The Fortnightly Rant for February 25, 2011, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 255, No. 11, posted on Tuesday, April 15, 2011.
About forty years ago, when Richard Nixon was scheming in the Oval Office and conscripted teenagers were fighting Commies in Vietnam and Ronald Reagan was threatening to unleash a bloodbath on protestors in California, there was an ongoing debate in certain circles about whether a Second American Revolution was approaching. Considering that nearly 100 kids were being killed every week in the war, and the National Guard was killing unarmed students in Ohio, the question was not entirely fanciful.
Out of untold hours spent in such discussions, one line lingers in this writer’s memory. Some streetcorner theorist said, “there won’t be a revolution here while we’ve still got a middle class.”
Now, in Wisconsin, a proposal to end collective bargaining rights for public workers may be putting that theory to the test. Strange — if the upheaval in the Badger State spreads and the status quo is overturned, the one who struck the spark will have been a Republican.
On, Wisconsin
Scott Walker has been Governor of Wisconsin for less than eight weeks. In that brief period he has turned the state capitol in Madison* into a boiling cauldron of discontent. Thousands of people have been occupying the building day and night for more than a week, while tens of thousands more surround the building. Fourteen Democratic State Senators, meanwhile, have fled to Illinois to prevent Walker from jamming through his union-busting legislation. About the only things missing are pitchforks and torches.
How did he do it? Pure natural talent, apparently.
Walker, 43, is at first glance an unlikely incendiary. The son of a Baptist minister, he’s heterosexually married with two children. A mediocre student, he dropped out of Marquette to peddle computers for IBM. He became Milwaukee County Executive in 2002 after serving nine years in the State Assembly. No beards, no Che T-shirts — his radicalism is strictly reactionary.
Foreshadowing Failure
An episode from Walker’s tenure as Milwaukee County Executive bears an eerie resemblance to what he’s attempting now. It was succinctly summed up on Monday night by Rachel Maddow.
“The last time Scott Walker did something like this, in his desperation to get rid of employees who joined unions, he improperly fired them, he overstated how much money that would save, and then he allowed for a private, foreign based butt-vodka company† to put a convicted criminal in charge of security at the Milwaukee Courthouse and City Hall.”
Can You Spell “Extreme”?
During the 2010 election Tom Barrett, Walker’s gubernatorial opponent, claimed that Walker opposed abortions across the board and without exception. If true, then by extension Walker favored forcing victims of incestuous rape to carry the consequences of that crime to full term at the risk of their own lives. Sounds nuts, but the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran Barrett’s claim through their Truth-O-Meter and rated it “True.”
The Usual Suspects
One might reasonably wonder how such a blunderer, holding views so extreme, could get elected in the first place. Enter two men who are rapidly earning the title, “The Usual Suspects”: Charles and David Koch.
According to a report in Mother Jones, the billionaire brothers’ Koch Industries PAC gave Walker’s campaign $43,000. Walker also benefited from an additional $65,000 in independent expenditures, the funding for which came from a $1 million contribution that the brothers channelled through the Republican Governors Association (RGA).
The RGA also paid for a $3.4 million barrage of negative TV ads and mailers attacking Tom Barrett. We don’t have a full breakdown, but it seems quite likely that some of that cost was covered by the Koch brothers’ million bucks.
Profligate as they are in their anti-democratic spending, the Kochs are far from careless. Another shrewd investment will help them keep tabs on their newly-purchased Governor: Koch Industries opened a lobbying office a stone’s throw from the capitol shortly before Walker was elected.
Solidarity Forever (Not)
Wisconsin has always been a strong union state. Walker’s plan to gut collective bargaining rights exempted fire and police unions. This clever maneuver succeeded in splitting the unions in last year’s election. Local police and firemens’ unions in Milwaukee backed Walker, while statewide unions opposed him.
Such a Deal!
While it’s abundantly clear that Walker’s goal is to break the unions, the excuse for his “budget repair bill” is the state’s alleged budget deficit. The Governor says the state has a $137 million deficit. That’s not true, though.
In fact, the state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau says that at the end of the state’s budget biennium later this year, Wisconsin’s treasury should have a balance of $121 million. Wisconsin’s only shortfall is the $140 million obligation that Walker and his Republican friends jammed through the legislature in January. The money is going for private health savings accounts — which will primarily benefit those with six-figure incomes — and tax giveaways for employers that, while too chintzy to spur any significant employment, will nevertheless cost state taxpayers $67 million.
Caught on Tape
On Wednesday, when the situation could hardly have been more fraught, came welcome comic relief. Ian Murphy, the editor of The Buffalo Beast,‡ posted online a recording of a telephone call he had made to Governor Walker in which he pretended to be billionaire campaign contributor David Koch.
During the twenty minute call Murphy/Koch suggests to Walker that “planting some troublemakers” among the protestors might help by discrediting his opponents.
Far from denouncing such an underhanded tactic, Walker replies that “we thought about that,” but he didn’t follow through.
“My only fear,” the Governor said, “would be if there’s a ruckus … that would scare the public” into pressing him to settle for less than complete victory.
The Public Campaign Action Fund (PCAF) quickly noted that during the call Walker may have broken the law.
“If Wisconsin law forbids coordination with political donors similar to federal law,” said PCAF’s David Donnelly, “Gov. Scott Walker is not just in political trouble, but in legal hot water.”
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* Wisconsin’s state capitol has a New Hampshire connection. It is surmounted by a statue sculpted by Daniel Chester French, who was born in 1850 in Exeter, New Hampshire. Fifteen feet tall, cast in bronze and covered with gold leaf, “Lady Wisconsin” is depicted wearing a helmet with the state animal, a badger, on top.
† Maddow is referring to Wackenhut, the British-based company whose employees guarded the U.S. Embassy in Kabul — when they were not wearing grass skirts and coconut brassieres, and drinking shots of vodka out of each others’ … let’s just let it go at that, shall we?
‡ Before it became a web-only phenomenon, The Buffalo Beast (www.buffalobeast.com) was published as a more-or-less monthly magazine to which, we are proud to say, we subscribed. It was scrofulously wonderful and we miss it terribly.