The Politics of Envy

What happened in Wisconsin on Tuesday?

Walker defeated Barrett by seven percentage points — it wasn't even close.  While it is true that Walker supporters, including most of the same out-of-state multimillionaires funding Republican superPACs, outspent Barrett supporters by more than three-to-one, I'm not sure that the relentless barrage of television commercials was entirely responsible for the outcome.

To the average private sector worker, it looks like public employees have it good — and they are not wrong about that.  Teachers, police, firefighters, etc. have benefit packages and pension plans, by and large, far superior to anything even unionized private sector workers have been able to achieve.  There are reasons for that, of course.  State and local leaders, in the past, were willing to promise benefits in lieu of salary increases — it helped them keep current taxes low, and passed on the costs to future politicians, long after the original negotiators had left office. The public employee unions sacrificed salaries for benefits, and properly believe they now deserve the benefits they were promised.  In the intervening years, though, state and local governments were either underfunding or outright looting public employee pension funds so they could pretend their budgets were "balanced."

Meanwhile, back in the private sector, workers were being royally screwed.  They lost both salary (adjusted for inflation) and benefits over the past thirty or so years, thanks to the intensely pro-corporate environment created by the Reagan-Thatcher revolution.  They look at public sector workers and, predictably, feel envy.  It was that envy that was exploited (partly through TV commercials) to bring Walker his victory — albeit the exploitation was paid for by the very same plutocrats who had created the situation in the first place by suppressing unionization, off-shoring jobs, and recreating what Mark Twain once called "the best Congress money can buy."

DESPICABLE!!!

The Republicans have a new hero.

Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and his Republican controlled state legislature have launched a vicious attack on the state's public employees by attempting to bust their unions. The governor maintains that taking away public workers' right to collective bargaining is necessary to reduce the state's deficit, and the major media seem happy to parrot that justification.

Needless to say, that's a lie.

Want public workers to pay more towards their medical insurance? Negotiate it! It's been done, over and over again, in state after state. Need public workers to accept pay freezes or reduced hours? Negotiate it! Public worker unions have gone along with such cuts when real needs exist.

Of course, it's a lot easier to balance a budget on the backs of public workers when government can dictate the terms of employment. Health care costs going up too fast? Easy. Just take away their health insurance — all of it. Need more money to give even more tax breaks to business interests? Easy. Just take it from the public workers.

(Incidentally, the real reason Wisconsin is in deficit — instead of running a surplus — is because Walker signed two big tax giveaways to business and another tax break to encourage an experiment with health savings accounts. Before that, Wisconsin was in very good shape by comparison with other states.)

In other words, Walker created the deficit, then used it as an excuse for union busting. I've got a word for that.

Despicable.

Exempted from the proposed anti-labor law are law enforcement and firefighting unions, either because they were supportive of Walker during the election, or because the public may be willing to live without schools, but not without cops and firefighters to protect them from the depredations of young people who aren't going to school. It would be nice if the cops and firefighters would support their fellow public workers if a general strike became necessary. I wouldn't count on it, though. After all, they got theirs — and "everybody" knows that they're special.

Every cloud has a silver lining, though. Unions, nationwide, are waking up to the real Republican agenda — wiping out whatever remains of the American labor movement. Union members, frightened and disheartened in recent years, finally seem to have had enough.

Thanks, Scott. We're awake now, and ready to push back.