Romney's Veep Choice: Paul Ryan, Koch Ally and 'Right-Wing Social Engineer'

And after Obama capitulates to his Wall St puppeteers, Romney's puppeteers--the Kochs--pick his VP running-mate for him...Paul Ryan. It can get plenty worse, though it doesn't seem possible.--jef

Gay or not gay?

In making the risky choice of picking Rep. Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney seals the deal on the Koch brothers' takeover of the Republican Party.
August 10, 2012

 |   By Adele M. Stan

It's official: The Republican Party is now officially a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers. How else to explain Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's pick of Rep. Paul Ryan, Wis., as his running mate. Yes, that Paul Ryan -- chairman of the House Budget Committee and author of the infamous Ryan roadmap budget plan, which promises to turn Medicare into a privatized voucher system, and yank health care from millions of children whose parents happen to be poor. And that's just the beginning. In addition to a raft of cuts, the Ryan plan would end the Earned Income Tax Credit, which millions of parents count on.

It's a plan that even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich deemed too "radical." Asked by NBC's David Gregory to respond to Ryan's proposal, Gingrich famously said [3] (video):

"I don't think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering. I don't think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate."

(Of course that was before Gingrich walked back [4] those remarks, apparently reminded by some savvy operative that he might not want to anger the Kochs, to whom Ryan, 42, is something of a youthful ward, having been the beneficiary of years of support from the Koch-founded Americans For Prosperity.)

In case anyone should miss the point that Ryan is a very Kochy guy, Romney is doing his big reveal of Ryan this morning aboard the U.S.S. Wisconsin, a decommisioned ship docked in the all-important swing state of Virginia. However important Virginia is to the electoral math, Wisconsin is a symbolic icon for the Tea Party. It's not only Ryan's home state; it's the poster state of right-wing triumph, the place where Gov. Scott Walker successfully fended off a recall attempt by progressives in response to a bill he rammed through the state legislature that all but ended collective bargaining for the state's public employees. Much of the credit for Wisconsin's right turn goes to Americans For Prosperity, which boasts a particularly aggressive Wisconsin chapter, which began building a network of activists there in 2005.

Ryan's association with the group goes back almost that far. In 2008, he was granted [5] the Wisconsin AFP chapter's "Defending the American Dream" award, handed to him by a young county executive who served as emcee for those festivities -- a guy named Scott Walker. Since then, he has made countless appearances on the group's behalf, at anti-health-care reform rallies on Capitol Hill, on conference town halls across the country and at Americans For Prosperity and Americans For Prosperity Foundation events. (Just enter Ryan's name into the search engine on the Amerians For Prosperity Web site, and you'll come up with eight pages [6] of citations.) In fact, Ryan was due to speak at last week's conference sponsored by the AFP Foundation in Washington, D.C., forcing increased speculation about his running-mate prospects when he failed to show [7].

For Romney, the pluses in picking Ryan are these: the Tea Partiers, who are less than wild about Mittens, really love them some Paul Ryan -- as does David Koch, who will be seated as a Romney delegate at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. Koch and his brother, Charles, are major donors, not only to political candidates, but to a range of right-wing think tanks and groups [8]. In the post-Citizens United world, those donations add up to millions in political advertisements by all manner of non-profit groups. Already, Americans For Prosperity has made a $27 million air-time buy [9] for running anti-Obama ads.

Romney already owes some of his success in the primary season to Koch's favorite politicians in Wisconsin. Remember Rick Santorum? Right-wing base types -- Christian evangelicals and Tea Partiers -- just loved him. He was giving Romney a whole lotta agita during the primaries -- first stealing Romney's reported win in the Iowa caucuses back from the Mittster in a recount, and nearly besting Romney in Michigan, where Romney grew up.

In the weeks leading up to the Wisconsin primary, Santorum was running double-digits ahead of Romney. But then Paul Ryan endorsed Romney [10], and so did the Koch-bought U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson. When Ryan began campaigning with Romney in the final days of the campaign, the crowds at Romney events seemed to swell. While conventional wisdom holds that endorsements don't amount to a hill of beans, conventional wisdom had an epic #FAIL on Wisconsin's primary night, when 60 percent of those responding in exit polls [10] said that Romney's endorsers influenced their vote. (Romney also won the endorsements of a number of Americans For Prosperity-backed state legislators.)

But Romney's Ryan pick is not without its minuses, the largest one being running with a guy who has promised to end Medicare and replace it with something else entirely that could wind up costing seniors big-time. Don't be fooled by the fact that Ryan calls his voucher-health-care system for seniors "Medicare". That's just a trick -- like an employer who promises you dental coverage that amounts to a coupon for a discount on a visit to your favorite dentist.

Of course, photos of the children who would lose health-care under the Ryan plan would probably not play well for Romney, either. Democracy Corps, the polling outfit run by Stan Greenberg and James Carville, found the Ryan budget to be a drag on Romney's prospects for moving swing voters into his column. (Greenberg refers to the key Obama coalition of unmarried women, youth, and minority voters as the "Rising American Electorate.") From their latest memo [11], issued in July:

The Ryan budget’s impact on the most vulnerable is powerful among key swing voters, including unmarried women, who shifted a net 10 points toward Obama, the Rising American Electorate (net 3-point shift), and independents (net 9-point shift). Even conservatives were swayed, shifting a net 13 points toward Obama.
Among those who heard an even split of facts about the Ryan budget – including ones about cuts to programs aimed to help mostly lower and working class families – the shift is even more pronounced. With this group of voters, Obama leads Romney by 9 points, 52 to 43 percent, the largest margin of any of the groups in our experiment. It’s clear that focusing on what the Ryan budget does to the most vulnerable Americans can pay dividends for Obama.

Looks like the Koch brothers are going to have to throw a whole lot of money at this thing to make it work for them. But we know they've got plenty of that.

 Links

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsHw92j9P0Q
[4] http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/05/17/gingrich-apologizes-paul-ryan-right-wing-social-engineering-criticism/#ixzz23DfTabbG
[5] http://www.alternet.org/story/149965/wisconsin_is_a_battleground_against_the_billionaire_kochs%27_plan_to_break_labor%27s_back
[6] http://americansforprosperity.org/search/Paul+Ryan/
[7] http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/08/paul-ryans-weekend-131130.html
[8] http://www.alternet.org/story/150520/you_thought_the_koch_brothers_were_bad_turns_out_they%27re_even_worse_than_you_thought?paging=off
[9] http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/08/afp-to-announce-a-new-27-million-ad-buy-against-obama/1#.UCYW42NSREM
[10] http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/876280/did_the_koch_machine_put_romney_over_the_top_in_wisconsin
[11] http://www.democracycorps.com/National-Surveys/serious-attack-on-ryan-budget-takes-toll-on-mitt-romney/#ftn1

How Not to Waste Your Vote in November

Repressive Democracy
by ANDREW LEVINE

There is no sugar-coating the fact: the failure to recall Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin was a defeat for organized labor and the entire American working class, and for everyone with interests opposed to those of the plutocrats for whom Walker fronts. By some estimates, this would be 99% of us.

Still, judging by the reaction of the corporate media, the election was barely newsworthy – except, for a night or two, to the Republican flacks at Fox News and their Democratic counterparts at “left leaning” MSNBC. What they both cared about was the impact on Barack Obama’s reelection.

Predictably, at Fox, Walker’s victory spelled doom for Obama; at MSNBC, also predictably, it wasn’t that big a deal. Sure, Ed Schultz, self-declared friend of the working stiff, was mad as hell, but he’ll get over it; Rachel Maddow, growing more tiresome by the day, seemed over it before she even got into it.

To the extent that they offered any analysis at all it was about how zillionaires, the Koch Brothers especially, pumped in so much money for Walker that he outspent Tom Barrett, the Democratic candidate, seven to one.

This translates into seven times more mind-numbing commercials. No one bothered to fault a political culture where this has become what it’s all about. Nobody complained that these ad campaigns leave little or no time or space for rational deliberation, the hallmark supposedly of collective decision-making in democratic states.

What the “left leaning” talking heads complained about instead was how unfair the PR wars have become now that the Supreme Court has given corporate “persons” carte blanche to spend all they please.

There was hardly a word, therefore, about how Obama remained aloof from the events in Wisconsin throughout 2011, as people from all walks of life mounted the most sustained revolt in decades against capital’s escalating attack on the working class. And neither was there much discussion of how, in the days before the election, Obama couldn’t even be bothered with the recall election – except to send a bland tweet of support for Barrett the day before.

He was too busy palling around with corporate CEOs in adjacent states, and chatting up hedge fund managers and banksters in Chicago; too busy, in other words, showing his true colors.

And, of course, no one thought to mention how little the Barrett campaign had to do with the aspirations of the tens of thousands of people who occupied the state Capital in the winter and spring of 2011; or of how the class offensive Walker launched was only an extreme version of the neo-liberal assault on the gains of the middle decades of the twentieth century, a regressive project that Democrats and Republicans alike have been pursuing for more than thirty years.

Therefore no one pointed out how the most one could have hoped for from a Barrett victory was a kinder and gentler version of Walker’s overreaching.

None of this is surprising. Serious discussions of anything other than the horse race between Romney and Obama would be too much to expect from the pundits at MSNBC. They are basically cheerleaders for Obama. They work a different angle.

Because they have so little to cheer, they fear monger shamelessly — making much, perhaps too much, of Republican idiocy. It’s nice work if you can get it because Republicans are easy prey – their plutocrats are more than usually repellent, their elected officials are morons, and their useful idiots wear their ridiculousness on their sleeves.

Rubbing all this in is well and good. But it is also diversionary. It helps Obama and Company go ahead with their endless (and largely secret) wars. It draws attention away from their war-induced disregard of the rule of law. And it frees them up to toady to the capitalists whose hearts and minds they yearn, in vain, to win over.

While Obama and the others do all this and more, liberals don’t notice or else they notice but still cut them slack. And why shouldn’t they? By their lights, Obama and his minions are all that stand between those who still have the wits they were born with and the demented theocrats and market theologians on the other side.

No matter that if there was anything like equal justice under law in the Land of the Free, Obama would have been indicted or impeached long ago. Having American citizens put to death without even a semblance of due process is only the most egregious of the high crimes and misdemeanors with which he could be charged. Nixon did no worse; by comparison, Clinton was impeached for a trifle.

No matter too that many of the Nobel laureate’s machinations abroad are actionable under international law. Were the mighty held to the standards they impose on others, Obama, like Bush and Cheney before him, could count on spending the rest of his life in an orange jump suit.

But none of this matters to the “liberal” media — not when there are Republicans to mock and Democratic voters to frighten.

On most domestic issues, Kennedy and Johnson and even Nixon were better than Obama by orders of magnitude. But like Obama and Bush before him, they waged ruinous wars that outraged the moral sensibilities of people throughout the world. Then, like now, the situation they brought about seemed impossible to set right; not, anyway, through the usual political channels.

The apparent impossibility of changing the old order from within led some of the opponents of Kennedy’s, Johnson’s, and Nixon’s wars to call on intellectual traditions that transcend the horizons of normal politics by focusing on the contradictory character of prevailing institutions and norms.

The most venerable and soundest of these radical currents, and the most influential in that period, derived from the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831). The usual point of entry to this tradition for anti-war and anti-imperialist militants in the United States in the sixties and seventies was through the writings of thinkers associated with the so-called Frankfurt School.

Herbert Marcuse was not the most eminent exponent of Frankfurt School thought but he was by far the most influential propagator of it in the United States. As such, he quickly rose from obscurity to fame, becoming a target of adoration in New Left circles and, needless to say, of media vilification. Today, he is an all but forgotten figure.

But his work remains a source of suggestive – and timely – insights that can be useful for thinking about overcoming hopelessness in the Age of Obama and in the aftermath of the Wisconsin defeat.

* * *

Four decades ago, Marcuse published a widely read essay with a seemingly self-contradictory title, “Repressive Tolerance.”

His aim in that essay was to account for the astonishing degree of political conformity he observed in the United States and other liberal democracies. What struck him was the fact that, despite a comparative absence of overt repression, “critical” thinking, counter-systemic thinking opposed to the established order, was, if anything, even less evident in liberal democracies than in societies where speech and other forms of expression were subject to government suppression and control.

For Hegelians like Marcuse, history is the story of the career and ultimate realization of Reason in society or, what comes to the same thing in the Hegelian view, of a certain idea of human freedom, according to which, at the end of history, universal principles of Right govern human interactions and institutional arrangements. The United States, for all its liberal virtues, was nothing like the ideal. Marcuse was struck by how politically inconsequential this fact was, and at how much support there was instead for the existing order.

From within a broadly Hegelian perspective, one possible explanation for political conformity could be a rational consensus supporting the status quo. It could be, in other words, that there is little critical thinking in societies like ours because the goal of criticism has already been realized. Marcuse, for obvious reasons, rejected this explanation. For him, as for all “left Hegelians” since the 1840s, liberal democracy was, at best, History’s penultimate stage; not its “end.”

How then can the inherently conservative, non-critical “one dimensionality” of our politics be explained? Marcuse’s ideas were sketchy and problematic, but they grew out of a striking insight that warrants careful consideration.

He thought that while liberalism had been and in many ways still is part of Reason’s forward advance, and while tolerance of speech and other forms of expression is a defining element of liberal doctrine, tolerance can and sometimes does work to maintain an oppressive status quo. Marcuse claimed that tolerance did for the regime in place in the United States and similar societies what repression did for societies on the other side of the “iron curtain.”

He was vague about how this comes about. Much like his contemporary, Marshall McLuhan, his reflections focused on the nature of modern mass media and, for reasons he never made clear, he ascribed great causal significance to the differences between, say, flat screens and printed words. His reflections were at most only suggestive. They were also vague enough to be ignored or dismissed once the political moment that had made them seem timely passed.

But however unsatisfactory or obscure his explanations were, he was clear as can be about the phenomenon itself: in (literally) repressive societies, subversive ideas are potent. On the other hand, where repressive tolerance reigns, anybody can say anything, but it doesn’t matter; critical thought is effectively neutered.

According to Marcuse, it is not the potency of critical ideas that necessitates their repression in authoritarian societies; quite the contrary, it is their repression that renders them potent. Similarly, it is not the impotence of critical thinking that makes pure tolerance possible in liberal regimes. Tolerance, Marcuse argued, is what renders criticism impotent.

To be clear: Marcuse was not an opponent of liberal values. For him as much as for any defender of pure tolerance, an ideal world would be a tolerant world. And he agreed with the founding figures of modern liberalism — John Stuart Mill, for example –when they maintained that in general tolerance is a means for advancing the ideal; that the end and the most effective means for achieving it are in many cases one and the same. His point was just that in societies like ours, for any of a variety of barely specified reasons, tolerance had “turned into its opposite”; that what had been and ideally is an instrument of human liberation had become a means for impeding humanity’s forward march.

Marcuse’s account of repressive tolerance was not just an idle philosophical reflection. It was a contribution to on-going philosophical debates about free speech, but it was also a political intervention at a time when students and others engaged in struggles for civil rights and against the Vietnam War would sometimes disrupt the speeches of racists and war defenders.

His views on disrupting speech were more subtle than those of many of the disruptors: he held that illiberal means are almost always counter-productive, even if there is no moral constraint in deploying them. Still, his brief against pure tolerance was taken as a theoretical justification for a political practice that had taken on illiberal colorations. This was yet another reason why Marcuse’s fame was brief.

But his position was not as out of line with mainstream thinking as might appear. For example, among those who think that violence has no place in an ideal world, there are some (the vast majority) who think that a judicious use of violence in the actual world can be, and often is, useful for advancing the ideal. Only pacifists, for whom violence is everywhere and always morally proscribed, think otherwise.

Liberals who uphold tolerance in any and all circumstances are like pacifists. Marcuse’s position is analogous to the non-pacifist’s. He thought that, in certain circumstances, a judicious use of intolerance can be beneficial for bringing a more tolerant society into being, just as others think that a judicious use of violence can help bring about a more peaceful world. Presumably, the bar with respect to both transgressions of the ideal is best set high.

Whatever we ultimately make of Marcuse’s position on free speech, his main point, properly generalized, is unassailable: that in the actual world, where the misfortunes consequent upon the indefinite prolongation of capitalist civilization are manifest, it can be and often is counter-productive to act as one should in a world closer to the Hegelian ideal.

In that spirit, it bears reflection whether, in our circumstances, democracy, or at least the electoral system that captures a large part of what we nowadays mean by that word, can work to the detriment of democratic ideals, whether it too can function repressively (or, more precisely anti-democratically).

This is a possibility that the Wisconsin insurgents would have done well to worry about more, and that people involved with the Occupy movements should think carefully about as well, especially now that Team Obama is eager to coopt their energy while quashing the ideas and not-yet-fully-articulated intuitions that spurred them into action.

* * *

The analogy with repressive tolerance is imperfect, of course. Marcuse’s target was pure tolerance, tolerance of speech and expression regardless of content. His point was that acting as if we are already living in a world in which pure tolerance can work the beneficial effects its defenders imputed to it can impede efforts to bring that condition about; that there are times and places – our own, for example – where tolerance that takes no account of content actually works to the detriment of the ideal.

But our democracy is anything but ‘pure.’ It is an amalgam of institutional arrangements and practices concocted long ago by lawyers, merchants and slave owners who sought democratic legitimacy at the same time that they were intent on shielding themselves from the consequences of government of, by, and for the people. Thus we don’t even pretend to implement anything like the principle of one person, one vote.

In addition, our democracy has lately been sullied further by Republican Supreme Court Justices intent on making plutocratic domination – they call it “free speech” — the law of the land. And lately, again thanks to the GOP, efforts at voter suppression are rife.

Therefore even if we identify democracy with competitive elections that, like ours, are more or less “free and fair,” our democracy is not nearly as ‘pure’ as our tolerance is. Nevertheless, Marcuse’s reflections on how tolerance turned into its opposite are applicable to what passes for democracy in our time and place.

Implicitly, the people fighting Walker’s depredations in Wisconsin realized this before the force of circumstances caused their efforts to take an electoral turn. The masses of people involved in the Occupy movement realized it too with even greater clarity. They grasped what had not yet become clear to many of them a year or two earlier or indeed to the millions who voted for Obama in 2008: that if the idea is to make the world a better place, forget about an electoral regime dominated by Democrats and Republicans.

If only it could have stayed that way!

When the electoral season was still far off, it was still possible to ignore Obama and the national Democratic Party, to pay back Obama’s indifference in kind. [In Wisconsin, the state Democratic Party was a different story; at key moments – for instance, when the entire Democratic caucus in the Senate fled the state – Democrats actually played a constructive role.]

But it soon became apparent that democracy in the streets would have to assume a more political focus. It was not possible to ignore Obama and the Democrats indefinitely, especially in an election year.

After what happened in Wisconsin, it has become as plain as can be that, in a repressive democracy, it is essential to name the enemy. The enemy includes benighted theocrats and free marketeers and, of course, the plutocrats who bankroll GOP candidates. But the list includes Obama too, and the Democratic Party, and their paymasters.

That’s not exactly news, but it is a point that that not everyone in the MSNBC demographic and in the ranks of organized labor realizes yet. Or, if they do, they don’t dare draw the obvious conclusion.

It’s that lesser evil thing again. And who can deny the reality of the menace? Romney and the Republicans truly are pieces of work.

Even so, it’s not clear what follows. Lesser evil voting almost always has race to the bottom consequences that must not be overlooked and that can be devastating over time. And it is demonstrably the case that when a Republican is in the White House, Democrats in Congress become better (less bad).

Compare the period from 2006 to 2008, when the executive branch was still in Republican hands and Democrats controlled Congress, with the period between 2008 and 2010, when Democrats controlled both branches of government. A case could be made that we were better off in the earlier period, even despite Nancy Pelosi’s, Harry Reid’s and other leading Democrats best efforts to keep the party on its rightward, Clintonite, course.

On the other hand, it is almost certainly the case that we can’t get from here back to there because a Romney victory in November would all but assure another Democratic “shellacking” in the House and Senate. And there is the additional consideration that a Republican administration would make worse judicial appointments than Obama would, and that we’d be living with the consequences for decades to come.

In short, the coming election raises problems for which there is no obvious solution. The only sure thing is that the outcome, whatever it is, will be awful – for everyone for whom the failure to recall Walker is awful, but on a grander scale.

A first step in gaining a sound purchase on just how bad the situation is, and therefore for figuring out what to do about it eventually – there may be nothing that can be done in the short run — is to realize, in the spirit of Marcuse’s account of repressive tolerance, that our democracy is indeed a repressive democracy, and that the electoral system itself — not in general but in our time and place – has become a means for keeping an oppressive status quo in place.

* * *

The problem would be mitigated, of course, if elements of the old liberal-labor coalition would break free from the Democratic Party by voting for candidates who run on platforms that plutocrats don’t own. In the presidential contest this time around that would mean voting for Jill Stein of the Green Party.

However it is a deeply entrenched dogma of our political culture that third party votes are wasted. This self-fulfilling prophecy is all but impossible to dislodge, and so its consequences cannot be evaded. If even a deeply respected national figure like Ralph Nader could only garner 2.74 per cent of the vote in 2000, running against Al Gore and George W. Bush, what chance is there for someone who is unknown and massively underfunded to break out of the iron cage?

The short answer is: none at all. But that doesn’t mean that her candidacy can’t be useful for telling people, those who are able to listen, what they need to hear. And it doesn’t mean that it there is no point in casting a protest vote when the alternative is piling on votes for the lesser evil, especially when it isn’t clear who the lesser evil is.

In our very impure repressive democracy, the only way to cast a protest vote against Obama is to vote for somebody else. Since voting for Romney is unthinkable for any ninety-nine percenter with minimally developed moral and intellectual capacities, voting for the Greens may be all that’s left.

To be sure, voting for someone, no matter how estimable, who has no chance of garnering a single electoral vote is making the best of a very bad situation. But at least it is not, as the conventional wisdom would have it, wasting a vote – at least not in states where, thanks to our impure democratic institutions, the electoral votes are already effectively cast.

In those cases, the best, perhaps the only, way to waste a vote is to cast it for the purported lesser evil, the drone-besotted corporate flunky who has made it all but impossible even to speak without derision of “hope” or “change.”

How Rural America Got Fracked: The Environmental Nightmare You Know Nothing About

Monday, May 21, 2012 by TomDispatch.com

by Ellen Cantarow

If the world can be seen in a grain of sand, watch out.  As Wisconsinites are learning, there’s money (and misery) in sand -- and if you’ve got the right kind, an oil company may soon be at your doorstep. 

March in Wisconsin used to mean snow on the ground, temperatures so cold that farmers worried about their cows freezing to death. But as I traveled around rural townships and villages in early March to interview people about frac-sand mining, a little-known cousin of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” daytime temperatures soared to nearly 80 degrees -- bizarre weather that seemed to be sending a meteorological message.

In this troubling spring, Wisconsin’s prairies and farmland fanned out to undulating hills that cradled the land and its people. Within their embrace, the rackety calls of geese echoed from ice-free ponds, bald eagles wheeled in the sky, and deer leaped in the brush. And for the first time in my life, I heard the thrilling warble of sandhill cranes.

Yet this peaceful rural landscape is swiftly becoming part of a vast assembly line in the corporate race for the last fossil fuels on the planet. The target: the sand in the land of the cranes.

Five hundred million years ago, an ocean surged here, shaping a unique wealth of hills and bluffs that, under mantles of greenery and trees, are sandstone. That sandstone contains a particularly pure form of crystalline silica.  Its grains, perfectly rounded, are strong enough to resist the extreme pressures of the technology called hydraulic fracturing, which pumps vast quantities of that sand, as well as water and chemicals, into ancient shale formations to force out methane and other forms of “natural gas.”

That sand, which props open fractures in the shale, has to come from somewhere.  Without it, the fracking industry would grind to a halt. So big multinational corporations are descending on this bucolic region to cart off its prehistoric sand, which will later be forcefully injected into the earth elsewhere across the country to produce more natural gas.  Geology that has taken millions of years to form is now being transformed into part of a system, a machine, helping to drive global climate change.

“The valleys will be filled… the mountains and hills made level"
Boom times for hydraulic fracturing began in 2008 when new horizontal-drilling methods transformed an industry formerly dependent on strictly vertical boring. Frac-sand mining took off in tandem with this development.

"Awash in promises of corporate jobs and easy money, those who lease and sell their land just shrug."

“It's huge,” said a U.S. Geological Survey mineral commodity specialist in 2009. “I've never seen anything like it, the growth. It makes my head spin." That year, from all U.S. sources, frac-sand producers used or sold over 6.5 million metric tons of sand -- about what the Great Pyramid of Giza weighs.  Last month, Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Senior Manager and Special Projects Coordinator Tom Woletz said corporations were hauling at least 15 million metric tons a year from the state’s hills.

By July 2011, between 22 and 36 frac-sand facilities in Wisconsin were either operating or approved. Seven months later, said Woletz, there were over 60 mines and 45 processing (refinement) plants in operation. “By the time your article appears, these figures will be obsolete,” claims Pat Popple, who in 2008 founded the first group to oppose frac-sand mining, Concerned Chippewa Citizens (now part of The Save the Hills Alliance).

Jerry Lausted, a retired teacher and also a farmer, showed me the tawny ridges of sand that delineated a strip mine near the town of Menomonie where he lives. “If we were looking from the air,” he added, “you’d see ponds in the bottom of the mine where they dump the industrial waste water. If you scan to the left, you’ll see the hills that are going to disappear.”

Those hills are gigantic sponges, absorbing water, filtering it, and providing the region’s aquifer with the purest water imaginable. According to Lausted, sand mining takes its toll on “air quality, water quality and quantity. Recreational aspects of the community are damaged. Property values [are lowered.] But the big thing is, you’re removing the hills that you can’t replace.  They’re a huge water manufacturing factory that Mother Nature gave us, and they’re gone.”

It’s impossible to grasp the scope of the devastation from the road, but aerial videos and photographs reveal vast, bleak sandy wastelands punctuated with waste ponds and industrial installations where Wisconsin hills once stood.

When corporations apply to counties for mining permits, they must file “reclamation” plans. But Larry Schneider, a retired metallurgist and industrial consultant with a specialized knowledge of mining, calls the reclamation process “an absolute farce.”

Reclamation projects by mining corporations since the 1970s may have made mined areas “look a little less than an absolute wasteland,” he observes. “But did they reintroduce the biodiversity? Did they reintroduce the beauty and the ecology? No.”

Studies bear out his verdict. “Every year,” wrote Mrinal Ghose in the Journal of Scientific and Industrial Research, “large areas are continually becoming unfertile in spite of efforts to grow vegetation on the degraded mined land.”

Awash in promises of corporate jobs and easy money, those who lease and sell their land just shrug. “The landscape is gonna change when it’s all said and done,” says dairy farmer Bobby Schindler, who in 2008 leased his land in Chippewa County to a frac-sand company called Canadian Sand and Proppant. (EOG, the former Enron, has since taken over the lease.) “Instead of being a hill it’s gonna be a valley, but all seeded down, and you’d never know there’s a mine there unless you were familiar with the area.”

Of the mining he adds, “It’s really put a boost to the area. It’s impressive the amount of money that’s exchanging hands.” Eighty-four-year-old Letha Webster, who sold her land 100 miles south of Schindler’s to another mining corporation, Unimin, says that leaving her home of 56 years is “just the price of progress.”

Jamie and Kevin Gregar -- both 30-something native Wisconsinites and military veterans -- lived in a trailer and saved their money so that they could settle down in a pastoral paradise once Kevin returned from Iraq. In January 2011, they found a dream home near tiny Tunnel City. (The village takes its name from a nearby rail tunnel). “It’s just gorgeous -- the hills, the trees, the woodland, the animals,” says Jamie. “It’s perfect.”

Five months after they moved in, she learned that neighbors had leased their land to “a sand mine” company. “What’s a sand mine?” she asked.

Less than a year later, they know all too well.  The Gregars’ land is now surrounded on three sides by an unsightly panorama of mining preparations. Unimin is uprooting trees, gouging out topsoil, and tearing down the nearby hills. “It looks like a disaster zone, like a bomb went off,” Jamie tells me.

"...Multinational corporations use their considerable resources to steamroll local councils and win sweetheart deals."

When I mention her service to her country, her voice breaks. “I am devastated. We’ve done everything right. We’ve done everything we were supposed to. We just wanted to raise our family in a good location and have good neighbors and to have it taken away from us for something we don’t support…” Her voice trails off in tears.

For Unimin, the village of Tunnel City in Greenfield township was a perfect target. Not only did the land contain the coveted crystalline silica; it was close to a rail spur. No need for the hundreds of diesel trucks that other corporations use to haul sand from mine sites to processing plants. No need, either, for transport from processing plants to rail junctions where hundreds of trains haul frac-sand by the millions of tons each year to fracture other once-rural landscapes. Here, instead, the entire assembly line operates in one industrial zone.

There was also no need for jumping the hurdles zoning laws sometimes erect. Like many Wisconsin towns where a culture of diehard individualism sees zoning as an assault on personal freedom, Greenfield and all its municipalities, including Tunnel City, are unzoned. This allowed the corporation to make deals with individual landowners. For the 8.5 acres where Letha Webster and her husband Gene lived for 56 years, assessed in 2010 at $147,500, Unimin paid $330,000. Overall, between late May and July 2011, it paid $5.3 million for 436 acres with a market value of about $1.1 million.

There was no time for public education about the potential negative possibilities of frac-sand mining: the destruction of the hills, the decline in property values, the danger of silicosis (once considered a strictly occupational lung disease) from blowing silica dust, contamination of ground water from the chemicals used in the processing plants, the blaze of lights all night long, noise from hundreds of train cars, houses shaken by blasting. Ron Koshoshek, a leading environmentalist who works with Wisconsin’s powerful Towns Association to educate townships about the industry, says that “frac-sand mining will virtually end all residential development in rural townships.” The result will be “a large-scale net loss of tax dollars to towns, increasing taxes for those who remain.”

Town-Busting Tactics
Frac-sand corporations count on a combination of naïveté, trust, and incomprehension in rural hamlets that previously dealt with companies no larger than Wisconsin’s local sand and gravel industries. Before 2008, town boards had never handled anything beyond road maintenance and other basic municipal issues.  Today, multinational corporations use their considerable resources to steamroll local councils and win sweetheart deals.  That’s how the residents of Tunnel City got taken to the cleaners.

On July 6, 2011, a Unimin representative ran the first public forum about frac-sand mining in the village.  Other heavily attended and often heated community meetings followed, but given the cascades of cash, the town board chairman’s failure to take a stand against the mining corporation, and Unimin’s aggressiveness, tiny Tunnel City was a David without a slingshot.

Local citizens did manage to get the corporation to agree to give the town $250,000 for the first two million tons mined annually, $50,000 more than its original offer. In exchange, the township agreed that any ordinance it might pass in the future to restrict mining wouldn’t apply to Unimin. Multiply the two million tons of frac-sand tonnage Unimin expects to mine annually starting in 2013 by the $300 a ton the industry makes and you’ll find that the township only gets .0004% of what the company will gross.

For the Gregars, it’s been a nightmare.  Unimin has refused five times to buy their land and no one else wants to live near a sand mine. What weighs most heavily on the couple is the possibility that their children will get silicosis from long-term exposure to dust from the mine sites. “We don’t want our kids to be lab rats for frac-sand mining companies,” says Jamie.

Drew Bradley, Unimin’s senior vice president of operations, waves such fears aside. “I think [citizens] are blowing it out of proportion,” he told a local publication. “There are plenty of silica mines sited close to communities. There have been no concerns exposed there.”

That’s cold comfort to the Gregars. Crystalline silica is a known carcinogen and the cause of silicosis, an irreversible, incurable disease. None of the very few rules applied to sand mining by the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) limit how much silica gets into the air outside of mines. That’s the main concern of those living near the facilities.

So in November 2011, Jamie Gregar and ten other citizens sent a 35-page petition to the DNR. The petitioners asked the agency to declare respirable crystalline silica a hazardous substance and to monitor it, using a public health protection level set by California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. The petition relies on studies, including one by the DNR itself, which acknowledge the risk of airborne silica from frac-sand mines for those who live nearby.

The DNR denied the petition, claiming among other things that -- contrary to its own study’s findings -- current standards are adequate. One of the petition’s signatories, Ron Koshoshek, wasn’t surprised. For 16 years he was a member of, and for nine years chaired, Wisconsin’s Public Intervenor Citizens Advisory Committee.  Created in 1967, its role was to intercede on behalf of the environment, should tensions grow between the DNR’s two roles: environmental protector and corporate licensor. “The DNR,” he says, “is now a permitting agency for development and exploitation of resources.”

In 2010, Cathy Stepp, a confirmed anti-environmentalist who had previously railed against the DNR, belittling it as "anti-development, anti-transportation, and pro-garter snakes," was appointed to head the agency by now-embattled Governor Scott Walker who explained: “I wanted someone with a chamber-of-commerce mentality.”

As for Jamie Gregar, her dreams have been dashed and she’s determined to leave her home. “At this point,” she says, “I don’t think there’s a price we wouldn’t accept.”

Frac-Sand vs. Food
Brian Norberg and his family in Prairie Farm, 137 miles northwest of Tunnel City, paid the ultimate price: he died while trying to mobilize the community against Procore, a subsidiary of the multinational oil and gas corporation Sanjel. The American flag that flies in front of the Norbergs’ house flanks a placard with a large, golden NORBERG, over which pheasants fly against a blue sky.  It’s meant to represent the 1,500 acres the family has farmed for a century.

“When you start talking about industrial mining, to us, you’re violating the land,” Brian’s widow, Lisa, told me one March afternoon over lunch.  She and other members of the family, as well as a friend, had gathered to describe Prairie Farm’s battle with the frac-sanders. “The family has had a really hard time accepting the fact that what we consider a beautiful way to live could be destroyed by big industry.”

Their fight against Procore started in April 2011: Sandy, a lifelong friend and neighbor, arrived with sand samples drillers had excavated from her land, and began enthusiastically describing the benefits of frac-sand mining. “Brian listened for a few minutes,” Lisa recalls. “Then he told her [that]… she and her sand vials could get the heck -- that’s a much nicer word than what he used  -- off the farm.  Sandy was hoping we would also be excited about jumping on the bandwagon. Brian informed her that our land would be used for the purpose God intended, farming.”

Brian quickly enlisted family and neighbors in an organizing effort against the company. In June 2011, Procore filed a reclamation plan -- the first step in the permitting process -- with the county’s land and water conservation department. Brian rushed to the county office to request a public hearing, but returned dejected and depressed. “He felt completely defeated that he could not protect the community from them moving in and destroying our lives,” recalls Lisa.

He died of a heart attack less than a day later at the age of 52. The family is convinced his death was a result of the stress caused by the conflict. That stress is certainly all too real.  The frac-sand companies, says family friend Donna Goodlaxson, echoing many others I interviewed for this story, “go from community to community. And one of the things they try to do is pit people in the community against each other.”

Instead of backing off, the Norbergs and other Prairie Farm residents continued Brian’s efforts. At an August 2011 public hearing, the town’s residents directly addressed Procore’s representatives. “What people had to say there was so powerful,” Goodlaxson remembers. “Those guys were blown out of their chairs. They weren’t prepared for us.”

“I think people insinuate that we’re little farmers in a little community and everyone’s an ignorant buffoon,” added Sue Glaser, domestic partner of Brian’s brother Wayne. “They found out in a real short time there was a lot of education behind this.”

“About 80% of the neighborhood was not happy about the potential change to our area,” Lisa adds. “But very few of us knew anything about this industry at [that] time.” To that end, Wisconsin’s Farmers’ Union and its Towns Association organized a day-long conference in December 2011 to help people “deal with this new industry.”

Meanwhile, other towns, alarmed by the explosion of frac-sand mining, were beginning to pass licensing ordinances to regulate the industry. In Wisconsin, counties can challenge zoning but not licensing ordinances, which fall under town police powers.  These, according to Wisconsin law, cannot be overruled by counties or the state. Becky Glass, a Prairie Farm resident and an organizer with Labor Network for Sustainability, calls Wisconsin’s town police powers “the strongest tools towns have to fight or regulate frac-sand mining.” Consider them so many slingshots employed against the corporate Goliaths.

In April 2012, Prairie Farm’s three-man board voted 2 to 1 to pass such an ordinance to regulate any future mining effort in the town. No, such moves won’t stop frac-sand mining in Wisconsin, but they may at least mitigate its harm. Procore finally pulled out because of the resistance, says Glass, adding that the company has since returned with different personnel to try opening a mine near where she lives.

“It takes 1.2 acres per person per year to feed every person in this country,” says Lisa Norberg. “And the little township that I live in, we have 9,000 acres that are for farm use. So if we just close our eyes and bend over and let the mining companies come in, we’ll have thousands of people we can’t feed.”

Food or frac-sand: it’s a decision of vital importance across the country, but one most Americans don’t even realize is being made -- largely by multinational corporations and dwindling numbers of yeoman farmers in what some in this country would call “the real America.”  Most of us know nothing about these choices, but if the mining corporations have their way, we will soon enough -- when we check out prices at the supermarket or grocery store. We’ll know it too, as global climate change continues to turn Wisconsin winters balmy and supercharge wild weather across the country.

While bucolic landscapes disappear, aquifers are fouled, and countless farms across rural Wisconsin morph into industrial wastelands, Lisa’s sons continue to work the Norberg’s land, just as their father once did. So does Brian’s nephew, 32-year-old Matthew, who took me on a jolting ride across his fields. The next time I’m in town, he assured me, we’ll visit places in the hills where water feeds into springs. Yes, you can drink the water there. It’s still the purest imaginable. Under the circumstances, though, no one knows for how long.

Many thanks to Wisconsin filmmaker Jim Tittle, whose documentary, “The Price of Sand,” will appear in August 2012, and who shared both his interviewees and his time for this article.

***

More proof that EVERY SINGLE aspect of fracking is corrupt, unhealthy, bad for the environment, people, animals, the earth, the water and the air. The clean burning fuel my ass! When it's all said and done, fracking will have hastened our demise.--jef

Wisc.Gov. Walker promised billionaire he would ‘divide and conquer’ unions

By David Edwards - RAW Story
Friday, May 11, 2012

Before Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI), who is facing a recall election, introduced legislation to strip some public employees of collective bargaining rights, he promised a billionaire donor that he would use a “divide and conquer” strategy to bust unions, a newly released video reveals.

In the video shot by documentary filmmaker Brad Lichtenstein on Jan. 18, 2011, billionaire Diane Hendricks asks Walker if he would make Wisconsin a “completely red state, and work on these unions, and become a right-to-work?”

“Oh, yeah,” Walker replies. “Well, we’re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. The first step is we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employees, use divide and conquer.”

Hendricks went on to give the governor’s campaign $510,000. That makes makes her not only Walker’s biggest donor, but the biggest donor to any candidate in Wisconsin’s history, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Only a month later, Walker introduced the legislation that cut collective bargaining for most public workers, triggering months of protests and a wave of recall elections.

The video seems to contradict the governor’s claim that he had no intention of making Wisconsin a right-to-work state, which would cripple unions by prohibiting that they require that employees join or pay dues.

“Scott Walker told me directly that he believed in prevailing wage,” Operating Engineers Local 139 business manager Terrance E. McGowan recalled to the Journal Sentinel. “I tried to hold some dialogue with him when the collective-bargaining issue went down. I am a union man. I believe in collective bargaining. The one thing he assured me, time and again, is that he believes in private sector unions. I don’t know whatever beef he had with public sector unions. But he said he believed in private sector unions, and that’s why I believe I have no reason to believe that right to work would be a threat from his office.”

After seeing the newly released video clip, McGowan said he found the “divide and conquer” strategy troubling.

“It means turning worker against worker,” he explained.

Lichtenstein, who filmed the video, donated $100 to Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in 2010. Earlier this week, Barrett won the Democratic primary and will face Walker in the June 5 recall election. His campaign has already used the video to created an online ad.

Watch this video from Barrett for Wisconsin, uploaded May 11, 2012.

What a scumbag! And I know that many out there approve of this strategy of crushing the working class--those people who are loyal to companies who aren't loyal to them back.--jef

Court Rules Parts of Walker's Anti-Union Law Unconstitutional

Saturday, March 31, 2012 by Common Dreams
Federal judge has struck down key provisions of Act 10

Key portions of Governor Scott Walker's controversial legislation limiting collective bargaining -- or Act 10 -- were ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge yesterday. The court ruled that the law, which has sparked a recall campaign against the Wisconsin governor, creates an arbitrary, and possibly politically-motivated distinction between "public safety" employees and other public employees. This, according to the court, violates the equal protection and First Amendment rights.

* * *

PR Watch: Federal Court Strikes Down Key Provisions of Walker's Act 10 as Unconstitutional

A federal judge has struck down key provisions of Act 10 -- Governor Scott Walker's controversial legislation limiting collective bargaining -- on grounds that the arbitrary, possibly politically-motivated distinction between "public safety" and other public employees violated equal protection and First Amendment rights. 

Several public employee unions had challenged the fact that Walker's bill exempted certain law enforcement and firefighter's unions from Act 10's restrictions, including the law's requirement that unions recertify annually with an absolute majority of members and its prohibition on voluntary union dues deductions. 

"So long as the State of Wisconsin continues to afford ordinary certification and dues deductions to mandatory public safety unions with sweeping bargaining rights, there is no rational basis to deny those rights to voluntary general unions with severely restricted bargaining rights," wrote U.S. District Judge William M. Conley. 

The suit was filed by multiple public employee unions, including the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the Wisconsin Council of County and Municipal Employees, multiple district councils of the AFL-CIO and AFSCME, SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin, CTW, CLC; American Federation for Teachers - Wisconsin; and the Wisconsin State Employees Union. 

Defendants in the suit included Governor Walker and head of the Department of Administration Michael Huebsch, as well as the heads of the offices tasked with implementing the law.

Wisconsin Voter ID Law Struck Down by Court

Wednesday, March 14, 2012 by Common Dreams
A Wisconsin law that requires voters present a photo ID when voting, was struck down by a Wisconsin Court today. Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess ruled that the law, signed by Walker in May of 2011, violated the Constitution.

"Without question, where it exists, voter fraud corrupts elections and undermines our form of government," wrote Niess in his decision. "The legislature and governor may certainly take aggressive action to prevent its occurrence. But voter fraud is no more poisonous to our democracy than voter suppression. Indeed, they are two heads on the monster."

Gov. Scott Walker said he would appeal the decision and vowed to continue to fight for a photo ID requirement in the voting booth.

* * *

From the Huffington Post.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) signed the voter ID bill into law in May, calling it a "common sense reform" that would "go a long way to protecting the integrity of elections in Wisconsin." 

"It’s a shame activist Dane County judges continue to stand in the way of common sense," said Cullen Werwie, a spokesman for Walker. "We are confident the state will prevail in its plan to implement photo ID." 

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen (R) said he plans to appeal the decision. 

"In its rush to enact a Voter ID law, the Wisconsin Legislature failed to pay attention to the Wisconsin Constitution. Luckily, the League of Women Voters had the courage to stand up and defend the fundamental right to vote that our constitution guarantees," said Pines. "The proponents of Voter ID assert that it is meant to prevent fraud. We all know the truth: it is designed to suppress voting by poor people and students. Now, in Wisconsin, that will not happen." 

This is the second time in two days that such a law was struck down. Yesterday, a similar law in Texas was blocked by the Justice Department. Activists are hailing the curbing of these laws as a victory for minority communities that, many argue, would be disproportionately impacted by this kind of legislation.

Walker Enlists Karl Rove Protégé to Promote New Protest Policy

Saturday, December 17, 2011 by PR Watch

by Brendan Fischer

 

As Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s new policies restricting protest in the Wisconsin capitol take effect in advance of the anniversary of 2011's historic labor uprisings, the controversial governor has enlisted a new spokesperson to sell the rules, a 28-year old protégé of Karl Rove and new political appointee of the governor. 

Madison blogger Joe Vittie broke the story on WisconsinReporters.com about Jocelyn Webster, the person Walker hired as the public face defending the rules. Webster cut her teeth with Rove’s notorious Office of Political Affairs in the George W. Bush Administration. A congressional investigation of the activities of that office yielded allegations -- including specific allegations against Webster -- that Rove’s team was involved in partisan campaigning on the public dime, a claim also leveled at aides of her newest boss during his tenure as Milwaukee County Executive.

Webster’s Eye-Rolling Lead Some to Discover Her Karl Rove Roots 

 

On December 1, Walker's Department of Administration (DOA) released a twenty-three page policy announcing new limits on demonstrations in and around the state capitol, the site of massive protests earlier this year. The policy was clearly drafted with an eye towards landmark federal First Amendment cases, but legal observers have criticized the new rules, and the ACLU of Wisconsin is considering legal action. Walker opponents view the new rules as an effort to suppress dissent. For example, the definition of a "rally" as four people appears aimed at the Solidarity Singers, a group who gather every day at noon to sing popular songs altered with political lyrics criticizing the Walker administration.

DOA unveiled the policy December 1, but announced a two-week "educational period" (which some perceived as a public relations blitz) to help the public understand the new restrictions. The rules take effect December 16.

Just before the policy was announced, the Walker administration selected a new political appointee to serve as DOA Communications Director. The name of the appointee, Jocelyn Webster, was at the top of the December 1 press release announcing the new restrictions on capitol protests. Webster was also quoted in the press claiming that the “updated policy is meant to remove confusion and create consistency” for law enforcement officers and the public.

Webster caught the eye of citizens attending a recent public "information session" about the new restrictions on rallies in the capitol. Based on what some described as her petulant eye-rolling in response to citizens expressing concerns about restrictions on their freedom of speech, Vittie took a closer look at her experience and background.

From Washington to Wisconsin 

 

Webster is no local. She was most recently in Dallas, Texas, working government relations for the global convenience store chain 7-Eleven. Previously, she worked four months for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s PR shop. For nine months before that she pushed press inside the beltway on education policy in the 2008 election year. She also worked PR for New Yorker Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign.

But before those experiences, Webster worked for the federal government in Washington, D.C., and was cited in a major congressional investigation.

After graduating from college in California, Webster got a gig at the new Department of Homeland Security as a liaison to the George W. Bush White House. After six months, she moved to the White House and became a staffer in the Office of Political Affairs (OPA) in February, 2006.

OPA was overseen by Karl Rove and was reportedly tasked with tracking the political environment. A three-year investigation into Rove's OPA concluded in January of this year with a report showing the office routinely violated the Hatch Act, a federal law that prohibits the use of taxpayer dollars on partisan political activities.

The report by the Office of Special Counsel found that the taxpayer-funded activities of OPA employees "were directed at the electoral success of Republican candidates and the Republican Party as a whole," and that "U.S. Treasury funds were unlawfully used to finance efforts to pursue Republican victories at the polls.”

"OPA was essentially an extension of the RNC in the White House,” the report stated.
Rove's OPA violated the Hatch Act throughout the Bush presidency, said the report, but particularly in the run-up to the 2006 mid-term elections, when Webster joined the OPA.

Webster's Ties to Bush White House Email Controversy 

 

The controversial role of the office in which Webster worked did not end after the 2006 mid-term elections.

In 2007, it was revealed that OPA staffers had been using partisan Republican National Committee (RNC) email accounts for official business, such as the controversial firings of federal prosecutors. This practice circumvented the requirements of federal sunshine and ethics laws, such as the Presidential Records Act, which required that employees preserve a record of all communications taking place at work. The National Journal wrote that Karl Rove sent ninety-five percent of his emails on his RNC account.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a letter to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman requesting an investigation. As a result of that congressional investigation, the Bush Administration claimed that 5 million emails had been lost or deleted. After a lawsuit, computer technicians were able to reconstruct some of the deleted messages and found that up to 22 million emails had been deleted.

Chairman Waxman rejected demands by the RNC that the searches of the emails be limited. In an April 2007 letter (pdf), Waxman notes that accepting the RNC's request to limit the email search terms "would not have located a January 19, 2007, e-mail from an official in Karl Rove's office to an official at the General Services Administration transmitting a copy of Powerpoint slides prepared by the White House that list the top 20 Democratic targets in 2008. That e-mail read: 'Please do not email this out or let people see it. It is a close hold and we're not supposed to be emailing it around.'"

Waxman's citation?

"E-mail from Jocelyn Webster (pdf), Staff Assistant, Office of Political Affairs, White House,
to Tessa Truesdell, Confidential Assistant to the Administrator, General Services Administration (Jan. 19,2007)." Webster was not charged with any crime for her activities in Rove’s operations during her work for him from early 2006 until early 2007.

Webster Role in "Pentagon Pundits" Operation, which CMD Helped Expose 

In early 2007, with public support for the Iraq war declining, Webster moved to the Pentagon's public affairs division.

In 2008, David Barstow broke a story in the New York Times about the depth and breadth of the Defense Department’s public affairs operation using "surrogates" to promote Bush administration policies in the press, without disclosing the Pentagon's hidden hand. The Center for Media and Democracy’s founder John Stauber called the scandal “the Pentagon Papers of this war” in Iraq. CMD, which publishes PRWatch, made the documents Barstow obtained available to the public through its SourceWatch electronic library. Barstow and the Times won a Pulitzer for its investigation.

One part of that program was described in an earlier Harpers Magazine article by Ken Silverstein, who specifically identified Webster as working on the project. The so-called "Surrogates Program," according to Silverstein, "arrange[d] regular conference calls during which senior Pentagon officials brief retired military officials, civilian defense and national security analysts, pundits, and bloggers. A few moderates are invited to take part, but the list of participants skews far, far to the right. The Pentagon essentially feeds participants the talking points, bullet points, and stories it wants told."

Silverstein wrote, "it’s quite clear that the Pentagon views it as a propaganda program."
Neither Webster nor others involved were charged with any crime, even though watchdog groups like CMD noted how the so-called "surrogate operation" violated long-standing federal appropriations rules and other laws against military propaganda in the United States.

Webster Joins the Walker Administration, and Makes a Splash 

 

Throughout the 2011 Wisconsin protests, Governor Walker falsely claimed that most of the demonstrators were from out-of-state. But some are now questioning whether he recruited his own out-of-state agitator in Webster.

During last week's public information sessions on Wisconsin's new capitol access rules, citizens concerned about the policy's impact on their First Amendment rights were dismayed by Webster's dismissive attitude towards them, which she reportedly expressed by rolling her eyes and shaking her head at their comments. Many were also put off by Webster's misleading press release that had asserted the new rules, which require permits for groups as small as four persons, were simply restatements of existing policies.

Her first real public performance in her new taxpayer-funded job caused some, like bloggers at WisconsinReporters.com, to look into her actual track record. At a hearing this week, Paul Schmid of that website expressed concern about the background of the Department of Administration's new communications director.

"This is the state of Robert LaFollette, open government, transparent government," said Schmid, noting that citizens were unlikely to trust the administration considering Webster's past involvement in taxpayer-funded political activity.

In response to Schmidt's comments, Chris Schoenherr, DOA Deputy Secretary, replied:
"You'll decide whether, or not, you decide to trust the administration. Or not."

ALEC Politicians Spin Special "Interest" Bill to Protect Corporate Wrongdoers as "Job Creation"

 (To my tea party friends--this is the end result of tea party politics: corporations exploiting you and your family so that they profit and don't get prosecuted for breaking laws...well, they'd be breaking laws had they not gotten those laws changed so that THEY don't get prosecuted, and THEY don't pay huge fines...but you do. ALEC exists to further cement profit as a higher priority than the rights of citizens. When you vote all tea party, you are in essence approving of your very own rape, figuratively, of course. But you'll still blame the other guys--and welfare moms and homeless people and minorities, and teachers--instead of the guys who are passing you around and having their way with you. Cognitive dissonance meets the Stockholm Syndrome...--jef)


Saturday, October 15, 2011 by PR Watch

by Lisa Graves

 

For years, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), has been itching to protect big corporations from high interest rates charged in cases where corporations have killed or injured Americans. Now, Wisconsin politicians serving on key ALEC task forces are pushing a bill embracing this idea as part of ALEC alumnus Scott Walker's latest effort to force the ALEC agenda into law based on claims that doing so will help "job creators."

Citizens Pay 12% but Companies that Injure or Kill Pay 4.25% 

 

The bill, introduced by Wisconsin State Senator Rich Zipperer of Pewaukee and Representative Paul Farrow, also of Pewaukee, would reduce the interest rate on court-ordered payments for Wisconsin residents who have convinced a jury and a judge that a corporation injured them, killed their loved ones, or violated consumer protections guaranteed by law. Under current law, in almost all types of civil lawsuits, Wisconsin requires the losing party to pay 12% interest on the judgment, until the amount owed is paid in full or unless overturned on appeal.

But ALEC politicians Zipperer and Farrow want to slash the interest rate charged (to about 4.25%) -- but only in cases involving personal injury and consumer claims. By definition these are cases in which virtually the only time there will be a financial judgment is when a Wisconsin resident proves in court that the defendant company violated his or her rights. But when a corporation, such as a bank or leasing company, sues a citizen and wins, the Wisconsin citizen still has to pay interest at 12% until the bill is paid in full.
How does this aid job creation?

"Lowering the price of breaking the law doesn't target job creation or economic development," says Laura Dresser an economist from the Center on Wisconsin Strategy. To put it less academically, "the only jobs it creates are for undertakers," said Democratic Rep. Brett Hulsey at a press conference about the so-called job creation bill package. To call legislation that rewards adjudicated corporate wrongdoers "job creation" is simply spin.

Anti-Consumer Bill Echoes ALEC "Model" 

 

The Zipperer-Farrow bill serves very special interests with their own special interest rate. It looks like ALEC's Pewaukee Posse -- a former estate lawyer and a current home inspector -- has taken a page from ALEC's "Prejudgment and Post-Judgment Act." That so-called "model" bill, which the Center for Media and Democracy exposed this summer through our ALECexposed.org project, would reduce the interest charged to corporations that kill or maim Americans.

This ALEC wish list item is a piece of the ALEC corporations' so-called "tort reform" agenda, an unabashed effort to tilt the scales of justice in favor of corporations in nearly every imaginable way. But Zipperer and Farrow have one-upped ALEC by adding consumer cases into the mix, on top of the cases involving Americans who have lost their lives or livelihood to corporate neglect, malfeasance, or greed. The Pewaukee Posse also tweaked the interest rate calculation of ALEC from using the Treasury bill rate to the prime rate plus one percent. These are differences without distinction -- both slash the interest rate paid by corporations that kill or maim. The Zipperer-Farrow bill is the ALEC bill on steroids by sweeping in all consumer cases in the state as well.

Pewaukee Posse Pushes ALEC Agenda in State 

 

It should come as no surprise that Zipperer sits on the ALEC Civil Justice Task Force. "Civil justice," in this case, is an Orwellian term for giving corporations whose products or policies happen to ruin people's lives more "justice" in the judicial system than corporations get under longstanding rules that protect people done wrong by corporate greed or negligence. The "private sector" head of that task force is none other than the so-called "King of Tort Reform," Victor Schwarz, who has long advanced the interests of tobacco and asbestos companies that for decades deep-sixed scientific proof that their products were literally killing Americans.

Zipperer is also one of the politicians who asked Wisconsin taxpayers to pay the $50 bucks a year ALEC charges for politicians to be members. And he's received financial compensation of over $1000 from ALEC for at least one trip, likely to an ALEC gathering known for schmoozing with corporate lobbyists -- lobbyists interested in legislation just like the one Zipperer and Farrow introduced. Like Zipperer, Farrow is no ordinary member of ALEC. He was chosen to sit on its Telecommunications and Information Technology Task Force alongside lobbyists from AT&T and other companies that have been sued for policies and practices that take advantage of consumers.

Pfizer Lobbyist One of ALEC's Corporate Co-Chairs for Wisconsin 

 

This is not the only bill being spun as job creation that has ALEC DNA and that would adversely affect injured Wisconsin residents. Another ALEC bill sponsored by Zipperer would limit the rights of Wisconsin residents to recover any damages in strict liability cases (the primary legal basis for cases involving injurious products) if they are injured by prescription or over-the-counter drugs. Like the special interest rate bill, the drug bill goes even further than the ALEC model -- adding in medical devices and barring lawsuits for drugs approved by the FDA, not just barring punitive damages for regulated drugs, ALEC policy since 1995.

Perhaps, it should come as no surprise that the latest corporate co-chair of ALEC assigned to the state of Wisconsin is none other than Pfizer through its lobbyist Bryon Wornson. The list of drugs Pfizer has gotten through the inadequate FDA review process only to recall them later is long. Last year, an intravenous drug it distributed was recalled because it "might kill" hospital patients. That's just the tip of the iceberg on unsafe products produced and recalled over the years by Pfizer, and Pfizer is just one of the many transnational corporations whose drugs or devices got through the FDA's process only to end up killing or causing life-threatening harm to American consumers.

"This proposal does nothing to help employ the people of Wisconsin and everything to help big-time, special interest drug company CEOs," says Phil Neuenfeldt of the state's AFL-CIO, speaking of the drug and device bill.

The interest rate bill and the drug and device bill are part of a package being considered under Governor Walker's "Special Session on Job Creation," but so far it's hard to spot the bills that actually focus on creating jobs.

Very Special Interest Bill Just One of the Posse's ALEC Echoes 

 

The Pewaukee Posse has proven to be such eager sponsers of legislation with ALEC DNA that perhaps they will get gold stars, or "scholarships," from ALEC's new state co-chair Robyn Vos to attend coming ALEC conventions/vacations along with invitation-only parties hosted by global corps. Vos and his predecessor as ALEC state co-chair, Senate Leader Scott Fitzgerald, have been charged under ALEC by-laws with a "duty" to get ALEC bills introduced in their home states. ALEC's politician co-chairs also are tasked with distributing the largess raised by state corporate co-chairs, like Pfizer, from corporate coffers to fund trips for loyal legislators.

Zipperer has put his name and effort behind: SB-1, which echoes several ALEC provisions to limit the rights of Pewaukee residents and other citizens of Wisconsin killed or injured by corporations, including negligent nursing homes (signed into law by ALEC alum Walker); AB-7, the so-called "Voter ID" bill that may block tens of thousands of students and others from voting in 2012, and which includes provisions consistent with ALEC's model bill (made law by Walker); SB-10, a tax give-away that benefits Wall Street speculators, similar to ALEC's "capital gains tax elimination act"; and AB-94, which expands taxpayer subsidies for private schools, echoing ALEC's privatization agenda in its "parental choice" bills.

Farrow has also pushed bills echoing the ALEC voter suppression agenda, capital gains, and school privatization efforts, and has introduced even more ALEC-like bills than his Pewaukee brother, including bills limiting the use of transportation taxes and embracing the NRA's shoot first bill known as the "Castle Doctrine," which shares core concepts with a parallel ALEC bill urged by the NRA, the former ALEC Criminal Justice Task Force Co-Chair.

These lists do not include all of the other bills similar to the cookie cutter legislation flowing out of the ALEC bill factory that the Pewaukee Posse voted for or that ALEC Alum Scott Walker signed into law this year.

But their latest foray into advancing the corporate wish list, through their very special interest bill, goes even further than ALEC has dared by targeting not just Wisconsinites physically injured by corporations but also consumers statewide.

The Verizon Strike as the Next Wisconsin

Saturday, August 13, 2011 by Dissent Magazine

by Mark Engler

 

The picket lines are up. This past weekend 45,000 Verizon workers on the East Coast, represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), went on strike. The cause of the strike was the company’s attempts to win massive concessions from the unions. Verizon argued that the employees should give up gains they had won over many years of struggle and negotiation in previous contract fights.

As the Wall Street Journal put it, “Verizon Communications Inc. is seeking some of the biggest concessions in years from its unions.” Demands include the weakening of health-care benefits, cuts in pensions, reduced job security, and elimination of paid holidays such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. This despite the fact that the company reported billions in profit last year, and that, in the words of New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse, “Verizon’s top five executives received a total of $258 million in compensation, including stock options, over the last four years.” The unions argue that Verizon has made some $20 billion in profit in the same time period, and Citizens for Tax Justice has pointed out that the company has done so while paying little to nothing in corporate income taxes.

Without a doubt, this is a conflict of national significance. As Bob Master, CWA District 1 legislative and political director, explained Wednesday in a conference call with supporters,

This is an enormously profitable company, which we believe is trying to take advantage of an anti-union environment and, in a sense, to replicate at a giant private-sector corporation what the governors of Ohio, New Jersey, and Wisconsin have been trying to do to the public sector. Our members feel very strongly that we need to draw a line here.

The parallel to Wisconsin is apt for several reasons. First, like the Republican elected officials in their attacks on unionized schoolteachers and other public employees, Verizon is taking aim at one of the last bastions of the American middle class. As a main strategy in its public relations, the company is trying to stoke resentment about the fact that the CWA and IBEW workers actually have living-wage jobs. It is hoping that “I don’t have a pension, why should they” logic will carry the day.

Accordingly, on Wednesday Verizon took out a full-page ad in the Philadelphia Inquirer suggesting that a typical employee makes $80,600 in annual pay and $42,000 in benefits. The union disputes this claim, contending that salaries are generally in the $60,000 to $77,000 range, and that benefits are less costly than the company would suggest. But, regardless, the debate over numbers misses some critical questions: What’s wrong with workers sharing in the profits of a healthy corporation? Isn’t that the way our economy is supposed to work?

(On a side note, it’s always a treat when companies plead poverty at the negotiating table and then turn around and spend big bucks on media spots, anti-union consultants, and pricey PR firms—but that’s another story.)

The fate of 45,000 middle-class jobs is a big deal for all of America. Last month, the entire U.S. economy had a net gain of only 117,000 jobs. Not only is that for the whole country, it represents a pretty decent month given the numbers from the past year. Furthermore, almost all of the new jobs now being created are low-wage. Given these realities—and the fact that concentrating all wealth in the hands of the rich is a very bad strategy for creating the kind of demand the economy needs to rebound—what happens to the Verizon workers is a matter of broad public concern.

Bob Master is right that Verizon’s aggressive bargaining stance, like Governor Scott Walker’s public-sector power grab, is the product of a political climate in which corporate interests feel they can do whatever they want to working people, and employees will have no recourse. The Verizon strike is unfortunately akin to Wisconsin in that it is a defensive battle—an effort to stop tragic rollbacks in previously established standards of fair employment.

The background for the contract dispute is that Verizon is now making most of its profits from its wireless services. While a small number of wireless technicians are involved in the strike, that part of the company is mostly non-union. In an ideal world, CWA and IBEW would be able to “bargain to organize,” balancing any concessions at the negotiating table for current union members with agreements that the company will remain truly neutral and allow workers at Verizon Wireless to make their own decision about whether or not to unionize. But this is not an ideal world. Like in Wisconsin, labor and its allies face a difficult fight merely to stave off the worst of a rabidly anti-union assault.

That said, there is a case for hope. The mass protests in Madison earlier this year gave some cause for optimism that a new type of energetic, broad-based, community-labor mobilization might become a lasting force in that state’s politics—and become a model for movements in other parts of the country. Wisconsinites’ success this week in recalling some Republican State Senators (although not as many as hoped) suggested that the struggle will be a long one, but that progressive efforts could have some real legs.

As for the strike, all those who have been wondering when working America will be fed up enough to finally stand up and fight should not sit this one out. If the Verizon strike becomes a rallying point in this country for a movement against runaway corporate power and for a fairer economy, it could have much broader implications than what contract terms are ultimately hammered out for those now walking the picket lines. That these workers are not rolling over in the face of company insistence on concessions is important and courageous. And they deserve widespread support.

***

Those on the East Coast can find a picket line to visit here.

Supporters all over the country will soon be able to “adopt a Verizon Wireless store” in their area and help to organize pickets at that location.

Finally, without even leaving your computer, you can sign the petition in support of the 45,000 CWA and IBEW workers on strike.