The 2011 Wisconsin protests should still be vivid in your memory – they certainly are in mine. In February of that year, tens of thousands of protesters filled downtown Madison, hell-bent on derailing Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to pass the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, which made public sector workers pay a bit more – though still substantially less than in the private sector – into their pensions and health insurance, thus driving the public sector unions into a rage. This orgy of civil disobedience was capped off with the midnight exodus of 14 Wisconsin State Democrats. These moral cowards fled the state in order to avoid voting on the bill which would save the jobs of thousands of state workers.
Where did these supposed public servants flee to?
The worker’s paradise of Chicago!
Chicago, where the gluttonous public unions (with the aid of their bought-and-paid-for political slaves) have reigned down economic ruin upon the people for decades. Chicago’s pension debt is over 22 billion dollars, Cook County’s pension debt is at least 6 billion dollars and the state of Illinois’ pension debt has exceeded 100 billion dollars. If there was ever a union ideal more offset by reality, I’ve not seen it.
So it made perfect sense for those Senators to make their temporary home in the town utterly cratered by the same groups they were trying to protect in Madison.
Of course reality had to come home to roost eventually. The Senators left the protection of the fearsome Rahmfather and returned home to face their defeat. The Senate passed the budget and Wisconsin avoided firing thousands of public employees. The protesters, bussed in from all across the country by unions and super PACs, eventually gave up and went home.
But where they should have gone was the same place those Senators hid out.
Rahm Emanuel’s open war on public unions makes the offense of Walker’s budget bill pale by comparison. Things have gotten so hostile that CTU President Karen Lewis has called Emanuel the “Murder Mayor.” During the 2012 Teacher’s Strike, Mayor Emanuel even went so far as to sue the CTU for striking.
It doesn’t end there, though. Rahm’s plans to force Chicago into a privatized for-profit school system will entirely obliterate the teacher’s union. This longtime DNC fundraiser and bullyboy has gladly extended these tactics to other sectors currently controlled by public unions. Think I’m way off base? Just ask the police, firefighter or sanitation unions.
Yet, strangely, this is what downtown Chicago looks like this afternoon:
That’s Daley Plaza. Odd, isn’t it, that no one is there, protesting? Now here’s Madison during the so-called budget battle:
