Love Letters from Wisconsin
Wisconsin’s public workers are showing us the way to stand up to the tyranny of 'balancing budgets’ on the backs of poor and working families. All week, the state capital has been overflowing with union members and their allies. Over 25,000 people took over the grounds on Wednesday.
My favorite protest sign says: “This Is Class Warfare and We’re Losing.” It doesn’t mince words, it gets straight to the point. Elected officials in Wisconsin and elsewhere, take heed: As long as fatcats’ taxes cannot be touched (they get big tax breaks while claiming that we need to bring down deficits and balance state budgets), and as long as Wall Street and Corporate America continue to sit on record profits that they are not reinvesting in our communities and to create jobs, DO NOT expect any workers to give up their basic right to collective bargaining. How dare you ask working people to sacrifice hard-won pensions and health benefits and cost of living increases. Do not ask Do not ask low-income families to give up home heating subsidies. Don’t ask students to give up summer grants, or ask low- and moderate- income families to pay more in rent for substandard housing. For that matter, don’t ask any town to cut its police force in half. And don’t expect homeowners to put up with illegal foreclosure procedures.
As long as the same people who crashed our economy continue with business as usual, leaving states, towns and working families to clean up their mess, we don’t want to hear anything about ‘tightening our belts,' ‘living within our means’ and ‘shared sacrifice.’ What shared sacrifice? We didn’t make this mess, but we have to clean it up? And those who did make the mess get to keep on getting obscene profits for doing so? They think they own the legislative agenda. They put their governors in place, governors like Scott Walker of Wisconsin, John Kasich of Ohio and Chris Christie of New Jersey.
The workers of Wisconsin are saying: we’re not going to take it, we will disrupt your ability to do business. And we are taking our government back.
Thank you, workers of Wisconsin, for reminding us how it’s done.
--Sandra Hinson
