This chapter in the WI saga may be coming to a close, with the next one starting immediately thereafter. Reuters:
Wisconsin Democrats who fled the state more than two weeks ago to block a vote on a Republican plan to limit public union collective bargaining said on Sunday they have no immediate plans to return.
"I think the situation has not been resolved," said Mike Browne, a spokesman for Wisconsin senate minority leader Mark Miller, while adding: "I don't think anyone has ever suggested that at some point the Democrats don't return."
Browne and several of the 14 Democrats in the senate who left the state on February 17 sought to downplay comments by Miller to the Wall Street Journal on Sunday that Democrats will return to the Capitol soon for a vote on the Republican bill.
They are buying us very valuable time.
Russell King/Filtered News blog:
20 lies (and counting) told by Gov. Walker
We’re used to politicians stretching the truth, but the level of deception and dishonesty Wisconsin’s governor has exhibited in the battle over his union-busting budget repair bill (even the name is a falsehood) sinks to astounding new lows. What follows are the 20 lies I’ve identified in a quick review of the record. If you find or recall others, please let me know. We’ll keep updating.
WaPo:
Tens of thousands of demonstrators again descended on the state Capitol in Wisconsin on Saturday in opposition to Gov. Scott Walker's plan to dramatically curb collective bargaining for public employees in the state.
The protest, which followed massive demonstrations the past two weekends, came one day after Walker notified unions that he would lay off as many as 1,500 state workers next month - jobs that he said could be saved if his plan were enacted.
600 pro-Walker folks vs tens of thousands of pro-union demonstrators. Let's cover them equally. Let's talk about "dueling demonstrations" or "both sides demonstrate at Capitol". [This story doesn't have the false equivalence, but many do.]
Telegraph-Herald (Dubuque, IA):
Walker scapegoats hard-working, tax-paying public employees for the budget crisis they did not create. What is going on here is a systematic attempt to strip away bargaining rights of public employees and reduce their unions to a shell.
This power grab goes beyond union busting. The budget bill allows officials appointed by the governor to make sweeping cuts in health care coverage for low-income families without legislative approval. The bill also gives the governor power to privatize state-run power facilities, selling them off without taking bids.
Register-Mail ( Galesburg, IL):
Editors Roundtable: Standoff in Wisconsin
3 of 4 sensible responses and one silly one (Democratic Senators should return, everyone should compromise, everyone gets a pony. Not in this world.)
WGN (Chicago, IL):
Protests show no signs of stopping in Wisconsin's capitol, and support for union workers show no signs of fading - as the battle over the budget continues.
More than 150 chicago area letter carriers will board buses bound for Madison Sunday to join a protest against Governor Walker's collective bargaining proposal. This will be their second trip in recent weeks to rally in support of public workers.
James Gray Pope:
Publicly, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and his Tea Party allies say it’s about taxes and cutting costs. Why pay more for what you can get for less? According to Walker, public workers enjoy benefits that are “out of line with the private sector.” Once their right to bargain collectively has been eliminated, We the Taxpayers won’t have to pay for union wages and benefits.
Polls show support
But Americans aren’t buying it. According to a recent New York Times/CBS poll, 60 percent of Americans oppose taking away even “some” of public employees’ collective bargaining rights, and 56 percent oppose cutting the pay or benefits of public employees to reduce budget deficits.
Why don’t Americans buy the Tea Party line? Maybe they’ve paused to consider the facts. According to studies by the Economic Policy Institute and economists Keith Bender, John Heywood and John Schmitt, public sector workers actually receive the same or less total compensation than private sector workers at the same level.
NY Times:
Organized labor has been on a long decline, but the recent attacks against it in Wisconsin and elsewhere have had a surprising result - they have energized the nation's unions. Instead of just playing defense to protect benefits and bargaining rights, labor leaders are plotting some offense, with several saying Walker may have unwittingly nurtured a comeback by unions.
As the Wisconsin showdown has unfolded, several recent national opinion polls have shown strong public backing for unions. And labor leaders say public awareness, especially among younger people, of what unions do has clearly increased.
"The challenge for us is to take this moment and turn it into a movement," said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. She acknowledged that she was not sure whether labor could accomplish that, but union leaders are quietly forging strategies to propel labor's cause beyond the immediate statehouse battles.
CBS:
Meanwhile, folk music legend Pete Seeger, who has been singing about union rights since the 1940s, told The Associated Press he's pulling for the demonstrators in Wisconsin who want to stop a bill taking away collective bargaining rights from public workers.
"Maybe the Republican governor, he's done us a favor by bringing the problem to national attention," the 91-year-old Seeger said in a telephone interview from his New York home. "It shows the whole country how much we need unions. We may end up thanking him."
Pete Seeger's 70 years of union support seen in this video. I dreamed I saw Joe Hill list night, alive as you and me... and check out the still pictures. Our fathers and grandfathers didn't have it so easy.
Paul Krugman:
The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.
Why is this happening? The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.
Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.
James Carroll:
The [Sec Def Wm Gates] speech was extraordinary, also, for its frank acknowledgment that America’s elders have consistently failed the nation’s sons and daughters in sending them off to war. “Since Vietnam, our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right — from the Mayaguez to Grenada, Panama, Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, Kuwait, Iraq, and more.’’ Gates was faulting failures to anticipate the true nature of those engagements, but their outcomes arguably establish that all of them were unjustified. Young lives wasted.