I wish I could say I did not know this was going to happen. I really wish I had been
wrong. I really wish that my theory that the power of Mass Protests to significantly affect political realities is expirational had been proven wrong. I wish that mass protests still had the power to convince politicians they represented overwhelming political force and therefore were an effective way for “the people” to curtail the excesses of corporate political power.
But I wasn’t wrong. Tonight Gov. Scott Walker used a parlimentary tactic to pass the major “union stripping” portions of his budget reform as a separate bill through the Wisconsin Senate. It is almost guaranteed to pass the lower Wisconsin house and be signed into law. By separating the union-stripping portions from the budget bill, they were able to bypass the need for a quorum… and therefore bypass the Democratic senators holed up in Rockford IL.
The protests exposed the Governor’s motives, and raised the issue as a national issue. The protests might have awakened the democratic base. What the protests did not to was stop the governor from stripping unions of their barganing rights…
There are times I wish I was wrong.
Yours in faith,
Rev. David
It’s about time for a left wing populist uprising.
Walker in Wisconsin is on a power trip to gain favor among Republicans for higher political office (VP in 2012?).
Hard to say at this point what the options are for the working families who will be affected…and they will be affected and in my humble opinion these moves to crush the labor movement, if they are successful will take our middle class status down many more notches…while the ‘fat cats’ survive and get away with more and more.
The next step for Walker will be privatizing State functions. Guess who will be getting some of the contracts? Koch brothers by any chance?
I wish you had been wrong, too, my friend. On the other hand, he has completely overplayed his hand now. Mass protests continue – and recall petitions are being circulated. We shall see…
I hope Walker has won the battle and will lose the war–there will be more battles, and the union movement, and unions, despite what some people say, have not lost their relevance. I can only speculate about the darkness of the motives for wanting to crush the rights of teachers, who rarely even threaten to strike. The inspirational leader of many, Ronald Reagan, might be rolling over in his grave, as he revered teachers. In many areas of the world, workers could use unions; here in the US, we are losing ground yet many claim that unions are unnecessary, even the enemy. One enemy I see is people’s willingness to be led, rather than to use their own judgment. Something repeated enough soon becomes taken as fact by too many people. I hope that we can see that unions are units that protect the rights of people who work and prevent them from being taken advantage of by more powerful interests–and that sometimes we the people, the voters as a unit must take a stand and take care of our interests, be it with lobbying for laws, or, heaven forbid, constitutional amendments, so that unions can continue to exist, and legislators and governors cannot break them without our consent. We the people must remember that in a democracy we are supposed to be governed with our consent.