Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Thursday 31 March 2011


TomDispatch.com: A Regular Antidote to the Mainstream Media
March 31, 2011
Tomgram: Andy Kroll, Union-Busting or Republican-Busting in Wisconsin?
One hundred years ago, 146 people, mostly young immigrant women, died in a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in downtown New York City, a building lacking sprinkler systems, fire walls, or adequate fire escapes. Onlookers watched horrified, writes historian Steve Fraser, as many of the trapped workers jumped to their deaths from upper-story windows. Those below “talked of the sky raining flaming bodies.”

Anger at the unnecessarily harsh and dangerous working conditions that caused such a toll was widespread. One hundred thousand New Yorkers would file past the coffins of the dead workers.  Within days, 350,000 New Yorkers would take to the streets in a massive march of protest -- many, adds Fraser, “to vent their anger and express their determination that tragedies such as this should never be allowed to happen again.”  That moment is now considered a turning point for the movement to improve working conditions in America.

That was then, of course, and until this February, the centennial anniversary of that tragedy would have been considered nothing more than history, and those thinking about it sentimentalists for a bygone era when people cared about and organized around the needs of working people in this country. No one would have imagined that those sorts of mass protests over the conditions of working people would ever again leave the history books for the streets of America. But as in the Middle East, so here, it’s often true that what no one expects or predicts happens, that one day the streets in Madison, Wisconsin, or Cairo, Egypt, suddenly, miraculously begin to fill. Now, in a moment when labor is under assault and some leading politicians seem to be dreaming of returning American workers to a state of powerlessness not seen in perhaps 80 years, something’s happening, even if we don’t know what it is, Mr. Jones.

What occurred in Madison may already be altering the normal political landscape of this country. The question is whether it will also, perhaps in unexpected ways, create a new terrain beyond the usual electoral politics. TomDispatch associate editor Andy Kroll covered the Madison protests for Mother Jones magazine and for this site in a stirring piece, “ Cairo in Wisconsin.” Now, he begins to explore the spread of what might be called "the Madison effect" and the changing contours of political America. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Kroll discusses his time in Madison and the larger meaning of those protests, click  here, or download it to your iPod  here.) Tom
Return to Wisconsin
The Beginning or the End?

By Andy Kroll
It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.
-- Joan Didion
In the February weeks I spent in snowy Madison, Wisconsin, that line of Didion's, the opening of her 1967 essay "Goodbye to All That," ricocheted through my mind as I tried to make sense of the massive protests unfolding around me. What was I witnessing? The beginning of a new movement in this country -- or the end of an existing one, the last stand of organized labor? Or could it have been both?
None of us on the ground could really say. We were too close to the action, too absorbed by what was directly in front of us.
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