Joan Walsh: Walker Pulls a PATCO, Wins One for the Plutocrats

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large.

At about 3 pm Wisconsin time Scott Walker Tweeted: “President Reagan died on June 5, 2004. Let’s win one for the Gipper!” It was moment of grandiosity for a man who endured the shame of a recall election, then ultimately spent enough to survive it, but it wasn’t the first time Walker invoked Reagan on one of his big days.

While talking to a prankster who pretended he was billionaire GOP funder David Koch more than a year ago, Walker confided what he did at a dinner for his staff the night before he unveiled his union-busting agenda. “I pulled out a picture of Ronald Reagan and I said ‘You know, this may seem a little melodramatic, but 30 years ago Ronald Reagan, whose 100th birthday we just celebrated the day before, had one of the most defining moments of his political career, not just his presidency, when he fired the air traffic controllers,’” Walker told the faux-Koch.

It turns out Walker’s anti-union gambit was a defining moment for the modern Republican Party. When Reagan busted PATCO, the air traffic controllers’ union, he accelerated the decline of the American labor movement, and American workers’ wages have declined along with it ever since. When Walker moved against public employee unions, it was an effort to drive the final nail in labor’s coffin, while defunding a crucial resource base for the Democratic Party. Plutocrats rewarded him handsomely for his work, shoveling money into Wisconsin and burying Democrat Tom Barrett with a 7-1 cash disadvantage....