Need for serious recall

So the campaign to recall Scott Walker is now underway, and there will be others yet to come, making for a wild political year. It's Recall Season in Wisconsin. Some of my friends and colleagues know I have at times expressed a certain skepticism - not because I don't think Walker needs recalling - he played politics of deception to get elected and politics of exclusion once in office, and the trail of money supporting him over the years has yet to be fully explored - but because of concerns about its prospects for success.

If this does not succeed, please, Wisconsin friends, do not become demoralized. This is a hard thing to do when even many Walker opponents are uncertain about using recall as an expression of political disagreement, however profound. He was elected, the wisdom goes, so let him serve his term and oust him in the next election.

But then others say, but just look at all the damage after only one year in office...

So we'll see how this goes. Most news pundits continue to focus their coverage on the elimination of collective bargaining rights for public sector workers and the undermining of the union recertification process itself. We do have a fiercely anti-union politics in this country right now, and this really ought to have surprised no one. Follow the path from Reagan to now. The politics of the corporate right has been taking over our national politics from the bottom up and using slick media tools to ramp up this anti-labor sentiment - along with bogus emotional issues like gun rights, abortion rights, and gay marriage, great tools of manipulation that hide the real agenda of the corporate right.

But if this remains the heart of the public debate, I fear this will not only not succeed but erode the politics of the state further. Because what is really needed is a politics of solidarity that centers on the situation of our state's most threatened populations - the poor, the discriminated against, the disabled, the elderly, immigrants, students, and all sorts of 'marginal' populations (only marginal because our culture puts them on the margins - not only Repubs do this). The advocacy work of the unions themselves needs to be about this solidarity, not only about protecting the interests of their members. The more labor joins with others in that solidarity, the more positive impact this campaign might have on Wisconsin's political culture.

Let's remember, please, that most public sector workers actually work on behalf of these very populations. That's why their demands matter. It's a question of putting the interests of those they serve at the top of their publicly expressed concerns. Many people think of these workers as spoiled or over-compensated, rather than providing vital services that meet the needs of the populations that, you know, have those needs.

The problems this state faces are abundant and frightening. Our state is in the hands of people who have little regard for the majority of us, especially workers and poor people, or for the lands, forests, and waters that make up the beauty and wonder that is Wisconsin. Collective bargaining rights may be the least of our worries if we allow mining companies, developers, and corporate polluters like Georgia-Pacific and immense industrial dairy farmers, to run our state politics, to write our laws and then hand them to the Fitzgerald brothers for passage in the statehouse. Think about the clash between environmental groups and unions over the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline extension. Unions want jobs for their members. Ecologists and climate scientists see the pyrrhic nature of this demand, knowing how the oil tar sands pose a threat to the planet whose consequences are beyond imagining - though we are beginning to imagine it.

There won't be any good union jobs in a world facing ecological collapse.

Or, closer to home, think iron ore mine in the Hurley area - unions also see good jobs while the Bad River Band and environmentalists see the imminent ruin of land and forest, and grave threats to a watershed relied on by many for drinking water.

We need a serious recall - a recalling of values and principles, a recalling of a social contract that understood that inequity and injustice is built into the capitalist system and therefore a strong publicly funded social safety net is required to keep those injustices from tipping into social unraveling and chaos.

We need a recall of the interrelationship between humans and their eco-communities, and how if you unravel those communities, if you ruin and toxify them, you threaten the future of the human as well.

I hope this campaign will focus on the corruption of our politics by billionaires like the Koch brothers who use Americans for Prosperity, Club for Growth and their vast wealth as tools of deception and manipulation of our people. I hope the campaign helps people realize that all this passionate focus on issues like gun rights have been part of that manipulation, great distractions that keep the public focus away from the concentration of wealth and erosion of democracy itself that is what is really at stake here (I get to carry my gun in my belt, who cares if my water is giving me and my children cancer?).

I hope the recall is a recall of what democracy really is and that it will promote a renewal of democratic culture by helping people realize what is really happening here, and how Wisconsin has become a political center for the most anti-democratic tendencies in the country, a testing ground, if you will, for how far these people can go.

I hope it is a recall of the value of dialogue, mutual respect, cooperation and compromise, the supremacy of the right to human well-being within healthy eco-communities over the right to wealth generation and corporate profit-making, the importance of neighborhood and community if we are to return to a social and cultural sanity that is being lost amidst the noise being fomented by these rightists to keep us from caring about one another.

Yes, we need a recall - a really profound one.

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All photos: Margaret Swedish

The death of manufacturing and the death of a neighborhood

Everyone who cares about the city of Milwaukee ought to read this entire article from yesterday's front page:

Where city factories, and now babies, die


There is something so very wrong here, even more than what these journalists penetrate as they describe what the death of manufacturing has to do with the shocking levels of poverty, deaths of babies, and abandonment of whole neighborhoods.

Just one rotting factory at the 30th St. Industrial Corridor.

This story is about the 30th Street Industrial Corridor, a stretch of toxic wasteland that I had the opportunity to briefly tour in September with the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee. There have been other studies and articles written about the link between poverty and the crash of this neighborhood - due in large part to the moving of manufacturing out of the U.S. as corporations chased growing cheap labor pools in other countries.

But for me one of the most shocking things was the abandonment of these workers who once built and assembled the things that we used, that created the base of a broad middle-class. Racism had a lot to do with this, as we all know but hardly ever say out loud (it needs to be said out loud). The tax money of the middle and upper-middle classes poured out of the city as the affluent moved out to suburbs and exurbs. We failed to see the connections between the two, mostly because we didn't want to, and we certainly failed the moral test of the mutual responsibility that comes from living in this world and in a particular community.

For me, one of the shockers was that all these manufacturing companies could just close up and disappear with no sense of responsibility for what they were leaving behind. As our tour guide said, some of them left in the middle of the night - a way to avoid scrutiny and outcry. Left behind were not only abandoned workers and their families, but also a toxic contaminated mess, land so polluted that the city can't even make plans to reclaim this area without having to remove hundreds of thousands of tons of contaminated soil off the top (the guy said 2-3 FEET covers much of the area) and old seeping waste tanks buried underground.

This is among the aspects of capitalism that reveals its voraciousness, selfishness, and greed - that these companies felt and feel no responsibility about leaving in a responsible way - taking their factories apart and cleaning up the mess on their way out. No care for the humans; no care for the land and community.

It's a lot like Walmart and other big box stores. They come; they go; they leave their big box store and paved over land behind for someone else to worry about.

It is not time to rebuild the manufacturing economy of the post- World War II era. It is time to build a new economy altogether, one that puts the well-being of our communities at its heart, one that promotes the health and happiness of the people who live in these neighborhoods, one that does not tear at the fabric of the human community but binds us together.

State Repubs want to throw 65,000 people off Medicaid rolls

The mean season in Wisconsin continues to unfold...

I don't know, friends, when I think about that story the other day about doubling the costs of security for Guv Walker, and when I think about the undemocratic, nearly dictatorial control of the Grover Norquist no-tax-increase crowd - as if this in and by itself is some deep, profound political concept, rather than what it is, a simplistic design to collapse government services in places where they are most needed and for the people who most need them - I wonder more and more how we will like living in a society like the one Walker & Co. are creating - a mean society, a society with escalating numbers of people living in desperation and deprivation, collapsed hopes and dreams.

You certainly know why Walker might feel the kind of paranoia that means more armed protection...

So read this story carefully, if you have not already:

Lawmakers OK changes that could drop 65,000 from Medicaid

You and I know how easy it would be to avoid these cuts made by people who do not have a financial care in the world, who have no fears of losing access to excellent health care, who think it a travesty that anyone thinks they, in their privilege, have any social responsibility in this world in which the wealthy and the corporate giants take more and more of the society's wealth to themselves.

We are in a selfish, mean, season. We are in an unraveling time when it comes to the political culture of this state.

Listen to the cold-hearted cruelty (I don't know how else to name it) hidden in this statement from Walker's State Health Services Secretary Dennis Smith (the position ought to be renamed to something like the drive-more-poor-people-into-poverty-and-illness secretary):

"Under our approach, individuals would lose coverage only if they make the choice not to pay a fair share of their coverage," Smith said, adding later, "We're at least giving people a choice."

Keep in mind who we are talking about here - families that sometimes have to decide between food and medicine, paying the rent or paying the doctor bills. An example from the news story:

For instance, a single parent with two children who makes more than $27,795 a year would typically see his or her annual premiums rise to $1,390 from $120 - a more than tenfold increase. In all, the higher premiums would apply to 91,500 BadgerCare Plus participants - almost two-thirds of them children.

And then when these children go to school, the rightwing Repubs will get all upset if they don't test well!!! And then schools' funding will be in jeopardy and teachers will be blamed - not hunger, not lack of preventive health care, not the poverty into which Repubs are driving more and more of our people.

Photo: Margaret Swedish

For what? So that Wisconsin can become even more 'open for business' than it was before; so that mining companies can get tax breaks to blow open more holes in our countryside; so that more Walmarts can be opened to take advantage of the rising pool of cheap, non-union labor, to staff their stores where more and more poor people undermine their well-being by shopping there because it's all they can afford, which ensures that more poor people will be exploited by companies like Walmart.

That's the world they are creating. It's a world I organized against creating over decades in my work in Washington DC when the US and big corporate 'free-traders' (a misnomer if ever there was one) were doing this to Mexico and Central America. Now it has come home, and how do we like it? Because this is not free trade; this is rigged trade, rigged politics, taking advantage of this strain of fierce individualism that is still way too pervasive in our socio-political culture.

If we don't feel the connection between our lives and the lives of these 65,000 people, then we are living an illusion that will come back to haunt us.

This issue is not over. It now goes to the federal government which must approve it by the end of the year in order for it to go into effect. That means it goes to the President of the United States who can decide that this will not stand. If you care, you could make your voice heard in Washington.

There's another message you could send to your state politicians as well - this whole problem could be resolved with minute tax increases on corporate and individual wealth which that class would hardly feel. They could still vacation in Cancun and buy yachts; they could still afford expensive security details. If we believe they have more right to our public wealth than the poor do, we are a sorry state indeed.

And for all of you BadgerCare advocates out there, all you who provide services to these populations bearing the brunt of the politics of meanness, thank you!! Your work is tireless and often despair-inducing. You see the politics of meanness where it plays out in the lives of real human beings, something that Walker & Co. have intentionally blinded themselves from seeing. And yet you press on, pricking our consciences every day, reminding us that poverty is the underside of an economic/political system for which we are all responsible.

One more on guns

Okay, yes, one more on our gun insanity. Did you see this article in the morning sports section?

Law will allow transporting uncased long guns

We are gun crazy. We are insane. These are hunting associations run amok.  This is in-your-face gun policy aimed at every person who ever thought it a good idea to have some gun control laws. How will we ever undo this damage?! Once you put guns and permissive laws like these into effect, just try and reverse them any time soon.

Here's what one hunting educator had to say about this law, as quoted in the article:

Wisconsin hunter education instructors, who for decades have taught long guns should be transported unloaded and in a closed case, are overwhelmingly opposed to the new law.

Is it because change is hard? Or something else?

"If it was for safety reasons, I'd be all for it," said Gary Egan, 64, of Marshall, a Wisconsin hunter education instructor for 28 years. "But this law seems to make things easier for violators and does nothing for safety. There's no place for uncased and loaded guns in a vehicle, in my opinion, whether it's legal or not."

We agree. And we also agree with those who are coming to realize that their votes for the Walker/Fitzgerald regime last year was not a vote for this.

Really, I will write this again, it's almost as if they are begging for someone to shoot somebody. Maybe they will eventually try to prove that that's okay too.

With best wishes to Gabby Giffords...

Needing protection

This was one of those eye-popping stories from today's paper:

Protection costs for Walker, Kleefisch more than double

I mean, I would love to have the info to know if they face more credible death threats than Gov. Doyle did, who was not exactly well liked by many Wisconsites. I would like to know how much of this is real, how much is paranoia, and whether or not Walker & Kleefisch feel at all that any of the vitriol of their supporters, or the policies that they have rammed through our state politics without popular support, have anything to do with creating this level of threat.  There are, after all, other styles of governing that do not leave people feeling so frustrated, powerless, and angry.

This is not to excuse a single credible threat. Sadly, these are part of our political culture now. I know what it means to be Barack Obama, for example. Being the first African-American president means you, your wife, and your 2 children are the subject of daily credible death threats because there are still white people who resent your mere presence on their TV screens. I am aware of this from my long time doing political work in DC. Members of Congress, too, get freaked out by the steady volume of threats that have increased exponentially in the past decade or so.

So, on the one hand, this makes me very sad. On the other hand, it reveals the consequences of a politics of rage and hate, resentment and division, and enormous frustration when those who now 'govern' (or try to 'rule') have often been part of that kind of politics, or even benefited from it.

I mean, listen to a little Charlie Sykes or Rush Limbaugh - these people are not innocent of creating the culture that gives rise to this kind of rage and resentment. They stoke it. They empower it.

There is no excuse for this on any side of the political and cultural divides; but, still, I would like to know more. I would like to know who is making these threats and why. I would like to know what leads law enforcement officials to be this concerned, and whether or not this level of protection is about something real or feared, often perhaps with good reason.

But here's the other thing that makes me crazy: Walker & Kleefisch, who are the targets of these threats, have just approved one of the nation's most permissive concealed carry laws in the nation!! People can now walk armed right into the Capitol!!

So this is my crazy-maker for this day: WI Repubs and Lena Taylor have just made our society less secure and a whole lot more frightening, and the result is more insecurity and more fear, and then more armed guards and more tax money to pay for more armed guards. We allow our people nearly unlimited access to guns, including high-powered handguns. And then we ramp up security.

And one day, we will wonder where our democracy went. Maybe that's what the NRA wants - a nation of scared people cowering behind walls and moats defending their property and their lives with guns (or 'works of art,' as Sen. Taylor calls them) against enemies, real or not, a statewide and nationwide O.K. Corral.  Sounds like fun, doesn't it?

I guess this story was for me yet another sad commentary on the state of the political culture. It will take a long time to repair these breaches of distrust. But let's remember where they came from - they came from a backlash against the broad social contract constructed over decades that included things like worker rights, civil rights, voting rights, affirmative action, Social Security, Medicare, more cultural inclusion of gays and lesbians, immigrants and people of other cultures, fair housing acts, more stringent environmental protections, and a tax structure that once helped prevent the kind of concentration of wealth we're seeing now, leading to the impoverishment of the middle class, a progressive tax structure that was one of the hallmarks of our relatively stable society.

Check out the list: virtually every one of these things is under attack right now, and the rollback began 10-20 years ago. It has been very successful, and it has torn the cover off of old animosities and prejudices, helping to re-create the politics of resentment that has brought our democracy to the edge of collapse.

So I hope nobody tries to commit violence against any of our elected politicians. It would be beyond tragic. It would actually pose a grave threat to our state's democracy. And I hope we can use this story as yet another stark warning: we need to start healing these breaches so that the social contract can be restored and a culture of tolerance and inclusion reborn.