[MD] US democracy at work?

[david buchanan]

I don't think there is any way to avoid party politics or the lines between liberal and conservative points of view when looking at the events in Madison and the other state capitols. We know that it's not really about money because the unions had already agreed to make the financial concessions that the Governor was asking for AND the right to bargain collectively doesn't cost money any more than the right to free speech does. While it may be possible to imagine that the unions would use that right in a foolish and self-defeating way that bankrupts their employer, the chances of that kind of collective stupidity seems quite unlikely.
I think it's important to know something about the historical context of these events. I wonder how many people realize that the right to bargain collectively was only won through a long struggle in which workers were locked out, starved and machine gunned. For example:
The Ludlow Massacre refers to the violent deaths of 19 people during an attack by the Colorado National Guard on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado on April 20, 1914. The deaths occurred after a day-long fight between strikers and the Guard. Two women and eleven children were asphyxiated and burned to death. Three union leaders and two strikers were killed by gunfire, along with one child, one passer-by, and one National Guardsman. In response, the miners armed themselves and attacked dozens of mines, destroying property and engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard.  This was the deadliest incident in the 14-month 1913-1914 southern Colorado Coal Strike, itself the deadliest strike in the history of the United States...
The Ludlow Massacre was a watershed moment in American labor relations. Historian Howard Zinn has described the Ludlow Massacre as "the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history". Congress responded to public outcry by directing the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the incident. Its report, published in 1915, was influential in promoting child labor laws and an eight-hour work day.
Madison, which is considered one of the nation's best places to live and has the highest concentration of Ph.D.s of any city in the country, has played a major role in winning little things like the five-day work week, the eight-hour day, compensation for workers injured on the job, child labor laws and similar pieces of progressive legislation.
Conservative politicians, on the other hand, have always resisted these reforms as they were first being implemented and they have done whatever they could to "bust" the unions once they were in place. And it is no co-incidence that the decline of union membership and power matches the decline of our middle class and the expansion of income discrepancy. What kills me is that the so many of the working people of America have been fooled into taking sides with the politicians who are robbing them and destroying their rights. I'm astonished that anyone could believe our teachers, postmen and cops are a bunch of greedy union "thugs". An average middle class income is the most any of them could ever reasonably expect and that's all they've ever gotten from their rights to bargain. 
Union busting. That's what's happening here. 
Did you hear what the Governor of Wisconsin said on the phone when he thought he was talking to the billionaire David Koch? All the sinister cynical motives his enemies might like to ascribe to him were vividly on display. And yet this sleazy liar still has his supporters. Unbelievable.