Thanks to the market-based solution forced on the city of Flint by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, clean drinking water is suddenly a bigger national issue than it's been since before good old liberal lion Dick Nixon signed the Clean Water Act in 1972. (I remain convinced that he did so after a long talk with the portrait of Abraham Lincoln that hangs in the White House and that they both were pretty hammered at the time.) Naturally, in situations like this, when we consider the depredations of Republican governors toward the commons, what springs to mind is the administration of Scott Walker, the failed presidential candidate and goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their wholly owned subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin. Naturally, Walker and his pet legislature have their own great ideas about Wisconsin's water. If privatizing local water systems works out as well as private prisons, private parking meters, and private highways, Wisconsin ought to look like the Gobi Desert within a decade. Naturally, there are out of state players involved here.
A bill quickly moving through the Legislature that would ease restrictions on the private purchase of municipal water systems is being pushed by a Pennsylvania company whose aggressive growth strategy has resulted in nearly 200 acquisitions in the last decade. Aqua America Inc. operates water systems in eight states, including Illinois. The company is now eyeing Wisconsin—a potential market where virtually all water and sewer systems are owned and operated by municipalities. The proposal could chip away at public ownership of water and sewer utilities by lowering legal barriers to private ownership. The measure passed the Assembly by voice vote on Jan. 12—normally a sign the legislation is not controversial—and now goes to the full Senate…"Government has a level of accountability to citizens that private companies simply don't have," Tom Stolp, deputy director of the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters, said at a news conference in Milwaukee earlier this week.
Silly Tom. That's the whole point, dude.
[Rep. Tyler August] emphasized the decision remains in the hands of local elected officials on whether to keep or sell water operations. August said he introduced the bill after meeting with representatives of Aqua America and its lobbyist, Steve Foti, a former GOP legislator. "It was a way to give communities an option, if they think someone else could do a better job," August said. "I really thought it was a simple change."
Translation from the original weaselspeak: we know that local officials are more easily convinced, and we also know that they are scared to death to suggest raising any tax or any fees. Pass this law and we've pretty much got it in the bag.
Local government officials are not shilling for this law. That doesn't matter, either.
Representatives of municipal associations say the push for the legislation isn't coming from them. "There's no interest in my members wanting to sell," said Jerry Deschane, executive director of the League of Wisconsin Municipalities, adding that his group nevertheless supports the bill. Interest appears to be greater in state government.
I'll bet it is.
Foti, the former majority leader of the state assembly who's currently lobbying for the bill, has an interesting track record. He copped to a couple of misdemeanor counts back in 2002 when the state government was rocked by a rather impressive corruption scandal. Foti was convicted of using state resources to campaign, a charge with which Scott Walker is not unfamiliar. Young Mr. August is another prize. Back in 2014, when the Madison police busted a bunch of drivers for running unlicensed ride-sharing services, August hit the roof.
"[I]f the city of Madison has enough resources available to waste on undercover enforcement taxi ordinances, perhaps it is time to revisit the millions of dollars given to the city in shared revenue as the next budget process begins...," August, the speaker pro tempore, wrote in a news release on Monday.
Lovely. He'd laid out his vision for Wisconsin in a speech to the CPAC hootenanny the previous year.
(And this is another chapter in our continuing series, ALL ELECTIONS MATTER, YOU IDIOTS!)
Next week, the two Democratic candidates are debating in Milwaukee which, as we know, is the only major American city to elect three socialist mayors. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bernie Sanders are fighting now—pointlessly, in my opinion—over who's the real progressive, and they are bringing their act to the state where progressivism was born as a political force in this country. Which is why, through people like Walker and Foti and August, out of state money and the rising plutocracy chose Wisconsin as their lab rat for the new gilded age. That should be the only thing anyone talks about, unless they both want to slap Scott Walker around, which I would totally understand.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
