Madison

Anna Grindrod Feeny’s video (above) provides an objective framework for the rallies and protests. Here’s my take…

The State of Wisconsin is now a battleground. Tea Party conservatives and their corporate backers allied with the Republican party have taken a stand against organized labor. Wisconsin has a Republican Governor, a Republican dominated Senate, and a Republican dominated Assembly. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court justices are elected for ten year terms and during the last several election cycles corporate cash has flooded the state with predictable results. Wisconsin state government belongs to the special interests so it’s understandable why it seemed like a good idea to break the back of organized labor here.

For the last week I’ve watched the struggle play out on the streets and in the Capitol. Governor Scott Walker drafted a “Budget Repair Bill” that went far beyond the fiscal concerns that it’s nominally supposed to address. One of the many evil aspects of the bill is its effect on the ability of public employee unions to negotiate the terms and conditions of their members employment. Here’s the bill and the Legislative Reference Bureau analysis (pdf).

So the unions took a look at that and said, well… no. That’s not how it’s going to be. On Tuesday 13,000 people came to the Capitol to protest. On Wednesday there were 20,000, on Thursday–25,000, Friday–40,000, and on Saturday, seventy thousand people or more protested the Governor’s hubris. The Governor’s supporters appeared on Saturday too. About 2500 people gathered on the sidewalk at the King Street entrance of the Capitol to listen to speeches by a local Madison right wing newsy, Andrew Breibart, and famous political personality and pundit for hire Joe the Plumber.

I’ve been taking pictures and aggregating them in a couple of albums on Facebook (“This is what dogmocracy looks like,” and “Signs of spring”) as well as in a lengthy and by now repetitious stream on Flickr. It was probably a lot more fun to be there and take the pictures than it is to look at them. Leave a comment if you’re somehow blocked from seeing them, and I’ll try to get permissions sorted out. The whole Facebook thing is a black art from my perspective.

I only took one picture of the Tea Party people. I figured they’d generate their own news and with Andrew Breitbart and Fox news on their side, the spin would be too dizzying for me. In true Breitbart fashion, a couple of pieces of disinformation have already surfaced that have the whole right wing echo chamber simply in a tizzy. It seems that a Doctor has written fake sick leave excuses for teachers! Or not. When Breitbart’s involved the truth-meter buries the needle at zero. Michelle Malkin also came up with a photo of some creep-a-zoids carrying signs laced with profanity. Since I’ve spent hours and hours on site and saw nothing like those signs, I’d bet dollars to donuts that they’re part of the Breitbart team’s Saturday afternoon special disinformation service. Just guessing, you understand.

Tomorrow there’s a press conference at the Madison Senior Center addressing the negative impact the Governor’s Budget Repair Bill 11 will have on our elderly and disabled populations in Wisconsin, by pointing out that the passage of Bill 11 will give Governor Walker’s administration unprecedented authority to make sweeping changes to Medicaid programs such as SeniorCare Rx, Family Care, BadgerCare, ADRC’s, the Benefit Specialists program and services provided by OCI and the Board on Aging and Long-Term Care, without public input or approval from the state legislature. Weather permitting, I’ll be there and hope to share a blog post about this aspect of Governor Walker’s budget planning.

Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill Protest from Matt Wisniewski on Vimeo.

Tagged as: progressive politics, Wisconsin unions