Few Heard At Wisconsin Budget “Hearing” In Milwaukee, But School Choice Advocate Denounces Walker’s Subsidy For Rich
At Monday’s public hearing in Milwaukee on Governor Walker’s budget, Wisconsin Republicans once again resorted to anti-participatory tactics to avoid criticism of their far-right agenda. Despite these efforts, strong criticisms were squeezed-in by longtime Milwaukee school choice advocate Howard Fuller, calling GOP efforts to lift income limits on school vouchers an “outrageous” program “that subsidizes rich people.”
Republicans Regulate Milwaukee Hearing
Milwaukee’s hearing at State Fair Park was the third of four statewide sessions on Walker’s proposed budget by the Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee, and controversy arose well before the hearing began. According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, two of Milwaukee’s congresswomen, Rep. Tamara Grigsby and Sen. Lena Taylor, were concerned that many working people would be excluded because the hearing was scheduled to end at 6pm. The two arranged to hold informal sessions until 9pm to allow people to voice their opinion, then notified Joint Finance co-chairs Rep. Robin Vos (R-Burlington) and Sen. Alberta Darling (R- River Falls) about their plans.
Sen. Darling reportedly approved the Grigsby-Taylor informal hearing and Rep. Vos “said he would think about it.” However, Taylor soon received notice from State Fair Park that Vos had reserved the facility until midnight, meaning the Dems’ hearing could not take place, and Milwaukee’s working population could not have their voices heard.
According to Taylor, “This isn’t open government. This is not democracy. This is shameful.”
Beer City Blockage the Latest in a Series
Vos and Darling were unabashed about their intention to suppress opposition, with Darling telling the Journal-Sentinel “we had to take precautions so that what happened at the Capitol wouldn’t happen at State Fair Park.”
“The hearings are going to be done when we say they’re done,” Vos said.
This is only the latest in a series of Wisconsin GOP efforts to limit scrutiny and stifle dissent. On February 11, Governor Walker sought to limit deliberation on his budget repair bill by introducing it on a Friday and ordering a vote on a Tuesday (Senate Democrats thwarted these plans by leaving the state). The Walker Administration violated the constitutionally-guaranteed right of public access to the state capitol in late February, and a judge ordered it re-opened; the administration violated that order in March and a hearing on that violation is pending. On March 11, Republicans forced the union-busting budget repair bill through the Senate with minimal notice, breaking state Open Meetings laws and possibly violating the constitution’s public access guarantees.
Hearing Limits Input from Milwaukee’s Particularly-Affected Populations of Color
This latest step towards suppression is especially egregious considering Milwaukee is not only the state’s largest city, but has the most people of color, a population that will be particularly affected by Walker’s budget and budget repair bill. The plans eliminate funding for a new program to track and remedy racial profiling (the first step towards confronting Wisconsin’s atrocious record of racial disparities in incarceration); will limit eligibility for medical assistance; kicks legal immigrants off food assistance; and eliminates funding for a program that provided civil legal services to low income residents. Walker is also expected to cut $300 million from Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), severely limiting education quality for the district teaching the greatest number of students (and students of color) in the state.
With Republican legislators keeping the Milwaukee hearing short, only speakers who signed up before 12:30pm had their voices heard. Hundreds of people were denied the ability to speak, and as the hearing ended at 6:30pm, there were shouts of “let us speak” and the now-familiar “shame” directed at those lawmakers.
Howard Fuller Heard on Education
While many Milwaukee residents were not heard on Monday, at least one prominent voice spoke strongly against Walker’s plans for Milwaukee schools.
In addition to cutting $300 million from Milwaukee’s public schools (and eliminating teacher’s unions), Walker’s budget reinforces existing inequalities by expanding the “school choice” program, which allows students to opt-out of public schools and use a taxpayer-funded voucher for private school tuition. The voucher program has been criticized not only because it directs money away from public schools, but because private schools can pick-and-choose their students, often selecting those who come from an advantaged background and leaving the rest to suffer in under-funded public schools.
Milwaukee became the country’s first publicly-funded school voucher program in 1990, and it grew under the tenure of MPS Superintendent Howard Fuller. He currently directs an institute at Marquette University that authorizes schools trying to get into Milwaukee’s choice program. Howard has collaborated with Republican lawmakers in the past, many of whom support so-called “school choice” out of belief in free market principles of competition and privatization. While many on the left fear defunding public education, some urban advocates like Fuller have supported vouchers to give promising low-income students a better chance at long-term success by providing education options that would not otherwise be available.
But Fuller, who is now regarded as the nation’s most influential African-American spokesman for “school choice,” strongly criticized Walker’s plans to remove income eligibility caps for the private school voucher program. “Please don’t make it true that you were using the poor just to eventually make this available to the rich,” Fuller said. “If [lifting income eligibility] is done, I will become an opponent of this.”
“I never got into this to give someone like me $6,500 to send their kid to Marquette High School (tuition $15,000 per year). . . This is where I get off the train, I’m not going to go anywhere in America and fight for a program that subsidizes rich people.”
By: Brenda Fischer, Center for Media and Democracy, April 12, 2011
What’s In The Compromise Spending Bill?
After a marathon four-day bill drafting session, the House Appropriations Committee early Tuesday morning unveiled compromise legislation to fund the federal government for the remainder of the fiscal year and cut $38.5 billion from current spending levels.
House Republican leaders struck a deal with Senate Democrats and the White House late Friday after pushing to cut $61 billion from current spending levels. GOP leaders hope to put the bill on the floor Wednesday, with Senate action expected Thursday. The current stopgap funding measure expires Friday.
Overall, labor, health, and education programs received a $5.5 billion cut from last fiscal year’s level, including the cancellation of 55 programs for savings of more than $1 billion. The final legislation prevents 218,000 low-income children from being removed from Head Start and rejects education grant funding that would have cost approximately 10,000 jobs and reduced educational services to 1 million students, according to Senate Appropriations Committee summary.
Here’s where the spending cuts (and, in the case of Defense, the increases) come from:
- TRANSPORTATION AND HOUSING. These programs would receive the largest cut under the compromise, $12.3 billion from fiscal 2010 levels, including a total of $2.9 billion in cuts for high-speed rail, $991 million in cuts to transit programs, and a $3.2 billion rescission of highway funding, including $630 million worth of old earmarks. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s community development fund would get a $942 million cut.
- SCIENCE. The continuing resolution also blocks funding for the establishment of a Climate Service at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; for the approval of new fisheries catch-share programs in certain fisheries; and for NASA and the Office of Science and Technology Policy to engage in bilateral activities with China.
- AGRICULTURE. Agriculture programs would see $3 billion in cuts from fiscal 2010, including a $10 million cut to food and safety inspection, but the plan allows “for uninterrupted meat, poultry, and egg products inspection activities of the” Agriculture Department, the committee said. The USDA’s Special Supplemental Feeding Program for Women, Infants, and Children, also known as WIC, received $6.75 billion, which is a $504 million cut from the fiscal 2010 level.
- ENERGY. Energy and water programs were reduced by a relatively modest $1.7 billion. The bill funds the Army Corps of Engineers at the president’s request level of $4.9 billion and supports existing applications for renewable energy loan guarantees at the Department of Energy.
- WASHINGTON, D.C. The compromise restores a long-standing provision against the use of federal and local funds for abortions in the District of Columbia, and includes the reauthorization of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships, along with a $2.3 million funding increase, to stop the termination of the program and allow new students to participate.
- HOMELAND SECURITY. A $784 million net reduction over last year, including a $786 million cut to Federal Emergency Management Agency first-responder grants and elimination of $264 million in funding that was previously targeted to earmarks.
- DEFENSE. Funded at $513 billion in the CR, about $5 billion above last year. The bill also includes an additional $157.8 billion for overseas contingency operations (emergency funding).
By: Humberto Sanchez, National Journal, April 12, 2011
How The Media Promotes Ignorance And Stifles Debate
Friday night, my eyes were glued to to the news, as I awaited any and all emerging details about the possible government shutdown. As outlets began reporting that republicans and democrats had finally reached a deal, I immediately felt a sense of relief. Thank goodness, I thought, so much unnecessary suffering averted. But the relief didn’t last long, because in the pit of my stomach was fear for the many millions of people who will be affected by the $38 billion in budget cuts passed by congress. Unfortunately, the media feels differently, preferring to discuss ad-nausium the budget cut’s political ramifications for the two parties.
The same thing happened when the GOP was determined to shutdown the government if democrats did not sign on to defunding Planned Parenthood. Again, the media’s focus was not on the health of the 3 million people the organization treats every year, by providing cancer screenings, HIV and STI checks, and contraceptives. They focused on how this painted republicans as partisan ideologues, or the democrats as supporters for women’s rights, which party was to blame for the almost-shutdown, and most notably, the consequences this would have on their popularity.
Almost all of the reporting by the establishment media centers around how X will affect the democrats favorability numbers, or how Y will affect the republicans chances in 2012. Whether I was watching MSNBC or CNN, the sole concern was always on the political implications of the budget cuts, rather than the real life consequences for the many millions of Americans already suffering from unemployment, foreclosures, and sky-rocketing medical costs.
And therein lies the problem with our media establishment: Every major policy issue is strangled by the established “right vs left” consensus. Whether it’s civil liberties, our endless wars, healthcare reform, or the economy, all are presented through the prism of democrat and republican disagreement. Not only does this ignore the tribulation of people around the country, but most importantly the media omits discussion of issues that receive bipartisan support, which has increasingly become the case, issue after issue.
There is very little that republicans and democrats in office disagree on. They both support the wars, the private insurance industry, tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, budget cuts during an economic recession, and the list goes on. Perhaps this is because both parties are corporately owned by the same interests. The only real difference today remains their position on social issues. Republicans are still against women’s reproductive rights and marriage equality, while democrats remain pro-choice and advocates for ending institutionalized discrimination against homosexuals (although they don’t do a very good job at consistently standing up for these rights). While these issues are of great importance, they are not the only problems afflicting the nation.
Look no further than the lack of coverage on economic suffering for proof. Republicans want to cut all social spending, while democrats prefer to cut a fraction of social services that benefit the public at large. So rather than discussing alternatives to austerity aimed at the working class and poor, the media solely focuses on how much austerity is enough. Poll after poll shows that Americans overwhelmingly support increasing taxes on the wealthy to reduce the deficit. In addition, major cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security to balance the budget are wildly unpopular. But the mainstream narrative does not even challenge whether budget cuts are necessary, or if other alternatives for deficit reduction exist, let alone the public’s opinion.
The media also refuses to bring up defense spending, which costs upwards of $1 trillion annually. Probably because both parties agree that the national security and warfare state are untouchable. Which is interesting, given that the public prefers cutting defense spending rather than social spending to reduce the deficit. Then again public support for the Afghanistan war is at an all-time low, but the bipartisan Washington consensus in support of the war remains unmoved. The fact that war spending is draining our treasury should be a significant story for the media, particularly since the government just launched another war in Libya, while ironically calling for fiscal responsibility.
If they aren’t even capable of exposing the cost of war, it is no surprise that the casualties of war, both the injured and dead, soldiers and civilians, are completely omitted from discussion. Again, this makes sense, given the bipartisan support for war, with tactical nuances making up the few points of contention. This was most apparent in the lead up to the Iraq war, which enjoyed strong bipartisan support, with the media following suit by forcing a pro-war narrative and firing those who loudly dissented.
The same is true for healthcare reform. Americans overwhelmingly support a single payer, medicare-for-all system, but since democrats and republicans are both in the pockets of the private insurance industry, single-payer is not a viable topic for debate on the airwaves. Even climate change has become a forgotten issue. Now that President Obama and his fellow democrats have adopted the Bush approach — i.e. refusing to cut greenhouse gas emissions, regulate resource exploiting industries, or invest in alternative energy — climate change and it’s very real, disastrous effects, are almost never examined.
It is no wonder so many Americans are turned off by politics. Many don’t realize how political decisions effect their everyday lives, from the quality of the water and air that they breath, to the seat-belts they wear and sick days they receive. If not for independent media outlets like Democracy Now! and independent journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and Marcy Wheeler, to name a few, I would be an apathetic liberal uninterested in “silly political debate”.
If the goal of the establishment media class is to portray significant political decisions as boring ideological nonsense, then they have succeeded. One doesn’t need to attend journalism school to understand that the mainstream media has failed at its job of informing the public and holding those in power accountable. Instead they have successfully promoted ignorance and stifled debate, to the detriment of truth and social justice.
By: Rania Khalek, CommonDreams.org, April 10, 2011
“An Inherent Relationship”: A Primer on Class Struggle
When we study Marx in my graduate social theory course, it never fails that at least one student will say (approximately), “Class struggle didn’t escalate in the way Marx expected. In modern capitalist societies class struggle has disappeared. So isn’t it clear that Marx was wrong and his ideas are of little value today?”
I respond by challenging the premise that class struggle has disappeared. On the contrary, I say that class struggle is going on all the time in every major institution of society. One just has to learn how to recognize it.
One needn’t embrace the labor theory of value to understand that employers try to increase profits by keeping wages down and getting as much work as possible out of their employees. As the saying goes, every successful capitalist knows what a Marxist knows; they just apply the knowledge differently.
Workers’ desire for better pay and benefits, safe working conditions, and control over their own time puts them at odds with employers. Class struggle in this sense hasn’t gone away. In fact, it’s inherent in the relationship between capitalist employer and employee. What varies is how aggressively and overtly each side fights for its interests.
Where else does class struggle occur? We can find class struggle wherever three things are at stake: the balance of power between capitalists and workers, the legitimacy of capitalism, and profits.
The most important arena outside the workplace is government, because it’s here that the rules of the game are made, interpreted, and enforced. When we look at how capitalists try to use government to protect and advance their interests — and at how other groups resist — we are looking at class struggle.
Capitalists want laws that weaken and cheapen labor. This means laws that make it harder for workers to organize unions; laws that make it easier to export production to other countries; laws that make it easier to import workers from other countries; laws and fiscal policies that keep unemployment high, so that workers will feel lucky just to have jobs, even with low pay and poor benefits.
Capitalists want tax codes that allow them to pay as little tax as possible; laws that allow them to externalize the costs of production (e.g., the health damage caused by pollution); laws that allow them to swallow competitors and grow huge and more powerful; and laws that allow them to use their wealth to dominate the political process. Workers, when guided by their economic interests, generally want the opposite.
I should note that by “workers,” I mean everyone who earns a wage or a salary and does not derive wealth from controlling the labor of others. By this definition, most of us are workers, though some are more privileged than others. This definition also implies that whenever we resist the creation and enforcement of laws that give capitalists more power to exploit people and the environment, we are engaged in class struggle, whether we call it that or not.
There are many other things capitalists want from government. They want public subsidy of the infrastructure on which profitability depends; they want wealth transferred to them via military spending; they want militarily-enforced access to foreign markets, raw materials, and labor; and they want suppression of dissent when it becomes economically disruptive. So we can include popular resistance to corporate welfare, military spending, imperialist wars, and government authoritarianism as further instances of class struggle.
Class struggle goes on in other realms. In goes on in K-12 education, for example, when business tries to influence what students are taught about everything from nutrition to the virtues of free enterprise; when U.S. labor history is excluded from the required curriculum; and when teachers’ unions are blamed for problems of student achievement that are in fact consequences of the maldistribution of income and wealth in U.S. society.
It goes on in higher education when corporations lavish funds on commercially viable research; when capitalist-backed pundits attack professors for teaching students to think critically about capitalism; and when they give money in exchange for putting their names on buildings and schools. Class struggle also goes on in higher education when pro-capitalist business schools are exempted from criticism for being ideological and free-market economists are lauded as objective scientists.
In media discourse, class struggle goes on when we’re told that the criminal behavior of capitalist firms is a bad-apple problem rather than a rotten-barrel problem. It goes on when we’re told that the economy is improving when wages are stagnant, unemployment is high, and jobs continue to be moved overseas. It goes on when we’re told that U.S. wars and occupations are motivated by humanitarian rather than economic and geopolitical concerns.
Class struggle goes on in the cultural realm when books, films, and songs vaunt the myth that economic inequality is a result of natural differences in talent and motivation. It goes on when books, films, and songs celebrate militarism and violence. It also goes on when writers, filmmakers, songwriters, and other artists challenge these myths and celebrations.
It goes on, too, in the realm of religion. When economic exploitation is justified as divinely ordained, when the oppressed are appeased by promises of justice in an afterlife, and when human capacities for rational thought are stunted by superstition, capitalism is reinforced. Class struggle is also evident when religious teachings are used, antithetically to capitalism, to affirm values of equality, compassion, and cooperation.
I began with the claim that Marx’s contemporary relevance becomes clear once one learns to see the pervasiveness of class struggle. But apart from courses in social theory, reading Marx is optional. In the real world, the important thing is learning to see the myriad ways that capitalists try to advance their interests at the expense of everyone else. This doesn’t mean that everything in social life can be reduced to class struggle, but that everything in social life should be examined to see if and how it involves a playing-out of class interests.
There is fierce resistance to thinking along these lines, precisely because class analysis threatens to unite the great majority of working people who are otherwise divided in a fight over crumbs. Class analysis also threatens to break down the nationalism upon which capitalists depend to raise armies to help exploit the people and resources of other countries. Even unions, supposed agents of workers, often resist class analysis because it exposes the limits of accommodationism.
Resistance to thinking about class struggle is powerful, but the power of class analysis is hard to resist, once one grasps it. Suddenly, seemingly odd or unrelated capitalist stratagems begin to make sense. To take a current example, why would capitalists bankroll candidates and politicians to destroy public sector unions? Why do capitalists care so much about the public sector?
It’s not because they want to balance budgets, create jobs, improve government efficiency, or achieve any of the goals publicly touted by governors like Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Rick Snyder, or John Kasich. It’s because of the profit and power they can gain by destroying the last remaining organizations that fight for the interests of working people in the political sphere, and by making sure that private-sector workers can’t look to the public sector for examples of how to win better pay and benefits.
Other parts of the agenda being pursued by corporate-backed governors and other elected officials also make sense as elements of class struggle.
Selling off utilities, forests, and roads is not about saving taxpayers money. It’s about giving capitalists control of these assets so they can be used to generate profits. Cutting social services is about ensuring that workers depend on low-wage jobs for survival. Capitalists’ goal, as always, is a greater share of wealth for them and a smaller share for the rest of us. Clear away the befogging rhetoric, the rhetoric that masks class struggle, and it becomes clear that the bottom line is the bottom line.
If class struggle is hard to see, it’s not only because of mystifying ideology. It’s because the struggle has been a rout for the last thirty years. But a more visible class struggle could be at hand. The side that’s been losing has begun to fight back more aggressively, as we’ve seen most notably in Wisconsin. To see what’s at stake in this fight and what a real victory might look like, it will help to call the fight by its proper name.
By: Michael Schwalbe, Professor of Sociology, North Carolina State University, Originally Published March 31, 2011, CommonDreams.org
Shutting Down Discourse: GOP Is The New American Thought Police
Recently William Cronon, a historian who teaches at the University of Wisconsin, decided to weigh in on his state’s political turmoil. He started a blog, “Scholar as Citizen,” devoting his first post to the role of the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council in pushing hard-line conservative legislation at the state level. Then he published an opinion piece in The Times, suggesting that Wisconsin’s Republican governor has turned his back on the state’s long tradition of “neighborliness, decency and mutual respect.”
So what was the G.O.P.’s response? A demand for copies of all e-mails sent to or from Mr. Cronon’s university mail account containing any of a wide range of terms, including the word “Republican” and the names of a number of Republican politicians.
If this action strikes you as no big deal, you’re missing the point. The hard right — which these days is more or less synonymous with the Republican Party — has a modus operandi when it comes to scholars expressing views it dislikes: never mind the substance, go for the smear. And that demand for copies of e-mails is obviously motivated by no more than a hope that it will provide something, anything, that can be used to subject Mr. Cronon to the usual treatment.
The Cronon affair, then, is one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become.
The demand for Mr. Cronon’s correspondence has obvious parallels with the ongoing smear campaign against climate science and climate scientists, which has lately relied heavily on supposedly damaging quotations found in e-mail records.
Back in 2009 climate skeptics got hold of more than a thousand e-mails between researchers at the Climate Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia. Nothing in the correspondence suggested any kind of scientific impropriety; at most, we learned — I know this will shock you — that scientists are human beings, who occasionally say snide things about people they dislike.
But that didn’t stop the usual suspects from proclaiming that they had uncovered “Climategate,” a scientific scandal that somehow invalidates the vast array of evidence for man-made climate change. And this fake scandal gives an indication of what the Wisconsin G.O.P. presumably hopes to do to Mr. Cronon.
After all, if you go through a large number of messages looking for lines that can be made to sound bad, you’re bound to find a few. In fact, it’s surprising how few such lines the critics managed to find in the “Climategate” trove: much of the smear has focused on just one e-mail, in which a researcher talks about using a “trick” to “hide the decline” in a particular series. In context, it’s clear that he’s talking about making an effective graphical presentation, not about suppressing evidence. But the right wants a scandal, and won’t take no for an answer.
Is there any doubt that Wisconsin Republicans are hoping for a similar “success” against Mr. Cronon?
Now, in this case they’ll probably come up dry. Mr. Cronon writes on his blog that he has been careful never to use his university e-mail for personal business, exhibiting a scrupulousness that’s neither common nor expected in the academic world. (Full disclosure: I have, at times, used my university e-mail to remind my wife to feed the cats, confirm dinner plans with friends, etc.)
Beyond that, Mr. Cronon — the president-elect of the American Historical Association — has a secure reputation as a towering figure in his field. His magnificent “Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West” is the best work of economic and business history I’ve ever read — and I read a lot of that kind of thing.
So we don’t need to worry about Mr. Cronon — but we should worry a lot about the wider effect of attacks like the one he’s facing.
Legally, Republicans may be within their rights: Wisconsin’s open records law provides public access to e-mails of government employees, although the law was clearly intended to apply to state officials, not university professors. But there’s a clear chilling effect when scholars know that they may face witch hunts whenever they say things the G.O.P. doesn’t like.
Someone like Mr. Cronon can stand up to the pressure. But less eminent and established researchers won’t just become reluctant to act as concerned citizens, weighing in on current debates; they’ll be deterred from even doing research on topics that might get them in trouble.
What’s at stake here, in other words, is whether we’re going to have an open national discourse in which scholars feel free to go wherever the evidence takes them, and to contribute to public understanding. Republicans, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, are trying to shut that kind of discourse down. It’s up to the rest of us to see that they don’t succeed.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 27, 2011
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