Gawker’s mysteriously anonymous ‘Mobutu Sese Seko’ reminds jubilant Democrats and the liberal media not to proclaim the GOP dead just yet:

There’s a time for champagne, though, and that’s election night. After that, reality sticks its head in the tent, and there’s no bigger or more relevant buzzkill than 2008. In that election, Democrats won both houses of congress, including a senate supermajority, and the presidency. Not only did they defeat a “war hero” and a hot lady, they did so with a goofy older guy who looks like he goes to sleep with a UV light in his mouth to lighten his CRELM TOOTHPASTE gleam—and also a black dude. It seemed as if there couldn’t be a bigger repudiation of the Republican Party and its ethos. Democrats were in charge of everything but the judiciary, riding the high of electing the hitherto racially unelectable.

Two years later, the Democrats had lost the house and significant gubernatorial races, introducing the country to men like Scott Walker or the preposterous mantis-creature Rick Scott—the biggest Medicare fraudster in history, who ran on a platform of government somehow hindering wealth creation, despite all the things he billed it for. The inevitability of Obama’s new leftist ascendancy was crushed by the election of someone like Allen West, basically a whackjob authoritarian-sexting Iraqi torturer whose voice programming got stuck for two years on a “HitlerHitlerHitlerHitler” loop.

The argument is a solid one, but it should also be remembered that the economy was falling off a cliff in 2008 giving Republicans quite a lot of wiggle room to pin some of the blame on Obama. This time around the economy is on the up and the Republicans are in the beginning of what looks to be a civil war between the moderates and the hard Right. Extremists only get attention in times of economic hardship, and as long as the economy keeps picking up jobs, the crazies won’t be anywhere near as relevant.

Having said that, the Democrats should not rest on their laurels and assume long term victory. The Republicans have been brilliant at negotiating in the past, forcing concessions from Obama before talks have even begun. We’re about to witness the big ‘fiscal cliff’ negotiations and it’s probably best to see what the Democrats are able to walk away with before dismissing the Republicans as an irrelevant party of the past.

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By Bob Cesca: We’ve all known a kid who upon losing a board game would freak out, hurl the game across the room and storm off while shouting something like, “This game sucks anyway!” The modern permutation of this unhinged sour grapes tantrum is to chuck a video game controller at the TV. (I sheepishly raise my hand: guilty as charged on the latter.)

It’s one thing to suffer a momentary lack of self-control after losing a simple game, especially if the game is stupid, stupid, stupid and doesn’t give you a chance to fire before enemies converge on your position seemingly out of nowhere I hate that game! Phew. Sorry. But it’s another thing entirely to engage in this kind of silly, irrational behavior as a business owner, politician or political pundit in reaction to the results of an election. It’s no surprise the Republicans are doing exactly that.

Last week, I wrote about the nonsensical secession movement. But it’s safe to say that it was spearheaded by a marginal, fringe, kneejerk group of mostly throw-back libertarian goofballs. The following examples of apoplexy, however, have come from people who reside squarely in the mainstream of the conservative right.

Let’s begin with fast food executives like Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter who threatened to raise the price of his crappy pizzas by 11-cents per pie while laying off workers as a means to side-stepping the forthcoming Affordable Care Act requirement that businesses with 50 or more employees provide all full time workers with health insurance or else pay a fine of $2,000 per employee. After crunching the numbers, however, Schnatter only needs to raise the price tag of each pizza by around 5-cents and use the proceeds to pay for health insurance for all of his full time workers. Done. Unless Papa John’s customers are radical misers, they’ll never notice the almost nonexistent price increase.

Elsewhere, a Denny’s franchise owner in New York threatened to add a five percent surcharge on each bill to pay for his new Obamacare expenses. The backlash was swift. Denny’s sales dropped all across the nation, even though John Metz, the franchise owner, only controlled a few dozen restaurants. So naturally the CEO of Denny’s had to step in and force-feed Metz some much-need Xanax.

Denny’s chief executive John Miller privately reached out to Metz to express his “disappointment” with the Florida franchisee’s controversial statements about Obamacare, which sparked a wave of backlash for the national restaurant chain over the past few days. Metz released a statement Monday night expressing “regret” over his statements.

“We recognize his right to speak on issues, but registered our disappointment that his comments have been interpreted as the company’s position,” Miller said in an email to The Huffington Post.

So that’s it. Hopefully Miller schooled Metz on the financial benefits of having a healthy workforce: fewer sick days, greater productivity, less turnover and higher-quality workers. In the case of Schnatter, the additional cost of health insurance will only reduce his profit margin by around $5-8 million annually if he doesn’t nothing to offset the cost. And yes — only. Last year, Schnatter’s pizza empire reported a profit of $87 million on gross sales of $1.218 billion, and if the trend holds, his profits for 2012 should be even higher.

Absent legitimate business concerns, what else do we call this behavior other than a tantrum?

Speaking of profits, if the president gets his way and taxes are returned to the Clinton-era levels for incomes above $250,000 for families and $200,000 for individuals, reports are coming in from various small business owners that they inexplicably intend to sabotage their revenue streams in order to keep incomes under the $250,000 threshold. For example:

Kristina Collins, a chiropractor in McLean, Va., said she and her husband planned to closely monitor the business income from their joint practice to avoid crossing the income threshold for higher taxes outlined by President Obama on earnings above $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples.

Ms. Collins said she felt torn by being near the cutoff line and disappointed that federal tax policy was providing a disincentive to keep expanding a business she founded in 1998.

“If we’re really close and it’s near the end-year, maybe we’ll just close down for a while and go on vacation,” she said.

It’s shocking that they’re successful business people, given their total ignorance of how taxes work. At the very least they ought to fire their accountant. But, once again, I don’t think this has anything to do with reality and everything to do with acting out like spoiled, petulant children.

Here’s how the tax code really works. If the Bush tax cuts expire on income higher than $250,000, the slightly higher tax rate will only apply to income over $250,000 — not the entire sum of $250,000. In other words, if the Collins family earns $251,000 next year, they will only pay a higher marginal tax rate on $1,000, not $251,000. And that doesn’t even take into consideration various deductions and tax credits that would cumulatively give the Collins family a lower effective tax rate (the process by which Mitt Romney or Warren Buffet pays a tax rate in the range of 15%).

So these people are deliberately restraining their revenue potential because they’re pissed about the election. In my video game metaphor, this is not unlike bashing yourself in the head with a controller instead of hurling it across the room.

Then there are the red state governors who are refusing to implement the health insurance exchanges required in the Affordable Care Act. Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Rick Scott and the other usual suspects have stonewalled the law. Bobby Jindal, who not only blasted his own party for being “stupid” but who also criticized the stimulus while accepting gigantic stimulus checks, has also joined the blockade against Obamacare.

These so-called states’ rights Republicans obviously don’t realize that the federal government will simply create an exchange itself for any state that refuses. In other words, here’s a case where the states have total control and these governors have all but relinquished that control to the federal government — literally allowing a government takeover.

I can’t even imagine the tarring and feathering that would’ve taken place if any Democratic politician had refused to implement Medicare Part-D or the USA PATRIOT Act or had refused to allow the deployment of national guard units to Iraq. The outrage would’ve been punitive and nearly universal. I mean, look at what happened to former-Senator Max Cleland (D-GA) in the 2002 midterms when he dared to oppose the Iraq War. Karl Rove and the Republicans accused this triple-amputee Vietnam War veteran of being sympathetic to Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. Saxby Chambliss won the election and has currently joined the witch hunt against U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, even though he and George W. Bush presided over a six year span of time when there were 11 terrorist attacks on various U.S. consulates resulting in dozens of casualties.

And finally, an article about kneejerk, childish reactions to the election wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the latest gibberish from Dean Chambers, the “portly” founder of Unskewed Polls. Immediately after the election, Chambers blamed me for his homophobic rant against Nate Silver. Yes, really. He blamed me. You know, because Republicans are all about personal responsibility. Evidently, Chambers objected to an article in which I described him as “portly” in an attempt to visually and professionally contrast him with Silver. Chambers is the “Bizarro Nate Silver,” I wrote. So naturally Chambers lashed out against… Silver. Odd.

But that’s not the worst of it. Chambers launched a new site called “Barack O’Fraudo.” I’m not making that up. Barack O’Fraudo. First of all, what’s the deal with the name? Chambers seems to have combined the president’s first name with an Irish version of the word “fraud” and tossed in a random “o” at the end — the president’s actual last name ends with an “a.”

The mission, as I predicted weeks ago, is to unskew the results of the election by smoking out cases of voter fraud orchestrated by Obama campaign. Chambers is back to doing what he does best: drawing wild conclusions from numbers he doesn’t fully understand. He’s pinpointed cases of alleged fraud in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida, and has therefore stripped 80 electoral votes away from the president. But, strangely, he doesn’t give those electoral votes to Romney — yet.

Four years ago, when the president won the first time, fringy Republicans merely threatened to “Go Galt,” in reference to the John Galt character in Atlas Shrugged who accumulates a group of wealthy disciples to stop contributing to the economy, thus bringing it to its knees. This time around it seems as if this conservative whiny freak-out is a futile extension of that initial effort. It won’t work and, in the final analysis, it will only serve to further embarrass and discredit a conservative movement that’s already in serious trouble. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From TPM:

Late last week more than a dozen Republican governors declared that they will not build the insurance market exchanges called for by the Affordable Care Act, including prominent names like Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, John Kasich of Ohio, Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Rick Perry of Texas.

On Monday, Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma joined them, declaring in a statement that it “does not benefit Oklahoma taxpayers to actively support and fund a new government program that will ultimately be under the control of the federal government.”

The original deadline for states to notify the Department of Health and Human Services on whether they intend to build their own exchange was last Friday, but the administration extended it to Dec. 14. About a dozen Republican governors are weighing their options, including Chris Christie of New Jersey, Rick Scott of Florida and Terry Branstad of Iowa.

The Affordable Care Act encourages each state to build and operate its own exchange — a regulated, subsidized marketplace where consumers and small businesses can shop for insurance plans. If a state declines, the federal government has the power under the health care reform law to build one for it.

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Glenn Greenwald: King of the smug (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Generally speaking, I respect Salon’s Glenn Greenwald – he’s a serious journalist and commentator, and has done a great deal of work to expose some of the awful things the US government gets up to. However, I’m starting to find his writing irritating beyond belief. Greenwald’s relentless attacks on government and the establishment Left are so monotone that his criticisms just seem boring rather than relevant. Greenwald adopts a holier than thou approach to his writing and takes a strict, constructionist view of politics. Greenwald is a former constitutional lawyer, so it’s certainly understandable, but if you’re looking for nuance and an understanding of the real world, Greenwald is not your man. Take for example, his recent attack on Raw Story for publishing a blog that posted a silly and baseless rumor about Scott Walker having a love child. It was an embarrassing episode for Raw Story, but Greenwald took it upon himself to smear the entire publication – not because it published something silly, but because it dares to publish writers who support the President. The sarcasm and smugness literally oozes from every sentence in Greenwald’s piece. Just check out the intro:

Raw Story is a moderately well-read political outlet that touts itself as “a progressive news site that focuses on stories often ignored in the mainstream media.” It recently began publishing a blog devoted exclusively to venerating the President and sliming his critics: because that’s so edgy, brave and rare; after all, the meek “MSM” would never dare glorify the nation’s most powerful political official and the party in power, so we really need a brave, dissident anti-MSM site like Raw Story to provide that.

I understand the need for journalists to hold both sides of the political spectrum accountable, but Greenwald’s belief that anyone who focuses on the good things government do, or the positive aspects of Obama’s Presidency is automatically a sell out and a hack, is just plain wrong.

I take the view that much of what the US government does is illegal both constitutionally and according to international law. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rendition, wire tapping, torture, the list goes on. I agree with Greenwald that these are serious issues and should be covered by the media – they usually aren’t, and Greenwald should definitely get credit for drawing attention to them. But the government also does good things, and some writers like to draw attention to those things too, particularly when faced with the nihilistic Republican Party bent on dismantling what is left of government. That doesn’t make you a hack – it means you live in the real world where people, politicians and government are both good and bad. Greenwald is lucky – he doesn’t have any actual responsibilities, he doesn’t have to make any decisions, or compromise to get things done – he gets to lecture everyone else and never, ever be wrong.

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Mitt Romney portrait: He'll need to do more than look Presidential to win in 2012 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Ben Cohen: So far, Mitt Romney’s Presidential campaign is based on not being Barack Obama. The Republican nominee is spending vast sums of money on attacking the President for his liberalness, his perceived weakness and lack of stewardship over the economy. Romney is going negative, and it seems to be having an effect. It is of course too early to tell, but a recent Gallup Poll had Romney pulling ahead with key middle income voters – a worrying sign that indicates the election will be close.

But as Hillary Clinton and John McCain learned in their epic battles with Obama, the President is alarmingly resilient to negative attacks, and beat both of them with a positive message of hope for the future. Mitt Romney might do well out of slamming the President in the short term, but his team must know they’ll need more than that take the Presidency.

There have been calls from other Republicans for Romney to spell out a new vision for America. Gov. Scott Walker, who just won the recall election in Wisconsin, urged Romney to  present a ‘big and bold’ plan for the country. On Face the Nation, he said:

“I don’t think we win if it’s just about a referendum on Barack Obama…..I think people like [Wisconsin Rep.] Paul Ryan and others hope that he goes big and bold….. “Romney’s got a shot if the ‘R’ next to his name doesn’t just stand for Republican, it stands for reformer, if he shows my state and he shows Americans that he’s got a plan to take on those reforms.”

Romney has been extremely vague, at least in public, about the direction in which he’d like to take the country – a sign that he doesn’t actually have a serious plan yet. And taking a look at his official website MittRomney.com would confirm that. The key topics he has been nailing Obama on; the deficit, taxation, and the weak economy are featured on the site, and unsurprisingly, Romney’s plan is extremely underwhelming.

Take the title banner for Romney’s site, for example:

Scintillating stuff.

And here’s the detail on Mitt Romney’s  plan for America on the two biggest issues:

Individual Taxes

Make permanent, across-the-board 20 percent cut in marginal rates
Maintain current tax rates on interest, dividends, and capital gains
Eliminate taxes for taxpayers with AGI below $200,000 on interest, dividends, and capital gains
Eliminate the Death Tax
Repeal the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)

Corporate Taxes

Cut the corporate rate to 25 percent
Strengthen and make permanent the R&D tax credit
Switch to a territorial tax system
Repeal the corporate Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT)

Basically, Mitt Romney’s entire vision for the country is to cut taxes for the rich. And digging a little deeper, he is actually planning on raising taxes for the poor. According to an analysis from a non-partisan Washington think tank (The Tax Policy Center) Mitt Romney’s tax plan strongly favors the wealthiest Americans. It offers earners in the top 20 percent an average tax cut of more than $16,000 while it raises taxes on the bottom 20 percent of earners. The analysis shows that under Romney, the bottom 20 percent would see their average federal tax rate increase $149. The top 20 percent, meanwhile, would see an average tax cut of $16,134, a 5.4 percent reduction in their tax rate. To top it off, highest one percent of earners would see their average tax rate fall by nearly $150,000 per year, and the top 0.1 percent would see a reduction of more than $725,000.

More damaging to Romney’s vision for America is the alarming amount of money his tax plan would add to the deficit. According to the Tax Policy Center, Romney would add $900 billion to the deficit in 2015 at the time when the changes would go into effect. The TPC also found that his proposed tax cuts would add $3 trillion to the deficit over ten years . Not exactly fiscally conservative.

This is typical of Republican economics – ie. it sounds good in theory, but the numbers don’t add up. The modern GOP adheres to the maxim that cutting taxes increases government revenue, not because it does (it doesn’t) but because it plays well with voters. Everyone wants to hear that if they pay less taxes, they’ll get better services. Logically, it can’t happen, but politicians like Romney don’t care about that – they will say anything to get elected.

And although Romney hasn’t started promoting it yet, this is his ‘Bold Plan’ for America. How do we know this? Because Republicans haven’t offered a new vision of society since Ronald Reagan. Everything revolves around the efficiency and inherent genius of the free market, making policy more of an ideology, and plans more of a fantasy. Romney’s campaign website confirms that he is offering more of the same illogical economics with little creative thinking or innovative policy ideas.

Romney’s team will do their best to package the tired argument that tax cuts and less government will solve all of America’s problems, but at the end of the day, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.

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A heads up to our readers, every Friday we'll be doing a brief roundup of the best stories here at The Daily Banter. This week we profiled arch conservative Grover Norquist's psychopathic view of society, and argued that Scott Walker's win in Wisconsin only proved that money can buy elections.  Chez Pazienza engaged in a highly entertaining debate with a weed smoker about the relative importance of legalizing marijuana, and assessed the reason as to why everyone in Mitt Romney's campaign videos are white. Bob Cesca dug into the Republican attacks on pensioners and the end of the American Dream, and worried that Americans would fall for Romney's propaganda, and finally, we profiled Paul Krugman and explained why he is such an important voice in America today.

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Welcome to this week’s edition of The Daily Banter Mail Bag!! Today, Bob, Ben and Chez answer reader’s questions on Obama’s chances of re-election during bad economic times, the recall fiasco in Wisconsin, and whether we’d vote for a third party candidate.

The questions:

I’m really starting to panic now. I know the economy isn’t in free fall, but every little bit of bad news about jobs etc is another nail in the coffin for Obama’s Presidency. How does Obama beat Romney under these conditions? It’s never been done before with unemployment numbers like this.
Kenny

Bob: Don’t panic! There was one month of lower-than-expected job creation. Still, 69,000 jobs were created and unemployment only went up by one-tenth of one percent. Last August, the economy only created 52,000 jobs and we’re all still here. Meanwhile, there’s this from my column this week: GDP is growing steadily. Jobs are being added every month. Unemployment is slowly declining (with a few blips along the trendline). The deficit is shrinking. Middle and working class taxes are lower. Inflation is nearly an entire percentage point below the average that began in the middle 1920s (long term average is 3.43%, while our current rate is 2.3% and dropping). The price of oil dropped below $90 last week and stockpiles are huge — the highest level in 22 years. New home sales are up by 10 percent over a year ago. Moody’s Analytics is calling this a “genuine rebound” in housing and mortgage rates remain tantalizingly low. Consumer debt is declining and corporate profits — despite the president’s false reputation as a profit-hating commie — are nearly double what they were in the boom times of 1999. 9.75 percent at the end of 2011, compared with 5.7 percent in the final quarter of 1999. The Dow has doubled since the deepest, darkest days of the Great Recession and some analysts suggest that the DJIA should be around 20,000, not 13,000, given all of these positive indicators. Now, if the Obama campaign can make this pitch successfully, they can win. But it’s up to Democrats everywhere to make the pitch, too.

Chez: The end isn’t nigh just yet. There are still a few more jobs reports left before the election and things can certainly improve. The important thing, though, is going to be for the Democrats to get off their asses and get better about controlling the narrative. The fact is that things are improving, albeit slowly, and they’d improve much faster if we hadn’t had decades of Republican and Republican-style economics to crash the whole thing in the first place and the past few years of GOP sabotage in an effort to make Obama look bad and hopefully win back the White House. President Obama is still very popular — and Mitt Romney is anything but in most circles — but the Democrats will have to learn to take the reins, come up with some strong talking points, stay on message and fight if they want to pull this thing out regardless of state of the economy.

Ben: I’m going to say worry – and worry a lot. I know there are some positive trends happening with the economy – it is actually growing (albeit very slowly), and jobs are being created rather than destroyed, but it isn’t anything to get excited about. The Euro Zone crisis is very serious and if Greece or Spain exits, we could see another gigantic world wide recession that would put Obama’s chances of re-election into serious doubt. I hope that the Democrats operate on the basis that the economy is going to get worse and find a way of pinning all the blame on the Republicans. That’s the only way they are going to pull it off in a worse case scenario, but they’ll need to hammer home the message with Rovian efficiency. The Democrats are pretty awful at controlling the narrative and always allow the Republicans to define the debate. It does look like Obama is going out of his way to reverse that trend, but he’ll need to get down and dirty if he wants to make it stick. This year is all about going negative on the Republicans, so prepare for a nasty slug fest.

What did you guys think about Wisconsin? Walker is a douche no doubt, but he was democratically elected and I think he deserved to see out his term.
Martin

Ben: Hi Martin, I wrote a piece about this earlier this week. I argued that while having a recall was a politically dangerous and risky move, Scott Walker’s affront to organized labor was so serious that it was definitely warranted. Unions have taken a horrendous beating over the past 30 years in America, with membership at its lowest in seven decades. Workers enjoy less rights in America than in any other OECD nation, and further attacks on them simply cannot be tolerated. Walker is an extremist dedicated to reversing decades of hard fought for rights, and he deserved everything he got in Wisconsin. t

Bob: I disagree about “deserved to see out his term.” We were out-hustled. That, and we ran a candidate opposing him who had already lost. Democrats self-destructing once again. The real lesson here is that we need to find a way to counter-attack all of the Super PACs and wealthy financiers who are bankrolling these campaigns now that the Supreme Court further corporatized the electoral process. This is the challenge of our generation: to reverse or, at least, to mitigate the corrosive effect of unlimited money in politics. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Republican or Democrat. Citizens United was a disaster of epic proportions, and we’re only seeing the beginning of its cancer on our representative democracy.

Chez: I’ve actually always had an issue with the idea of recalling an elected official. I think it should only be done under the most extreme of circumstances. Yeah, I dislike Scott Walker immensely, but the constant push to overturn the will of the people will only end in disaster. We’re so divided right now as a country that I get the feeling we’re going to see more and more recall attempts and while maybe we thought Walker should go, the GOP is always going to be more likely to try to unseat somebody it doesn’t like because, as we’ve seen, Republicans tend to think that anybody other than them in a seat of power is illegitimate, regardless of what the electorate may have chosen of its own volition. If elected officials always fear for their jobs they can’t govern properly for anyone — and constantly pushing to recall leaders we disagree with will only lead to chaos.

What do you think about a 3rd political party? The Republicans are insane, but it’s not like the Democrats are significantly better. If there was a serious alternative candidate that had a legit shot, would you vote for him/her?
Steven D.

Chez: Eventually there may be a viable third party. There isn’t right now and a vote for one of the ones currently in existence is a fucking waste. Best to keep your eye on the ball.

Bob: No. I made that mistake already in 2000 when I stupidly voted for Ralph Nader — the biggest mistake I’ve every made in my political life. Why? Because it meant nothing other than to take a vote away from Al Gore who probably could have used it. Besides, third parties can’t really win at the presidential level — not with the electoral college. And you know what? Good! It’s not very populist to write this, but I actually like the two party system. It maintains relative consistency in government, and our leadership is generally able to govern with majority support. Do we really want a multi-party system in which someone who was elected with a 20 percent plurality to make decisions impacting over 300 million people (and more, if you count our role on the world stage)? The best thing we can do is to put forth the effort to change the parties to our liking, and this requires going door-to-door (figuratively and literally) to convince voters that what we have to say is best for the nation. That’s how we get conservadems to vote our way. That’s how we elect more progressives. Taking our toys and marching off to a dinky third party is a waste of time and effort amounting to nothing.

Ben: Generally speaking, I think a serious third political party in America would be a good thing. If you look at the big picture, there is little substantive difference between the Republicans and the Democrats – both parties have been corrupted by corporate interests, and actual policy is virtually identical (the argument over tax rates comes down to a couple of percent either way, and both parties have a record of aggressive foreign policy). I’d love to see a different vision for the country not based on serving the needs of the ultra wealthy. Having said that, in today’s climate the small differences between the two major parties literally means the survival of the country. The two or three percent difference in the tax code means having enough money to pay for children’s education, to ensure roads are maintained and the deficit can be paid down responsibly. Democrats at least believe ideologically in the role of government, whereas the Republicans don’t. When you have highly volatile financial markets, having a rational government is crucial to maintain some sort of stability – Democrats provide that and Republicans aren’t interested in the slightest. For that reason, I’d ignore any third party right now and focus on keeping adults in government, however bad they might be.

—-

Got a question for the team? Please write to TheDailyBanter@gmail.com and we’ll do our best to answer!

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By Ben Cohen: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s victory over Barret Tom Barrett last night was another sad reflection of the corrupting influence of money in American elections. Organized labor took on Walker over his budget repair bill in 2011 that saw workers rights slashed, their salaries decreased, collective bargaining rights vanish and mandatory yearly votes for unions to continue representing government workers. They fought a long, hard campaign against Walker, but ended up losing after being outspent 7-1 and being deserted by the Democratic Party.

As Gary Younge writes:

Money matters and the Republicans have a lot of it. Walker outspent Barrett by seven to one, with most of it coming from outside the state. This is a very corrupting fact about American politics, particularly since Citizens United. But it is a fact nonetheless. So either unions and grassroots organisations don’t participate in the electoral process but work outside it to change the debate and mobilize public opinion – like Occupy Wall Street – or they have to find money from somewhere……If progressives are looking for political support they should look down to the grassroots, not up to the Democratic party. Rhetorically Obama was with them all the way. Not only was he all about the audacity of hope. But in his campaign he would quote the late poet and essayist June Jordan, with an empowering message about the need for political activism: “We were the ones we are waiting for.”

Wisconsin radicals could have been waiting for him until the cows in this dairy state came home. He wasn’t coming. The fierce urgency of now had given way to the tepid ambivalence until November. He could have sent Joe Biden as a show of solidarity. Instead they kept their distance.

The fight to defeat Scott Walker was an incredibly important one in American history. It was only the second recall in the nation’s history, and a sign that the labor movement in America was far from dead.  A remarkable grassroots campaign was lead to recall the Governor in an attempt to regain long fought for rights that Walker had cavalierly dissolved under the guise of fixing the state’s budget deficit.

The move to destroy worker’s rights was straight out of Milton Friedman’s playbook -  Walker used a crises to scare the people of Wisconsin, took away their rights and then implemented his own ideologically based economic model on the state. As Naomi Klein noted in her extremely important book ‘The Shock Doctrine’:

The bottom line is that while Friedman’s economic model is capable of being partially imposed under democracy, authoritarian conditions are required for the implementation of its true vision. For economic shock therapy to be applied without restraint – as it was in Chile in the seventies, China in the late eighties, Russia in the nineties and the U.S. after September 11, 2001- some sort of additional major collective trauma has always been required, one that either temporarily suspended democratic practices or blocked them entirely.

For Klein, Walker’s draconian measures in Wisconsin were simply another example of this – a highly undemocratic and manipulative way of forcing through unpopular economic measures without real consent. She told Amy Goodman at the time:

It should not be in any way surprising that we are seeing right-wing ideologues across the country using economic crisis as a pretext to really wage a kind of a final battle in a 50-year war against trade unions, where we’ve seen membership in trade unions drop precipitously. And public sector unions are the last labor stronghold, and they’re going after it……Scott Walker was not elected with a mandate to bust unions and to strip collective bargaining rights. He did not mention that in his campaign. He talked about balancing the budget. He made some vague statements, you know, about shared sacrifice. But he absolutely did not campaign promising to do what he is now doing

Walker’s move to strip collective bargaining rights had nothing to do with the budget deficit – it was simply an excuse to follow through with the economic orthodoxy of his party that has radically changed the face of the country over the past three decades. By vilifying public workers and making them the enemy of economic recovery, he was able to ram through measures that make the long term recovery of the state even more difficult.

The Left’s loss to Walker shows just how badly outgunned the general public are when it comes to the ceaseless assault on workers rights from big money interests. The GOP threw huge amounts of cash at Scott Walker so he could defeat Tom Barrett, and their gamble paid off. It takes an extraordinary amount of organization, propaganda and money to convince regular people that unions are responsible for the nation’s economic problems, despite union membership being at a 70 year low, and despite no evidence that cutting wages leads to any sort of benefit to the economy. It does however, benefit the wealthy, and that is why Walker was able to raise so much money.

The fight is not over, and Wisconsin proved that organized labor can still go to battle and fight hard. They’ll just need more money to actually win.

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Scott Walker survives a recall election (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Wisconsin‘s governor Scott Walker survived a bitterly fought recall election on Tuesday after Republican voters mobilised in huge numbers, propelling him to a victory that will boost Mitt Romney’s run for the White House.

Television networks called it for the incumbent at 11pm local time after early returns from rural counties gave him an apparently unassailable lead even as voters were still queuing to cast ballots at polling stations in Milwaukee, a Democratic stronghold.

It was a devastating defeat for Democrats and union activists who had waged an 18-month campaign to oust Walker over his restrictions on collective bargaining and cutbacks of pension and health benefits of public sector workers.

Romney issued a swift statement saying the result would “echo beyond the borders of Wisconsin” by showing Republicans could stand up to “runaway government costs imposed by labor bosses” and demonstrated “what sound fiscal policies can do to turn an economy around”.

With almost two thirds of precincts reporting, Walker led by 57% to 42% against his challenger, Tom Barrett, according to early returns tabulated by AP. Barrett said he had telephoned Walker to concede the race.

The vote was widely seen as a referendum not just on Walker but Tea Party-tinged conservatism. The movement will now claim vindication and try to build on the momentum.

A silver lining for President Barack Obama came in the form of exit polls that gave him a 52-43 lead over Romney, suggesting Wisconsin, a swing state which he won in 2008, would remain loyal come November.

Read more at the Guardian…

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While kicking teachers in the face, Scott Walker was padding the pockets of cronies.

The administration of Gov. Scott Walker hired the 27-year-old son of a veteran lobbyist then promoted him to an $81,500-per-year job overseeing environmental and regulatory matters and dozens of employees, despite his having no college degree and little management experience, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Monday.

One critic of the administration said it looks to him like political payback. “It has all the markings of political patronage,” said Michael McCabe, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and a frequent critic of the new Republican governor.

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