Pax Republicana:Payback Writ Large

Scooter and his fellow corporate puppets are using tactics straight out of the national republican playbook. Divide and conquer, popularized by those other empire-mad demagogues, the ancient Romans, is now in play. In this modern take, pit private sector workers against public sector workers, stand back until both are bloodied and breathing hard, then sweep in and vanquish both. Pax Republicana.

Think this battle is only between the public sector unions and the governor? Dig a bit into the backgrounds of his big donors.

Big contributor #1 ($43,125.00) Concerned Realtors Committee (Wisconsin Realtors Association). “What are they concerned about?” you might ask.

Well, the people who smiled all the way through the real estate bubble, raked in commissions like they were lawn clippings, wined and dined and overconsumed as speculators jacked up the prices of homes...are now defending helpless rural McMansion owners against those wicked wind farms.

Thomas Content wrote an article in the Business Section of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel which provides background. (02/24/2011). http://www.jsonline.com/business/115336489.html

It seems, though, that two of Walker's big supporters, CRC and WMC (Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, or We Muckrake for Corporations), find themselves at odds over one of the payback bills that Scooter and the repub majority introduced in early January. This qualifies as an ironic twist on the “Elections have consequences” whitewash the enraptured faithful have been droning into any open mic lately.

Big contributor #2 ($43,000.00) The Koch Brothers, owners of the second largest private company in the U.S., seem to have a grudge against public sector unions that is all out of proportion to their own net worth, to say nothing of their own influence.

Andy Kroll wrote an article in Mother Jones (2/18/2011) on this topic.

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/wisconsin-scott-walker-koch-brothers

Jay Heck wrote an article in Common Cause (2/23/2011) on this topic.

http://www.commoncausewisconsin.org/2011/02/governor-walkers-actions-reflect-agenda.html

The Koch Industries Website provides this gem: “Charles Koch has worked to fulfill his second passion – to understand how free societies advance social progress and well-being.” It did not go on to specify who would be free in those societies, who would experience social progress, or who would experience well-being. Unions do not appear on their list of the ideologically pure.

It is also not clear where you have to live in order to benefit from the Koch Brothers largesse. The Political Economic Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, ranked Koch Industries 10th on the list of top US corporate air polluters, the “Toxic 100 Air Polluters.”

A search of Koch Industries' environmental record reveals an impressive list of violations. To quote just one, a CBS News story dated November 27^th, 2000, reveals that...”In 1999, a federal jury found that Koch Industries had stolen oil from government and American Indian lands, had lied about its purchases more than 24,000 times, and was fined $553,504.”

This is the kind of action the Koch brothers promote? Do we want this kind of free society, this kind of social progress?

Scooter didn't care to know too much about the Koch brothers: their money was the right color. The Union-Busting Bill, by the way, also happens to contain language giving him the authority to sell state-owned utilities to private investors (Hmmmm, can you think of any he might know?) without having to take any of those messy, open-government steps like accepting competitive bids or notifying Wisconsin citizens of his intent.

True to form, Walker wants to liquidate state assets in a fire sale to solve a short-term problem, the deficit, and has made no effort to comprehend or communicate the long-term consequences. This mirrors perfectly his practice of nonexistent/incoherent policy-making, epitomized by his time as Milwaukee County Executive. In short, he knows how to cut (a budget: any puppet can defund according to unexamined ideological premises) but not how to run (a government).

In the next post we'll examine the economic climate the Republicans are scheming to create. Public sector employees won't be the only Wisconsinites left out in the cold.

Deficit Repair: Pulp Fiction from Scooter and the Gang

Winston Churchill, an intelligent, witty man, though he considered himself a conservative, once quipped of a political opponent, “There's less to that man than meets the eye,” slyly inverting a popular turn of phrase.

Wisconsin's new republican governor is a fitting target for similar appraisal, given his distorted conception of the legislative calendar. Without reason, explanation or sense, Walker and the republican-dominated legislature have connived to bull rush a budget repair bill into law. “Budget Repair” is a misnomer, however. It suggests their aims are responsible and self-evident.

Then you actually read the bill.

Better names for it soon percolate from the pages: The Payback Bill, or Corporate Rewards Come Quickly When Walker Wins Bill, The Union-Buster Bill, The Window Dressing Bill, The Bull Rush Bill to Kill Unions, The I've paid my dues can I join the Country Club? bill.

Wise minds ask, “What's the rush, Scooter?”

Readers, no emergency exists. And this is not the budget which Walker is trying to hurry through the legislature. If it were, you'd be wise to be even more alarmed at republican recklessness. Vote on the entire budget is months away, summertime, which allows plenty of time for the legislature to debate, amend and compromise on the contents and costs. That's how legislatures operate. The latest republican talking point used to justify this high-speed hijack is to say “Elections have consequences,” a statement fraught with ambiguities.

No, Walker and his wonks, worried about wobblies, have wushed this wascally wicked little bill because of its content.

Remind your grumpy conservative neighbors that unionized state employees have agreed (!) to help balance the budget by accepting some concessions. These do little to dent the deficit, true, but this is window-dressing that Scooter and the republicans can crow about in sermons to the true-believers. Even Dems don't mind if the loyal (to whom?) opposition get a chance to bask in the spray-tan glow of a contrived victory.

The devil is in the details, though, and here it's those lines of legislation that strip state unions of the right to collectively bargain over benefits. Pause here, make “grumpy” look you directly in the face and repeat very slowly to him, “This Bill? It ain't about the deficit. It ain't about the money, Sonny.” It is all about busting unions.

Unions, especially public-sector ones, resist the Reagan Doctrine of redistribution of wealth upwards to the already wealthy. That means they tend to vote Democratic, which irks the Corporate, er, I mean republican party. Public sector unions are alligators, solitary reminders that private sector unions once garnered similar deference, once protected their turf with similar tenacity. Before deregulation and the bubble economy of the nineties, the consequences of which most of us non-elites now must weather, when was the American economy last an undeniable powerhouse, last the envy of the world?

Look to the 1950s. Like some of those rose-colored-glasses-wearing social conservatives say, it was, in some ways, a better time. Not because minorities were equal participants in the American economy, or American society; they weren't. Not because alternate sexual orientation had stopped being a social and sometimes real death sentence; it hadn't. Not because the glass ceiling in management had been smashed; that wouldn't happen for decades.

But by many economic yardsticks, that decade had a stronger, more stable and robust marketplace than today, a comfortable standard of living within reach of a higher percentage of the population than today, wages and benefits more than keeping pace with inflation, unlike today, and importantly, much less economic stratification than today.

And get this. Post-WWII Americans paid their taxes gladly because it was the patriotic thing to do. They were the front line against communism. That was when the Berlin wall began to crumble. Real free-market forces, at work in an economy that had moderate government oversight and just taxation rates (90% on incomes over $400,000.00), allowed the U.S. to control and manage its huge war debt, retool for a peace-time economy, fund the Marshall Plan to rebuild a free and democratic Western Europe, aid Japan to rebuild and eventually become an economic powerhouse and ally, and weather several moderate recessions, yet operate at a level of economic efficiency and equity that the Soviet government could never achieve in its command-based economy.

Ordinary U.S. citizen-taxpayers were also a powerful voice in the socio-political sphere. They didn't hesitate to shame the wealthy again and again for grumbling about the tax rates in place at the time. Wealthy Americans were not permitted to indulge the belief that their wealth granted them nobility status, or exemption from contributing to the public sector redistribution. These just taxation rates recirculated money back into the economy. And Eisenhower, certainly no Democrat, had the foresight to leave in place New-Deal era agencies and mechanisms that made the federal government a permanent player in the nation's economy. Ike didn't like what he saw as the “creeping socialism” of New Deal-era government, true, but he saw that the private sector would never act to end the boom-bust economic cycles that have plagued this country since its founding. He saw that it was not labor which caused these boom-bust cycles, not labor which tried to corner markets or engage in reckless speculation, not labor which had once offered management only starvation wages, no pension or health care benefits, seven-day, ten-hour-a-day work weeks, not labor which had the arrogance to collect obscene profits while the entire citizenry and labor force were engaged in an all-out fight against Fascists, Nazis, and the mad empire builders ruling Japan. No, Eisenhower did not dismantle Roosevelt's welfare state, much as he disliked some aspects of it. In fact, Ike strengthened it: Social Security coverage was expanded, and he created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

Eisenhower walked the tightrope between the party ideals (smaller, less-influential federal government, stronger state governments) and the need for the federal government to master and shoulder its responsibilities (regulating but not commanding the economy, military defense, equity for citizens who could not (or weren't allowed to) participate fully in the marketplace). Recall that it was he who warned us about an adversary as dangerous as the Soviet-bloc: the military-industrial-congressional complex. He could've added the word corporate to that cabal. While he promoted an economy in which corporate profits would boost the economy (a real economy, in which entrepreneurs build and earn their money through long-term strategies, as opposed to a bubble economy, in which short-term speculation and financial shell games destabilize markets and send the economy into recession/depression.), he also acted wisely and with farsighted vision in the role of public sector advocate/executive. He increased funding for the Federal Housing Administration, for example, making home ownership more accessible without promoting a real estate bubble-market.

Eisenhower was a form of politician now feared to be extinct; the moderate republican. His country came first, not his political party, and certainly not any corporate-puppetmasters.

Anyone looking to take the pulse of this new governor and gauge his credibility can look to his stint as Milwaukee County Executive. His bizarre record of statements followed by nonactions, the utter absence of any cohesive attempt to comprehend and address the complexities of funding county government, the list of non-accomplishements, the clear evidence of ATDD (Attention-to-Deficit-Disorder), all speak more loudly than any carefully calibrated list of talking points he utters today.

How did it come to this? (This is NOT the Wisconsin Idea!)

The pressing issue: how did it come to this? A new republican governor provokes a red-herring crisis, plunges with disturbing mania into a scheme to bust the state employees' unions, and refuses to listen to anyone but his handlers. Psychologists ponder his mental stability and fitness to serve in office.

What mindset drives republican governors and legislators to systematically disenfranchise the middle class? (In a future post we'll dissect how their tacticians and strategists managed to persuade so many voters to vote against their own best interests.)

The sire of today's conservatives is Ronald Reagan, elected in 1981, though his handlers might also need to submit DNA. Too many of his policies were double-edged swords, doing some small good but far more harm. His tax cuts benefited the wealthy far more than the rest of the tax base (Conservatives are curiously silent about this.), but the supply-side defense of this move was to argue that all taxpayers would have more incentive to work, output would rise, and inflation would subside. Business taxes were chopped, and a twenty three percent cut in personal income taxes was phased in during 1981 and continued for three years. This government-sponsored “gifting” of revenue to the already wealthy, which the democratic republic was supposed to use to provide services, fund regulatory agencies and research, provide for the common defense and redistribute wealth, would prove a poison pill for the nation.

Many conservatives these days float a muddled notion that the U.S. has, or should have, a capitalist economy. It doesn't, and it shouldn't. The U.S. has a mixed economy, with private and public sectors. Federal, state and local governments are charged with collecting taxes and yes, (Here's what makes the laissez-faire capitalists and Robber Barons' blood boil.), they redistribute some of it, sometimes in the form of money but also in the form of services, to those who cannot participate fully in the economy and marketplace. The old, the poor, and the disabled are citizens too, as are those ordinary people who were inoculated against money-madness. All citizens are entitled to protection from threats external AND internal.

The government accepts that certain tasks and services belong to the public sector, in part because the private sector has no conception of the challenges they present (being able to comprehend only the tangibles associated with chasing after profit in a market as free as it can be without being labeled anarchy), in part because the private sector has no will to perform any act which cannot be commoditized and exploited for profit, in part because the private sector has no talent, experience or resources it is willing to devote to the task, and largely because the government, the administrator of the legal system, guardian of national security and protector of citizens, is compelled in the interest of its own preservation, and hopefully by ideals expressed in constitutional documents, to provide a minimum level of equity for those citizens.

But the deregulated market environment that Dr. Reaganstein re-animated and that now, after decades, passes for normal, now allows corporations to raid public sector and quasi-public sector spheres for profits. The growth of for-profit colleges is one sad example. CEOs at these “institutions” take salaries in the millions but can't be reached for comment when students find their class credits don't transfer to legitimate colleges. Nor will these “innovators” own up that profit is paramount, rather than the goal of enriching students with marketable skills. When graduates fail to find employment, despite the “I'll-say-anything-to-get-you-in-here” claims made by recruiters at these for-profit colleges, which CEO steps to the reporter's microphone? “Graduates” are handed a worthless degree and promptly saddled with student loans they cannot repay, because they can't find work in their field of study. Nor will bankruptcy lift the burden of these loans. The Business Media hails this as innovation. Let's be more accurate and call in predation.

With deregulation, entrepreneurs, investors, hedge fund managers, financiers and the like saw that it was easier, and now legal, to steal than to innovate. Long-term thinking and long-term investment vanished from the corporate mindset. The labor force is now viewed as more disposable than it had been in nearly a century.

Thanks to the Reagan Doctrine, government became a republican farmer, who actually led the foxes into the hen house. Wealth redistribution, once a functional part of our mixed economy, was turned on its head and made a tool of the money-mad. The money and benefits, the latter taking many forms, is now funneled in the wrong direction, to those least in need of it.

Indeed, since the 1980s, there has been a remarkable and dangerous divergence in income levels. Princeton economist Paul Krugman even calls it The Great Divergence. Conservatives grow curiously angry at the mention of this phenomenon, and furiously evade, avoid and distract attention away from any discussion of it. This widening income disparity, sad to say, and predation by the affluent upon the middle class have become an internal threat to our national security. And as in the time of Dickens, conservatives see the poor as lazy, responsible for their plight, best left to Malthusian ends. Conservatives create a class of have-nots, then turn around and blame the poor for clearly having the wrong values.

But didn't Reagan's policies help the country? The economy? In light of the current economic blight, the answer is no. Or maybe yes. A monied elite did benefit.  But Reagan's successful push to deregulate the private sector and concurrently cripple government oversight has proven as dangerous to our nation, if not more so, than his victory in the battle for corporate welfare and tax cuts for the wealthy. Arguably, deregulation had a role in spurring, but not causing, the ten-year-long economic expansion in the 1990s (Computerization was a larger factor.), but that sword slashed both ways: Deregulation also fostered the housing and credit bubbles, the related mortgage meltdown, and the (I love this phrase.) “financial innovations” that took Wall Street and the Financial District by storm, helping to create a “shadow banking system” which also collapsed.

Anyone hear echoes of 1929 bouncing off those buildings in the Financial District? But these are only more recent and thus immediately recognizable examples. Here's an older one.

Fill in the blank: The Savings and Loan ____________.

Actually several answers are correct. They include Scandal, Crisis, Debacle, Meltdown....

The Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980s blossomed into a financial scandal because Reagan's advisors worshiped a simplistic belief that problems limiting the growth and profitability (never mind the accountability and stability) of this industry could be addressed by merely deregulating it. This action epitomizes the “Government is the problem” mantra Reagan liked to intone. Real solutions required greater intelligence, a more comprehensive and complete understanding of the problem than Reagan's advisors could stomach, ideologically and temperamentally, the sustained political will to apply long-term thinking to a long-term solution, and the ethical will to stop the problem from being co-opted for political and financial gain. The administration failed on all fronts.

Through it all Reagan doddered, an active non-listener who smiled and waved, acting the role of a lifetime, one that always evaded him during his Hollywood apprenticeship: the concerned, affable patriarch, assuring a confused, worried electorate that he and his advisors were solving every new crisis (Think: Iran-Contra), all the while enacting policies that buried a time bomb in the U.S. economy. That bomb recently detonated, leaving a Great Recession in its place.

The economic crisis we find ourselves in, then, had its origins in a set of elitist, pro-corporate policies enacted over thirty years ago by a Straw-Man much like the one now in the Governor's office in Wisconsin. The ideology that enslaved Reagan's intellect and blinded his reason was crafted by wealthy, powerful interests eager to work from the shadows. Now replace the name Reagan with the name Walker in that last sentence.

In the next post, we'll shine a light into the corners and closets of Walker's office and flush out those ventriloquists.

Response from John, Milwaukee, WI

I'm a small business owner. Readers here can check out Harold Meyerson's op-ed in the Washington Post Newspaper, Worker's topple Dictator in Egypt, but might be silenced in Wisconsin.

Meyerson highlights a few points relevant to this mess in Madison...Walker’s bill would strip all public employees in Wisconsin, from teachers to nurses, of their right to collectively bargain (for such things as sick leave, vacation, work conditions, shifts they work, etc.).

The rights of private sector employees to pursue collective bargaining are protected by the National Labor Relations Act. Public employees are NOT guaranteed such Constitutional rights by the states. The right of employees to collectively bargain with their employers is a universally accepted “human right” acknowledged by the United Nations. (see Article 23).

In the case of public employees, this human right is being attacked under the guise of balancing the budget. Teachers and other state employees have NO problem kicking in more. THAT IS NOT THE ISSUE. The issue is that these workers will lose their rights, their voice – they will be silenced. You can guess who will be next once bills are passed and the public sector is stripped of all their rights. In the end, not only will we as a society become more and more divided, but we truly will become a two-class system in this country; the rich and the poor – the middle class will be gone and all hard-working Americans WILL be affected. This is a BIG DEAL right now and it’s time we drop our party differences and look-out for the middle class, my neighbors, my family, and my friends.

Response from John, Hartford, WI

Two economists at the University of Wisconsin, Keith Bender and John Heywood, said: “Holding education and other characteristics the same, typical state and local workers earn an average of 11 percent less and 12 percent less, respectively, than comparable private-sector workers.”"

Unionized State Employees Protest Power Grab by Straw-Man Governor

2-16-2011, Madison, Wisconsin


Turning a deaf ear has become the signature move of Wisconsins' new republican governor. For a second day, Scott Walker refused to sit down with representatives of the states' unionized workers to discuss wage and benefit concessions.
Walker-watchers recognize this affectation of rule-by-edict from his days as a failed Milwaukee County Executive. His tenure was marked by a near- complete absence of content, communication and collaboration. Never known for innovative thinking, or for consulting with a broad spectrum of relevant analysts, Walker twiddled away his time in office without demonstrating any evidence that he grasped the complexity of the problems set before him.

Recognizing Walker's pliability, corporate ventriloquist/donors purchased a governorship for him. No one should be surprised by what he now spouts. The latest misdirection finds him and the new republican majority accepting the christ of fiscal sobriety as their savior, ready to smite the deficit-loving heathens.

This eleventh-hour conversion is laughable, but the misdirection it intends is sly. How did fifty state governments all find themselves in such similar, dire straits? Odd, too, the speed with which this new creed has spread among republicans nationwide.
A mere moments' thought clouds the sincerity of their conversion. What exactly were the causes of this rash of state government deficits? The Great Recession, yes, but what in turn caused it?
Reagan, long a demigod to conservative men with distant or absent fathers, now wears the mantle of instigator-in-chief. More on this parenting-style tomorrow.