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.
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 27th, 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.
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