After attacking public union workers and passing draconian and very controversial new laws in Ohio and Wisconsin that vilified public workers as an albatross around the necks of their states, both Walker and Kasich are pretending as if nothing happened at all, and now are hypocritically thanking those same public workers.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) have decided to pay tribute to state workers.

In Ohio, Kasich declared this week "Public Service Appreciation Week" on Monday. The same day, Walker announced a new public employee "recognition" program in Wisconsin. Given their high-profile battles with unions and state employees, plenty of people in the two states are wondering whether the olive branches are some kind of joke.

When "honoring Ohio's thousands of public employees," Kasich asked his fellow Ohioans to "reflect on all that our public employees do in our communities, and thank them for the invaluable work they do each day." During his first four months in office, Kasich has made rolling back the collective bargaining rights of public workers a centerpiece of his administration's agenda.

In response to the declaration, Ohio House Minority Leader Armond Budish (D) said in a statement that he had to "check my calendar" to make sure it wasn't April Fool's Day. He continued: "Do you thank teachers and firefighters for the invaluable work before or after you slash their wages and benefits?"

Now that we've screwed you, we will thank you. Workers are shocked by the chutzpah of these moves, and Wisconsinites are responding in kind:

The Wisconsin Capital Times reports that today a group of state employees are rallying outside the Capitol to instead recognize "State Employee Depreciation Day."

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The NFL was forced to open their doors as Judge Susan Nelson ruled twice that their lock out of the players was out of order. Making billions of dollars in profits was not enough for the greedy owners so they decided to plot and plan to take it away from the players by opting out of their labor deal and then tried to use billions of network money to wait out the players. Doesn't it remind you of typical tea party corporate and political behavior? All unions are being attacked from all sides. Roger Goodell, who was hired by the owners to be their Commissioner has also been used as a very vocal tool to attack the players instead of remaining an impartial voice. Here's his WSJ op-ed which spins the facts and attacks the players union.

Rather than address the challenge of improving the collective-bargaining agreement for the benefit of the game, the union-financed lawsuit attacks virtually every aspect of the current system including the draft, the salary cap and free-agency rules, which collectively have been responsible for the quality and popularity of the game for nearly two decades. A union victory threatens to overturn the carefully constructed system of competitive balance that makes NFL games and championship races so unpredictable and exciting.

The deal that the owners opted out of was working fine for both sides as football is more popular and profitable than ever, but suddenly it's the union that wants to destroy football.

Nate Jackson responded to Goodell on Dead Spin:

This PR push by the NFL — a response to DeMaurice Smith's recent public attempts to shed light on what a typical career is like for an NFL athlete — is confusing to a former player like me: confusing, disingenuous, and ignorant. Confusing because it implies that the average NFL career, the average professional football existence, is comparable to the anomalous careers of Pro Bowlers and first-round draft picks. Disingenuous because it comes at a time when Goodell purports to care profoundly about the health of his players. Ignorant because it dismisses the thousands of athletes who sacrifice their minds and their bodies for a sport that keeps them hanging by a thread for years, shuffling them in and out of training camps and practice squads and never paying them full value for their services.

In other labor disputes, the commissioner has usually not been involved. During the lock out, players didn't hide their feelings about him. Good for the fans to recognize the hackery of Goodell and when he took the stage to start the draft he was booed by the Radio City crowd.

Let's see: There were so many union supporters that Sarah Palin was drowned out at this Madison rally yesterday, yet the AP just can't estimate how many of the thousands of people who attended were supporting unions. Here's a clue, guys: They're not the ones with the misspelled signs:

Capitol Police estimated about 6,500 people converged on the building Saturday, but said it was impossible to tell how many were tea partyers and how many were labor supporters.

Tea party activists are a loose coalition of community groups largely made up of people with conservative views who believe government has grown too large. They take their name from a 1773 protest in which activists in the then-British colonies in America boarded ships and dumped their cargo of English tea into Boston harbor.

"Loose coalition of community groups." Nothing about Dick Armey or the Koch brothers' money that's funding this, not even a mention of where these demonstrators came from -- and who paid for their buses. Even though the media always makes a point of saying unions bused in their members!

The tea partyers appeared clustered in front of the building, waving "Don't Tread on Me" flags and signs that read "Public workers — the party is over," ''Thank you, Scott," and "Tax and spend brings the end."

Counter-protesters surrounded them, banging drums, bellowing into bullhorns and ringing bells. Bitter arguments broke out along the edges of the two groups over everything from the size of government to corporate power. At one point conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart took the stage and told the labor supporters to "go to hell."

"I'm serious!" he screamed. "Go to hell! You're trying to divide America!"

Carl Jung, genius. Talk about projection, eh?

Palin told the tea party rally that Walker is working to solve Wisconsin's long-term budget problems so it can honor pension commitments to public workers.

"This is where the line has been drawn in the sand and I'm glad to stand with you in solidarity," Palin said.

Oh, Mrs. Palin. Are you simply woefully misinformed, or shamelessly cynical? (I'm going with the latter.) Wisconsin's public pension fund is fully funded.

Just keep shifting the goalposts. That's why you get all that money, after all.

Oh, and by the way, Proud Defenders of the Constitution: Gov. Scott Walker plans to get rid of any elected officials he wants, just like the Republican governor of Michigan did. Freedom!

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Courage is contagious, and nothing shows it like the growing numbers of people joining in the UKUncut demonstrations against government austerity. (USUncut held rallies Saturday across the country.) Sign up for your closest group, get involved in local actions:

Around 400,000 people (Ed. note: The Guardian has updated the headline to 500,000) have joined a march in London to oppose the coalition government's spending cuts.

In what looks like being the largest mass protest since the anti-Iraq war march in 2003, teachers, nurses, midwives, NHS, council and other public sector workers were joined by students, pensioners and direct action supporters, bringing the centre of the capital to a standstill.

Tens of thousands of people streamed along Embankment and past police barriers in Whitehall. Feeder marches, including a protest by students which set off from the University of London in Bloomsbury, swelled the crowd, which stretched back as far as St Paul's Cathedral.

The biggest union-organised event for over 20 years saw more than 800 coaches and dozens of trains hired to bring people to London, with many unable to make the journey to the capital because of the massive demand for transport.

"I'm sure that many of our critics will try to write us off today as a minority, vested interest," said Brendan Barber, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, which organised the march.

"The thousands coming to London from across the country will be speaking for their communities when they call for a plan B that saves vital services, gets the jobless back to work and tackles the deficit through growth and fair tax."

Got that? A plan that "saves vital services, gets the jobless back to work and tackles the deficit through growth and fair tax." Learn it, love it, live it! Stand up for your rights.

Meanwhile, in USUncut actions yesterday, Ohio members demonstrated at a local Verizon store; D.C. members shut down a Bank of America branch; Jackson, Mississippi members presented a bill for unpaid taxes to Verizon; Minneapolis shut down a Bank of America loan office due to "fraud"; and in Philadelphia, members demonstrated at a downtown Bank of America office.

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You can help out in Wisconsin, wherever you are. Call now, (608) 266-1212. Be polite, be thorough, and tell him all your clues!

Do you do impressions? Ask to speak to Chief-of-Staff Keith Gilkes, he'll get a big kick out of those!

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From PoliticusUSA, a reminder that the massive media corporations just aren't all that interested in covering anything that might give people (or politicians) ideas. After all, they'd rather pay out money in dividends than in salaries and benefits, right?

Over 100,000 people in Madison, Wisconsin were joined by thousands of other Americans around the country in protest of Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to strip collective bargaining rights from the state’s unionized workers, but you would not have known any of this if you watched cable news on Saturday as the coverage of the protests ranged from disappointing (MSNBC) to scant (CNN) to non-existent (Fox News).

AFL-CIO spokesman Eddie Vale estimated that the crowd was over 100,000 people before the rally began at 3 PM. According to the Wisconsin State Journal, police estimated the crowd size at around 70,000 three hours before the rally began, “Madison police spokesman Joel DeSpain said the number of protesters around the Capitol is on the scale of last Saturday’s peak crowd of an estimated 68,000 and could swell even more for a 3 p.m.

Hundreds of thousands of Americans around the country march on their governments in an event that would be a perfect fit for the 24 hour cable news cycle. Even better, the protests were occurring during the news cycle dead zone of Saturday afternoon. The coverage should have been everywhere in the media, but if you turned on your television in hopes of watching the rally from Wisconsin live, you were disappointed.

As the official state run television of the Republican Party, Fox News has been openly and loudly supporting Gov. Walker. It is no surprise that the right wing network would ignore the events in Madison and around the country today. A propaganda outlet never spends much time relaying information that is detrimental to their message.

CNN, which is supposed to be moderate network in the cable news ideological spectrum, sort of thought they should cover the story, so they did a few minute and half live cut ins here and there. No wall to wall coverage of course, but they at least managed to pull themselves away from celebrating the Tea Party long enough to take a quick glance at Madison.

Yes, CNN wished a happy birthday to the Tea Party. No, I'm not making this up.

You can read here about turnout in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Harrisburg PA, San Francisco, Charleston WV, Lansing MI, Salt Lake City UT, D.C., Annapolis MD and Richmond VA, St. Paul MN, NYC and Albany NY, Frankfort KY, Columbia SC, Boston MA, Albuquerque NM, Juneau AL, and Philadelphia PA.

Were you there?

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Credit: Mother Jones

From Henry Ford’s time until recently, there always has been a segment of the business community who was willing to grudgingly put up with the labor movement, Social Security, and other New Deal/Great Society programs because they knew they needed a broad, prosperous American middle class to buy their goods. The reason we are seeing such wrenching, brutal fights today is that the people with money and power who make and sell things know there is a worldwide market for their goods, and the most wealthy and powerful of all — the Big Six Wall Street banks who control assets equal to 64 percent of our economy — make their money mainly by financial manipulation and speculation. I mean if you can make money by securitizing subprime mortgages, selling them as AAA rated, and then take a short position so that when they blow up for your clients, you make billions, who needs a middle class?

During the New Deal, the wealthy and powerful didn’t like what was going on very much, but they were getting their asses kicked politically by FDR, so there wasn’t a lot they could do about it. In the post-World War II decades (1945-1975), a lot of the business community was making really good money because union workers, newly economically secure retirees, veterans who had college educations because of the GI Bill, and other working class people whose incomes were rising, were buying a lot of their products: homes, cars, TV sets, appliances, and all the other wonders of that era. Business leaders might try to tinker around the edges, but they also realized there were benefits to them in that strong, stable American middle class. With the globalization and financialization (deregulated bankers getting more and more reckless with other people’s money) of the economy, and the steady weakening of unions, it began to occur to a lot of the big money guys that made America didn’t need a financially strong middle class or retirees with money anymore. If they could make money selling to Europeans and Brazilians and Chinese and Indian folks, or just by taking other people’s money and place big bets that no one but them understood on the Wall Street casino, what good were workers with decent wages, an American safety net, or those annoying unions?

The result has been an ever-rising attack over the last three-plus decades on unions, middle-class wages, and the safety net. The examples are abundant: deregulation of transportation, energy prices, the financial sector, and other industries; rampant union busting and blatant violations of the National Labor Relations Act; trade deals with Mexico, China, and other low wage, no environmental rules countries; repeated attempts to privatize and/or defund Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; repeated cuts to all manner of domestic programs. Added to all this, especially in the last 10 years, has been skyrocketing inflation in the most essential items for middle-class families, while their incomes have been stagnant. As I wrote in a memo earlier this month:

“…over the last decade, income levels for middle class families have stayed essentially flat, while the cost of living for most basic household necessities have gone up considerably: average grocery costs for a family of four have gone up more than $200 a month in the last decade; the average American had to spend about $3,000 more on their health care per year than they did at the beginning of the decade; household energy costs have been climbing at about 8 percent a year; in early 2000, the average price per gallon of a tank of gas was $1.31, while in January 2010 it was $3.06; and for those families with kids in college, tuition and fees have gone up an average of almost 6 percent a year each of the last 10 years.

Now, with far-right Republicans having swept into power in important states across the country in the 2010 landslide, the Wall Street guys and right-wing ideologues have decided this is their moment. We will be seeing the most extreme proposals imaginable in the coming days to break unions, destroy the safety net, and wreck the middle class, which is why taking these guys on in full battle gear is so important.

Here is what is most important to remember about what the Republicans, extreme right, and Wall Street guys are trying to do: it goes against the entire political theory this country was founded on. Remember the Federalist Papers, those essays Madison, Hamilton, and John Jay wrote to distill the essence of the new Constitution to the American public? They focused on the fundamental idea of pluralism: that this new form of democratic republic could only survive if competing interests, constituencies, regions, industries all were represented, and all had enough power to keep any of the others from controlling the government. What the founders believed to their core was that if any one industry or region or powerful interest became too dominant, it would destroy a democratic form of government.

That fundamental danger is very much in front of us today. A small collection of stunningly wealthy and overwhelmingly powerful companies have become dominant in our government and our economy, and they are a very real threat to the American way. These companies and their allies — some who really share their ideology, some just being compensated for their service — are now trying to do what people with overwhelming power usually do: crush the last vestiges of opposition so they don’t have to worry about anyone challenging them again. Unions are one of the few pockets of strength left, and merely weakening them is no longer enough: they have to be crushed.

The American system of checks and balances can be frustrating to those who want to see big changes made, but it is as foundational to the American system as any other idea there is. A system where the last institutions with any ability to push back on the big banks and businesses who generally dominate our economy and politics are destroyed should be terrifying to every American.

The good news is that the people of Wisconsin are not buying the corporate right’s BS. Check out this great new poll from Wisconsin; the governor is getting totally hammered in public opinion. The other good news is that we can all join the people in Wisconsin who are fighting back. This Saturday, there will demonstrations at every state capitol and in every major city. Help fight for your democracy this weekend. Help fight for the American way, and a check on the power of big business.

In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. Billionaires can field armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers did in the case of Mr. Walker). On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we’re more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate.

Given this reality, it’s important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions.

You don’t have to love unions, you don’t have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they’re among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans, as opposed to the wealthy. Indeed, if America has become more oligarchic and less democratic over the last 30 years — which it has — that’s to an important extent due to the decline of private-sector unions.

And now Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to get rid of public-sector unions, too.

There’s a bitter irony here. The fiscal crisis in Wisconsin, as in other states, was largely caused by the increasing power of America’s oligarchy. After all, it was superwealthy players, not the general public, who pushed for financial deregulation and thereby set the stage for the economic crisis of 2008-9, a crisis whose aftermath is the main reason for the current budget crunch. And now the political right is trying to exploit that very crisis, using it to remove one of the few remaining checks on oligarchic influence.

So will the attack on unions succeed? I don’t know. But anyone who cares about retaining government of the people by the people should hope that it doesn’t.

This is exactly right. No, unions aren't always perfect. So what? They're all that's left to protect the rest of us. Remember: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

One of the Masters of the Villagers, Joe Klein takes a sledge hammer to the public employee unions of Wisconsin in his newest piece of dribble.

Digby:Joe Klein Takes A Trip Down Memory Lane

Wow, talk about misreading the zeitgeist. Joe Klein has been so immersed in the Third Way centrist babble on public employee unions for so long that he's completely lost the thread.

Revolutions everywhere--in the middle east, in the middle west. But there is a difference: in the middle east, the protesters are marching for democracy; in the middle west, they're protesting against it. I mean, Isn't it, well, a bit ironic that the protesters in Madison, blocking the state senate chamber, are chanting "Freedom, Democracy, Union" while trying to prevent a vote? Isn't it ironic that the Democratic Senators have fled the democratic process? Isn't it interesting that some of those who--rightly--protest the assorted Republican efforts to stymie majority rule in the U.S. Senate are celebrating the Democratic efforts to stymie the same in the Wisconsin Senate?

An election was held in Wisconsin last November. The Republicans won. In a democracy, there are consequences to elections and no one, not even the public employees unions, are exempt from that. There are no guarantees that labor contracts, including contracts governing the most basic rights of unions, can't be renegotiated, or terminated for that matter. We hold elections to decide those basic parameters. And it seems to me that Governor Scott Walker's basic requests are modest ones--asking public employees to contribute more to their pension and health care plans, though still far less than most private sector employees do. He is also trying to limit the unions' abilities to negotiate work rules--and this is crucial when it comes to the more efficient operation of government in a difficult time.

If I didn't know better, I'd think that Joe just dusted off an old column from 1993, changed a few names and just threw it on line. He clearly has not been following the changing debate on these issues over the past few years and certainly hasn't the vaguest clue about what Walker is really doing.

Joe Klein was on MSNBC during the 1 PM PST hour to debate with a union hater and it appeared as if the MSNBC host thought Klein was going to support the unions so they had a twofer railing against the Wisconsin protests. Weird. Suddenly elections matter to idiots like Klein. We had one in 2008 too. A BIG one.

Ezra explains that unions aren't the problem to Klein pretty easily:

Let's be clear: Whatever fiscal problems Wisconsin is -- or is not -- facing at the moment, they're not caused by labor unions. That's also true for New Jersey, for Ohio and for the other states. There was no sharp rise in collective bargaining in 2006 and 2007, no major reforms of the country's labor laws, no dramatic change in how unions organize. And yet, state budgets collapsed. Revenues plummeted. Taxes had to go up, and spending had to go down, all across the country.

Blame the banks. Blame global capital flows. Blame lax regulation of Wall Street. Blame home buyers, or home sellers. But don't blame the unions. Not for this recession...read on.

I loved how close ally of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Rep. Paul Ryan, blurted out that Madison in recent days looked like Egypt. Realizing that made the protesters sound like the good guys, he tried to backtrack with something incoherent about meaning the violent protests there, but given that the only violence in Egypt was done by the government and Mubarak’s allies, he just dug himself a deeper hole.

The fact is that the pictures we are seeing and the story playing out in Wisconsin is like Egypt in some really important ways. The new mass militancy of union members, students, and other allies of the maligned teachers, social workers, cops, firefighters, and other public employees being attacked and threatened by the Governor is not a manufactured thing, it is a mass movement spreading like wildfire, building in momentum day by day. Blaming public employees for the state’s economic problems is like blaming foreign aid (less than 1 percent of the budget) for our federal budget deficit: the numbers don’t add up. And building an economic strategy around breaking unions, laying off more workers, driving down wages, depriving retirees of pensions, and forcing already hard-pressed workers to pay more out of pocket for health care is pure, unadulterated economic insanity. Taking money out of the economy and decimating a huge part of the middle class’ disposable income is not exactly a formula for stimulating a recovery.

The response to Gov. Walker’s insanity has been as inspiring as the protesters in Egypt, and it is a joy to see workers, students, and progressives of all stripes spontaneously say “NO!” in a very loud voice. In fact, it is clear that protesters in Wisconsin and Ohio were inspired by the Egyptian democracy movement; some folks were even carrying Egyptian flags. The fact that the protests are spreading like wildfire to Ohio and other states is heartening, too. I can tell you this, as an old hand at the electoral and legislative battles progressives have fought over the last couple of decades: it is only this kind of mass militancy that will give us a chance to survive the power of the Wall Street, big business, and right-wing media machine. They have too much entrenched power, too much money, and too much concentrated media sway for progressives to beat them using conventional tactics and strategies.

Here’s the other thing: the current crop of extreme-right Republicans have no interest in compromise, on anything. They don’t want to force the public employee unions to the table to bargain over wages and health care, they want to utterly destroy the unions for all time. They don’t want to negotiate over changing the formula on pension contributions, they want to make workers pay for half their pensions, or slash their benefits to shreds — and then never have to negotiate with workers again over them. At the federal level, they don’t just want to make substantial cutbacks in domestic programs, they want to defund many of them entirely — and if they don’t get their way, all of it, they’ll just shut down the government. It’s not just economics issues either: pro-lifers don’t just want to make it harder to get abortions, they want redefine rape and make shooting an abortion doctor a justifiable homicide. These Republican extremists are completely beyond the pale.

As Dean Baker and so many other rational economics writers have documented thoroughly, the cause of our federal and state budget problems are not teachers and firefighters and social workers and food safety inspectors, who make about as much on average as comparable workers in the private sector. The problem is out-of-control Wall Street bankers whose reckless speculation crashed our economy, and an ever tightening squeeze on middle-class workers whose wages are flat and whose daily living expenses are rapidly increasing.

So fight back, you teachers in Wisconsin. Fight back, bus drivers in Ohio. Join them, students and progressive activists of every size, shape, and color. We are fighting for our lives against extremists who quite literally are moving openly to roll us back to the mid-1800s, when the robber barons got the governors in their pockets to call out the National Guard to shut down strikes, and when the richest 1 percent controlled most of the wealth in the country. Big business and the Far Right have joined forces to try and destroy unions and the safety net for all of us. We have to beat them.