Wisconsin Recap: Thanks to Obama, American Left Lies in Smoldering Wreckage [View all]

[abelenkpe]

Wisconsin Recap: Thanks to Obama, American Left Lies in Smoldering Wreckage

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/06/wisconsin-recap-thanks-to-obama-american-left-lies-in-smoldering-wreckage.html#comment-729935

On Tuesday, Wisconsin Republican Governor Scott Walker humiliated his Democratic opponent, Tom Barrett, by easily turning back a popular recall attempt sponsored by unions and liberal activists. The numbers in the election, which were supposed to be close, were ugly, in favor of the Republican. But this wasn’t just any Republican, Scott Walker is THE Republican, the politician who made his governorship a referendum on a hard right agenda, in a blue state. Walker waged a direct and very public attack on the major constituencies of the Democratic Party, rolling back rights for women, the working class, and the young with measures such as ending collective bargaining for state employees, privatizing state assets, and repealing Wisconson’s equal pay provisions for women. His agenda provoked a fierce reaction – – Wisconsin citizens occupied the Statehouse for months - and then a recall.

Yesterday, Walker’s agenda was ratified by the voters of Wisconsin, the state where public sector unions were born. It’s hard to overstate how bad this is – Wisconsin is now on the road to becoming a right-to-work state, in what is likely to become a right-to-work country. Right-to-work laws are provisions that allow individual employees to withdraw from unions, and they make it much harder for unions to organize.

And the deeper you look into the race, the worse it looks. By calling for a recall instead of a general strike after Walker stripped collective bargaining rights and cut benefits for workers, labor and Democratic leadership in the state diverted and then subverted populist energy, channeling it into an electoral process (at least one union, one very active in the occupation of the Capitol, stood apart from the electoral stupidity). Then, Barrett, an anti-labor centrist, won the Democratic primary by crushing his labor-backed opponent, Kathleen Falk. Finally, Barrett himself was destroyed by Scott Walker, who outspent Barrett 7-1 with corporate money. In other words, first, liberals lost a policy battle, then they failed to strike, then they lost a primary election, then they lost a general election to the most high-profile effective reactionary policy-maker in the country. The conservative beat the moderate who beat the liberal. And had Barrett won, he wouldn’t even have rolled back Walker’s agenda. Somehow, in a no-win electoral situation, Democrats and labor managed to lose as badly as they possibly could.

What happened?

(more at link)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I find it a bit ironic that this article calls for a general strike and support from Obama when most of the posts I read by Stoller are divisive and highly critical of the administration, but whatever. Maybe it's just another chance to tell readers how there's no difference between the parties. (This working mother thinks otherwise, but Stoller is a white guy so surely things look different from his perspective.)

But Unions are under attack and over the years I've watched the union pass up many calls for strikes in favor of more bargaining. And every time that bargaining leads to compromises that leave workers with less and corporations with more. There have been calls on this site for a general strike in the past, but they are always reasoned away. What do workers have left? How much worse do things have to be before that would ever be considered?