The Plan to Steal Everything: Wisconsin Death Trip

[Jackpine Radical]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27664.htm

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 labor. The privatization of public assets is now on the agenda, with the yet-to-be-voted-on budget repair bill.

Wisconsin is a state that invented Progressive Era Republican rule in the 19th and early 20th centuries under such progressive populists 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-birth the asset-grabbing Gilded Age. A plague of rent-seekers is seeking quick gains by privatizng the public sector and erecting tollbooths to charge access fees to roads, power plants and other basic infrastructure.

Economics textbooks, along with Fox News and shout radio commentators, spread the myth that fortunes are gained productively by investing in capital equipment and employing labor to produce goods and services that people want to buy. This may be how economies prosper, but it is not how fortunes are most easily made. One need only to turn to the 19th-century novelists such as Balzac to be reminded that behind every family fortune lies a great theft, often long-forgotten or even undiscovered.

[asjr]

1. We are now dealing with the Republican Taliban

Party. Unfortunately there are many at their table.

[Marblehead]

2. the word nazi comes to mind

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. Naomi Klein says Walker's bill contains plans for corporate coup d'état at the municipal level.

"So it starts with the school boards, and then it's whole towns, whole cities, that could be subject to just being dissolved because there's an economic crisis breaking collective bargaining agreements. It also specifies that-
-this bill specifies that an emergency manager can be an individual or a firm. Or a firm.
So, the person who would be put in charge of this so-called failing town or municipality could actually be a corporation. "

"you do now have whole towns, like Sandy Springs in Georgia, run by private companies. It's very lucrative. Why not? You start with just the water contract or the electricity contract, but eventually, why not privatize the whole town?"

Important read: Naomi Klein and Amy Goodman discussing the little known parts of Walker's bill.

http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2011/03/legislating_corporate_rule_the.php#more

[seafan]

4. '...it is the middle class that is being euthanized – throughout North America and Europe.'

That is the conclusion of Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers in this important piece.

And the right wing assault on Wisconsin is the leading edge of the battle front in America.



March 11, 2011

.....

A peek into Governor Walker's so-called "budget repair bill" reveals a shop of horrors that is just the opposite of actually repairing the budget. Among the items listed in the bill until Wednesday night were selloffs of state power generation facilities – in no-bid contracts notoriously prone to insider dealing.

The 37 facilities he wants to sell off that produce heating and cooling at low cost to the state's universities and prisons. Walker's budget repair bill would have unloaded them at a low price, presumably to campaign contributors such as Koch Industries – and then stick the bill for producing this power at higher rates to Wisconsin taxpayers in perpetuity. (And this is all being sold as a "taxpayer relief" plan!) Invariably, this will make its way into new legislation once attention is diverted from the current controversy.

The budget bill also plans to tear down the Wisconsin Retirement System (WRS). This is not New Jersey, where a succession of corrupt governments have underfunded (read: stolen) the state pension system in order to shift resources to pay for budget shortfalls in general revenues caused by tax breaks for the rich. The WRS is one of the nation's most stable, well-funded and best-managed pension systems. Although Wisconsin is not a big state, the WRS has amassed $75bn in reserves, and pays out handsome pensions to its public retirees, without needing new public subsidy. The Walker bill has language providing for tearing down this system, raiding its assets to pay for further tax cuts for the rich (especially property owners), and then throwing Wall Street a meaty bone as public employees would be shifted to 401k plans handled by money managers on commission.

In a separate proposal, Governor Walker would start privatizing the University of Wisconsin's two flagship doctorate-granting campuses. Ironically, the land grant universities – of which Wisconsin has long been among the best – were created by protectionist 19th-century Republicans as an alternative approach to British free-market doctrine, which dominated the prestigious and largely anglophile Ivy League universities. These universities, like their German counterparts, taught a new economic policy of state management and public enterprise that formed the basis for subsequent US and German development.

.....

Walker has no use for intellectual tradition. Just auction it off.


The same goes for Wisconsin's public lands rich with minerals and timber, which are also in the cross hairs of Walker's poison-laced "budget repair bill".




The recalls in Wisconsin cannot happen quickly enough.

Sadly, the pace of the ballot box is insufficient to stop this right wing smash and grab as other newly installed right wing governors around the country crouch at the starting gate to unleash similar onslaughts on their people's rights.