The nearly 14 million unemployed people in this country are a constant reproach to the Republican economic doctrine of shoveling as much money as you can into the pockets of a few already ridiculously wealthy people. For all that the GOP is trying mightily to restrict voting so that those without automobiles or a stable address, or those whose skin pigmentation or age indicates a possible vote against their party, cannot vote; there's still this stubborn reality that there's only so much you can steal an election when a majority of Americans have had enough of waiting until corporate CEOs think they are finally rich enough to trickle some largesse down to the peons by deigning to hire them to do something at their companies. What that something would be when no one other than the 1% can afford to buy anything remains to be seen, but that's the Republican doctrine and they're sticking with it.

I keep thinking of that notion put forth on Up With Chris Hayes last weekend, that this is now a nation of wasted resources -- 13.3 million of them, in fact. But rather than blame the GOP (and to a lesser degres, the Democrats, who are willing to be bought more cheaply), and the people who finance them and turn Congressmen from rural backwaters into multimillionaires simply by demanding legislation in exchange for campaign contributions, it's so much easier to demonize those who are unemployed due to outsourcing, appeasing Wall Street through massive job cuts, changes in technology, or simple obsolescence. After all, if they can just keep those of us who still have jobs separate from those who don't, perhaps enough votes can be squeezed out of the middle class to elect enough Republicans to completely demolish our way of life more quickly than the piecemeal efforts we've seen over the last thirty years.

The easiest way to do this is to paint the unemployed as somehow different from those of us lucky enough to still have jobs. So what the GOP is trying to do is turn all of the unemployed, no matter what their age or race or work history, into "the new n----rs" -- lazy, shiftless, drug-addicted leeches on society. Newt Gingrich advocates that anyone receiving any kind of federal aid (such as extended unemployment benefits) be drug tested. So does Congressman Jack Kingston.

All this brings us to word this morning of a "compromise" that may be reached today in the budget stalemate that threatens to shut down the government on the 16th of this month. When I hear "compromise" in the context of negotiations on Capitol Hill, what that means is "Democratic Capitulation", because the Democrats have shown again and again that there is no Republican plan to which they won't eventually capitulate, because if they don't, Chuck Todd and Bob Shieffer will paint them as obstructionist. Of course history has shown that capitulation doesn't change the media spin one iota, but that doesn't stop them from doing it. And of course there might be some trickle-down largesse from lobbyists as a consolation prize as well.

Today an editorial from the New York Times breaks down the Republican plan, just so you know what's coming when the Democrats blink, as we all know they will:

At last count, 13.3 million people were officially unemployed and 5.7 million of them had been out of work for more than six months. At no time in the last 60 years has long-term unemployment been so high for so long.

But Republican lawmakers would have you believe that the nation cannot afford jobless benefits and that many recipients are not so much needy, as lazy, disinclined to work as long as benefits are available. When was the last time any Republican lawmaker tried to live on $289 a week, the amount of the average benefit?

Under current policy, federal benefits kick in when state-provided benefits run out, typically after 26 weeks. The duration of the federal payouts depends on the level of unemployment in a given state. Currently, workers in 22 of the hardest-hit states — including California, New Jersey and Connecticut — qualify for up to 73 more weeks of aid. In five other states — including New York — up to 67 more weeks are available. In the remaining 23 states, maximum federal benefits range from 34 weeks to 60 weeks. The cost to continue the program for another year would be about $45 billion.

The Republican plan would cut $11 billion of that in 2012 by slashing up to 40 weeks from the program, reducing by more than half the maximum 73 weeks now available. Because of the way the program is structured, the biggest cuts would come in the states with the highest unemployment. Millions of jobless workers would be quickly left without subsistence, and the weak economy would be weakened further by the drop in consumer spending.

The bill would also impose onerous — and gratuitous — requirements on people who apply for jobless benefits. It would allow states to drug test applicants and would require recipients to be high-school graduates or working toward an equivalency degree

Don't look at your neighbor who does construction and hasn't worked in a year. Don't look at your spouse who can only get contract work for half the pay he used to get and no benefits, paid holidays, or vacation time. Don't look at the sixty-year-old down the street who's spent his own money on courses to keep his skills up to date and can't find a tech job because the industry is "too fast-paced" for him. Don't look at the machinist on the next block who would be happy to retrain for something if he only knew what kind of training would net him a job where he could supplement his wife's pay as a waitress at iHOP and maybe get their home out of foreclosure. Just convince people that all of those people are lazy, shiftless drug addicts -- just like those black people the GOP used to demonize when it was OK to do so (and if you're Newt Gingrich, you think it still is) and that unemployment can't happen to them.

This tactic of pointing people's attention down the economic ladder to the boogeyman of choice while the people up the ladder take the last few bucks out of our back pockets has worked for thirty years, convincing Americans that THEY are somehow different, that poverty will NEVER affect THEM, because THEY aren't LIKE those OTHER PEOPLE.

Except that in the Great Recession of the Oughts, yes, they are. The only question is how many of them know it, and how long it will be before they join them.

Labels: government for sale, Greedy Republican Bastards, heartlessness, unemployment

I don't answer my land line phone at home. I screen all calls, and return calls I want to return. I do this because despite being on the "do not call" list, my phone often rings off the hook with nonprofits and political groups wanting money and robocalls from groups and politicians. I have a policy: I only give to individual candidates as I see fit, and I only give to local nonprofits -- mostly animal shelters and food pantries --where I know the money they raise isn't going for bloated administrative salaries and the mailing of free crap in fundraising letters. So it's a waste of time for telemarketers to contact me.

I use my cell phone a lot more than I used to. It isn't that I talk more on the phone for fun, because I actually hate talking on the phone. But I spend at least a third to half of my work time on teleconferences, and when I'm at home, I use my cell phone to access them. So in some months, I might use my entire 500 shared monthly minutes allowance in a single week.

But now the telecommunications industry seeks the ability to use up your minutes by haranguing you with robocalls on your cell phone.

The Mobile Information Call Act is a proposal by Nebraska congressman Lee Terry. Yes, he is a Republican. The Republicans have time for this, and they have time to reaffirm "In God We Trust" as he national motto. That pesky jobs business? That's for pussies.

Labels: government for sale, lobbyists, telecommunications

Meet Brian Deschane:

Just in his mid-20s, Brian Deschane has no college degree, very little management experience and two drunken-driving convictions.

Yet he has landed an $81,500-per-year job in Gov. Scott Walker's administration overseeing environmental and regulatory matters and dozens of employees at the Department of Commerce. Even though Walker says the state is broke and public employees are overpaid, Deschane already has earned a promotion and a 26% pay raise in just two months with the state.

How did Deschane score his plum assignment with the Walker team?

It's all in the family.

His father is Jerry Deschane, executive vice president and longtime lobbyist for the Madison-based Wisconsin Builders Association, which bet big on Walker during last year's governor's race.

The group's political action committee gave $29,000 to Walker and his running mate, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, last year, making it one of the top five PAC donors to the governor's successful campaign. Even more impressive, members of the trade group funneled more than $92,000 through its conduit to Walker's campaign over the past two years.

Total donations: $121,652.

That's big-time backing from the homebuilders.

The younger Deschane didn't respond to questions about his job.

(via)

Labels: And You Want To Give Power Back To These People?, government for sale, incompetence, scumbaggery, Wisconsin 2011

Krugman on the Shock Doctrine in action in Wisconsin:

What’s happening in Wisconsin is, instead, a power grab — an attempt to exploit the fiscal crisis to destroy the last major counterweight to the political power of corporations and the wealthy. And the power grab goes beyond union-busting. The bill in question is 144 pages long, and there are some extraordinary things hidden deep inside.

For example, the bill includes language that would allow officials appointed by the governor to make sweeping cuts in health coverage for low-income families without having to go through the normal legislative process.

And then there’s this: “Notwithstanding ss. 13.48 (14) (am) and 16.705 (1), the department may sell any state-owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state. Notwithstanding ss. 196.49 and 196.80, no approval or certification of the public service commission is necessary for a public utility to purchase, or contract for the operation of, such a plant, and any such purchase is considered to be in the public interest and to comply with the criteria for certification of a project under s. 196.49 (3) (b).”

What’s that about? The state of Wisconsin owns a number of plants supplying heating, cooling, and electricity to state-run facilities (like the University of Wisconsin). The language in the budget bill would, in effect, let the governor privatize any or all of these facilities at whim. Not only that, he could sell them, without taking bids, to anyone he chooses. And note that any such sale would, by definition, be “considered to be in the public interest.”

If this sounds to you like a perfect setup for cronyism and profiteering — remember those missing billions in Iraq? — you’re not alone. Indeed, there are enough suspicious minds out there that Koch Industries, owned by the billionaire brothers who are playing such a large role in Mr. Walker’s anti-union push, felt compelled to issue a denial that it’s interested in purchasing any of those power plants. Are you reassured?

Labels: corporatism, Cronyism, government for sale, Greedy Republican Bastards, Paul Krugman, Wisconsin 2011

That's the analogy I've been using for years to describe how the bankers and the rest of the über-rich have been able to get away with funnelling so much of the nation's wealth into their own pockets without the kind of revolution we've been seeing this month in the streets of Cairo and Tripoli.

The Tea Partiers initially had it right in that they sensed that something was very, very wrong economically. They even started sniffing in the right direction, with their outrage at bank bailouts and TARP. But then Dick Armey and the Koch Brothers got hold of them, and pointed their heads down the ladder, first at immigrants, and now at public workers, so that they wouldn't notice while they help themselves to whatever is left in the pockets of the middle and working classes. Give the Koch brothers credit: they knew how to harness that rage and redirect it while the Democrats were still listening to David Broder and Barack Obama was insisting on being the One To Unite Them All.

There are a bunch of graphs over at Mother Jones (I do seem to be linking there a lot lately, don't I?) that explain everything you need to know. They won't shrink well enough to reprint here, so you'll have to click over to take a look. But here's how Average income per family for each income group in this country breaks down:

Top 0.01% (that's one one-hundredth of one percent, not one percent)	$27,342,212
Top 0.1%	$3,238,386
Top 1%	$1,137,684
Top 10%	$164,647
Bottom 90%	$31,244

While you're there, take a look at the net worth of the 10 highest-income members of Congress. Then consider just who they're going to represent.

Hint: It ain't you.

Labels: corporatism, government for sale, greed, income inequality

The realities surrounding Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's true agenda are no longer the exclusive province of the blogs:

As Eric Lipton reported in The Times on Tuesday, the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who have long been staunch union opponents, were among the biggest contributors to Mr. Walker. (Americans for Prosperity, the conservative group financed by the Kochs, will begin running anti-union broadcast ads in Wisconsin in the next few days.)

Some public sector unions have contracts and benefits that are too rich for these times, but even when they have made concessions, Republican officials have kept up the attack. The Republicans’ claim to be acting on behalf of taxpayers is not believable.

In Wisconsin, union leaders agreed to concessions requested by Mr. Walker: to pay nearly 6 percent of their wages for pension costs, up from nearly zero, and double payments for health insurance. At that point, most governors would declare victory and move on. Instead, Mr. Walker has rejected union concessions and won’t even negotiate. His true priority is stripping workers of collective-bargaining rights and reducing their unions to a shell. The unions would no longer be able to raise money to oppose him, as they did in last year’s election, easing the way for future Republicans as well.

The game is up when unionized state workers demonstrate a sense of shared sacrifice but Republican lawmakers won’t even allow them a seat at the table. For unions and Democrats in the Midwest, this is an existential struggle, and it is one worth waging.

And in a piece "below the fold" on the paper's web site's op-ed page, a reminder of why unions are important, and what happens when we rely on corporations to do what's right (whether our own employer is union or not):

In The Times’s grim, vivid account on March 26, 1911 — the day after the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire — these words appear: “The victims who are now lying at the Morgue waiting for some one to identify them by a tooth or the remains of a burned shoe were mostly girls from 16 to 23 years of age.” There were 146 victims in all, 129 of them women.

Nearly a century later, the names of the last unidentified victims have been discovered, thanks to the work of a historian named Michael Hirsch. They are Maria Giuseppa Lauletti, Max Florin, Concetta Prestifilippo, Josephine Cammarata, Dora Evans and Fannie Rosen, all buried together beneath a single monument in the Cemetery of the Evergreens on the border of Brooklyn and Queens. This completes the roll of the dead in one of the city’s worst and most important fires.

The fire started late on a Saturday, possibly in a waste bin, just before the Triangle shirtwaist factory closed for the day. The flames and smoke spread quickly, and there was no way to escape. The building was supposedly fireproof, the stairwell doors were locked and there was only one internal fire escape, which quickly buckled under the weight of bodies. Before the fire engines arrived, the terrified workers began leaping from the upper windows to their deaths.

The outer building did not burn; it still stands at 23-29 Washington Place. The horror there brought about sweeping changes in fire safety codes, workplace regulations and conditions for working women.

The owners of the factory had managed to fight off the International Ladies Garment Workers Union right through the 1909 and 1910 garment factory strikes (good information here).

Labels: government for sale, union-busting, Wisconsin 2011

Paul Krugman today pulls the curtain aside from Scott Walker:

But Mr. Walker isn’t interested in making a deal. Partly that’s because he doesn’t want to share the sacrifice: even as he proclaims that Wisconsin faces a terrible fiscal crisis, he has been pushing through tax cuts that make the deficit worse. Mainly, however, he has made it clear that rather than bargaining with workers, he wants to end workers’ ability to bargain.

The bill that has inspired the demonstrations would strip away collective bargaining rights for many of the state’s workers, in effect busting public-employee unions. Tellingly, some workers — namely, those who tend to be Republican-leaning — are exempted from the ban; it’s as if Mr. Walker were flaunting the political nature of his actions.

Why bust the unions? As I said, it has nothing to do with helping Wisconsin deal with its current fiscal crisis. Nor is it likely to help the state’s budget prospects even in the long run: contrary to what you may have heard, public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are paid somewhat less than private-sector workers with comparable qualifications, so there’s not much room for further pay squeezes.

So it’s not about the budget; it’s about the power.

In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. Billionaires can field armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers did in the case of Mr. Walker). On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we’re more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate.

Given this reality, it’s important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions.

You don’t have to love unions, you don’t have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they’re among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans, as opposed to the wealthy. Indeed, if America has become more oligarchic and less democratic over the last 30 years — which it has — that’s to an important extent due to the decline of private-sector unions.

And now Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to get rid of public-sector unions, too.

There’s a bitter irony here. The fiscal crisis in Wisconsin, as in other states, was largely caused by the increasing power of America’s oligarchy. After all, it was superwealthy players, not the general public, who pushed for financial deregulation and thereby set the stage for the economic crisis of 2008-9, a crisis whose aftermath is the main reason for the current budget crunch. And now the political right is trying to exploit that very crisis, using it to remove one of the few remaining checks on oligarchic influence

What Krugman doesn't mention is the $43,000 in campaign donations that Walker accepted from the billionaire Koch brothers. Walker's marching orders from his billionaire benefactors from the day he took office were to bust the public sector unions. He's just doing the bidding of his masters.

Labels: government for sale, union-busting

Dave Johnson over at the Campaign for America's future notes that no matter what the problem is, Republicans have a completely bogus "solution" that they say will fix it -- but it never does:

How often do you see the same solutions offered up for any given problem? Tax cuts for the rich, gut government, get rid of unions, privatize Social Security, etc. (And more tax cuts for the rich.) When something shocking happens the right always has ready-to-go, pre-packaged solution waiting in the wings that they offer to fix the problem.

Take Wisconsin for example. They ginned up the appearance of a budget crisis, got everyone worked up, and wham-o, introduce a bill to kill public-employee unions, gutting worker pay and pensions and their ability to do anything about it.

But in fact, like so many of their "solutions" this was something they already wanted to do, and were just waiting for the opportunity to push it through, or creating the crisis to bring about the opportunity to push it through.

These pre-packaged "free-market" "solutions" are not what the public wants, but are always forced through before anyone can react. They don't solve problems, just make the rich richer at the expense of the rest of us.

When the public is worried, stirred up, hopefully to the point of panic you put in your pre-arranged "solution" and start getting them stirred up about the next problem you will "solve." And those conservative solutions never seem to work out.

The deficits get worse, wages don't go up, retirement gets harder... This is because the real purpose of these "solutions" -- cut taxes, cut what government does for regular people, get rid of unions, privatize social security and for good measure cut taxes more -- are not to solve the problem they were offered up to fix. They have another purpose: make deficits worse, make wages stagnate, make retirement harder...

It always, always, always comes down to a simple formula: more (and more) to the rich at the expense of everyone else.

Right now there is a showdown in Wisconsin that as Rachel Maddow notes, has the future of everything we take for granted as workers in this country at stake -- days off in the form of weekends, the right to a safe workplace, a guarantee that at the end of the day we'll actually get paid what we're supposed to(unless we work for Huffington Post, but that's another story for another day):


There was a time when public sector workers were given generous benefits in order to offset the fact that salaries were lower in the public sector than in the private one. For decades, no one objected, because everyone understood that public sector compensation took a different form than that enjoyed by people employed in the private sector. That is because in the aftermath of World War II, a thriving middle class, built and encouraged by the G.I. Bill, flourished in this country, buying houses and cars and those newfangled color TVs and new GE ranges and refrigerators and Schwinn bicycles for the kids they were having. I'm not discussing the entrenched and persistent poverty that existed at the time and still exists today; not because I want to ignore it, but because what we're seeing in Wisconsin isn't about people who have been poor for decades, it's about people who will be poor tomorrow -- and how their own government (in the case of Wisconsin, their governor) will make them that way, because That Is What He Has Been Paid To Do.

I'll get to Scott Walker and the Koch brothers in a minute. But first, let's get back to those generous public sector benefits and the days when there was a middle class that believed in its own future. That middle class was fueled by a number of things, all of which would be derided as "socialist" today: a college education for returning veterans. Low-cost housing bought with VA loans. Defined benefit pension plans. Cost of living increases. A blue-collar component of that middle class could look forward to seeing its children grow up and get the college education they never had, because they were able to go to the plant every day and build cars that Americans bought and make a living wage doing it. The workers of the UAW have always been blamed for the decline of the automobile industry in this country, but it wasn't the guys on the assembly line who are to blame, it was the guys in the suits in Detroit who, when faced with a 200% jump in gasoline prices in 1973 and another jump in conjunction with a fuel shortage in 1977, were caught with their pants down and an inability to make the kind of reliable fuel-efficient cars that recession-conscious buyers wanted. While Honda was importing Civics and Toyota was importing Corollas, General Motors and Ford were putting out crap like the Vega and the Pinto. The UAW didn't cause the auto industry to be caught with its pants down, and neither did the guys who built these cars. It was bad corporate decisions, and over the last three decades we've seen not the guys at the top, but the guys on the assembly line take the blame.

But there's more to this middle class in which I was fortunate enough to grow up. This middle class had optimism about the future. It participated in a consumer-based economy that wasn't about a sense of entitlement to the same trappings of luxury as the rich, but about a country in which there was the opportunity for the children of that middle class to BECOME rich and to be able to afford those trappings. There's a reason why "Doctor Lawyer CPA" was a suburban mantra; those were professions in which one could buy a house with a pool and a luxury car and clothes from Saks.

But then something happened. Over time, the salary advantage enjoyed by private sector workers disappeared, as companies decided that what the American workforce needed was a race to the bottom -- competition from countries where workers made a dollar a day. Cost of living increases disappeared in the private sector, but not the public one. Private sector wages dropped and public sector wages stayed the same or grew. Unions lost their power in the private sector and kept it only in the public one.

And so we now are watching a hideous and sad irony of this spectacle take place in this country. It's one in which middle-class people with only a tenuous hold left on being middle class and those who have already left it due to executive suite decision-making and the wholesale purchasing of government by corporate titans like the Koch brothers, are defending the people who pulled the rug out from under them. They're defending the robber barons while regarding the members of the very unions to whom they owe much of the benefits enjoyed by the middle class while there was one as the enemy. Instead of wanting the kind of benefits still enjoyed by public sector, the kind they and their fathers and mothers USED to have, they want the members of public sector unions to get screwed over just as badly as they are.

Imagine the possibilities of what could happen if everyone who has been hurt by the Republican mantra that if we just shovel enough cash into the pockets of the Koch brothers then happy days would be here again joined together with the public sector workers in Wisconsin. Imagine if the aggrieved Tea Partiers who are driven by the loss of economic opportunity in this country stopped pointing their fingers down the ladder while largely, but not exclusively, Republican politicians and their corporate masters steal the few bucks left in the wallet in their back pocket. Imagine if the worried moms who are believing what they hear on the morning news while they're packing the kids' lunchboxes -- that what's happening in Wisconsin is all about a refusal to accept benefit cuts rather than about the end of collective bargaining by gubernatorial fiat actually listened to what is going on and realized that this is about them too. Imagine if they were joined by people who have been unemployed for 99 weeks despite having education and skills because they're regarded as "overqualified" (read: too old) or because there are too many people chasing too few jobs. Imagine if they were joined by the tech workers and people in other fields whose jobs have been outsourced. Imagine how big the crowds would be in Madison, Wisconsin and elsewhere.

But alas, that's not what's happening. It's not happening because these people are having the message pounded into their heads every day by Republicans and by corporate-owned media that has itself purchased a sizable chunk of government, that it's all about greedy teachers and firemen, that Scott Walker is just a responsible adult who is trying to impose discipline on a bunch of id-driven two-year-olds. The problem is that this is not what Scott Walker is at all. In reality, he's a bought-and-paid-for lackey of the aforementioned Koch brothers, who architected a deficit in Wisconsin for the express purpose of union busting.

Brian Beutler at TPM reported on Thursday that Wisconsin's "budget crisis" was created by, you guessed it, Scott Walker:

Unlike true austerity measures -- service rollbacks, furloughs, and other temporary measures that cause pain but save money -- rolling back worker's bargaining rights by itself saves almost nothing on its own. But Walker's doing it anyhow, to knock down a barrier and allow him to cut state employee benefits immediately.

Furthermore, this broadside comes less than a month after the state's fiscal bureau -- the Wisconsin equivalent of the Congressional Budget Office -- concluded that Wisconsin isn't even in need of austerity measures, and could conclude the fiscal year with a surplus. In fact, they say that the current budget shortfall is a direct result of tax cut policies Walker enacted in his first days in office.

"Walker was not forced into a budget repair bill by circumstances beyond he control," says Jack Norman, research director at the Institute for Wisconsin Future -- a public interest think tank. "He wanted a budget repair bill and forced it by pushing through tax cuts... so he could rush through these other changes."

THAT is why public sector workers in Wisconsin are protesting. It isn't because of a resistance to givebacks, or an unwillingness to make concessions. It's about eliminating in perpetuity the ability to collectively bargain. It's about union-busting.

And at whose behest is Walker working? It isn't for the benefit of "the taxpayers of Wisconsin", no matter what he said yesterday. It's for the benefit if his masters, the Koch brothers:

According to Wisconsin campaign finance filings, Walker's gubernatorial campaign received $43,000 from the Koch Industries PAC during the 2010 election. That donation was his campaign's second-highest, behind $43,125 in contributions from housing and realtor groups in Wisconsin. The Koch's PAC also helped Walker via a familiar and much-used politicial maneuver designed to allow donors to skirt campaign finance limits. The PAC gave $1 million to the Republican Governors Association, which in turn spent $65,000 on independent expenditures to support Walker. The RGA also spent a whopping $3.4 million on TV ads and mailers attacking Walker's opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Walker ended up beating Barrett by 5 points. The Koch money, no doubt, helped greatly.

The Kochs also assisted Walker's current GOP allies in the fight against the public-sector unions. Last year, Republicans took control of the both houses of the Wisconsin state legislature, which has made Walker's assault on these unions possible. And according to data from the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, the Koch Industries PAC spent $6,500 in support of 16 Wisconsin Republican state legislative candidates, who each won his or her election.

Walker's plan to eviscerate collective bargaining rights for public employees is right out of the Koch brothers' playbook. Koch-backed groups like Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Reason Foundation have long taken a very antagonistic view toward public-sector unions. Several of these groups have urged the eradication of these unions. The Kochs also invited (PDF) Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, an anti-union outfit, to a June 2010 confab in Aspen, Colorado; Mix said in a recent interview that he supports Governor Walker's collective-bargaining bill. In Wisconsin, this conservative, anti-union view is being placed into action by lawmakers in sync with the deep-pocketed donors who helped them obtain power.(Walker also opposes the state's Clean Energy Job Act, which would compel the state to increase its use of alternative energy.) At this moment—even with the Wisconsin uprising unresolved—the Koch brothers' investment in Walker appears to be paying off.

And here, via The Political Carnival, are the Koch brothers' talking points. Scott Walker is a good little lackey, isn't he?

Labels: government for sale, scumbaggery, Teabag America, union-busting

Krugman on how News Corp. wants to have complete dominion over the executive branch by hiring as many 2012 hopefuls as possible onto the Fox News payroll:

I mean that literally. As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.

Arguably, this shouldn’t be surprising. Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.

And these organizations have long provided havens for conservative political figures not currently in office. Thus when Senator Rick Santorum was defeated in 2006, he got a new job as head of the America’s Enemies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that has received funding from the usual sources: the Koch brothers, the Coors family, and so on.

Now Mr. Santorum is one of those paid Fox contributors contemplating a presidential run. What’s the difference?

Well, for one thing, Fox News seems to have decided that it no longer needs to maintain even the pretense of being nonpartisan.

Nobody who was paying attention has ever doubted that Fox is, in reality, a part of the Republican political machine; but the network — with its Orwellian slogan, “fair and balanced” — has always denied the obvious. Officially, it still does. But by hiring those G.O.P. candidates, while at the same time making million-dollar contributions to the Republican Governors Association and the rabidly anti-Obama United States Chamber of Commerce, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox, is signaling that it no longer feels the need to make any effort to keep up appearances.

Something else has changed, too: increasingly, Fox News has gone from merely supporting Republican candidates to anointing them. Christine O’Donnell, the upset winner of the G.O.P. Senate primary in Delaware, is often described as the Tea Party candidate, but given the publicity the network gave her, she could equally well be described as the Fox News candidate. Anyway, there’s not much difference: the Tea Party movement owes much of its rise to enthusiastic Fox coverage.

As the Republican political analyst David Frum put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox” — literally, in the case of all those non-Mitt-Romney presidential hopefuls. It was days later, by the way, that Mr. Frum was fired by the American Enterprise Institute. Conservatives criticize Fox at their peril.

So the Ministry of Propaganda has, in effect, seized control of the Politburo. What are the implications?

Read on to find out.

Fox News viewers like to fancy themselves as independent thinkers, intellectual giants who look at Glenn Beck's blackboard and his references to philosophers and the Founding Fathers that make absolutely no sense, historical or otherwise. Fox News' demographic skews older, which means many people who rely on Social Security (which Republicans want to get rid of), Medicare (which Republicans want to get rid of), traditional pensions (which Republicans and businesses have already gotten rid of), and other accommodations. How any American who claims to value "freedom" and "liberty" can advocate a government that is 100% bought and paid for by a corporation, well, I'd love to hear the arguments for that.

Labels: Fox News, government for sale, Greedy Republican Bastards