And therein hangs a tale: about grassroots Democrats who act like activists, who hold that slaps are sometimes what it takes to get the political job done, and Democratic leaders who act like you can solve all political problems with a hug. Which, pretty much, was Tom Barrett’s entire election platform. As I explained here in May, the leading candidate in the primary to face Walker in the recall ran with a take-no-prisoners strategy to restore union rights: she pledged to veto any budget that didn’t restore collective bargaining. That meant that if she won the statehouse, Republican legislators in Madison could hold on to their anti-union law only on pain of shutting down the state.
Then, out of nowhere, little more than two months before Election day, a new candidate announced: Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Two days earlier, he’d had a $400-a-plate fundraising luncheon, closed to the media, hosted by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Here was a signal: Barrett was the Democratic Party Establishment’s man. And the Democratic Establishment, in this age of Barack Obama, does things in a very certain way: it never takes any prisoners, never takes the most gutsy path (this is even true for the vaunted “tough guy” Rahm Emanuel, whose standing orders as White House chief of staff was never to take on any fights unless victory was assured in advance).
Barrett immediately announced a different plan to reverse the anti-union law if he became governor: He would call a special legislative session, in which he would introduce a standalone repeal bill. He would make it hard for his side on purpose. He would make the lions lay down with the lambs, Obama style. He would sell himself to the electorate as the peacemaker. He would follow the Bill Clinton strategy, triangulate against his own side. If swing voters hate union cronyism, he would prove he wasn’t a union crony. “I’m not the union guy,” he would say on the campaign trail – he was the guy the unions didn’t want; they even tried to talk him out of running.
There are many problems with this strategy. The first has to do with the way the media works. Programmed robotically to see any political issue in polarized terms, journalists will register “leftist” pugnacity no matter how conciliatory a Democrat behaves in actual fact – as with Bill Clinton in the 1990s and Barack Obama now. The second problem is that it requires Democrats to simultaneously surrender the actual benefits of being bold, tough partisans. The Republicans enjoy the grassroots energy of a fierce field army on the ground convinced they are fighting for nothing less than the survival of civilization (meanwhile they harvest moderates in a far more efficient way – using their money advantage to saturate the electorate with slick TV ads). Democrats appeal to moderates as their activist strategy – although, in an old saw Democrats have long ago forgotten, moderates are the people who don’t knock on doors on election day. Liberal activists who show up do so reluctantly – having already seen their candidate sell them out.
wisconsin
Thus, the whole “Thomas Frank” line about how Wisconsin workers betrayed their own interests is absurd precisely because it assumes that the Democrats stand for advancing those interests. As was to be expected, the Democrats cozied up to Walker’s line on every single issue that sparked the rebellion in the first place. And Wisconsin Democrats weren’t alone in doing this—they were toeing the same line as their pro-austerity, anti-union counterparts in other so-called “blue states” such as Illinois, New York and California. This isn’t a problem of this or that Democrat politician; it’s a national problem that concerns the entire Democrat edifice.
A new plan crafted by Gov. Scott Walker (R) would allow guns in most of Wisconsin’s state Capitol, while most photos would still be banned.
Wisconsin is, in a sense, near-ideal terrain for a showdown with the Tea Party brand of Republicanism. The actors in the drama are overwhelmingly white, putting the raw class nature of capital’s aggressions in stark relief. With relatively few Black scapegoats to complicate the issue, white folks must confront the bare facts of the way late-stage capitalism tramples ordinary people as it careens from crisis to crisis. Or, maybe not. White supremacy is a dynamic ideology that has always been central to the domestic functions of American Exceptionalism, distorting not just race relations but all other social relations, as well. Once the foundational Nigger has been invented and given life in the public mind, with all his purported logic-bending and society-polluting defects, his characteristics can be imputed to other targeted groups – a ready-made demonization kit. Public employees in general and teachers in particular now find themselves Niggerized as lazy featherbedders, no-count malingerers, fellow travelers with welfare queens and other human malignancies that must be excised so that the free market can work its wonders. Glen Ford ☀
David H. Koch ☀
Nothing in this cartoon makes sense. The prank call to Walker shows that Walker has no idea what David Koch sounds like, so it’s pretty clear they don’t talk to each other. Needless to say, there’s no evidence that Koch ever suggested to Walker that Walker take on the public unions, much less that it would be “no problem” to do so. And Koch has no personal stake in the matter; he own private companies, and the fight is over public employees.
The billionaire Koch brothers played an “influential role” an overt national political campaign starting in early 2011 to end the collective bargaining rights of workers who belong to public unions. The push to bust the unions started in Wisconsin in February, 2011, and spread to other states that had newly-elected Republican governors whose campaigns had been supported by the Kochs. In a February 26, 2011 article, Andrew Stern of Reuters tied the Koch brothers and their businesses directly to the union-busting effort, saying, “Charles and David Koch, who both rank 24th on the Forbes list of the world’s richest people with $17.5 billion each, are behind campaign donations of tens of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to Republicans leading the anti-union effort.” As libertarian stalwarts, the article said, the Koch brothers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars since the 1960s to help destroy unions. “This is all a wave of political belief that the Kochs unquestionably have funded in various ways for years and years,” said Brian Doherty, editor of Reason Magazine, published by a think tank funded by the Kochs.[1]
Scott Hagerstrom, executive director of the Koch-funded front group, Americans for Prosperity in a speech to attendees of the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) , publicly advocated taking unions out “at the knees,” which contradicted public statements to the contrary made by Republican governors, like Wisconsin’s Gov. Scott Walker, regarding anti-union legislation being brought in state legislatures nationally. Walker has insisted unwaveringly to the public that the union-busting effort it purely an economic move designed to help bring the state out of debt.[2][3]
Koch Industries Front Group Americans for Prosperity Launches Ad to Support Walker’s Union Busting
As ThinkProgress has reported, the global conglomerate Koch Industries not only helped elect Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), but is the leading force orchestrating his union-busting campaign. Koch gave Walker over $43,000 in direct donations and its allies aired millions of dollars worth of attack ads against his Democratic opponent. Then, Koch political operatives pressured Walker to crush labor unions as one of his first priorities. Tim Phillips, a former lobbying partner to Jack Abramoff and current president of Americans for Prosperity, a front financed by David Koch, told the New York Times that Koch operatives “had worked behind the scenes to try to encourage a union showdown.” A Koch-financed front group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, has prepped Wisconsin GOP lawmakers with anti-labor legislative ideas.
In his two terms as governor (1900-1906), Robert La Follette saw big business threaten the foundation of democracy. He responded by making his state a leader in the burgeoning progressive reform movement. “Fighting Bob” sought to regulate business owners like George F. Baer, who scoffed at the need for labor unions, claiming that “the rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by Christian men to whom God has given control of the property rights of the country.”
La Follette’s reforms in Wisconsin were consistent with his ultimate goal: to distribute more equitably the nation’s wealth and power. His reforms included regulation of railroads and other powerful utilities, civil service reform, regulation of lobbyists, resource conservation measures, tax reform, and candidate nomination by primary election. As a U.S. senator from 1906 until his death in 1925, he continued his efforts to prevent what he termed “the encroachment of the powerful few upon the rights of the many.”
Robert La Follette Jr. was elected as his father’s successor in the Senate and continued Wisconsin’s reform tradition for another twenty-one years.
Most Americans today don’t know the name La Follette, but they immediately recognize the name of the man who in 1946 ended the family’s forty-year reign in the Senate: Joseph McCarthy.
McCarthy, whose insistence that communists had infiltrated America’s unions as well as the State Department and the Army, provided a very different kind of national leadership. In the early 1950s McCarthy enjoyed enormous popularity. He was hailed as a hero for his aggressive efforts to ferret out the internal communist menace. He was featured on the covers of Time and Newsweek magazines and celebrated by social and political organizations nationwide for displaying the kind of toughness the country needed in the crisis of the Cold War.
Despite his short-term popularity, McCarthy’s aggressive crusade exacerbated rather than solved the nation’s problems. Formally censured in 1954 for bringing “dishonor and disrepute” upon the U.S. Senate, McCarthy left in his wake broken careers and damaged lives. His leadership proved an international embarrassment.
A GNT creation ©2007–2013
