it will be a long fight.

Paul Ryan is the latest TEA party candidate to propose massive cuts and government privatization under the banner of saving money. His Plan is very closely related to that of Gov Walker for Wisconsin. It sounds reasonable to cut spending when there is a shortfall, but Paul Ryan and Gov. Walker did not come up with these ideas on their own. Their budget repairs are a cut and paste job taken from the 'budget repair toolkit' of the ALEC.
ALEC is made up of private corporate interests that pay lots of money to write model legislation. That is then introduced by the GOP lawmaker side of the business. This is different from what we think of as normal lobbying because it is highly organized, very successful, and secretive. The official ALEC membership is secret, as are the corporations that sit on each committee, and the amount of Money that is paid to belong to each committee.
William Cronon wrote about this shady organization, on his blog (scroll down a bit) the post prompted a Freedom in Information request from the DOA, which was meant to intimidate and embarrass him.
The ALEC, Fox News, The John Birch society, The Americans for Prosperity, and increasingly corrupt GOP politicians on the State and National level are all a part of this big-business takeover of government. I am fighting it here in Wisconsin, but the movement is larger than us. We are just now recounting our latest Supreme court election. Outside interest groups outspent Joanne Kloppenburg 3:2. The main 'nonprofit' funding the Prosser campaign was connected to and funded by the Koch Brothers- who also fund the Americans for Prosperity and very likely bribed national supreme court justices to get the Citizens United decision.
We need all non-profits' membership/contributors to be public record. We also need Citizens United to be overturned. We need to get the word out and expose the corporate greed machine that is the ALEC. We need to recall as many Republican Senators as possible here in Wisconsin. I believe that if people know about what is going on, then they will revolt.

Civil rights is an interesting analogy for the current protest. All minorities suffered under jim crow in the south. But the middle class black population did not participate much in the civil rights movement. As Condoleeza Rice said "if we had waited for the middle class, we would still be waiting". There was a lot of opposition to civil rights; plenty of ant-civil rights groups pointed out that Jim Crow was legal, that it wasn't perhaps a constitutional right to drink from every drinking fountain, and that plenty of places have it worse. I imagine that there was a sneer and an eyeroll when anti-civil rights people derisively said that slavery was wrong, but that there was no relation between that great evil and eating in a segregated restaurant.

I find it very interesting that the John Birch Society, which was well known for their anti-civil rights campaign also vehemently denied that they were a racist organization. The Americans for Prosperity are also funded by the Koch family, albeit a new generation. The AFP also embraces a less explicit anti-civil rights mission, mostly clothed as being pro-american by cutting entitlements and the social safety net, as well as busting unions- which benefit all workers, but benefit minorities most by mandating equal pay for equal work. They also advocate policies like Voter ID which will disenfranchise the poor. Because of these and other claims, the AFP is constantly denying allegations that its policies are classist and racially motivated. They like to point out that they have a few black members. This is true. There are black people in the AFP, and they are very popular, because practically every member of the AFP has a black friend that they love to talk about.
Far from excusing the AFP from any racist tendencies, this just proves that caucasians do not have a monopoly on gullible people.

This is going to be a long fight. It is starting to pick up some steam here in Wisconsin, but it is far from over. Civil rights took over a decade, and there are still battles to fight on that front. Exposing the GOP corporate law machine, and reforming our national campaign finance laws may take just as long. There are plenty of skeptics, plenty of detractors, and a whole lot of misinformation. I am in this for the long haul, and I have never appreciated the words of Dr. Martin Luther King more than I do now when I read;

"We shall overcome because Carlisle is right. "No lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right. "Truth crushed to earth will rise again." We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right. "Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne." Yet that scaffold sways the future. We shall overcome because the Bible is right. "You shall reap what you sow." With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to speed up the day when all of God's children all over this nation - black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual, "Free at Last, Free at Last, Thank God Almighty, We are Free At Last."
-MLK