Madison Teachers Inc. executive director John Matthews says the difference between Falk’s and Barrett’s plans for how to restore workers’ collective bargaining is “the key issue” in the primary. Falk, Barrett and the race’s two other Democratic candidates all say they support that goal. But even if Democrats retake the Governor’s Office and flip the state Senate, they may still have a Republican assembly to contend with. Falk committed early on to veto any budget that doesn’t include collective bargaining restoration, a move that SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin vice president Bruce Colburn praises as “very significant.” Barrett has said he would pursue the issue on multiple fronts, including calling a special session of the Legislature. Barrett Communications director Phillip Walzak says that a budget showdown would risk leaving the entire Walker budget in place. Falk campaign communications director Scot Ross says that in a special session, Assembly Republicans could easily decline to hold any votes.

Matthews, whose union has not yet endorsed a candidate, declined to say which approach he prefers. But he says that other unions erred by endorsing Falk early in the process, with insufficient member involvement, in an effort to “freeze out Tom Barrett.”

Barrett’s run was actively discouraged by some unions that had held union contract negotiations with both him and Falk. Marty Biel, the executive director of the Wisconsin State Employees Union, told Salon in February that he hoped Barrett would understand “why he might not fit the matrix of what a champion looks like.” In an April 7 statement, WSEU wrote that whereas Falk had a history of “working with our members to solve problems,” Barrett “wasn’t interested in working with us” to get a collective bargaining agreement signed in the weeks before Walker’s anti-union bill passed (in the same statement, WSEU acknowledged “poor judgment” in promoting a web video that implied Barrett had fully supported Walker’s bill). Wisconsin Education Association Council president Mary Bell says that Falk distinguished herself last year both by negotiating in good faith with union members to reach agreements before Walker’s bill passed and by traveling the state in support of recall efforts afterward.

But Barrett is on track to win the nomination. Wisconsin Democratic Party spokesperson Graeme Zielinski says that whoever wins the primary “will certainly be the head of our party, and will be directing our messaging and what we’re talking about.”  A poll released Monday from Public Policy Polling showed Barrett ahead of Falk 38 to 24 among likely voters. SEIU’s Colburn says that polling “shows there’s some ground to be made up,” but notes that Barrett has a name recognition advantage from his 2010 gubernatorial run, and led Falk by nearly twice as much in February.

Ross says that Falk’s endorsements from unions and other progressive organizations equal not just voters, but “people who will be out on the streets, knocking on doors and getting out the vote.” Walzak notes that Barrett has a few of his own local union endorsements, and says that prominent politicians backing Barrett “have their own networks they can tap into” to support him.

Sources from labor and both campaigns insist that the national media have exaggerated the bitterness of the primary. AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Stephanie Bloomingdale says that while news reports play up “tension in labor” over the race, “We’ve read more about that on the newspaper online than we have actually seen on the ground in Wisconsin.”

But MTI’s Matthews says statements – or silences – from some of the unions backing Falk make him worry that they could sit out the general election against Walker if Barrett is nominated. Bloomingdale says that won’t happen: “I’ve heard that all the affiliates have made indications that they will support whoever gets through the primary.”

Last Thursday, in an Op-Ed almost perfectly written to flame the fears of Barrett’s labor critics, Barrett backer and former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz wrote of Falk that “A candidate beholden to big unions is no more appealing to independent voters than one who answers to the Koch brothers.” Cieslewicz charged that while voters want an “independent” leader, “the unions seem to want to offer them Jimmy Hoffa instead.” He added that not having been endorsed by public sector unions could help Barrett’s campaign with independents. Asked about Cieslewicz’s column, the Barrett campaign’s Walzak said he saw it as an attempt to point out “a difference between rank and file union members” that may support Barrett, “and some of the leadership that are driving some of the political decisions.” The Falk campaign’s Ross said, “Comparing the working men and women to the Koch brothers … is an inappropriate, negative campaign tactic that doesn’t have any place in this race.”

Labor leaders reject the idea that distance from unions will be an electoral asset this year. “The issue is really going to be who’s going to come out and vote,” says SEIU’s Colburn. He warns that “unless people see this as something that’s going to really reverse what Walker’s done … people who have been involved, and are involved from the movement side, then they’ll be reluctant to participate, and even vote perhaps.”

WSEU’s Bell says that “the energy and the enthusiasm” are on Falk’s side, in both the primary and the general election. “In the end, the electorate is very divided.  And they’re looking for someone that they think can bring us back together.”

Walker will now face the voters on June 5, with polls showing the state’s voters split almost exactly down the middle on whether to retain him. But it’s far from clear who his Democratic opponent will be, thanks to the other big news last Friday: Tom Barrett, the mayor of Milwaukee and Walker’s opponent two years ago, is running again.

Barrett has been seen as a potential candidate since the recall push began more than a year ago, and his broad name recognition and credible showing against Walker in ’10 (Barrett lost by five points in what amounted to an impossible political climate) make him a logical option for Democrats. But his own political situation in Milwaukee, where he’s expected to easily win a third mayoral term on Tuesday, led him to put off making any public moves until last week.

With Barrett on the sidelines, Kathleen Falk, the long-serving executive in Dane County, the second most populous county in the state and the home of Democratic-rich Madison, spent the past few months making noise, raising money and – most importantly – benefiting from a massive television advertising campaign underwritten by a labor-backed group, Wisconsin for Falk. Polls earlier this year showed Falk running far behind Barrett in a potential primary match-up. But the latest survey, released just before Barrett jumped in last week, put her just seven points behind him, 36 to 29 percent.

The Democratic primary will take place on May 5, and the nightmare scenario for Democrats is that a heated Barrett-Falk contest will drain resources, divide key party constituencies, and distract attention from Walker. Two other candidates, Secretary of State Doug La Follette and state Senator Kathleen Vinehout, are also running but are barely registering polls.

To Obey, there’s a risk that Democrats are taking their eye off the ball. For all of the outrage that Walker and his Republican allies stoked when they went to extraordinary means to strip public employees of many of their collective bargaining rights last year, the state’s voters seem to approve and disapprove of their governor in roughly equal numbers.  Plus, there are voters who just don’t like the idea of recalling a governor, and while Wisconsin is known for its rich progressive tradition, Obey is quick to note that, “It’s the state that produced Gaylord Nelson. It’s also the state that produced Joe McCarthy.”

Democrats, he warned, “need to understand that this is not going to be a cakewalk. This is a very uphill fight.”

“We don’t have any luxury but taking someone with the broadest possible appeal,” he said. “We’ve got to nominate somebody who has the broadest possible ability to carry the fight to Walker. We can’t conduct ourselves like we’re the permanent president of the Optimists’ Society.”

This sounds a little like an argument for Barrett over Falk, who is less well-known statewide and whose likability score is substantially lower than Barrett’s, at least for now. There are those who believe that her close identification with the state’s most liberal region would make her an easier mark for Walker and the GOP. Obey says he’s going to make a formal endorsement in the next few days, and that “you’ll have to reach your own conclusion for the moment.”

Falk’s surge in support has been about more than just Barrett’s absence from the campaign trail. It also speaks to organized labor’s profound skepticism, and even hostility, toward him, which is rooted Barrett’s decision as mayor to use the collective bargaining reforms implemented by Walker to impose $25 million in cost-sharing on municipal employees.

To the labor groups that have poured money into the pro-Falk effort – including AFSCME and the state’s largest teachers’ union – this makes Barrett an unacceptable nominee. Others cite a pragmatic concern: Won’t his Milwaukee record make it easy for Walker to throw any criticism of the collective bargaining law back in Barrett’s face?

Obey calls this a “very misleading conclusion,” noting that Barrett is also pledging to do away with Walker’s collective bargaining law and that “all of the Democratic candidates have roughly the same view” on the issue.  And anyway, he says, the public anger that’s driving the recall effort is bigger than the issue that initially spurred it.

“It’s far broader. The collective bargaining issue is very important. But the problem isn’t just what he’s done and what the legislature has done – it is the way they have done it.”

Obey himself was talked up as a potential candidate for a while. He considered running, he now says, “only in my worst moments” and decided not to because of “common sense” – he hates dialing for dollars, and managed to avoid it for most of his 41-year congressional career.

Even though that career took him to a top position in the House – chairman of the Appropriation Committee – Obey was always known for keeping close tab on his home district and state, something that remains true now. While a serious Democratic primary is apparently unavoidable, he expressed hope that the unusual nature of the election will make it easier to heal any wounds.

“Governor Walker is simply hoping that the voters of Wisconsin will have the attention span of a cocker spaniel,” Obey said, “and that they’ll forget the abusive style he has brought to government.”

And they reminded Americans of the value of organized labor. People who’d never been part of a union stood and marched, rallied and voted, knocked on their neighbors’ doors to gather signatures on petitions for recall elections and a ballot referendum.

“For all its faults, the National Labor Relations Act established that it is the policy of the U.S. government to encourage collective bargaining,” Jacob Remes, assistant professor of public affairs and history at SUNY Empire State College, told AlterNet. “The New Deal established collective bargaining as a fundamental part of democracy–what they called industrial democracy. We talk about how the New Deal era has ended, but I think one of the great things about these fights is that they reminded people–politicians, pundits, the populace–that despite the decline of the rest of the New Deal, we still believe in at least this element of industrial democracy.”

In Wisconsin, despite over 100,000 protesting in the streets of Madison and a weeks-long occupation of the Capitol, Governor Scott Walker signed Act 10 into law, stripping around 175,000 public workers of their right to bargain collectively with their bosses over anything but wages. Wisconsinites turned to recall elections to express their anger; they recalled two Republican state senators and are now working on getting rid of Gov. Walker.

“One of the things people we represent now see is the value of their collective bargaining agreements,” Marty Beil of AFSCME Council 24 told AlterNet. “Workers come in and they take for granted all the protections and benefits and processes. Now that there’s no collective bargaining agreement and management can do what they want with you, folks are getting a better understanding of the value of their union.”

In Ohio, state law allowed workers to get SB5, the anti-union bill, on the ballot as a referendum in 2011 and overturn it by a substantial margin. While that hasn’t stifled Governor John Kasich’s attacks on workers, it has certainly limited his ability to directly crack down on union power. The anti-labor right hasn’t rested, though, and it is still pushing other bills—and even a constitutional amendment—that would undermine unions in other ways.

It’s obvious that the conditions on the ground for working people in Wisconsin and Ohio are very different. AlterNet took a look at the struggles of public workers in both states—what it’s like to have lost collective bargaining rights, the endless string of new attacks on workers, and what people in both states are doing to fight back.

Missing Collective Bargaining in Wisconsin

For those watching Wisconsin after last year’s protests, most of the news has been of recall elections—last year, the recalls of two Republican state senators and this year’s recall of Scott Walker, his lieutenant governor and four more state senators, launched with a petition signed by over one million people.

But in the meantime, Walker’s Act 10 went into effect June 29, 2011, instantly stripping collective bargaining rights from some 175,000 Wisconsin public employees, and the recalls have yet to produce changes in the law.

According to information gathered by the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future, a state worker who earns $40,000 a year, under Act 10, has lost an average of $3,668 from her paycheck. “That’s $70 a week cut from a family budget, $70 weekly which cannot be spent at local stores,” they point out. They also estimate the loss to local economies caused by the pay cuts and hikes in the workers’ side contributions to health insurance premiums will be over $700 million—and that taking that money out of Wisconsin’s economy will lead to the loss of nearly 7,000 private-sector jobs in the first year of the governor’s austerity budget.

And it’s not just wages that have been lost. “Regardless of what happens with the recall, we’re probably not going to be able to completely roll back the increases in contributions on health insurance and pensions,” Jenni Dye, an attorney and candidate for Dane County Board, told AlterNet.

Meanwhile, under Act 10, unions are now required to recertify each year, holding an election that requires 51 percent support of all employees in the bargaining unit—even if some of them choose not to vote. This means that, unlike political elections in this country, any non-vote is counted as a “no.” In large bargaining units, made up of thousands of workers, Beil said, that makes recertification nearly impossible, and many of the unions didn’t try.

For those that did go through the recertification process, Act 10 placed extreme limits on what they can bargain over—wages only, up to a capped increase at the consumer price index. (The AFL-CIO noted that there is no such cap on non-union workers’ wage increases.) Vacations, benefits, working conditions, sick days, overtime—bargaining for any of that is expressly forbidden.

Now Walker has even refused to negotiate with the unions willing to jump through all these hoops to comply with his law. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports that two of the unions, the State Professional Education and Information Council #1 and the Wisconsin State Attorneys Association, have filed unfair labor practice complaints against Walker’s administration because it has refused to set a date for negotiations–and as many as four other unions might also file suit. These unions have gone through elections, finishing, according to Beil, in December of last year, and have been trying to get Walker to come to the bargaining table ever since. Dye said that Walker’s refusal to negotiate proves that his goal was always “to see an end to collective bargaining, period, in Wisconsin.”

Beil represents, among others, workers at the state’s correctional institutions, who are openly being told by their bosses that they simply have no union anymore. Yet the unions keep fighting for the workers, even without official recognition. AFSCME and others have to use the courts or administrative hearings to fight for the workers. Beil called it “a campaign of suppression and intimidation.”

Beil told a story of guards at a women’s correctional facility, who get sent along with inmates when they have to go to the hospital to hold a “vigil.” If one of the guards has to use the bathroom while waiting, they are now required to call the prison, get a replacement sent out, and not use the bathroom until they have returned to their post at the prison. “Workers are every day subject to this kind of abuse and degradation. There’s absolutely no dignity in the workplace anymore,” he said.

Wisconsin’s teachers, are also feeling the loss of their protections at work, with new handbooks replacing their old union contracts, containing strict and arbitrary rules on dress code and restrictions on their outside-of-work activities. In New Berlin, teachers reported [PDF] that not only were workdays for teachers getting longer with no pay increases, but that teachers must adhere to a dress code that includes skirts below the knee, no jeans, no open shirts, and that they can be dismissed for the crime of having students as “friends” on Facebook. They are also required to report any traffic incidents or tickets to their school district.

“’Moral turpitude’ is a standard [officials] are trying to now use in very vague ways,” Dye said.

And because Act 10 expressly forbids collective bargaining, Dye noted, some districts are worried that if they collaborate with teachers to design an employee handbook that is fair to all, they could actually be in violation of the law.

But workers haven’t given up, and are finding new ways to fight despite the loss of their union protections. “The decertified unions in Wisconsin are in some ways a return to a world before collective bargaining was the sine qua non of a union. This is scary, certainly, but some unions might find it liberating. It allows them the opportunity to experiment with new ways of building power,” Remes pointed out.

In Madison, the teachers’ union, Madison Teachers Incorporated, is playing a large role in school board elections, because those school board officials once in office have the ability to write rules for the teachers. Dye, who decided to run for office after being deeply involved in last year’s Capitol protests and occupation, noted, “It’s even more important that we have strong candidates and strong elected officials on school boards, county boards, because now those officials have so much more power and control over our public employees.”

Dye and others like her, running for office around the state or joining up with insurgent campaigns as organizers, are part of a movement that is determined to bring some rights and respect back to Wisconsin’s working people. “It’s actually kind of difficult to have a sense of the real movement spirit that is part of the day-to-day life here on the ground,” Peter Rickman, a union organizer and former leader of Wisconsin’s Teaching Assistants Association, told AlterNet. “We’ve gone from feeling like the right-wing is ascendant, to now–not only have we staged a dramatic fight-back at the Capitol, but collective action is a part of everyone’s day-to-day lives.”

Rickman pointed out that the organizing happening now is bringing together community groups, political organizations and unions, building new organizations (many under the umbrella of We Are Wisconsin) that can last beyond one protest or one election cycle. “We do rallies and we do protests and we do direct action in addiction to voter contact. We have strength in numbers, the 1 percent has the money,” he said.

The logo that became ubiquitous during last spring’s protests, the state of Wisconsin redesigned as a blue clenched fist, is still everywhere, Rickman said, a sort of talisman for those involved in the movement. “When you have the blue fist button folks will come up to you and say ‘Here’s what I’ve been doing, what are you up to?’ We have a real social movement on the ground, and it involves everyday people.”

Beating Back Mini-SB5s in Ohio

In Ohio, state law allows for a “Citizens’ Veto“ of a law passed by the legislature and signed by the governor—and the citizens took advantage, first gathering 1.3 million signatures on a petition to overturn Senate Bill 5, the anti-union law, 6,000 volunteers dancing them in a parade down to the Secretary of State’s office, and then resoundingly defeating the law in an off-year ballot referendum that saw record voter turnout.

“It got people to start thinking about the role of labor in Ohio,” Brian Rothenberg, executive director of ProgressOhio, told AlterNet. “You can almost thank John Kasich and the Republicans because it woke up a lot of Ohioans who had been bombarded by talk radio and had forgotten what labor meant to them.”

But Kasich and Ohio Republicans—and even some Democrats—aren’t done trying to eliminate union power just yet. Jason Perlman of the Ohio AFL-CIO told AlterNet that they’re seeing attempts around the state to revive bits and pieces of SB5 in local legislation, attacking workers’ rights by dribs and drabs.

One development is a new plan to overhaul Cleveland’s schools—and like the emergency manager provisions in Michigan, give officials the power to break existing contracts with workers. “Really, if this happens, they can do what they want, no contract has meaning, the school board has no more power of authority. It’s a little authoritarian in its concept,” Perlman said.

Workers are still facing pressure to take pay cuts (the same rhetoric around “shared sacrifice” hasn’t gone away) and many have faced cuts to their benefits as well. Perlman noted, “I think people are still unfortunately confused as to what they perceive a public employee actually making. The other side did a very good job of portraying public workers as overpaid and underworked.”

The Dayton Daily News reported that five local governments stopped paying 100 percent of their employees’ insurance premiums in 2011, requiring employees to contribute part of the costs. In the city of Moraine, unions have agreed to pay freezes, job cuts, and the city has doubled the deductible on its employees’ healthcare plans. Public employees have been making concessions on their contracts for years, Perlman noted, but they understand that right now they still may have to give up a bit more to show good faith. “I’m hoping and believing that this is a one step back, two steps forward process,” he said.

But Rothenberg pointed out that in Ohio, at least, the employees still have a seat at the bargaining table, and that has an impact on the entire economy; when union workers get better wages, it helps set the standard for non-union workers’ pay as well.

Meanwhile, while union workers are giving up hard-won wages and benefits, others in the state are pushing for a misleadingly named “Right-To-Work” law—they’re working to get the provision, which defunds unions by allowing employees represented by a union not to pay the costs of representation, passed as a constitutional amendment. To get an amendment on the ballot this year, they need around 381,000 signatures by July 4—which Perlman said seems unlikely. And, he noted, even many Republicans have distanced themselves from the proposal, which is being pushed by Tea Party groups and the Associated Builders and Contractors of Ohio.

While the anti-union crowd might be having trouble getting signatures together for their no-rights-at-work agenda, Rothenberg said that the progressive and pro-labor coalition that overturned SB5 is in great shape, having just collected signatures to redo how redistricting is done in Ohio. And Perlman appreciates the help from community groups. It’s nice to see people who aren’t union leaders discussing the benefits of unions, he noted. “When people see the head of a labor union talking about the good things they do, of course he’s going to say that.”

Beyond the benefits of unions in the workplace, though, Rothenberg argued that part of the reason Ohio is in a better place right now is that it is not reliant on politicians—the citizens had to find other means by which to fight their governor’s regressive agenda. “The lesson of Wisconsin and Ohio is that those citizens can be organized and they can make a difference regardless of who’s in power.”

In both Wisconsin and Ohio, what started as an attack on public employee unions that a couple of Tea Party governors thought they could sneak past the public has turned into a vibrant people’s movement. Perlman pointed out that for a long time, workers had grown used to a middle-class lifestyle and were distanced from the fights of the labor movement that had won them decent wages and benefits in the first place. The attacks they’ve faced in the past year, and particularly in Wisconsin, the struggles workers face every day now that they have lost collective bargaining, have woken them up to the reality that the other side wants to eliminate all their rights.

“For a long time the American worker has had it good enough, they’ve had something to lose,” Perlman said. “I think people are finally starting to realize that we no longer have it good enough.”

Yet, 2012 finds progressives without any such unifying vision to mobilize a broad-based reform movement, let alone to define the debate about the economic future. Instead, by some still-puzzling turn of events, the Tea Party infused political right has capitalized on the crisis produced by already radically deregulated “free-market” financial capitalism to promote an even more radically right-wing agenda based on the argument that what we need now is more of the same—further tax cutting, deeper spending cuts, more deregulation and the eventual elimination of what remains of social welfare and labor rights. Right-wing activists have also reclaimed the moral high ground by framing their agenda as a crusade to save capitalism and political freedom from the threat of liberal “big government,” albeit by resorting to the decidedly low-road tactics of blaming the Great Recession on overly-generous entitlements, organized labor and the “undeserving” poor. For the time being, this is the narrative that is setting the terms of the debate in Washington over what the post-recession economy should look like.

Still, there is reason for hope. From Wisconsin to Wall Street, grassroots movements have resuscitated flagging reform momentum, organizing to defend the rights and dignity of labor, to protest the rise and concentrated power of “the 1 percent,” and to make deeper, decades-in-the-making issues of inequality the center of a campaign to renew representative democracy. Whether and how this translates into a more concrete reform program — and whether it will be able to displace the still locked-in logic of austerity and retrenchment  —remains to be seen.

Hope can also be found in the enduring salience of an older tradition of progressive economic reform. From the late 19th century through the New Deal, similarly fraught moments of economic crisis and inequality were used to frame a series of public debates about the rise of industrial and finance capitalism, and the hazards it introduced. Chief among these were the problems of inequality and concentrated economic power that marked the decades around the turn of that century as what, until very recently, was our first and only Gilded Age.

Indeed, that era’s skewed patterns of wealth and income distribution were much like our own. They stemmed from deliberate,  ideologically slanted policy choices and industry practices in a political system dominated by the interests of big corporations and the wealthy. They reflected vast imbalances of power when it came to controlling wages, prices, working conditions and the broader fate of the economy. For the great majority of citizens, the material risks and consequences of these imbalances were palpable, and never more so than in the sequence of mass unemployment, falling property values, foreclosure and deepening depression that periodically gripped the economy in the wake of the financial panics endemic to unregulated industrial capitalism.

The moral and political hazards of Gilded Age capitalism were palpable as well, inspiring a language of protest most recently echoed in anti-Wall Street demonstrations in Zuccotti Park. Then as now critics protested the “evils” of inequality and wealth concentration as akin to plutocracy, predation, malefaction, economic oligarchy and outright theft. They worried about the corrupting influences of a financial sector that had grown too large and of the speculative pursuit of profit for its own sake.

But the progressives of yesteryear voiced their concerns in the name of more positive, traditionally republican principles as well: principles grounded in ideas about socially productive labor as the source of true economic value and civic virtue; about the need to balance the public interest against the overreaching claims of narrow private economic interests; about the importance of free (that is, autonomous and independent) and fairly compensated labor that were rapidly being undermined by the work conditions of industrial capitalism. While hardly uncontested, and by no means applied equitably across the lines of race, ethnicity and gender, these principles stood in sharp contrast to Andrew Carnegie’s self-justifying Gospel of Wealth and every-man-for-himself Social Darwinism. They provided the basis for framing Gilded Age inequality as a violation of traditional republican values, and for justifying such measures as anti-trust legislation, labor and environmental protections, the progressive income tax, and financial reform. The true radicals, in this narrative, were the proponents of laissez faire.

Over the course of several decades, a wide and by no means unified array of political actors — labor unions, farmer alliances, consumer groups and policy intellectuals as well as elected officials from both major political parties — would draw on these principles and values to build a case not only against the “evils” of wealth concentration and oligarchic control but for a political economy that represented the worth and served the interests of  the people. Few issues absorbed as much public attention — or have as much contemporary relevance — as the Congressional investigations of Wall Street and the banking industry conducted in response to the system-shaking financial panics of 1907 and 1929.

The first of these investigations was conducted in 1912-13, and was aptly dubbed “the hunt for the money trust” in a series of riveting blow-by-blow articles by renowned investigative journalist Ida B. Tarbell. It also produced the well-known broadside by lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who published a series of articles in Harper’s Weekly in 1913, soon after collected in a book with the memorably aphoristic title “Other People’s Money, and How the Bankers Use It.” The articles, illustrated with caricatures of overfed plutocrats, used evidence from the “money trust” investigations to track the system of “interlocking directorates” that had allowed a small coterie of investment bankers to establish monopoly control over the nation’s credit, and hence over the economy writ large. Worse still, they financed their riskiest and most personally profitable ventures by using bank deposits — the modest savings of the average citizen — appropriating the people’s capital and putting it to self-enriching but otherwise unproductive speculative use. Brandeis looked to the state for regulation, suggesting, among other things, that banks be regulated as public utilities, entrusted as they were with safeguarding so much of the nation’s wealth. But in “Other People’s Money,” he offered a complementary strategy as well. Banking, he urged, could be by and for the “the people” if the millions of farmers, workers and clerks who entrusted their savings to the big banks would put it in credit unions and banking cooperatives — the financial instruments of industrial democracy — instead.

Although it would take another two decades — and a more massive financial collapse — to pass meaningful financial regulation, Brandeis’ basic formulation continued to serve as a powerful touchstone for reform throughout the New Deal. In 1933, the Senate instigated the well-known Pecora investigations of the Wall Street money trust and its role in the stock market crash of 1929. (Congress soon after passed the Glass-Steagall Act to prevent the very abuses that would lead once again to reckless financial speculation in the wake of its 1999 repeal.) Echoes of “Other People’s Money” could be heard in letters to Ferdinand Pecora, the chief counsel for the investigation,  urging him to “bring all these crooks to their knees, and make them repay us decent and honest people” for the life savings they had lost.

In 1938, countering the ill-advised austerity measures that had led to the deep “Roosevelt recession” the previous year, progressives in the administration pushed a vacillating president to step up the battle against the monopoly practices that, they suspected, were stifling the recovery.  After three years of research, the eventual recommendations of the Temporary National Economic Committee were fairly tepid, nor did the committee find evidence of the suspected capital strike.  But by then FDR had used the TNEC’s creation to turn the tables on his conservative critics.  The true threat to liberty came not from an elected and publicly accountable government, as detractors charged, but from “a concentration of private power without equal in history.” He also joined a host of other political activists and reformers in recognizing the necessity, indeed the imperative, of a government prepared to hold private industry accountable to the standards of democracy.  “[T]he liberty of a democracy is not safe,” the president argued, “if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living.”

Though articulated in immediate response to the looming threat of economic oligarchy, these principles of reform and regulation were embedded in the more expansive idea of the economic and  political rights of citizenship — and the role of government in protecting them — that had become the cornerstone of New Deal reform. FDR enumerated these as a “second,” economic bill of rights in his 1944 State of the Union address. Among them were the right to a job with a fair wage, a decent home, a good education and healthcare as well as the right to an equitable playing field and to protections against the power of organized wealth. Underlying these rights, FDR declared, was an even more basic and “self-evident” — republican — economic truth: True freedom rested on economic security and prosperity for all. This principle would be embraced by generations of civil rights, women’s rights and labor movement activists as they struggled to make the country live up to that promise.

It is against this historical backdrop that the convergence of Wisconsin and Occupy Wall Street can be seen as an opportunity to articulate some core principles of a progressive vision for the 21st century economy: jobs at living wages for all who want them; equal opportunity regardless of race, class, gender, religion or sexual orientation; universal access to social goods such as health, education, decent housing and economic security; a fair distribution of wealth and income; a democratic system of finance; respect for human dignity in the workplace and the public sphere; a  market regulated by representative government rather than left to its own devices. These, at a minimum, are a starting point for an economy that creates the  conditions within which modern-day democracy can thrive.

At a time when even the most modest healthcare and financial reform measures spur charges of “European-style social democracy,” it may be tempting to conclude that these expansive ideals are simply too far outside the realm of political possibility to be relevant. But that logic, decades in the making, has already exacted a devastating political price. We see it in the failure, after nearly 40 years of falling wages and rising inequality, to make full employment that sustains decent standards of living a standard-bearer for economic health. We see it in the absence — public outrage over Wall Street bailouts and “too big to fail” aside — of any real challenge to the logic and power that continues to sustain our modern-day money trust. We see it in the inability of progressive individuals, organizations and movements to connect to create an economy that works for the benefit of a democratic polity rather than the other way around. And we see it in the right’s enduring monopoly on the politics and the rhetoric of economic values and reform. It’s high time for progressives to reclaim that too-long neglected territory, lest we do ourselves the injustice of forgetting a vital part of our past.

Last winter, the three-week occupation of Wisconsin’s capitol brought into sharp relief what would become two of the year’s defining forces: Emboldened far-right state governments and emergent left populist movements.  After Walker successfully pushed through his “budget repair” bill to cripple public workers’ collective bargaining rights, much of the energy of the capitol occupation shifted to efforts to recall the bill’s midwives in the Senate.  Though they took place in Republican-leaning districts, last summer’s recall campaigns against six GOP senators were marked by fierce populism rather than cautious moderation.

TV ads, door-to-door canvassers, and some of the Democratic candidates themselves portrayed Republicans as rich people out to screw the 99 percent.  Their effect, Wisconsin AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Stephanie Bloomingdale told me during the campaign, would “determine how we do these kinds of populist messages in other states.”  The result was a split decision. Two Senate Republicans went down, and four held on (all three Democrats facing similar recall elections survived).  The effort fell one success short of the announced goal of flipping the state Senate, but it was a striking victory against senators who had weathered the Democratic wave of 2008.  And it laid the groundwork for the recalls now facing more GOP senators, the lieutenant governor and Walker himself.

Will the campaign against Walker pick up the populism where those recalls left off, making class-based appeals and drawing sharp contrasts?  Or will it pander to the moderate sensibilities of an imagined middle 5 percent?  A few factors will make the difference.

First will be the selection of a candidate.  “The key to winning is to have a candidate who is a champion,” says SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin vice president Bruce Colburn, “and not somebody who is more of the same, or wants to be in the middle of the road.” Once Wisconsin’s elections board certifies the petitions, dates will be set for a general election (expected in spring or summer) and a Democratic primary preceding it.  By then, there could be a consensus candidate – or not.

In an early sign that “Anybody but Walker” won’t cut it, a rumored candidacy by Walker’s 2010 Democratic opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, has been met by public and private discouragement from unions charging that his own hostile relations with public sector workers should be disqualifying.

“I would hope that Tom Barrett understands the issues here, and why he might not fit the matrix of what a champion looks like,” says Marty Biel, executive director of the largest local of the state’s largest district council of the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

One public face of the Wisconsin uprising, Fire Fighters Union president Mahlon Mitchell, has been publicly weighing his own run, though it appears unlikely.  Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca, a prominent Walker antagonist, is a potential candidate.  State Sen. Kathleen Vinehout, who has often sided with the GOP, announced her candidacy on Wednesday and touted her role as one of the “Wisconsin 14” senators who fled the state last year in opposition to Walker’s bill.

The state’s largest teachers union announced Wednesday it’s backing the other declared candidate, former county executive Kathleen Falk.  But Madison Teachers Inc. president John Matthews, whose union’s mass walkout helped jump-start the capitol occupation, says he wants more candidates to join the race.  If there’s a theme here, it’s this: Labor expects to play a major role in vetting a candidate, and electability alone won’t be enough this time.

But it won’t just be the candidate setting the tone; so will the tactics. To channel, and resemble, an actual popular movement, much of the campaign will have to take place in face-to-face conversations rather than just on TV.  The more progressives take the campaign door to door, the more populist it will be – and that may be where the campaign is won or lost.  Activists expect the message on the doors will be more aggressive than whatever the candidate’s own message is. “It’s pretty clear that when people call him ‘1 percent Walker,’ that resonates,” says Colburn, who adds that labor will supplement traditional voter canvassing with rallies around the state.

Then there’s the message of the TV ad wars, of which Americans for Prosperity’s $700,000 is just a harbinger.  Much the advertising in the Senate recalls came not from the Democratic candidates or party, but from the labor-community We Are Wisconsin coalition.

“Historically it was labor and the Democratic Party that partnered in the political process,” says Biel.  “But here the change is, it’s labor and the community that partner in the political process.”  We Are Wisconsin’s ads helped establish the campaign’s populist edge, and some Democrats’ ads reinforced it.  The more third-party groups dominate advertising, the more populist it’s likely to be.  A spokesperson for Democracy for America  says the national group will support We Are Wisconsin’s efforts.

All of these influences will be mediated by the events unfolding outside the campaign over the next few months.  Positive economic signs that buoy Obama’s reelection chances would do the same for Walker.  If the economy improves, progressives may be more hesitant to skewer Walker as representing the 1 percent — but that kind of contrast will become even more important.

Even more significant may be the metastasizing corruption controversy embroiling Walker.  One of the former Walker aides charged with illegal campaigning Tuesday pled guilty as part of a deal in which she’ll testify against other Walker associates.  Walker himself has retained a pair of criminal defense attorneys to accompany him to a meeting with Milwaukee’s district attorney.  If the scandal intensifies, it could become the centerpiece of a cautious, moderate campaign that skirts ideology and makes the case Walker is just too corrupt and divisive to serve.  Or the scandal could be folded into a populist narrative in which Walker’s alleged crimes are portrayed as an extension of his corporate agenda.

“The message we started here has gone out [through] the Occupy movement and really resonated,” says Democracy Addicts co-founder Ed Knutson, who’s been active in last year’s capitol demonstrations and Occupy Wall Street. Knutson expects “a strong populist element” to the campaign.  “There’s a real opportunity here to … move it a little bit further back to the left.”

The AFL-CIO’s Bloomingdale says the work of the recall – long days volunteering in the cold – has raised activists’ expectations.  “People didn’t go out and collect those signatures in those conditions for nothing.”