By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
“… we know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.”
— Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Miffed beyond the ability to reason, last November the American public elected some 16 new state governors, all members of the corporate party. Added to the red states that already had conservative leadership, those numbers now include such hotbeds of Tea Party activism as Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Wisconsin. Each of these new governors vows that its respective state has unique qualities and challenges demanding fresh thinking and serious solutions, yet their policies replicate one another as dependably as Dolly the sheep cloned her predecessor. Dolly was short-lived. Let’s hope the precedent sticks.
Working in hive-mind, the corporate party is dismantling anything that smacks of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society. There isn’t a dime in play across this nation that they don’t expect a share of, nor a working class citizen that they fail to blame for the nation’s problems. And while the Congress works to turn back all progress made in the last years, state leaders are taking liberties so questionable that they will surely end up decided in court. In Michigan, new Republican Governor Rick Snyder passed a law saying he had the right to take over any community by declaring it a “financial emergency,” whereupon he would be free to dismiss local officials and declare contracts void. You can almost see him turning to Wisconsin’s Scott Walker with a smirk and saying, “I’ll see your tyrant and raise you a despot!”
Meanwhile, it’s almost a joke how often Republican governors have transferred so much of their state’s piggy banks into the pockets of big corporations that they must then declare a fiscal emergency, hacking at the livelihoods of working class citizens. In Wisconsin, state government declared war upon public servants who had dared to organize into unions, exempting only the firefighters and police whom they evidently still needed. The specter of a greedy kindergarten teacher with a fat paycheck and over-the-top medical coverage has never kept me awake nights, but if you think the Department of Education should be cashiered along with public schools, it makes sense to go after teachers. If you think unions keep the money out of the hands of the ruling class, and the rulers’ good defines your own, then union-busting makes sense as well.
Across the board, states with Republican governors face a coup against public interests and well-being in the name of fiscal conservatism and balanced budgets. Conservatives attack public interests and civil rights with the zeal of brutal theocrats. Reckless, rash policies are being pushed on an unwilling public. Think Progress has listed what the various governors are up to and it’s shocking. The question at hand is obvious: why are we letting this happen?