The Republican attack on Wisconsin’s public employees’ rights to collectively bargain is yet another stunning display of politics serving business interests.  The economic crisis has now become another opportunity for the agenda of corporations and the rich to be furthered at the expense of everyone else.
Consider some basic economic facts: corporate speculation in financial derivatives, corporate banking that failed to adequately assess the riskiness of loans, corporate insurance of securities that held too little reserves to cover the insurer’s obligations, and corporate decisions to increase profits by moving production abroad – these were all major drivers of the current economic crisis. In turn the crisis meant millions more unemployed, millions with economic problems requiring them to spend less, etc. People without jobs and incomes pay much less in income tax; reduced sales lower the states’ revenue from sales taxes, and so on.
Governments at all levels are thus facing the same basic situation: just as the ongoing crisis means the people have more need of public services and supports, the government charged with providing those supports loses the tax revenues needed to pay for them.
So the big question is what to do in this situation. One obvious option is to offset the federal, state, and local governments’ crisis-driven loss of income tax and sales tax revenues by raising taxes on large corporations and the richest 5 % of the citizens. After all, they have done far better over the last 25 years than most Americans; their wealth means the crisis hurts them the least; their decisions and policies had much to do with producing this economic crisis; and they run the businesses and own the stocks that have seen “recovery” sine 2008-2009. They always were and are now more than ever “those most able to pay.” Because they are rich and have assets, their consumption would be little affected by tax increases (and in any case, far less affected than middle income and poor people would be).
It is, after all, a national crisis. Charging larger corporations and the richest 5 % more taxes would enable them to give something back to a system that made them richer than everyone else. But the corporations and the rich don’t want that option to be chosen, not even a little bit. They demand and get the agreement of nearly all politicians in both parties to not even debate the merits of this option.
So other options are chosen. Governments everywhere are instead cutting government services provided to the citizens and cutting the jobs and job conditions of government employees. This worsens unemployment and increases the hardships of the majority of people already suffering the economic crisis and the government’s failed program of trickle-down economics in response to the crisis. This shifts the costs of economic crisis and failed government policies onto the mass of people.
The Republicans stumble over themselves to cut the government, their favorite whipping boy. The Democrats prefer to move more slowly and less harshly, although in the same basic direction. The rest of us enjoy the “freedom” to choose between these parties.
What can better illustrate the irrelevance of establishment politics and their distance from the needs of the people than these spectacles of slavish obedience to corporations and the rich?  A new political formation not financially dependent on nor beholden to those two groups is the sine qua non of returning to a reasonable assessment of and choice among all the options our governments face in meeting their obligations.