And of course anger can be power, as Joe Strummer used to say, if you know how to use it.
But Robert Reich says we must couple our anger with self-discipline in fighting back against the corporatists and oligarchs:
Governor Scott Walker and his Wisconsin senate Republicans have laid bare the motives for their coup d’etat. By severing the financial part of the bill (which couldn’t be passed without absent Democrats) from the part eliminating the collective bargaining rights of public employees (which could be), and then doing the latter, Wisconsin Republicans have made it crystal clear that their goal has had nothing whatever to do with the state budget. It’s been to bust the unions.
That’s no surprise to most people who have watched this conflict from the start, but like any coup its ultimate outcome will depend on the public. If most citizens of Wisconsin are now convinced that Walker and his cohorts are extremists willing to go to any lengths for their big-business patrons (including the billionaire Koch brothers), those citizens will recall enough Republican senators to right this wrong.
But it’s critically important at this stage that Walker’s opponents maintain the self-discipline they have shown until this critical point. Walker would like nothing better than disorder to break out in Madison. Like the leader of any coup d’etat, he wants to show the public his strong-arm methods are made necessary by adversaries whose behavior can be characterized on the media as even more extreme.
Be measured. Stay cool. Know that we are a nation of laws, and those laws will prevail. The People’s Party is growing across America — and the actions of Scott Walker and his Republican colleagues are giving it even greater momentum. So are the actions of congressional Republicans who are using the threat of a government shutdown to strong-arm their way in Washington.
The American public may be divided over many things but we stand united behind our democratic process and the rule of law. And we reject coups in whatever form they occur.
Nate Silver points out one way that this corporatist coup in Wisconsin could reverberate in the national body politic:
It is questionable how much voters outside the state will care about the Wisconsin debate a year from now, given other issues like the health of the national economy, the debate over the federal budget and the war in Afghanistan. Two groups that may have longer memories are two core constituencies in the Democratic base: union households and voters who describe themselves as liberal. A Pew poll conducted earlier this month found that while there was little overall change in opinion of unions — the public went from having a favorable view of them by a 45 to 41 plurality to a 47 to 39 plurality, not a statistically significant increase — there were exceptions among these groups.
In particular, the number of liberal Democrats who said they had a very favorable view of unions jumped to 32 percent from 14 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of labor household voters who held a very favorable view increased to 45 percent from 27 percent. There was no comparable change among conservative voters; the number of people who said they had a very unfavorable view of unions was roughly unchanged, both among the country as a whole and among different subgroups.
Wisconsin, then, could motivate these groups to vote — something that they usually do fairly reliably, but did not in 2010. (The share of union household voters in the electorate dropped to 17 percent in 2010 from 21 percent in 2008, according to exit polls.) Although self-described liberals almost always vote Democratic, between 35 and 40 percent of labor households have voted Republican in recent elections. If that fraction decreases to something like 30 percent at the same time that union turnout increases, that would hurt Republicans by a couple of percentage points nationally.
And, if the Pew poll is right, Republicans will have no particular counterweight to this; the Wisconsin dispute has motivated the Democratic base more so than theirs.
That does not mean that the Republican base will not have other issues to motivate them in 2012 — they will almost certainly have plenty. But the likelihood of an “enthusiasm gap” of the sort that was present in 2010 has diminished.
What we must remember is that voting for Change We Can All Believe In does not necessarily bring about the diminishing of the corporatist/oligarchy agenda.
So while it is important to recall the Republicans who voted for this bill in Wisconsin, it is also important that we support progressive Democrats who SUPPORT unions and working and middle class people over Wall Street, the Too Big To Fail banks, and the Great Corporatocracy.
Alternatively, we can punish Dems who are beholden to the great moneyed interests and let them know that selling out unions and middle and working class Americans to Wall Street will hurt them come election time.
President Obama thinks union members will work for him simply because the alternative to him is unacceptable.
He MUST have the opinion changed.
He must be told by the union leadership that if he refuses to work for union interests, or worse, promotes policies that hurt unions (like with his education policy), then unions will not help his campaign with the GOTV operations.
Unions MUST instead focus their efforts on politicians who are helping in this class war, not politicians who TALK about helping, then do NOTHING.
Wisconsin can be a galvanizing point for both progressives and for unions.
We can see how the fight there has already begun to change some opinions in the general public about unions.
And this fight has also showed us (most recently in a Bloomberg poll) that the American public DOES support the right of public employees to collectively bargain.
These are important things.
But the most important is that this fight shows us which politicians are on the side of the unions and the working and middle classes and which ones talk a good game while taking in all that yummy, yummy Goldman Sachs money.
Are you listening, Hopey/Changey?
I like Reich's idea of the People's Party. Dennis Kucinich, Bernie Sanders, and Russ Feingold come to mind.
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