Here at Rutgers our union is actively involved with the larger labor movement in solidarity campaigns for Wisconsin public workers.

On Friday at the State House in Trenton, New Jersey, there will be a solidarity rally for Wisconsin public employees at which Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, will speak. Wisconsin's struggle is our struggle, because our far right governor, Christie, has declared war on public employees also, even though he has a Democratic legislature to contend with.

Yesterday in releasing an anti-people state budget, Christie repeated his pre Kindergarten view of social relations by contending that there were  two social classes in New Jersey, the privileged public employees and the working taxpayers.

There is  indeeda "class war"  but it is the war of the corporations and the wealthy, the investors and the owners, against the workers both public and private.  The war is constant, but sometimes, as is true today, it becomes much more open.

Rigthwing Republicans everywhere, Walker in Wisconsin, Christie in New Jersey, Kasich in Ohio, won their well-funded campaigns by promising jobs that would flow from tax cuts and union busting.  Everywhere their policies have made matters worse.  They have no wish to understand what mass purchasing power is about, how the public sector employees are as necessary to the overall economy as private sector employees, how the policies that they are pushing today with more open hatred and contempt for wage workers and employees than their political authors, Reagan and W Bush, have produced the crisis.

Let me present a little history that suggests that Labor can fight back and win.  Employees can and must demonstrate and strike against employers that seek to unilaterally take away the rights and benefits that they have won over generations of struggle.  The Obama administration should play an important role in these struggles, as the Roosevelt administration did in the 1930s. 

The people whom the Walkers and the Christies are assaulting are essentially the people who put Barack Obama in the White against great odds and give his party their majority.  Now is not the time to cry over failed opportunities--the failure of the administration to establish a WPA style jobs program, to use "bailout" money differently, that is, to help small and middle sized businesses that provide the bulk of private employement, debt ridden home owners, not the top of the system. 

Now is the time for the administration to come forward with programs that will help the states and also compel the Walkers and Christies to cease and desist from their anti-labor policies.

First as a very big carrot, the administration could come forward with aid to absorb much if not all of the state debts, which represents a fraction of the money it pourd into Wall Street and the banks.   It could make such aid contingent on the end of anti-labor policies and budget cuts which have crippled necessary social services.

 As a big stick, it could clearly threaten to eliminate federal funding for a wide variety of programs to states like  Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, New Jersey, which advance such policies.  The supremace of the federal over the state governments was established after the Civil War by constitutional amendments.  President Obama has the power to act against pipsqueak local politicians who believe that they can sabotage national programs like high-speed rail systems and undo much of what his administration has attempted to do at the federal level through state policy.

Labor is there, but labor needs political allies, the allies whom it has put into office.  Reactionaries always play hard-ball.  It is time that progressives do the same.