"Walker blew into office as part of a red
wave in the 2010 election, with Republicans capturing control of the
state Legislature at the same time. Together they enacted a host of
conservative reforms, chiefly taking away nearly all collective
bargaining power from teachers and other public workers as part of a
fight in 2011 that put Wisconsin at the forefront of a new war over
union rights.
That battle that drew
protests as large as 100,000 people spurred the 2012 recall, which
Walker won. It raised his national profile and laid the groundwork for
his presidential bid. Along the way, Walker signed laws making Wisconsin
a right-to-work state, enacting a 20-week abortion ban, passing a
concealed-carry law and scaling back a host of environmental regulations
that businesses opposed."
While Scott Walker's revolution signed into law many things that Republicans wanted, those changes have not brought the prosperity that conservatives promised (surprise, surprise). I recommend this article from David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute for a comparison between Scott Walker's failed policies in Wisconsin contrasted with the more liberal path chosen by Minnesota. Cooper notes:
"Since the 2010 election of Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Governor Mark Dayton in Minnesota, lawmakers in these two neighboring states have enacted vastly different policy agendas. Governor Walker and the Wisconsin state legislature have pursued a highly conservative agenda centered on cutting taxes, shrinking government, and weakening unions. In contrast, Minnesota under Governor Dayton has enacted a slate of progressive priorities: raising the minimum wage, strengthening safety net programs and labor standards, and boosting public investments in infrastructure and education, financed through higher taxes (largely on the wealthy)."
Cooper goes onto note that between 2010 and 2018 job growth and overall economic growth has been markedly stronger in Minnesota than in Wisconsin. Minnesota also saw faster wage growth, greater shrinkage in gender wage gaps, greater increase in median household income and greater reduction in poverty. Minnesotans are also more likely to have health insurance.
There's a lot more to be said about the mess that Scott Walker made in Wisconsin, but I want to focus on the way his agenda has increased corporate and conservative power at the expense of working people and the democratic process. Here's what I said about Walker five years ago in a post called, Cheat to Win: The Republican Strategy to Stay in Power:
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Old joke: A corporate executive, a union representative and a worker are sitting at a table with a chocolate cake on it. The executive cuts the cake into 8 slices and takes 7 for himself. He then turns to the worker and says, "Watch out for that union guy, he'll try to steal your share of the cake."
In January of 2010, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in the case of Citizens United v Federal Election Commission that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections. This of course has been a giant gift to Republicans, who as a result of the ruling have seen a veritable tidal wave of money pour into their coffers from corporations and billionaires. In 2010, the first election after the Citizens United Decision, the top four fundraising groups, all of whom were created to give money to Republicans, contributed $97.7 million. In distant fifth place was the Service Employees International Union, which raised $15.7 million for Democrats. Similar to the old joke above, Republicans look at this situation and think, "We've got to stop these union contributions to elections."
Here's an example. In 2011, new Republican Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker went to a great deal of trouble to destroy the union representing state employees. Walker claimed that busting the union would save the state money, but was ultimately forced to admit that it did not. So what's the scheme? Republican State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald did everyone the courtesy of explaining the real goals of the plan in plain language, "If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you’re going to find is President Obama is going to have a much difficult, much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin."
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Like so many right-to-work states, Wisconsin has increased corporate power at the expense of everyone else. This strategy is ultimately self-defeating; a consumer economy can't function when working people don't have money to spend. But the damage Scott Walker has done is far deeper than that. Walker has taken a page from George Orwell's 1984: It isn't enough to be louder than the opposition; the point is to eliminate the voices of resistance entirely. Today's Republican party has achieved new heights in endlessly lying about, well, everything. According to the Washington Post, President Trump lies an average of 7.6 times per day, on every subject from the economy to immigration to the Mueller investigation.
We may know in our minds that Trump is lying, but the more Republicans dominate the media and eliminate organized labor and other voices on the left, the more it becomes impossible to refute Trump's lies. Or as the character Winston Smith observed in the novel 1984,
"The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’."
Wisconsin is also, again thanks to Scott Walker, on the cutting edge of voter suppression. In my next post I'll be covering some of the latest developments in the Republican scheme to keeping voters from exercising their franchise.
