The combative governor tried unsuccessfully to force the senators back to give constitutional legitimacy to his plans to end health care, collective bargaining and pension rights for teachers and other public sector workers. Walker’s strategy has been to pit hard-pressed blue collar and middle class (in the US, it means lower-waged employees) workers against state employees and to blame them for the state’s $137 million deficit by claiming that, with benefits, they earn as much as $75,000 a year and enjoy job security. Meanwhile, his party has been pushing for lower corporation tax and tax breaks for the top 2 per cent of the country. Any opposition is denounced as “class war” or “politics of envy”. Sound familiar? Tensions became so heated in the past two weeks that protestors occupied the state’s ornate Capitol building in Madison for a prolonged “sleep over” – prompting an unsuccessful appeal to them to leave to allow the authorities to steam clean the legislature because of the overpowering smell of, erm, well, irate workers and voters, not to put too fine a point on it.
