Required Reading

This is perhaps the best piece I've read about why Wisconsin is the most important story of the year.  More important to Americans, I would argue, than the Jasmine Revolutions.

Read it:

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-labor-union-decline

Drum compelling lays out how labor - wedded with the electoral power of the Democratic Party - created the modern American middle class.  And how the New Left (hippies for the non-academic) ruptured the New Deal coalition by driving a wedge between Old Labor - the cigar chomping union bosses - and the Democratic Party. This led to the decline in union membership and union electoral muscle and launched the DLC neo-liberalism that further undermined unions, as Democrats began to solicit corporate money rather than union votes.

It's a fascinating read and I think largely historically accurate.  The question is: what comes next?  Unions - as we have known them - are largely dying.  What will take their place as advocates for a blue collar middle class and - frankly - everyone else.

When you're sitting at home enjoying your weekend, in the house where your mortgage was made possible by federal tax policy, watching a TV you bought with your decent wages... think about the unions who helped make all that possible.