Thursday 17 February 2011

Solidarity with the Cheeseheads

Over in Wisconsin, the Tea Party extremists have taken over the Governership. Their first major action: to withdraw virtually all fundamental workers' rights: collective bargaining has gone, salaries have been slashed, redundancy no longer has a due process, and the governor threatened his victims with military force if they dared to demonstrate against these plans.

Symbolically, the march meant that Scott Walker (the governor, not the singer) had to deliver his budget from the fortified offices of a corporation - the real source of this attack on the workers.

I don't know if any of you give a flying one about this, but you should. Wisconsin is also the home of our current government's mean-minded, petty attack on the welfare state. Globalisation proved to us how interconnected the banks and business are: it's time that workers started to globalise too. If Wisconsin's public servants can be discarded without a care, we can be too. They aren't being oppressed like the Egyptians or Saudis, but they have a righteous cause. Where they lead, we will follow.

This, by the way, is why I'm a lefty.

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