Thursday, February 24, 2011

I SHOULDA BEEN THERE









Tom Morello and our good buddy Brother Wayne Kramer galvanize the troops in Wisconsin.

"On Monday night, Wisconsin’s week-long protest against Gov. Scott Walker got a soundtrack. Five thousand people squeezed into the Monona Terrace exhibition hall to hear Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Wayne Kramer of the MC5 curse Walker’s plan to undercut public employee unions. Walker got called every name in the book – “motherfucker,” “asshole” – but the acoustic show was still overwhelmingly peaceful and positive. Morello and friends focused on marshaling the protesters’ energy for continued resistance to the budget bill that would strip away unions’ collective bargaining rights. The predominantly young crowd batted around balloons and waved signs, some with defiant messages and others with almost self-mocking jokes. (My favorite: “Scott Walker Eats Kittens.”) Union representatives began by speaking about the cause, but none of them more passionately than Morello, who came on next as the night’s MC. In bright orange T-shirt and cap, he made a direct connection with the Cheesehead throng, taking on their cause as his own. “This has been the most inspiring 24 hours of my life!” he said, to deafening cheers. “You have your hand on the wheel of history!” (Click here for more)

Meanwhile someone in the mainstream finally tells it like it is. But you can trust Paul Krugman. He has Nobel Prize.

"Last week, in the face of protest demonstrations against Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor, Scott Walker — demonstrations that continued through the weekend, with huge crowds on Saturday — Representative Paul Ryan made an unintentionally apt comparison: “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison.” It wasn’t the smartest thing for Mr. Ryan to say, since he probably didn’t mean to compare Mr. Walker, a fellow Republican, to Hosni Mubarak. Or maybe he did — after all, quite a few prominent conservatives, including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum, denounced the uprising in Egypt and insist that President Obama should have helped the Mubarak regime suppress it. In any case, however, Mr. Ryan was more right than he knew. For what’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side." (Click here for more)

Click here for Wayne

The secret word is definitely Oligarch

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

You certainly SHOULD be there.

nancy said...

Gimmee a break --- you should have been there? For what? If you think you missed out at the epicenter of the revolution... Sorry, false alarm.

Dude, if you were still here, you'd see and hear it for what it is. Check out Scott walker's prank call from Mr. Koch and all them lot are trying to drag this out to the end of bedruthers. It's a media hag job and frankly, quite boring at this point.
Don't get me wrong --- you are missed, and I love your blog and I read it every day. But maybe now that you are Over There, your filters need to be changed/cleaned. Just a thought.

Your driver said...

Nancy, sorry, I'm hearing from Labor people who are there and this is the real deal. The great thing about revolutions is that they never look like revolutions when they are happening.
This is definitely not like the boho hoedowns of the '60's. It's midwesterners recalling the all but forgotten traditions of midwestern and even earlier, immigrant, labor activism.
To me it's swell. The other thing is, if Wisconsin loses, it's all over for America. It has taken a generation to destroy America's labor movement and it will take generations to bring it back.
Yep, we shoulda been there.
So instead, I went to the meeting of our local, small but mighty labor council and we voted to send them some dough.
Afterwards there was a lot of excited talk to the general effect that there shoulda been a general strike back in '80, when Reagan broke the PATCO strike. Mind you, this was coming from middle aged labor bureaucrats who spend most of their time so far up the Democratic party's ass that they are afraid of the day light. Even they were all excited.
There's something going on here.

Your driver said...

Incidentally, I'm so proud of Wayne. He played the '68 Democratic party protests, my 29th birthday party in Indiana and now Madison. The guy is always there when history happens.

Mick said...

When my friends are on the barricades, I figure I should be there too.