HOW BEST TO FLING WALKER’S CHILDISH BRIBE BACK IN HIS FACE

By Dominique Paul Noth

In a blatant ploy to buy votes for his re-election, Gov. Scott Walker signed a law in April that will give parents of young children $100 per-child cash rebate just in time to make them feel good about him -- if they apply by July 2 to get the money later in the summer, along with a one-week tax holiday in August on school supplies.  Sneaky Scott, loading up the pitiful goodies just before the November election.

An estimated 600,000 Wisconsin families could see the largesse from these two tax programs, some $137 million in all that will not be better spent directly on schools but try to make Walker look like a child-friendly governor.  It is such a raw attempt to buy favor and votes that many families are casting around to find a better use.

An educator friend has the best idea of how to turn the tables on Walker.

Families should take the $100 per child and give the money to their favorite local Democratic candidate to help turn the state’s education slump around and defeat Walker in the bargain.  Change the legislature and the governor -- and educational needs will start to be met!

It’s one of the few times that the cavalier way Walker has used state taxpayer money for his own image-stroking can be turned around and pointedly used to  tell him to go away. It is rightly being called Walker’s Folly – giving citizens ammunition to vote his gang out of office with his own misuse of our money. 

Trump (with Pence) may display Harleys but he sure shrugged off
promises to American workers.

There is, alas, no such simple turnaround with most of what the conservative elites are doing to cripple democratic norms.  And that has turned out to be particularly true about their own tax bill. They’ve made it a living breathing example of why trickle down doesn’t work – especially when no controls are put on greed. 

The main problem was giving most of the money to the wealthy who already have it and doing very little for the struggling workers.  All those words about how good businesses leaders would elevate Main Street along with Wall Street rather than line their own pockets are now exposed as a farce.

The tax bill dropped the corporate tax rate from 31% to 25% but according to many news sources, the corporate preference was to use that windfall not for workers but for stock buybacks –   $178 billion in the first three months of 2018 while hourly earnings for American workers averaged a 67 cent increase.

Trump and the GOP had touted the tax bill as good news for the American worker, but again and again companies have decided not to invest in their home workforces or expand them, or even improve their facilities – all of which could be accomplished, and the public was told it would be, by lowering the corporate tax rate. Instead, the tax bill has mainly resulted in using profits to benefit shareholders and continue to outsource jobs.

The picture postcard for this behavior is a Milwaukee landmark company – Harley Davidson. Whatever pride Wisconsin felt when its motorcycles were displayed on the White House lawn and Trump spake wonderful words about the company have now vanished.  Harley has taken its tax profit to reward shareholders – announcing a dividend and a stock buyback of 15 million shares – and close its Kansas City plant, throwing 800 out of work while claiming it was adding 450 various jobs in York, Pennsylvania, a loss of 350 jobs if you are keeping count.

The Steelworkers and machinists of Harley are keeping even better count, pointing to a new Harley facility about to open in Thailand as well as a plant in India to increase the company’s international fleet.  There is also a plant in Brazil. 

Though Harley spokesmen insist in press releases that opening a plant in Thailand had no impact on the Kansas City decision to close down, for which the unions had no warning, Harley workers dispute that, as Kansas City machinist Richard Pence did in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal: “Part of my job is being moved to York, but the other part is going to Bangkok.” 

In 2017 Harley and two unions representing production employees terminated their 22-year partnership, so Harley felt under no legal compulsion to tell the workers they were losing their jobs.

Machinist President Robert Martinez Jr.

Others in Wisconsin have long memories of broken promises, as when then House Speaker Paul Ryan traveled to the Harley-Davidson plant in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, in 2017 to preview the Republican tax bill as a way to “keep jobs here in America.” 

IAM President (International Association of Machinists) Robert Martinez Jr. even  sent a letter this March  to the White House asking Trump to save the Kansas City facility where “for decades, hard-working machinists have devoted their lives to making high-quality, American-made products for Harley.”

Asked to elaborate, Martinez said simply, “America’s working men and women deserve better than being thrown out onto the street.”    He clearly wants to hold Trump’s feet to the fire of his campaign pledges.

But Harley is hardly alone in seeing the tax bill as a way to line CEO  pockets and shaft the worker, both blue collar and middle class.   Other companies that have gone the stock buyback route rather than elevate its US workforce: Alphabet (Google’s parenting company), Cisco, Wells Fargo, Pepsi and many more.

Walker’s Folly may give voters a chance to fling his cash back in his face to help opponents, but curing the corporate behavior over the tax bill requires careful strategizing about what sort of votes will right the ship.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.  

SOME UNDERTOWS BENEATH WISCONSIN BLUE WAVE

By Dominique Paul Noth

Of the nine active candidates running for governor on the Democratic side, the worst strikes me as better in policy and personality than that  tired, glib one-note  Scott Walker who has driven our beloved state toward the bottom of every poll on good places to live.

Wisconsin bishops leave the mainstream but Tammy tells it true.

But that’s not to say that several candidates don’t bring their own complicated resumes and controversial decisions to the table. And that’s not to say that voters don’t sometimes drive themselves away from candidates through their own pet peeves or unbending expectations.  As the moment  approaches when cleaving together, knitting together at the ballot box will be most important, Democrats have to face up to attitudes that tear at the fabric.

Progressive groups are applying pressure with online polls and meetings to thin the herd, an action that disturbed some voters I talked to. They fear this is leading to some kind of purity test about what peripheral issues should be important – and that some candidates demeaned as moderates may actually embody the path to victory. 

The pressure may elevate issues into a central position that many voters don’t feel as strongly about as devotees, and some may even feel differently about.

Bringing all ages and social classes along is difficult but essential. Despite the youth movement that has so excited the Democrats, the fact remains that seniors are more politically active, voting in numbers way out of proportion to their share of the population. Increasing the youth vote seems underway, but cultivating the older reliable voters remains crucial. It’s probably not good strategy to tell traditional voters, “Get with the program or get out of the way!”

All this plays against a national backdrop.  The Democrats want their platforms to weigh more heavily than their attitude toward Trump, but his presence is certainly felt. His efforts to turn the country back to 1930s isolationism or 1950s “what’s good for General Motors is good for the country” are forcing Democrats to look for fresher, bolder ideas and bolder statements to emphasize the antiquity of his views and the 21st century nature of theirs.

And let’s be honest – no candidate for governor has yet caught fire with the public.  So voters are more susceptible to attacks on those candidates they know little about and definitely susceptible to  vague rumors and  undercurrents.

Let’s explore two undercurrents that are not much discussed. Let’s start with the bluntest:

Catholicism. Or, more broadly, how people view religion within politics, and why Catholics in Wisconsin are central to the mix – they are the biggest segment of those who claim to be religious.

Pope Francis may be an ardent conservative but when asked if homosexuals can’t be religious, he said, “Who am I to judge?” It’s not a view that springs easily to the lips of Wisconsin’s conservative bishops who tend to put their oar in on issues other than social justice.

This became apparent when all sent a letter to Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who is gay, accusing her of opposing Catholicism when expressing doubts about Trump judicial candidate Gordon Giampietro. He failed to share his real thoughts with the selection committee (mainly that US Justice Anthony Kennedy’s decision on same sex marriage was wrong and “worse than Roe vs. Wade”). 

It was a strange and even ludicrous attack on Baldwin, who routinely votes for Catholic judges,  or on the selection committee that chose three Catholics out of four picks, or  for that matter on the US Supreme Court, which has six Catholics.

But it underlines one problem with American Catholicism – and why it is losing many young people who think the church is strident on issues such as women or women’s rights.  These  cafeteria Catholics, as they are often called,   feel  free to select out what they believe in. That maddens bishops who meanwhile madden Catholics when they save their letters for issues like homosexuality and  don’t embrace social justice causes that are even more intrinsic to Catholic beliefs. 

These Catholics accept the separation of church and state, that  the US Constitution allows things the church doesn’t, so there shouldn’t be special tensions on Catholics who become judges about which oath they will be following. You might think JFK settled that issue but it keeps rising up.

There are even progressives who argue that anyone against abortion can’t be a member of the Democratic Party, much less a candidate.  But honestly, there are a heck of a lot of great social justice Catholics who personally oppose abortion, though they recognize that constitutional freedoms allow the pill, same sex marriage and Roe vs. Wade rules on abortion. To drum them out of women’s marches or out of candidate support groups is really shooting your candidate in the foot. But that is indeed happening in Wisconsin.

Many Catholics part ways from the hierarchy on how to handle the issues of LBGTQ  and same sex marriage.  Yet these are the voters who don’t always feel welcome by some Democrats though their personal views on social issues are anathema to the GOP. 

This is playing out in Wisconsin gubernatorial politics. If a candidate expresses pro-life concerns  -- or  times when women’s rights conflict with others’ rights --   a segment of the electorate looks with disfavor. Some don’t believe you can be pro-choice and pro-life.  Politics are making it hard to tread a middle path – where a surprising number of voters feel comfortable.

Marijuana -- That's another undercurrent fighting to become loud and central. Legalizing it has been the rallying cry of many campaigns, almost a definition in today’s politics of being progressive.  There are even groups that feel if this is not a central platform of a candidate for governor, he or she should be tossed to the curb.  

There are good reasons for the March for Cannabis. But the weakest in my view is personal freedom – the same sort of personal freedom that allows people to smoke tobacco or not wear safety helmets on bikes or cycles or drink 38 ounces of sugar soft drinks if they damn well want to. 

Legalized smoking or vaping has long been a health concern for individuals and their neighbors – you can start a good argument any place about whether tobacco should even be legal. And it is hard to imagine an entire party building its platform around introducing foreign substance into the body regardless of how extremist the penalty was in the past.

Even the push for pot for medicinal purposes is not about creating pills but allowing smoking or related access to CBD oil.  The medical issues are complex and rendered scientifically ridiculous by people like AG Jeff Sessions who  link pot with the opioid epidemic. 

Yet there are salient reasons for making pot legal – mainly the incarceration impact,  the reality of a pot to prison pipeline that has no justice in reality and brands good people with prison records they have to explain all their lives. 

There are also imbalances of race and income behind this incarceration and a lot of evidence that many so-called  felony non-violent  pot convictions stem from an exaggerated and painful era of our law and order excess. The human cost as well as the financial cost are enormous.

This alone should bring legalization. Candidates who push that side of the issue make a lot of sense. 

We haven’t even mentioned the money government could make from the business now rewarding underworld profiteers – and the attendant crime that would prevent.  But the money reward for states is there and the voters know it, even if it sounds greedy on the stump. 

Democrats should brim with sensibility when they discuss these issues – not assume that all Democrats of all generations are simpatico. When you want all to push together on the final road, you have to make roadblocks temporary and openness to variety essential.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for Urban Milwaukee.