Originally published in The Daily Censored for Project Censored.
This week, in the American corporatocracy, we witnessed Wisconsin Republicans, including their newly minted Governor Scott Walker (no relation to my brother), attempt to bust the unions. To do this, Walker and his Republican allies maliciously manufactured a financial crisis.
For decades the lairs on the Right have been scheming to strip workers of their right to collectively bargain with employers. The reason is simple, if you’re a proponent of the corporatocracy, the last thing you would want is an empowered work force. In fact, the real endgame for the folks that believe America should be turned over to a corporate power structure is the elimination of the middle class and the establishment of a vast underclass. Think about it.
For nearly 150 years, the corporatists have subtlety and sometimes forcefully pushed America towards a vast underclass. However, over the last ten years, the Republicans sinister plans have been accelerating. Their devotion to Laissez-Faire ideology has them hopped up like addicts on vodka and Red Bulls at a Christian punk rock concert. As a result of their zealot faith in free-markets, over the past ten years our nation has moved from surplus to massive deficit and most Americans less off then they were a decade ago.
What Scott Walker and the Right-wing extremist are doing in Wisconsin is a microcosm of how the Republicans plan on achieving their corporate takeover of America. Consider this, according to the Wisconsin’s state own assessment , before Scott Walker and the Repugs took office the state had a $121.4 million budget surplus. However, the state had past obligations to Medicaid, the public defender’s office, and corrections. This pushed the surplus into $137 million deficit. Not an extraordinary amount of money for the state, but a deficit none the less.
Once the Right-wing took control of the state, they enacted a sweeping new budget that gave $140 million in corporate tax cuts, $48 million in tax cuts mostly to those earning more than $139,000 a year, and another $92 million in ill conceived “job creating” hand outs to special interests. According to newly adjusted estimates, the state’s projected $137 million deficit is set to explode under the Republicans leadership. While Scott Walker and the Right-wing didn’t singlehandedly created the deficit, their budget accelerates it. Their economic policies are a ramped up version of what the Laissez-Faire liars did under the W. Bush years.
As a result, Scott Walker and the Right-wing ideologues now claim the state is in a financial crisis. A crisis exaggerated by Scott Walker and the Right-wing extremists. Once again, we see the Laissez-Faire liars manufacture a financial crisis in order to justify stripping away every day Americans right to collectively bargain for a fair wage.
In 2001, when George W. Bush and the Republicans took control of all three branches of the government the Democrats left them with a budget surplus. The first thing the Right did was cut taxes for their rich sponsors and create a deficit. Then, they expanded the size of our militant government, took two wars off the books, and continued to cut both taxes and regulations for the rich. As a result, the Laissez-Faire lairs left America with a massive deficit, the responsibly of cleaning up two wars, and a broken banking system that continues to plague the middleclass.
The only answer the Tea Party, Republican controlled congress, and the state of Wisconsin has now brought to America’s troubled table is more of the same corporate gaga. The Right wants to kill government jobs and push the middle class into the ever expanding underclass. By destroying the unions, America’s corporatocracy is one step closer to achieving its goals. And as the Speaker of the House John Boehner told middle class America this week, “We all must sacrifice.” Well, except for the Speaker of the House and the Wall Street bankers buying off both the Democrats and Repugs.
Ever since the Gilded Age and the era of the robber barons, unions have fought and won the 40 hour work week, help create OSHA for basic worker protections, provided health care for workers, end child labor, and guarantee a basic living wage that created a standard of living in America that established a vast middle class. The labor movement also supported, although sometimes reluctantly, women’s rights and civil rights. Nonetheless, in many ways, the labor movement in the U.S. has been the rising tide that lifts all ships.
Since the Reagan era, the Right-wing has been extremely hostile toward unions and has deceitfully worked to systematically undermine them. As a result, unions have been on the decline and so has America’s standard of living. Not since the roaring 30’s -just before the Great Depression- has the divide between the have and have not’s been so vast. While unions are busted and destroyed, so is America’s middle class.
A weak middle class is exactly what the corporatocracy needs. Their aim is to turn America’s middle class into a vast underclass. They are working to disenfranchise America’s main stream, middleclass and turned them into a subservient culture with diminished rights and freedoms.
Scott Walker and the Right-wing’s economic game plan is simple. First, create massive deficits by giving away as much of the tax payers money as possible to the rich supporters of their campaigns. Second, manufacture an economic crisis. Third, use the crisis to strip middle Americans of their wages, jobs, benefits, and rights. Forth, repeat cycle until the Right creates a vast, disenfranchised underclass to rule with impunity.
What will happen in Wisconsin’s style of corporatocracy remains to be seen. Yet, by simply looking at the economic strategy of the Right-wing extremists, the direction they plan on taking our nation in is increasingly becoming clear.
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