Wisconsin Update: The rise of the plutocratic corporatocracy

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

In an "historic" first, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker became the first governor to survive a recall election. It's a small sample size, since there have only been two other recalls of governors, and Arizona's Ev Mecham was impeached before we could vote to recall him.

The Lieutenant Governor and four GOP state senators also survived the recall election.

The New York Times published the exit polling which is far more interesting than the topline results of the election. Wisconsin Recall Exit Polls: How Different Groups Voted:

Party Identity

Democrat 34%

Republican 35%

Independent/Other 31%

Who did you vote for in the 2010 election for governor?

Tom Barrett 34%

Scott Walker 47%

Soemone else 4%

Did not vote 13%

Do you or someone in your household belong to a labor union?

Yes 33%

No 67%

Opinion of recent changes in state law limiting ability of government workers to collectively bargain over pay and benefits

Approve 52%

Disapprove 47%

Do you think recall elections are appropriate?

For any reason 27%

Only for official misconduct 60%

Never 10%

So the topline results are not surprising.

What we have here are Republicans and "independents" who are willing to vote against their own economic self-interest (collective bargaining with their employers) because of the Republican strategy of generating envy and resentment against public sector workers among private sector workers who do not enjoy the employee benefits of unionized public sector workers. Or as Governor Scott Walker described it to one of his wealthy plutocratic supporters, the strategy of "divide and conquer."

Rather than raise the working standards of all workers up to the standards of unionized public sector workers, Wisconsinites voted against their own economic self-interest in a race to the bottom. This phenomenon is not limited to Wisconsin. This has been repeated in states across the country, including Arizona.

This is class warfare. As Robber Baron Jay Gould once said, "I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half." In Wisconsin, it was the Koch brothers (Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, and numerous other front groups) who got one-half of of the working class to kill the other half to serve the interests of these wealthy plutocrats.

There are two subtexts to the Wisconsin recall election that portend a threat to the very survival of our democratic form of government.

First is the extraordinary amount of money spent in this race by eccentric conservative billionaires like the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and Dick DeVos, and corporate Super PACs, like Karl Rove's American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, unleashed by Citizens United v. FEC. As President Harry Truman observed, "They admire the government of the United States so much that they would like to buy it."

Second is the GOP strategy to destroy unions as a means to the end of permanently defunding and disabling the Democratic Party to achieve Karl Rove's promise of a "permanent Republican majority." The goal of the GOP is not just to kill unions, they want to kill the Democratic Party, and to remove the last obstacle to imposing an authoritarian plutocratic corporatocracy.

Let's look at the Citzens United effect. "Tuesday’s recall election of Republican Gov. Scott Walker is the most expensive in Wisconsin history. More than $63.5 million has been spent by candidates and independent groups, the overwhelming majority underwritten by out-of-state sources," according to iWatch News, a publication of The Center for Public Integrity:

The record spending total was made possible thanks to the Citizens United U.S. Supreme Court decision — which had the effect of invalidating Wisconsin’s century-old ban on independent expenditures by corporations and unions — and a state law that allows unlimited contributions to the incumbent in recall elections.

The amount spent since November 2011 trounces the state’s previous record of $37.4 million, set during the 2010 gubernatorial campaign.

While Barrett has received about 26 percent of his $4 million in campaign donations from outside the Badger State, Walker has drawn nearly two-thirds of his $30.5 million contributions from out of state, according to campaign filings released May 29. Walker has outraised Barrett 7 ½ to 1 since late 2011, though Barrett didn’t enter the race until late March.

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They include the Republican Governors Association, which received a $1 million contribution from conservative billionaire David Koch in February, and billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson.

* * *

Through April, Walker’s top three donors combined gave more than challenger Barrett’s campaign had raised overall. Four of Walker’s top seven donors are out-of-state billionaires, including former AmWay CEO and former Michigan gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos, and casino magnate Adelson, who each gave $250,000.

Adelson has given $26.5 million to super PACs in the 2012 election — most of it to Winning Our Future, a pro-Newt Gingrich group — making him the most prolific super PAC contributor so far, according to a Center for Public Integrity report.

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The Republican Governors Association has spent roughly $4 million on campaign ads through its Right Direction Wisconsin PAC since April 23. But because the RGA’s PAC is based out-of-state, it only has to disclose to state regulators its donations coming from inside Wisconsin, a glaring loophole.

Of its most recent $4 million outlay, the RGA raised only a little over $7,000 from inside the state.

The RGA does have to report donors to the IRS, and its 2012 first quarter filing reveals a $500,000 donation from the Chamber of Commerce and a $1 million February contribution from Koch.

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The Campaign for Wisconsin Democracy gathers purchasing data from media outlets, and estimates about $8.5 million in issue ads have been bought during the recall.

The right-wing groups Americans for Prosperity and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, known as “Wisconsin’s Business Voice,” and the anti-union Center for Union Facts have made roughly 75 percent of those purchases. Greater Wisconsin [pro-union] has spent about $2 million, according to McCabe.

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In total, outside spending made by independent expenditure groups and Issue ad organizations, totals $30.5 million in the recall election — well over half of which has been contributed by undisclosed sources, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

“All the spending is outrageous and wrong, but it’s also legal,” says McCabe.

Wisconsin is also ground zero in the GOP strategy to destroy unions, and the unions are losing. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (decisively anti-union) reported last week Wisconsin Unions See Ranks Drop Ahead of Recall Vote (pay wall):

Public-employee unions in Wisconsin have experienced a dramatic drop in membership — by more than half for the second-biggest union — since a law championed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker sharply curtailed their ability to bargain over wages and working conditions.

Wisconsin membership in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees-the state's second-largest public-sector union after the National Education Association, which represents teachers-fell to 28,745 in February from 62,818 in March 2011, according to a person who has viewed Afscme's figures. A spokesman for Afscme declined to comment.

And here is what has happend to the American Federation of Teachers Union.

As Rachel Maddow observed in a segment of her program on Friday, "Killing off the unions is what Republicans want to do in every state of the country. That's why Scott Walker is the poster boy for the Republican Party this year. They understand this is the way they can win not just now but forever. Republicans get this and they want it to happen in every state in the country. Do Democrats get it? Do they understand what's at stake?"

Rachel Maddow explained what's at stake in this segment from her program last Friday.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Steve Benen writes today, The lasting impact of the Wisconsin recall:

Walker's agenda has always been about taking a level playing field and making a permanent change, tilting it in the GOP's favor forever more. And after last night, he's gotten away with it.

In the process, the governor, his party, and his very wealthy allies have also created a blueprint for other Republicans to follow elsewhere — crushing public-sector unions in order to destroy one of the pillars of the Democratic Party's electoral foundation. If labor can't organize, Democrats can't compete.

We have one political party whom political scientists Thomas Mann and Robert Oppenheimer have described as "an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition." Let's just say it: The Republicans Are The Problem. This is not your father's GOP. This is something alien, something radical and extreme and authoritarian.

These radical extremists are funded by wealthy plutocrats who want to impose a corporatocracy which they control. Thanks to Citizens United v. FEC, these wealthy plutocrats are now free to spend as much money as it takes now to buy the government so they can control it forever.

Unless the U.S. Supreme Court uses the opportunity presented by the Montana case of American Tradition Partnership, et al., v. Bullock (11-1179) to reconsider its decision in Citizens United v. FEC at the Justices’ private Conference on June 14, or the American people rise up and force an amendment to the U.S. Constitution declaring that corporations are not people and money is not speech to reverse Citzens United v. FEC, 2012 may very well be our last democratic election.

This new breed of American radical extremists, funded by wealthy plutocrats, will succeed in killing off the unions and ultimately disabling the Democratic Party, so that there is no effective political opposition to their ability to impose an authoritarian plutocratic corporatocracy.

President Harry Truman's words of wisdom are never more relevant than today: "“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”