The Wisconsin Shell Game

"Even before Kansas, Wisconsin was the lab rat for an assault on the political commons on behalf of the modern oligarchs. If they could do it in Wisconsin, the theory went, they could do it anywhere. And so they did. And they have."

Charles Pierce explains the disaster of Scott Walker's Wisconsin (in Esquire).

But there is always a reason for cutting public funds for unnecessary frills and luxuries like universities and schools and roads and hospitals. Being thrifty, for instance. Can’t spend money we don’t have, they say. (When you cut taxes to the people who have most of the money, you do wind up with less money to spend. Unless you are one of the few with the most money and lower taxes.)

Or there may be better more sensible places to spend that money, giving it to those who need it more, for instance. In the case of Scott Walker, he decided the great public university system in Wisconsin was less deserving than the new basketball stadium some hedge fund billionaires wanted but didn’t want to pay for.

SLATE reports on where Scott Walker's spending cuts were more usefully spent.

The same shell game reported in Forbes.

How do you persuade the public that a .500 basketball team with attendance fifth lowest in the league is more deserving than the college students of Wisconsin (and the advanced science and industry that is created by those college graduates)?

First you rubbish education and educators. You begin by rubbishing any system you want to get rid of, whether you want to pocket the money or give it to your friends.

You say they think they’re superior to regular folk. This creates resentment.

Then you defund what you have carefully rubbished.

Defunding leads to poorer performance and dysfunction, which you can point to and say “See? This is rubbish!” thus justifying your funding cuts.

Dysfunction will make people dislike just about anything, especially if it’s something they’ve relied on.

Defund and create dysfunction. This dysfunction leads to dissatisfaction. It’s like shooting someone in the leg and mocking them because they’re limping. Humanity is very fickle in its affections.

While one hand has been accomplishing this nasty deed your other hand has been handing the “savings” to people you like better than university know-it-alls who might understand what a crook you are, who might also know how you’ve been crooked and how your crookedness is harming everybody.

A less educated population is easier to push around.

Wisconsinites: get ready to be a more obedient and servile population! Prepare to be less than you used to be! Wisconsin is becoming more like the backward southern states where income, life expectancy, health, education and functioning social fabrics are all near the bottom.

The leading Wisconsin newspaper tells the sorry tale of Wisconsin's decline since Walker took over.

It’s the same story in GOP governed Michigan (Flint water anyone?), Kansas, Florida, Louisiana (Where Jindal drove the state into the ditch and then left the scene of the accident). In state after state the Republican experiment with lowered taxes has put the economy into crisis. Today’s Republicans love breaking things that work. They’re a lot different from the responsible, practical Republicans we knew a few decades ago.

The Atlantic reports on the failure of GOP governed states to keep up with the rest of America.

Know-Nothingism and Nullification

In Wisconsin, failed candidate Scott Walker is making it harder to investigate the alleged corruption of his governor’s office or his election by allegedly illegal means. He is supported in this effort by a state supreme court dominated by justices who allegedly used the same corrupt means to get elected. But if we cannot investigate it, then it must conclude no crime was committed.

This brash arrogance is described brilliantly by Charles Pierce in his Esquire column.

In the lobbyist-ruled halls of our nation's capital, the NRA asserts its role as chief health research officer by blocking all research into the health hazards of being shot with a gun.

Public Radio International reports on efforts to hide, cover up and shut down such research before it can be done.

Meanwhile the leading candidate in the GOP presidential sweepstakes is an odd, twinkly-eyed sociopath named Ben Carson M.D. Here are some of his odder beliefs, notably his bizarre comparisons of healthcare and the institution of slavery and his idea that freedom of thought should be enforced on college campuses by censoring liberal ideas.

ThinkProgress lists Dr. Carson's nuttier ideas. (Don't laugh. He might win the nomination.)

This shutting down of investigations (while your own witch hunts proceed unchecked) and shutting down scientific inquiry that might harm some corporations’ profits and shutting down freedom of speech and freedom of religion and freedoms in general at the Boss’s discretion, all of it flows from the central concept that has energized the radicalism of the white South since the age of Lincoln. The theory of nullification. Lincoln fought and won a war to kill the idea, but it laid eggs. All across the white South and the Right Wing West folks are taught and firmly believe that obeying the law is optional. If you disagree with the law you ignore it. Unless, of course, it’s a law they hold sacred. Then failure to obey it to the letter is treason. Again: if they like the law disobeying it is treason. If they dislike the law obeying it is treason. All authority resides in the gut (specifically in the large intestine) of god-fearing, gun-carrying, white-ancestored, non-scientist folks of the American South and West, with its various extremist outposts in northern backwoods and suburbias.

Nullification is the blunt refusal to respect federal law, especially on the subject of slavery and equal rights for persons of color. The Confederacy was an armed nullification, which followed the legislative nullification practiced by various Southern legislatures in the 19th century. Followed by the violent nullification of the Civil War defeat, a period we know as Jim Crow.

I’d be curious to know if anyone else has encountered nullificationists as I have. I had a disagreement with a lawyer once. To disprove his point I cited a state law on the books. He replied by saying that state law was invalid because it had not been fully litigated up to the Supreme Court of the land. By which logic, most laws are invalid, because very few laws are argued up to the Supreme Court. And if nullificationists disagree with a Supreme Court ruling they still maintain it is illegitimate while they relitigate it.

The reductio ad absurdum of this being that the only valid law is whatever each individual wants to believe. A mixture of narcissism and libertarianism and our beloved Wild West Yahoo Yosemite-Sam-gunfight-free-for-all.

Slavery is the Next Neat Idea (and other outrages)

Republican Department of Neat Ideas (via Mike Huckabee): slavery for non-violent offenders

Here's how deals are done on the money minded Right. You use the Party office to run a loansharking business and loot a charity to cover expenses. When there's trouble, declare bankruptcy. Pocket consulting fee. This actually happened in the GOP offices in Nevada.

"We didn't have a spending problem. We had a revenue problem,” said Scott Walker's campaign manager. This is how the failed Walker campaign brushes off their $1 million deficit. The point being this: if you spend people’s money on Scott Walker it’s well spent. If you spend taxpayer dollars on public needs it’s money wasted.

Another example of the Republican “Not My Responsibility” mindset: whenever possible let’s give the wealthy and corporations the option to avoid supporting public needs. NPR reports on a "neat" Oklahoma law that allows companies to leave workers high and dry.

For them, owning the company is what funds their workers’ comp. The only worker they want to compensate is the one at the top. Everything spent on other people is either waste or theft.

For the guys at the top “efficiency” becomes a question of “Who can we do without?” “Who can we get rid of?” The CEO himself is essential, of course, but everyone else is expendable.

When this kind of thinking migrates from the top of corporations into the top of government, what does it begin to remind you of? Which countries have systematically planned how to get rid of groups of people they didn’t want or didn’t like?

Don’t immediately say Germany in the Thirties. That’s easy. The same nasty thinking has been rampant in this country too. One loud voice in favor of selective extermination is now the favorite philosopher of the Republican Party: Ayn Rand.

When the thinking gets this toxic people want to step away from it. So you’d think.

But the migration of the GOP from levelheaded mainstream practical thinking to nutty extremist hate mongering insanity has been so gradual that a lot of people you thought are sane are still party to it. They’re the ones trying to explain away the ugly statements and proposals as isolated gaffes not representative of the broader party. David Brooks, the soft-voiced overly-polite columnist for the NYTimes is one of these, but even he is expressing disgust. Not so much with the hateful policies, though. It’s the dysfunction he finds embarrassing. Forgodssake, if you’re going to be a bigoted extremist party at least be an efficient and competent one! Think German engineering.

Here's an analysis of Brooks' fed up rant.

The problem is, David Brooks has been ushering the GOP down this road for decades. Explaining away the nuttiness, smoothing out the ugly policies, rationalizing the outright unAmericanness of the whole selfishness creed. He’s shocked, SHOCKED, to find the Republican Party––whose dysfunction and extremism he’s been doing PR for all this time––has become a dysfunctional and extremist party. Typically Republican. His response to any problem is threefold: Not my job. Not my responsibility. Not my fault.

A Cunning Plan To Make America Fail

The GOP Plan Looks Like A Conspiracy To Make America Fail

97 of the 100 poorest counties in the US are in Red States. True? Certainly factual. (PolitiFact) The interpretation might depend on your politics. Rural tends to mean poor. It also tends to mean Republican. Why? That is very hard to understand. Which doesn’t make it untrue nor does it make the voting habits of those poor counties seem rational. But it does supply a rationale for the leaders who like to have stupid people under their supervision, in their electorate.

Republican hero Scott Walker has led Wisconsin toward the worst end of the economic spectrum (National Memo). Why do Republicans admire that? The money men admire it because it means they’re sucking the maximum amount of wealth and income away from the majority who work for a living. Their spare change can persuade the victims that it’s a great thing for them.

This kind of outright stupidity and greed and bad planning may explain why America’s worst enemy is America itself. (New Yorker article)

The Republicans’ (and their rich clients’) uniting principals are 1. kicking the working poor off healthcare and 2. keeping unregistered immigrants outside the law so they can go on hiring them for slave wages. There is an really cruel, greedy, heartless beauty to this. (New York magazine article explaining the GOP plan to replace Obamacare.)

This is only a winning strategy because they have all the money and money buys advertising and advertising creates fear.

Evaders, Seceders, Confederates and Outlaws

The Houston Chronicle reports on a meeting of Texas secessionists who got a surprise visit from local police, Texas Rangers and FBI. No mention of Walker, Texas Ranger being among them.

Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican congressman (and father of the moppet-haired presidential candidate) thinks it’s a great idea to secede from the United States.

Unlike these characters in Texas, the big secessionists are the large corporations who only secede their money. They don’t secede completely. They live here. They own properties here, and run companies here, and their companies use our roads and other public systems paid for by taxpayers. They enjoy all the things US citizens enjoy, but they have the option of not paying for those things, at least not at the rate working people do. Some corporations don’t pay any taxes at all. They keep one hand in their pocket. Their other hand is always out for government contracts and subsidies.

A CNN piece on corporate tax evaders.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders' lists the top ten corporate tax evaders and corporate welfare recipients.

Flip The Debt is running a meter on the billions these tax cheats are making off with.

Some little known facts about the biggest corporate freeloaders.

The other Walker isn’t a Texas Ranger, he’s a governor. His secessionist trick is to secede taxpayers’ money, which is intended to pay for Wisconsin state government, infrastructure, education and the general welfare of Wisconsin’s citizens, and to pay it instead to out-of-state corporations like Koch International and to wealthier Wisconsinites (most of whom winter in the South each year) in the form of tax breaks and refunds. Wisconsin does owe for the things that have been done and billed but Walker has decided he can simply not pay for things he doesn’t like. Wisconsin has become an a la carte state where paying the bill is optional. Nobody writes about this more entertainingly than Charlie Pierce.

Letter to George Will

(George Will gave some advice to Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker about the stupidity of science denial. Which prompted me to write this letter.)

Mr. Will,

I sympathize with your situation, having to advise a Republican frontrunner to acknowledge science and reality. It must be embarrassing.

John McCain corrected a woman in the crowd during his campaign who said Obama was a Muslim. Then it seemed the only rational thing to do.

The problem is the Republican Party has spent the years since then catering to this same ignorant prejudice. Actually they’ve been doing it longer, if you consider Lee Atwater's and Roger Ailes' and Pat Buchanan’s not so subtle dog whistle bigotry. This past week we also have Giuliani’s ugly, ignorant remarks.

Why cater to ignorance? Because it’s worked for you. It’s elected right wing Republicans, each one further right than the last, each one more out of touch with reality. Each one more cynical and dishonest and nutty.

And this has made your party the cynical dishonest nutty bigoted party. It wins elections for you.

Well (and I realize it’s totally wrong to use this analogy) this kind of nutty cynical dishonest bigotry also helped Hitler win elections.

If it works it becomes compulsory? That seems to be the rationale Republicans have imported from the business world. It’s wrong and dangerous in both places. It’s endangering the climate our food supply is based on, it’s endangering our democracy, it’s endangering our economy, it’s endangering our future.

You have a lot of work to do unwinding this.

Of course, if you think it’s more important to carry water for the Republicans in next year’s election… if that’s more important to you and the other commentators on the right, God help us.

They know when you're sleeping and they know when you're awake

Big Brother is already here. He's very tech savvy, very control-minded, very cynical and (no surprise) very right wing. Is there any wonder the 1% knows how to game the financial system?

First, from the Daily Beast: is your IPhone app secretly working for the pro-life movement? It sure appears that way.

Here's a similar story from Alternet about how the Wisconsin Governor's right wing is gaming the internet and social media to shut down the effort to recall him. Are Go-Daddy and Facebook in league with national Republican operatives?

It's all pretty chilling. Media dominance and concentrated money go hand in glove. Look at how cynically the Republican Party uses FoxNews to dominate the political argument, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in 50 states. And their viewers are less informed and more misinformed than people who don't follow the news at all. They want Americans dumb, lost and clueless.