Vote Barrett for Wisconsin Governor, June 5

I haven't written much about Wisconsin politics here lately.  For one thing, the legislative session is over for the year, so there haven't been any new laws in the pipeline to promote or resist.

But next week is a big one here in Wisconsin.  On Tuesday June 5, voters will head to the polling places to determine whether Scott Walker gets to finish his term as governor, or whether Tom Barrett will step in to finish the term and try to begin to repair some of the damage that the Walker administration has wreaked on this state since January 2011.

Faithful readers may remember my spree of outraged, astonished posts in February 2011, as Governor Walker "dropped the bomb" (his own words) on Wisconsin -- blindsiding the state with an unnecessary "budget repair bill" carrying immense, devastating policy consequences for Wisconsin Medicaid, collective bargaining, and more.  If the protests hadn't happened, and 14 state senators hadn't chosen to work from Illinois for a couple of weeks, that bill would have become law within a single week's time, with most of the public not even knowing what was in it, let alone having the chance to weigh in.  Inaccessibility, autocracy, secrecy and flat-out lies have continued to be hallmarks of the Walker administration.

Here, by contrast, is Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett as he started his campaign a month ago -- reaching out to the "Stand With Walker" counter-protesters who showed up at one of his events:

Communication and listening and reaching out to ALL the people is so basic, and it's been so badly missing this past year and a half in Wisconsin.  But what's at stake goes well beyond that.

Walker's Wisconsin represents a future that the wealthiest of the far-right have been coordinating and working toward in America for decades now.  I didn't understand it until the events of last February opened my eyes.  But it is real, it is dire, and it has been in process of happening for years now in this country.  The end-game is plutocracy -- government by the wealthy, for the wealthy.

That's what the ginned-up anger about taxes is about -- so the wealthiest and their corporations can continue to pay less and less toward the common good.

That's what the privatization movement is about -- private prisons, private schools, private all-sorts-of-things that have traditionally been public enterprises but are in the process of claiming more and more tax dollars to the profiteering benefit of the few.

That's what demonizing unions is about -- the last coordinated voices on behalf of workers, who have already seen wages stagnate over the past few decades, falling further and further behind the rising cost of living, while CEO pay rises into the stratosphere and the wealthiest of the wealthy hoover up the lion's share of the past decades' economic gains.

That's why money has been defined as free-speech -- for the purposes of buying electoral majorities in both the courts and the legislatures, so that the plutocratic policies can pass with unstoppable margins.  (Witness the astonishing flow of big-donor dollars, 70% from out of state, to the Walker coffers.)

By the money-is-speech definition, disability issues tend to be pretty darn silent as well.  I've written before about the ALEC threats to insurance mandates, the devastating and irresponsible cap on Wisconsin's Family Care program (which the federal government subsequently forced the state to lift), the (so-far unsuccessful) attempts to privatize special education in Wisconsin.  The disability lobby is not a wealthy one.  We've got people-power -- but not money-power.

Wisconsin's issues are a microcosm of a nationwide takeover.  I've come to believe that plutocracy is THE central issue of the upcoming national elections this November.

We need to push back whenever and wherever we can.

And in Wisconsin, on Tuesday, we can speak via the ballot box against Wisconsin's Walker big-money juggernaut by voting Tom Barrett for governor on June 5.

Perception Creates Reality

I note that my posts of late have been very upbeat. There is plenty in Joy's life, in our lives, to feel upbeat about! Joy has continued to do some amazing things as spring transitions into summer. Here's a sequence from just yesterday morning that I snapped while she was playing independently with her musical gears-toy, experimenting all-on-her-own with placing things on the central gear to see them spin.

A stack of gears that she built herself:

The bouncy-ball she got at the drugstore the other day:

Her echo-ey microphone:

These are true stories that we tell, that encourage us to keep going -- despite the fact that she's pulled enough hair out of another patch on her head to make us consider going with the buzz-cut again. And the fact that she's been apparently-randomly refusing food, and making those protests by suddenly spit-spraying large mouthfuls right into our faces.

Here are some more lovely true stories from yesterday morning, as we went to the Capitol Square once more to protest the impending disastrous budget bill:

I found myself being interviewed by a reporter for our local paper, who was intrigued by my "Budgets are Moral Documents" sign. Here's the interview as it was happening...

I got a chance to put in a plug for community long-term-care:

[JoyMama] pushed her daughter in a stroller and carried a “Budgets Are Moral Documents” sign. She said her family would be harmed by proposed cuts to state funding for the long-term care of people with disabilities.

“We keep hoping folks who have acted as moderate Republicans in the past will listen to their consciences,” she said.

Then Rose found, to her delight, a group of protesters hula-hooping for justice! An intern from a local paper filmed her and Twittered the video out into cyberspace -- Rose is the one on the left doing the stand-on-one-foot tricks. (Sorry 'bout the ads.)



Then around the corner came a stream of educators marching against the education cuts in the budget -- and who should be leading the march but Joy's special education team! So Joy and I left Rose with the hula-hoopers
while we made a circuit of the Square in the company of Joy's beloved teachers.

It was a beautiful day. It was good to be with sincere, creative people, determinedly protesting the trainwreck of a budget and other legislation that is being crammed through double-time, in a little-used procedure called "extraordinary session" that has NEVER been used to passed a budget before.

And then we learned that, late in the day, amazingly-coincidentally in the nick of time, the Wisconsin Supreme Court (along partisan lines) had overturned a lower court's ruling that the so-called "budget repair bill" violated the state's open-meetings law. The conservative members of the supposedly-non-partisan Supreme Court, bought and paid for by floods of corporate campaign cash, argued that the courts could not make the legislature abide by laws governing its own procedures unless those laws were part of the Constitution. And the open-meetings law is just a statute, not part of the Constitution. [I think I'm understanding this right. It's very tangled.]

How did we come to this?

Well, perception creates reality. And the wealthiest corporate interests of this country have bought the perceptions of anyone who gets their information from Fox News, or right-wing radio, or conservative campaign commercials. They've ridden those perceptions to electoral victories that then allow them to pass rapid-fire, coordinated, cookie-cutter corporate-written legislation via the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

And they've effectively spread the lie that the coordinated propaganda and fear-mongering over at Fox News is somehow equivalent to how the rest of the news networks run...

I am still hopeful about the recall elections in Wisconsin, that we can flip the state senate this summer and temporarily stop the bleeding. If you are at all inclined to contribute to this effort, you can do so via the Act Blue fundraising page.

But I am feeling very low right now about the powerful, incredibly wealthy forces that brought us to this point, and the alternate propaganda-reality that they have created.

Mother's Day 2011

What a lovely Mother's Day!

Rose painted me a watercolor card. Talent, the girl's got talent!
(I Photoshopped out her signature & JoyDad's for anonymity's sake, but Joy's signature manages to be pretty anonymous with no help from me.)

JoyDad got me a box of chocolates. The good stuff. I tried to share a piece with Joy, who nibbled a corner but then pushed it away. (Aw, shucks, had to eat it myself.) She was thrilled to be given the chocolate-brown ribbon from around the box to paly with, though.

Then we had home-made waffle-breakfast with Rose's friend Elizabeth and family, complete with maple-syrup and the last of the frozen strawberries from 2010. Spring came late this year, but the first strawberry blossoms did open this weekend.

Then we got out the bouncy castle for the first time this season. Joy was delighted. She bounced and bounced, both on her own and in the middle of a boisterous ball game between Rose & Elizabeth. I had to remember how tentative Joy was about her new castle when we first bought it almost three years ago. Some gifts she just has to get used to, maybe grow into. (Maybe if I plied her with high-end chocolates at regular intervals, she'd learn to appreciate them? The world may never know...)

And if all that weren't enough, the whole family went downtown to the Capitol Square for an activist Mother's Day picnic event and Solidarity Singalong. I made a new ALEC sign:

This one is protesting yet another piece of ALEC legislation that is fast-tracking its way through the Wisconsin legislature: AB110, the "Special Needs Scholarship Program Act." (They say "scholarship," I say "voucher.") Parents whose child has a public-school IEP would be able to take that child's share of public-ed tax dollars and spend it to send him or her to private school -- losing all their IDEA rights in the process, with no guarantee of any special-ed services at the private school. Though some families would surely benefit (most likely middle-to-upper income families, because the family pays the difference between the voucher & private school tuition), the big winners are those with corporate and religious interests in pushing private schools, and our public schools would be the big losers. (Here's a document of myths and facts about the bill.) So many things to protest, happening so fast!

But that's mother-commitment in Wisconsin, these days.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Mother's Day! I'll close with a salute in the form of a Facebook status-post that was making the rounds on Sunday:

For all the moms out there who had to wait longer (or still wait) to hear a first word, who spent more time in doctor's offices with their child than on playdates, who find joy in the uniqueness of their child even when others don't get it....For the moms who promote the ABILITIES and gifts of their child everyday, we salute you.

Autism Insurance: They Were For It! (before their party/ALEC was against it)

I've continued thick and fast with the advocacy here in Wisconsin. So much going on, with such blinding speed. Is it possible that it's only been two-and-a-half months since this assault started for real, with the "Attack on Wisconsin Families" bill (which its proponents liked to call the "Budget Repair Bill" -- a moniker that would have been laughable if it weren't so serious.)

I can't even address the unbelievable sequence of events in the WI Supreme Court race -- you couldn't make this stuff up if you tried. Instead, let's go for some more advocacy, OK?

As I wrote in a previous post, Now They're Coming for her Autism Insurance, there is some ugly legislation waiting in the wings to be introduced at the Capitol. Two bills, written by ALEC under the names of Sen. Leah Vukmir (R-Wauwatosa) and Rep. John Nygren (R-Marinette), are poised to destroy not only the autism insurance mandate that we worked so long and hard to achieve, but also every other insurance mandate in the state of Wisconsin. A very similar bill has passed both chambers of the Arizona legislature, and lacks only Gov. Brewer's signature to spell disaster for their autism insurance mandate [UPDATE!] has been vetoed by Gov. Brewer! Woohoo! (But we can't count on any such veto happening in Wisconsin...)

The Republican party in Wisconsin has been marching in lock-step on ALEC ideas, from corporate handouts (ongoing) to the weakening of consumer legal protections (January) to the evisceration of collective bargaining (currently tied up in the courts).

Funny thing about autism insurance, though.

There are more than a couple of Wisconsin GOP legislators -- still serving today -- who were FOR autism insurance before ALEC and the GOP collaborated to ride the Tea Party wave AGAINST insurance mandates!

Here are the currently-serving Republican state representatives who co-sponsored autism insurance legislation in the Assembly in both 2007 and 2009:

Rep. Dean Kaufert (R - Neenah)
Rep. Alvin Ott (R - Forest Junction)

The autism insurance bills never came to a standalone vote in the Assembly. In the 2007 version they ended up voting instead on an altogether-different (and unacceptable) substitute amendment; the 2009 version was then incorporated into budget legislation so it wasn't a separate vote. So we don't have a voting record on autism insurance in the Assembly. We do know, however, that the following currently-serving Republican state senators voted for autism insurance on 2007 SB178:

Sen. Robert Cowles (R - Green Bay)
Sen. Alberta Darling (R - River Hills)
Sen. Michael Ellis (R - Neenah)
Sen. Sheila Harsdorf (R - River Falls)
Sen. Dan Kapanke (R – La Crosse)
Sen. Luther Olsen (R – Ripon)

That makes a total of eight currently-serving Republican Wisconsin state legislators who took tangible recorded legislative action in favor of autism insurance.

Before their party / ALEC wrote the (not-yet-introduced) legislation that would kill it.

Then there are the Democrats on the record -- voting or co-sponsoring -- in support of autism insurance as well.

Co-Sponsoring Democratic Senators:
Sen. Spencer Coggs (D - Milwaukee)
Sen. Jon Erpenbach (D – Middleton)
Sen. Dave Hansen (D - Green Bay)
Sen. Robert Jauch (D - Poplar)
Sen. Julie Lassa (D - Stevens Point)
Sen. Mark Miller (D - Monona)
Sen. Fred Risser (D – Madison)
Sen. Lena Taylor (D - Milwaukee)
Sen. Kathleen Vinehout (D - Alma)

Additional Aye-Voting Democratic Senators:
Sen. Tim Carpenter (D - Milwaukee)
Sen. Robert Wirch (D - Pleasant Prairie)

Co-Sponsoring Democratic Assembly Representatives
Rep. Therese Berceau (D – Madison)
Rep. David Cullen (D - Milwaukee)
Rep. Jason Fields (D - Milwaukee)
Rep. Tamara Grigsby (D - Milwaukee)
Rep. Gary Hebl (D – Sun Prairie)
Rep. Andy Jorgensen (D - Fort Atkinson)
Rep. Margaret "Peggy" Krusick (D - Milwaukee)
Rep. Cory Mason (D - Racine)
Rep. Joe Parisi (D – Madison) -- just elected to Dane County Executive!
Rep. Mark Pocan (D – Madison)
Rep. Sondy Pope-Roberts (D – Middleton)
Rep. Jon Richards (D - Milwaukee)
Rep. Donna Seidel (D - Wausau)
Rep. Jennifer Shilling (D - La Crosse)
Rep. Christine Sinicki (D - Milwaukee)
Rep. John Steinbrink (D - Pleasant Prairie)
Rep. Robert Turner (D - Racine)
Rep. Leon Young (D - Milwaukee)

If you live in the district of any of the aforementioned legislators, here's how you can help.

Contact your legislator by phone, e-mail, or postal mail -- you can look them up online. Consider postal mail if you have time and can spare the stamp! They get less of that than they do phone/e-mail these days, so the impact may be greater. There's also plenty of time for a letter to arrive and be processed, since these bills may not be introduced until the legislature convenes in the fall (but if we put legislators on notice NOW, maybe we can even keep the measures from being introduced?)

Tell them these things:

1) Thank them for their past vote / co-sponsorship for autism insurance.

2) Tell them that autism insurance not only helps people who are able to access it, but also saves the state on Medicaid expenses! (Your personal autism-insurance story goes here if you have one.)

3) Ask them to be consistent with their previous stance by joining you in opposing LBR0373 and LRB1529, which would undermine all of Wisconsin's insurance mandates (including autism insurance)

4) Make sure to include your full street address with your signature.

I've already made a personal visit to Sen. Darling's office, with Joy at my side, to address this issue. Since I'm not a constituent of hers, I didn't get a direct visit with the senator, but I did make an appointment and had a reasonably good conversation with a staff member.

More opportunities to get your lobby on!

ALEC is Hazardous to Our Health Care

I carried a new sign to the Capitol Square yesterday:

It says:

ALEC is hazardous to our health care - protect Medicaid & insurance mandates!

So what is ALEC? I actually had an oblique reference to it in my last post -- it's the organization that distinguished professor William Cronon wrote about so convincingly in the blogpost that caused the Wisconsin GOP to start a witch-hunt into his university e-mails two days later. One small excerpt from Cronon's writing to set up the explanation:

If it has seemed to you while watching recent debates in the legislature that many Republican members of the Senate and Assembly have already made up their minds about the bills on which they're voting, and don't have much interest in listening to arguments being made by anyone else in the room, it's probably because they did in fact make up their minds about these bills long before they entered the Capitol chambers.

ALEC is the organization that provides the text of those bills on which they have already made up their minds, marching in lock step with no room for debate. ALEC stands for the American Legislative Exchange Council (their site has been up and down since Cronon's post was published, but it is up as I type now). It's a membership organization with a secret membership list of Republican legislators and business interests. Not just anyone can join: Republican legislators can join after being vetted, paying $50 per year in dues. Businesses pay thousands of dollars for a seat at the table. Then those conservative legislators and the deep-pocket business partners sit down together and draft legislation that then shows up, with minor modifications, in state-houses across the country.

This is how, when they get majorities like they have in Wisconsin, they can move so fast and so ruthlessly. The legislation is all ready-made from out of state!

Now, as Cronon pointed out in his piece, there's nothing wrong with like-minded folks getting together and strategizing about legislative goals. On the other hand, what makes ALEC different and frightening, as Shawn Doherty of Madison's Capital Times sums up the objections, is

the corporate and wealthy interests behind ALEC (which others note include the billionaire Koch brothers) are far more organized, coordinated, and stealthy than anything we've seen before in this country.

Doherty has been doing amazing investigative work on a fast-shifting landscape on the health beat here in Wisconsin, and I hope she wins awards for it. She's the one who broke the story on the impending GOP bills I wrote about earlier this month, the ones that would smash not only the autism-insurance requirement we worked so hard so win, but also every other insurance mandate in Wisconsin as well.

Guess what? The mandate-busting bills are ALEC bills.

Doherty makes this connection via an ALEC publication called The State Legislator's Guide to Repealing Obamacare (.pdf) [alternate Google-space copy here in case the ALEC original goes down.] From Doherty's post:

Also included in ALEC's list of model legislation are proposals aiming to undo the power of health mandates, which the guide complains are "often steamrolled into existence by politically active interest groups."

That's us, friends, a politically active interest group. You better believe it. Except that we don't have the deep pockets and conservative credentials that it takes to buy a seat at the table where the legislation is being templated.

Hence the ALEC bills that are waiting to be introduced in Wisconsin, LRB0373 and LRB1529. From Doherty's post again:

This legislation, dubbed "Health Choices and Opportunities" by authors Sen. Leah Vukmir, R-Wauwatosa, and Rep. John Nygren, R-Marinette, Sen. is similar to what the ALEC guide calls the "Health Care Choice Act for States," which allows people to purchase health insurance across state lines. In 2010, according to the guide, 19 states introduced such legislation, and Wyoming enacted it.

That's what my new sign is all about. I want to see "ALEC" pop up on as many signs at the Capitol, and in as many bitter jokes, as quickly as the name "Koch" did when the funding connection and the prank call between a fake billionaire brother and Gov. Scott Walker made the news. This needs to be a well-known part of the conversation, on everyone's lips, part of the argument as to why we need to vote JoAnne Kloppenburg into the Wisconsin Supreme Court April 5, and recall the 8 eligible Republican State Senators who are forcing this ALEC legislation down our throats, and then recall Scott Walker when the time comes.

There's an interesting tension here when it comes to talking about ALEC. On the one hand, Bill Cronon did it and got a huge heavy-handed response just two days later. As a university employee myself, it makes me at least a smidge-bit nervous about blogging too, though I'm doing so early in the morning on a personal computer on my day off! But the more of us who spread the word, the harder it will be to come after us all... I am Spartacus! (There are folks at the university who are now including all the open-records-demand keywords in their sig files on every message: "Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, Mary Bell." Just in case someone asks, y'know.)

On the other hand, I've got friends in legislative-related jobs who have known about ALEC for years. It's not as if the organization's existence and its mission are secret, or else they wouldn't have a web site, etc! Plus, again in Doherty's article, she interviewed WI Sen. Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, who took an almost nonchalant approach:

But so what, asks Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, when I call him about my discovery. Fitzgerald says he has been a proud member of ALEC since he first became a legislator in 1994, and is currently the Wisconsin State Chairman. State lawmakers have always turned to such national organizations for help brainstorming ideas and crafting legislation, Fitzgerald says. "These groups are about exchanging ideas between different state legislators from around the country to be sure we're not isolating ourselves in Wisconsin," he tells me.

Which is it, guys? Harmless collaboration or sinister plot? Until the open-records intimidation-demand on Prof. Cronon is withdrawn, I'm going to have to go with the latter. Especially since the legislation resulting from ALEC templates is so radically hazardous.

Which takes me back to our trip to the Capitol yesterday. This time it wasn't just me -- it was me and both daughters, Joy's first protest participation. There wasn't any formal protest planned, but these days there is a constant ongoing protest during daylight hours, a small but determined trickle of people circling the Capitol Square, carrying signs and encouraging one another in our resolve.

The following photo (a little freaky-looking with blurred faces but it was too good not to post!) was taken by a fellow protester we met on the Square, a stranger who turned out to have Mennonite connections back in my hometown Kansas community.

Keep an eye on ALEC. This story is still being written.