DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Eating Egyptian pizza in
Wisconsin By Andy Kroll
The call reportedly arrived from Cairo.
Pizza for the protesters, the voice said. It was
Saturday, February 20, and by then Ian's Pizza on
State Street in Madison, Wisconsin, was
overwhelmed. One employee had been assigned the
sole task of answering the phone and taking down
orders. And in they came, from all 50 states and
the District of Columbia, from Morocco, Haiti,
Turkey, Belgium, Uganda, China, New Zealand, and
even a research station in Antarctica. More than
50 countries around the globe. Ian's couldn't make
pizza fast enough, and the generosity of distant
strangers with credit cards was paying for it all.
Those pizzas, of course, were heading for
the Wisconsin state capitol, an elegant domed
structure at the heart of this Mid-Western college
town. For nearly two weeks, tens of thousands of
raucous, sleepless, grizzled, energized protesters
have called the
stately capitol building
their home. As the police moved in to clear it out
on Sunday afternoon, it was still the pulsing
heart of the largest labor protest in my lifetime,
the focal point of rallies and concerts against a
politically-charged piece of legislation proposed
by Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a hard-right
Republican. That bill, officially known as the
Special Session Senate Bill 11, would, among other
things, eliminate collective bargaining rights for
most of the state's public-sector unions, in
effect eviscerating the unions themselves.
"Kill the bill!" the protesters chant en
masse, day after day, while the drums pound and
cowbells clang. "What's disgusting? Union
busting!"
One world, one pain The spark for Wisconsin's protests came on
February 11. That was the day the Associated Press
published a brief story quoting Walker as saying
he would call in the National Guard to crack down
on unruly workers upset that their bargaining
rights were being stripped away. Labor and other
left-leaning groups seized on Walker's incendiary
threat, and within a week there were close to
70,000 protesters filling the streets of Madison.
Six thousand miles away, February 11 was
an even more momentous day. Weary but jubilant
protesters on the streets of Cairo, Alexandria,
and other Egyptian cities celebrated the toppling
of Hosni Mubarak, the autocrat who had ruled over
them for more than 30 years and amassed billions
in wealth at their expense. "We have brought down
the regime," cheered the protesters in Cairo's
Tahrir Square, the center of the Egyptian
uprising. In calendar terms, the demonstrations in
Wisconsin, you could say, picked up right where
the Egyptians left off.
I arrived in
Madison several days into the protests. I've
watched the crowds swell, nearly all of those
arriving - and some just not leaving - united
against Governor Walker's "budget repair bill".
I've interviewed protesters young and old, union
members and grassroots organizers, students and
teachers, children and retirees. I've huddled with
labor leaders in their Madison "war rooms," and
sat through the governor's press conferences. I've
slept on the cold, stone floor of the Wisconsin
state capitol (twice). Believe me, the spirit of
Cairo is here. The air is charged with it.
It was strongest inside the capitol. A
previously seldom-visited building had been
miraculously transformed into a genuine living,
breathing community. There was a medic station,
child day care, a food court, sleeping quarters,
hundreds of signs and banners, live music, and a
sense of camaraderie and purpose you'd struggle to
find in most American cities, possibly anywhere
else in this country. Like Cairo's Tahrir Square
in the weeks of the Egyptian uprising, most of
what happens inside the capitol's walls is
protest.
Egypt is a presence here in all
sorts of obvious ways, as well as ways harder to
put your finger on. The walls of the capitol, to
take one example, offer regular reminders of
Egypt's feat. I saw, for instance, multiple copies
of that famous photo on Facebook of an Egyptian
man, his face half-obscured, holding a sign that
reads: "EGYPT Supports Wisconsin Workers: One
World, One Pain." The picture is all the more
striking for what's going on around the man with
the sign: a sea of cheering demonstrators are
waving Egyptian flags, hands held aloft. The man,
however, faces in the opposite direction, as if
showing support for brethren halfway around the
world was important enough to break away from the
historic celebrations erupting around him.
Similarly, I've seen multiple copies of a
statement by Kamal Abbas, the general coordinator
for Egypt's Center for Trade Unions and Workers
Services, taped to the walls of the state capitol.
Not long after Egypt's January Revolution
triumphed and Wisconsin's protests began, Abbas
announced his group's support for the Wisconsin
labor protesters in a page-long declaration that
said in part: "We want you to know that we stand
on your side. Stand firm and don't waiver. Don't
give up on your rights. Victory always belongs to
the people who stand firm and demand their just
rights."
Then there's the role of
organized labor more generally. After all,
widespread strikes coordinated by labor unions
shut down Egyptian government agencies and
increased the pressure on Mubarak to relinquish
power. While we haven't seen similar strikes yet
here in Madison - though there's talk of a general
strike if Walker's bill somehow passes - there's
no underestimating the role of labor unions like
the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International
Union (SEIU), the American Federation of State,
County, and Municipal Employees, and the American
Federation of Teachers in organizing the events of
the past two weeks.
Faced with a bill that
could all but wipe out unions in historically
labor-friendly states across the Mid-West, labor
leaders knew they had to act - and quickly. "Our
very labor movement is at stake," Stephanie
Bloomingdale, secretary-treasurer of Wisconsin's
AFL-CIO branch, told me. "And when that's at
stake, the economic security of Americans is at
stake."
'The Mubarak of the
Mid-West' On the Sunday after I arrived, I
was wandering the halls of the capitol when I met
Scott Graham, a third-grade teacher who lives in
Lacrosse, Wisconsin. Over the cheers of the crowd,
I asked Graham whether he saw a connection between
the events in Egypt and those here in Wisconsin.
His response caught the mood of the moment.
"Watching Egypt's story for a week or two very
intently, I was inspired by the Egyptian people,
you know, striving for their own
self-determination and democracy in their
country," Graham told me. "I was very inspired by
that. And when I got here I sensed that everyone's
in it together. The sense of solidarity is just
amazing."
A few days later, I stood
outside the capitol building in the frigid cold
and talked about Egypt with two local teachers.
The most obvious connection between Egypt and
Wisconsin was the role and power of young people,
said Ann Wachter, a federal employee who joined
our conversation when she overheard me mention
Egypt. There, it was tech-savvy young people who
helped keep the protests alive and the same, she
said, applied in Madison. "You go in there
everyday and it's the youth that carries it
throughout hours that we're working, or we're
running our errands, whatever we do. They do
whatever they do as young people to keep it alive.
After all, I'm at the end of my working career;
it's their future."
And, let's not forget
those almost omnipresent signs that link the young
governor of Wisconsin to the aging Hosni Mubarak.
They typically label Walker the "Mubarak of the
Mid-West" or "mini-Mubarak," or demand the recall
of "Scott 'Mubarak.'" In a public talk on Thursday
night, journalist Amy Goodman quipped, "Walker
would be wise to negotiate. It's not a good season
for tyrants."
One protester I saw on
Thursday hoisted aloft a "No Union Busting!" sign
with a black shoe perched atop it, the heel facing
forward - a severe sign of disrespect that
Egyptian protesters directed at Mubarak and a
symbol that, before the recent American TV blitz
of "rage and revolution" in the Middle East, would
have had little meaning here.
Which isn't
to say that the Egypt-Wisconsin comparison is a
perfect one. Hardly. After all, the Egyptian
demonstrators massed in hopes of a new and quite
different world; the American ones, no matter the
celebratory and energized air in Madison, are
essentially negotiating loss (of pensions and
health-care benefits, if not collective bargaining
rights). The historic demonstrations in Madison
have been nothing if not peaceful. On Saturday,
when as many as 100,000 people descended on
Madison to protest Walker's bill, the largest
turnout so far, not a single arrest was made. In
Egypt, by contrast, the protests were plenty
bloody, with more than 300 deaths during the
29-day uprising.
Not that some observers
didn't see the need for violence in Madison. Last
Saturday, Jeff Cox, a deputy attorney general in
Indiana, suggested on his Twitter account that
police "use live ammunition" on the protesters
occupying the state capitol. That sentiment,
discovered by a colleague of mine, led to an
outcry. The story broke on Wednesday morning; by
Wednesday afternoon Cox had been fired.
New York Times columnist David Brooks was
typical of mainstream coverage and punditry in
quickly dismissing any connection between Egypt
(or Tunisia) and Wisconsin. On the Daily Show, Jon
Stewart spoofed and rejected the notion that the
Wisconsin protests had any meaningful connection
to Egypt. He called the people gathered here "the
bizarro Tea Party." Stewart's crew even brought in
a camel as a prop. Those of us in Madison watched
as Stewart's skit went horribly wrong when the
camel got entangled in a barricade and fell to the
ground.
As far as I know, neither Brooks
nor Stewart spent time here. Still, you can count
on one thing: if the demonstrators in Tahrir
Square had been enthusiastically citing Americans
as models for their protest, nobody here would
have been in such a dismissive or mocking mood. In
other parts of this country, perhaps it still
feels less than comfortable to credit Egyptians or
Arabs with inspiring an American movement for
justice. If you had been here in Madison, this
last week, you might have felt differently.
Pizza town protest Obviously,
the outcomes in Egypt and Wisconsin won't be
comparable. Egypt toppled a dictator; Wisconsin
has a democratically elected governor who, at the
very earliest, can't be recalled until 2012. And
so the protests in Wisconsin are unlikely to
transform the world around us. Still, there can be
no question, as they spread elsewhere in the
Mid-West, that they have reenergized the country's
stagnant labor movement, a once-powerful player in
American politics and business that's now a shell
of its former self. "There's such energy right
now," one SEIU staffer told me a few nights ago.
"This is a magic moment."
Not long after
talking with her, I trudged back to Ian's Pizza,
the icy snow crunching under my feet. At the door
stood an employee with tired eyes, a distinct five
o'clock shadow, and a beanie on his head.
I wanted to ask him, I said, about that
reported call from Cairo. "You know," he
responded, "I really don't remember it." I waited
while he politely rebuffed several approaching
customers, telling them how Ian's had run out of
dough and how, in any case, all the store's
existing orders were bound for the capitol. When
he finally had a free moment, he returned to the
Cairo order. There had, he said, been questions
about whether it was authentic or not, and then he
added, "I'm pretty sure it was from Cairo, but
it's not like I can guarantee it." By then,
another wave of soon-to-be disappointed customers
was upon us, and so I headed back to the capitol
and another semi-sleepless night.
The
building, as I approached in the darkness, was
brightly lit, reaching high over the city.
Protestors were still filing inside with all the
usual signs. In the rotunda, drums pounded and
people chanted and the sound swirled into a
massive roar. For this brief moment at least,
people here in Madison are bound together by a
single cause, as other protesters were not so long
ago, and may be again, in the ancient cities of
Egypt.
Right then, the distance separating
Cairo and Wisconsin couldn't have felt smaller.
But maybe you had to be there.
Andy
Kroll is a reporter in the DC bureau of Mother
Jones magazine and an associate editor at
TomDispatch.com. He will never again sleep on the
frigid stone floor of a state capitol.
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