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!

Now we see the great divide

Gov Walker and Republican state legislators have certainly helped to do one important thing - to surface the great cultural divide in my state.

* Solidarity v. fierce individualism

* Workers v. corporate powers

* Cutting taxes as an ideology v. a strong social safety net based on a sense of shared responsibility

* Government as outside monster v. government as a service to its people

* Government as guarantor of private business and wealth generation v. government as guarantor of rights and fairness

* Leave me alone! v. we are all in this together

It doesn't have to be this way. What we are seeing now in the public sector in this state we saw in recent years in the private sector - a divide-and-conquer strategy. Threaten to move a plant out of the state to force workers into huge wage and benefits concessions. Threaten massive layoffs of public workers if they don't accept being stripped of collective bargaining rights. Worse, there is a calculated campaign to drive a wedge between the unemployed or workers seeing their wages fall and benefits disappear, and public sector workers who still have jobs and benefits.

It's an old, tired, anti-people strategy - breakdown solidarity among workers, make them feel like the unions are the enemy, rather than the bosses who are trying to remake the workforce to their benefit.

What in the world happened to our once-inspiring pro-labor culture here, to our sense of pride in what workers built here?  This city was built on the labor of my ancestors, my uncles, my cousins, musicians who worked for my father - all of whom had access to decent well-paid work and benefits because of unions, who had clout in setting work rules (like the 40 hour work week, overtime pay, safe factories, grievance procedures, and more) and from all of that were able to own a house, raise their kids, send them to good public schools, etc., etc. - because of unions, because of organized labor fighting for their rights.

The powers-that-be say we can't afford this anymore, but before we rush to that judgment, take a look at what is happening to the earnings of the already wealthy, to the soaring Wall Street companies. Read articles in the business news about how many corporations are awash in cash but not hiring - because they don't need to do that to make money anymore.

Then check out how many of the wealthy pay little or no state taxes at all (Chris Abele being among them) because tax rules are stacked in their favor. And here, while you're at it, study this document and its many graphs indicating how the top 1% in the US own 34.6% of all privately held wealth while the bottom 80% owns just 15% of all wealth.  This is a staggering divide and something to keep in mind when the anti-tax rhetoric is soaring across the airwaves.

One thing you won't hear our governor talk about is how revenue could be raised to help meet the needs of our people. That actually could be done. But if you think public service is a cancer on the body politic rather than a service - educating our kids, answering the phone when you call 911, plowing snow during and after a blizzard, picking up the garbage, processing marriage certificates and birth records, staffing courtrooms and public health centers - if you think all these public sector workers are sitting with their feet up on desks raking in the dough and not working very hard, then you think Scott Walker a hero.

He is not. And if he gets to run the show here, this state is headed for real trouble.