On February 14, 1929, a bunch of gangsters with machine guns murdered seven people in a Chicago warehouse. On Valentines day this year, in Madison, Wisconsin, only 148 miles from the 1929 massacre, people were assembling to protest an attempt to murder the right of a free people to collectively bargain the rate and conditions of their employment.
The Governor of that state has already called upon the police to detain and kidnap duly elected representatives of the people that choose not to participate in his scheme. They are to be rounded up, bound and forced, against their will, to addend a session of the legislature so that he will have a quorum to approve his agenda. So far all the protests have been peaceful but he has threatened to call out the state’s National Guard to maintain “Public Safety” if his actions result in strikes by the public employee unions. The last time that happened in Kent, Ohio, 431 miles distant and thirty years before the events now occurring in Madison, it resulted in four innocents laying dead in the dirt.
This is just the beginning of the next round in the fight between the middle class and the oligarchs who rule this country. If they are successful in Wisconsin you can be assured the battle will spread to your state and from the public employee unions to the private sector. You will be told over and over until you believe it with every fibre in your being that this is about balancing a budget. Mostly Fox News will be the guys throwing out this line. Don't believe it.
This is about the wealthy trying to keep from paying their fair share of taxes. Most of the problems that have taken such a toll on governments are the direct result of these wealthy individivuals and their corporations refusal to pay a living wage to their employees If the workers in this nation had received a fair portion of the profits accrued from the increased productivity of the last thirty years, our governments - state and local - would be in much better shape. Instead all the profits derived from this increased productivity have gone into already wealthy pockets and now these folks have no desire to clean up the mess they have made of this country. This is a war for that last and most valuable of your possessions, your time. Time is all you can sell to a taskmaster and if you can not bargain for it all is lost.
The oligarchs are students of history and the model they are using to accomplish their end, the destruction of the middle class, was perfected in Germany during the 1930’s. First you start with a small group of people, defeat them and then you move on to another small group and defeat it. Next comes a larger group and before you know it, you’ve won. In this country the first small group targeted for defeat is the union of public employees.
It's easy to turn the public against them. They still have a pension and decent benefits. The oligarchs have gradually, over the course of the last thirty years, taken these things from private employees. Instead of demanding these benefits be returned to them, private employees are incensed that the public sector still has theirs and want to take them away. Reason has been turned on its head by the constant pounding we have received, first on the evening, and now on the twenty-four hour "newscasts" that tell us what to believe. What is more reasonable, to desire a benefit for yourself or to deny that benefit to another because it's been taken from you?
These are the folks who educate your children, make sure water and power are delivered to your homes, maintain the roads upon which you drive and the parks where you recreate. Their research improves everything in your lives from the foodstuffs that are raised on farms to the weaponry that maintains your security. They are everyday people just like you. They go to work, do their jobs and go home to their families - just like you. No matter what the oligarch owned and controlled media have told you for the last several years, these are real people with real jobs that work everyday.
Next will come the public unions and after them it’ll be your turn. The fight starts here. It starts now. If you are willing to see the first group lose their rights, you will lose yours. No question. No doubt. There was money enough to give bonuses to bankers and tax breaks to the wealthiest people in this country but there is not enough to pay a man a decent wage. This is not only a fight against the public employees in Wisconsin, this is a fight against your right to a decent living. It just has not landed on your doorstep yet.
When will the greedy oligarchs learn the surest way to lose their power is to take away a man’s ability to provide food and shelter for his wife and children? They may win all the battles but in the end they will lose the war. And, the longer it takes for them to realize this, the more violent it will become.
John Steinbeck said it best. “And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.”
UPDATE: I'm not alone in this view. Seems a movement that started in the UK targeting corporations that avoid taxes has begun to spread to the US. Thanks, MJ, for sending this http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/feb/18/ukuncut-grassroots-movement-grows-us
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