Battling 'Neoliberalism' in Wisconsin
Editor's Note: For a third day, protesters rallied in Wisconsin's capital to protest a plan by the state's new Republican governor to reduce the budget, in part, by stripping public employee unions of many collective bargaining rights.
These Wisconsin demonstrations are the first major challenge to the newly empowered Republicans and their "neoliberal" goal to slash government and to protect tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, as Marquette Professor Daniel C. Maguire notes in this guest essay:
It has been well noted that the protest in Madison, Wisconsin, is not about the budget but about union-busting, but that is a symptom, not the root of the problem.
Gov. Scott Walker's project is to impose the neoliberal (neoconservative) political economy on a state that pioneered many progressive traditions and reforms.
Neoliberalism (or neoconservatism) has been the operating system of the Right since the 1980s, though its roots go back further. It has these four characteristics:
---Neoliberalism has been called a philosophy of "possessive individualism." Historian Richard Hofstadter called it "beneficent cupidity" or the notion that "greed is good," in more modern parlance. It embodies Social Darwinism - survival of the fittest - which sees society, as C.B. MacPherson said, as a mass of competing "dissociated individuals."
Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister in the 1980s, even asserted there is no such thing as "society," only individuals and families. If there is no "society," we owe society nothing - and there is no such thing as social justice.
And thus Fox News' Glenn Beck, the clown prince of neoliberalism, can urge his faithful to walk out of church if their pastor so much a mentions social justice.
Of course, some other famous thinkers had a different point of view. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle said that justice holds the city together. Thomas Aquinas, the 13th Century Catholic philosopher, asserted that "justice consists in sharing."
Indeed, a government grounded in the moral traditions of Judaism and Christianity is a government that acts as the caretaker of the common good with a special concern for the poor and the powerless. Neoliberalism is heretical to the Judeo-Christian moral tradition.
--Neoliberalism despises government because government is the enforcer of the sharing (e.g. taxes, regulations, monopoly curbing) needed for the common good. Neoliberals want to shrink government so small that it can be drowned in the bathtub, as right-wing political operative Grover Norquist cleverly put it.
Consistent to this anti-social core, neoliberalism stresses "privatization," taking things out of government hands and giving them to private business.
Following the neoliberal script, President George W. Bush tried to "privatize" Social Security, handing over retirement benefits to the mercy of the stock market. Water supply has in some places been privatized; airports and roads have been targeted for privatizing.
--Neoliberalism is anti-union. Though neoliberals laud competition, they do not want competition coming from workers who are instead reduced to "human capital" that can be discarded as readily as a worn-out machine. You don't do collective bargaining with machines, so why should you with workers?
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan went after the air traffic controllers union, setting an anti-union tone that would dominate the decade. Today, Gov. Walker is going after public workers' unions trying to deny them the right to collective bargaining. It's all of the same piece.
--Neoliberalism is a kind of secular religion which demands that we embrace a pious faith in the "market," which must be granted unfettered freedom to work its will, the sort of power that traditional religions ascribe to God.
Believers in neoliberalism talk about "the magic of the market" or what "the market decides" as if it were some supernatural or all-knowing deity, not just a collection of corporations and investors. The goal of the corporations and investors, of course, is profit and growth, not the common good.
So, not surprisingly, neoliberalism, when unleashed, produces economic and social inequality. But its adherents insist that whatever the "market" creates is "good," regardless of the harm to the planet's environment or the human pain.
"It is our job to glory in inequality!" Thatcher once declared - and she was as good as her word. In pre-Thatcher Britain, one person in ten was classed as living below the poverty line. When she finished in 1990, one in four was poor and among children the ratio was one in three.
Reaganism achieved a similar result in the United States. Kevin Phillips, a former aide to President Richard Nixon, notes that during the 1980s, wealth gushed to the top. The top 10 percent of Americans increased their average family income by 16 percent; the top five percent by 23 percent; and the ecstatic top one percent reaped a whopping 50 percent increase.
As economist Susan George pointed out, the bottom 80 percent all lost, and the lower you were on the scale the more you lost.
However, the Progressive tradition of Wisconsin is not dead. Today, it roars in the rotunda of the Capitol building, where on the ceiling is depicted the Wisconsin image of justice, a woman holding scales but she is not blindfolded.
She is holding the scales with a determined look on her face that seems to say: "Don't you dare fuss with these scales of justice."
In these heartening yet trying days, as Americans take to the streets to defend those principles, one can detect a hint of a smile on the strong face of Lady Justice - as she looks down on workers united in spirited protests against neoliberal injustice.
Daniel C. Maguire is a Professor of Moral Theology at Marquette University, a Catholic, Jesuit institution in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is author of A Moral Creed for All Christians.
He can be reached at daniel.maguire@marquette.edu
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/021811b.html
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Remember this folks; anyone here who agrees with what is happening all over the country - the attack on the middle class and unions, the worship of inequality and the removal of safety nets for the needy, (I got mine - you get yours) giving the wealthy whatever they want, revering the "free market", results and reality be damned, and all of the other things that my corporate thread and the repuke thread expose, is an enemy of this country. They want rule by business with the government acquiesing to their demands. And a government too small to fight them.
I don't want runaway government either. I dislike uncontrolled power wherever it exists. We must be vigilant and be suspicious of both, but what conservatives/libertarians/the religious right/ are now attempting, especially since Reagan, will destroy this country. Ponder the recent financial catastrophe and its damage to the world, notice who paid the bills, and how the perps got away unscathed to see the danger. It has happened before and it will happen again if corporate power is not controlled.
Be warned.
Conservatives use divide and conquer rhetoric in Wisconsin union protests.
How Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker divvies up the world:
“We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots,” Mr. Walker, a Republican, said in a speech. “The bottom line is that we are going to look at every legal means we have to try to put that balance more on the side of taxpayers.”
News flash: Public employees are taxpayers.
How the headline writers at the Wall Street Journal divvy up the world:
What's at Stake in Wisconsin's Budget Battle
Who's in charge of our political system—voters or unions?
News flash: Union members are voters.
Notice how it's never "Who's in charge of our political system? Tea Party Express OR citizens?"
This divisive framing about the Wisconsin protest is deliberate, not just a reflection of how conservatives don't understand the difference between sets and subsets. Setting up phony factions in the working and middle classes is the main strategy they use whenever there's a possibility of unification and concerted action not condoned by elites.
Fight it. Document it. Call it out. Every single time.
http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/...union-protests
Anyone Want To Defend This A-Hole Liar And Sleazeball
Scott Walker Padded Salary Increases for Cronies During Budgetary Distress: 24% Salary Increase for Aide with 2 Public Pensions
Scott Walker, the Governor of Wisconsin who is spearheading the GOP effort to crush collective bargaining, lavished relatively large salary increases on his staff when he was chief executive of the Milwaukee County Board. Walker surreptitiously did this in 2008 - without the approval of the county board itself and at a time that the county was facing a fiscal deficit, and Walker was about to lay off a large number of union workers. In addition, 700 county positions had already been left vacant due to budgetary pressures.
According to a 2008 Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (MJS) article, which exposed Walker's illicit personal staff raises, one aide was to achieve a 26% increase - solely initiated and approved by Walker - even though the staffer, Tom Nardelli, was to receive tax-payer funded pensions that would exceed $35,700 a year. A member of the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors called Nardelli's salary increase "obscene," according the MJS.
As with the current "budget crisis" in the State of Wisconsin, Walker was helping to create a budget deficit, while using the situation he is responsible for to try and break the unions.
According to a February 18 New York Times editorial, "Just last month, he [Walker] and the Legislature gave away $117 million in tax breaks, mostly for businesses that expand and for private health savings accounts. That was a choice lawmakers made, and had it not been for those decisions and a few others, according to the state's Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the state would have had a surplus."
It's appropriate then to backtrack to 2008 and Walker's history of gilding the lily for his cronies while trying to break the back of working families becomes illuminated.
According to the MJS article entitled "Walker Issues Hefty Raises to Top Milwaukee County Aides":
Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker wants a 26% pay raise for his chief of staff, former Ald. Tom Nardelli, while bypassing traditional County Board approval in quietly issuing large pay raises over the summer to several other top aides.
Nardelli would get the biggest pay increase of top-tier county officials, a nearly $20,000 raise to $95,000 a year. Seven county administrators also scored increases of up to 12.5%.
Some supervisors are upset about being left out of the decision-making process for many of the raises and say Walker's timing couldn't be worse. Heavily rewarding a few top managers while Walker puts final touches on a 2009 budget that's expected to call for scores of layoffs of union workers sends a message of callous disregard, critics of the raises say.
Among the other big winners among Walker's top aides was Mitchell International Airport Director Barry Bateman. His pay rises $13,595, or 11%, to $136,299 a year. Facilities Management Director Jack Takerian got an $11,771 (12.5%) raise, to nearly $106,000.
One of Walker's highly questionable claims in his Koch Brothers' efforts to squash unions by first going after public worker collective bargaining is that the union benefits are higher than in the private sector.
Yet, in 2008, the MJS reported:
Orville Seymer, field director for Citizens for Responsible Government Network, said the raises for Nardelli and some other Walker aides appeared excessive.
"I just think all these people are overpaid" and unlikely to command such salaries in the private sector, Seymer said.
In his stand-off as the point man for the Koch Brothers, Dick Armey, and the national
Republican Party, Walker is doing in 2011 what he did in 2008: enrich his cronies and the well-off at taxpayer expense, create a budget crisis, and then using the budgetary problem that he is responsible for to crush the unions.
History repeats itself, doesn't it - and so does the hypocrisy that threatens the existence of the American working family.
Walker issues hefty raises to top Milwaukee County aides
http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/32492604.html
Gov. Walker's Pretext
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/op...1.html?_r=3&hp
This Article Contains A Profound Truth
WI Update: "It's Not About the Budget; It's About the Power," Weak Compromise Offered by Republicans
Amid much excellent coverage of the Wisconsin union protests, Paul Krugman's column in the Times yesterday is worthy of a close read:
[W]hat’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite [Wisconsin Governor Scott] Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy. And that’s why anyone who believes that we need some counterweight to the political power of big money should be on the demonstrators’ side.
Indeed. He goes on:
[I]t’s not about the budget; it’s about the power.
In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. Billionaires can field armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers did in the case of Mr. Walker). On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we’re more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate.
Given this reality, it’s important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions. You don’t have to love unions, you don’t have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they’re among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans, as opposed to the wealthy.
The news out of Wisconsin today is that the state's moderate Republicans have tossed out something of a compromise to the protesters. The proposed compromise "calls for most collective bargaining rights of public-employee unions to be eliminated—per Mr. Walker's bill—but then reinstated in 2013." The state's Democrats are rejecting the offer, noting that they unions have already compromised enough, having made concessions on their pension and healthcare. As Sen. Jon Erpenbach noted, "If it's OK to collectively bargain in 2013, why isn't it OK today?"
Meanwhile, Governor Walker continues to be a tool, releasing three bogus reasons why "collective bargaining is a fiscal issue." Here's FireDogLake on why his reasoning is so weak:
One concerns what health care plan teachers sign up for, which is mainly an issue of the Governor seemingly wanting to strip the health care choices of workers (if you like what you have, you can keep it!). The next is some gotcha issue about Viagra in Milwaukee, which state courts ruled against a few years later. The third, and the only state issue, is overtime rules for corrections officers. Somehow I’m not convinced that this is such a scourge. The President of the Wisconsin State Senate didn’t do the job on that either today.
Grasping at straws, that.
By Lauren Kelley | Sourced from AlterNet
Posted at February 21, 2011, 8:47 am
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The part I put in bold says everything about this clash in Wisconsin that matters. Power must not be inappropriately uneven - in ANY direction.
Oh Noes, This A-Hole Is trying To Do Even More Damage
Than We Thought.
The other part of the Scott Walker plan: Firesale of Wisconsin state assets
Via Mike Konczal, more explanation of why big corporations like Koch Industries are going to such lengths to support Gov. Scott Walker's budget. There's some sweet deals in it for them. Ed at ginandtacos highlights one:
The lion's share of attention regarding Scott Walker's legislative proposal has been paid to the effort to revoke Wisconsin public employees' collective bargaining rights, but the 144-page bill (more reliable link here) is a far more exhaustive and inclusive list of the fundamentals of Republican politics in the 21st Century. Not many people have the time to plow through the whole bill but those who do will be rewarded with plenty of gems like this:
16.896 Sale or contractual operation of state-owned heating, cooling, and power plants. (1) Notwithstanding ss. 13.48 (14) (am) and 16.705 (1), the department may sell any state-owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state. Notwithstanding ss. 196.49 and 196.80, no approval or certification of the public service commission is necessary for a public utility to purchase, or contract for the operation of, such a plant, and any such purchase is considered to be in the public interest and to comply with the criteria for certification of a project under s. 196.49 (3) (b).
If this isn't the best summary of the goals of modern conservatism, I don't know what is. It's like a highlight reel of all of the tomahawk dunks of neo-Gilded Age corporatism: privatization, no-bid contracts, deregulation, and naked cronyism. Extra bonus points for the explicit effort to legally redefine the term "public interest" as "whatever the energy industry lobbyists we appoint to these unelected bureaucratic positions say it is."
Walker's budget—and his intention—goes well beyond crippling public employees' unions. He's selling the state to the highest bidder (or more like it, the largest campaign contributor, since bids won't be required for the acquisition of state assets). The new slogan: What's good for the Koch brothers is good for Wisconsin. Breaking the back of labor is one part of that end goal, but not the whole of it.
http://rss.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/...n-state-assets
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This is friggin unbelievable. Privatization of state assests. This is in the repuke playbook!!!
Holy cow. Wow. Jeez. Holy Crap! Son-of-a-gun. Damn.
For those who want to read about pukes doing this ALL OVER THE WORLD read Naomi Klein's, The Shock Doctrine. These people are repulsive scum. (redundant, I know)
The Last Time Scott Walker Went Union Busting,
He Was Overruled And Wasted Taxpayer Dollars.
The last time Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) went after public sector unions it had “disastrous results” for him and for taxpayers. As Milwaukee County Executive in 2009, Walker tried to get rid of the unionized security guards at the county courthouse and replace them with contractors, which he promised would save the county money. The County Board rejected the idea, but in March of 2010 Walker “unilaterally ordered it,” claiming there was a budget emergency. Walker hired the British security contractor Wackenhut — of Kabul Embassy sex scandal fame — to replace the guards. Unfortunately for Walker and Milwaukee taxpayers, an arbiter later ruled that Walker had overstepped his authority, and ordered the county to reinstate the unionized workers, pay backwages, and pay tens-of-thousands of dollars in arbiter fees. As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow pointed out last night, Walker’s “dress rehersal” for his current union busting effort may end up costing Milwaukee taxpayers an extra half a million dollars.
Watch it: http://act.alternet.org/go/4710?akid...018.ysqGGU&t=3
While his anti-union crusade proved to be a boondagle for Milwaukee County, Walker had escaped in time to wash his hands clean of it, as the arbiter’s ruling against didn’t come down until last month — after Walker had been sworn in as governor. Maddow also notes that the man put in charge of Wackenhut’s security at the courthouse had a criminal record and had served prison time.
Law Enforcement Association Official Regrets Walker Endorsement
Tracy Fuller, executive board president of the Wisconsin Law Enforcement Association, says in a statement on the association’s website that he regrets the endorsement by the Wisconsin Troopers Association of Gov. Scott Walker.
The law enforcement union’s members were not included in Walker’s assault on jobs and collective bargaining rights. (We’re sure the fact the group endorsed Walker is just coincidence. Not.) Fuller also says he regrets “being the recipient of any perceived benefits provided by the governor’s annointing.”
More from Fuller:
I value all of the…agencies around the state. I don’t know how any of us could function without any of us around the state. We all need each other….
I think everyone’s job and career is just as significant as the others. Everyone’s family is just as valuable as mine or any other person’s….Everyone’s needs are just as valuable. We are all great people.
http://org2.democracyinaction.org/di...DszrjDlrQDmkKL
