It still makes me uncomfortable to write about politics in terms of ethnic, socio economic and gender based terms, but I guess that’s the reality of how campaigns are planned and executed. Having said that, maybe Obama’s recent bump in the polls from a demographic he has had trouble connecting with in the past is a signal that America, or at least parts of it, are not so easily stereotyped. From the Atlantic:

Across most of the presidential battleground states, particularly in the Midwest, President Obama’s lead rests on a surprisingly strong performance among blue-collar white women who usually tilt toward the GOP.

A National Journal analysis of recent polling results across 11 states considered battlegrounds shows that in most of them, Obama is running considerably better than he is nationally among white women without a college education. Obama’s gains with these so-called “waitress moms” are especially pronounced in Heartland battlegrounds like Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa.

The Democrats have been actively targeting this demographic, bombarding them with ads focusing on Romney’s wealth and indifference to the concerns of working Americans, so it’s probably nothing to get too excited about. But at least they feel more comfortable with a Black man in the Oval office than an aloof, rich white guy.

Isn’t that progress?

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Paul Ryan pick announced via twitter

The Daily Banter Headline Grab (via the Guardian):

Mitt Romney has confirmed his selection of Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential running mate, stating that he is “proud” to have the Wisconsin congressman on the Republican White House ticket.

In a tweet sent out ahead of a formal announcement Saturday, the presidential candidate said: “I am proud to announce @PaulRyanVP as my VP. Stand with us today.”

Via his newly created Twitter handle @PaulRyanVP, the vice-presidential candidate tweeted: “I’m honored to join @MittRomney on America’s Comeback Team. mi.tt/Romney-Ryan #RomneyRyan2012″

The surprise pick comes after months of speculation over who the former Massachusetts governor would pick as his running mate ahead of November’s election.

Ryan, a 42-year-old conservative who has become the leading Republican voice on spending cuts, was earlier confirmed by a Romney campaign app.

“Mitt’s choice for VP is Paul Ryan. Spread the word about America’s comeback team,” it stated.

It confirmed rumours that had been circulating since late Friday, when it was announced that Romney’s VP pick would be made public today.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab (from Reuters):

A gunman killed six people and critically wounded three at a Sikh temple during Sunday services before police shot him dead in an attack that authorities are treating as an act of domestic terrorism.

Witnesses said the gunman opened fire when he entered the kitchen at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in suburban Milwaukee at about 10:30 a.m. CDT (1530 GMT) as women prepared a Sunday meal, sending worshippers fleeing to escape the barrage.

The suspect was a bald, white man, approximately 40 years old, said Thomas Ahern, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Authorities did not release his identity.

Four people were shot dead inside the sprawling temple. Three, including the gunman, were killed outside.

The gunman ambushed and shot a police officer who was responding to a 911 call and helping a shooting victim, Oak Creek Police Chief John Edwards said. A second officer shot and killed the gunman.

Edwards said he had no identification for the shooter nor information on what kind of weapon or weapons he had. The victims’ identities and descriptions were not made public.

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By Bob Cesca: Throughout the previous decade, anyone who claimed that there was no real threat of terrorism was hectored, accused of hating America and temporarily driven out of politics, even though the numbers vindicated them.

According to a study by Nate Silver, your odds of dying in an airplane-based terrorist attack are around one in 10,408,947. Statistically, that’s pretty close to zero. Conversely, your odds of dying by suicide are around one in 121. In other words, you’re significantly more of a threat to yourself than any terrorist ever.

And yet for the last 10 years, we’ve spent countless trillions of dollars fighting terrorists while enacting dubious laws like the USA PATRIOT Act, along with warrantless wire taps of American citizens, torture, two wars and illusory airport security measures that include disposing of your potentially explosive bottle of water in a trash bin that sits in the middle of a crowded line of passengers waiting in line.

Why? It’s a means of controlling the population through fear, while subsidizing security and defense contractors who’ve made a fortune because we think there’s a serious chance we’ll be killed in another 9/11 style attack.

The same thing is happening with Voter ID laws. Republicans have passed law after law forcing Americans to, in effect, pay a poll tax through the acquisition of government-issued photo IDs in order to vote this year. That’s on top of the usual voter registration process. As I’ve detailed here many times, the laws are entirely intended to suppress Democratic turnout in order to stack the deck in favor of Republicans like Mitt Romney.

How do we know this? Basic deduction from the standpoint of a near zero rate of actual voter fraud. It simply doesn’t exist. Study after study has turned up at most 13 instances of possible voter fraud nationwide over the last 10 years in innumerable elections and, repeating something I reported here last week, the Bush Justice Department searched for voter fraud for five whole years and turned up nothing.

This week, the Pennsylvania Voter ID law went to trial in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the NAACP, and in a pre-trial agreement, Pennsylvania attorneys admitted to nonexistent voter fraud in that state.

“There have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania; and the parties do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states,” the statement reads.

According to the agreement, the state “will not offer any evidence in this action that in-person voter fraud has in fact occurred in Pennsylvania and elsewhere,” nor will it “offer argument or evidence that in-person voter fraud is likely to occur in November 2012 in the absense of the Photo ID law.”

Astonishing! So why the new Voter ID law? The answer is obvious and was confirmed by PA House Republican Leader Mike Turzai who said that the Voter ID law was designed to get Romney elected.

A similar confession occurred in Wisconsin yesterday. State Senate Minority Assistant Leader Glenn Grothman, a Republican, blurted out the truth on the Alan Keyes radio show.

KEYES: If it were upheld and in place in time for the November election, do you think — polls have shown a pretty razor-thin margin — do you think it might ultimately help Romney’s campaign here in the state?

GROTHMAN: Yes. Right. I think we believe that insofar as there are inappropriate things, people who vote inappropriately are more likely to vote Democrat.

KEYES: So if these protections are in place of voter ID, that might ultimately help him in a close race?

GROTHMAN: Right. I think if people cheat, we believe the people who cheat are more likely to vote against us.

But there isn’t any evidence of “inappropriate things” anywhere. So how the hell can Grothman know that Democrats are somehow more responsible for them? Clearly, he can’t know. Because there aren’t any numbers or prosecutions or arrests indicating anything. I mean, this is like saying, “Let’s pass an anti-hobbit law! Even though hobbits don’t exist, they’re totally gonna steal your veggies and hurl your jewelry into volcanos. Yeeehaw! Fuck hobbits!”

300,000 registered voters — mostly low income Democratic-leaning voters in Wisconsin don’t have a photo ID required to vote. In a tight race, that’s the election.

At the end of the day, this could end up electing Mitt Romney and, potentially, a Republican Senate majority. And they’re telling us that Democrats are the “people who cheat?” They’re digging up the corpse of Jim Crow in order to steal this election. Who’s the cheater again?

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Do we need less firemen? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Bob Cesca: Thank you, Mitt Romney, for this: “[Obama] wants to hire more government workers. He says we need more fireman, more policeman, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.”

This is easily the biggest Romney gaffe yet. Actually, I hesitate to call it a gaffe since a lot of Republicans agree with what he said and he simply blurted it out in public. Not only did Romney say something universally positive about the president (framed as something negative), but he also illustrated one of the most glaringly obvious conservative contradictions regarding government programs.

There are several layers to this, so let’s begin with what most conservatives secretly believe.

While they insist they’re the party of “first responders,” “law and order” and so forth, Republican leadership really doesn’t like the idea of police and firefighters working for state and local government — in other words, they don’t like law enforcement and the like working directly for We The People. As we’ve seen in neocon utopias like Iraq, they’d prefer that these services be run by profiteers. Republicans prefer that every government service be handed over to private industry. Let the marketplace handle the services. They could charge a fee to either the government or to the people on a pay-per-arrest or pay-per-fire basis.

As for education, conservatives are well on their way towards privatizing that particular government program. School vouchers and charter schools are sucking money out of public education and pumping it into private services, leaving public education in a deep hole, and momentum remains in favor of more charter schools and less funding for everyone else.

We’re on a path towards for-profit education, security and rescue. The danger, of course, in this agenga is that private corporations are solely in business for the sake of profit. If it makes financial sense to ban disabled or slower children from school, then so be it. If it makes sense to only rescue homes owned by people who can afford the fee, then so be it. Profit is the only result worth measuring in the corporate world. We’ve already witnessed what happened when network programming and the profit-motive transformed broadcast news.

This is the Republican leadership agenda. Bleed the government to death, drown it in the bathtub and hand everything over to Blackwater and Walmart.

Meanwhile, Republican voters don’t even really understand what their leaders are up to. While they crap on the notion of “socialism,” most Republican voters like the idea of a reliable police force and firefighters — we all simply expect these services to be free and available, even self-identified anti-government conservatives. Republicans send their kids to public schools, too. They send their kids to public colleges. They shoehorn their kids into public school sports programs — proudly and with thunderous applause, especially in notoriously conservative states like Texas (see also Friday Night Lights). They expect freely maintained and accessible public roads, national parks, clean water, tunnels that don’t flood, bridges that don’t collapse and, most importantly, military watchmen standing on “that wall.” Some of them, like George W. Bush, didn’t mind giving piles of government money to the financial sector. They heartily offer government subsidies and incentives (corporate welfare) to businesses all across the country. Oddly, they draw the line when it comes to making sure we can be treated for an illness or injury without going broke. They’re selective socialists — even the hardest of the hard core American conservatives. Case in point: Ron Paul, the most conservative member of Congress in nearly a century, is on Medicare.

So I don’t imagine Romney’s remarks about the evils of government services like police, firefighters and education will resonate very well with Republican voters — especially the ones who, like most of us, still applaud units like the NYPD and FDNY. Speaking of which, I assure you, if this had been a Democratic remark about firemen and policemen, the Republican response would have been a reel of every second of videotape from 9/11 crammed into a 60-second commercial aired nationwide.

We already know that Mitt Romney is opposed to the president’s stimulus, which pumped billions in federal money to state and local governments in order to save the jobs of teachers, firefighters and police officers. $4 billion for state and local law enforcement. $2.1 billion for Head Start. $53.6 billion to prevent cuts in local school districts and state colleges. Why? Because the “free market” wouldn’t do it. Mitt Romney is opposed to this spending. He said so, and he needs to be asked why. A lot.

And so I’m looking forward to hearing Mitt Romney tell us that it was okay to lay off 700,000 of these valuable public servants due to state and local cutbacks. I’m looking forward to hearing Romney tell us that we have enough teachers and firefighters and police and that, in order to roll back the pro-firefighter, pro-police, pro-teacher Obama agenda, we should perhaps fire even more. After all, they’re government workers. This is what Romney might want, especially if his business partners might profit from privatizing these services, but I assure you: across the political spectrum, this will be wildly unpopular.

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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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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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Andrew Sullivan: Usually spot on, but misses the mark on Wisconsin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Ben Cohen: The fallout from the bitter recall election in Wisconsin is reverberating around political circles and the media. The Right is claiming victory in an election that they believe should never have happened, and the Left is busy licking its wounds and crying foul play. Depending on who you listen to, the election was a major affront to the Democratic process, or a brave attempt to stop the disintegration of worker’s rights.

Former Bush Republican turned Obama Democrat Andrew Sullivan is taking an interesting and basically centrist position on the election that on the face of it looks reasonable, but really betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about workings of the modern American economy and just how serious Walker’s transgressions were against organized labor. Sullivan’s take on the events in Wisconsin is an important one as he basically represents the intellectual center in America and helps define the parameters of acceptable debate. Given his transformation in recent years, Sullivan’s analysis is usually very astute, but this time his argument is misleading and factually wrong.

In a post on The Daily Beast, Sullivan argued that despite Walker’s extremism, it was wrong of the Democrats to wage war on an already elected official. He wrote:

The Democrats refused to allow Walker to serve his full term and then seek the judgment of the voters. They acted throughout as if he were somehow illegitimate. They refused the give-and-take of democratic politics, using emergency measures for non-emergency reasons. And in this, they are, it seems to me, a state-based mirror-image of the GOP in Washington.

Sullivan contended that the war fought against Walker was a ‘case study in the complete breakdown of our political system, and of public trust’ and accused the Democrats of being just as partisan as the Republican Party.

The first major flaw in this argument is that the Democratic Party largely disavowed the recall election. Obama barely mentioned it at all, and did no campaigning on Democratic candidate Tom Barrett’s behalf. The best the President could do was to send out a solitary tweet the day before the election:

Not exactly a massive show of solidarity. The establishment Democrats clearly sided with Obama on this, allowing Barrett to be seriously outspent and heavily reliant on grassroots campaigning – clearly not enough to defeat the well oiled, corporate funded Republican Party.

The second and most serious flaw is Sullivan’s argument is his comparison between the grassroots campaign that tried to protect workers rights and restore collective bargaining in the state, and the Republican efforts to dismantle organized labor and buy elections.

There is no doubt that the modern Democratic Party has sold out to corporate interests and engages in underhand manipulation to win elections, but compared to the radical incarnation of the Republican Party that no longer disguises its complete subordination to corporate America, they still resemble a functioning political organization.  I outlined in a piece yesterday Walker’s radical legislation against working people in Wisconsin. In short, Walker’s budget repair bill in 2011 saw government workers rights slashed, their salaries decreased, collective bargaining rights vanish and mandatory yearly votes for unions to continue representing government workers.

Andrew Sullivan wrote:

While I don’t see the harm in allowing public sector unions to retain some collective bargaining rights, especially in an era when unions can be seen as institutions putting a break on soaring economic inequality, I also believe there’s a difference between public sector and private sector unions, and that curtailing the massive collective costs that public union benefits place on the public is a perfectly legitimate way to cut spending. It may be vital if we are to regain some fiscal balance.

Taking a mild position on the role of unions in America may seem reasonable, but only in the context of American political culture which is far to the Right of any other industrialized nation. Sullivan’s support of public sector unions retaining ‘some collective bargaining rights’ amounts to nothing when compared to bargaining rights in other countries. Just check out this fascinating report by Krissy Frazao on the RT network that highlights the stunning difference between unions in the US and in Europe. Some key points:

* At least 134 countries have laws setting the maximum length of the work week. The US does not.

* In the US, 85.6% of males and 66.5% of females work more than 40 hours per week.

* Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours that British workers and 499 more hours than French workers.

* There is no federal law requiring sick days in the United States.

America does have a deficit crisis, and it does need to be addressed, but to further strip the rights of public sector workers is absolutely criminal. It should be remembered that the deficit came at the hands of the banking system that blew a multi-trillion dollar hole in the economy by speculating on real estate, not government workers getting paid too much. Sullivan is buying into the whole ‘shared responsibility’ meme floating around political punditry that equates the behavior of casino style gambling on the stock market with school teachers educating the next generation of Americans. It is grossly unfair and a complete distortion of the economic fraud coming from the top down, not the bottom up.

Sullivan does a great job of exposing the nihilistic culture of the Republican Party and has forcefully argued to keep them as far away from government as possible. And that is why equating their lunacy with the collective efforts to preserve long fought for labor rights is so troubling to read.

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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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