A Struggle for the Soul of America Is Being Waged in Wisconsin

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            The struggle in Wisconsin is a struggle for the soul of America. Governor Scott Walker and the majority Republican legislature have made a Faustian bargain with the Koch brothers and American Chamber of Commerce to sell their souls in return for campaign contributions and electoral success.  

            The efforts of Governor Scott Walker and his Republican legislature to gut the collective bargaining rights of employees is part of the on-going assault by corporate America and their cronies upon the middle class. Since the 1940s the American labor movement has been forced into retreat. After the death of Franklin Roosevelt and the election of a Republican Congress in 1946, as discussed, right-wing liberalism became resurgent. The first great success of New Deal critics was achieved with the enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which was passed over President Truman's veto. The effect of this legislation was to outlaw "closed shops" and to permit individual states to allow "open shops"--i.e. shops in which elected unions could not require all of the employees to belong to the unions, irrespective of whether the non-union employees also received and enjoyed the benefits of collective bargaining.

            As a result of that legislation, corporations began an inevitable migration to the South where welcoming state legislatures hastily enacted "right-to-work" laws. The migration of these manufacturing companies away from the unionized urban centers of the Midwest and North left hundreds of mill towns impoverished and desolate, and the union movement was effectively eviscerated. It did not take long for the owners of corporations to discover that, once they had escaped from the threat of unionization, they could escape almost all government regulation by moving their business and manufacturing operations out of the United States to Third World countries. As a result, in the private sector, unionized workers now number less than 7% of all employees.

           By contrast, in the public sector, approximately 37% of American employees are unionized. Because a  large number of these employees - including teachers, university professors,  social workers, inspectors, and law enforcement - are often better educated and more articulate than their private sector  peers, and are more often Democrats, these public employees pose a greater challenge to on-going efforts of American corporations to destroy the ability of American employees to challenge their hegemony.    

          Because the facts are to the contrary, corporate America and its media outlets have now resorted to a tsunami of lies and misrepresentations in which ordinary middle class Americans have now become the enemy. For example, according the Wisconsin Budge Project, Wisconsin, based on the most recent national data, ranked 27th in total state and local spending (measured as a percentage of income).  Contrary to the perception that Wisconsin had a large government bureaucracy, it   ranked 43rd (8th lowest) in 2009 in the number of state employees relative to population, and 38th (13th lowest) in total state and local government employees relative to population.

          In fact, the cause of Wisconsin's fiscal problems have little to do with the public employees and much more to do with the loss of tax revenue caused by the continuing recession an d the high rates of unemployment, all of which stemmed from the excesses of wall Street and the lack of government regulation of the financial sector during the most recent eight years of George Bush's administration . In addition, in Wisconsin, at least eight new or expanded state tax cuts and tax credits went into effect at the beginning of 2011. These tax changes will add up to an estimated $210 million cut in state taxes in the next two years. These tax cuts, along with  other tax reductions with different effective dates, will contribute more than $320 million to the structural deficit in the next two years.Wisconsin also spends less on its state employees than the national average in payroll spending for government employees. Wisconsin was 8.7% below the average and ranked 30th among the states.

         Finally, it should be noted that, included in the current budget before the Wisconsin legislature, is a provision that permits the governor's state appointed administrators to sell all of Wisconsin's public utilities "at a price deemed satisfactory to the state." How is that for a payback to the Koch brothers - who, incidentally, were major contributors to Governor Walker's campaign?  How will the sale of public utilities to private, for-profit n entities reduce the cost of services to the citizens of Wisconsin?

        The United States has a troubled and bloody labor history in which leaders such a Bill Haywood, Mother Jones, Eugene Debbs, John L. Lewis, and the Walter and Victor Reuther, among thousands of others, struggled to secure social and economic justice for American workers. Organized labor brought to America the right to grieve mistreatment in the workplace, "just cause" termination standards, the eight hour day, weekend offs, overtime and rest break regulations, workers' compensation, unemployment insurance and pensions. 

       It would be a tragedy of the first magnitude - and surely single this country's continued descent  -  if American employees did not stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Wisconsin employees. The struggle for social justice will never end. It is now this generation's burden to continue that struggle. The question to be answered is, "what kind of a country do we want to ensure for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren?

        Edmund Burke, a true conservative, reminds us that "society is indeed, a contract...It is to be looked on with reverence; because it is not a partnership in things...It is a partnership in science, a partnership in art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born."

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