Scott Walker and the Chamber of Horrors, er, Commerce

As I was working on catching up on the things I missed while I was away, I saw a story from JSOnline reporting that on Wednesday, our wayfaring governor is going to Washington D.C. to "attend U.S. Chamber of Commerce events."

Normally, I would have just brushed it off as just more of Walker's "rising-star-before-smashing-into-a-Walkergate-nova" antics.  But this caught me dead in my tracks.

Lewis F. Powell

The reference of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was most timely.  During my travels, I was given a tip from a most sagacious soul.  Said tip had to do with a letter written 41 years ago by Lewis F. Powell, just two months before he was nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States by President Richard M. Nixon.

Powell's letter, which came to be known as the Powell Memo or the Powell Manifesto, was written to and at the request of his friend, Eugene Sydnor, Jr., then Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.  It has come to be a strong influence in the strategy adapted by the likes of the Koch Brothers, Sam Adams Alliance and the Bradley Foundation.  It is also the basic playbook for ALEC.

The first part of the letter was a cursory overview of the plaints that businesses are echoing to this day: That taxes are too high and that there are too many regulations.  He goes on to complain of "attacks" by the usual bogeymen of the right wing corporate nuts - communists, socialists, statists and leftists. And, as one might expect, Powell portrays the CEOs as the poor, downtrodden class that is too meek for their own good.

But as one reads on, it gets downright scary as you see Powell describing what is happening today, forty years after he wrote his letter.

He speaks of infiltrating the school systems with right-minded people, both as speakers, as teachers and as activists.  This brings to mind the story from one year ago about the undue influence the Koch Brothers had in personnel decisions at Florida State University.  Walker's own "merit system" is nothing more than a way for him to force out the malcontents and to keep and reward the ones that pass their fealty tests.

Powell even advocates for censoring what is in the textbooks and what is being taught in the classrooms.  Does "intelligent design" and "abstinence only" ring a bell?

What sent chills down my spine is when Powell writes about the ways to control the public, which he says is most vital for the immediate term.

He describes controlling what's on television, including educational programs and newscasts, much like he wanted control over the textbooks.  He advocated for similar control of the radio.  Suddenly, Fox News and talk radio takes on a much more ominous look.

Powell also describes the need to put out their own publications, whether it be "scholarly publications," books, pamphlets and advertisements.  What he is describing is their need for pseudo-scholarly propaganda machines such as WPRI, MacIver Institute and the Franklin Center.  And yes, I would add corporate media like the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Wisconsin State Journal and the Wall Street Journal to this list.

Powell goes on with more strategies, such as using the courts (see Rick Esenberg and his legal group which just happens to be funded by the Bradley Foundation but "without expectations"). even more lobbying (which apparently became buying politicians like Walker) and generally flooding the system with more graft, er, I mean, money.

So what do we do now?

We have the corporate takeover of not only Wisconsin, but the entire nation, which has been meticulously and methodically taking place for literally decades.  They control most of the media and information sources, thereby controlling the population.  There is no better example than the unsuccessful recall of Walker.  It all looks like we are about to become an oligarchy and there's no way to stop it.

Well, we are not helpless and the situation is not hopeless.  Indeed, we have already started giving ourselves the means to stop and even reverse this trend.

First of all, Powell gives us a glimpse of the where they have overreached his original intent (emphasis mine):

We in America already have moved very far indeed toward some aspects of state socialism, as the needs and complexities of a vast urban society require types of regulation and control that were quite unnecessary in earlier times. In some areas, such regulation and control already have seriously impaired the freedom of both business and labor, and indeed of the public generally. But most of the essential freedoms remain: private ownership, private profit, labor unions, collective bargaining, consumer choice, and a market economy in which competition largely determines price, quality and variety of the goods and services provided the consumer.

The current version of the robber barons of old have stepped over the line when they started attacking Labor and collective bargaining.  Their greed has gotten the better of them and we can use that in a form of political judo.

Secondly, we have one of the largest grassroots movements in the nation in the form of #wiunion.  #wiunion is, as most already know, the loosely formed group that consists of people from the right, the left and the independent who feel that things have gone too far already.  We are public and private sector workers as well as the unemployed and underemployed.  We are the people of Wisconsin and we are fighting for our homeland, in every sense of the phrase.

Thirdly, we have ways to getting the information out there, whether it be through blogs, social media or even just social gatherings.  However, this is not enough at this time.  I would like to see a group of people come together to form a counterweight to the corporate media.  With the number of teachers and other workers who have been laid off and/or retired, not to mention citizen journalism, there are more than enough people who could be benefited by and beneficial for an alternative news source.  The funding to support the reporters, editors, artists, etc. could come from the same groups that supported the recall movement: the unions, the advocacy groups and groups like United Wisconsin.

Fourthly, as I pointed out right after the recall, we need to get some fresh faces into the political system.  We can't keep hanging our hopes on corporate Democrats who aren't much better than the Republicans.  The first example of this which comes to mind is Lori Compas.  Yes, she lost the recall election.  But the fact that there was even a recall election exceeded all expectations from the Republicans or the Democrats. Compas did that with the grassroots movement that I just mentioned above.

And lastly, we have the weapon that the would be corporate overlords gave us on a silver platter - Scott Walker and his crew.  Walkergate is upon them, with two convictions already and four more of Walker's aides facing serious charges.  It is only a matter of when, not if, Walker himself is indicted.  The level of corruption in Walker's administration is so complete that even though they are downplaying it, the corporate media that supports him has had to admit to the seriousness of it.

When Walker is indicted and goes to trial and the information comes spilling out, there will be a backlash at the extent the corporate overlords have gone in trying to make their final push at a hostile takeover.  This backlash, I have reason to believe, will spill all over the nation.

Then, maybe, just maybe, we can start restoring balance to our state and to our country.

Lessons From CPAC

Elizabeth DiNovella, writing at Dane 101, went to CPAC (Conservatives Planning Absolute Corporatism) and learned a few things about the mindset of the money-grubbers.

But there are a few things we can learn as well.  One is that an unified front is essential:

“The difference between Ohio and Wisconsin is that Governor Walker exempted health and safety [workers] for the most part,” said Vince Vernuccio, Labor Policy Counsel for the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Going after police officers and fire fighters turned out to be a nightmare.

“In Ohio, essentially what you had is firemen and police—in uniform—going door to door, saying this bill will kill babies. Now when you have police and firemen in uniform, saying the apocalypse is going to happen, it’s very hard to message against that,” Vernuccio said. “The problem is we didn’t get our message into Ohio soon enough.”

Fortunately, we already have the police and the fire fighters, who have been able to see through Scott Walker's BS and have chosen to stand with Wisconsin.

The article goes on to say that they think laws like Ohio's SB 5 or Wisconsin' Act 10 will create a clear sense of winners and losers among the states. They also site as their justification that public sector union members outnumber private sector union members, but make no mention that this is because of their decades long onslaught on the private sector unions, chiseling away at their strengths until they were shadows of what they once were.

When discussing "winners and losers" they are obviously talking about how states would appear in the eyes of the corporatists, since they include this line:

During the questions and answer portion, one student asked what Ohio should do to enact long-term reform, given it is such a pro-union state.

Vernuccio said that Ohio needed to pass some version of SB 5. Wisconsin and Indiana are going to thrive, he said, with their reforms. “You are going to see those states sky-rocket, and Ohio is going to stagnate.” This decline will make people want to leave Ohio.

He offered a short-term solution instead: “Build a wall, a Berlin-style wall, to keep people in.”

Oh yeah, we're really thriving here, aren't we?

This is going to end up being a fight for our very lives and livelihoods people. Be ready.