Wisconsin: It's About the Money, But Not the State Budget

A Must Read Article of the Day...   by David Michael Green

"People need to understand what Warren Buffett understands, that there has been a class war going on for three decades now, and that his team is winning.


It’s crucial to understand what the regressive initiative that our brothers and sisters in Wisconsin are right now fighting is really all about, and how that fits into the context of our era. 


This is just the latest, and nearly the last, in a succession of efforts in America over the last three decades to move money from the hands of non-elites to those of oligarchs. 


Make no mistake, that program constitutes essentially the sum total of American politics at its core over the last generation.  All else is a sideshow or, more likely and more ominously, an intentional diversion, just as a skilled magician is careful to give your eye something else to focus on as he moves the ball from under the cup.


That money-shifting effort has been relentless, and it has been fantastically successful.  We have witnessed the greatest transfer of wealth in human history over this period of time.


 More astonishing, here in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is that it went the wrong way – from ordinary folk who need the money to wealthy elites, many of whom actually couldn’t even find ways to spend those enormous quantities flooding their accounts if they wanted to. 


Most astonishing of all is that this happened in a functioning democracy, where the votes of rip-offees vastly outnumber the votes of rip-offers.  If anyone you meet ever doubts the capacity of human stupidity, tell them this tale.  It’s an amazing story.  It’s also the most significant single fact of American politics in our time.  And we don’t even talk about it.


That’s because of the stunning success of the thieves in executing their heist.  As oft-noted, the perfect crime is one that is not even detected.  Welcome to America.


You gotta hand it to these guys.  They have been smart, thorough, ruthless, tenacious, patient and ruthless.  Did I mention ruthless?  They have attacked New Deal America – the set of policies that created a vast middle class for the first time and dramatically improved people’s quality of life en masse – in every way possible, and have managed to beat it into near submission.


They’ve been very clever about it, too.  They fabricated think tanks whose product at any other time would have seemed absurdly laughable. 


They created a whole new media for themselves, and intimidated the parts they didn’t outright own. 


They dumbed down education, making sure that any knowledge of history or civics or – god forbid – comparative politics was eliminated from the curriculum, thus producing nice, docile worker bees who know just enough to do their ill-paid jobs, but not enough to even know that they’re ill-paid. 


They allied with regressive forces like religious institutions, the military and the Republican Party. 


Then they bought the Democrats too, not least of which including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, whose economic policies are fundamentally indistinguishable from the GOP’s. 


They infiltrated the courts with corporate hacks so corrupt that they steal elections and sit on cases even when they’ve received contributions from litigants in the matter. 


They smashed labor unions at every opportunity. 


They drove the country deep into debt with the express purpose of making it then seem that any further social spending was no longer sustainable. 


They tore down even the thin veneer of campaign finance reform from the prior era. 


They shredded the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and have bullied any opponents with thuggish acts of verbal and other forms of personal assault. 


They made voting more difficult, wrongly purged masses of voters from the rolls, and used rigged machines to steal elections. 


They have poisoned the minds of Americans with diversionary bogeymen ranging from Saddam Hussein to marrying gays to the War on Christmas.


The purpose of all these efforts, however, was always the same, and typically had little to do with culture conflicts, endless Middle Eastern wars, or televised Hannity and Colmes style pissing matches.  It was always about the money.  Always.  It remains about the money today.


That’s why the malignant disease better known as Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker is now doing what he is doing. 


He claims that the state is broke and that he has no choice but to roll back public sector salaries and benefits.  Everything about that claim is a lie. 


The state is not nearly as far in the red as other states that are not doing what he is doing.  The state could increase taxes if it wanted to solve its problem, rather than exploiting workers.  In fact, the state just got done creating it’s the very deficit Walker claims to be the problem by slashing $177 million from its tax rolls.  State employees are underpaid compared to equivalent private sector workers, not overpaid as he claims.  And despite all this, the unions have nevertheless publicly agreed to negotiate givebacks with the Governor.  And so on."
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This post is an excerpt from an article written by David Michael Green,  a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.  The complete article is here:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/21-3