A few weeks ago, I was a guest on a radio show hosted by Ed Martin on KDVS in Davis, California. The Egyptian revolt was in full swing. I said:
I know there's a lot of pent-up anger. If you take a country like Egypt, where people are suppressed, when they get an opportunity, a real opportunity, like what happened in the wake of the revolt in Tunisia, they will do things, they will take to the streets, they will show just how angry they are, just as, when the peasants in China got a chance to get back at landlords, they did, in 1949 after the Communists took power. In the United States, you wonder about that sometimes. I'd like to think that would happen, but I'm not at all certain that it would. Those of us who want radical change have our work cut out for us here in this country.
A short time later, I did another interview on the same station, this time with France Kassing. Some of what had happened in Egypt was now taking place in Madison, Wisconsin! Tens of thousands of protestors were marching, and the capitol building itself had been peacefully occupied. The demonstrators were opposing right-wing Governor Scott Walker’s plan to terminate the collective bargaining rights of the state’s non-uniformed public employees.
Over the past four years, millions of people in the United States have lost their jobs, and many of them have little prospect of finding a new one. Millions have lost their homes. Hunger, homelessness, and hopelessness stalk our streets. Profits have been restored, thanks in large part to government bailouts and near zero interest rates, and the financial markets are once again booming. But it is becoming clearer by the day that working men and women face a bleak future, one with limited security, either on the job or from social welfare programs. Every kind of protection is under attack, and if Obama and his deficit reduction commission have their way, we’ll be seeing a major scaling back of social security benefits.
Yet all of this misery had not led to mass protests. There have been some anti- immigration demonstrations and the various Tea Party events, but these were not grassroots movements. Quite the contrary, they were usually organized and funded by corporate interests masquerading as popular outpourings of righteous rage. Then, finally, all the anger and frustration erupted in Madison, in the form of rallies, marches, building takeovers, and runaway legislators, all done peacefully and with humor but also with dogged determination. As I write this, the protests continue. And they have spread to other states as well; support for the Wisconsin public employees around the country is considerable, more than I would have expected given the way public sector workers have been demonized as overpaid and underworked by the media.
D