—Cartoon in the Houston Chronicle

There's an alternative to Wisconsin's budget deficit that doesn't involve taking away workers' rights.

Photo by David Hoefler.

As states struggle to meet their budgets, public pensions are on the chopping block, but they needn’t be. States can keep their pension funds intact while leveraging them into many times their worth in loans, just as Wall Street banks do. They can do this by forming their own public banks, following the lead of North Dakota—a state that currently has a budget surplus.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, whose recently proposed bill to gut benefits, wages, and bargaining rights for unionized public workers inspired weeks of protests in Madison, has justified the move as necessary for balancing the state's budget. But is it?

After three weeks of demonstrations in Wisconsin, protesters report no plans to back down. Fourteen Wisconsin Democratic lawmakers—who left the state so that a quorum to vote on the bill could not be reached—said Friday that they are not deterred by threats of possible arrest and of 1,500 layoffs if they don't return to work. President Obama has charged Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker with attempting to bust the unions. But Walker’s defense is:

“We're broke. Like nearly every state across the country, we don't have any more money."

Broke Unless You Count the $67 Billion Pension Fund . . .

That’s what he says, but according to Wisconsin’s 2010 CAFR (Comprehensive Annual Financial Report) [pdf], the state has $67 billion in pension and other employee benefit trust funds, invested mainly in stocks and debt securities drawing a modest return.

A recent study by the Pew Center for the States showed that Wisconsin’s pension fund is almost fully funded, meaning it can meet its commitments for years to come without drawing on outside sources. It requires a contribution of only $645 million annually to meet pension payouts. Zach Carter, writing in the Huffington Post, notes that the pension program could save another $195 million annually just by cutting out its Wall Street investment managers and managing the funds in-house.

The governor is evidently eying the state’s pension fund, not because the state cannot afford the pension program, but because he sees it as a potential source of revenue for programs that are not fully funded. This tactic, however, is not going down well with state employees.

North Dakota: Banking on the Locals
Video: David Brancaccio visits a bank that is invested in its community.

Fortunately, there is another alternative. Wisconsin could draw down the fund by the small amount needed to meet pension obligations, and put the bulk of the remaining money to work creating jobs, helping local businesses, and increasing tax revenues for the state. It could do this by forming its own bank, following the lead of North Dakota, the only state to have its own bank—and the only state to escape the credit crisis.

This could be done without spending the pension fund money or lending it. The funds would just be shifted from one form of investment to another (equity in a bank). When a bank makes a loan, neither the bank’s own capital nor its customers’ demand deposits are actually lent to borrowers. As observed on the Dallas Federal Reserve’s website, “Banks actually create money when they lend it.” They simply extend accounting-entry bank credit, which is extinguished when the loan is repaid. Creating this sort of credit-money is a privilege available only to banks—but states can tap into that privilege by owning a bank.

How North Dakota Escaped the Credit Crunch

The state-owned Bank of North Dakota (BND) has allowed North Dakota to maintain its economic sovereignty, a conservative states-rights ideal. The BND was established in 1919 in response to a wave of farm foreclosures by out-of-state Wall Street banks. Today, the state not only has no debt, but it recently boasted its largest-ever budget surplus. The BND helps to fund not only local government but local businesses and local banks, by partnering with the banks to provide the funds to support small business lending.

The BND is also a boon to the state treasury, having contributed over $300 million to state coffers in the past decade, a notable achievement for a state with a population less than one-tenth the size of Los Angeles County. In 2008, the BND returned a 26 percent dividend to the state. In comparison, California’s public pension funds are down more than $100 billion—that’s billion with a “b”—or close to half the funds’ holdings, following the Wall Street debacle of 2008. It was, in fact, the 2008 bank collapse rather than overpaid public employees that caused the crisis that shrank state revenues and prompted the budget cuts in the first place.

Seven States Are Now Considering Setting Up Public Banks

Faced with federal inaction and growing local budget crises, an increasing number of states are exploring the possibility of setting up their own state-owned banks, following the North Dakota model. On January 11, 2011, a bill to establish a state-owned bank was introduced in the Oregon State legislature; on January 13, a similar bill was introduced in Washington State; on January 20, a bill for a state bank was filed in Massachusetts (following a 2010 bill that had lapsed); and on February 4, a bill was introduced in the Maryland legislature for a feasibility study looking into the possibilities. They join Illinois, Virginia, and Hawaii, which introduced similar bills in 2010, bringing the total number of states with such bills to seven.

Why All Americans Should Care About Wisconsin

If Governor Walker wanted to explore this possibility for his state, he could drop in on the Center for State Innovation (CSI), which is located down the street in his capital city of Madison, Wisconsin. The CSI has done detailed cost/benefit analyses of the Oregon and Washington state bank initiatives, which show substantial projected benefits based on the BND precedent. See reports here and here.

For Washington State, with an economy not much larger than Wisconsin’s, the CSI report estimates that after an initial start-up period, establishing a state-owned bank would create new or retained jobs of between 7,400 and 10,700 a year at small businesses alone, while at the same time returning a profit to the state.

A Bank of Wisconsin Could Generate “Bank Credit” Many Times the Size of the Budget Deficit

Economists looking at the CSI reports have called their conclusions conservative. The CSI made its projections without relying on state pension funds for bank capital, although it acknowledged that this could be a potential source of capitalization.

If the Bank of Wisconsin were to use state pension funds, it could have a capitalization of more than $57 billion—nearly as large as that of Goldman Sachs. At an 8 percent capital requirement, $8 in capital can support $100 in loans, or a potential lending capacity of over $500 billion. The bank would need deposits to clear the checks, but the credit-generating potential could still be huge.

Banks can create all the bank credit they want, limited only by (a) the availability of creditworthy borrowers, (b) the lending limits imposed by bank capital requirements, and (c) the availability of “liquidity” to clear outgoing checks. Liquidity can be acquired either from the deposits of the bank’s own customers or by borrowing from other banks or the money market. If borrowed, the cost of funds is a factor; but at today’s very low Fed funds rate of 0.2 percent, that cost is minimal. Again, however, only banks can tap into these very low rates. States are reduced to borrowing at about 5 percent—unless they own their own banks, or, better yet, unless they are banks. The BND is set up as “North Dakota doing business as the Bank of North Dakota.”

That means that technically, all of North Dakota’s assets are the assets of the bank. The BND also has its deposit needs covered. It has a massive deposit base, since all of the state’s revenues are deposited in the bank by law. The bank also takes other deposits, but the bulk of its deposits are government funds. The BND is careful not to compete with local banks for consumer deposits, which account for less than 2 percent of the total. The BND reports that it has deposits of $2.7 billion and outstanding loans of $2.6 billion. With a population of 647,000, that works out to about $4,000 per capita in deposits, backing roughly the same amount in loans.

Wisconsin has a population that is nine times the size of North Dakota’s. Other factors being equal, Wisconsin might be able to amass over $24 billion in deposits and generate an equivalent sum in loans—over six times the deficit complained of by the state’s governor. That lending capacity could be used for many purposes, depending on the will of the legislature and state law. Possibilities include (a) partnering with local banks, as in the North Dakota model, strengthening their capital bases to allow credit to flow to small businesses and homeowners, where it is sorely needed today; (b) funding infrastructure virtually interest-free (since the state would own the bank and would get back any interest paid out); and (c) refinancing state deficits nearly interest-free.

Why Give Wisconsin’s Enormous Credit-generating Power Away?

The budget woes of Wisconsin and other states were caused not by overspending on employee benefits, but by a credit crisis on Wall Street. The “cure” is to get credit flowing again in the local economy, and this can be done by using state assets to capitalize state-owned banks.

Against the modest cost of establishing a publicly owned bank, state legislators need to weigh the much greater costs of the alternatives—slashing essential public services, laying off workers, raising taxes on constituents who are already over-taxed, and selling off public assets. Given the cost of continuing business as usual, states can hardly afford not to consider the public bank option. When state and local governments invest their capital in out-of-state money center banks and deposit their revenues there, they are giving their enormous credit-generating power away to Wall Street.

Ellen Brown wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Ellen is an attorney and the author of eleven books, including Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free. Her websites are webofdebt.com and ellenbrown.com. 

Interested?

• Visit PublicBankingInstitute.org for more information on the movement for publicly-owned banks.
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I could buy a two-bedroom home in most American cities with what I owe on my student loans. I’ve been making monthly payments for four years now and, thanks to a locked-in 4.5% APR, my debt is bigger than when I started paying. I’ll most likely die before it’s gone.

So when I heard that people from Occupy Theory, the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, and OWS Free University, among others, were holding open assemblies in Washington Square Park on the topic of debt, I showed up to the next one scheduled.

Occupy Wall Street’s Next Move: Bailing Out the People
Strike Debt organizers are mobilizing arts, eduction, and media for a “People’s Bailout.”

It took place at noon on a Sunday in early June. Just a handful of people were there at first, but our numbers grew to around 25 over the next couple hours. The conversation focused on debt, and how something had shifted in Occupy that was turning our focus toward this issue. I recognized some labor folks, some professors, and people who I had been in marches with. There were also people I didn’t know.

One professor talked about his work with the Occupy Student Debt Campaign, and about a personal conflict he had been having. He had realized, he said, that he was participating in an exploitative system of education that was sending students out to start their lives in service to enormous burdens of debt. This struck an immediate chord with me, being in service to enormous burdens of my own through that very system.

Another speaker described the idea of debt as a negative commons, how most of us shared a permanent state of docile servitude to our creditors through a constant, nagging anxiety of maintaining credit ratings. People talked about their own medical bills and horrific experiences with the American healthcare system. Municipal and sovereign debt was discussed. People talked about their experiences with credit cards and underwater mortgages, which are mortgages that exceed the current value of the property they’re paying for.

The conversations fluctuated between analytical ruminations on debt and its effect on people’s lives, and emotional anecdotes about speakers’ personal experiences with debt. Some people floated ideas of debt abolition and debt strikes, different ways that we could mobilize large masses of people to refuse to pay their debts.

I felt compelled to speak and began talking about my experience being brought up in a working-class family, and how all of my education was financed by loans I’d taken on. In the flow of what I was saying, I felt angry, and then sick with nerves as I approached the specific amount in dollars that I owed.

I realized in that moment that, while I’ve spoken about how much I owe to a very few close people, I had never before stood up in public and spoken about how enormous my debt actually is. This is something I have always kept secret, in the dark. My debt is something I had always been ashamed of. In spite of my sick nerves, I let it out, and was met with a circle of nodding heads and twinkling fingers. It was liberating and empowering to, for lack of a better phrase, come out with that.

Finding support

By the end of the assembly, quite a few others spoke out about their debt. We had this eureka moment, realizing shame was a powerful tool used by all different types of creditors to manage us, keeping us working and committed to treating our debts as if they were actual moral obligations.

We came to  understand that this shame is one of the things that gives debt power over our lives, both individually and collectively. Perhaps letting go of the shame around our debt was a first step toward identifying other debtors and beginning to lay the groundwork toward building a global movement of debt resistance. We vowed to pick up this conversation the next time we met, and to allow time for a debtor’s speak-out.

The next week, our assembly had more than doubled in size. We dedicated an hour for debtors to speak out about their debt. What followed was, judging from a palpable range of affect, something very powerful for the speakers and assembly alike. A diverse group of women and men of all ages stood up one at a time and spoke emotionally of their own struggles. They received spontaneous encouragement, attentive respect, and applause from the group. They spoke of their fears, humiliations, regrets, and choices they may have made differently in life if these burdens of debt hadn’t been weighing down on them. It was clear, having listened to these testimonials, that we really are not alone.

Looking ahead

Weekly meetings continued all summer. In addition to the speak outs, rigorous research and organizational work continues to be done. Several initiatives were developed in time for September 17, the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street and the beginning of Year Two. On Saturday, September 15, Strike Debt released the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual (DROM) at Judson Church.

The DROM is a living document collectively written for collective action. It provides useful information for any debtor considering becoming a debt resistor, with a focus on dealing with types of debt such as: municipal, housing, student, medical, fringe finance, credit card, and bankruptcy. In addition to being available online, 10,000 copies have been printed and distributed. Translations into other languages are currently being made.

Strike Debt also has several special events planned for the fall. The Rolling Jubilee is a Strike Debt campaign to liberate debtors at random by purchasing and abolishing bundles of anonymous debt for pennies on the dollar. [Editor’s note: organizers aren’t sharing the financial details behind this project at this time.] The Rolling Jubilee will launch a People’s Bailout with a variety show & telethon on November 15, with 100 percent of ticket proceeds to benefit the Rolling Jubilee. Comedian Janeane Garofalo, songwriter Jeff Mangum (of Neutral Milk Hotel), and members of the Yes Men are among those scheduled to perform.

Strike Debt aims to transform the shame and fear of being burdened with debt into outrage, and turn that outrage into action, resistance, and mutual aid. Strike Debt is the beginning of a radical movement of international debt resistance.

Personally, I have more hope and faith in the possibility of Strike Debt continuing to spread and to build viable alternatives to living at the service of credit ratings, than I do in ever paying down my own debt.

Chris Kasper wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Chris is an organizer for Strike Debt, based out of New York City.

Interested?

• A Student Debt Strike Force Takes Off
  Debt—and the shame that surrounds it—is the tie that binds the 99 percent. Can young people reimagine it as something productive, rather than a tool for profiteering?
• How the Student Loans Debate Got Religion
  There’s a biblical precedent for forgiveness—of debt. Why churches are standing by students on one of the Bible’s most surprising social principles.
• This Changes Everything: How the 99% Woke Up
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This interview and its transcript originally appeared on Democracy Now!

Amy Goodman: Rallies for workers’ rights are spreading across the country. In Michigan, over a thousand people rallied at the State Capitol in Lansing to oppose a measure allowing the breaking of labor contracts by placing schools and districts under emergency management. In a scene reminiscent of Wisconsin, hundreds of demonstrators packed the Capitol Rotunda chanting slogans. Protests were also held against anti-union bills Tuesday in Indiana, Ohio, Iowa, Florida and Tennessee.

Meanwhile, in Idaho, the state legislature has given final approval to a measure restricting the collective bargaining of public school teachers. The bill would limit teachers’ collective bargaining to salaries and benefits. It also ends teacher tenure, limits teacher contracts to one year, and removes seniority as a factor in determining layoffs.

As a wave of anti-union bills are introduced across the country in the wake of the Great Recession, many analysts are picking up on the theory that award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein first argued in her bestselling book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. In it, she reveals how those in power use times of crisis to push through undemocratic, radical, free market economic policies.

Nobel Prize-winning economist, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, recently referenced the book in his column called "Shock Doctrine, U.S.A." He wrote, quote, "The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority [in Iraq] was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book'The Shock Doctrine, which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.

"Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011, where the shock doctrine is on full display," Krugman wrote.

Well, Naomi Klein joins us today in our studio for the hour. In addition to The Shock Doctrine, she’s the author of two previous books: No Logo: Taking Aim at Brand Bullies and Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. She’s currently writing a new book which focuses on the public relations campaign distorting climate change facts.

Naomi Klein, welcome to Democracy Now!

Naomi Klein: Hi, Amy. Great to see you.

Amy Goodman: It’s great to have you with us. Let’s talk Wisconsin. What do you see is happening in this uprising?

Naomi Klein: Well, first of all, it’s such an incredible example of how to resist the shock doctrine. And it should not be in any way surprising that we are seeing right-wing ideologues across the country using economic crisis as a pretext to really wage a kind of a final battle in a 50-year war against trade unions, where we’ve seen membership in trade unions drop precipitously. And public sector unions are the last labor stronghold, and they’re going after it. And these governors did not run elections promising to do these radical actions, but they are using the pretext of crisis to do things that they couldn’t get elected promising to do.

Wisconsin Awakens a Sleeping Giant

And, you know, that’s the core argument of and the thesis of the book, is not that there’s something wrong with responding to a crisis decisively. Crises demand decisive responses. The issue is this backhanded attempt to use a crisis to centralize power, to subvert democracy, to avoid public debate, to say, "We have no time for democracy. It’s just too messy. It doesn’t matter what you want. We have no choice. We just have to ram it through." And we’re seeing this in 16 states. I mean, it’s impossible to keep track of it. It’s happening on such a huge scale.

Teachers’ unions are getting the worst of it. As you know, it’s overwhelmingly women who are providing the services that are under attack. It’s not just labor that’s under attack; it’s the services that the labor is providing that’s under attack: it’s health care, it’s education, it’s those fundamental care-giving services across the country, which could be profitable if they were privatized.

Amy Goodman: In Ohio, more than 20,000 people marched to oppose the Republican Governor John Kasich’s attempted anti-union legislative putsch. Kasich recently defended his policy proposals on Fox & Friends.

Gov. John Kasich: It’s part of a big piece of reform. Come March the 15th, we will be reforming Medicaid, K-through-12, higher ed, prisons. It is going to be a reform agenda in Ohio like no one has ever seen, all designed to get us in a good position. In terms of unions? I respect unions. I come from a union family. I mean, the idea that we’re attacking anybody is—look, what we’re attacking: poverty, joblessness. OK, that’s what I’m attacking. And all I’m doing is saying to everybody, participate. Everybody jump in this. Together, we can make Ohio stronger. If we do not do that, you know, then we’ll continue to lose jobs, and that means misery for everybody. That’s not going to happen. We are going to be successful here.

Amy Goodman: Republican Governor John Kasich, going back to his old haunt. He was a commentator for a long time for Fox and, before that, a conservative congressman.

Naomi Klein: You know, the reason why this isn’t working and why people are so outraged by it and why they’re in the streets and we’re finally seeing the resistance in this country that we have seen in Europe, with this chant, "We won’t pay for your crisis," that really started in 2008 in Greece and spread to Italy and France and England—and, you know, the rest of the world has been waiting for the United States to—you know, how much are Americans going to take of this? It seems that Americans were willing to say, you know, "We will pay for your crisis, and would you like a tax break with that?" Right? And finally, they went too far. And so, that resistance is finally happening.

And this attack on collective bargaining, the reason why people won’t take it is precisely because they understand that this is not shared pain. It is not being shared equally. The people who created the crisis in the first place are not sharing the pain. And the injustice of this response is so blatant. This isn’t just any economic crisis. This tactic has worked. And this is, you know, what I’ve tracked over a 30-year period, that it is really easy to use an economic crisis—people panic, hyperinflation, issues like that.

In the '90s, when Newt Gingrich was Speaker, it was possible for him to argue that the source of the budget crisis really was so-called entitlement programs. You cannot do that in this moment in history because everybody understands that the crisis was created on Wall Street, it was created through speculation and greed, and a decision was made to bail out the bankers with public money and to pass the bill on to the public. And they're seeing the bonuses back. They’re seeing the outrageous salaries. They’re seeing corporations not paying their taxes. And it’s just too unjust. It’s just so morally outrageous. And then to turn on the television and talk about everybody sharing the pain? I mean, people are just not that stupid. Thankfully.

Amy Goodman: And where does the Obama administration fit into this? We have played that clip of President Obama when he was running for president, saying, "If anyone challenges your collective union rights, I will be walking with you."

Why Every American Should Care About Wisconsin

Naomi Klein: Yeah. Well, I mean, this is the irony of this moment, and this is—it really is about democracies. Scott Walker was not elected with a mandate to bust unions and to strip collective bargaining rights. He did not mention that in his campaign. He talked about balancing the budget. He made some vague statements, you know, about shared sacrifice. But he absolutely did not campaign promising to do what he is now doing. Obama, on the other hand, campaigned promising to strengthen union rights. He promised, again and again, whenever he had a labor audience, that he was going to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, and he promised to stand with them.

And, you know, one of the things that’s so important for us to understand about why—you know, there are many reasons why the resistance is so strong in Wisconsin and why they’ve become this beacon for not just the rest of the country, but the world, and so much of it, I think—you know, my colleague at The Nation, John Nichols, has written beautifully about it this week in a cover story where he talks about the rich sense of collective history, of collective memory, and the fact that people know their progressive history in Wisconsin, so they’re harder to exploit. You know, they’re not going to fall for the latest Fox News messaging, because they know their history. But, you know, this is—there’s something else that’s going on here.

Amy Goodman: Well, let me ask you about Michigan. About a thousand people rallied in Michigan—reminiscent of Wisconsin. Talk about the proposal there.

Naomi Klein: Well, I just found out about this last night, and like I said, there’s so much going on that these extraordinary measures are just getting lost in the shuffle. But in Michigan, there is a bill that’s already passed the House. It’s on the verge of passing the Senate. And I’ll just read you some excerpts from it. It says that in the case of an economic crisis, that the governor has the authority to authorize the emergency manager—this is somebody who would be appointed—to reject, modify, or terminate the terms of an existing contract or collective bargaining agreement, authorize the emergency manager for a municipal government—OK, so we’re not—we’re talking about towns, municipalities across the state—to disincorporate. So, an appointed official with the ability to dissolve an elected body, when they want to.

Amy Goodman: A municipal government.

Naomi Klein: A municipal government. And it says specifically, "or dissolve the municipal government." So we’ve seen this happening with school boards, saying, "OK, this is a failing school board. We’re taking over. We’re dissolving it. We’re canceling the contracts." You know, what this reminds me of is New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when the teachers were fired en masse and then it became a laboratory for charter schools.

And what we’re seeing with the pretext of the flood is going to be used with the pretext of an economic crisis. And this is precisely what’s happening. So it starts with the school boards, and then it’s whole towns, whole cities, that could be subject to just being dissolved because there’s an economic crisis breaking collective bargaining agreements. It also specifies that—this bill specifies that an emergency manager can be an individual or a firm. Or a firm. So, the person who would be put in charge of this so-called failing town or municipality could actually be a corporation.

Amy Goodman: Whose government they dissolve, a company takes over.

Naomi Klein: A company takes over. So, they have created, if this passes, the possibility for privatization of a whole town by fiat. And this is actually a trend in the contracting out of public services, where you do now have whole towns, like Sandy Springs in Georgia, run by private companies. It’s very lucrative. Why not? You start with just the water contract or the electricity contract, but eventually, why not privatize the whole town? So—

Amy Goodman: And what happens then? Where does democracy fit into that picture?

Naomi Klein: Well, this is an assault on democracy. It’s a frontal assault on democracy. It’s a kind of a corporate coup d’état at the municipal level.

Amy Goodman: Let me ask you a question that came to us from Facebook. This is a question about the Madison protest. Kelvin Williams asks, "Are there any specific ways that Wisconsin workers can use the ideas in [your book] The Shock Doctrine to go on the offensive and force true fiscal responsibility, perhaps even rolling back the compromise contract?"

Naomi Klein: Mm-hmm. It’s a great question. I think what’s finally starting to happen, and this is—Wisconsin has really been going from one victory after another. This started off with an attack, but people have been—have just found such incredible reserves of resolve and dignity and collective history that the ground is shifting. So, the situation under which those compromises were made, those concessions were made, it’s changed. You know, people are feeling their power and their possibility.

Amy Goodman: I mean, it’s amazing now. The Governor, who was just elected, Scott Walker, a few months ago, is now—his popularity has dipped to the 30s. And even the conservative newspapers are asking serious questions.

Naomi Klein: Mm-hmm, yeah. I mean, he clearly made a real miscalculation. I mean, what was obvious is that he was really playing to the national stage. He’s clearly a very ambitious guy. He’s got real national political aspirations. I think that’s clear. You know, in that conversation with fake David Koch, the prank call, he compares himself to Reagan. He compares his actions to Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers, that sort of "shot heard around the world" moment. That’s what he wanted, you know? And he is not getting that.

Amy Goodman: And then he said, first he fired the PATCO strikers, and then the Berlin Wall came down. He made that link.

Naomi Klein: He said it. And it’s not a crazy link, in the sense that it was part of a frontal assault on labor and the left, and it continued for many, many years. But, you know, it’s not the ’80s anymore, and people are on to these tactics.

Bigger Than Unions, Bigger Than Wisconsin

And I do think—you know, just coming back to that question—that it is possible. But the real key is that we have to be having the debate about where the money should be coming from. I mean, if there is a fiscal crisis—and in Wisconsin, there’s a crisis that was created by tax cuts, and this is why there’s so much outrage, because it comes back to that false claim that there’s shared sacrifice here. There isn’t shared sacrifice here. There are gifts that are being handed out to the elites. Scott Walker is governing based on this radical free market ideology that if we just create the perfect, most hospitable, most gentle, less demanding conditions for corporations to do business, then we’ll have a booming economy, and it will trickle down, and everyone will benefit. And that is exactly the ideology that Obama campaigned against—and won—saying we can’t keep giving more and more to the people at the top and waiting for it to trickle down. And that was a message that really resonated with voters.

One thing I wanted to come back to that I was starting to get at earlier about why what’s happening in Wisconsin and what we need to take from it is that when bad things are happening, it’s helpful to have a bad guy. And Scott Walker is a good bad guy. And he has galvanized progressives. And people have, you know, an enemy to organize around and to point out these disparities. It hasn’t happened at the federal level, despite the fact that Obama is also involved in attacking labor rights with his pushing of charter schools and draconian budget cuts. He’s not a good bad guy for progressives. So, we’re still in a situation where Obama is getting away with, in my opinion, shock doctrine-style tactics, because people still don’t want to believe that Obama is doing it, too. So, when you have an easy bad guy, a Republican governor who’s obviously trying to be the reincarnation of Ronald Reagan, you can mobilize the left. But it won’t just work if we are only going after the Republicans and if this is fought along just partisan lines, as opposed to being fought based on principle. No matter who is doing it, we need to be mobilizing, if it’s Obama, if it’s Scott Walker.

Amy Goodman: And the people that President Obama surrounds himself with, especially when it comes to the Wall Street insiders, especially as we move into the 2012 election, when it’s said Obama will raise more than a billion dollars for the presidential election?

Naomi Klein: There’s a lot of denial, still, about who Obama is and who he surrounds himself with. And, you know, we’re going to talk a little bit later about Tim DeChristopher, but I’ve said it many times: Obama is fundamentally a centrist. And I do think that when there is a mobilized progressive movement in the United States that is putting pressure on him, on Democrats in Congress, they will respond.

And that’s another lesson that we can take from Wisconsin. You know, I was talking, once again, to John Nichols the other day, and he said, "What’s really working here is that we have the inside-outside pincer." Right? You’ve got people in the streets, but you also have Democratic lawmakers willing to put themselves on the line, being surprisingly courageous, leaving the state, and blocking it. So it isn’t just the people in the Rotunda. It isn’t just the protesters at the rally. It’s a kind of a partnership that’s going on. Why is that happening? Well, they looked out the window, and they saw their voters in the streets really committed and really mobilized, and that gave them courage.

And that’s something really important to remember. So many liberal groups are involved in this gentle backroom lobbying, a token protest here and there, which says, "I’m willing to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday, but I’m not really willing to fight to win." And what’s going on in Wisconsin is something very different. It’s not just a rally on a Saturday afternoon. It is people really upending their lives for weeks and weeks and weeks on end. That sends a message to politicians who want to get re-elected that this is a big issue, a top priority. And they hear that.

This interview and its transcript originally appeared on Democracy Now!

Interested?

• An American Uprising
  Wisconsin and beyond: While wealth and power concentrate in the hands of a few, the rights, jobs, and services that everyday Americans depend on are on the line. Across the country, people are rising up to defend them.
• "This is Not Democracy"—Wisconsin's Anti-Union Bill Passes
  In a controversial move, Republicans maneuvered the passage of Wisconsin's assault on collective bargaining after three weeks of protests. How'd they do it, and what happens next?
• Time to Reclaim the American Dream
  Van Jones: Why Wisconsin gives the movement for “hope and change” a second chance—and what you can do about it.
  

Glenn Beck has made a startling discovery. People are working together to make change!

Beck used my recent article, “Wisconsin: First Step in an American Uprising?” as a backdrop during his Wednesday show on Fox News, where he talked in dark, hushed tones about the spread of the UK Uncut movement to the United States. “A coincidence?” he asked. Is it a coincidence that citizens of both countries are holding protests in multiple locations on February 26?

Hardly! Organizers of US Uncut have made no secret of the fact that they were inspired by the British upstart group. UK Uncut started when 12 people meeting at a London pub decided they were fed up waiting for “someone to do something” about the fact that, in response to budget shortfalls caused by the financial crisis, the government was planning drastic cuts to public services while big businesses were raking in record profits. “Why don’t we just start?” they wondered. “If we do it, maybe everybody will stop asking why it isn’t happening and join in.”

They sat down in front of a retail outlet of a major cell phone company that was $6 billion behind in its taxes. If that company paid up, they argued, all those cuts—to libraries, schools, health benefits, pensions—wouldn’t be needed. The protests spread, eventually shutting down retail stores and banks across the country.

Unlike the Tea Party movement that Beck likes so well, they didn’t have billionaire money behind them. The oil tycoon Koch brothers didn’t bankroll a front group to train and fund them and give them talking points. No, UK Uncut is made up of ordinary people, using social media to coordinate their actions, getting their voice heard in spite of being off the message that the Murdoch media would like us to hear. When news of their success spread to the U.S.—primarily via an article in The Nation by British columnist Johann Hari (reposted here)—Americans with the same concerns were quick to take up the idea, and dozens of decentralized US Uncut groups quickly formed.

Now, MoveOn.org and Van Jones are teaming up in a call for rallies on the same day to protect the American Dream. And the United States Student Association and Jobs with Justice are collaborating (there's that word again!) on a call to defend public benefits.

These sorts of collaborations are not new, and they're not secret. If Beck had been reading YES! Magazine, for example, he would have seen hundreds of examples of groups that form from the bottom up, that work for the benefit of ordinary people, and that collaborate in lots of creative ways. 

Which we think is a good thing. That collaboration is urgently needed at a time when the power balance in the United States is leaning dangerously toward large corporations and Wall Street banks. Because these institutions are formed to increase the wealth of those who already have it, any other goal we might have for our communities, our families, and our future easily gets pushed aside.

Video still from Fox News' Glenn Beck Show

It’s very clear what happens when corporate power and the fixation on short-term profits get too strong. Taxes on corporations and the wealthy get cut, and so money for infrastructure goes away, and our roads, bridges, schools, and universities decline. The pay and benefits of ordinary workers get cut, and they can no longer afford homes, education for their children, or health care. Environmental protection is put on the back burner or simply gutted, and our mountaintops are blown apart (including sites that could be ideal for wind farms that could supply energy for centuries to come). The climate crisis disrupts agriculture, causes floods and droughts, and brings extreme weather events, yet corporations prevent action. Our local economies are sapped of their strength, and regulation that could prevent some of the worst abuses goes away. That leaves us vulnerable to the sort of global economic meltdown that happened in 2008, and that continues to undermine economies everywhere. And the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling is just the latest in a cascading series of events that adds still more power to the corporate side of the scale.

This lopsided power makes the events in Wisconsin (and now Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, and many other states) all the more important. Ordinary people still have power, but only when we talk together and work together.

We Are Wisconsin
Video: Meet the people making history in Wisconsin.

Beck would like to shift the conversation to one of conspiracies and fear—frankly, I’m not not sure what he’s so afraid of, but it seems to be a rotating list that includes communists, the United Nations, and Muslims. Oh, and our president.

But in Wisconsin, firefighters, teachers, nurses, sanitation workers, and students are rediscovering courage. Look at their faces, and you see fatigue, but also joy. No longer isolated and afraid, standing up for what they believe in, and, yes, collaborating, these people know they have power. And so do the rest of us.

How to get involved:

US Uncut actions targeting Bank of America and others will happen in more than 50 American cities on February 26. Here's where you can find the one near to you, or organize a new action.

Van Jones and MoveOn.org are organizing a February 26 “Rally to Save the American Dream” at noon at state capitals and major cities around the country. Wear Wisconsin colors, red and white.

Student Labor Action Project, a collaboration of United States Student Association and Jobs with Justice, is calling for a national day of action to defend the public sector on March 2nd.

Sarah van Gelder is co-founder and executive editor of YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions.

Interested?

• The First Stop in an American Uprising?
  The article that caught Glenn Beck's attention.
• People, Power, and Public Spaces
  What the privatization of public spaces has to do with our likelihood of taking to the streets.
• Signs of the Times
  In Madison, Wisconsin, a workers' uprising is resulting in some clever slogans.
  

Just before 3:00 a.m. yesterday, while helping myself from a massive pile of donated groceries in the Wisconsin state capitol, I met Taylor Tengwall. He is a junior at UW-Superior with no previous ties to the labor movement—or any movement, for that matter. “I’ve never done anything like this in my life,” he told me.

He first showed up in Madison over a week ago with some friends, expecting to leave two days later. But Tengwall says he was so moved by what he saw, he told his friends to go home without him.

“It’s been the most moving, paradigm-altering experience in my life,” he says, appearing totally energized despite the late hour. “I came here so outraged and angry. So many people did. And they’ve formed something so peaceful and so meaningful.” He’s realized, he says, that “we have power.”

From Firefighters to Faith Leaders: A Movement of Solidarity

Public sector workers and union members stand to lose the most from the passage of the Budget Repair Bill, the proposed Wisconsin law that would essentially strip unions of their collective bargaining rights. And union members and leadership were certainly key to the early organization of the protests. But it doesn’t take more than a few hours in Madison talking to protesters and listening to Wisconsinites’ testimony to realize that this is a movement that’s gone far beyond union members.

An amazing, organic array of students, white-collar workers, religious leaders, unionized workers not covered by the bill, and average citizens have all amassed together in Madison. And they’ve inspired rallies around the country, as non-union supporters have joined with union workers to stand in solidarity with Wisconsin or to stand up against similar proposals in their own states.

Most media has focused on the massive crowds packing the capitol’s rotunda and the streets outside. With tens of thousands of people taking part, those scenes have been impressive to witness in person. But on the third floor of the capitol, a much quieter, more reserved scene has unfolded. Democratic lawmakers have held round-the-clock hearings on the bill, hearing from state residents, one by one, about how the bill would affect them. The majority are not union members, but rather Wisconsinites of all stripes.

Many of them are students. Jessica Weber, an undergraduate student studying education at UW-Platteville, sat down at the microphone in front of a packed room. She has wanted to be a teacher since she was a child, she explained. But the Walker bill has made her “scared.”

“It’s like a slap in my face,” Weber said. “Wisconsin has never made me feel this way before; I'm sad that there are people who have the power to do this."

Analyse Dickinson, a UW-Madison student originally from Michigan, took the mic next. She was worried about the bill's potential to create a phenomenon her home state experiences: "brain drain," the loss of educated people to states with better jobs and working conditions. More importantly, she said, the bill would reorient the state's priorities away from average people and towards the rich.

"It will show Wisconsin to be a state where corporations are more important than workers," she said. Her opposition "is about respecting the rights of those who can't afford to buy power."

That opposition is shared by religious leaders throughout the state and country. Madison-area rabbis released a joint statement Wednesday condemning the bill, saying, "As rabbis this an affront to our values—the Jewish mandate to protect workers, as well as the poor and needy among us. It is an affront to our deep value for education, for supporting women's rights, and for creating sustainable communities. And it is an affront to our belief that these issues should be debated openly and fairly under public scrutiny."

Progressive faith leaders like Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., have come out against the bill, of course, but so have other local faith leaders not known for backing labor causes. Religious leaders in Wisconsin and Illinois even offered safe haven for the 14 Democratic state senators who fled the state to prevent the bill’s passage. Kim Bobo, executive director of Interfaith Worker Justice, changed the old protest chant to say, “Tell me what religion looks like. / This is what religion looks like.”

We Are Wisconsin
Video: Meet the people making history in Wisconsin.

Unionized workers whose rights aren’t on the line have been some of the most vocal participants. Some of the only public workers who will not lose collective bargaining rights with the bill are police officers and firefighters. (Both unions endorsed Walker for governor). So the prominent participation of firefighters and police throughout the protests has been somewhat surprising.

It shouldn’t be, they say. "We just couldn't stand by and let this happen to our brothers and sisters," Mahlon Mitchell, State President of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin told the Huffington Post. "We are firefighters, we respond to emergencies... We are responding to an emergency of the middle class."

In the large rotunda rallies, no other group draws such raucous cheers as the firefighters.

“It’s powerful,” says Alex Hanna, a sociology grad student at UW-Madison and the president of the Teachers Assistants Association. “Everyone knows they’re here to show solidarity. It really says a lot about the sense of camaraderie this whole movement has produced.”

We’re Not in Wisconsin Anymore

Over the last week, solidarity rallies have spread rapidly far beyond Wisconsin. In large cities like New York and Chicago, as well as small ones like Juneau, Ala., and Helena, Mon., citizens have demonstrated or are planning demonstrations to show their support for the workers of Wisconsin. On Saturday, MoveOn.org is helping to coordinate similar demonstrations in the capitols of all 50 states. A USA Today/Gallup poll found that 61 percent of Americans oppose attacks on collective bargaining such as the one in the Wisconsin bill.

But not all of the demonstrations are about simply supporting Wisconsin; in many states, workers are defending themselves from similar attacks on their benefits or bargaining rights. The Washington Post cites hotspots in Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and California. In Trenton, New Jersey, AFLCIO president told demonstrators, “What happens in Wisconsin affects every man, woman, and child in America. Nothing less than the fate of our middle class is at stake.”

Wisconsin: The First Stop in an American Uprising?

In Columbus, Ohio, where thousands protested an anti-union bill, state troopers locked the citizens out of the state’s capitol for fear of a Madison-style occupation. Indiana state senators have taken a page from Wisconsin senators and have fled their state in protest of an anti-union bill there (the state senate leader has declared the Right to Work provision of the bill “dead”).

On Saturday, students and union supporters will rally in Topeka, Kansas—unlike Madison, a city not known for a long history of labor fights and solidarity. Ben Jefferies, an economics student at Kansas University, is one of the Wisconsin supporters organizing the protest.

“A strong union movement was and still is essential to the creation of that middle class,” Jefferies said. “It is truly cultural amnesia that people have forgotten that fact.” He’s particularly concerned about the Wisconsin bill because he’s seen the effect of similar legislation passed in his home state.

“Kansas, as a right to work state, has already lost much of the legal framework which allowed unions of public or private sector workers to become strong,” he said. “The fundamental issue with this bill is that it strips workers of the legal standing to collectively bargain, eroding a key component of workplace democracy. If we let that happen in one place, it will likely spread to others. It's important to show strong support for workers rights now before those that oppose workers rights gain any more momentum.”

Micah Uetricht wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Micah is a staff writer for CampusProgress.org and GapersBlock.com, and a frequent contributor to In These Times. He lives in Chicago. Follow him on Twitter for updates from Wisconsin this weekend.

Interested?

• "This is a Peaceful Protest"
  Video: What's it like in the Wisconsin capitol?
• Dear Glenn Beck: It's Not Conspiracy, It's Courage
  Glenn Beck thinks the spread of protests is a little too convenient. But this is what happens when ordinary people discover their power.
  
• Wisconsin: Solidarity Among Workers ... And Football Players
  As Wisconsin's public workers fight to keep their wages and bargaining rights, they're joined by others involved in a labor struggle: their Super Bowl champion neighbors.
  

"Enough is enough."

That's what Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald said in a statement about why Wisconsin Senate Republicans on Wednesday evening carved the anti-union provisions out of the state's now-infamous Budget Repair Bill and quickly passed them, 18-1. There was no debate and not a single Senate Democrat was present; some observers say less than the legally required notice was given. The bill is widely expected to pass the Assembly on Thursday, then be signed into law by Governor Scott Walker.

"Enough is enough" also describes the sentiment on the other side of the debate. Following the vote, protesters streamed by the thousands into the capitol building they've been largely excluded from over the past several days, many of them chanting "This is not democracy."

The 14 Senate Democrats, of course, were in Illinois, where they've been for the last weeks in an effort to prevent the quorum needed to bring the Budget Repair Bill to a vote. But since a simple majority is needed for non-fiscal bills, Republicans decided to split the bill and move quickly on the anti-union items.

Opponents of the bill are pointing to a number of irregularities in the way it was passed:

• Governor Walker has maintained for weeks that the anti-union provisions in the bill were not a form of union-busting—that instead they were necessary for addressing the state's fiscal problems. Protesters now say that stripping out the budget sections in order to pass the collective bargaining restrictions makes it obvious that the bill is, indeed, about busting unions. (Also undermining the credibility of Walker's argument: business-friendly tax breaks that Walker called a special session to pass in January will nearly double the current deficit). “To pass this the way they did—without 20 senators—is to say that it has no fiscal effect,” Democratic Senator Timothy Cullen told the The New York Times. “It’s admitting that this is simply to destroy public unions.”
  
• The haste with which the Republicans passed the bill through committee and on the Senate floor has also sparked cries of foul play. The state's open meetings law requires a minimum of two hours' notice in emergencies and 24 hours under normal circumstances) before meetings begin. At this point, it's unclear just how much warning was offered before the votes started, but they were certainly characterized by speed rather than deliberation. Talking Points Media reports that the conference committee that passed the bill met for less than five minutes, despite the efforts of Peter Barca, a Democratic member of the Wisconsin Assembly, who called the vote illegal under Wisconsin's open meeting law and attempted to add amendments to the bill. The vote on the Senate floor took less than a half hour. Chris Larson, a Democratic Senator who says he began racing toward Madison as soon as he heard the vote would be called, told Democracy Now! "They didn’t give us a chance. They didn’t give the public a chance to do anything about it."

Wisconsin: First Stop in an American Uprising?
protests in Wisconsin show that poor and middle class Americans are ready to push back against the policies that hurt them most. Madison may be only the beginning.

So what happens next? Immediately after the bill was passed, thousands of protesters demanded entrance and surged into the capitol building. After more than two weeks of round-the-clock protests, they had been restricted from the building itself since last Sunday. On Wednesday night, though, protesters were again unfurling sleeping bags and preparing to preparing to spend the night.

Meanwhile, rumors were circulating of plans for a general strike, either in Wisconsin or nation-wide. Some of the protesters in the capitol chanted their support for the idea. Michael Moore called for a nationwide walk-out of high school students, to begin at 2 pm local time. Momentum is also building around the movement to recall the eight senators who supported the bill and are eligible to be recalled. Protests are also spreading to other states where anti-union laws are being proposed or passed.

And Wisconsin protesters are affirming—in protest signs, on Twitter and Facebook, and in interviews—that the passage of the bill doesn't mean they consider this fight to be over. In fact, many see the way the bill was passed as nearly as antagonizing as its contents: "Nothing says democracy like voting with no notice, preventing the public from observing, and locking the doors of the capitol," Wisconsinite Michael Mirer tweeted.

Though the protests are undoubtedly entering a new phase, they're likely far from over. "The jig is now up," Barca said. "The fraud on the people of Wisconsin is now clear."

Brooke Jarvis wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions for a just and sustainable world. Brooke is YES! Magazine's web editor.

Interested?

• The Middle Class Needs to Stick Together
  Firefighters weren't directly included in the anti-union bill that sparked the protests in Wisconsin. Lieutenant Mahlon Mitchell on why they're taking to the streets, anyway.
  
• Why Every American Should Care About Wisconsin
  The debate in Wisconsin doesn't just apply to union members and public workers.
• We Are Wisconsin
  Video: Meet the people making history in Wisconsin.
• Bigger than Unions, Bigger than Wisconsin
  How Americans across professions, religions, and states are uniting in opposition to Wisconsin's anti-union bill—and cultivating a movement that reaches far beyond the state border.
  

University of Wisconsin student Matt Wisniewski created this video from two days of footage taken in the Wisconsin state capitol building, where teachers, fire fighters, and others have been rallying in defense of union rights for the last week.

The protests have drawn tens of thousands of public workers and their supporters in opposition to a proposed bill that would cut their wages, benefits, and right to bargain collectively. Solidarity protests have been reported in a number of other states.

Video by Matt Wisniewski

Interested?

• Wisconsin: The First Step in an American Uprising
  It took a while, but protests in Wisconsin show that poor and middle class Americans are ready to push back against the policies and cuts that hurt them most. Madison may be only the beginning.
• Solidarity Among Workers ... And Football Players
  As Wisconsin's public workers fight to keep their wages and bargaining rights, they're joined by others involved in a labor struggle: their Super Bowl champion neighbors.
• Signs of the Times
  The best signs and slogans from protesters in Wisconsin.
  

In 2009 and 2010, according to their SEC K-10 report, filed on Friday, Bank of America paid no income taxes. Meanwhile, the federal government and many state governments, facing large budget shortfalls, are cutting services and benefits that help the poor and middle class. For many people, that just doesn’t add up.

On Saturday, many of those people took to the streets in cities across the country to protest corporate tax dodging. In more than 50 cities, those protests focused on Bank of America.

Local activists protested inside and outside of Bank of America branches, conducting teach-ins about corporate tax avoidance and theatrical “bail-ins.” They stopped passers-by to ask, “Do you pay your taxes? Bank of America doesn’t.”

In Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, protests forced the early closure of major bank branches. The San Fransico protesters presented bank tellers with fake checks, made out from Bank of America to “The United States of America, c/o Tax-Paying Citizens.”

US Uncut: How To
Do Your Own Bail-In
Advice from UK Uncut: Bringing an Uncut protest to your town is easy.

This effort, called US Uncut, has been inspired by UK Uncut, which formed in response to drastic spending cuts—the deepest in 60 years—being proposed in Britain. Tens of thousands of English activists have targeted corporations that have paid no or very low corporate income taxes, largely thanks to elaborate use of overseas tax havens and other tax loopholes, pointing out that the cuts would be unnecessary if only the corporations would pay up.

As in England and across the Middle East, the decentralized protest movement now underway in the United States is organized largely through the Internet, including Facebook, Twitter, and the US Uncut website.

These protests are putting a spotlight on the shadowy world of overseas corporate tax havens. Many U.S. corporations shift their earnings around, reporting losses in the United States while reporting profits in tax havens like the Cayman Islands, where they pay little or no taxes.

Nicholas Shaxson, author of the forthcoming book Treasure Islands, writes that tax havens are a major mechanism through which “wealthy and powerful elites take the benefits from society without paying for them.”

Congressional budget officials estimate that over $100 billion a year is lost because of such tax loopholes. That would go a long way toward closing state deficits—according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the combined budget gaps in U.S. states is between $102 billion and $148 billion.

Wisconsin: The First Stop in an American Uprising?

Protests against corporate tax dodging could be one of the ways that the spark of the Wisconsin workers’ rights protests could spread widely. While not every state has a reckless anti-union governor like Scott Walker or the union solidarity to push back, the whole country is facing serious budget cuts.

The U.S. movement officially started two weeks ago in Jackson, Mississippi, where 23-year old Carl Gibson, in between working three part-time jobs, organized a website and the first group. Within days, other groups were being formed in dozens of cities across the United States and Canada.

“Why has the knee-jerk reaction for our politicians been first and foremost budget cuts to critical social services? They tell us that no other options are on the table, yet cracking down on corporate tax avoidance has received little, if any attention,” said George Taghi, an organizer for the Washington, D.C., Uncut action.

What’s Next?

• There will be another wave of protests, focusing on other tax-dodging corporations with high profiles and retail outlets. You can organize a local demonstration and coordinate it through the US Uncut web site or on Facebook.
• The newly fledged groups are planning to make April 15, tax day, a day of national demonstrations calling attention to corporate tax dodging—and its effect on budgets.
• Small and U.S.-rooted businesses, competing with tax dodgers on on an unlevel playing field, are fighting back, organizing their voices under the banner Business and Investors Against Tax Haven Abuse. Businesses of any size can get involved by visiting their website.

Chuck Collins wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Chuck is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good.

Interested?

• The UK's Progressive Tea Party
  Read the article that inspired US Uncut.
  
• Dear Glenn Beck: It's Not Conspiracy, It's Courage
  Glenn Beck thinks the spread of anti-corporate protests is a little too convenient. But this is what happens when ordinary people discover their power.
• Bigger Than Unions, Bigger Than Wisconsin
  How Americans across professions, religions, and states are uniting in opposition to Wisconsin's anti-union bill—and cultivating a movement that reaches far beyond the state border.