Rain on Wisconsin's Parade

And I hate to have to say that I agree with him, even though we both hope he's wrong.

I am proud of the Wisconsin workers, and that’s why my prognosis is all the sadder. They were undercut years ago by the Democratic Party and their own leadership.

The unions and the public workers are going to lose. I’d love to be proven wrong, and maybe my math is no good, but even if they don’t lose this one, the trade union movement in the United States has been a dead letter for quite some time now.

[...]

When the trade union movement decided to join itself at the hip with the Democratic Party, they brought this on themselves. They consistently spend members’ money on Dem politicians, making them a direct target of the Republicans, who represent many anti-union interests already, but who had now been given a direct political stake in busting the unions.

[...]

Union resources are a Piper Cub against the business class’s F-16. In no time at all, the unions came to depend on the Democrats, and on elections, instead of facing off against employers directly and without the legal sanctions that they accepted ever since Taft-Hartley.

Democrats pushed through one neoliberal measure after another, undercutting the unions, and like an abused spouse that can’t leave, union leadership sent their members back again and again to vote, vote, vote Democratic.

[...]

The highest union density is in New York with 24.2%. The lowest is North Carolina with 3.2%. Wisconsin is 14.2%; and Wisconsin voters – knowing damn well that Republicans are anti-union – elected Scott Walker as Governor with 52.3% against Tom Barrett, who received 46.5% of the 2010 Wisconsin vote. Even long time Senator Russ Feingold was displaced by Republican Ron Johnson in a 51.9% to 47% race.

[...]

This national Republican campaign was launched fully cognizant of the balance of forces, and the reason they went green-light on it is because the numbers worked.

  Stan Goff

Stan has other disheartening numbers for unions in that article if you care to read it.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Solidarity is a two way street, and it is absurd to expect people working for $9 an hour to support a union movement that has long since abandoned them.

It is also an ugly fact that the total failures of the American public education system have everything to do with a country full of people so stupid that they listen to Glenn Beck. The teachers (and their unions) do in fact have something to do with that.

The Republicans have a strategy that is delusional and self destructive. We have no strategy at all. So even when they lose by blowing themselves up, and we gain an advantage, we can never profit by it and they can always recover. This is how we went for the almost unbelievable democratic victories of 2008 to the election of the tea bag republicans in less than two years.

  Victor