What Wisconsin's Public Employees Are Fighting For

Josh Marshall parses Scott Walker's actions.

But there's another layer of the story that's only gotten cursory attention in the national media. Walker's proposal doesn't apply to all public sector unions in the state. Broadly speaking it targets unions that consistently support Democrats (teachers and other public employees) and exempts those that are often more friendly to Republican candidates (police and firefighters). Walker has been quick to point out that the statewide police and firefighters unions, as opposed to those in Milwaukee, both supported his opponent last year. He claims he makes the exception because the state can't afford any walk-outs from these public safety related employees.

But that doesn't really hold up.

It strains credulity to see this as anything but a political effort to destroy organizations that are critical foot soldiers for Democratic candidates at election time. 

This is why Republicans have been targeting unions, particularly teachers and state employees' unions, for some time now.  If unions are eliminated, Democrats at the state level will be severely weakened.  That's always what the end game was here, to rid the country of unions.  At the private sector level, unions have all but been eliminated in many states and replaced with "right-to-work" laws.

If public employee unions are eliminated, then the backbone of labor in this country will be broken for good, with American workers at the tender mercies of international corporations who simply do not see investment in the US middle class as a smart move when there's billions of Chinese, Indian, Brazilian and Indonesian workers forming a market ten times the size of the United States.  And they will not have the best interests of American workers at heart.

The goal here is to remove the unions as the last obstacle for the corporate takeover of the US in a post-Citizens United world where they can simply buy the races they want to win and the candidates who will do what they say.

And then our Democracy really is over.

[UPDATE]  And now Walker is hinting that as many as 12,000 state employee jobs will be eliminated as part of his budget plan...putting them on state unemployment is a much better idea than actually employing them as far as taxpayers are concerned, right?