Republicans are conspiring to subvert democracy in America. Deny it if you wish. Scoff if you are so inclined. But I know it’s true.
Obviously, I don’t have the space in a blog to substantiate such a charge. So today, I will just point to a few examples that you may have noticed yourself.
The first and most glaring is the spate of restrictive voting legislation being introduced by Republican controlled legislatures across America. While most Americans were busy watching the Casey Anthony trial, the ACLU and a bunch of other civil rights groups were demanding an investigation of this activity by the U.S. Justice Department. They say the legislation violates the Voting Rights Act by restricting access to the ballot box by seniors, minorities, students and the poor.
Then there’s that travesty in Wisconsin, where Governor Scott Walker (featured in magazine parody above) and his GOP allies have been using every kind of “dirty trick” to strip teachers, police officers, firefighters and other state workers of their right to join a union. Who but a bunch of conspirators would come up with such underhanded tactics?
Persuading Republicans to enlist as Democrats and run in the Democratic primaries, for example … who ever heard of such creepiness?
Yet that’s what the Wisconsin GOP did in an effort to delay the recall votes their union busting behavior precipitated.
No, none of the fake Republicans won, but they achieved their objective: the primaries gave the Republican Party time to organize a defense against the recall movement.
Wisconsin is not alone. Union busting legislation is part of a nationwide Republican strategy.
Here’s an excerpt from an article by investigative journalist Beau Hodai describing the conspiracy:
Nov. 2, 2010 saw a radical cohort of Republicans swept into office in states across the country.
When the legislative sessions began in January, the American news-consuming public was shocked by the tenacity of this new breed of Grand Old Partier as it set to the task of breaking public employee unions, dismantling state government and privatizing civic services.
While battles still rage in the nation’s legislatures and statehouses, mainstream media attention peaked in February and March with the culmination of the fight over Gov. Scott Walker’s budget bill AB 11, which sought to curtail the collective bargaining rights of government employees and thus disempower Wisconsin’s public sector unions.
When on February 23 the Buffalo Beast published recordings and transcripts of a prank call to Walker from a Beast reporter posing as billionaire GOP donor David Koch, it became apparent how intimately involved brothers David and Charles Koch were in Walker’s efforts to break public sector unions.
Subsequently, bloggers and editorialists began batting around possible scenarios involving myriad right-wing public policy foundations funded by the Koch brothers and proceeds of Wichita, Kan.-based Koch Industries (and other Koch-controlled corporations). During such speculation, one name arose as the favorite villain behind the multitude of bills aimed squarely at public employee unions. That name was ALEC (see sidebar detailing the organization’s Koch connections).
An exhaustive analysis of thousands of pages of documents obtained through public records requests from six states, as well as tax filings, lobby reports, legislative drafts and court records, reveal that these suddenly popular anti-public employee bills, while taking different forms from state to state, were indeed disseminated as “model legislation” by ALEC.
Not coincidentally, bills similar to those in Florida and Wisconsin have been introduced in Arizona, California, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Vermont.
Click here to read Hodai’s article.
Look, if you have heard of the debt ceiling wrangling, the massive state layoffs and the numerous other deliberate attempts to sabotage the American economy as a prelude to the 2012 presidential campaign, you will have to agree with me that these cannot be coincidences, that behind it all is a sinister and sickening conspiracy.
