Not so great Scotts
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
One might have thought that the era of top-down class warfare and Robin Hood in reverse policies were history with the election of the relatively progressive Democrat Barack Obama and the end of the presidency of George W. Bush — who once quipped to an audience he described as composed of the “haves and the haves more” that some people call you the elite but I call you my base.
It turns out that we hadn’t seen anything yet. The Great Recession set off a whole new round of class war, one bigger and more ominous even than that we suffered during the eight years of the younger Bush’s presidency. For this time it is not only being waged at the federal level — pitting the Democratic president against a House of Representatives dominated by reactionary Republicans — it is also being waged in one fashion or another in all fifty states.
Leading the pack are the two terrible Scotts, the freshly minted governors of Florida (Rick Scott) and Wisconsin (Scott Walker) who are taking the preferential option for the rich (the reverse of the social doctrine of the most progressive wing of the Roman Catholic Church) to a whole new level. They want to plug the big holes that the Great Recession poked in state budgets on the backs of government workers, their unions, and the most vulnerable sectors of the population, especially those who rely on Medicaid and other state programs for their welfare — or their very survival.
Never mind that the Great Recession, which sharply cut into state budgets by reducing income, property, and sales taxes collected and increasing the demand for state services for the newly unemployed or underemployed, was caused not by lavish compensation for teachers, public health workers and firefighters but by the colossal irresponsibility of Wall Street speculators, with the largest and most prestigious banks and financial companies in the lead. The budget axe everywhere is being swung against workers, particularly state workers, and with special vengeance against public sector unions, which represent the last bulwark of what is left of the labor movement in the United States, and which, not coincidentally, provide key financial and organizational support to the Democratic Party.
It is no surprise that Florida governor Rick Scott recently pleaded with the Tea Party to help him steamroll his program through the state legislature. The two Scotts — and their brethren in the many states where in the 2010 elections the GOP won a “trifecta” (the governorship plus both branches of the legislature) — are hard-core right-wing ideologues hell-bent on transforming the United States into a heaven for business, especially big business, by neutering all actors that might pose a semblance of a countervailing force, namely the state and organized workers. The Tea Party — with its abhorrence of government — could provide ideal shock troops for this endeavor.
In their brief tenure, each of the Scotts has given ample proof of their ideological extremism. In the case of Rick Scott probably the clearest example is his stubborn refusal to reject $2.4 billion of federal stimulus money allocated to build a high-speed rail line linking Orlando and Tampa. The federal money would have covered almost the entire cost of the project. In 2010, Republican Governor Charlie Crist and a GOP-dominated state legislature gladly accepted the money. Scott gave various reasons for his decision, mainly concerns that Florida taxpayers would be stuck with the bill in the event of cost overruns or excessive operational costs. Yet, even after advocates of the high-speed train project cobbled together a coalition of Florida cities — Orlando, Lakeland, Tampa and Miami — that would have guaranteed that state taxpayers would not be responsible for any of the costs, the Florida Governor proved unyielding and effectively killed what has been described as a “decades-long dream” of a rapid rail system linking the state’s major cities. The project would have created an estimated 24,000 jobs; this in a state with an unemployment rate consistently above the dismal national average and from a governor who campaigned on the promise of creating 700,000 new jobs in seven years.
Scott’s decision to reject the rail money was so rigidly and transparently motivated by politics and ideology that it even drew sharply adverse reactions from several Republican politicians. One GOP senator joined a Democratic colleague in an unsuccessful suit charging the governor with overstepping his constitutional authority. According to The Miami Herald, Senator Paula Doherty (R-Lakeland) “accused the governor of making a political decision aimed at thwarting a priority of the Obama administration. Another GOP senator said the governor was sending the wrong message to Washington: “There seems to be the thought that if there’s money from Washington it’s evil and we should send it back…. That money is our money. We send it to Washington.”
For his part, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has been pushing legislation that would break the back of the state’s public labor unions by virtually denying them the right to collective bargaining. In a state with a strong progressive tradition Walker’s move has been met with a fierce reaction. For the last three weeks, hundreds of thousands of protesters have braved frigid temperatures to mob the state Capitol in Madison while all fourteen Democratic Senators left the state to deny the quorum necessary to present a spending bill. A protest on February 19 drew 70,000 people; on February 26, the number grew to around 80,000. In contrast, a protest organized by a right-wing national organization in support of the governor’s policies drew only 700. One local commentator called Walker’s proposed budget an “unprecedented assault on public education.” A new poll of likely voters in the state found that 57 percent disapproved of the governor’s performance, including 48 percent who strongly disapproved.
The cases of Florida and Wisconsin are only instances of a larger battle that is being waged across the nation. At stake is virtually all of the social progress and labor rights won after tough battles lasting decades. The entire campaign being carried out by radical conservatives in the Republican Party and allied groups is built on a pack of lies. The notion that government workers are overpaid has been refuted by tons of research. Governor Rick Scott’s logic for cutting $5 billion from education, Medicaid, and other services in order to lower the corporate tax rate is belied by a number of facts. At a flat 5 percent, Florida already has one of the nation’s lowest corporate tax rates. A recent survey of corporations found that a state’s corporate tax rate ranks sixth among the reasons for location decisions. And the five states with the lowest corporate tax rates are home to 52 Fortune 500 corporations while the five with the highest rates host 120.
Finally, the case for reducing government spending in the midst of a lame and uncertain recovery is non-existent. It can only further reduce the low level of demand responsible for the recession in the first place, thereby setting in a vicious circle that will guarantee glacial growth or a fallback into another full-blown recession.
The Republican reactionary “revolution” that began with Ronald Reagan in 1980 never went away and is rearing its ugly head once again, and with a vengeance. It has bred a state of mind in which cant and falsehoods count more than the truth. Yet there is no reason to abandon hope. In the long run, the arc of history does bend toward justice. As 93-year old Stéphane Hessel, a hero of the French Resistance and the author of a recent best seller in France (Indignez-vous) just translated into English said, there is no objective reason why the richest societies in world history cannot sustain “a true economic and social democracy” when England and France built their welfare states after World War II “when Europe lay in ruins.” It’s a good lesson for today’s progressive and faint-hearted Democrats. Let us hope that, just as what started in Tunisia didn’t stay in Tunisia, what started in Madison will not stay in Wisconsin.
