On Wednesday evening, in a veritable Night of the Long Knives,

[cali]

Wisconsin's integrity was brutally murdered on the floor of the state Capitol in Madison. On 9 March, integrity and trust built up over a century was obliterated as Wisconsin state senators quickly reversed course and cleaved its budget "repair bill" in half. Financial items require a quorum, thus, collective bargaining was split off from the budget repair bill and voted on separately so as to permit its being voted on now. Even so, this still broke the state's open meeting law requiring 24 hours' notice to ensure transparency. Instead, the Wisconsin senate Republicans pulled out this new legislation without advance notice and began voting, leaving only a stunned Democratic legislator, Peter Barca, to read the open meeting law out loud to prevent the senators from voting. The senate voted over his objections anyway.

The Wisconsin brand has always centered on integrity. This was really about the only distinctive comparative advantage the state could lay claim to. Now, it is gone. With collective bargaining abolished, huge issues remain beyond labour. The privatisation of public assets is now on the agenda, with the yet-to-be-voted-on budget repair bill.

Governor Scott Walker emerges from Wisconsin, a state that invented Progressive Era Republican rule in the 19th and early 20th centuries under such exemplars as Robert LaFollette. Under their tenure, rent-seeking from the public domain and similar insider corruption were checked by a strong public sector anchored in integrity. The state's long history of reforms nurtured a prosperous middle class and made it a model of clean government, solid infrastructure, trade unionism and high value-added industry managed by socialists and the LaFollette Progressives.

Fast-forward to Scott Walker today. Representing a new breed apart from Wisconsin's earlier Republicans, he is seeking to re-open the asset-grabbing Gilded Age style. A plague of rent-seekers is seeking quick gains by privatising the public sector and erecting tollbooths to charge access fees to roads, power plants and other basic infrastructure.

<snip>

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/mar/10/wisconsin-usa?commentpage=last#end-of-comments

[cali]

1. I'm gonna kick this because it is- by far- the best piece I've read

on what Walker is doing.

[prairierose]

2. Here is another kick for this topic....

:kick:

[steve2470]

3. k&r nt

[no_hypocrisy]

4. Kick

[somone]

5. This is a must-read

[coalition_unwilling]

6. Excellent article. Not sure the reference to the Night of

Long Knives is totally apt, as that was the night that Hitler purged members of the Nazi Party's SA, among them its leader Ernst Rohm and consolidated his power even further. As evil as he is, Walker did not do in any of his rivals in the Republican Party. At least not yet :)