Vital programs, human & political rights, all lined up on the Walker/Fitzgerald chopping block - unless democracy takes the knife from their hands

What they want is to dismantle the public sector as much as possible and privatize whatever they can get their hands on. What they want is a world in which corporations are free to make as much money as they want, CEOs and shareholders, with as few constraints as possible (like freedom to pollute, to not pay taxes, to make profits in prisons and schools, freedom to pay workers as little as possible, etc.), to surrender the inner cities to poverty because there's nothing in it for them to create programs that would generate jobs, housing, good education for workers they will never need.

You get the idea. I don't usually do a blog post on Sunday but will not be at my computer in the morning, so here's my rant as this week begins. It took a whole lot of decades to make of this western industrial world something other than what is so aptly and horrifically described in a Charles Dickens novel. But that's where we're headed if the corporatist right gets its way. I wish I could say there is an effective political counter to this steamroller, but even much of the political left has been pretty ineffective in recent years.

Which is why the Madison story is so important - something emerged there that does not fit easily into anyone's attempt to stereotype the phenomenon according to the old political spectrum. What joined people together with such an amazing combination of rage and joy was the threat we all feel to our communities, our neighborhoods, to a culture in this state - flawed, yes, overly parochial, yes, tainted with all sorts of troubled history like racism and self-interest, and leave-me-alone sorts of sentiments, sure, that's all present - but a culture that in its best moments recognizes that Wisconsin is a good place to live and can be an even better place to live if we address these flaws.

Now we see a great unraveling. Look at the long list on the Walker/Fitzgerald chopping block: public education, threatened by many things, none more serious than lifting the income caps for the voucher program; voter rights, as manifested in the proposed voter I.D. law that would disenfranchise large numbers of students, poor people, legal immigrants, and elderly folks; rollback of environmental regulations and a direct threat to the Clean Air Act as enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency; lower corporate tax rates, or even the elimination of corporate taxes, despite the heavy toll they take on our resources and the services they demand (think Zoo Interchange reconstruction, as one example); intentions to privatize (out-source) more public services, meaning lower wages, no benefits, more working poor, fewer worker rights, sacrificed on the altar of defeating Dems at all costs; threatening what little public financing for elections we have now, turning them over to those with the most money to spend.

I could go on. You could each add to the list. Point is, our quality of life is under assault by the current regime, and the only counter I can see to that is the popular voice that exploded into the headlines these past couple of months. Even our Wisconsin 14 were very clear about this - they have said that they only stayed away because of the protests. They left the state not knowing what would happen, but once folks were in the streets day after day and weekend after weekend, they COULD NOT come back even though a few of them really wanted to.

Larson, Erpenbach, Taylor, Risser, and others said this - their strength came from us.

I think often of the moment when LBJ signed the civil rights legislation knowing that his Democratic Party would probably lose the South for a generation after that (prescient). But he did it because politically he had no choice; it was not only the right thing to do, it was the ONLY thing to do to save the nation from a real collapse into more chaos and violence.

The point being, it was a moment when a movement and the politics came together. The politics did not create that moment; the movement did. The movement shaped the politics and the politics had to respond. That's what happened in the weeks following the Wisconsin 14's flight to Illinois. A movement appeared, loud and raucous and energized by a feeling of popular empowerment, and the 14 determined their strategy on that basis.

And this spirit feeds the new political work - recall efforts and certainly the highest profile race for judge that we've seen in a long time, if ever; voter registration efforts; greeting the governor with protests wherever he happens to be appearing; or the record attendance at town hall meetings and community gatherings.

All of this to try to keep together what sits on the chopping block. A big knife hovers over so many programs and rules and regulations that bring quality to our lives, or at least attempt to do so, and the point is to simply take that knife from the hand that wields it.

Apathy, lethargy, lack of vigilance and participation on the part of citizens of this state are among the reasons why we are seeing our rights threatened by a state government voted in with only half of eligible voters exercising this right (and that was considered a high turnout). Now we are seeing not only what participatory democracy can do, but why it is so crucial to our well-being, to the common good and the good of the commons.

Oh, and BTW - Vote on April 5!

Photos: Margaret Swedish

All together or all apart - which way will we go?

It's difficult for me not to think of the Wisconsin governor and Republican legislators as crossing over the threshold from merely damaging, ideologically rigid politics to cruelty. But when I read articles like this in the morning paper, the word cruelty bubbles up. When deficit hawks create or deepen deficits by offering government services and tax breaks to the wealthiest and to corporations, then insist they are 'broke,' cruelty is one result. (Note to Governor Walker: please get a dictionary and look up the word 'broke;' we are not broke! We have imbalances in revenue and spending, but we are not broke!!).

Cruelty towards human beings, towards students in public school systems who will be failed by these policies, towards public workers who provide services to all of us for very modest incomes (put the cuts to these workers up against the tax breaks for folks like the Koch brothers), towards those slipping rapidly from the ranks of what we once called the middle class while the wealthy become obscenely wealthier, towards the poor who are about to see BadgerCare 'reformed' by cruel policy by a governor attempting to legislate sole authority over the program - oh, we could go on.

This is class warfare in the extreme, brought to you by 20-30 years of the erosion of our democracy, an erosion caused by handing it over to corporations and financial institutions. They own the system. They can purchase politicians, hire lobbyists who help write the legislation that will serve their interests (I am not making this up. I learned this all too well in my 26 years working in Wash. DC), and if they get the right presidents, they can appoint Supreme Court justices who will defend corporate interests.

For decades now, the courts have recognized corporations as 'persons' with certain constitutional rights. This is completely made up and never intended by our Founding Fathers or anyone else until this past century. But it has served corporate interests well. And these are the folks that have money to buy cable news channels, to saturate the airwaves with paid ads from mystery organizations, and do things like move lobbying offices right into the heart of Madison to influence legislation.

So, the struggle here in Wisconsin really is about the soul of this nation, and what kind of nation we want to be. Will we allow those with power and wealth to tear us apart so that they can better control our lives and well-being, will we allow ourselves to be bullied or duped by their faux news outlets, paid ads, or politics of blame - blame of the marginalized, the public worker, the failing middle class, the urban poor, the immigrant? Or will we choose to resist those trends and create solidarity among our people, pull together across class and lines of 'competing' individualistic interests, and center our values on a sense of the common good and the good of the commons, a realization that we are all in this together, and that the path of mere self-interest and concentration of wealth and power is leading us towards a world most of us won't want to live in - mean, impoverished, cruel, heartless, and ecologically wrecked?

Thank you Wisconsin 14, thank you to my guy Chris Larson, thank you protesters, thank you public sector workers - for giving us all this time to find out what is really going on. The real victory here is knowledge, and the more we have about what is really going on, the more empowered we are to change this ugly course before things get worse - much worse - which is what Walker, the Koch brothers, and Repub state legislators sadly have in mind for our state.