain collectively on matters essential to their economic security.

Walker’s gambit has rightly elicited outrage, but considering the breadth of the attack unions are facing nationally, it is only the tip of the iceberg...

As Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive sees it, ground zero for these efforts begin in Madison, Wisconsin.

What glory it is to be in Madison, Wisconsin, this week, where the people of this state have risen up in revolt against the Neanderthal Republicans who are trying to bust public sector unions and inflict massive harm on their workers.

It’s not about balancing a budget. It’s about destroying unions as a political and economic force. That’s why the bill says every public sector union would have to re-certify every year, and why it says that no employer could deduct union dues from paychecks. Neither of those things has anything to do with saving a dime of Wisconsin taxpayer money.

This is ground zero in the fight back, and Wisconsinites are engaging in the closest thing to a general strike that I’ve ever seen in my lifetime...

Much of what is transpiring in Wisconsin has less to do with balancing a state budget and far more to do with dealing a death blow to the union movement!!

The red herring trotted out again and again is that government workers are grossly overpaid as compared to their private sector counterparts. Needless to say, this assertion isn't necessarily true.

Even if state and local government employees are not responsible for the budgetary problems that emerged out of the recession, are they nevertheless receiving bloated wage and benefits packages that are holding back the recovery? Since the recession began, there has been a steady stream of media stories making such claims. One widely cited 2009 Forbes cover article reported, “State and local government workers get paid an average of $25.30 an hour, which is 33 percent higher than the private sector’s $19…. Throw in pensions and other benefits and the gap widens to 42 percent.”

What figures such as these fail to reflect is that state and local government workers are older and substantially better educated than private-sector workers. Forbes is therefore comparing apples and oranges. As John Schmitt of the Center for Economic Policy Research recently showed, when state and local government employees are matched against private sector workers of the same age and educational levels, the public workers earn, on average, about 4 percent less than their private counterparts. Moreover, the results of Schmitt’s apples-to-apples comparison are fully consistent with numerous studies examining this same question over the past twenty years. One has to suspect that the pundits who have overlooked these basic findings have chosen not to look...

But as has been reported by even the mainstream media, tens of thousands of union workers, students and citizens have descended on Wisconsin's state capitol in protest. If the Republican-controlled legislature moves forward on the bill as expected, don't be surprised if the unions call for and implement something akin to a general strike.

If that happens, things really will get interesting.