Accidental Blogger

As usual, I am late in commenting on a hot topic on the blog which I had up on my Facebook page (under the same title) as soon as the news broke of thousands of protesting public sector employees taking to the streets in Madison, WI. In the FB comment I called Scott Walker, the newly elected Tea Party governor of Wisconsin a jackass. As more facts about the Wisconsin have emerged, I have found no reason to revise my opinion of the man. Here are a few things about Walker's actions that I found suspicious right off the bat.

• Wisconsin, like many other states is facing budgetary constraints. But when Walker took over, the state budget was projected to end with a surplus in the 2011 fiscal year.
• Walker proceeded to give tax cuts to businesses as one of his first acts as governor claiming that those taxes go to support the excessive benefits of state employees.
• He refused to negotiate benefits and pensions with public employees until they gave up their right to collective bargaining.
• Although most employees unions were targeted, Walker left out the unions of police, fire fighters and the state patrol (these particular unions tend to vote Republican) although these groups too are public workers.

I don't have much to add to the facts that have emerged since the news first broke. I will instead link to a couple of articles that have the details of the strike in Wisconsin and its ramifications for the rest of the country where similar measures are being considered by Republican governors. First, from the Christian Science Monitor:

No region of the country was more comprehensively recast by the 2010 elections than the seven states of the upper Midwest that arc from Minnesota to Ohio. Where before Democrats had held the upper hand, Republicans now have a virtual stranglehold on politics, controlling both houses of the legislature and the governors’ chairs in Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

The full import of that switch has become apparent on the streets of Madison, Wis., this week. At least 25,000 union Wisconsin protesters amassed Friday morning in and around the Capitol to protest the governor’s plans. Earlier in the week, there had been as many as 40,000. Schools have been canceled, and one rally lasted a marathon 17 hours.

With the state's tea party activists set to counterprotest Saturday, the drama has set the scene for the streets of Madison to become a surrogate for the clash of broader forces that currently define American politics.

House Speaker John Boehner (R) has backed Governor Walker even as President Obama denounced the Wisconsin bill as an "assault on unions." The AFL-CIO, the country's largest union, vowed a national protest to support Wisconsin public employees.

One political scientist has gone so far as to compare the Wisconsin protests with what transpired in Cairo earlier this month.

Yet for the Midwest, the protests hint at a conflict that could extend well beyond this weekend and beyond Wisconsin. With state legislatures redrawing congressional and legislative district maps this year, Midwest Republicans have an opportunity to change the political landscape for years to come.

And here is Joshua Holland in Alternet explaining why Walker's plans amount to plain old union busting disguised as fiscal responsibility just as the Republican hero Ronald Reagan once did and thrilled his admiring fans. (Before Reagan became the president of the country, he twice served as the  president of the Screen Actors Guild, a trade union like any other, and which has expressed its support for the striking Wisconsin public employees)