Yesterday on WTTW's Chicago Tonight, the Illinois Policy Institute's John O'Hara presented what you might call the conservative alternative history of the ongoing battle in Wisconsin. In his version of events, the tens of thousands of protesters who've rallied in and around the capitol building in Madison for weeks now simply haven't gotten the news that Republican Gov. Scott Walker's attempt to drastically reduce public employee collective bargaining rights (except for the unions who backed his campaign) is actually a form of empowerment. And O'Hara rejected any talk that powerful corporate players like the billionaire Koch brothers are seeking to hammer public workers. Take a look:

The Koch interests, of course, are deeply invested in Republican governors, Walker included, who are turning the screws on the rights of teachers, nurses, police officers, and other public employees to negotiate with their employers. "Koch Industries Inc. and its employees and subsidiaries spent $1.2 million in the last election helping to elect Republican governors who are now trying to take away bargaining rights of state workers," according to a report last week in Bloomberg News. "The Koch-backed advocacy group Americans for Prosperity helped organize a rally on Feb. 19, set up a website and today announced a $342,200 ad campaign in support of Walker," the article says later. Walker, of course, will take a call from a reporter pretending to be David Koch, but won't negotiate with Wisconsin Senate Democrats.

Note that O'Hara gets into class war arguments in the clip above, claiming the question on the table is whether the country will have "two classes of people: a highly politically powerful, public employee unions [sic] and everyone else who pays for their salaries." It's an over-the-top statement on a number of levels, especially given the dramatic rise in inequality seen across the U.S. over the past 30 years or so (Wisconsin workers have agreed to all of Walker's economic demands, by the way). Milliionaires' tax rates continue to drop. The wealthiest 10 percent of Americans now take in two-thirds of the country's net worth. And the top 1 percent of households controlled 17.1 percent of all after-tax income by 2007, up from 7.5 percent in 1979.