Wisconsin's Neo-Fascist Governor, Scott Walker, Warns GOP Faithful That The Recall Elections Will Be A Referendum On His Agenda

This past weekend's Wisconsin Republican Party convention in the Dells was a real mess-- especially for Tommy Thompson's apparently stillborn Senate campaign-- but the state's extremely controversial governor used the occasion to warn his followers that recall elections are a threat to all he's attempting to achieve in the state. Having disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin voters with a draconian voter suppression bill (see video above), Walker feels he can stop Democratic momentum-- and democracy itself-- through the recalls this summer, after failing to derail them. (Anti-working family Senators Dan Kapanke, Randy Hopper, and Luther Olsen will have to face the voters July 12, two days before Bastille Day. Next up: Robert Cowles, Sheila Harsdorf and Alberta Darling.)

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and other Republican leaders urged party members at their annual convention Saturday to take seriously the threat of losing control of the state Senate through recall elections.

Six Republicans and three Democrats are targeted for recalls starting as early as July 12. Democrats need to pick up three seats to take control of the Senate from Republicans. If that happened, the Republican agenda would come to a grinding halt in the Statehouse, where Democrats currently are unable to stop Walker's proposals from passing.

Walker, speaking to about 1,000 Republicans at a Wisconsin Dells resort, said the only thing that could stop the GOP's momentum in the state are the recall elections.

"For the next two months, you shouldn't think about any United States Senate seat, you should think about protecting six brave senators and picking up three others," Walker said.

All nine of the senators were targeted for recalls because of positions they took earlier this year on Walker's proposal taking away most collective bargaining rights from public workers. The Republicans voted for it, while the Democrats fled to Illinois for three weeks in an ultimately vain attempt to stop it from passing.

The law is tied up in the courts and has not taken effect yet.

Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald said he thinks Republicans will actually pick up a seat through the recalls, but he also extolled the party faithful to not take them lightly. He said the recalls have made the state Senate the bulls-eye of a national political battle.

And that voter suppression bill... Scott Walker boasts that he was the author of it-- 10 years ago. Earlier in the month, the conservative Economist reported on Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan's roadmap to recession. It's the twin faces of Ryan and Walker that will be on the minds of the state's voters when they cast their ballots in the recall elections. The Economist look at Ryan's budget plan-- what he's called his "cause"-- starts by them derisively pointing out that it's backed up by nothing but "a short, lazy piece of analysis by a Fed chairman who's most famous previous involvement in the regulatory system was his failure to rein in a dangerous explosion in irresponsible mortgage lending." That would be fellow Ayn Rand devotee Alan Greenspan.

Ryan then proceeded to lay out his four pillars for a strong recovery. First up were spending cuts. Government spending is generating uncertainty among investors, as are increases in the debt, he argued, and this problem must be tackled immediately. And indeed, Republicans have pushed for cuts to discretionary spending in the current fiscal year, and larger ones still in 2012. Pillar number two is regulatory reform. Big companies and banks are being choked by new regulations, many of which were put in places by new pieces of legislation some of which contained an alarming number of pages. The EPA wants to regulate carbon emissions. This all must be stopped. Regulations must be rolled back.

A third pillar is tax reform. Not a bad idea, that, but Mr Ryan added that any tax reform must include a reduction in rates. Tax increases are entirely off the table; Mr Ryan was clear about that. Not because tax increases don't pay for themselves—he acknowledged that eliminating the Bush tax cuts would raise revenue levels. But Mr Ryan seemed to suggest that current tax rates make American businesses uncompetitive, and that because not all of the fiscal gap could be closed with tax hikes, none of it should be. A sweeping tax reform is therefore the order of the day.

And then finally, Mr Ryan said, America needs sound money. He told stories of traveling around Wisconsin and being handed pieces of currency from Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe, he remarked on how nothing was more insidious than inflation, and he declared that the Fed was making a critical mistake by keeping monetary policy loose.

I was struck hearing all this, explained in this way. Adopting these policies would be nothing short of disastrous.

The spending cuts Republicans seek for this year and next would not doom the American economy to disaster, but they would place a meaningful drag on a recovery that continues to chug along at or just under trend growth, and that's risky. The literature suggesting that austerity can be expansionary has faced a great deal of criticism, and that literature itself suggests that expansionary austerity is most likely when interest rates are high-- which they aren't-- and when the currency is allowed to depreciate considerably-- which Mr Ryan opposes. Short-term spending cuts are unambiguously contractionary, and Mr Ryan wants them in spades.

I could get behind a sweeping regulatory and tax reform, provided it was done well, with an eye toward improving efficiency rather than simply trimming things back for trimming's sake. It seems clear that that's not what Mr Ryan is after. All the same, sweeping reforms seem like an odd short-term prescription from a guy who says that uncertainty is constraining recovery. Another attendee asked Mr Ryan about this seeming tension, and his response was essentially that a sweeping reform won't happen because Democrats still hold the Senate and the presidency. In other words, if Republicans had their druthers, they'd be free to enact a potentially destabilising-- according to Mr Ryan's view of the economic situation-- set of reforms. Only Democratic reluctance is sparing the economy this horror.

...Ryan's views are at odds with economic history and at odds with prevailing views of economic policy. They're untethered from economic reality. And no matter how charmingly he delivers them-- and he is an engaging, funny speaker-- they're a path to disaster. Ryanomics is a recipe for the return of recession.

This morning Paul Krugman brought back his classic description of Ryan from August, 2010: The Flimflam Man. Back then he was mortified that Beltway pundits had bought the Wall Street spin that Ryan was "intellectually audacious" and pointed out that it's just "the audacity of dopes" and that he wasn't offering food for thought but "serving up the leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce." Today it's Flimflam Part II. Ryan's plan, he asserts, is "a self-serving piece of junk. It doesn’t add up-- in fact, it would probably make the deficit bigger not smaller. And far from representing some kind of sacrifice of political interests in the service of the greater good, it’s a right-wing wish-list on steroids: sharp tax cuts for corporations and the rich, savage cuts in aid to the poor, and a gratuitous privatization of Medicare. And again, it’s technically incompetent along the way. ... Ryan and his colleagues expected to float through on a cloud of pundit love, which would allow them to bypass the public’s fundamental dislike of everything they were proposing."

Exactly what Ryan's Democratic challenger, Kenosha County Supervisor Rob Zerban, was saying after Ryan's serial lies on Meet the Press Sunday. "Paul Ryan tried to promote his radical budget plan on Meet the Press yesterday by falsely claiming that the alternative would lead to rationed care when the truth is the exact opposite. By forcing seniors into private healthcare with a voucher of diminishing value as their only assistance, many would forgo treatments and new technologies because the costs would be out of their reach. Paul Ryan knows that by gutting our current Medicare plan, seniors will face drastically higher out-of-pocket costs. This helps big insurance companies, not Wisconsin's seniors. What the taxpayers of southeastern Wisconsin need is a plan that would shore up our existing Medicare system without gutting it and forcing our seniors to figure it out on their own." Maybe Zerban was being too polite to mention that Big Insurance has showered far more cash on Ryan ($713,003) than on any other Wisconsin politician in history.

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