Revolt

They revolted in Egypt, and now it's spreading to Algeria, Yemen, Bahrain and Iran.

Then they revolted in Wisconsin, and now it's spreading to...Ohio.

Protests against proposed laws to strip public employees of collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin continue to grow (40,000 demonstrated Thursday) and included Democrats of the state legislature who themselves went on strike, depriving the legislature of the necessary quorum, and said they would not be back until this law was abandoned. The Obama adminstration is openly aiding the protests.

Demonstrations spread to Ohio, where its governor is making a similar proposal.

The rhetoric is about state budgets (though the Wisconsin governor is accused of ginning up his own deficit to enable his anti-union ploy) but the attempt is seen as a deliberate attempt to destroy public employee unions, the last category of the American workforce to be heavily unionized. It is less often noted that public employees are more likely to be racial minorities and women than many other job categories.

As a nakedly political ploy, it is the essence of political cynicism: if you can't convince particular groups of people to support your candidates and positions, you use your power and talent for hypocrisy to weaken institutions that protect them, and you drive these people into poverty and powerlessness. You might even kill them off. It's the worst partisan politics and it's racism as well.

That's the sort of tyranny that ordinary people are fighting against in those other countries. Not meaning to minimize the bravery and the dangers of their struggles, what's going on in Wisconsin and Ohio is our version. In both cases, they are also fighting for the welfare of their countries. Despite the suicidal as well as homicidal rages of the Rabid Right, public employees do work that is essential to our democracy, our society and civilization. Until that is acknowledged, no reform is going to work.

It is justified, as is so much by the party of Voldemort, with lies. Even the Christian Science Monitor knows this:

"One of the arguments [Wisc. gov] Walker has made is that public-sector workers are compensated at a higher rate than those in the private sector. But according to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, Wisconsin’s public sector workers get compensations that are 4.8 percent less than those for their counterparts in the private sector.

Dresang argues that the structure of how public workers are paid also saves the state money. He says that 26.7 percent of public-worker compensation is in benefits, compared with 11 to 17 percent for private workers. Because more public-worker compensation is in benefits, the state government is able to purchase health-care and pension packages in bulk, “which actually costs taxpayers less,” he says.

But that's pretty much in line with their professional liars in Washington, who justify a lot of what they try to do by lying about the effects of their budget-cutting (it will destroy jobs and create massive unemployment), about the number of federal jobs and about the effect of government spending, specifically for the Obama stimulus. The Congressional Budget Office numbers are unequivocal and huge: By the third quarter of 2010, "the Recovery Act increased employment by up to 3.6 million jobs and lowered the unemployment rate by up to 2.0 percentage points."