MADISON WISCONSIN - SUNDAY FEBRUARY 20, 2011.
Yesterday (Saturday February 19th) more than 70,000 demonstrators filled the capital city of Wisconsin, just across Lake Michigan from my perch here in Grand Rapids Michigan. Each day more and more demonstrators are showing up to voice their opinion of the Tea Party governor, Scott Walker, and his attempt to shove a bill through the Wisconsin legislature that would effectively take away the right of public employees to engage in collective bargaining. In other words, Walker wants to eliminate the unions that represent state and municipal workers in Wisconsin. Walker is insisting that he will not compromise.
This bill, called “the Budget Repair Bill", is designed to eliminate a projected deficit of $3.6 billion by 2013. A closer look at Wisconsin’s budget situation reveals some interesting details. According to NBC’s John Daily, the immediate budget shortfall is $137 million. Not really all that much, as these things go. Much of that red ink has been because of decreased incoming tax revenues due to the poor economy. But other factors contributing to the current and projected shortfall are tax cuts for individuals and corporations passed in 2003, rising health care costs, including $2.9 billion in projected Medicaid outlays because of people forced out of work in the private sector. The $2.9 billion projected Medicaid outlays by the state is a consequence of the expiration of funding from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 (ARRA2009, better known as Obama’s Stimulus Plan). In other words, the expiration of ARRA2009 has left all the states and their constituent communities with budget issues stemming from the evaporation of Federal revenue sharing this year.
Meanwhile, that portion of the state budget earmarked for public employee benefits is flush with cash. The governor and his Tea Party cronies in the state legislature want to not only raid the union benefit funds, they want to destroy the unions altogether.
Now, the skinny on the consequences of the tax cuts of 2003.
Since 2003, the tax cuts have resulted in a cumulative $3.7 billion revenue deficit, and by 2013 will amount to $800 million in lost revenue per year. $2.9 billion in Medicaid expenses will fall to the state because of the expiring ARRA2009. The bottom line – Walker wants to make up for the tax cuts, the toll of the bad economy (caused by Wall Street’s fat cats), and the expiring stimulus funds from ARRA2009 (which Republicans fought furiously to block) on the backs of the middle class, particularly the public employees unions. Further, Walker pushed through three new tax cut bills earlier this year amounting to another $117 million for the current fiscal year.
It’s no secret. Tax cuts are minimally (if at all) helpful to the middle class, inconsequential for the poor, but fabulously helpful to the rich. They profit from the compounded income they receive from the tax savings they invest in the stock market (and other investments) and thus become obscenely rich. Many have become so rich that they can buy off politicians and sponsor candidates for political office that will continue and even expand the conservatives’ war on the middle class and their labor union allies. If Gov. Walker is successful in destroying Wisconsin’s public employees unions, that will amount to the first domino to fall in a continuing cascade of public union busting in other states by newly elected Tea Party governors and legislators. And since public employee unions are the only real source of campaign financing for candidates representing middle class aspirations, their destruction will allow the far-right Tea Party and their minions to run the table and permanently eliminate Democratic financial support for moderate and progressive Democratic candidates in future elections. With all campaign funding of any consequence being controlled by corporations and the far-right, we will have a one-party system on our hands – a party dominated by a large cadre of radical right-wing Tea Party zealots and their billionaire backers/controllers. The Democratic party will no longer be able to field winnable candidates because there won’t be money available to sponsor their candidates. They will effectively disappear as a united political movement representing rank and file citizens.
Adam Smith, in his treatise The Wealth of Nations, asserts that “the biggest threat to Capitalism are Capitalists, because their aversion to competition will cause them to convert a capitalist system into a monopolistic system. The only antidote is regulation.”
Regulation! That's a construct that causes the far right to wax apoplectic. They want to unleash Wall Street on the world like a pack of pit bulls to continue and accelerate the transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich (thereby destroying the middle class in the process). They want to deregulate not only Wall Street but the big multinational corporations as well, so they can accelerate the transfer of great sums of wealth out of the country – not only to take advantage of cheap labor but to sock trillions away in offshore accounts and thereby avoid paying the taxes they owe. This has been an ongoing problem that could be pursued, but is deliberately not being pursued because those same plutocrats and American-based multinational corporations finance and control the (mostly Republican) politicians in Congress. For them to act to retrieve some of the wealth illegally stashed offshore is forbidden by their wealthy controllers.
When left to its own devices, that is, when totally unregulated, Capitalism devolves into Fascism. Fascism does not necessarily mean a single dictator – it describes an economic system in which large industrial interests control the government. It’s a system that compels the government to look after the interests of Big Business at the expense of the people. We have been seeing the uncontrolled monopolizing of the health care industry, high finance on Wall Street, Big Oil, pharmaceutical companies – indeed, the unrestrained speculative price fixing of commodities that affect not just the United States but the entire world. We've been seeing merger after merger promoted by Wall Street interests that amounts to the building of trusts. We need Teddy Roosevelt more than anyone - even more than Obama!
Back to Wisconsin. The Tea Party governor, Scott Walker, and the Tea Party and conservative dominated legislature in Wisconsin are trying to 1.) destroy the public employee unions, 2.) thereby destroying the Democratic party by depriving it of most of its funding, 3.) set the table for future vast majorities in the legislature and more far-right governors, 4.) all of which act as proxies for the far-right Tea Party zealots and their billionaire controllers, 5.) deregulate all business and place them in control (behind the scenes), 6. eventually (within two or three election cycles) set up a fascist state. This movement is starting in Wisconsin and is threatening to spread across the country. People taking to the streets are trying to prevent the take-over of the political system by the Tea Party and like-minded Republicans, which puts them in solidarity with the people taking to the streets in the Middle East. The middle East, in fact, may have inspired the protests, or at least contributed to the magnitude of them.
What do the public employee unions want to do? They want to work out something that will yield major concessions but retain the right to engage in collective bargaining. With inflation running rampant (I mean real inflation, not the sanitized numbers the government publishes that omit the skyrocketing costs of food and gasoline), the 5.6% pay cut and the 12.6% increase in employees health insurance that can amount to another 10% or more decrease in take-home pay means hardship for public workers. The public workers are saying – OK, we’ll endure the salary cuts, just don’t disappear our union. But Walker has said he is not going to compromise, and, for his part state senate Republican leader Scott Fitzgerald says “This bill is not negotiable”. That’s the take-no-prisoners approach the Tea Party politicians have been advocating all along. This should be no surprise – these sleazy people are merely keeping their promises to the voters who elected them. And therein lies the problem. Too many middle class and, especially, too many (in fact, most) of the poor failed to show up at the polls while the Tea Party supporters showed up at the polls in force on Nov. 2nd 2010.
One can blame Wall Street for causing the deep recession we’re still saddled with. One can blame the deregulation that started with President Reagan, continued under president Clinton, and really took off under President Bush – deregulation that allowed, even encouraged, Wall Street abuses, big companies shipping millions of jobs overseas while at the same time firing domestic workers. Never mind that American companies could easily afford to pay their domestic employees middle class wages - they got rid of them so they could make obscene profits on the backs of foreign workers that worked for slave wages. Never mind that Big Business precipitated the gutting of the Federal, state and local government revenue streams not only by firing their tax-paying workers and forcing them into the safety nets of unemployment insurance (of which the first six months were paid for out of their wages) and Medicaid, which in turn put a strain on state and Federal budgets. Never mind that Big Business further decimated the revenue streams of government by having their toadies in Congress and in the various state legislators reduce their corporate taxes, over and over again, and in some cases eliminate corporate taxes altogether. Yes, you’re going to have deficits when you decrease incoming revenue by billions and increase expenses by billions simultaneously. It’s third grade arithmetic. But because too many moderates, progressives, students, and minorities failed to vote in sufficient numbers, much of the blame for their current predicament lies with them. Here’s why.
The Tea Party, which does not necessarily represent the majority of voters, induced their zealots to venture forth en masse to vote in huge numbers. Rank and file Tea Party activists are pigeons, of course. They are acting against their own self interests by voting into power a nihilistic element that is committed to turning our system into a fascist state. And they don’t even realize it. So there’s two forms of stupidity represented in the current conflict – the Tea Party voters who elected extremist governors, state legislators, and senators and representatives into the 112th Congress, and the moderate / progressive middle class voters (and most of all, the disenfranchised poor) who stayed home on November 2nd 2010. Nobody can say they weren’t warned. The main reason the poor stand to be the biggest losers in this debacle is that most of them failed to vote, and therefore bear perhaps the brunt of the responsibility for this turn of events. The poor stand to suffer becaus they will lose low income heating credits, supplemental food benefits, Medicaid, and other low-income programs the Republicans will surely cut or eliminate. They won't be able to heat their homes or get medical care. They didn't take the midterm elections seriously, largely because Obama wasn't a candidate. Their apathy threatens to destroy our country and allow the despots now in power to turn the United States into a fascist state. Currently, the only bulwark against the far right is the (still) Democratic controlled Senate. If we're not careful, the Senate will fall in the next election and that'll just about do us in.
I know this sounds extreme, but that’s the way I see it. I see striking comparisons to the Nazi takeover of Weimar Germany in the early 1930s. Hitler and his Nazi minions were voted into power by the people who were unaware at first who they were actually giving the reins of power to. Scapegoating was employed (against the Jews) just as scapegoating is being employed by the Tea Party in that they’re blaming unions for the financial crisis. They wax apoplectic at President Obama for running up the huge budget deficits when anybody living above ground knows (or should know) it was Bush and the Republicans who ran up the national debt. They did so largely by giving massive tax cuts to the rich and to Big Business which cost the government trillions in lost revenue. The same holds true for Republican governors and Republicans in the statehouses who engineered tax cuts for the rich and for Big Business at the state level.
Another element of the Tea Party and their Republican brethren is their demonstrated antipathy toward minorities such as Blacks and Hispanics. Tea Party rallies often include posters depicting Obama in very racist and derogatory terms - even in some cases as a devil with horns. A common slogan by the Tea Party types is “we want to take our country back!” Back from whom? What they really want (whether they realize it or not) is that they aim to take it from a Black president whom they consider alien and/or inferior, and give it over to those who seek to destroy America. The poor, apathetic, and disenfranchised voters failed in 2010. Perhaps they'll wise up before the 2012 election cycle. One can only hope. It's up to them to save the America from further disintegration. I'm talking about the America that I grew up in, the America whose Armed Forces I served in, the America that put men on the moon, and the America that engages in charitable activities the world over. The America that was once the pinnacle of the civilized world. That was my America. They want to turn my America over to fascists. They want to turn it over to the Koch brothers, among others.
For further reading I have included a link to an article in the New Yorker magazine on the Koch brothers, Charles and David, the billionaire brothers who are financing the Tea Party takeover of the machinery of government. I strongly encourage the readers of this blog to read the article. It is disturbing.
*Early in the article there is material describing the Koch brothers’ opposition to climate change legislation. Anyone who has read my thirteen part series on climate change which I posted on this blog in November 2010 might think of this writer as a hypocrite, since I am so violently opposed to the Koch brothers’ agenda while at the same time I am in favor of their support for opposing research on the matter of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Please allow me to explain.
While the Koch brothers are “deniers”, I do not consider myself as such. I consider myself a skeptic, whereas my skepticism is predicated not on a refusal to believe there’s been an uptick of the earth’s temperature over the past 100 years – I accept that we’re getting warmer – but that any warming we see is caused entirely by human activity. My skepticism is fueled by AGW proponents’ demonstrated proclivity to manipulate data in order to bolster their case. When one has to manipulate or distort data to prove their hypothesis, one has a weak argument. As someone who opposes forced policy directives by governments and other policymaking bodies in response to what I believe is an unproven hypothetical construct, I agree with the Koch brothers on that particular issue and I support their approach to resisting harmful and destructive policies intended to punish CO2 “polluters”. Of course the Koch brothers' motivation is that they believe it will cost them money. Of course, being the greedy #$!#t©€&£#¢&* they are, they will simply pass along any cost increases to their business resulting from punitive assessments by policymakers on behalf of their AGW agenda. In the long run, then, the consumer, being at the end of the pipe, will have to bear the added cost of AGW inspired regulations - not Koch Industries.
In the eventuality that humans are (or are not) found to have contributed to the warming, I will accept it, but I don’t expect to be alive in two or three hundred years when the matter is resolved one way or another, because climate is the aggregate weather over a time span of many decades at the least, and, more accurately, over time spans of centuries and millennia and beyond.
Having said that, I would point out that the world is not made up of absolutes. Purely black / white approaches to problems usually result in vastly imperfect solutions. Therefore, my agreement with the Koch brothers' financial support to foundations and other bodies supporting parallel research into other causes of climate change besides or instead of human cause is only a small part of a much larger whole. If one looks at the world as shades of gray between extremes of black / white, then my view of the Koch brothers agenda occupies a place in the spectrum between black (0 bytes) and white (255 bytes) at about 10 bytes, i.e. 96% black. I would certainly wish they would disappear somehow, as the harm they represent is far, far greater than any good they are capable of with respect to their sponsored research on climate change.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
