Hijacking The Wisconsin Uprising

Why Electoral Politics Sold Out the Popular Uprising in the Badger State -- and Why It’s Not All Over 

By Andy Kroll, cross-posted from TomDispatch

The revelers watched in stunned disbelief, cocktails in hand, dressed for a night to remember. On the big-screen TV a headline screamed in crimson red: "Projected Winner: Scott Walker." It was 8:49 p.m. In parts of Milwaukee, people learned that news networks had declared Wisconsin’s governor the winner while still in line to cast their votes. At the election night party for Walker's opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, supporters talked and cried and ordered more drinks. Barrett soon took the stage to concede, then waded into the crowd where a distraught woman slapped him in the face.

Walker is the first governor in American history to win a recall election. His lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, dispatched her recall challenger no less decisively. So, too, did three Republican state senators in their recall elections. Democrats avoided a GOP sweep with a win in the sixth and final senate recall vote of the season, in Wisconsin's southeastern 21st district, but that was small consolation. Put simply, Democrats and labor unions got rolled.

The results of Tuesday's elections are being heralded as the death of public-employee unions, if not the death of organized labor itself. Tuesday's results are also seen as the final chapter in the story of the populist uprising that burst into life last year in the state capital of Madison. The Cheddar Revolution, so the argument goes, was buried in a mountain of ballots.

But that burial ceremony may prove premature. Most of the conclusions of the last few days, left and right, are likely wrong.


The energy of the Wisconsin uprising was never electoral. The movement’s mistake: letting itself be channeled solely into traditional politics, into the usual box of uninspired candidates and the usual line-up of debates, primaries, and general elections. The uprising was too broad and diverse to fit electoral politics comfortably. You can't play a symphony with a single instrument. Nor can you funnel the energy and outrage of a popular movement into a single race, behind a single well-worn candidate, at a time when all the money in the world from corporate “individuals” and right-wing billionaires is pouring into races like the Walker recall.


Colin Millard, an organizer at the International Brotherhood of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental, and Reinforcing Iron Workers, admitted as much on the eve of the recall. We were standing inside his storefront office in the small town of Horicon, Wisconsin. It was night outside. "The moment you start a recall," he told me, "you're playing their game by their rules."

From Madison to Zuccotti Park and Beyond

A recap is in order.

The uprising began with Colin Millard. The date was February 11, 2011, when Walker "dropped the bomb," as he later put it, with his "budget repair" bill, which sought to gut collective bargaining rights for most public-employee unions,  Later that day, a state Democratic Party staffer who knew Millard called him and pleaded with him to organize a protest. Millard agreed, even though other unions, including the AFL-CIO, urged him to back out. Don't make a fuss, they advised. Let's call some lawmakers and urge them to oppose Walker's bill. "Fuck off," was Millard's response.

On the Sunday after Walker unveiled his bill, Millard rounded up more than 200 people and marched down Lake Street, past the John Deere factory and Dannyboy's Bar, to the home of Republican Jeff Fitzgerald, the speaker of the state Assembly and a Walker ally. Fitzgerald lived a mile or two from Millard in Horicon. "I've got a message for Scott Walker," Millard told the crowd outside Fitzgerald's house. "This is my union card and you can pry it from my cold, dead hand."

As rumors spread of more protests, Walker threatened to call out the National Guard to deal with the protesting public workers. That's when popular outrage erupted. Students marched on the state capitol, and then a local teaching assistants union led the effort to take over the capitol rotunda, transforming intermittent protests into a round-the-clock occupation. Organizers provided food, shelter, health care, day care, education, and a sense of purpose for those who had taken up residence inside the capitol.

In support of the occupiers, the daily protests outside the capitol grew into crowds of 10,000, 25,000, then upward of 100,000. People marched in the snowy streets to challenge Walker, Wisconsin Republicans, and their political donors. Tractors circled the capitol in protest, as did firefighters and cops, even though their bargaining rights had been exempted from Walker's "reform" proposals. By now, Madison had captured the nation's attention.

A two-week occupation of the capitol and months of protests didn’t, however, deter Walker and Republican lawmakers. He signed his budget repair bill, known as Act 10, into law in March. But that doesn’t mean the Wisconsin uprising had no effect. For one thing, the "Walkerville" occupation of the grounds outside the state capitol helped inspire the "Bloombergville" protest in New York City targeting Mayor Michael Bloomberg. That, in turn, would be a precursor to the Occupy Wall Street events of the following September and later the Occupy movement nationwide. Without Wisconsin, without the knowledge that such things could still happen in America, there might never have been an Occupy.

Hijacking the Uprising

By the time Occupy Wall Street took off, the Wisconsin uprising had swapped its come-one-come-all organizing message for a far narrower and more traditional political mission. Over the summer of 2011, the decision was made that the energy and enthusiasm displayed in Madison should be channeled into recall elections to defeat six Republican state senators who had voted for Walker's anti-union Act 10. (Three Democratic senators would, in the end, face recall as well.) By that act, Democrats and unions hoped to wrestle control of the senate away from Walker and use that new power to block his agenda.

The Democrats won two of the 2011 recalls, one short of gaining control of the Senate, and so the Republicans clung to their majority.

What followed was more of the same, but with the ante upped. This time, the marquee race would be the recall of Walker himself. Launched last November, the grassroots campaign to recall the governor put the populist heart of the Wisconsin uprising on full display. Organizing under the United Wisconsin banner, 30,000 volunteers statewide gathered nearly one million signatures to trigger the election. The group’s people-powered operation recaptured some of the spirit of the Capitol occupation, but the decision had been made: recalling Walker at the ballot box was the way forward.

The Walker recall effort would, in fact, splinter the masses of anti-Walker protesters. Many progressives and most of the state's labor unions rallied behind former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk who, in January 2012, announced her intent to challenge Walker. Tom Barrett, who had lost the governor’s race to Walker in 2010, didn't announce his candidacy until late March, his entry pitting Democrat against Democrat, his handful of union endorsements pitting labor against labor. Unions pumped $4 million into helping Falk clinch the Democratic nomination. In the end, though, it wasn't close: Barrett stomped her in the May 8th primary by 24 percentage points.

By now, the Madison movement was the captive of ordinary Democratic politics in the state. After all, Barrett was hardly a candidate of the uprising. People who had protested in the streets and slept in the capitol groused about his uninspired record on workers' rights and public education. He never inspired or unified the movement that had made a recall possible -- and it showed on Election Day: Walker beat Barrett by seven percentage points, almost his exact margin of victory in 2010. Democrats and their union allies needed to win over new voters and old enemies; by all accounts they failed.

And had Barrett by some miracle won, after a few days of celebration and self-congratulation, those in the Madison movement would have found themselves in the same box, in the same broken system, with little sense of what to do and, in a Barrett governorship, little hope. Win or lose, there was loss written all over the recall decision.

The Fate of the Uprising

The takeaway from Walker's decisive win on Tuesday is not that Wisconsin's new populist movement is dead. It's that such a movement does not fit comfortably into the present political/electoral system, stuffed as it is with corporate money, overflowing with bizarre ads and media horse-race-manship. Its members' beliefs are too diverse to be confined comfortably in what American electoral politics has become. It simply couldn’t be squeezed into a system that stifles and, in some cases, silences the kinds of voices and energies it possessed.

The post-election challenge for the members of Wisconsin's uprising is finding a new way to fight for and achieve needed change without simply pinning their hopes on a candidate or an election. After all, that's part of what absorbed the nation when a bunch of students first moved into the Wisconsin state capitol and wouldn’t go home, or when a ragtag crew of protesters camped out in lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park and wouldn't leave either. In both cases, they had harnessed the outrage felt by so many Americans for a cause other than what’s usually called “politics” in this country.

And they were successful -- even in the most traditional terms; that is, both movements affected traditional politics most strongly when they weren’t part of it. The Occupy movement, for all its flaws, moved even mainstream political discourse away from austerity and deficit slashing and toward the issues of income inequality and the hollowing out of the American middle and working classes.

Avoiding politics as we know it with an almost religious fervor, Occupy still managed to put its stamp on national political fights. Last October, for instance, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly to repeal SB 5, a law that curbed collective bargaining rights for all public-employee unions. Occupy’s "We are the 99%" message reverberated through Ohio, and the volunteers who blitzed the state successfully drew on Occupy themes to make their case for the law's repeal. Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, which spent $500,000 in Ohio fighting SB 5, told me at the time, "Every conversation was in the context of the 99% and the 1%, this discussion sparked by Occupy Wall Street."

The money that flowed into Walker's recall fight speaks loudly to the disadvantages a Wisconsin-like movement faces within the walls of electoral politics and the need for it to resist being confined there. On the post-Citizens United playing field, the unlimited amounts of the money that rose to the top of this society in recent decades, as the 1% definitively separated itself from the 99%, can be reinvested in preserving the world as it is and electing those who will make it even more amenable. The advantage invariably goes corporate; it goes Republican.

Historically, the Republicans have long been the party of big business, of multinational corporations, of wealthy, union-hating donors like Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and Amway heir Dick DeVos -- and in recent decades the Democrats have followed in their wake sweeping up the crumbs (or worse). And here’s the reality of a deeply corrupt system: unless Congress and state legislators act to patch up their tattered campaign finance rulebooks, the same crew with the same money will continue to dominate the political wars. (And any movement that puts its own money on changing those rules is probably in deep trouble.)

In the wake of the recall losses, the people of Wisconsin's uprising must ask themselves: Where can they make an impact outside of politics? The power of nonviolent action to create social and economic change is well documented, most notably by Jonathan Schell in his classic book The Unconquerable World. The men and women in Schell's invaluable history -- Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his civil rights fighters, the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel, and so many others -- can serve as guides to a path to change that doesn't require recall elections. Already mainstays of the Madison protests have suggested campaigns to refuse to spend money with businesses that support Walker. "Hit 'em where it hurts. Pocketbooks," C.J. Terrell, one of the Capitol occupiers, recently wrote on Facebook.

Wisconsinites could also turn to one of their own: Robert "Fightin' Bob" La Follette. He created his own band of "insurgents" within the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Republican Party. Together they formed the Progressive Party, which fought for workers' rights, guarded civil liberties, and worked to squeeze corruption out of government.

Ultimately, however, the decision on what comes next rests in the hands of those who inspired and powered the Wisconsin uprising. And with an emboldened Governor Walker, there should be no shortage of reasons to fight back in the next two years. But success, as Tuesday's election made clear, isn’t likely to come the traditional way. It will, of course, involve unions; it might draw on state and local political parties. But in the end, it's in the hands of the people again, as it was in February 2011.

The future they want is theirs to decide.

Andy Kroll is a staff reporter in the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones magazine. He is also an associate editor at TomDispatch.com. He has covered Wisconsin politics since the first protests ignited in February 2011.

Wisconsin Post-Mortem

DonkeyHotey

"Money can't buy you love, but it sure can by you power."  As  Matt Rothschild says:

Walker raised seven-to-ten times as much money as Barrett did. The governor collected six-figure checks from a rogue’s gallery of the far right: Bob Perry of Swift Boat infamy gave $500,000. Sheldon Adelson gave $250,000, Richard Devos gave $250,000, Foster Friess gave $100,000.

A wrinkle in Wisconsin campaign finance laws, which allows for unlimited contributions to a candidate between the time recall papers are filed and the day that the election formally gets scheduled, gave Walker four and a half months to sit on the lap of every rightwing roofer in Missouri (two of whom gave him $250,000 checks), every conservative Wall Street financier, every reactionary Texas oilman that he could find.

On top of that, the Koch Brothers poured in millions through their front groups, and the RNC funneled money in, as did other Republican organizations.

Thus, John Nichols writes:

The Wisconsin result—which followed upon a campaign that saw Walker outspend his Democratic challenger by perhaps 8–1, as the governor’s billionaire backers flooded the state with tens of millions of dollars in “independent” expenditures on his behalf—should send up red flares for Democrats as they prepare for this fall’s presidential and congressional elections. The right has developed a far more sophisticated money-in-politics template than it has ever before employed. That template worked in Wisconsin, on behalf of a deeply divisive and scandal-plagued governor, and it worked.

But, as Nichols is quick to point out, organized money will not always beat organized people, and the anti-Walker forces had other disadvantages.  First, it must be noted, "they were let down by national Democratic players who never quite recognized that Republican National Committee chairman Reince Preibus and “independent” groups on the right were testing and perfecting strategies for November."

As Rothschild tells it, in contrast to the "rightwing moneymen and the Republican Party," who understood the importance of this election, "the DNC was stingy, and Barack Obama couldn’t find Wisconsin with GPS and a flashlight. Hell, he was in Minneapolis on Friday and didn’t even bother to drive across the Mississippi to set foot in Wisconsin. He never showed up. Neither did Joe Biden. All Obama did was send a tweet on election morning."

Another problem was the unpopularity of recall elections, generally.  Rothschild notes that exit polls showed that "60 percent of Wisconsin voters said recall should be used only for “misconduct” in office, and not for other reasons."

It is important to recognize, therefore, that Walker won not, as Republicans want us to believe, because of the popularity of their ideas, but because of their staggering financial advantage, because the organized right made Walker's victory a national priority, and due to legitimate concerns voters had about using the recall procedure. 

Nevertheless, as Greg Sargent states, "Scott Walker’s victory in tonight’s recall battle is a major wake-up call for the left, Democrats, and unions about the true nature of the new, post-Citizens United political landscape, and it should force a major reckoning among liberals and Democrats about what this means for the future."

Wisconsin Needs You

As Meteor Blades at Daily Kos puts it:

Wisconsin progressives have inspired us, invigorated us and built an aggressive fight against the right-wing's continuing efforts to smash unions, trash equal pay for women, give tax breaks to corporations, raise taxes on low-income people and make it harder for voters to actually vote. Today that battle culminates in the recall election against Gov. Scott Walker. But it's far more than just an effort in one state against one governor. Whatever its unique qualities, it epitomizes the struggle we face nationwide. Today, we progressives are all Wisconsinites.

If you're in Wisconsin, We Are Wisconsin has field offices around the state running canvasses you can participate in.  If you don't live in Wisconsin, you can still help get out the vote by clicking here and signing up for Friends and Neighbors, created by the AFL-CIO and Workers' Voice, which will put you in touch with Wisconsin voters you have already connected with online.

Wisconsin Recall: A Battle We Can't Afford To Lose

By Isaiah J. Poole, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

For the progressive movement, it's put up or shut up time in Wisconsin.

We said that we despise the agenda of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. We cheered the thousands of people who occupied the state capitol in 2011 to protest Walker's ramming legislation crippling public employee unions through the legislature. We celebrated when a legislature recall election led to the ousting of two of the state senators who backed the legislation. And we were bolstered when a record number of signatures put a Walker recall election on the ballot.


But now that it's crunch time, we are dangerously close to losing it all. And the consequences of a recall defeat are almost impossible to overstate. Imagine the gloating on Fox News and the right-wing blogs if Walker wins on Tuesday, and the claims that our insurgent movement for rebuilding the middle class is bloodied and can be left for dead.

If we are really serious about standing up against the unholy alliance of conservative extremism and corporate money that has imposed an austerity agenda on the working class while further enriching the wealthy, then we need to help the people in Wisconsin who are trying against the odds to win this Wisconsin recall.

We're asking people this weekend to sign up with Worker's Voice and contribute time to help get out the vote against Walker.

Workers' Voice is a new political action committee affiliated with the AFL-CIO that offers get-out-the-vote tools that leverage the power of your social networks with information in the voter file.
You can help identify voters, make phone calls, or send your own personalized direct mail to people you know. And you can do it all from home, no matter where you live. And in an election race that polls suggest could go either way, every phone call, every email, every knock on a door will matter.

What has me particularly fired up is an article progressive commentator Sally Kohn has posted on The Daily Beast, with a headline that claims "Democrats Lose Momentum in Wisconsin: The left has seemed more comfortable being angry than channeling that emotion into influence."

I respect Sally Kohn and think she's a smart political analyst. But I would really like to see her proved wrong.

Her sense is that grassroots progressives did a good job pulling together a movement based on opposition to Walker's policies—not just on labor rights but also on a budget that, like national conservative policies, cuts services vital to the middle class and poor while cutting taxes to the wealthy and corporations. But the momentum fell apart when it came time to take that energy and translate it into actual change at the ballot box.

"Progressives have had a far harder time yoking grassroots activism to electoral politics than conservatives, who quickly managed to translate Tea Party rabble rousing into political power," Kohn writes.

It is true that progressives need a more solid strategy for electoral and political gains in the face of how, with the aid of the Citizens United ruling, the right and its corporate backers have dominated the political landscape. That is a key focus of the Take Back the American Dream conference, where many of the plenary meetings and strategy sessions will be focused both on how progressives can score gains in the November elections and on how progressives can affect the course of economic policy during December's "taxmageddon," when Congress must decide how to handle the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, payroll tax relief and a deal on federal spending.

But, as The Nation's John Nichols told me in my interview with him today, people power has already accomplished more in Wisconsin than skeptics in either the left or the right expected. As he reminds us, the Capitol protests were supposed to quickly fizzle, but they didn't. The public was supposed to massively turn against supporters of public employees, but they didn't. The Walker recall was expected to flail in the midst of the harsh Wisconsin winter. It didn't.

So now we come to this moment, where it will become clear to the nation whether the 99 percent can in fact use people power to push back against the 1 percent and insist on government policies that restore a measure of prosperity to the majority of Americans, not just those at the very top.

Workers Voice is one way you can help, but it is of course not the only way. However you choose to get involved, this is the time to move from the sideline to the front line.

Then, at our Take Back the American Dream conference, we can do the work of building on a Wisconsin victory. That conference will feature Paul Krugman, Van Jones, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ai-jen Poo, Sandra Fluke, Gov. Howard Dean, Melissa Harris-Perry, Chris Hayes and Katrina vanden Heuvel. (Click here to register.)


When you consider all that is at stake throughout the country, as conservatives continue their assault on worker's rights and economic security at both the state and national level, we literally cannot afford to lose on Tuesday.

Wild And Woolly In Wisconsin

Barrett To Face Walker In Historic Recall Election

By Mary Bottari, cross-posted from PRWatch

DonkeyHotey

Wisconsin voters chose Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett to run against incumbent Governor Scott Walker in the first gubernatorial recall election in the state's history. It has been 450 days since the first protests against Walker's bill to strip state workers of collective bargaining rights sparked massive protests and an 18 day occupation of the Capitol building. Now, there are only 28 days left before a general election that will decide the next governor of the state.

Barrett told MSNBC: "It will be a wild and woolly 28 days."

Barrett got 58% of the vote. He was trailed by Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk at 34%, State Senator Kathleen Vinehout at 4%, and Secretary of State Doug Lafollette at 3%. Wisconsin State Firefighters President Mahlon Mitchell easily bested two unknown candidates for the right to run in the recall against Republican Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch. "Real" Democrats easily defeated the "fake" Democrats run by Republicans in four key State Senate recall elections, which will determine whether Democrats retake that body. Democrats recalled two State Senators in the summer of 2011 and only need to knock off one more to take control of the chamber and put a stop to the GOP agenda. In 2010, Walker beat Barrett by 5% during a national tsunami that swept Democrat Russ Feingold and many other long-serving Democrats out of office and gave the GOP trifecta control of 26 statehouses.

Walker faced a symbolic challenge from self-described (and attired) "Lincoln" Republican Arthur Kohl-Riggs, who received 3% of the vote in the Republican primary. Active campaigning by Walker and full mobilization by right-wing talk radio pumped up voter turnout in the Republican primary to unexpected levels.

State is a Hotbed of Politics

A June 5 general election will determine whether Walker becomes the third governor in U.S. history to be recalled.


The primary showcased a booming interest by Wisconsin voters -- Democrats and Republicans alike -- in the political process. A new Marquette University poll showed that nearly twice as many Wisconsin voters have attended a political rally or demonstration as in the 2008 presidential election, which was one of the highest turnouts ever. One in five has made a campaign contribution, one in four has bought a bumper sticker or posted a yard sign. These numbers show a much higher level of political engagement than comparable national figures.

670,000 voted in the Democratic primary. 647,000 voted in the Republican primary, even though Walker did not have serious competition. Undecided voters comprise a minuscule part of the electorate, polling at one to two percent of likely voters.

These undecided voter will be the targets of millions in campaign dollars yet to be spent.

Walker Has Spent $20 Million But Has Not Convinced Many Voters

Despite spending a record $21 million over the past few months -- during which all Democrats combined barely raised $2 million -- polling shows that as many voters still dislike Walker as like him. For the first time, the recent Marquette poll has Barrett beating Walker 47-46% among registered voters, putting the race in a statistical dead heat.

Even though unions are anticipated to come in strong for Barrett, he is still likely to be at a financial disadvantage to Walker, who has been traveling around the country raising huge sums from out of state millionaires -- more money than any other candidate in Wisconsin history. For a period of time, he was allowed to raise unlimited amounts of money, and he did, many in $250,000 contributions. 74% of Walker's individual contributions are from out of state.

Walker is also backed by huge independent expenditures by the Republican Governor’s Association and the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity Group. Both groups have spent $2-3 million each on TV ads in support of Walker and are anticipated to spend much more.

As for the Democrats, they feel that they have two critical issues on their side: Walker’s abysmal jobs numbers and an on-going criminal investigation of his former staff that has gotten very little state-wide attention.

"John Doe" Ads Launched Against Walker

The Democrats have focused their ad campaign on a single issue: jobs. While Walker ran on a promise to create 250,000 jobs, his austerity budget sent jobs off a cliff in the summer of 2011, reversing a positive trend. Wisconsin has shed 23,900 jobs from March 2011-March 2012, the worst performance in the nation. Polling shows that residents are deeply concerned that Wisconsin appears completely delinked from the modest federal recovery.

But today, with the primary out of the way and the battle lines drawn, independent expenditure groups took out one of their biggest weapons in the recall, the 15 felony indictments against Scott Walker's former aides and associates emerging from a secret "John Doe" probe being run out of the Milwaukee District Attorney's office.

The ads detail the 15 felony indictments of Walker’s former staff. These include indictments for illegal campaigning on the public payroll, indictments for embezzlement of veterans' funds, illegal campaign contributions, and even solicitation of minors.

Walker has denied that he is a target of the John Doe investigation, but he has hired two groups of criminal defense firms and has established a criminal defense fund, a fund that by statute is only available to a public official when they are actual subjects of a criminal investigation.

Mordecai Lee, a respected professor of government at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,said that the general recall election will rank among the most important in Wisconsin history. "In a handful of political events in Wisconsin's history, this is on one hand," said Lee, a former Democratic state senator. "This is just an unbelievably important moment."

Four hundred and seventy-eight days after the Wisconsin Uprising began, an extremely active and engaged electorate will either recall or reinstate Scott Walker.

One Million Signatures To Recall Scott Walker

By Mary Bottari, cross-posted from PR Watch, January 17, 2012

DonkeyHotey

The petition drive to recall and remove Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has surpassed all expectations, collecting over one million signatures in just 60 days.

Petitioners were only required to collect 540,000 by law. They far exceeded this number, making a successful legal challenge of the recall highly unlikely. This is the largest recall in U.S. history. Volunteers also gathered over 845,000 signatures to recall Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch, as well enough signatures for four of the state senators who voted for Walker's collective bargaining bill in March 2011, adding hundreds of thousands more petitions to a pile estimated to weigh over one ton.

The Governor was not immediately available for comment. At the moment the recall petitions were being filed, he was the guest of Citibank on Wall Street at a high-dollar recall fundraiser.

Wisconsin Recall Will Make History

The numbers coming out of Wisconsin are stunning. Of the 19 states that permit the recall of governors, Wisconsin has one of the highest thresholds. For governors (and legislators), recall organizers must gather signatures equaling 25 percent of the turnout in the previous election for the office. That means organizers faced the daunting task of collecting about 540,000 signatures. To avoid losing the election through signature challenges, signature collectors wanted a "cushion" of additional signatures, so they set a goal of 720,000 signatures. They surpassed even that goal.

When California governor Gray Davis was recalled in 2003, residents collected 1.6 million signatures out of 21.1 million eligible voters, or approximately 7.6 percent. In Wisconsin, 25,000 trained volunteers had 60 days to collect approximately 1 million signatures from 4.37 million eligible voters or approximately 23 percent. Plus, 1 million is almost half of the votes cast in the 2010 Wisconsin gubernatorial election. Wisconsin volunteers did it with less money, over the holiday season and in the depths of winter.

As a heavy snow fell on Wisconsin, volunteers explained that the 3,000 pounds of petitions would be delivered to the non-partisan elections board in trucks escorted by armed security guards. Volunteers from United Wisconsin, the grassroots organization that took charge of collecting the signatures, have designated two volunteers from each of Wisconsin's 72 counties to hand carry a box containing a portion of the petitions to highlight the fact that the work took place in every corner of the state.

Red State Blue State

In the months to come, the remarkable story of the recall organizers' massive, grassroots signature-collecting drive is likely to be lost to the unprecedented sums of money the campaigns and the independent expenditure groups will raise and spend, and to the charges and counter-charges that will volley back and forth as they do in all elections, but today recall organizers celebrated.

Tina Nelson, a Dane County Coordinator for United Wisconsin, said she was "unbelievably excited," but also "wondering what to do with myself" now that she did not have thousands of emails to send and volunteers to organize. In Dane County, the liberal bastion surrounding Madison, volunteers collected an estimated 160,000 petitions.

But signatures came from red as well as blue areas of the state. In conservative Walworth County, represented by Rep. Paul Ryan in Congress, volunteers collected an estimated 10,000 signatures, 2,000 more than their goal. "I am feeling pumped, optimistic and gratified," said Ellen Holly, a United Wisconsin coordinator for the county. "But deep down, I am also a little bit angry and sad. I have never lived somewhere where I had to recall my government before," she explained.

Volunteers in the small town of Burlington, which voted to support George W. Bush and John McCain and strongly backed Scott Walker in 2010, collected over 6,000 recall signatures from the area. Mary Ann Staupe, a retired school teacher, explained why people signed: "I asked every person who came into [the Burlington] office. Every person added another piece to the puzzle. Collective bargaining was just the tip of the iceberg. People were also concerned about neglected schools, neglected infrastructure, health care changes that hurt the poor and the disabled. Many people have friends and families in those situations. It was a huge tent."

In Delavan, Scott Walker's home town, volunteers set up shop in "Circus Park," in the town's tiny main square, where a towering statue of a giraffe watches cars roll by. On the first day that volunteers circulated petitions, "We created a traffic jam. People were whipping up in their cars like NASCAR trying to be among the first to sign. Delavan was our 'hot spot' for a very long time," said Holly.

For Peggy Ellerkamp, a high school librarian, signature gathering felt more like a civic duty. "Walker has caused so much damage in less than one year," Ellerkamp said, referring to Walker's anti-union budget repair bill, $1.6 billion in public school aid cuts, Wisconsin's precipitous job losses, and the general climate of despair and anger in the state. "Just think what he can do if we don't get him out of there by end of his first term."

Making a List, Checking it Twice

The unofficial estimates coming in from around the state are impressive. Over 14,000 from Sheboygan County (6,000 above the goal) and 9,000 from Manitowoc County (2,800 more than the goal). Although Wisconsin Republicans have been raising the specters of "Mickey Mouse" signing petitions multiple times, the petitions were checked and rechecked.

Volunteers described a meticulous process by which signatures were reviewed first by the circulator, then by the local recall office, then in a regional recall office, then at the Madison headquarters. Volunteers were first looking to make sure the record was complete and correct. They also scanned for questionable names and other mischief. No one I spoke to reported any problems other than the occasional "WI" in the zip code spot. "We wanted to do it right, we knew that every signature had to count," said Staupe, who described the process as "arduous." In Madison, the recall office apparently entered all the records in the computer in an attempt to scan for duplicates.

Walker Team Petitions Court to Delay

The latest employment figures show Wisconsin lost 14,500 jobs in November. The latest poll shows that support for the recall is around 58 percent, up from 47 percent in the spring. For Scott Walker lawyers, delay appears to be their strategy. During that delay, Walker can continue to raise unlimited campaign funds and has already brought in close to $5 million, approximately half of which is from out of state.

In a normal recall, lawyers representing the candidate targeted for recall would review each signature and challenge any that seem inappropriate or unclear. Each challenge would be considered by the nonpartisan elections board. That is the way recalls have been handled in Wisconsin for decades, but even with 5,000 volunteers at the ready to review signatures, the Walker camp decided to bring a lawsuit to change standard procedure and lay the burden of the recall review on the small state elections board. On January 6, they succeeded in convincing a court to order the elections board to conduct a costly review. Kevin Kennedy, the head of the elections board, testified that entering signatures into a database and looking for duplicates could take eight extra weeks for his staff or might require the hiring of an outside computer firm.

Yesterday, Kennedy told the press, "We used to say that we could see an election as ear ly as late May, but now we just don't know." An eight week delay when the numbers are so overwhelmingly in favor of the petitioners is likely to spark a court challenge of its own. Some anticipate that the whole issue is likely to end up in the hands of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, no stranger to partisan bickering and controversy.

Putting off worries about the future and the massive amount of work ahead, thousands of recall volunteers prepared to party tonight at Frank Lloyd Wright's Monona Terrace, the site of Scott Walker's 2010 inaugural.

What's Next For Wisconsin?

The Badger State's Bloody Stalemate

By Andy Kroll, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch.

Stephanie Haw needed a good cry.

On the night of August 9th, the rowdy crowd inside Hawk's bar in downtown Madison grew ever quieter as the election results trickled in. Earlier that day, with the nation watching, voters statewide cast their ballots in Wisconsin's eagerly awaited recall elections that threatened the seats of six Republican state senators. Democrats needed to win three of them to regain control of the state senate and block Republican Governor Scott Walker's hard-line agenda. But it wasn't to be.  Deep into the night, an MSNBC anchor announced that a fourth GOP senator, Alberta Darling of north Milwaukee and the nearby suburbs, had clinched a narrow victory.

Haw slipped outside. It wasn't supposed to turn out like this, she thought. Progressives had mobilized damn near every possible supporter they could, phone banking and door knocking and Facebooking and Tweeting, and in the end, it still wasn't enough. She thought of all the energy poured into the recall effort, and of her two-year-old daughter running around the house shouting "Recall Walker! Recall Walker!" Standing on the sidewalk, she burst into tears.

I met Haw and her mother later that night at Hawk's. We sat around chewing over the election results till the bar emptied. Haw, who was wearing a red t-shirt with SOLIDARITY emblazoned on the front, said simply, "I feel terrible that we lost." I reminded her what the Democrats had been up against: with one exception, the six districts in play leaned to the right, and all six of those Republicans had won in 2008 despite the Obama frenzy that gripped the state. (He won it by nearly 14 percentage points.) She nodded along with me and then summed her feelings up this way: "I guess it's the best of times and the worst of times."

That ambivalence seemed to carry through Wisconsin's historic summer of recalls, which ended on August 16th when a pair of Democratic state senators easily defended their seats from a Republican recall effort. Which is to say, when the dust settled in the Badger State, there was no clear winner.


Wisconsin Democrats took five out of the summer's nine recalls, and also won the overall vote count by 50.7% to 49.3%. They failed, however, in their chief goal: winning enough seats to wrest control of the State Senate majority and so shift the balance of power away from Governor Walker and his allies in the legislature.

That didn't stop Mike Tate, chair of the state Democratic Party, from crowing that Democrats had clinched the "overall victory." Republicans, meanwhile, cast the results as a vindication of Walker and his Republican game plan. "Wisconsin now emerges from this recall election season with a united Republican majority," Wisconsin GOP chairman Brad Courtney bragged. "[We’ve] beaten off an attack from national unions and special interests and emerged steadfastly committed to carrying forward a bold job creation agenda."
Liberal and conservative media similarly claimed victory. The Nation's John Nichols, the most vocal cheerleader for the Democrats, wrote that their recall wins dealt "a serious blow to [Republican] authority inside the state Capitol." Conservative blogger Owen Robinson was typical when he opined in the West Bend Daily News, "The people decided that they were pretty happy with the direction the Republicans are moving the state and let them retain power in Madison."

Can it be both? If not, then who really won in Wisconsin? And what does that portend for the fledgling movement sparked by the labor uprising in February and March?

The Union Manpower Machine

The night before the August 9th recalls, people clutching stacks of paper and cradling cell phones to their ears spilled out of the Laborers' Local 464 union hall on the north side of Madison. The Democratic Party had moved its phone-banking operation to the union hall to accommodate the waves of volunteers who had turned out to help the six Democrats in the next day's election. The hall itself buzzed with the din of a few dozen conversations, and with volunteer trainers getting the next crop of callers ready for their upcoming three-hour shift.

I logged 1,200 miles driving around Wisconsin before the GOP recall elections, and saw the same enthusiasm nearly everywhere I went. It was something to behold, the staggering get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort mounted by the labor unions and the Democratic Party -- at a time of year when many Wisconsinites are normally more preoccupied with last night's Brewers game and heading out to the lake for the weekend.

One Sunday afternoon, I tagged along with a savvy, relentless community organizer named Austin Thompson in a mostly black, low- and middle-income neighborhood that locals call "Far North" Milwaukee. At door after door, Thompson stressed the importance of voting in the recalls; by the time I met him, he'd visited some houses five or six times, determined to mobilize a pocket of the city that, he reminded me, barely turned out the vote in the 2010 election.

That energy carried right up until the polls closed. Tom Bird, a whip-smart grad student I'd befriended during Madison's labor protests back in February, texted me at 6 p.m. on Election Day from a local union meeting place, "I can't even phone bank because the labor temple is full." Democrats and the unions had thrown everything in the ring.

All that GOTV effort paid off -- but for both parties. Forty-four percent of eligible voters in the six state senate districts cast a ballot on August 9th, just shy of the combined turnout for the 2010 governor's race. The GOP's biggest fear -- that a small but motivated base of opponents would come out while their supporters stayed home -- did not happen. "Everybody voted. Ultimately, that probably hurt," Democratic pollster Paul Maslin told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "We didn’t have that kind of aggrieved-party advantage [we needed].”

Nor did Democrats have a big money advantage. Mike McCabe, director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a non-partisan outfit that tracks money in Badger State politics, said upwards of $40 million was spent on the nine recall races, with both left- and right-leaning groups spending roughly the same amount. By contrast, $3.75 million went into the entire slate of legislative races in 2010. The key difference, McCabe explained, was the wave of “dark money” spent by right-leaning groups, who, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision of 2010, didn't have to disclose their donors. (Left-leaning groups almost entirely disclosed their funders.) Such staggering recall spending, he said, "is so out of whack from everything we've ever seen."

Make no mistake: the Democrats and labor unions won the overall GOTV fight. In the nine Senate districts in play this summer, more ballots were cast for Democrats than for Tom Barrett, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, in last November's general election. Sure, Republican turnout was higher than expected, but a majority of the districts at stake were colored red on the political map anyway. "Union money is being matched or outmatched by money from conservative organizations," wrote Slate's Dave Weigel, "but union turnout operations are outmuscling conservatives and the Tea Party."

Putting the Cart before the Donkey

A week before the August 9th recalls, Democratic Party of Wisconsin Chairman Mike Tate held a national conference call with reporters to deliver some rosy news. Internal polling (always to be taken with a hefty pinch of salt) showed Democrats leading in three races and tied in the remaining three. Tate didn't say so outright, but the swagger in his voice sent a message: We're gonna win this thing. Next stop, senate majority.

When I arrived in Wisconsin four days before the vote, many of the activists, operatives, and candidates with whom I talked brimmed with confidence. Polling data from the liberal Daily Kos website showed Democrats ahead in three races, albeit by the narrowest of margins in two of them. "In my mind we get all six," Jessica King, one of the six Democratic challengers, told me on the steps of the Waupun City Hall. (And she would, in fact, unseat the Republican she was facing.)

Then, on the eve of the elections, I sensed a subtle shift. A succession of union and Democratic staffers pulled me aside to remind me about what an uphill fight their candidates faced, and how difficult it was going to be to win on GOP turf in the dead of summer. You could feel then that, by trumpeting their chances of ousting three or more senators, left-leaning groups feared that they had put the cart before the donkey (if you will). Suddenly, the bluster was gone, and they were racing to manage expectations.

It was too late. When Democrats fell one seat short of winning back the senate majority, their opponents promptly portrayed what was certainly a victory as an embarrassing loss, a waste of money and manpower, a sign of the left's waning clout. "They came, they spent, they lost," was how one conservative blogger put it. "Unions made Wisconsin a great battleground to send a message to other states that politicians who challenge union power will pay a price," the Wall Street Journal editorial board opined. "The real price was paid by the unions themselves, in the national demonstration of their diminishing power." Never mind that the Republicans had fired the first shot in the summer's recall battle, and that the Democrats had launched their own recall efforts only in response to Republican threats -- a point, it should be added, that Democrats failed to hammer home.

And so even though left-leaning groups turned out more voters, won more races, and left Governor Walker with a razor-thin majority -- and one Republican senator who who voted against Walker's anti-union bill and might be willing to work with the Democrats on key issues -- they found themselves losing the messaging war. They had pinned their hopes on instant and total victory, on flipping the Senate, when they just as easily could have kept expectations in check. Such lofty ambitions in the face of very long odds and unfriendly demographics gave Republicans an opening to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Further to the Left -- and Right

Matt Thompson leaned back in his chair at the Argus pub just off Capitol Square in Madison, and thought about what came next. (Heavy political discussion in Wisconsin, you might have noticed, is often accompanied by even heavier ales.) Thompson had taken to the streets during the winter labor uprising to protest Walker’s anti-union actions, and since then has been a voice in the debate over the future of Wisconsin's re-energized progressive movement, a discussion cultivated on the Twitter hashtag #wiunion. "I just don't want this movement, whatever you want to call it, to fade," he told me. "But if we don't get three seats, I feel like that's gonna hurt our momentum."

Thompson was right to worry. With no obvious winner in Wisconsin's summer recalls, it's unclear what comes next for progressives. Many of the Wisconsinites I met told me that they were tired of the attack ads and political fisticuffs; they couldn't wait for the senate recalls to end so they could get on with their lives. Yet left-leaning groups insist that the nine races were mere previews for the biggest recall of all: Governor Walker’s.

There are plenty of reasons why a Walker recall would be a long shot. For starters, only two governors have been recalled in this country’s history: North Dakota's Lynn Frazier in 1921 and California's Gray Davis in 2003. Walker’s opponents will need to collect upwards of 600,000 signatures in 60 days to trigger a recall. And they will have to decide whether to begin collecting signatures in January, the moment Walker is eligible for recall -- he has to have been in office for a full year -- or plan their effort to coincide with the November presidential election.

Collecting 600,000 signatures, activists told me, isn't that daunting; one million Wisconsinites voted for Walker's opponent in 2010 in an election featuring a mediocre turnout and before anyone knew that Walker wanted to kneecap public-sector unions. But winning a recall election remains a very tall order.

If the senate recalls succeeded at anything, experts say, it was in further polarizing the voters of Wisconsin, widening the chasm between left and right in a state previously known for compromise. (Remember, it was Republican Governor Tommy Thompson who ushered in BadgerCare, the state's renowned health insurance program for low-income parents and children.)

Then there's the recall fatigue felt by many. After weeks of nasty attack ads blanketing the airwaves, some of them peddling outright lies, there was a general feeling that people wanted to get on with their lives. A recent survey by left-leaning Public Policy Polling captured that wariness, with 50% of respondents opposing a Walker recall while 47% supported it. Any such recall effort would also fall within the shadow of the 2012 presidential race, if not on election day itself, raising an important question: Would the Democratic Party and liberal outside groups that spent tens of millions of dollars in Wisconsin this summer siphon money away from defending President Obama or preserving their U.S. Senate majority in a difficult effort to defeat Walker?
When you play the angles, a Walker recall looks increasingly unlikely, says Charles Franklin, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist. "I think it could happen," he told me, "but between the letdown of not having succeeded fully this time and the competition in 2012, I think it's going to wither away."

Progressives at the Crossroads

Not if the unions can help it. After returning from Wisconsin, I interviewed Mary Kay Henry, the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), at her organization's headquarters just off Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. Henry's spacious office was splashed with colorful maps depicting SEIU membership around the country or various states' positions on issues like anti-gay and right-to-work legislation.
She was, Henry said, "incredibly proud of the heroic efforts" of the unions in pushing back against Walker and Wisconsin Republicans, but also "disappointed with the outcome." Most of all, she went on, the big challenge for SEIU and other unions was transforming the Wisconsin uprising into something larger. "I have waited all my life to see what I saw in February," she told me. "And I think the question for us is how do we add oxygen to that?"

Henry acknowledged the possibility that a Walker recall election might go forward, but insisted that the key for Wisconsin's progressives was "not to limit [the movement] or narrow it into electoral politics.”  Instead, she considered it crucial to make sure “it's expanded into a demand for jobs from the private sector in the state, and getting people back to work." She summed things up this way: "I just think we need to expand the fight."

Even activists on the ground in Wisconsin don't yet know if that will happen. For the rest of us, their decision either to press on or pack it in will speak volumes about where progressive organizing stands in America, a nation where too many protesters believe it's enough to turn up for a few rallies and then go home, even though the foundations for real mass movements (like Egypt's democracy uprising) are laid years before lasting change occurs.

Americans need such a movement, built on economic populism and the dream of shared prosperity. The question is: Are Wisconsin's progressives the first spark in that movement? Or is theirs a flare that is already flickering out?

Andy Kroll is a staff reporter in the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones magazine and associate editor at TomDispatch.com.

Wisconsin -- Ground Zero For An "American Spring"

By Richard (RJ) Eskow, cross-posted from Huffington Post

People watching the news over the past week might have thought that Congress was the only place where battles for our future were being won and lost. That's wrong. There are other battles, better battles, battles far from the glare of the Beltway spotlights. And more are on their way.

So forget Washington for a minute. (If you feel like I do right now, that'll be a pleasure.) If you want to see where the next wave of corporate-sponsored political attacks is being launched, look to New Orleans. And if you want a shot of optimism, a ray of light, a sign that battles can be won against overwhelming odds, turn your eyes toward Wisconsin.

That's where the action is.

On Wisconsin

Al Gore said this week that we need an "American Spring." It would be a stroke of Carl Sandburg-ish poetry if we were to someday look back and see that the first signs of our spring appeared in Midwestern farm country. And if that image is too corny for your taste, remember: The corn harvest starts around now. I'm just getting an early start.

The Wisconsin uprising began when Gov. Scott Walker and the Republicans in the legislature began their ruthless attempt to strip unions of their rights in that state. They had every right to believe it would be easy. The Democrats had just been routed in their state and across the country, as voters discouraged by the lack of jobs and growth took their revenue on the ruling party. Walker and his colleagues thought they had found their "Shock Doctrine" moment in that state's budget crisis, and used it to strip unions of their collective bargaining rights because they claimed the state "couldn't afford" to pay their wages and benefits.

The unions offered Walker virtually all the concessions he wanted, which took the financial argument off the table, but he moved forward anyway. And then a miracle happened ... Voters who had accepted one injustice after another finally decided they'd had enough. Demonstrators flooded into the state capitol, support flowed in from around the state, and six GOP legislators who voted for these provisions found themselves forced into recall elections. (It was too early to force a recall of the newly-elected governor.)

The "empire" always "strikes back," and Wisconsin was no exception. Dollars flowed in from the usual rich right-wingers, and they were used to force three Democrats into recall elections, too. The six Republicans will fight for their seats next week, on August 9, and two Democrats will be challenged on August 16. (One of the Democrats has already beaten back his challenge.)

People of all parties should back the challenge of these Republicans and support the Democrats - not out of party loyalty, but because each victory strikes a blow for fair play, the middle class, and a just economy. If three Democrats win, Republicans will lose control of the state legislature. That would be a huge triumph for everyone except the wealthy and cynical hacks who are trying to usurp democracy and destroy the middle class.

These recall elections have already been a victory. They've put the oligarchs and their political lackeys on notice, letting them know that it won't be as easy to trample on the public as they through. But the most inspiring thing about Wisconsin is the spirit that's been tapped. Similar movements are springing up in other states. And in one of the most cheerful stories of the uprising, a local pizza joint reported that it was getting orders from around the world from callers who wanted to send food to the strikers in the Capitol -- including calls from Egypt, even as that country's uprising was reaching its peak in Tahrir Square.


You want anchovies with that political powershift?

Crescent City Blowback

Meanwhile, down in New Orleans, a shadowy convocation takes place ... It needs a musical soundtrack, something just right for the occasion ... but sadly, Black Sabbath broke up years ago.

"ALEC," the "American Legislative Exchange Council," is holding its annual meeting. ALEC is funded by billionaire right-wingers the Koch Brothers. It's mission is to help political servants of the corporate class advance at the state and local levels, and then to provide them with their commands from the Death Star ... ahem, "model legislation" that they're expected to pass once they gain political power.

The Wisconsin union-busting law, like other legislation passed around the country, was incubated in the bowels of ALEC. And now legislators from states like Florida and North Carolina are flying to New Orleans on the taxpayers' dime so they can be given more guidance on how to strip most of the same taxpayers of their rights, their prosperity, and their chances for economic advancement.

Corporations don't get to program these automated politicians for free, of course. Undermining democracy is a "pay to play" proposition. As Bloomberg News reports:

"At ALEC's annual meeting in San Diego last year, three companies -- pharmaceutical manufacturer Allergan Inc., telephone giant AT&T Inc. (T) and cigarette maker Reynolds American Inc. (RAI) -- each paid $100,000 to be "President Level" sponsors. Another 11 groups, including Pfizer Inc. (PFE) and the Institute for Legal Reform, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce arm that advocates for jury award limits, wrote checks for $50,000, according to documents distributed at the meeting that were given to Bloomberg."

Today's Manchurian Candidates aren't programmed by Communists, but by executives for corporate America. (But who's playing Angela Lansbury's role as "Mother"?)

People will say that ALEC isn't that bad, or that secretive. If so, why did they have its own staff throw one reporter out of the Marriott where the meeting's being held, while another was ejected twice for tweeting about it!

(Who could have predicted that 2011's version of Big Brother would ban something called "tweeting"?)

As for ALEC's agenda, the organization isn't content to strip union members of their rights. It's also behind a wave of "voter ID" laws designed to disenfranchise voters who are more likely to vote Democratic, to help their servile minions sympathetic politicians get into office. Those voters are more likely to be black, brown, and poor, which makes ALEC the country's leading sponsor of 21st Century Jim Crow laws.

New Parties? American Spring?

This week Al Gore said something a lot of people have been thinking when he told Keith Olbermann it's time for an "American Spring." Fox News predictably - and hilariously - twisted Gore's words with the headline, "Gore: We Need An Arab Spring In America." (Right - because the Kenyan Muslim didn't work out as well as hoped, so we need Arab ones to complete our Shariah Law program.)

Gore's meaning was plain enough, of course: Americans need a revitalization of democracy, too. Fox helped make his point by its willingness to serve the ALEC crowd the way Qaddafi's newspapers serve their "great leader."

People across the country who are disillusioned with the latest budget deal, and who see it (rightly) as yet another program funded and designed by billionaire cash, have a place to channel their third-party energy: We already have a third party of sorts, made up of candidates at the state and local levels who fly under the radar of corporate America, and who have been bought off by Wall Street cash of "legislative models" funded by polluters and multinationals.

It's too early to tell if Wisconsin is the first bird of an American Spring, but one thing's for sure. In the icy grip of corporate winter, Wisconsinites turned up the heat on their corporate-controlled politicians. These folks deserve support -- whether it's cash or get-out-the-vote calls. (You can learn more about how to help here.) And there will be more Wisconsins - in Ohio and elsewhere - as voters strike back against the corporate political agenda.

That's why despair shouldn't be an option. A cop slaps a shopkeeker in Tunisia and the Arab world changes. An old man walks out of a jail cell with dignity and courage, and apartheid falls. Some Midwesterners get fed up and ... well, let's see. Better yet, why not influence the outcome? After Wisconsin comes Ohio. "Where are the jobs?" events are scheduled for August 10. If you're in Washington - or can get there - the Take Back the American Dream conference happens on October 3.

But there's also action in homes, workplaces, and capitals all across the United States. Don't let the bluster fool you. The ALEC crowd is running scared ... and it should be. They can still win, of course. The good guys are outgunned, at least when it comes to cash, and the Crescent City mob's got a running start. But things can change quickly. We may be eating "Wisconsin uprising" pizzas all across the country soon. If so, I want to thank our Tahrir Square allies in advance for phoning in those pizza orders. And to tell them something important:

Americans hate anchovies. (At least, this one does.)

Editor's note:  Lovechilde loves anchovies

For What It's Worth

While the media obsesses on Anthony Weiner's tweets and why Sarah Palin is being mean to them, there's something happening in Wisconsin.  Next month nine state senators -- six Republicans and three Democrats -- face a recall election.  What is at stake in Wisconsin is the balance of power.  As Dante Chinni of PBS NewsHour explains, "should Democrats manage to pick up a net of three seats in all those recall votes, they would control the Senate and be able to put the brakes on [Governor] Walker's agenda."  But, as Howie Klein argues, the recall will reach far beyond Wisconsin.  This is a battle that is "crucial for the whole progressive movement and for the future of our country."

Klein reminds us what Governor Walker has wrought:

As you no doubt recall, earlier this year the newly elected extreme Republican governor of the state, Scott Walker, pushed through a radical attack on basic labor rights. His plan to strip workers of the right to bargain collectively for protections against unfair treatment and unsafe worker conditions was one of the greatest assaults on working families in the last half century. And now he's pushing a radical, destructive agenda that guts priorities like education, health care and help for seniors while giving hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks to huge corporations. He couldn't have done it with an equally extremist state legislature, which has rubber stamped every single point on his destructive agenda.

It isn't just about Wisconsin.  "The Walker agenda," Klein contends, "is being duplicated in state after state by the extreme Republicans who swept into power in last November’s elections. This fight for rights and the basic values we all hold dear will reverberate across the nation, impacting elections in every region of the country." 

For this reason, former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold is actively supporting the Democrats on the ballot in order to "stop Governor Walker's radical agenda."  And Blue America (see ActBlue badge on the right side of the blog) has started a new Wisconsin Recall page to fund raise for the progressive Democrats who are running to replace the Republicans. 

As Klein insists, "winning these recalls will not just help protect Wisconsin -- it will send a signal to the entire country that we will stand up to extreme, divisive agendas that hurt our values and threaten the priorities we know are so important."

Nothing To See Here

When a politician gets caught in an embarrassing situation that is neither criminal nor relevant to public policy it may be fodder for good, even great comedy (Please see John Stewart, The Big Wang Theory).  But it shouldn't rise to the level of major news as the Weiner story has become.  Nor should whatever nonsense Sarah Palin utters, for that matter.  But the mainstream media remains focused on such inanities while failing to dig into some really important stories, such as the global energy crisis, the recall elections in Wisconsin, the GOP assault on voting rights, the thwarting of key Obama Administration nominees, and the the fact that the Republicans are truly seeking to abolish Medicare, to name just a few.  Come on, media, get serious.  I'm just a part-time blogger, I can't do everything.

Badger Zeitgeist

The right wing Governor of Wisconsin comes into office with a budget surplus and creates a modest shortfall by giving tax breaks to big business.  He then exaggerates the nature of the fiscal crisis, blames it on the public unions and uses it try to crush the rights of state workers.  What is remarkable about the situation in Wisconsin is the unified push back from the Democratic Party and the  huge and energetic popular protests in the streets and in the state Capitol.

It is important to understand what is behind this effort. It has little to do with the budget -- indeed the unions can't be blamed for the budget -- and everything to do with politics.  As Kevin Drum points out:  "It's an effort to destroy one of the few institutions left that fights relentlessly for the economic interests of the middle class."  But more than that, it is an attempt to permanently weaken a group that provides the most significant organized opposition to Republican candidates. 

The latest news is that the Republicans may be backing down.  Chris Bowers reports that before adjourning until March 1st, the Republican-controlled state Assembly rescinded their vote to move to final passage on the bill to strip state employees of the right to collectively bargain, making it possible to amend the bill and suggesting Republicans may be open to compromise.  Meanwhile, the protests are going to continue all weekend and all of the Democratic State Senators remain across state lines where they fled to deny the Republicans in the Senate a quorum on the bill.

It is amazing what can happen when you fight back.  Show your support for this effort by clicking on the Act Blue badge on the right hand column of the blog under Worthy Causes, and donate $14 to the Wisconsin State Senate Democratic Committee, one for each of the 14 heroic Senators.

Regenerated Progressive

Russ Feingold

The most bitter loss of the mid-term elections was the defeat of Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin to plastics executive and Tea Party-backed candidate Ron Johnson.  (See Plastics.)  Feingold is a true progressive and unyielding civil libertarian.  He was the only Senator to vote against the Patriot Act in 2001, a remarkably courageous act at that time, and he later introduced a resolution to censure President Bush for authorizing illegal wiretapping.  He is a staunch opponent of the death penalty.  He was outspoken in his opposition to the Iraq War, and accused Bush of "mounting an assault on the Constitution."  And, of course, he co-authored the McCain-Feingold Act on campaign finance reform.

On his last day in the Senate, Feingold was interviewed by The Nation's John Nichols.  The whole interview is really worth reading, but the highlight was Feingold explaining how our society is "being dominated by corporate power in a way that may exceed what happened in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century;" our country "has become so corporatized that the progressive movement is as relevant as it was one hundred years ago, maybe more so."  To Feingold, this is a struggle over the same issues:  "It's just that [corporate] power, because of money, international arrangements and communications, is so overwhelming that the average person is nearly helpless unless we develop a movement that can counter that power."  Feingold contends that we are at a critical moment:

We need to regenerate progressivism and make it relevant to what's happening right now.  But there's no lack of historical comparison to a hundred years ago.  It's so similar; the only real difference is that corporate power is even more extended.  It's the Gilded Age on steroids.

Feingold will back President Obama in 2012.  He advises progressives to support and respect Obama, but to be vocal about "a desire that he move more strongly in certain areas, such as civil liberties."  He urges that this be done "in a way that makes it clear we are not trying to harm the presidency but that we're trying to make sure that the base of the party and the progressive movement is motivated for this re-election."

According to Nichols, Russ Feingold will not fade away or follow the path of so many of his colleagues by becoming a corporate lobbyist.  On the contrary, he "intends to embrace the role of citizen reformer, continue challenging corporate power and play a part in renewing and extending the progressive movement."

[Related posts: Plastics]

Plastics

Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold lost his Senate seat to Tea Party-backed Republican Ron Johnson.  Johnson, who has run a plastics company for the last three decades, has said his main priority is to repeal health care and he gained notoriety earlier this year opposing a law that would extend the statute of limitations in cases of child abuse.  Feingold is a true progressive and unyielding civil libertarian.  He was the only Senator to vote against the Patriot Act in 2001, a remarkably courageous act at that time, and he later introduced a resolution to censure President Bush for authorizing illegal wiretapping.  He is a staunch opponent of the death penalty. He was outspoken in his opposition to the Iraq War, and accused Bush of "mounting an assault on the Constitution."  And, of course, he co-authored the McCain-Feingold Act on campaign finance reform. As the Washington Post reports, a large reason for his defeat was money. Johnson invested more than $8 million of his own money in the race, and another $3 million was poured into the campaign from outside groups in the wake of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision.  You can watch Feingold's concession speech here, where, after quoting Bob Dylan, he says "it is on to the next fight, on to the next adventure, on to 2012, and it is on to our next adventure forward."