On Feb. 11, the Egyptian people rallied in celebration on Tahrir Square and elsewhere throughout the country when President Hosni Mubarak's resignation was announced following 18 days of continuous demonstrations.

The next week, demonstrations not only spread to nearby Arab states, they also spread to Madison, Wis., where an equally autocratic ruler was attempting to destroy public employees' labor rights that had been in place since Dwight Eisenhower was president, more than 50 years ago.

Starting with about 10,000 workers and their supporters at the beginning of the week, numbers swelled to nearly 40,000 by Feb. 18, the largest protests in the state since the Vietnam War era. The number of protesters swelled even further Feb. 19—up to 70,000 with a paltry 2,000 Tea Party counter-demonstrators. There were even scattered signs in Arabic, a nod to the inspiration provided by Egypt's democracy movement. It's an inadvertently ironic nod, perhaps, since Wisconsin is in many ways the birthplace of union democracy in America, dating back to the late 19th century.

The rightwing narrative, promulgated by newly-elected Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (renamed “Hosni” by some protesters), was that Wisconsin was facing a budget crisis and that public employee unions were standing in the way of solving the crisis. But Walker's own press release announcing the “budget repair” bill on Feb. 11 utterly contradicted that narrative.

“The state of Wisconsin is facing an immediate deficit of $137 million for the current fiscal year which ends July 1,” Walker's statement read.

He took immediate aim at public employee unions: “First, it will require state employees to pay about 5.8% toward their pension (about the private sector national average) and about 12% of their healthcare benefits (about half the private sector national average).”

But the budget benefit was relatively small: “These changes will help the state save $30 million in the last three months of the current fiscal year.”

In sharp contrast, a single item more than covered the deficit Walker claimed: “The budget repair will also restructure the state debt, lowering the state’s interest rate, saving the state $165 million.”

Thus, everything else in the bill was superfluous. What's more, that one item involved a very strict time limit: “Since the state is required to make debt service payments by March 15th, the bill must be enacted by Feb. 25 to allow time to sell the refinancing bonds.”

An honest budget repair bill, containing that item alone, could easily have passed on time. The Republican majority in the state legislature had already rubber-stamped seven bills since Jan. 3. But Walker's bill not only went after public employee benefits, it went after their rights to bargain and even organize—matters with no fiscal impact. In fact, those provisions wouldn't even kick in until after the fiscal year ended.

“Walker wants to remove all collective bargaining rights, except for salary, for all of the roughly 175,000 public employees starting July 1,” the Associated Press reported. “Local police, fire and the state patrol would be exempt.”

Why were they different? Simple: Their unions had supported Walker in his race for governor, and exempting them was a way of splitting the public employee unions. It didn't work, however, as firefighters quickly joined the protests. The state patrol's union also denounced Walker's bill, saying, “One could argue that the doctor diagnosed a sprained knee, and the Governor’s solution is to amputate both legs.”

“Any requests for a salary increase higher than the consumer price index would have to be approved by referendum,” AP went on to explain. “Contracts would be limited to one year and wages would be frozen until the next contract is settled. Public employers would be prohibited from collecting union dues and members of collective bargaining units would not be required to pay dues.”

“This is a shocking development,” Bryan Kennedy, president of AFT-Wisconsin, told AP. “It ends collective bargaining for public employees in our state, after 50 years of management and workers solving problems together.”

But it didn't just shock labor. Even Republican lawmakers were caught off-guard.

According to AP, “Sen. Luther Olsen, R-Ripon, said he was surprised Walker went after unions as aggressively as he did. 'It’s not what I thought he was going to do,' said Olsen, adding he honestly didn’t know how Republicans felt about it.”

What's more, Walker had already taken steps that worsen Wisconsin's budget gap—though how much, if any, of that comes due before July 1 is unclear. First, just after his election, on Nov. 9, the Wisconsin State Journal reported on the deliberate loss of $810 million in high-speed rail stimulus funds: “The $810 million Madison-to-Milwaukee passenger rail appears to be dead after Gov. Jim Doyle Monday announced he was leaving its fate in the hands of his successor, Gov.-elect Scott Walker — an outspoken critic of the project who has repeatedly vowed to kill it.”

Because of existing costs and commitments to related expenditures, that cancellation cost Wisconsin almost $100 million of its own funds as well, according to that same story. Then, in January, the legislature passed a series of bills in special session. An editorial in the Feb. 16 Madison Capitol Times quoted the progressive watchdog group, One Wisconsin Now, saying:

Since his inauguration in early January, Walker has approved $140 million in new special interest spending that includes:

• $25 million for an economic development fund for job creation that still has $73 million due to a lack of job creation...
  
• $48 million for private health savings accounts, which primarily benefit the wealthy....
  
• $67 million for a tax shift plan, so ill-conceived that at best the benefit provided to ‘job creators’ would be less than a dollar a day per new job....

While it appears that this new debt kicks in only after July 1, that's hardly helping to improve Wisconsin’s' overall budget outlook. Plus, the $73 million sitting untouched in the job creation fund is more than twice the $30 million Walker is trying to drain from public sector workers.

In short, Walker's cries of a budget crisis seem entirely fabricated. On Feb. 16, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow explained, “What's happening in Wisconsin right now is not about a budget. This is about elections. This is about the Republican Party going after the institutions that make it possible for Democrats to win elections in America.”

She went on to cite the top 10 party donors in 2008 and 2010—the later after the notorious Citizens United Supreme Court decision allowed unlimited outside donations from corporations and unions.

“In 2010, post-Citizens United, seven of the 10 top outside spending groups in the election were all right wing,” Maddow said. “(The) Chamber of Commerce, both the Karl Rove groups, the American Future Fund, Americans for Job Security—all of these right-wing groups. The only non-conservative groups that cracked the top 10 were the public employees union, the SEIU, and the teachers union. That's it.

“Without unions, essentially all of the big money and politics would be right-wing money—all of it.”

Two days later, Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, appeared on MSNBC Live.

“The thesis of the book is that the rightwing policy playbook is tremendously unpopular in a lot of places, particularly when it involves rolling back benefits that people have fought for,” Klein said. “You know, everyone likes a tax break, but people are going to protect hard-won public services, public benefits, labor rights… And so what I argue in The Shock Doctrine is that if you look at the 30-years history of the triumph of these policies around the world, what you see is that their great leaps forward happen during a time of crisis, and that's because in a time of crisis you have politicians able to do exactly what Scot Walker is doing right now in Wisconsin, which is say 'The roof is falling in. We have a state of emergency here. We don't have time for democracy or public consent, or deliberation, or collective bargaining.'

“So it becomes an opportunity to ram through these unpopular policies, many of which he did not campaign on--he campaigned on the popular parts of it, the tax cuts, but he didn't say how he was going to pay for it.”

What shock doctrine practitioners aren't prepared for is what we're seeing now in Wisconsin—organized mass resistance.

Klein continued: “I end the book by saying that the way you resist these tactics is to understand what's happening while they're happening... What's happening in Wisconsin is an excellent example of what I call 'shock resistance', because people are naming this while it's happening, they're saying 'you're manufacturing a crisis so that you can exploit it. And the other thing they're doing is that they're talking about all the other ways that you could fill that budget shortfall, besides this very narrow vision that we're seeing.”

“This is a challenge to one of the original shock doctors Margaret Thatcher, whose favorite phrase was that 'there is no alternative'. What we're seeing is that people very loudly talking about the alternatives that are available.”

Wisconsin is only the beginning. Republican governors across the country are preparing similar measures, in Ohio, Tennessee and elsewhere. All eyes are on Wisconsin, trying to judge whether they are likely to succeed, or only fuel a growing popular backlash against their anti-worker, pro-corporate agenda.

Already, in Wisconsin, there is talk of an organized recall petition drive. Three senate Republicans were elected more than two years ago with less than 51 percent of the vote. Recall petitions against them could be launched almost immediately, and they could be voted out of office in a matter of months, giving the Democrats back a slim senate majority. A Facebook page for that purpose has already been launched. If Egypt is any indication, the mass organizing has only just begun.