MoveOn.org organized nationwide Rallies to Save the American Dream to demonstrate support of Wisconsin workers last Saturday.

Their original goal was to have a solidarity demonstration in every state capitol, but in the end, there were rallies in every state capitol + 16 other cities. Tens of thousands of Americans demonstrated in 66 separate events around the country.

Despite competing lefty events on Saturday, approximately 600 Tucsonans demonstrated in favor of Wisconsin workers and unions on all four corners of Speedway and Campbell and down Campbell toward the University of Arizona. A reported 900 demonstrated in Phoenix.

Check out this story on the MoveOn blog for 50 photos from 50 different rallies around the country.

More than 100,000 people braved the snow and demonstrated in Madison on Saturday.

This 3-month-old baby and her six-year-old brother are among the 90,000 Arizona children on the Kids' Care waiting list. (Photo Credit: Pamela Powers)

Arizona Governor Hard-Hearted Hattie… oops… Jan Brewer gained national attention last fall when she dropped 97 people who had been eligible for transplants under the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS) off the list.

Arizona’s Death Panel quickly went viral– thanks to multiple news stories, including the front page of the New York Times, and open fund-raising for Arizona transplant patients on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann. The decision also secured the Scrooge of the Year title for Brewer.

Now, fast forward to February 2011, at least two of the transplant patients have died, waiting and hoping that the Arizona Legislature would change its mind and vote to fund transplants again. Although the Arizona transplant patients have become a cause celebre, they are by far not the only victims of Arizona’s Teapulbican government.

Brewer and her Legislative cronies want to knock everyone– 250,000+ adults– off of the AHCCCS list. Last summer, they wanted to shutdown the voter-initiated Kids’ Care program, which provides health care and early childhood development programs for small, low-income children, and steal the Kids Care money, but the voters said “no way” in the November 2010 election. The Legislature did cap enrollment for Kids Care, which now has a 90,000 (and growing) waiting list of children who have been denied AHCCCS coverage but may be eligible for Kids Care.

Now, I may sound hard-hearted here, but why would the Arizona Legislature care about 95 transplant patients when they don’t care what happens to 90,000 babies or 250,000 adults? Yes, all 95 of those people will most likely die without a transplant, but without health insurance coverage, a percentage of the 90,000 babies and 250,000 adults will also die or go undiagnosed and untreated.

When you’re on a Death Panel, you have to make tough decisions– like giving corporate tax breaks.

I was discussing this situation with a friend yesterday. He said, “All hell will break loose when the babies die by legislative decision.”

Arizona Legislators Anna Tovar (a former transplant patient) and Kyrsten Sinema (who voted to dump 250,000 people off AHCCCS) will hold a press conference and rally at the state capitol today, February 28, 2011, to draw attention to the 95 remaining transplant patients. I want to know why they are focusing on a small group of transplant patients and not on the 90,000 babies and 250,000 adults who need help.

On Friday, February 25, Derechos Humanos is sponsoring a demonstration to protest Arizona Emperor Russell Pearce’s omnibus SB1611 (nicknamed SB1070 on steroids) and other recent racist laws passed or considered by the Arizona Legislature. The protest will be held at 4 p.m. at the state building in downtown Tucson (corner of Congress and Granada).

SB1611 is so far-reaching that it forces citizens and institutions at multiple levels of society to become immigration officers. Radio, newspaper, and citizen journalists have decried SB1611 because it will force schools, universities, hospitals, and even homeschooling moms to verify citizenship of the people to whom they provide services. It also includes strict penalties for non-compliance; for a complete list, check this link.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union:

“This bill is miles beyond SB1070 in terms of its potential to roll back the rights and fundamental freedoms of both citizens and non-citizens alike,” said Alessandra Soler Meetze, executive director of the ACLU of Arizona. “It demonstrates the lack of leadership, lack of priorities and complete lack of understanding by some Arizona lawmakers of what it really means to uphold the Constitution of the United States and Arizona.”

In addition to 1611, the Arizona Legislature has passed or is considering several other racist laws:

1225– targets forgery of documents used to rent, purchase or lease a dwelling in order to prevent drop houses that could hold undocumented people, but the law could be used to entrap and penalize innocent people who are knowingly or unknowingly helping friends who are not citizens.

SB1308– one of the so-called “anchor baby” laws which would change who is eligible to receive citizenship and a US birth certificate and regulate how the new Arizona birth certificates will work with US birth certificates (which would still recognize the 14th amendment).

SB1309– another “anchor baby” law which would dictate who is eligible to receive “Arizona citizenship.”

SB1405– restricts who can receive hospital services in Arizona and mandates that hospital personnel verify citizenship and call immigration– rather than provide services– when they discover an undocumented patient.

SB1509– increases the penalty for making false statements under oath.

Of course, this is far from a complete list of crazy and unnecessary bills being considered by the Arizona Legislature this session.

Ironically, in just a few weeks, the Teapublican candidates who campaigned on smaller government and more freedom have proposed more than 600!!!! pieces of new legislation that do nothing to solve the state’s problems or give Arizonans more freedom. If anything– except for loosening gun laws even further– the new bills restrict the freedom of Arizonans. For the most part these bills are:  pro-gun, anti-women’s rights, anti-anyone-who-is-not-straight-and-white, anti-poor-and-sick people, pro-fetus-but-anti-children, anti-education, anti-federal government, anti-municipal government, and my personal favorite…authorization of half-a-billion in corporate welfare. Groan…

So, if you are fed up with Emperor Pearce’s shenanigans, come out tomorrow with a sign denouncing your favorite piece of Legislative nonsense and bring a friend!

Want to learn more about the assault on state workers, the middle class, unions, and pension plans in Arizona and across the US? Tune in to the Steve Leal radio show– All things political– today (Thursday) on The JOLT, 1330AM at noon.

Leal’s regular commentators– Three Sonorans (Abie Morales), Tucson Progressive (Pamela Powers), and Jim Hannley, neighborhood and labor activist– will join Leal for rousing political commentary.

Union-busting Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was caught in a telephone sting. A blogger from the BuffaloBeast posed as David Koch (notorious right-philanthropist, major donor to Walker’s campaign), and owner of 18 factories in Wisconsin and talked with Walker on the phone about his union-busting plans.

Above is part one; here is a link to part 2.

In part 2, Walker brags about “doing something big” as a new governor and brags about how popular his union-busting activities are with Wisconsinites and other governors, who are contacting him. He and the fake Koch also discuss placing thugs among the friendly protesters, and he agrees with the fake Koch when he disses the “liberal bastards” on MSNBC.

“This is our time to change the course of history,” Walker tells the fake Koch, as he compares his struggle with the unions to President Ronald Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachov, tear down this wall” challenge to the communists.

“It’s all about getting our freedom back,” Walker says. [Huh?] “… The bottom line is we’re going to get to the world movement here.”

Ed Schultz– one of those “liberal bastards” on MSNBC– is going to be covering this story on his show on Wednesday night on MSNBC.

Dear President Obama,

We, the loyal citizens of Baja Arizona, desperately need your help. We are being held captive by a band of marauding, Narcissistic know-nothings from the north.

Under the ironclad control of their ruthless, maniacal leader, Emperor Russell Pearce and his hand-maiden Jan Brewer, the Empire of Maricopa has lost sight of what is good for the citizens of Arizona, in general, and the citizens of Baja Arizona, in particular.

The Empire of Maricopa has held us Bajans against our will and stolen our tax dollars for decades. Now that they want to secede from the United States of America– and have the guns and the anger to do it– we feel that they have gone too far. We want our own state!

The Emperor and his Lackey Legislature have robbed Bajans of our tax money, raped our school/university systems, and highjacked our children’s future to pay for pet projects like private prisons, corporate welfare, discriminatory laws, and unnecessary court battles with the federal government– while ignoring our state’s budgetary problems. Mr. President, they even want to use our pristine open spaces as a nuclear waste dump for the rest of the country!

They starve our cities by withholding revenue-sharing, and they enact laws that meddle with our local government’s sovereignty and attack specific ethnic groups and specific curricula in our schools. They waste time and tax dollars on unnecessary and discriminatory legislation while continuing to ignore our state’s problems, which the Emporer and his Lackey Legislature created as a result of extreme, long-term fiscal mismanagement.

The citizens of Baja Arizona are tired of taxation without representation in the Arizona’s Lackey Legislature. Year after year, the loyal US citizens of Baja Arizona elect reasonable, intelligent state representatives and senators and send them to Phoenix to be ignored by the white power elite of the Empire.

We, the citizens of Baja Arizona, believe:

In open, representative government by and for real, flesh-and-blood People– not corporations.

In equality and the value of human life– regardless of race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual orientation or religion– even after birth.

In progressive ideals– like public education, public health services, a living wage, clean energy, clean environment, and cultural diversity.

In nurturing, educating, and caring for future generations as they mature–rather than casting them off to fend for themselves after birth.

That it is an abomination to fund prisons at a higher level than schools or universities.

That tax dollars should be used for the public good– rather than corporate welfare.

That you are a citizen, Mr. President, and we won’t make you show a birth certificate when we hold the Baja Arizona presidential primary in 2012.

And, lastly, we believe in the sovereignty of the US government and choose you as our leader over Emperor Pearce.

Please help us in our struggle to free ourselves from tyranny.

Ya Basta!

Viva Baja Arizona. Libertad! Igualdad! Fraternidad!

Your humble scribe,

The Tucson Progressive

P.S. If you want to Start Our State, join this facebook group. If you’re not on facebook, join!

One Dollar = One Vote (Photo Credit: Pamela Powers)

Billionaire Brothers’ Money Plays Role in Wisconsin Dispute from the New York Times may belong in the “duh” category, but I think it worthwhile to note the connection between billionaire right-wing philanthropists Charles G. and David Koch, Wall Street, and the current union-busting activities in Wisconsin and other states.

According to the Times, Koch Industries was one of the largest contributors to union-busting Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. The article excerpted below also says that Koch Brothers’ political operatives have been working with state governments in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania to bust public employee unions.

From the NY Times…

WASHINGTON — Among the thousands of demonstrators who jammed the Wisconsin State Capitol grounds this weekend was a well-financed advocate from Washington who was there to voice praise for cutting state spending by slashing union benefits and bargaining rights.

The visitor, Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, told a large group of counterprotesters who had gathered Saturday at one edge of what otherwise was a mostly union crowd that the cuts were not only necessary, but they also represented the start of a much-needed nationwide move to slash public-sector union benefits.

“We are going to bring fiscal sanity back to this great nation,” he said.

What Mr. Phillips did not mention was that his Virginia-based nonprofit group, whose budget surged to $40 million in 2010 from $7 million three years ago, was created and financed in part by the secretive billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch.

State records also show that Koch Industries, their energy and consumer products conglomerate based in Wichita, Kan., was one of the biggest contributors to the election campaign of Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a Republican who has championed the proposed cuts.

Even before the new governor was sworn in last month, executives from the Koch-backed group had worked behind the scenes to try to encourage a union showdown, Mr. Phillips said in an interview on Monday.

State governments have gone into the red, he said, in part because of the excessively generous pay and benefits that unions have been able to negotiate for teachers, police, firefighters and other state and local employees.

“We thought it was important to do,” Mr. Phillips said, adding that his group is already working with activists and state officials in Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania to urge them to take similar steps to curtail union benefits or give public employees the power to opt out of unions entirely.

To union leaders and liberal activists in Washington, this intervention in Wisconsin is proof of the expanding role played by nonprofit groups with murky ties to wealthy corporate executives as they push a decidedly conservative agenda.

“The Koch brothers are the poster children of the effort by multinational corporate America to try to redefine the rights and values of American citizens,” said Representative Gwen Moore, Democrat of Wisconsin, who joined with others in the union protests. Check this link for the rest of the article.

A few weeks ago, Common Cause linked the Koch Brothers to Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia (who voted in favor of corporate personhood and the right of corporations to donate unlimited secret funds to political campaigns). At issue is Thomas’ and Scalia’s attendance at soirees hosted by the Kochs before the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling in January 2010.

How much more evidence do we need to show that the US government is a corporate oligarchy and not a democracy? How about this story from Rolling Stone Magazine and Democracy Now?

Ohio’s union-busting Republican Governor John Kasich worked for Lehman Brothers. As such, he was “intimately involved” in selling risky investments to Ohio’s pension fund managers and those of other states. Of course, a big part of the reason pension funds are under water now is that they lost money on Wall Street during the crash– the crash that Kasich’s former employer Lehman Brothers helped to create. From Democracy Now…

Governor Kasich, yeah, and he was intimately involved with selling—getting the state of Ohio’s pension fund to invest in Lehman Brothers and buy mortgage-backed securities. And of course they lost all that money. And this, broadly, was really what the mortgage bubble and the financial crisis was all about. It was essentially a gigantic criminal fraud scheme where all the banks were taking mismarked mortgage-backed securities, very, very dangerous, toxic subprime loans, they were chopping them up and then packaging them as AAA-rated investments, and then selling them to state pension funds, to insurance companies, to Chinese banks and Dutch banks and Icelandic banks. And, of course, these things were blowing up, and all those funds were going broke. But what they’re doing now is they’re blaming the people who were collecting these pensions—they’re blaming the workers, they’re blaming the firemen, they’re blaming the policemen—whereas, in reality, they were actually the victims of this fraud scheme. And the only reason that people aren’t angrier about this, I think, is because they don’t really understand what happened. If these were car companies that had sold a trillion dollars’ worth of defective cars to the citizens of the United States, there would be riots right now. But these were mortgage-backed securities, it’s complicated, people don’t understand it, and they’re only now, I think, beginning to realize that they were defrauded. Check this link for the rest of the interview.

I agree with the Progressive Democrats of America. I’m fed up with politicians who are owned by corporatists; this includes Walker, Kasich, and Arizona’s own Governor Jan Brewer and State Senate President Russell Pearce (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). How do these people get elected? Oh, yeah, money. Lots of money.

More than 300 unapologetic progressives packed a local YWCA for the inaugural meeting of Progressive Democrats of America, Tucson Chapter. (Photo Credit: Pamela Powers)

Who said the progressive movement was dead? It is alive and well in Tucson, Arizona.

An estimated 300 activists, liberals, Green Party members, and Democratic Party foot soldiers crammed into a large meeting room at the YWCA on the west side of Tucson Monday night for the inaugural meeting of the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), Tucson Chapter.

Twenty minutes before the meeting started, it was standing room only. By the time the first speaker began at 7 p.m., all chairs were filled and people were standing 2-3 deep on the sidelines, sitting 4-5 deep on the floor in front, and standing out in the hall.

Pretty much all of Tucson’s liberal leaders and volunteers– including a significant portion of Democratic Party Precinct Committeepersons (PCs)– came to hear what Congressman Raul Grijalva, populist radio commentator Jim Hightower and PDA leaders Tim Carpenter and Mimi Kennedy had to say.

As one of the introductory speakers, Carpenter sparked cheers from the crowd with fiery rhetoric, saying, “We [PDA] are not the Democratic Party… We’re the insurgency of the Democratic Party!”

Carpenter said that PDA was born out of the presidential races of Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean. He gave a shout-out to other liberal groups whose members were in attendance: MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, Jobs with Justice, and the Central Labor Council.

Populist commentator and author Jim Hightower was the keynote speaker, along with Congressman Raul Grijalva. (Photo Credit: Pamela Powers)

“Building community and building organization. That’s what PDA is about,” said Carpenter. But despite their efforts, progressives learned in recent years that electing a Democratic Party president and Congress wasn’t enough to get progressive legislation enacted. PDA is now going to work inside and outside the Democratic Party for real change in America.

The speeches were punctuated with cheers when Carpenter, Grijalva, and Hightower talked about taking our country back from the radical right and corporate pawns in the  Republican and Democratic Parties.

Hightower warned activists that taking the country back from the corporate oligarchy that now runs it would be a long struggle and likened it to the 70-year battle for women’s suffrage.

Hightower did admit that he wasn’t beyond “colluding with the pharmaceutical industry” in his quest to rebuild the middle class. He wants them to invent a “new Viagra” that could be used to stiffen the spines of Democrats and give them the backbone to fight for the middle class, rather than kowtowing to big business and their lobbying machine.

After the speeches, attendees broke up into issue organizing teams around PDA’s six core issues:

• Single-payer healthcare (Medicare for All)
• Peace (ending the wars and occupations and redirecting the funds)
• Clean elections and voter rights (including repeal of Citizens United and elimination of private funding for elections)
• Economic and social justice
• Accountability of elected officials
• Environment and global warming

Republicans and Republican-lite Democrats– be forewarned. Like the Tea Party on the right, progressives are “mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore”. Well, maybe we’re seriously annoyed and not going to donate to or volunteer for Republican-lite anymore. Southern Arizona Leadership Council Democratic Party sympathizers and No Labels Democrats could be in trouble, if even half of the Democratic Party PCs in attendance decide to work for real progressive candidates and issues instead of just settling for someone who is not Republican.

The Tucson meeting was the second in a series of PDA organizing meetings across the state. According to Carpenter, the Bisbee organizing meeting drew 120 attendees; later this week PDA will hold events in Phoenix, Flagstaff, and Winslow.

Watch for an update of this story with full video of the speeches.

This has been a banner year for sometimes-crazy and often-dangerous bills in the Arizona Legislature.

Several of these bills will be heard by the Arizona Senate Appropriations Committee on February 22, 2011 at 2 p.m. in Phoenix.

The Phoenix Urban Health Collective and migrant community groups are calling on doctors, nurses, other healthcare workers, and concerned citizens to protest SB 1405, which would require hospitals to determine citizenship before providing medical care. The group is organizing a press conference and demonstration to speak out against this bill and others.

They are asking everyone who opposes this and other discriminatory Arizona legislation to attend the press conference outside of the Arizona Senate Building and sign up to speak at the press conference and/or in the Senate Chambers. Below is a link showing the agenda for the committee; several bills will be reviewed.

Here is the information about the demonstration and press conference.

We will be holding a press conference at 12:30 to let the nation know about this inhumane and dangerous bill. The conference will be held in a hearing room in the Senate Building and we will announce exactly where when we have this information.

We urge you to try to show up around 12:00 and plan to stay for the afternoon and perhaps into the evening as there are many items on the agenda for the hearing and we do not know in what order they will be heard.

If you are a healthcare provider we ask that you show this by wearing your scrubs or whatever you normally wear to work. Please encourage your co-workers to come as well, we need a huge turnout!

We encourage EVERYONE to sign up to speak during the hearing. There will be volunteers available to assist you at the kiosks in the Senate building.

We are also hoping for a large crowd outside of the senate building actively demonstrating against this and other bills under consideration that day.

There will be numerous bills before the Senate Appropriations Committee that are of great concern. While we are somewhat focused on SB 1405, we also feel that the other equally discriminatory, anti-immigrant, and anti-health bills need to be protested and spoken out against as well. Here is a list of the bills that concern us the most (subject to change as the list is updated):

SB 1308 – Interstate compact; birth certificates—seeks to issue separate birth certificates to those born in this country to undocumented and visa-holder parents.

SB 1309—Arizona citizenship—seeks to redefine the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment to only allow those born in the US to one parent who is a citizen or permanent resident to become a US citizen.

SB 1405—Hospital Admissions; restrictions—seeks to require hospitals to verify immigration status of all emergency patients as well as patients who are admitted.

SB 1407—Schools; data; noncitizen students—seeks to require schools to identify and collect data on undocumented students.

SB 1519—AHCCCS; termination—seeks to terminate the state Medicare system AHCCCS. Monies will be redistributed and $900,000,000 will go to the state general fund

SB 1611—Immigration omnibus—this bill is still listed as “Pending Introduction, First Reading and Committee Assignment”. It requires watching.

For more information on these bills, search here:http://www.azleg.gov/bills.asp

Appropriations Committee Agenda:http://www.azleg.gov/FormatDocument.asp?inDoc=%2Fagendas%2F02220154102.doc.htm

Please spread the word and invite your friends, neighbors, family, and co-workers!

Here is a facebook link for more information.

Feb. 22 UPDATE: According to Random Musings blogger Craig McDermott, more than 100 people showed up for this demonstration at the Arizona State Senate’s Appropriations Committee Meeting, but the Senate stalled with floor business instead of having the scheduled committee meeting. Here is an afternoon update from McDermott…

What is almost unheard-of is the fact that the committee hearing room, SHR109, is locked tight and Capitol police have just cleared the hundred+ people waiting for the hearing. Most of the folks present are opposed to one or more of the bills on the agenda.

Everybody has been funnelled into SHR1, which is serving as overflow seating. It’s at least 3X the size of SHR109, and it is full.

Feb. 22 SECOND UPDATE: The Senate Appropriations Committee did start meeting– about 1.5 hours late, according to McDermott.

Estimates vary, but between 80,000-100,000 demonstrators protested against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s union-busting “Budget Repair Bill” on Saturday in Madison, Wisconsin. According to radio talk show host Ed Schultz, another 70 protests were held around Wisconsin over the weekend– despite freezing rain on Sunday. (Burrr… )

The “Mubarak of the Middle West” (AKA Walker) appeared on CNN over the weekend, but he refuses to compromise or negotiate with the unions and refuses to address the crowd regarding the “budget crisis” that he personally created by giving corporate tax breaks that the state could not afford. (Sound familiar?)

Unlike Arizona, Wisconsin has one of the best public education systems in the country. Walker’s union-busting activities are not about pensions. They’re about radical anti-union, anti-public-education, pro-corporate-welfare ideology. (This, too, should sound familiar.)

From The Nation…

What has become clear to the protesters over the past week is that, beyond an assault on unions, Walker’s bill is part of a wider attack on working families and public education.

“The second reason that this fight matters is the future of public education,” The Nation’s Chris Hayes said. “What’s driving it is the ultimate aim of permanently scrapping the model of public education that has sustained this country for years. Teachers unions are the stewards of preserving public education, which is the core element of our civil life.”

Walker’s track record illustrates his lack of support for public education. Before he was governor, he was the executive of Milwaukee County, where the nation’s first mass-scale private school voucher experiment was implemented. He then campaigned for governor on expanding these vouchers, Hayes said.

Under the widely disputed bill, local police, firefighters and state troopers would retain their collective bargaining rights—their unions generally supported Walker during his campaign. Teachers unions, who sided with Democrats in last fall’s election, and other public workers would lose that process.

The proposed bill, according to Walker, is intended to balance the state’s budget and avoid layoffs. But despite an offer by public workers to give financial concessions instead of relinquishing collective bargaining, the governor refuses to drop the plan.

In a statement issued this weekend, Democratic State Senator Jon Erpenbach said that the offer made by public workers was “a legitimate and serious offer on the table from local, state and school public employees that balances Governor Walker’s budget.”

The denial of this offer shows that “Governor Walker’s only target is the destruction of collective bargaining rights and not solving the state’s budget,” Erpenbach said.

Teaching assistants have planned a “teach-out” for Tuesday to permit their students to join them at the capitol to protest the Assembly’s meeting. They also helped organize “teach-ins” over the weekend at the campus’s main library to further explain to students how this bill will affect them.

Graduate student assistants teach 85 percent of discussion sections and nearly 20 percent of the lectures on the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s campus. The proposed bill targets both their benefits and their ability to bargain over tuition remission. This is no small matter: a statement released by the TAA Saturday said that tuition remission is the university’s strongest recruitment tool for graduate students and ending collective bargaining in this area would impact the quality of the teaching and research brought into the university.

Over the last week, groups of students migrated from other state campuses to participate in the protests in Madison. Rachel Matteson, a member of Students for a Democratic Society at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, came down Sunday to rally at the capitol.

“Attacking teachers assistants and teachers directly affects the quality of our education. Students realize this. Many of us will be graduating soon and entering the public sector, so this is also an attack on our own rights,” Matteson told The Nation.

Some 260 faculty members at UW-Madison signed a letter opposing the bill. “We recognize that the state faces a severe budget shortfall. We have already taken wage and benefit cuts to help address that problem and expect to make more sacrifices in the future. But eliminating collective bargaining will not address this shortfall. We urge you not to allow this crisis to undermine our state’s strong traditions of democracy and human rights.”

Public school teachers from around the state have been protesting at the capitol for the past week. On Sunday, after a four-hour debate on how to balance maintaining their opposition to the bill with their responsibilities to teach, Madison public school teachers decided to return to work on Tuesday.

Not only are public school teacher’s collective bargaining rights threatened, but public education is also expected to be reduced by nearly $500 annually per student.

Simultaneously, and also causing a stir, is a proposal expected to be included in Walkers budget that involves splitting the University of Wisconsin-Madison from the rest of the state’s university system. Some officials worry this could cause tuition to skyrocket.

For more on union-busting and Wisconsin, check out these stories.

Video of Ed Schultz broadcasting from Madison from MSNBC

Wixconsin Power Play from the New York Times

Wisconsin’s Protests in Pictures from The Nation

‘This Is What Democracy Looks Like’ in Wisconsin, as Largest Crowd Yet—80,000—Opposes Union Busting from The Nation

The Future of Public Education, as Much as Unions, Is at Stake in Wisconsin from The Nation

Why cover what’s happening in Wisconsin? Because Arizona Republican Governor Jan Brewer and other radical corporate puppet governors around the country are taking pages from the same playbook as “The Mubarak of the Middle West”. Stay tuned. There are a lot of rumblings about marching on Phoenix.