The Koch Brothers’ Governors
Butlers Selling the Public’s Silver….
A Dress Rehearsal for Hillary?
By Jeffrey Sommers & Michael Hudson
The Koch Brothers are the closest thing the United States has to Russia’s oligarchs. They fuse ownership of the economy and state, using the latter to enrich themselves while making private gains through the public’s losses. Their idea of a “market economy” is to buy government officials and the assets they privatize at giveaway prices.
The top three butlers at the Koch’s nouveau riche ‘Downton Abbey’ are Governors Sam Brownback of Kansas, Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, and Chris Christie of New Jersey. All three ran elections based on the anti-Keynesian oxymoron of promoting job creation by balancing budgets with regressive tax plans. All declared that cutting taxes (chiefly on their wealthy campaign contributors) was the way to achieve their goal (more campaign contributions). All have served at least one term in office and the results are in: Their rates of job creation and income growth are way below the national average. Rather than closing budget deficits, tax cuts create them – providing more excuse to privatize state assets, post-Soviet style.
Brownback simply hopes to stay on the job as governor of the state where the Kochs’ corporate headquarters are located. Despite flagging poll numbers, he remained in office thanks to a mildly tawdry incident involving his Democratic opponent’s youthful visit to a strip club (in the era of talk radio and Fox News, anything can be manufactured into a scandal). Christie and Walker, by contrast, have presidential aspirations and are raising funding as the two top prospects from the Kochs’ political farm team.
The looming public danger ahead is how these Koch governors will ‘repair’ the fiscal potholes their tax policies are creating. Chanting the GOP refrain of ‘lower tax rates good, higher taxes bad’ as their stage-magic abracadabra, they proselytize Arthur Laffer’s cocktail napkin ‘Laffer Curve’ depicting lower tax rates delivering higher tax revenues as a sacred scroll – its inevitable failure leading to privatization of rent-extracting opportunities in a Yeltsin-like post-Soviet policy under the banner of free markets.
Jeffrey Sommers is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and visiting faculty at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. His book with Charles Woolfson, The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-economic Costs of the Neoliberal Baltic Model is available from Routledge.
Michael Hudson is the visiting distinguished research professor at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. He is also author of The Bubble and Beyond. His website contains his recent articles and interviews.
