The assault on our public life goes on - comes down to what kind of world we want, and for whom

It's hard to keep up. They come at us fast and furious, as if trying to overwhelm by the sheer volume of the assaults on our Wisconsin democracy and culture, such as it is in these days of the great polarizing divide. I believe that divide has been beautifully manufactured and manipulated by those with enormous financial resources and rightist courts that allow them to use those resources to purchase our political system - those who stand to benefit from the great divide.

We have family members, friends, neighbors that don't talk to each other anymore, while these guys continue to make off with our wealth, the wealth of the common good and the good of the commons. Trust me, people like Hannity, Beck, and Karl Rove love it when we don't get along. Political paralysis and unraveling of democracy suits them fine.

Anyway, a couple of stories raise these basic questions again of what kind of society we want. Competing visions are at work here, and one of them has a fierce hatred of the 'masses,' the 'common,' workers, the poor, the vulnerable and marginalized. And many of them don't like African-American presidents either, if we are honest about it.

Revealing, this unnecessary anti-Obama rant from one of Scott Walker's campaign donors, the now-infamous David Koch, who supports the gov on things like dismantling union rights and environmental protections in our state. Sarah Owen of New York magazine approached Koch at a fundraiser in Manhattan and he said he didn't understand why Prez Obama was getting so much credit for the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

"He just made the decision, it was obvious where the guy is...The real hard work was done by the intelligence and the SEALs."

Um, David, that's what presidents do. They set policy goals, in this case catching up with the 9/11 guy. They are given the options presented by the professionals who work for them and then they weigh those options and make a decision. Then they live with the consequences of those decisions. Takes a lot of guts, something you may not appreciate, protected as you are by your billions, your walled mansions, your many minions.

But the real attitude is barely hidden in this outburst.  From New York magazine: 

Obama is "a hardcore socialist," Koch told us, "and he’s marvelous at pretending to be something other than that, but that is what I believe he truly is, a hardcore socialist. He’s scary to me."

Scary, scary Obama. 'Uppity' of him to take so much credit, right?  C'mon, we all know what's going on here. The Koch family background with its roots in the John Birch Society, their funding of rightist, anti-democratic groups with clear racist tendencies (like the Tea Party birthers), makes this obvious.

Okay, that's my long aside. The real issue of this post has to do with the Wisconsin we want. On a smaller but culturally significant scale is Walker's assault on the arts. His budget calls for a 66% cut in the Wisconsin Arts Board budget.  I leave it you to read the details and consequences of this, well spelled out in a column today by the Journal Sentinel's art critic, Mary Louise Schumacher.

I want to emphasize one of her key points:  "Can you think of any great nation or civilization that did not support the arts in some way?" But, sadly, there are people who don't think of art and culture as public 'goods' to be fostered and developed for the good of all.

Again, what kind of society do we want?

Or this, about job creation. Now, creating jobs is not a project that submits itself to a single recipe, for instance: lower taxes on business, allow them freedom to use and exploit labor and resources free of government constraint, focus on projects that build roads and use of lots of fossil fuels, things that wreak havoc on nature, and, according to the gospel of these industries and Scott Walker, you carve a sure path to lower unemployment and greater prosperity. And if you don't do these things, we will not create jobs.

Really? Actually, creating work opportunities is another way of envisioning the world we want. You can create jobs that jeopardize the future, enrich the few, do more damage to the earth, guarantee lower wages, consign more people to low-wage work (like the 62,000 MacDonalds jobs that we are supposed to be celebrating as 'progress'), and in that process create one kind of society.

Or you can begin to create new work opportunities by addressing some of our key challenges. For example - how to move people around in a world growing more congested and more addicted to oil with every passing day. You can grow the congestion, you can pave over more of our Wisconsin countryside, or you can move to other cleaner forms of transportation.

So, here you go - just announced this morning: thanks to Walker's hostility towards federal money for high-speed rail, we have just been cut out of funds to upgrade the Milwaukee-Chicago Hiawatha.

We can create jobs making Highway 41 into a freeway, building more roads to satisfy the road-building lobby that backs Walker, or we can create jobs that will develop clean high speed rail. Jobs are also about the vision of the world we want. One path is sustainable and the other is not.

Another example: the headline in today's local section: Walker, GOP reversing green initiatives. You can create jobs by making the world dirtier, adding more and more toxic chemicals and other poisons into our air, water, and soil, make more of us sick (which helps grow the private health care systems), and jeopardize the future of our kids and their kids. Or, you can create jobs by building the new clean more locally based sustainable economies. You can create jobs in the effort to clean up the environment, to create the technologies for clean renewable fuels, for greater efficiency in how we use energy, etc., etc.  Lots of dynamism in that kind of economy, as other nations have already experienced - and we used to, or at least had hoped to.

This state and the current regime are bent on old technologies and economic development models that will be dying out this century as the world moves through this tumultuous time, the era in which the whole industrial/technological project begins to reach its limits. Sadly, this state is moving in a direction that will leave us ill-prepared.

What kind of world do we want? I don't like the direction this current state government is turning towards. It's getting uglier, less empowering, less human, less creative, more toxic physically and spiritually. It is bringing out the worst in us, not the best - racist sentiments on the surface, folks eager to carry more guns around, unwarranted fears being stirred up to set us against one another.

Or we can try something else, set a different course with a different vision of what our world could look like - if we could lay down the fears and realize that we are all in this together. Together in animosity and resentment in a diminished environment bent on our fierce individualism - that is one possibility.

I am looking for ways to create another...

This is getting crazy - the latest assault on democracy from Walker & Co.

Really, folks, you think these people would at least pretend that they honor democratic government, the three co-equal branches of government, the laws and rules of the political process.

But when they don't get their way, they just steamroll right over democracy itself. Even when a court slows them down, they go on as if courts, as if the judicial branch of government, is a mere annoyance, something to get out of their way.

They, of course, being the corporate-run and increasingly dominant wing of the Republican Party, the one trying not to govern our state but to rule it.

The latest trick is pretty enraging. A judge issues a restraining order prohibiting publication by the Sec. of State of a proposed law to take away collective bargaining rights from public workers, and so they publish it anyway - somewhere else.

Read all about it here. Now, the Walker/Fitzgerald administration is playing cute with the law, saying the order only mentions publication by the Sec. of St. in the Wisconsin State Journal and so now that it is published somewhere else, the law is now in effect. But here is what the order actually states:

“I do, therefore, restrain and enjoin the further implementation of 2011 Wisconsin Act 10. The next step in implementation of that law would be the publication of that law by the secretary of state. He is restrained and enjoined from such publication until further order of this court.”

Okay, Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi who issued the order back on March 18 does stop the 'next step' in implementation of the law, publication of it by the Sec. of State - because that would be the next step. But the first sentence tells you everything you need to know about the intent of the order.

Meanwhile, Republicans are also trying to chill speech. The other day, as you know, Professor William Cronon of UW-Madison wrote an Opinion essay for the NY Times that rather unflatteringly compared the political style of Scott Walker to Joe McCarthy, in the sense that his tactics are causing profound polarization and demonizing of his opponents. He accuses Walker of making a radical break with our state's 'core values.'

In his recent research into the sudden emergence of similar and very well organized legislative campaigns in a number of states, Cronon had delved into the key role being played by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-sponsored, secretive organization that is behind much of the agenda of gutting state government, slashing corporate taxes, busting unions, and privatizing public services that is all the rage in places like Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, Indiana, Florida...

You see, there is a plan afoot here, one that has been funded and pushed for decades and which now is having real impact on our local and state governments, not to mention that Tea Party crowd that worked their way into the House of Representatives with the intent to shut down government and create chaos.

From SourceWatch, an excellent resource if you are looking for background into all sorts of organizations, their sponsors, funders, and agendas:

"The organization [ALEC] has been semi-secretive (makes knowing its members difficult information to find), has been highly influential, has operated quietly in the United States for decades, and received remarkably little scrutiny from journalists, media or members of the public during that time. Superficially, ALEC’s membership is mostly made up of thousands of state legislators, each of whom pays a nominal membership fee to attend ALEC's retreats and receive model legislation. ALEC’s corporate contributors pay far more to gain access to legislators and distribute to them corporate-crafted legislation. Thus, while ALEC's membership appears to be mostly from the public sector, the groups funding is almost entirely private sector. In reality, ALEC's public-sector membership dues account for only around one percent of ALEC’s annual revenues. 81.7% of ALEC's income comes from corporations, while just 1.3% comes from legislator dues.

"ALEC claims to be nonpartisan, but its free-market and pro-business goals are clear. The result of ALEC's efforts has been a consistent pipeline of special interest legislation being funneled into state capitols across the United States... One of ALEC's primary funders are the trusts associated with the controversial Koch family, that includes David Koch, a billionaire and one of the leaders of one of the richest privately held corporations in the world, Koch Industries."

Anyone still think the real agenda here is about deficits and balancing budgets?  Anyone think that Walker really believes the state is 'broke' and there's nothing we can do about it except to gut government, pull the rug out from under the middle class, give our natural resources away, pollute our environment, and throw more of our people into poverty?

I urge anyone who reads this to click on the link to the SourceWatch page on the ALEC and then pass it on to your friends. It is vital that we know this - otherwise, we will be waging the wrong struggle.

As I have written before, the only way to effectively counter this kind of corporate power over the body politic is by mass democracy, cross-sector solidarity, a coming together of mutual interests across class and economic lines, a sense that we are all in this together, all threatened by the same forces, all united in our desire for a decent and democratic state government which priority is the well-being of all our citizens, with the broadest participation, especially of the poor and marginalized among us, those most endangered by the policies these budget bills seek to put in place.

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BTW - Cronon has a terrific study guide on the ALEC and similar groups on his new blog. Click here.  And you may be interested to know that since the controversy lit up after his piece in the Times, his blog has had more than TWO MILLION visits. The ALEC is trying to tamp down the attention. In attacking Cronon and seeking to chill his speech and others who dare expose these things, the sun is shining brighter and brighter on their intentions.