When corporate money owns the government

This is what comes of electing judges rather than appointing them, running them through a vigorous confirmation process that examines who they are, their record, their potential conflicts of interests, etc.  They end up serving the same interests as elected politicians, but with more at stake.

If it is true, and this stands, that a majority of Wisconsin Supreme Court justices do not have judicial authority to hold the actions of the legislature to constitional tests, then we really are moving towards one-party rule in this state.  And that party has been bought by the rightist money that is trying to do the same throughout the country.

From Karl Rove and his American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS (those groups funded by a handful of millioniaires), to the Koch brothers -funded Americans for Prosperity and Club for Growth, to direct compaign donations flowing into the coffers of the Repub's most rightist politicians, we are seeing a kind of power grab that spells real trouble for the people of this state and this country.

Why do we hate the very unions who brought us a worker rights laws, decent wages (which tended to raise wages for everyone, not only union members), and some organized defense against the overwhelming power of corporations? The US Chambers of Commerce is incredibley organized and their members are now spending huge millions of dollars to lobby for business interests - but unions are losing their collective bargaining rights in state after state. First private sector unions were gutted as business threatened time and again to leave states in which workers did not agree to tear up contracts and accept their new terms.

Now the State of Wisconsin has devastated those rights in the public worker sector.

Scott Walker's Wisconsin is 'open for business' and closed to the well-being of its citizens and our precious environment.

But let's be clear about what the corporate right has been able to take advantage of - the apathy and disinterest of the citzenry, the lack of interest in government, understanding how it works (more than a third of people polled do not know the three branches of government and even fewer know what their responsibilities are - like checking the power of the legislature when it acts unconstitutionally), and being incredibly susceptible to manipulation by those interests who use God and guns and abortion and gay rights to mobilize people to support their corporate right agenda.

Watch wages fall.  Watch the downward trend in the quality of life for more and more people in this state, many of whom really believe that somehow this is a gleeful moment - "Yea, we've undermined the power of unions!"

What in the world is wrong with us?

This will have to play itself out. And what I can say about it this morning is that we are moving into unprecedented times. And if what folks try to do is recover what has been lost, try to move back in time to an old framework now being dstroyed, we will not get through this. These other guys have recognized better than most of us that times have changed, the global economy has changed, power bases are shifting, the old political divides don't describe anything real anymore, they just serve the interests of the conquer-and-divide rightists whose tactics have worked so well.

If times are unprecedented then the response must also be unprecedented. First is understanding how power is shifting in response to a new phase of global capital, one that is fiercely anti-democratic and anti-popular, and beginning to operate out of a narrative that does not describe what has been lost so much as how to move forward in that reality.

Must read - for whom do Walker and Prosser really work?

Friends, I'm on the move for a few days and will post only sporadically.  However, the article linked here is a must read! It shows just how much Walker and Prosser work not for you and me but for Koch Industries. This is not a political statement, it is what good investigated journalism is uncovering:

Walker and Prosser Crushed Regulations on Koch Industries Phosphorous Pollution in Wisconsin

Now please remember what Prosser's challenger, JoAnne Kloppenberg, has been doing for a living - she is assistant attorney general and her responsibilities include constitutional law, appellate law, civil litigation, environmental prosecution and administrative law.

Now you can understand why Koch, in the guise of Club for Growth, Americans for Prosperity, etc. would spend millions on campaign ads to defeat her - and another reason why Waukesha's questionable election, and the secret ballot counting tactics of County Clerk Kathleen Nickolaus is so disturbing, given her past connection with Prosser when he was in the Assembly, and the fact that Waukesha voting tallies have been suspect for several election cycles in a row.

One of the most crucial struggles of this era now is to take our democracy back from the corporations who have purchased it with their now Supreme Court guaranteed unlimited campaign spending. We are not just losing collective bargaining rights and the rights to a decent life; we are losing democracy itself - because the majority of us have stopped caring about it or participating in it a long time ago. In that vacuum, corporations are moving in, and they are changing the rules, regulations, and government itself to their ends.

Awfully hard to get democracy back once it is gone...

Koch brothers buying our government

An editorial in today's NY Times really caught my attention. If you want a clearer picture of what is going on in our state, where Koch Industries opened a lobbying office in downtown Madison as Walker was being inaugurated, here's another example.

Koch Industries' home base is Wichita KS. Mike Pompeo is a new member of the House of Reps and, according to the editors, is known as 'the Congressman from Koch.'  The now-infamous brothers donated $80,000 to his campaign.  Now they are getting their payback.

"[Pompeo's] contributions to the House Republicans’ budget-slashing legislation included two top priorities of Koch Industries: killing off funds for the Obama administration’s new database for consumer complaints about unsafe products and for a registry of greenhouse gas polluters at the Environmental Protection Agency."

Remember, too, that the Supreme Court ruled last year in the notorious Citizens United case that corporations pretty much have unlimited 'speech,' meaning can spend unlimited funds trying to influence the outcome of elections. President Obama and many others rightly called this a threat to our democracy, a major unbalancing between the power of the richest, biggest corporations in the world and, you know, us.

Photo: Margaret Swedish

It has been suggested that a major reason for busting public sector unions is to remove one of the few organized voices of the folks, a voice with some considerable funds available to lift up an alternative to the corporate media blitz. Crush unions, corporate bosses crush a major opposition voice. Crush unions, crush a source of campaign donations for candidates who oppose their corporate agenda.

And you see from the actions of Pompeo what that agenda looks like, what the intent is - to gut the role of government to regulate the worst corporate practices, to protect citizens and consumers from their toxins and waste, from their bad products and threats to our environment. Also, to protect the rights of workers by defending their rights to collectively bargain over their contracts, basics like decent wages and benefits, working conditions, grievance procedures, and more.

In an article for The New York Review of Books last year, Ronald Dworkin wrote a long, disturbing analysis of the Citizens United ruling. He writes:

"Though the Court’s decision will do nothing to deter corruption in that way, it will do a great deal to encourage one particularly dangerous form of it. It will sharply increase the opportunity of corporations to tempt or intimidate congressmen facing reelection campaigns. Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi had great difficulty persuading some members of the House of Representatives to vote for the health care reform bill, which finally passed with a dangerously thin majority, because those members feared they were risking their seats in the coming midterm elections. They knew, after the Court’s decision, that they might face not just another party and candidate but a tidal wave of negative ads financed by health insurance companies with enormous sums of their shareholders’ money to spend."

We are seeing the results of this power grab by corporations now here in Wisconsin.  This is why I cannot say strongly enough: if organizations of all kinds all around the country do not get focused on issues like campaign finance reform, if taxpayers continue to resist public financing of campaigns, if we continue to appoint Supreme Court justices who believe that corporations have rights to speech as 'persons' under the Constitution, our democracy is in grave danger, indeed.

The political reform needed is becoming more urgent and profound. We are only beginning to realize the extent to which our democracy is being stolen from us by corporate money.

I urge you to read carefully all the linked articles on this post. Our futures are at stake. We need to know what's going on in order to meet the challenges effectively.

And vote on April 5!