How strange and wondrous it must be to gaze from some celestial perch and see history -- your history -- being relived. From their great Progressive Precinct in the Sky the family of Robert "Fighting Bob" LaFollette surely must be smiling as they observe the throngs of workers and sympathizers flooding Madison to protest the Koch brothers and corporate America's drive to cripple and ultimately destroy Wisconsin's public service unions. The LaFollettes have seen and lived it all before.
I know the LaFollettes. I spent four years researching and writing a book about them. And I'll wager that they would see the growing resistance in this fourth year of the so-called Great Recession -- which, for those who have lost jobs, homes, and futures is indistinguishable from a Depression -- as a turning point, a wake-up call that begins a counter-revolution against the steady encroachment of the political and corporate Right, with help from Democratic "centrists," on the shrinking contours of the social contract they fought so hard to advance.
That's up to us. If we ourselves light candles from the flame kindled in Madison and carry them to our communities, then the tumult in Madison could resemble events in the 1890s that provoked a political revolt against the first Gilded Age, like our own, dominated politically, culturally and economically by an elite of super-rich securely entrenched behind their golden walls, indifferent or hostile to the protests of debt-stricken farmers and exploited workers, the thwarted hopes of small businessmen and professionals crushed under the weight of the great trusts and their legions of bought lawyers and editors , the sufferers from the poverty that festered in the shadows of the great cities' monuments to progress.
But year by year as the twentieth century dawned, a new breed of thinkers and activists who labeled themselves "Progressives" -- journalists, academics, enlightened businessmen and financiers, officeholders in state capitals and city halls -- along with anonymous and rebellious workers and farmers who pushed from below -- chipped away at the golden walls. They pushed through three amendments in the Constitution -- a deliberately long and hard process -- between 1909 and 1920: a progressive income tax, the direct election of Senators, and votes for women.
Campaign by campaign, local, state and national, navigating through the endless grind of assemblies and petitions and public events sometimes supported by striking workers who risked their jobs, their physical safety and even their lives for equal justice, they gained other protections and guarantees. Workers compensation, occupational safety, guarantees of pure food and drugs, conservation of natural resources, restriction of child labor, regulations of railroads, trusts, and insurance companies, strengthened defenses against financial panics ignited by reckless speculation. Protections for all, especially that vital middle class on whose shoulders democracy rested. Achieved through a political process made accessible to all by machine-fighting reforms like the secret ballot and the open primary.
A climactic highlight was reached in 1912's presidential election. Of the four candidates, only the incumbent president, William H. Taft, was a forthright conservative (and by the standards of current "conservatism," a trust-prosecuting big-government liberal). Denied the Republican nomination, Theodore Roosevelt was running on a third-party ticket on a platform embodying most Progressive demands. So was Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat. Differences between the approaches those two candidates took did not blur the close similarity of their goals.
And there was also Eugene V. Debs, running on a still-respectable Socialist ticket, though in general "socialism" was still a national bugaboo and some Progressives defended their own programs as safety valves to relieve pressure towards the frightening revolutionary doctrine. Debs' capitalism-denouncing platforms were indeed fiery-sounding, but his personal interpretations of them owed as much to Jesus, the Founding Fathers, and philosophical anarchists like Tolstoy as they did to Marx.
It was a no-lose situation for progressives of all shades; Taft received only eight electoral votes, Debs none (but a striking seven per cent of the popular vote -- just under a million cast their ballots for him) while TR and Wilson split the remainder, with Wilson coming out the winner.
Which is where La Follette and Wisconsin enter the picture and connect this week's headlines to that Progressive past. Madison was possibly the best-known center of the political hurricane that had blown down the glittering, deceptive towers of the first Gilded Age. As a three term governor from 1900 through 1906 La Follette -- a Republican, bear in mind -- pioneered the "Wisconsin Idea" -- an alliance between a popularly chosen government and a cadre of experts in law, economics, sociology and associated disciplines who would help him to translate "reform" into rational, research-based regulations governing such areas as transportation and utility charges, the taxation of corporate property, the financial responsibility of lending institutions, and the proper management of public resources resource and public health.
The presumed goal was always fairness, rather than what the traffic would bear or what corporations could get away with. Madison's geography puts the university campus and the State House at opposite ends of a walkway no more than a few hundred yards long -- an axis of cooperation between Governor La Follette and his pioneering version of what later, under FDR, was called a "Brain Trust."
La Follette's career did not end in Madison, even if his symbolic presence hovers over the state capitol at this moment. Nor was he the only Progressive in Wisconsin, but his star was the brightest in their firmament. He went on to the U.S. Senate, and stayed there for nineteen years until his death in 1925, whereupon the then he was immediately succeeded by his son, Robert Jr, appointed to his unexpired term by the then-governor after he had offered it to La Follette's activist widow, Belle, and she had declined with thanks. "Young Bob" held the seat until defeated in 1946 by Joseph R. McCarthy. During the nineteen thirties his younger brother Phil also held the governor's mansion for two terms and joined in creating a short-lived state Progressive Party in Wisconsin on whose ticket he ran. It was an impressive dynastic record.
But there are other "witnesses" looking over the shoulders of the protesters at Madison, and particularly of those Wisconsin Democrats who are fighting back and fighting hard, something for which the national party has not precisely been known for a long time. Perhaps it is because these insurgents recognize that the stakes here go far beyond a simple and traditional matter of "greedy" public service unions versus their employer, the state of Wisconsin and its tax paying citizens. That is, of course, the way Governor Walker and his right-wing cohorts want to frame it. As if the public service workers themselves were not "people" and taxpayers! As if their pensions and rights were not fairly earned at the bargaining table in lieu of wage hikes in better times and they had not already agreed to negotiate them downward if their sacrifices are equally shared by the wealthy. As if their services in the "submerged" government -- the taken for granted cleaning of streets, provision of water and sanitation, police and fire protection, the teaching of the state's children -- were not honest and necessary work. How dare Rush Limbaugh, the principal foghorn of the Right-wing noise machine, denounce them as "freeloaders?"
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I'm a longtime progressive in Madison who will be at the Capitol tomorrow. The progressive tradition is a large part of why Wisconsin has historically been such a humane, clean and innovative state.
Even our former longtime Republican governor Tommy Thompson used to praise that tradition. And, by the way, he was good to the state's public employees.
Scott Walker is trying to erase the state's history and character. That's why we're fighting and will continue to fight, as hard and creatively as possible.
"And then there’s this: “Notwithstanding ss. 13.48 (14) (am) and 16.705 (1), the department may sell any state-owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state. Notwithstanding ss. 196.49 and 196.80, no approval or certification of the public service commission is necessary for a public utility to purchase, or contract for the operation of, such a plant, and any such purchase is considered to be in the public interest and to comply with the criteria for certification of a project under s. 196.49 (3) (b).â€
What’s that about? The state of Wisconsin owns a number of plants supplying heating, cooling, and electricity to state-run facilities (like the University of Wisconsin). The language in the budget bill would, in effect, let the governor privatize any or all of these facilities at whim. Not only that, he could sell them, without taking bids, to anyone he chooses. And note that any such sale would, by definition, be “considered to be in the public interest.â€
If this sounds to you like a perfect setup for cronyism and profiteering."
This was one nugget in this bill, that I think Americans should be aware of, just like the Union busting
So, Walker takes over a budget that is balanced, gives the rich and Corporations a big tax break that puts that balanced budget in the red, for which he insists the public service workers must pay. In his bill to accomplish this theft, he also decides to take a huge chunk out of Medicaid, but manages to insert that at the end, so hopefully the public won't read that far.
Meantime, the Democratic Senators of the State, trying to save Walker from himself, and the people of their State from going to the poor house, take the only recourse they have and exit the State, applauded by a newly awakened electorate.
Now Walker wants to sell State's (People's) Public Utilities? This looks very much like he is trying his level best to bankrupt every man, woman and child in the State. This looks very much like a Blitzkrieg. What is his hurry? The hope that if he does it all at once, people will be too confused to fight back at all?
Free market has a different meaning for the elites it means free to exploit..so they bribed government to let them be free...The system is deeply terminally broken corrupted and diseased with duplicity....
Identify and remove.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/05/beware-the-psychopath-my-son/
People change their opinions over time. Who would have thought that GW Bush would morph into a War Criminal?
This is why I study history so much. The future is writ in its pages. All of our possible futures.
The true history of our nation has never been quiet. It has always been tumultuous, and at times, violent. The things that we have been lulled into taking for granted are even now being snatched away ... if we allow it. But, as you observe, not if we do not allow it.
There is nothing writ, in our national documents or in our history, that says that anything which we now have (or have ever had) in America is permanent. Human nature always pits man against man, and the man who is to be feared the most is the rich-man. Our system of governance is designed to strive to balance the power of the many against the power of the few, but only if the many relentlessly and peacefully demand it.
What ever happened to the pledge, "NEVER AGAIN?"
the Answer lays back in the 1920's someplace, I suspect.
When a group forms to make demands from the people employing them they assume an implicit obligation by this defacto partnership to help steward the business to ensure their own job security. In hundreds of cases across the country, the unions have driven their own jobs into the ground in order to get short term gains...so..Union membership has dropped form 32% to under 10%.....and now the jobs have been exported to escape them. Tough huh?