Part 1: A primer on the Michigan GOP’s corporatist assault

Rich Robinson on the Republican Governors Association’s expenditures in 2010

Midwestern states with new Republican governors elected in last year’s first-ever Tea Party election have embarked on a radical new agenda of change that progressives like me definitely don’t believe in. While their federal counterparts work on gutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and cutting taxes on millionaires, billionaires and corporations, newly installed GOP Governor Rick Snyder and his Republican-dominated legislature appear hellbent on ramming through a package of more than 30 pro-corporatist bills that will ultimately:

• end collective bargaining as we know it,
• cut taxes on the rich and shift them onto the elderly and the poor and
• establish a new class of unelected and undemocratic leaders called Emergency Financial Managers who are empowered to run any municipality or school district deemed financially troubled with a previously unimaginable new set of dictatorial powers.

Rich Robinson (video above) directs the non-partisan Michigan Campaign Finance Network, a watchdog group that scrutinizes how money flows through the state’s political system. In All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein are credited with saying “follow the money” as the key to understanding power politics, and Rich does that job for us.

In the video and in his organization’s new release entitled “The RGA’s $114M shell game,” Robinson explains that the Republican Governors Association (RGA) actually outspent the combined campaign budgets of the conservative Republican U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Action Network, American Crossroads, Crossroads GPS and the liberal Democratic Service Employees International Union in the 2010 election cycle.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision last year removed the brakes on corporate campaign spending, thereby opening the floodgate of dollars into the GOP coffers. The national press caught wind of the international money entering our elections through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, causing a mini-scandal, but Robinson’s press release details how even more money was spent during that time by the RGA.

For those of us who care about vesting power in people rather than business, this radical change in campaign funding is bad news indeed. Micah White of Adbusters points out that nine out of 10 elections in the United States are won by the candidate who spends the most money. By ending collective bargaining, not only will workers have no counterweight to corporate power, but the Dems face losing lucrative union campaign contributions, which means they will sell out even more quickly than they already have in their quest for corporate campaign cash.

Wonder why President Obama has not joined in the protests in Wisconsin? The Dems apparently figure that the unions have nowhere else to go, so there’s no need to court them. And if the these new Midwestern GOP governors succeed in killing collective bargaining, President and his fellow Dems won’t risk offending them by standing up for workers and their rights. They will instead cravenly curry favor now with our corporate overlords, to ensure they get their share of corporate campaign dollars in the future when unions are gone.

Forget economic populism. If the GOP succeeds in killing unions, future elections will demonstrate Ralph Nader’s maxim that what we really have is one corporate party with a left and right wing on social issues.

If you want to see the playbook that the GOP governors rely on, look for the policies generated by:

• The Heritage Foundation – Their first two principles are: (1) To reorient American politics toward the First Principles of the American Founding and (2) To reshape public policy to reflect our constitutional framework of limited government. Need I say more? These are the guys who will jump down the throat of any politician who suggests a tax hike even if it’s on billionaires.
• The Mackinac Center for Public Policy- Lead-off article today from this Midland-based conservative think tank is “Who Benefits from Lower Business Taxes?”. Why you and I do, of course, in their alternate universe. These are the folks who recently drew attention for filing a Freedom of Information Act request for the emails of all supposedly pro-labor profs at MSU, U of M and Wayne State.
• American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) - Yet another right-wing policy-producing enterprise supported by the billionaire energy plutocrats the Koch Brothers, ALEC is becoming an increasingly important player in staking out ideas like the Emergency Financial Managers law that would have been considered too extreme for even the fringiest fringe groups a few years ago. A recent post on Daily Kos shows that ALEC consistently pushes legislation that promotes privatization – or what Naomi Klein rightly calls crony capitalism (see the video below). Clearly there is no way you can add the need to generate a profit into any agenda and hope to come in lower than what government can do the same job for, but that is what ALEC will insist until enough people believe it to pull the country even farther to the right.

Naomi Klein on Crony Capitalism

More than one person has pointed out that many GOP goals are ultimately self-defeating. Reduce wages too far and fewer people can the goods and services that corporations feed on. Kill health care and worker productivity declines. The relentless corporate undermining of the countervailing institutions’ ability to fight back against them risks bringing down the entire economic edifice. But isn’t that a movie we see again and again in our bubble economy? End-stage Western capitalism today encourages eating your own while destroying the planet in the process.

Enough bad news for one week? Check back next week for Part 2 of our primer on what the Michigan GOP has in mind for us.