What is it about Wisconsin?

What is it about my home state that produces such wild characters in our nation's politics? I mean, Paul Ryan?  Really, I don't understand why he is taken so seriously. His ideas are not that interesting - unless you like slash-and-burn approaches to our profound, complex national problems - and his 'radical,' 'revolutionary' budgets never quite match up with reality, never square with economic reality, never actually balance (quite the opposite), are not even sophisticated enough to be smoke-and-mirrors.  They are just straight out lies and deception.

For example, that you can sharply cut back tax rates on corporations and the wealthy to pre-1931 levels and ever, ever, ever cut the long-term deficits by doing it on the backs of those with so few resources - working poor, unemployed poor, children, elderly, you know, the usual crowd so disliked and disdained by the rich (reminding ourselves that most members of Congress are millionaires).

Or this - that you can help balance the budget by taxing wages rather than wealth, as has been the practice more and more since Reagan and right on through the Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama years, meanwhile busting unions, lowering labor costs by gutting wages and benefits meaning less wages to tax, which means more long-term deficits, oh, and meanwhile you slash more at the social safety net, cutting unemployment benefits, food stamps - well, you get the picture.

So what are they really trying to do? 

They are trying to privatize as much of the economy as they can; they are trying to take even more of our public funds and make them available to investors and corporations to make profits off them.

Example - convincing millions of Americans that it would be in their interest to move out of guaranteed pension plans into private 401(k) investments. Public money put into the hands of financial firms. You see how well that did back in 2008.  Millions of those millions of Americans will never fully recover their lost savings. Oh, and by the way, have you heard that investment firm executives are making record pay and bonuses now?

Or take the Obama-led health insurance reform. Everyone on God's earth knows the most efficient and cheapest way to deliver health care is in a regulated publicly funded single payer system. Our private health insurance system has created one of the most health-care-delivery-hostile systems in the western world, a case where even those who think they have insurance still must wage all out war sometimes to get their insurers to pay the costs of their surgeries and illnesses. I have to shop on the private individual market. My premiums are nearly unaffordable and God help me if I actually get sick!

What did we get from the reform? Yet another major transfer of wealth to an expanded private health insurance market - companies insuring us for the sake of their own and their shareholders' profits. Do you really think they care about my health or yours?

So - Social Security and Medicare. Just imagine how investment firms are salivating at the thought of getting their greedy hands on these enormous pots of public money. By most analysts' accounts, Ryan's budget would mean that seniors would one day be paying up to 70% of their health care costs. Translate: elderly folks will live lives of misery, pain, and earlier death because any sane person knows the vast majority of our seniors will not be able to do that. Meanwhile, since his plan involves giving seniors vouchers to cover some of the cost of purchasing private health insurance, well, gee, whaddya know? once again, health insurance companies would get that public money to subsidize their industry.

See, friends, a lot of this policy stuff from our corporate-financed Repubs (Dems, too, I'm sad to say, which is why our political engagement should not wed itself to either party) involves accelerating the transfer of wealth from the public sector to the corporate sector, from the poor and middle class to the wealthy.

Paul Ryan wants to make the rich richer and turn this country into a paupers' land, a United States we once knew in our earlier history when most people lived lives of misery and want while the rich had a great party.

What is remarkable to me is how much of this political energy right now, a focal point of the nation's great divide, of the vast chasm opening between the few rich and the growing numbers of poor and struggling, of the politics of corporate greed and right wing closed-mindedness v. the politics of expansiveness and inclusion, is centered right here in the State of Wisconsin.

We've always had characters - Joe McCarthy and 'Fighting Bob' La Follette, for example, the state could produced both these guys, or the German Bund and Father James Groppi, both possible here. Is it something in the drinking water that keeps our politics so divided and so lively? So maybe we are presented here with a great opportunity and even responsibility:

to take the eccentric, eclectic character of this state and use it to turn this time of crisis into a time when a new kind of democracy is born here, when we honestly grasp the stakes involved at this turning point where we face either decline and intense class struggle or a new kind of hope for a just and inclusive society.  It is time to answer the Paul Ryans and Scott Walkers and Fitzgerald brothers and Koch brothers and all who have an agenda of exclusion, of indifference to the suffering of workers and the poor, of greed and anti-democratic tendencies, with an agenda of inclusion, honesty, compassion, justice, integrity - all those things missing right now from these state and federal budgets, budgets that would mean vast misery and deteriorating quality of life for most of us if they are ever enacted.

Budget cuts and the reality of decline

Get used to a deteriorating quality of life in this state, and in my city - because it is becoming clearer and clearer what Scott Walker's budget proposals will mean if they become law.

Let me just put this comment in some perspective: in September 2008, the financial world collapsed on the cracked pillars of financial speculation by enormous banks and Wall Street investors involving our home mortgages, mounting consumer debt, and deceptive loans provided to people who didn't know what they were signing. Throw in a couple of wars which costs will be in the trillions. A recession had already begun, but it got going in earnest following the collapse. Unemployment rose to 9.4%, remains very high amid growing signs that those who have not worked over the last 1-2 years may have joined the rolls of the permanently unemployed.

Two years later, in Dec. 2010, President Obama agreed to a compromise that extended unemployment benefits but also extended the Bush tax cuts another 2 yrs - cuts that many economists consider one of the biggest drivers behind the US's mounting deficit problem.

Throw these dymanisms on the fuel of disruptive major changes in the global economy over the past 3 decades - production moving off-shore, unions losing their clout to defend the old social contract of well-paid labor with benefits, robotics and other technology replacing more and more workers, rising poverty, unemployment and lower wages for those still working, meaning lower tax collections for cities and states - while still more taxes on wealth and corporations were being cut...

Now add into this mix the rising demand for government services because of these economic drivers - unemployment insurance, rising Medicaid costs as workers lose health benefits from their lost jobs, rise in demand for food stamps and other poverty programs, greater stresses within inner cities that feel the brunt of these changes which get translated into greater needs for services, and on and on... you get the picture.

Then along comes Gov. Walker whom people elect in a 'throw the bums out' pique of discontent, a guy who when asked insists on describing himself as a 'budget cutter' with little regard for those who will be most impacted by the cuts - the same people already impacted by the lower revenues from the combination of a fractured middle class and rising poverty with more and more tax benefits for the wealthy and for corporations - and what do you have?

Yes, decline. Decline in our cities. Decline in our environment. Decline in quality of life. Decline in any sense of the common good.

Is this really the future we want?

Today's paper had a front page article on what the cuts will mean for counties, where so many of the services on which we rely originate - like fixing the growing potholes and the streets falling apart, or trash collection, or mental health services, or upkeep of our parks and summer swimming pools, etc.  'Local counties hit hard in Walker budget,' screams the headline. At least it screams to me. It screams decline, a deteriorating quality of life.

Appreciate, please, that I do mean quality of life, not 'standard of living.' I work on ecological issues, and it is clear that the US cannot sustain in any rational way the 'standard of living' to which we became accustomed in our consumer society. I mean quality - things like breathable air, clean water, good food, decent housing, availability of quality health services, efficient mass transit, roads that won't eat your tires, neighborhoods where people care about one another and it's safe to walk down the street or sit on your porches in the evenings visiting with neighbors and friends, decent work and wages that make it possible to raise a family with dignity.

These things depend upon a strong concern among a population for the well-being of all, for the common good, and the good of the commons - the goodness of what we share as residents of our community by the simple fact that we live here. It means a commitment to folks paying their fair share in taxes so that all of us can have quality of life. It means regulating corporate behavior to protect our environment, the commons we share, the general well-being.

These are not the things that are in Scott Walker's calculations, or the Fitzgerald brothers, or those who think cutting budgets is the singular way out of our economic problems.

I still insist on this - we do not have a deficit problem. What is creating the budget crunch is not on the deficit side. We have a revenue problem. And since, for whatever reason, we no longer think that a progressive tax system is the way to go, that system which - and please make note of this - was the basis on which a broad middle class was built, we are leaving ourselves with few options to reverse the decline. The biggest cut to revenue in my lifetime has been the lowering of tax rates on wealth from 90% in the 1950s to the current 35%. And it is one of the drivers that has accelerated the concentration of wealth to the point where 400 people hold more wealth and assets than half our population.

In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). ~ Wealth, Income, and Power, G. William Domhoff, Univ. of California at Santa Cruz

But now we have workers and unemployed fighting against one another and voting for more budget cutters, while folks like the Koch brothers laugh all the way to the bank, getting tax breaks to cut down our trees and pollute our air and water to their benefit, or agribusiness folks and chem-lawn type companies who make their profits off the greatest threat to the water that comes out our taps - runoff pollution.

We read last week that Walker wants to repeal new regulations put in place to control runoff. Who benefits? You and me?

So when I speak of quality of life, I do not mean weed-free lawns, or the rights of industrial farms to avoid regulations on fertilizers and other pollutants; I mean the health and well-being of our people.

Wisconsin is seeing numerous issues now being thrust into the light of day. We have to keep shining more and more light on the hidden places - so that we can make the decisions we need to make before we find ourselves unable to make any effective decisions at all about the future of our communities and the kind of life we want for our families, neighbors, and friends.

Photos: Margaret Swedish

A glance at Scott Walker's Wisconsin

In Scott Walker's world, the elderly can no longer afford their medication, taxpayer money will go to vouchers for middle class folks to send their kids to private school, at risk kids will no longer have special programs available to them to keep them in school and help them survive the harshness of urban poverty, and folks on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder will have less and less transportation available to them for things like getting to work or to a job interview because bus routes will disappear and, of course, there will be no rail of any kind, not light, not commuter, not high-speed.

There will be plenty of money for road construction (road-building lobbies contributed to his campaign, of course), dirty industries will get anti-pollution regulations weakened or eliminated (payback for the Koch brothers and WI's new Senator, plastics manufacturer Ron Johnson), the wealthy who already don't pay taxes will still not have to pay taxes though the heavy weight of their industries and privileges will cost the taxpayer dearly, and wages will continue their trend downward, another boon for employers like Harley-Davidson and Mercury Marine and Kohler, but bad news for working families.

Photo: Margaret Swedish

Lots of folks will be kicked off BadgerCare rolls in an effort to 'save money,' which means more people will go to emergency rooms already very sick, which is a far more expensive way to get health care, and then we will all pay for that in higher insurance premiums for our private sector health insurance policies.

Also gone: any sense of, or commitment to, the common good and the good of the commons, to government at the service of its people whom it is supposed to represent and serve, any sense that to provide the services needed by all our people, we must all contribute our fair share of taxes to make this possible.

We are moving deeper into a time of vast inequities and unfairness in our society, a time in which the enrichment of the few will come at the expense of the most vulnerable populations and the growing number of struggling workers and their families.

Do we see where this goes?  Do we understand what is happening? Is this the Wisconsin we want?