Wisconsin is so last week.
But Sam Pizzigati writing at AlterNet says Progressives digging deeper into the state's history will find support for today's agenda.
American progressives do indeed owe an enormous debt to Wisconsin. In fact, we can trace back to Wisconsin many of social decency's most basic building blocks.
A short list: Wisconsin reformers pioneered workmen's compensation to protect workers injured on the job and later enacted the nation's first state law that extended benefits to unemployed workers. In the early years of the 20th century, Wisconsin evolved the direct primary and outlawed legal discrimination against women before any other state. Progressives who cut their eye teeth in Wisconsin a hundred years ago would go on to play, a generation later, key roles in the New Deal. One would author the original Social Security Act.
Pizzigati remembers Wisconsin's "Fighting Bob" La Follette, who, in 1912, said "is the encroachment of the powerful few upon the rights of the many." La Follette took office as Wisconsin's first progressive governor in 1901. At the time, Wisconsin's richest 1 percent owned half the state's property. A mere 10 percent of the state's wealth, meanwhile, belonged to Wisconsin's bottom 80 percent.
Alternet quotes LaFollette:
So long as there is an income to be found in the country so large that it yields to its possessor a surplus over and above what he needs for the comfort or even luxuries of life for himself and his family," La Follette thundered in the debate over war finance, "I am in favor of taking such portion of that surplus income by taxation as the government needs for war purposes, and if it needs it all, I am in favor of taking it all before we take one penny from the slender income of the man who receives only enough to provide himself and family with the bare necessaries of life.
That's quite a contrast to the current administration which has given a tax cut to the rich and has left the debt from the current war to be paid by his children and grandchildren.
-- Jim Grinstead
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