Thank you, Wisconsin friends

I'm taking a break from blogging until Monday. But I wanted to offer some words of gratitude here for this Thanksgiving week.

First, I want to thank all you folks out there gathering signatures on recall petitions as the weather gets colder and nastier. I want to thank especially those people standing with their clipboards amidst the crowds at Lambeau Field on Sunday. I have no doubt you received a load of grief from many fans, evidenced by the fear on the face of one young man as I approached him, and his relief when I cheered him on.

I want to thank the tens of thousands of people who showed up in Madison many times this year, including this past Saturday, for your good spirit as you reclaim space for the voices of those silenced in this repressive, divisive atmosphere created by the politics of exclusion of the current state government.

I want to thank those dedicated workers who are on the front lines dealing with the impacts on real human beings of the cuts in health care programs, education, and other essential services. I want to thank dedicated public sector workers who hang in there despite the demonization of them that is all the rage these days from the political right, including those who have been picking up our leaves and who will be plowing our snow this winter. What would we do without you?

And a special shout-out of thanks to public school teachers who these days seem to be on so many Repub dart boards. I don't get it, and this, too, shall pass. What you do is so important.

I want to thank the Occupiers who have sent a burst of energy into our movements for social justice, fairness, and decency, and for helping to make the concentration of wealth part of our national conversation - finally!!

I want to once again thank the Wisconsin 14 for their witness, for taking the drastic step that helped bring the true intentions of the Walker/Fitzgerald brothers into the light of day. You also helped reinvigorate popular democracy showing that sometimes elected officials will actually respond to, even take risks on behalf of, the people they represent.

This is a beautiful state full of good, good people. Yet, even as I give thanks here, I am aware that right in my own city there are thousands of people who are suffering from deep poverty, discrimination, and a special kind of urban hopelessness. As we give thanks, let's also remember that we have to do better than this.

While we worry about worker rights, let's also worry about poverty. While we worry about protecting wages and benefits in the public sector, let's also remember those with no wages or benefits. While we loudly defend our democratic rights, let's remember those whose voices are barely heard amidst all the noise, who are most likely to be shoved farther to the margins by the current regime.

Let's remember that our struggle is not a just one if we are only defending our own interests and the interests of our particular sector, union, or interest group. Our struggle is only just if it has at its foundation a concern for the well-being of all, for the common good and the good of the commons.

Have a great Thanksgiving weekend!

"Our past is usable today."

Well, friends, as we move soon into the new fiscal year and the budget debate comes to a dismal end, I have to decide what to do with this blog.  It's been a great 'vent' for me and a way to connect with folks feeling as morally outraged as I am by the corporate, rightist, takeover of our state government.  I can't keep up this pace, but I welcome any thoughts about whether or how to continue.

Meanwhile, I will post now and again some longer-range reflections on Wisconsin and our predicament. The headline is a quote from one of the Upper Midwest's finest writers, Meridel Le Sueur, in her marvelous book, North Star Country. Just finished it and highly recommend it. As insightfully as any Midwest writer I have read, she captures something of the long history of the pioneers, the Indian massacres, the rape and pillage of the land, the horrible exploitation of immigrants and workers by corporate bosses over generations, the struggle for the dignity of workers, the bloody costs of fighting for the right to form unions - the right to not be savagely exploited, manipulated, robbed, and abused.

The struggle has been a  long one, and as I learned from a recent exchange with someone in my family, we forget or neglect these roots at our peril.

From Le Sueur's book:

The growth of corporations and absentee ownership of natural resources brought a change in human relationships, shifts of group allegiances, a new pattern. Pioneer days were marked by thrift, economy, and simplicity. But now mutual co-operative aid and the simple relationships of an expanding democracy were shattered. A new pattern was forged, a separation of interests; groups fell into those who possessed natural resources and tools of production, and those who, on the other hand, sold their labor.

"The pattern sharpened by the further impoverishment of the land, depletion of forests, erosion, and destruction, so that the land also began to fall into the hands of financiers; there was the vanishing of old ways to make a living, marked by ghosts towns, dead areas, loss of farms, migration of whole sections and there was even a partial exhaustion of high-grade ores. The development of aluminum alloys, the refinement of steel, sharpened the conflict of the big dinosaurs.

That was written just after World War II. Could it be more relevant today! The roots of the struggle between the corporate big bosses and the workers, farmers, and middle class, is as old as the struggle to define what it is to be 'American.' We have arrived at another of those defining moments when we must determine who will decide what our future looks like, what kind of world we want this one to be.

What kind of Wisconsin...

Then this final thought from Meridal Le Sueur:

The North Star Country's long cradling of democratic institutions, the peculiar largeness and boldness of its structure has always demanded new techniques and laws of common and individual rights, suggesting always the necessity of broader forms of democracy.

"Our future stands in real and sunlit shapes in all the gloom...

To truly understand what is going on in our state right now, it helps to know its cultural roots, and thus today's headline. Those roots are deep and abiding, they are tangled and source of great conflicts of interests and values. It will not help to sling insults at one another, but rather to understand this history and to begin coming together around some common purpose and vision for a future threatened on many fronts by the power of capital, the destruction of our natural environment, the individualistic lifestyles that have fragmented us, and the moral righteousness that has come to pervade so much of politics, culture, and religion.

To move forward, we must try to peer into the future to see the 'real and sunlit shapes.' We must pull those shapes out of the gloom that surrounds us now and begin to make them real, and, by necessity, through 'broader forms of democracy.'

------------------------ 

To order North Star Country from Amazon.com, click on this link.

Tough morning

Well, friends of Wisconsin, I know we're all feeling pretty down this morning - and undoubtedly frightened about our future here. Discouraged, sad, angry - all that. It is a helpless feeling to see authoritarians make off with one's democracy and feel like there is nothing you can do to stop this steamroller.

It has to play itself out. It will.  It will be ugly.  It will not be permanent.

But we do need to learn some lessons - urgently. One is that we must promise never again to become complacent about staying engaged with the democratic process. I worked on Central America human rights issues for more than 25 years in Washingon DC and it was always moving to tears to see poor people claiming their rights, organizing, forming political organizations, voting, when any of those things could get you killed (or worse, like tortured first). Voter turnout was always in the 80-90% range.

We are a complacent, spoiled people in many ways. We don't remember what it cost people over generations to win the rights we take for granted. I live in the Bay View neighborhood of Milwaukee and I am reminded every time I drive to the Hoan Bridge what that cost was in the lives of people who carved the path for us - the memorial to workers massacred by state militia, under a governor's orders, while holding a peaceful march to demand an 8-hour work day.

Or the police dogs and hoses in Birmingham.

Now most of us don't even bother to vote, much less engage the process in between elections, until one day we find our rights are threatened, and then suppressed - then we get all upset.

Lately I find myself pondering daily about how my state is the home of Fighting Bob La Follette and Joe McCarthy, the birthplace of AFSCME and of the Republican Party. I recall that that Republican Party was founded as an anti-slavery party and that now, in my state and others, it is trying to suppress the vote of African-Americans and is fueled by resentment that a black man is our president. I reflect on my own family roots - pro-union Democrats (except for my father, Republican but also a union member) harboring deep racist attitudes.

In the birthplace of collective bargaining rights for public sector workers, we have just busted their collective bargaining rights - which is the whole point of having a union.

This is my bipolar state, and the rightist Repubs now in power are using their authoritarian bent to drive a wedge right through that divide. I have it in my own family, as does just about everyone I know, growing lists of things we can no longer talk about because disagreement now is not the beginning of conversation or even argument, but of no discussion at all.

It hasn't yet, but it's a nice thought.

We will have to pull out of this not by turning to old ways of thinking and organizing and running organizations and institutions; those old 'paradigms' failed to anticipate fully what was coming or to mobilize a broad and effective solidarity - not because they are bad but because the world has changed and is changing all around us rapidly. I think we fail to understand what this power grab is really about and what these people have in mind for our nation.

It is not time to regroup, it is time to reinvent. So while many are out in districts working on the recall elections, they and all of us need to take time to read, learn, discuss, and think again about how one builds a movement appropriate and relevant to the real shift in power that has taken place in this state, and which is proceeding across the nation.

This will be a time of great demoralization or it will become a time of great creativity. And that choice is completely up to us.

Vital programs, human & political rights, all lined up on the Walker/Fitzgerald chopping block - unless democracy takes the knife from their hands

What they want is to dismantle the public sector as much as possible and privatize whatever they can get their hands on. What they want is a world in which corporations are free to make as much money as they want, CEOs and shareholders, with as few constraints as possible (like freedom to pollute, to not pay taxes, to make profits in prisons and schools, freedom to pay workers as little as possible, etc.), to surrender the inner cities to poverty because there's nothing in it for them to create programs that would generate jobs, housing, good education for workers they will never need.

You get the idea. I don't usually do a blog post on Sunday but will not be at my computer in the morning, so here's my rant as this week begins. It took a whole lot of decades to make of this western industrial world something other than what is so aptly and horrifically described in a Charles Dickens novel. But that's where we're headed if the corporatist right gets its way. I wish I could say there is an effective political counter to this steamroller, but even much of the political left has been pretty ineffective in recent years.

Which is why the Madison story is so important - something emerged there that does not fit easily into anyone's attempt to stereotype the phenomenon according to the old political spectrum. What joined people together with such an amazing combination of rage and joy was the threat we all feel to our communities, our neighborhoods, to a culture in this state - flawed, yes, overly parochial, yes, tainted with all sorts of troubled history like racism and self-interest, and leave-me-alone sorts of sentiments, sure, that's all present - but a culture that in its best moments recognizes that Wisconsin is a good place to live and can be an even better place to live if we address these flaws.

Now we see a great unraveling. Look at the long list on the Walker/Fitzgerald chopping block: public education, threatened by many things, none more serious than lifting the income caps for the voucher program; voter rights, as manifested in the proposed voter I.D. law that would disenfranchise large numbers of students, poor people, legal immigrants, and elderly folks; rollback of environmental regulations and a direct threat to the Clean Air Act as enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency; lower corporate tax rates, or even the elimination of corporate taxes, despite the heavy toll they take on our resources and the services they demand (think Zoo Interchange reconstruction, as one example); intentions to privatize (out-source) more public services, meaning lower wages, no benefits, more working poor, fewer worker rights, sacrificed on the altar of defeating Dems at all costs; threatening what little public financing for elections we have now, turning them over to those with the most money to spend.

I could go on. You could each add to the list. Point is, our quality of life is under assault by the current regime, and the only counter I can see to that is the popular voice that exploded into the headlines these past couple of months. Even our Wisconsin 14 were very clear about this - they have said that they only stayed away because of the protests. They left the state not knowing what would happen, but once folks were in the streets day after day and weekend after weekend, they COULD NOT come back even though a few of them really wanted to.

Larson, Erpenbach, Taylor, Risser, and others said this - their strength came from us.

I think often of the moment when LBJ signed the civil rights legislation knowing that his Democratic Party would probably lose the South for a generation after that (prescient). But he did it because politically he had no choice; it was not only the right thing to do, it was the ONLY thing to do to save the nation from a real collapse into more chaos and violence.

The point being, it was a moment when a movement and the politics came together. The politics did not create that moment; the movement did. The movement shaped the politics and the politics had to respond. That's what happened in the weeks following the Wisconsin 14's flight to Illinois. A movement appeared, loud and raucous and energized by a feeling of popular empowerment, and the 14 determined their strategy on that basis.

And this spirit feeds the new political work - recall efforts and certainly the highest profile race for judge that we've seen in a long time, if ever; voter registration efforts; greeting the governor with protests wherever he happens to be appearing; or the record attendance at town hall meetings and community gatherings.

All of this to try to keep together what sits on the chopping block. A big knife hovers over so many programs and rules and regulations that bring quality to our lives, or at least attempt to do so, and the point is to simply take that knife from the hand that wields it.

Apathy, lethargy, lack of vigilance and participation on the part of citizens of this state are among the reasons why we are seeing our rights threatened by a state government voted in with only half of eligible voters exercising this right (and that was considered a high turnout). Now we are seeing not only what participatory democracy can do, but why it is so crucial to our well-being, to the common good and the good of the commons.

Oh, and BTW - Vote on April 5!

Photos: Margaret Swedish

100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire - and we're losing our memory

I've been sitting at my computer trying to get some work done with a live stream of the commemoration events at the site of the fire 100 years ago today in the background grabbing my attention over and over again - 146 young women whose lives were snuffed out in a moment of incomprehensible horror because their bosses thought of them as machines for their use and exploitation.

Wonderful website for the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition.

How quickly we forget. How quickly we relax into inertia and complacency believing that rights once won can never again be lost, as if the very fact that they were hard won doesn't mean that their defense calls always for vigilance.

I think now of eroding worker rights in the private sector (here in Wisconsin most recently with contract concessions at Harley-Davidson, Kohler, and Mercury Marine) and now in the public sector all across the country.  Bosses and bureaucrats want us to forget what working conditions were like before unions, and they hope that forgetfulness translates into apathy when 'other people's' rights are taken away.

The big surprise in Wisconsin last month was that this is not what happened. When the assault on the collective bargaining rights of 350,000 public workers (a number that means all of us know someone impacted by the threat) happened here, tens of thousands and then well over a hundred thousand people poured into the streets of Madison and many other communities around the state.

It is crucial now that public workers pay this back in support for the factory workers whose livelihoods have been gutted, in support for the unemployed and the poor, those who have diminishing hopes of ever again having a decent job to support their families. Without solidarity of great breadth and depth, the forces with endless resources to support them - corporations, CEOs, investors, politicians bought and paid for by corporate campaign donations - will steamroll over all of us.

The crowd in Manhattan is huge. This is gratifying. We are waking up. We are beginning to remember. We are beginning to reclaim this history.

Terrific essay in the Journal Sentinel today connecting the Triangle Factory fire to our struggles today, written by Nan Enstad, UW-Madison, The Triangle Fire and Its Lessons. She explains clearly what has happened to the evolution of the corporate world in this country and the connection between this and our swiftly disappearing worker rights:

People in Wisconsin now find themselves embroiled in this 100-year-old battle, opened on a new front. The Citizens United 2009 Supreme Court decision expanded the rights of corporate personhood in our political life, removing caps on corporate - and union - spending in elections.

The crisis in Wisconsin is occurring at just this junction of government, corporate power and workers' rights. Republican leaders respond strongly to distant corporate donors and ignore local polls of voters' views. The proposed budget threatens to privatize education and utilities while cutting benefits and programs that serve the poor, shifting profits to corporations and distributing costs downward.

The Triangle era provides us with an important insight: Corporations on their own lack local accountability. Politicians in the service of corporations will be tempted to betray their constituents. Local people have an investment in local accountability. Schools, faith communities, townships, workers, farmers and small business owners all must empower themselves and each other to participate meaningfully and creatively in guiding our path into the future.

Gratifying to see in today's crowd in the streets of Manhattan signs proclaiming, "We Are All Wisconsin."  That makes me proud to be a citizen of this state. But it is also a challenge to us all - to live up to those hopes and expectations.

Rep. Charles Schumer from New York just gave a stirring speech at the commemoration, and he held up Scott Walker as someone prepared "to undo your loved ones' legacy," speaking to garment workers and their union. We are at the heart of this struggle here in Wisconsin. We are being lifted up across the nation as an example of the threat and the hope that is in that struggle.