It’s about power, not the budget. Threats to democracy in the Midwest

The attack on public employees spreading through the Midwest threatens middle-class working people across the nation.  Big-money and corporate interests are out to destroy collective bargaining to solidify their control of political and economic life in this country.

The rash of proposals targeting public employee unions (in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and a dozen more states) isn’t about budgeting – it’s about political power – as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman explains and Indiana’s governor admitted yesterday.

The teachers’ and other public workers’ unions of Wisconsin already agreed to Gov. Scott Walker’s demands to cut their benefits. He insists on ending their right to negotiate at all.

Just as the billionaire activists funding the Tea Party intended, the middle class is divided against itself, with many laid-off and struggling workers backing the attacks on public employees. But state workers’ healthcare and pensions have nothing to do with the financial crisis. In fact:

• Gov. Walker created much of Wisconsin’s budget problem himself, by enacting huge corporate tax breaks.
• Public-sector workers are not overpaid. The Economic Policy Institute has shown that public employees are paid less than private-sector workers with similar education and qualifications.

Not one teacher or police dispatcher or state office worker had a role in the financial collapse that has devastated so many working families and hammered state and local governments. Now the same corporate interests that caused the crisis are exploiting it to break up one of the last bastions of political voice for workers – public-sector unions.

If they succeed, the outsized power of Big Money in politics will only increase, to the detriment of democracy.  That means more tax breaks for multinational corporations and the superrich, more cuts in public education and other vital public services, and expansion of the already vast income gap between the economic elite and people who work for a living.

A USA Today/Gallup poll released today shows that most Americans oppose bills that suppress collective bargaining. Will politicians listen to their voices or to the flow of corporate dollars to their campaigns?

Here are some of the many ways people are speaking out:

• MoveOn has a petition calling for rallies at every statehouse this Saturday.
• The AFL-CIO has petitions to every state legislature asking for a focus on good jobs with fair pay, not political attacks on working people and their unions.
• WeAreWisconsin.org has a schedule of rallies around the country.