Backing and reinforcing a position first taken by the Archbishop of Milwaukee, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a strong statement supporting workers’ rights -- notably collective bargaining rights -- on Feb. 24. Not only is refusing to bargain wrong, but “it is equally a mistake to marginalize or dismiss unions as impediments to economic growth,” wrote Bishop Stephen Blaire, chair of the conference’s committee on domestic justice in his letter.

We are in the third winter of the recession; 26 million Americans are out of work, cannot find full-time work, or have given up looking for work, and $11 trillion in household wealth has vanished. But as winter turns to spring, there is an evolving perspective on the crisis, shifting from an attempt to identify the causes to blaming the victims -- as if detectives had removed the smoking guns from the perpetrators’ hands and arrested the corpses.

On a prank call that quickly spread across the internet, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was duped into discussing his strategy to cripple public employee unions, promising never to give in and joking that he would use a baseball bat in his office to go after political opponents. Believing the caller was conservative billionaire David Koch, Walker revealed that his supporters had considered secretly planting people in pro-union protest crowds to stir up trouble.