As I wrote earlier, WI governor Scott Walker’s attack on workers is also an attack on the middle class, and the economy in general. At a time when our economy is struggling from a lack of consumer demand, Walker is going to drastic lengths to kneecap middle-class workers and ensure that they won’t recover. That’s the only possible explanation for the lengths to which Walker’s bill goes.

Republican apologists for Walker’s attack on the middle class — including Walker himself — claim that this is about balancing the budget. But that’s a red herring meant to distract you from a far-reaching assault on middle-class workers’ wages. Rather than negotiating with public workers to arrive at a contract sensitive to Wisconsin’s budget crisis, Walker instead has chosen to revoke their right to negotiate. Not for the next year or two, but forever.

UPDATE (4:55 PM): As several commenters have pointed out, Wisconsin is actually running a surplus. And to the extent there is any budget problem, it’s of Walker’s own making. That’s just more proof of his real intentions.

Remember, unions don’t get to unilaterally determine their wages and benefits. Their sole purpose is negotiation. Any contract is ultimately made between two equally-responsible parties. Walker could have negotiated with public workers , perhaps even proposing a temporary pay cut — even though public employees are paid less than comparable private employees. He chose not to do that. Instead, his bill would permanently end employees’ right to collective bargaining [PDF].

So if this isn’t about the budget, what is it about? It’s another front in the GOP’s war on the middle-class, launched to pay back their corporate backers for their hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions. Destroying unions is about turning the middle class into a source of cheap labor for massive corporations, and ensuring that all of the wage growth in the coming decades goes only to the rich.

What’s really sick is that most Americans have bought into this. We cheer for the very policies that will make us the first generation to have a lower standard of living than our parents. As the rich take more and more, and gap between the aristocracy and the rest of us continues to grow, we don’t stand up for ourselves. Instead, we blithely give them even larger tax cuts, desperately hoping that maybe this time a crumb or two will trickle down to the rest of us.