The New York Times has just posted this excellent and comprehensive article by Dan Kaufman. It will appear in their Sunday magazine. Of all the summaries that I have read of the Wisconsin situation, this is perhaps the clearest, best informed, and most insightful and compelling. It pulls together the various threads, recounts the high points and low points, connects the dots, and brings into the foreground some of the most important, but less appreciated, parts of the story.
A few selected highlights below....
Kaufman rightly identifies the battle over proposed legislation that would gut mining regulations and permitting processes as "Walker’s most significant political defeat" thus far. The article is framed within this critical and nationally under-reported story.
After the vote, GTac [the company that for all intents and purposes wrote the draft bill] issued a brief statement that they were abandoning their interest in the Wisconsin mine. Before he took the vote, Fitzgerald thought he had one Milwaukee Democrat lined up to support the bill, and he still hoped he could persuade one. “I would not rule out calling an extraordinary session,” Fitzgerald said, “if we could get a signal from the corporation and a 17th senator.”
Within the article, Kaufman focuses on many of the key storylines in Wisconsin: ...the assault on unions and collective bargaining:
His attack on public-employee unions was lauded by Mitt Romney, John Boehner and Karl Rove, and he has received significant financial support from the billionaire conservative donors Charles and David Koch. [I do wish Kaufman had described the insidious, and even greater, influence of the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation.]
...the destruction of Wisconsin's culture of civility and fairness and open political process:
Bill Kramer, the Republican speaker pro tem of the Assembly, recently told a reporter that at times he finds it necessary to bring his Glock semiautomatic handgun to work, owing to the atmosphere in the State Capitol.
...the incredible influence of out-of-state money coming from the national Republican powerbrokers on Walker's behalf:
In February, David Koch gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which is spending heavily to fight Walker’s recall campaign, and that same month he praised Walker’s anti-union legislation in The Palm Beach Post. “We’re helping him, as we should,” Koch said. “We’ve spent a lot of money in Wisconsin. We’re going to spend more.”
...the role of ALEC in destroying home-grown Wisconsin ideas to solving our problems, and making us just another "pawn on a national chessboard" (quoting Mike McCabe of the
Wisconsin Democracy Campaign):
Scott Suder, the Assembly majority leader and a state co-chairman of ALEC, defended the group’s work. “ALEC’s basis is free-market, Jeffersonian principles,” Suder told me over the phone. “That’s my core philosophy: getting government out of the way as much as possible.”
...Wisconsin's trashed traditional of bipartisan progressive policy:
President Theodore Roosevelt described Wisconsin as a “laboratory for wise, experimental legislation to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole.” Native icons like the populist senator and governor Robert (Fighting Bob) La Follette and the conservationist Aldo Leopold still loom in the state’s collective consciousness and legislative record. More recently, Senator Russ Feingold cast the lone vote against the U.S.A. Patriot Act in 2001.
...the lameness of the state Democratic Party, and the response of the most awesome Lori Compas in her grassroots campaign to recall Scott Fitzgerald:
One of Compas’s friends had written her speech, but the day before, Compas decided to start from scratch. She told the crowd that Fitzgerald’s recall election had been certified the day before, and then she talked about how she had seen the first sandhill cranes of spring the same day. “Every year their return tells me that even after the most difficult winters, new life is stirring,” she said. “Those two things just kind of came together in my mind overnight.”
....Walker's despicable strategy of divide-and-conquer:
Randy Bryce, the political coordinator of Milwaukee Iron Workers Local 8 and one of Walker’s most tenacious opponents, reluctantly supported the legislation. “They’re trying to divide us,” he told me, “but my members need work.”
...the extraordinary leadership of the state's Native tribal communities, and especially the Bad River Band of Ojibwe, in fighting the powerful Walker mafia:
To [tribal chair Mike] Wiggins, a large open-pit mine in the Penokee Hills was a life-or-death matter for his tribe. The headwaters that feed the river would be in the footprint of the mine, and the Bad River reservation lies downstream. Wiggins was also worried about the tribe’s sensitive wild-rice beds, which lie on the coast of Lake Superior.
Folks, this is one of the best things you will read about what is going on in Wisconsin, and what it means for the rest of the country. There are a few missing pieces -- the aforementioned Bradley Foundation, the role of the deeply Republican Milwaukee ring counties in fomenting partisan divisiveness, the weakness of the state Democratic Party, the creeping criminal investigation of Walker, etc. But it's essential reading. Read it, share it widely, then let's get to work, to reclaim democracy in Wisconsin from the clutches of the arrogant and powerful.
UPDATE: Added bonus. Here is a good piece from The Progressive website on last night's debate between Lori Compas and Scott Fitzgerald:
Compas crafted her closing statement with a broader brush: “We’ve never had a clearer choice between an entrenched politician and a grassroots candidate. Instead of jobs, he gave us divisive policies. He never said he’d roll back women’s rights, but he did. He never said he’d roll back voting rights, but he did. He never said he’d roll back workers rights, but he did. In doing so he turned neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend. He had absolute power and he used it to hurt us. 20,000 of his own constituents said they can’t bear this anymore and it’s time to move on.”