Walker over workers

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

Phil Gramm, the former right-wing Republican member of Congress, once said, without a hint at irony, that money is the mother’s milk of American politics.

Now that the U.S. Supreme Court, the most conservative high court in generations, has opened up the floodgates for virtually unlimited contributions by the rich and colossal corporations, money has become something much more potent than mother’s milk and extremely more toxic. Money, really big money, has become the plutonium of American politics.

The latest evidence of this portentous escalation in the dreadful role of money in American politics came just last week when Wisconsin’s GOP Governor Scott Walker, who earlier had sparked massive popular protests when he rammed a bill through the legislature that renders public sector unions essentially powerless, easily beat back a recall effort put together by angry teachers, firefighters and other public-sector workers bent on throwing him out of office.

Fueled by a 7-1 money advantage, Walker defeated Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and his army of passionate supporters by a comfortable seven percent. David Horsey, an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, put it best in his column’s headline: “Billionaires Buy Recall Election for Scott Walker.” Horsey went on to add just how Walker accomplished this feat and to suggest the ominous implications:

“The governor put together a nationwide fundraising effort and was richly rewarded. Two-thirds of the $31 million Walker raised to fight the recall came from out-of-state donors, mostly rich guys who hate unions. The gush of cash going to Walker overwhelmed Barrett’s boots-on-the-ground effort and provided more proof, if any more were needed, that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling—eliminating limits on campaign donations—has dramatically altered the balance of power in American politics.”

The real scary thing is not Scott Walker, however, for while his policies are unfair and obnoxious enough, he seems more a marionette of the sugar daddies, especially the to-the right-of-Attila Koch brothers, than the second coming of another infamous Wisconsin politician, the late and unlamented Senator Joe McCarthy.

No, the really scary thing is that those same rich guys who hate unions also hate taxes (although they benefit greatly from the human and physical infrastructure taxes make possible and they go after any government largesse they can get their hands on). They hate any kind of government regulation to protect the planet from environmental disaster. They really despise government rules to make dirty, dangerous jobs like mining less deadly. They are hardly happy with laws that force employers to pay women the same as men when they do the same work. And – this is the scariest part of all – these same rich guys that hate all that had their way in Wisconsin and they will be trying their hardest to do the same in November.

Is history repeating itself, are we witnessing a second and even more vicious rightward turn of the screw in American politics than the Reagan “revolution”?

The defining moment of the first turn came at the dawn of 1980s when Ronald Reagan led off his presidency by crushing the air traffic controllers union (PATCO) and firing all the strikers. It was the clearest of signals – if not the first – that the tacit social contract between labor and capital that had held for more than three decades was over.

The long nightmare – to conservative Republicans and rich right-wingers – of the ascendancy of America’s very mild version of social democracy was history. The bosses were back in charge. The rich got the tax breaks. With their Midas touch, and by virtue of Arthur Laffer’s laughable curve theory, formally supply-side economics, the rich were to deliver prosperity. Or, in the words of a devastatingly effective Reagan 1980 campaign commercial, it would be “morning again in America” – again.

Instead, it was the sunset of the modest progress the United States had made since the 1930s toward an economically fairer and downright more decent society. But it was also a dawn, and not one of those picture postcard ones, but the wretched start of a massive redistribution of power and privilege in the United States. Ever since, the flow all has been in one direction: up.    
   
Supply-side economics was hocus-pocus, pure ideology in the guise of economic science. David Stockman himself confirmed it. Reagan’s budget director, the man who worked the numbers and who knew how they affected who got what out of the economy, said so himself. In a magazine interview, Stockman admitted that supply-side economics was nothing but “trickle-down economics,” the kind of eat off the crumbs of our croissants stuff favored by kings and the rich and mean since time immemorial.

The real purpose was to reverse the dangerous alleged trend toward “creeping socialism” represented by such things as the New Deal, Social Security, Medicare, the Great Society and the “war on poverty.”

Reagan’s ascendancy was a quantum leap in the long cherished, ultra-conservative, turn the clock back wrecking project. Precious little trickled down to the ordinary family, but that was never the point. According to Laffer’s theory, less laughable in practice than on paper, top-tilted tax cuts were supposed to provide such attractive incentives for those who got them that they would spend gobs of money on job-creating investment, generating such strong economic growth that government tax revenues would actually increase!

Voila, cut taxes, collect more taxes. Running against Reagan, George H.W. Bush called this “voodoo economics.” That was an insult to a rich, religious tradition. Instead, it was the stuff of con men, cranks and charlatans – snake oil, perpetual motion machines, get-rich-now schemes, bending metal with the mind, alien abductions.

Yet the real game, shifting money and power upward, was accomplished. Yes, it turned out that when the government drastically cuts taxes, it collects way less, not more revenue”: duh!

The Reagan administration created the greatest deficit in American history before George W. Bush did him one better. The Laffer curve was disproved big time, but it was never serious. And the massive deficit was far from a liability but rather a useful byproduct for the right’s project. It would, from then on, be used to justify tearing ever-larger holes in the nation’s already fragile social safety net.

Walker’s Wisconsin win over the unions, eerily reminiscent of Reagan’s smashing of PATCO, seems disturbingly emblematic of a second, more vicious turn of the screw against the 99 percent. What is amazing is that today’s Republican rhetoric, underpinned by a theory that, way back in the Reagan administration, was proved to be bogus, is almost identical to the ideas the Republicans are peddling today, and with disquieting success.

Substitute “job creator” for Laffer curve and you end up with the same stuff: mind manure and economic and political plutonium in the hands of the haves.

It’s the same kind of mental fecal matter peddled today by Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and –worst of all – Mitt Romney. The Reaganuts took a hatchet to the safety net. Today’s Republicans plan to attack it with a hydrogen bomb. The ideological bullshit of top-down redistribution hasn’t changed since Reagan. But the means to deliver sure have improved.
The American people bought Reagan’s brand of economic claptrap. Will they buy the same lousy product in a thinly veiled disguised a second time?

George W. Bush famously and characteristically got himself in a verbal tangle when he tried to quote a popular saying (“fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”) He forgot the second part of the aphorism, coming up instead with “you can’t fool me twice.” Hope that the American people prove him right in a few months.  

If U.S. politics were ruled by reason, if people power really trumped dollar power as it didn’t in Wisconsin, they would. But there is a chillingly good chance they won’t. Or, to twist soul singer Aretha Franklin’s musical verse what’s logic got to with it?

Precious little: It’s the money, stupid. The Republican right’s colossal cash machine tasted victory in Wisconsin, and it was sweet. The same juggernaut is coming for what’s left of the rest of the country in November. Watch out.