Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin says that public employee unions are to blame for that state’s fiscal woes. Of course, this assumes there was a crisis to begin with. In point of fact, prior to Walker taking the job, Wisonsin’s fiscal predicament was actually pretty rosy. Turns out Governor Walker manufactured the crisis. His sights were set on union-busting from the beginning:
The financial collapse of 2008 was caused by reckless economic elites who were well-connected enough to take risks and not suffer consequences for them. This led directly to a $900 billion dollar decrease in the value of public pension funds (not to mention the depletion of privately held 401k’s and other middle-class sources of retirement savings). Now well-connected economic elites are blaming public workers for the sorry state of affairs we find ourselves in and want to cripple public labor unions and further deplete these ‘unsustainable’ public pensions in order to restore fiscal sanity, all while extending their own Bush-era tax cuts indefinitely. Money flows up, after all.
The middle class is being pit against itself. Somehow, thousands of laid off workers and the loss of retirement income for countless others is an economic boon, whereas taxing the wealthy is a sure recipe for fiscal insolvency. Wisconsin is just one example of this elaborate con. And it is a con. Robert Reich explains:
Republicans would rather no one notice their campaign to generate further tax cuts for the rich—making the Bush tax cuts permanent, further reducing the estate tax, and allowing the wealthy to shift ever more of their income into capital gains taxed at 15 percent.
And the whole enterprise is, of course, extremely well-funded.
There is no crisis in Wisconsin, except a crisis of the middle class. Teachers and other public servants face the same fate that the once-unionized private sector faced. Rather than working together to bolster the middle class against hard times, and pave our way into a more sustainable, equitable future, we’re trying to level everyone down. Except the very, very rich of course.
