Milwaukee Biz Blog

Wisconsin's legislature will soon decide whether to reopen part of the Northwoods to iron ore mining.

Much has been written and said about the proposed new mine in the Penokee-Gogebic Range, but not much attention has been paid to the man behind the project and the sprawling global conglomerate he is connected to.

The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign first started noticing large campaign contributions from mining interests to Wisconsin politicians just over a year ago, long before the mining bill was introduced.

All of the money came from out of state. Roughly a quarter of the donations came from West Virginia mining magnate Chris Cline. The rest came from associates of Cline's. Some of those associates are at Cline Resource and Development. Others are with a company called Foresight, which is majority-owned and led by Cline. Still others are with a law firm Cline does business with. The remainder are other mining executives who've done business with Cline.

Environmentalists claim the mining bill being pushed in Wisconsin was written by the mining industry and would gut existing safeguards. The legislation certainly is Chris Cline's dream. And its approach to permit streamlining and environmental deregulation does bear a striking resemblance to the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council's model legislation known as the "Performance Based Permitting Act" and "Groundwater Protection Act."

Cline's Foresight is part of the global asset management firm Carlyle Group, a highly controversial and politically well connected corporate behemoth with tentacles that reach across the defense, aerospace, automotive, energy, health care, real estate, technology, telecommunications and transportation industries. Carlyle Group first earned a mention on the Democracy Campaign's website in a 2005 report we issued about shady Illinois donors who were funneling money to three candidates for governor in Wisconsin.

The Economist describes Carlyle Group as "deeply embedded in the iron triangle where industry, government and the military converge" and says it "arguably takes to a new level the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower feared might 'endanger our liberties or democratic process.'"

Carlyle Group also is into mining, through Chris Cline's Foresight. Which is itself a danger to our liberties and democratic process here in Wisconsin.

Mike McCabe is the executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan election campaign watchdog agency.

Dave Zweifel wrote the other day about a friend from out of state calling him to ask what the hell is going on in Wisconsin. Good question. And he's not the only one getting it.

We've got the most polarizing governor in America who can't for the life of him see what it is about him that so divides people. Supreme Court justices whose contempt for each other has been put on public display, with name calling eventually escalating to a physical altercation. A legislature that considers itself above longstanding open meetings and open records laws.

We had lawmakers passing a new law allowing Wisconsinites to carry concealed weapons at the same time the Capitol was in virtual lockdown and visitors to the people's house were being subjected to intensive weapons screening.

Weirdness abounds in America's Dairyland.

Voters are not amused. A great many have taken matters into their own hands, prompting an unprecedented number of recall elections.

Painfully ironic though it is, this year is the 100th anniversary of the most remarkable legislative session in Wisconsin history. The nation's first progressive income tax was established. Workers' compensation was invented. Railroads were regulated. The insurance industry was reformed and a state life insurance plan was instituted. Maximum work hours for women and children were set. Vocational and technical education systems were initiated. And that's just a partial accounting of the 1911 legislature's accomplishments.

That all this happened in 1911 was no accident. The stage actually was set much earlier when landmark political reforms were enacted in Wisconsin. In 1897 the crudest forms of corruption such as bribery, illegal voting and election fraud were outlawed (yes, you heard right, these things were not illegal in the first half century of statehood). In 1905 campaign contributions by corporations were banned. Democracy was further strengthened in that amazing 1911 session with the passage of the Corrupt Practices Act requiring candidates to report all sources of their funding and barring elected officials from trading favors, monetary or otherwise, in return for financial support from wealthy donors.

These laws have been badly weakened in recent years, and newer laws like the 34-year-old public financing program for state elections have been swept away entirely. New political pathogens have emerged and have been left largely untreated. What is happening in 2011 is no accident either.

As was the case in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Wisconsin is at a crossroads. The defining question of our moment is the same one that stared the people of our state in the face back then. Which shall rule, wealth or people?

A new report issued yesterday by a national academic research institute suggests an answer is in the offing. The study was based on based on an analysis of data from recent elections in six Midwestern states including Wisconsin. Among other things, the authors offer an assessment of the Democracy Campaign's proposed new approach to election campaign financing, concluding that the "combination of policies would have extraordinarily powerful effects."

The institute estimates our plan would increase the proportion of campaign money coming from $100-and-under donors from the current 19 percent to as much as 91 percent of the total. At the same time, the role of $1,000-or-more donors would be cut from the current 34 percent to 6 percent, while the role of special interest political action committees (PACs) would shrink from 9 percent to only 1 percent.

Game changing, that's what it would be. The report's conclusion, not mine. The report's lead author happens to have a Republican pedigree. He used to write speeches for Dick Cheney when the former vice president was secretary of defense. He also once was a top congressional staffer as associate director of the House Republican Conference.

As was the case in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the problems we face cross partisan boundaries. The question is not which shall rule, Democrats or Republicans? The question is which shall rule, wealth or people?

When Wisconsin answers that question as definitively and effectively as our state did a century ago, the stage will again be set for a legislative session every bit as remarkable as 1911's. Then Wisconsin will come back to its senses.

Can't wait.

Mike McCabe is the executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan election campaign watchdog agency.

From the debt ceiling talks in Washington to the reaction to the Wisconsin Supreme Court's Stranglegate scandal, the politicians' Rule Number One is on prominent display. When things get fouled up, never accept responsibility and always assign blame.

When one justice's hands somehow made their way to another's neck, our state's officialdom could have swiftly insisted on acceptance of responsibility. Instead we got hasty assignment of blame. Some are faulting Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson for not being more of a peacemaker. Now two state senators are blaming the state constitution, calling for it to be amended to end Supreme Court elections.

Political Rule Number One makes them roads rarely traveled, but the paths to responsibility are as numerous as the potential targets of blame. Let's review the options.

The judiciary could police itself. Judicial misconduct charges could be filed in response to the recent physical altercation in the high court's chambers. Discipline can range from reprimand to suspension and even removal from office.

Any perpetrators of physical violence could be held to account in the criminal justice system. Charges could be filed and any criminal acts could be prosecuted.

The Legislature could initiate impeachment proceedings.

Voters could, at the proper moment, exercise their right to pursue a recall election.

It is striking that Senators Dale Schultz and Tim Cullen did not advocate any of these measures. Instead they found fault with the state's founding document. And they blamed the voters.

It is even more striking that they issued their indictment of Supreme Court elections a matter of days after legislators voted to eviscerate the Impartial Justice Act that provided high court candidates with an alternative to grubbing for private special interest money in order to run competitively for the office. And they put an exploding candle on their carcinogenic cake when they increased the limit on private donations to Supreme Court hopefuls. Not by a little either. Tenfold. The old limit was $1,000. The new limit is $10,000.

There is no doubt that the flood of money in recent Supreme Court elections is at the heart of the court's current dysfunction. And there is no doubt that legislators and the governor just made matters much worse.

They are not done throwing monkey wrenches. Now that they have swung the floodgates open even more widely, they are advancing legislation to prevent the public from knowing how much money is flowing into elections and where that money is coming from.

They take such actions and then they have the gall to suggest that the real problem is the governing framework Wisconsin's founders designed. They scream at the top of their lungs, "the state Supreme Court is an effing mess! Amend the constitution!"

Wisconsin's Supreme Court used to be a national model, recognized as one of the finest courts in the nation. Has it occurred to no one in the Capitol or on the Wisconsin State Journal editorial board that all the while this reputation was being earned the court was elected?

Our state has elected Supreme Court justices for over 150 years. For a century and a half, those elections produced a court that was deserving of the public's trust and confidence. In very recent years, the court's reputation has been badly tarnished. Has it occurred to no one at the Capitol or the State Journal that maybe, just maybe, the problem isn't that we had Supreme Court elections for over a century and a half, it's that we started having Supreme Court auctions beginning in 2007?

The constitution is not the problem. Democracy is not the problem. Political Rule Number One is. So are all the backward policies and judicial edicts that have turned our elections into auctions. Any real solution has to address those real problems.

Mike McCabe is executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan election campaign watchdog agency.

The ventriloquist dummies that pass for state policymakers these days are moving at breakneck speed to take away longstanding worker rights in Wisconsin. They say it has to be done right now to patch a hole in the state's budget for the current year, even though the Legislature's own nonpartisan budget analysts say there's no such short-term problem.

Green Bay-area business leader Paul Linzmeyer is right. What the dummies say is nonsense. Governor Walker and his allies in the Legislature are not doing this for budgetary reasons. Their inspiration is ideological. This is about politics, not state finance. This is about paying back big campaign donors and punishing political opponents. And yes, this is about union busting.

The health insurance and pension benefit concessions they are after would reportedly save the state about $300 million over the next two years. The deficit for the coming two years is now projected to be $3.6 billion. They expect us to believe it is worth ripping Wisconsin in two to solve less than a tenth of the long-term problem the state faces. And they expect us to believe it despite the fact it has become abundantly clear they could get the concessions without stripping workers of their rights.

These facts make the political games the dummies are playing plainly visible. All that aside, for me it boils down to this: Workers have a fundamental right to organize and collectively bargain with their employer. It is unacceptable under any circumstances to solve budget problems by taking away people's rights.

I am not a public employee. In fact, I've never been represented by a union in any job I've ever had. But I am not incapable of seeing and appreciating that all working people have benefited greatly from things unions have fought for and won over the years. We take for granted as a basic employment standard that workers have weekends off, eight-hour work days, 5-day work weeks, and paid vacation and sick leave. All of these things were won by unions.

My benefits aren't as good as those received by Wisconsin's public workers. My employer pays a third of the cost of the health insurance I have. I pay $789 a month out of pocket to cover my family, nearly $9,500 a year. There is no dental coverage. The Democracy Campaign covers one third of a rather meager monthly payment into an individual retirement account.

I'm not complaining. I consider myself lucky. I am paid to do work I love. My parents were dairy farmers and the family didn't have health or dental insurance at all when I was growing up. They had no pension plan. No weekends off or vacations either. Cows need milking twice a day, every day.

Although I fit the profile of someone who might resent public employee compensation, I can't begrudge state and local government workers their pay and benefits. A teacher's job is far more important than mine. A firefighter's is more essential. So is a police officer's. Plowing snow and picking up the trash are indispensable too.

Millions of dollars are showered on professional athletes for entertaining us. A good teacher is worth infinitely more to society than a good quarterback or starting pitcher or point guard. Yet I'm supposed to be bent out of shape because the average teacher in Wisconsin earns something like $51,000 a year? Hell, a truly outstanding teacher would be a bargain at $200,000 in my book.

A state budget is more than just an accounting of how much we'll be taxed and how those taxes will be spent. It is a reflection of our society's priorities. We need to get ours straight.

Mike McCabe is executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, an independent, non-partisan political watchdog organization that monitors the impact of money on the state’s elections.

By our latest count, there are 43 different interest groups spending money like crazy to influence the outcome of state-level elections in Wisconsin this year.

Eleven of the 43 are disclosing their donors while three-quarters of them are able to keep their funding sources a secret. The ones structured in a way that allows them to conceal their donors are doing the vast majority of the spending, so the public is being kept in the dark about the origins of almost all of the money being spent by outside groups.

The other thing that is striking about these outfits is their fly-by-night nature. Of the 43 groups active in state-level races in 2010, only 14 of them were around in 2008 and 11 were doing electioneering in state races in 2006.

The most shadowy of these groups have names that ooze grassroots authenticity and evoke images of patriotism or motherhood and apple pie. They pop up, travel the low road doing the dirtiest of the political dirty work, and then vanish, to be replaced by new groups run by the same cast of characters.

The Democracy Campaign has been tracking this political sleight of hand since it started in earnest in Wisconsin in 2000. That year, the campaign hijackers were named Americans for Job Security, Independent Citizens for Democracy, People for Wisconsin's Future and Project Vote Informed.

Independent Citizens for Democracy was anything but independent and was really just one citizen, namely Chuck Chvala, who was then Senate Democratic leader and later of course a convicted felon. Chvala's group returned under the same name to haunt Wisconsin elections one more time in 2002. Project Vote Informed morphed into the Alliance for a Working Wisconsin. They were joined by Citizens for Clean and Responsible Government, Citizens for Wisconsin's Future, the Coalition for America's Families, Coalition to Keep America Strong and Working Families of Wisconsin.

In the next election in 2004, Citizens for Wisconsin's Future stuck around for a repeat performance and was joined by All Children Matter, the Alliance for Choices in Education and Americans for a Brighter Tomorrow.

All Children Matter remained active for two more elections in 2006 and 2008. Another group that surfaced in 2004, the Greater Wisconsin Committee, continues to intervene in state elections to this day. They were accompanied in 2006 on the left by Building Wisconsin's Future, not to be confused with Building a Better Wisconsin, the campaign arm of the Wisconsin Builders Association. And there was Working Families PAC on the right, not to be confused with Working Families of Wisconsin that helped Democrats in 2002.

Joining the fray in 2008 was Advancing Wisconsin, a regional group called Keep Our North Strong, and the Wisconsin Institute for Leadership. Only Advancing Wisconsin has been heard from in Wisconsin since.

This year, All Children Matter has been reincarnated as the American Federation for Children. This group's efforts are being orchestrated by former Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen, who is awaiting a new trial on corruption charges. It is best known for attacks leveled against Green Bay-area state senate candidate Monk Elmer, who has served on the Kimberly school board. The group lambasted Elmer and his supposed fellow board members for declaring a financial emergency and hiking taxes by exceeding state revenue limits on school budgets. The ads cite as evidence an article that appeared in a newspaper . . . in Idaho . . . about the fiscal woes in a Kimberly school district in that western state.

Other groups sponsoring campaign ads in 2010 include the American Justice Partnership, Building a Stronger Wisconsin (not to be confused with Building a Better Wisconsin or Building Wisconsin's Future), Citizens for a Progressive Wisconsin, Citizens for Fox Valley Jobs, Citizens for Southwest Wisconsin, the Club for Growth, Jobs First Coalition and Northwoods Patriot Group. Two of the biggest spenders this year are the Republican State Leadership Committee, one of the few such groups with a name that gives voters a clue which side it is on, and RGA Wisconsin 2010 PAC, whose initials would provide a clue if voters knew they stand for Republican Governors Association.

The reason most of these electioneering groups don't have to reveal their donors is they are gaming the tax code. This also helps explain why they come and go so quickly. Staying one step ahead of the law, don't you know.

Many of these groups are organized under section 501c of the federal tax code. Political campaigning is not a permissible primary purpose for 501c organizations under federal law. Some complaints have been filed calling on the IRS to investigate, but one wonders if the subjects of the complaints will exist anymore by the time the IRS finishes investigating and tries to enforce the law.

Trying to chase groups that spring up like weeds one moment and evaporate into thin air the next is exceedingly unlikely to get us anywhere good. Instead, Congress and states like Wisconsin should pass new disclosure laws requiring disclosure of the source of funds used for election spending regardless of how a group is organized. In the meantime, the IRS could do the public a huge favor by refusing to automatically grant 501c status to groups intending to engage in electioneering. Make them organize under section 527. Political campaigning can be the primary purpose of so-called 527s, but they have to disclose their donors.

Our elections are filthy with party fronts and shadowy interest groups that the IRS considers charitable organizations that promote the social welfare. This is a ruse. Both common sense and the public interest demand that they be required to operate as 527s and made to prove that influencing elections is not their primary purpose before being granted 501c status.

Mike McCabe is executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, an independent, non-partisan political watchdog organization that monitors the impact of money on the state’s elections.

No doubt about it, most Americans can't stand the Democrats. And with Democrats currently controlling both houses of Congress and the White House (not to mention both houses of the legislature and the governor's office here in Wisconsin), most in the political class are figuring lots of them are going to be sent packing in November.

Problem is, if the latest polling done by The Associated Press is to be believed, the Republicans are even more hated than the Democrats.

Spooked by the parallels between present-day America and the fall of the Roman Empire, even mainstream political observers like Tom Friedman are left to ponder whether we have reached a point when the existing two-party arrangement is no longer sustainable. He quotes a Stanford University political scientist stating the obvious, that we "basically have two bankrupt parties bankrupting the country."

Friedman seconds the motion, observing "our two-party system is ossified; it lacks integrity and creativity and any sense of courage or high-aspiration in confronting our problems."

No kidding.

We are all enduring what will most assuredly prove to be the most expensive midterm election in history. And the least transparent election of any kind in anyone's memory. Thanks to the Roberts court for that. Outside interest groups are pouring vast sums of carefully laundered money into television advertising, get-out-the-vote campaigns and other electioneering efforts. Some analyses have Republican front groups outspending Democratic groups by as much as 6 to 1 on TV ads.

It's hard to feel sorry for the Democrats on this, though. Before Ted Kennedy's death, they had a filibuster-proof majority in Congress and failed to take any action to alter election financing. They eventually adjourned and hit the campaign trail without passing the Fair Elections Now Act or the DISCLOSE Act or the Shareholder Protection Act.

It was the same story at the state level. The Democrats had majorities in both the Assembly and Senate as well as Jim Doyle as governor, but failed to reform the way their elections are paid for. Oh, they passed public financing for state Supreme Court, but pointedly refused to do the same for their own elections. The Senate passed major campaign finance disclosure legislation, but despite the fact the votes were there in the Assembly to put it on Doyle's desk (who promised to sign it), Democrats in the lower house closed up shop and went home without acting.

Obviously they wanted the bed made this way. So now they must lie in it. Even if it winds up being their death bed.

Mike McCabe is executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan political watchdog group.

When we elect a new state legislature and governor this fall, we will be choosing who we want to deal with a broken state budget, a hobbled economy and a long list of other concerns.

Whether we’re thinking about it or not, we also will be choosing who will redraw congressional and legislative district lines and thereby determine who has the upper hand politically for the next decade.

In a democracy, voters are supposed to choose their representatives. Every 10 years, it’s the other way around as our representatives get to choose their voters. The way it’s worked is that legislators draw new district lines after each census, and the lines they draw tend to be tailor-made for their reelection. Democrats find ways to pack as many Democratic voters as possible in their districts, and Republicans load their districts with GOP voters.

In the vast majority of congressional and state legislative contests, the outcome is a foregone conclusion because of the lopsided political makeup of the districts. Much is made of how Wisconsin is neither a Republican red state nor a Democratic blue state, but rather has a distinctly purplish hue. As a classic swing state, reflected in the state’s battleground status in presidential elections, one might imagine Wisconsin would have a significant number of competitive districts. But individual districts are bright red or dark blue.

And they generally are not competitive politically. Since 2000, only two U.S. House races have been competitive (with a margin of victory within 10 points) – the 2000 election in the 2nd Congressional District and the 2006 election in the 8th. Depending on the election year, either 116 or 117 state legislative seats are up for grabs. Over the last 10 years, the number of competitive elections for the legislature has ranged from a low of 10 to a high of 29.

Since 2000, state legislative incumbents have been reelected 95% of the time. In 2000, incumbents won 102 times and lost three. In 2002, they went 89-6. In 2004, 91-4. In 2006, 97-9. And in 2008, 99-3.

Not only do politically lopsided districts make elections less competitive and voters less powerful and less able to get new blood and fresh ideas into the legislature, but they also contribute to hyper-partisan, polarized politics that make compromise nearly impossible on controversial issues. One-sided districts tend to produce candidates who appeal to just one side. Squeezed out are candidates who appeal to independents or voters of both parties. The result is a legislature of fierce partisans, with fewer members willing to reach across the political divide to get the public’s business done.

It has cost us a pretty penny to get these dismal results, as state politicians have spent huge sums of taxpayer money on sophisticated map-drawing technology, technical experts and political consultants to help them draw new district lines. According to various sources, the total amount spent on redistricting was somewhere between $2.6 million and $2.9 million for the 2000 remapping of the state. This represented a significant cost overrun. The governor had put $827,200 in the state budget for redistricting costs. Even after spending all that money, the legislature couldn’t finish the job and the task was thrown to the courts. In fact, federal courts have had to step in the past three decades.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can have more competitive elections and more civility among lawmakers by creating an independent commission in charge of drawing voting districts like the one in Arizona or we could embrace the changes neighboring Iowa made some years ago.

Iowa’s nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency redraws the districts obeying criteria spelled out in state law. By law, the agency must ignore such factors as previous election results, the addresses of incumbents, or any other demographic information. Not coincidentally, races for four of Iowa’s five U.S. House seats are perennially competitive and the fifth sometimes is too.

It is possible to draw a better Wisconsin. There are proven ways to curb the excesses of partisan redistricting and thereby produce more competitive elections and more partisan cooperation. One way can be found right next door.

Mike McCabe is director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan watchdog group that tracks the money in state politics and works for clean, open and honest government. WDC’s website is www.wisdc.org.

Fear is an unflattering garment, but we still wear it every time much is unknown about what lies ahead for us and our kids and grandkids. We live in such a time.
Producing even more anxiety is the lack of control we as citizens currently have over the ship of state. It’s hard not to notice how lawmakers regularly put the demands of wealthy interests ahead of the needs of the general public, and a great many people have lost faith that their elected representatives are actually representing them.

There’s good reason to feel this way. Wisconsin legislators, for example, get roughly $2 of every $3 they raise for their election campaigns from people who cannot vote for them because they live outside their districts. To put an even finer point on where state lawmakers are getting the money to fuel their election campaigns, more than three-quarters of the money raised by legislators in 2009 came from a pool of donors who amount to less than 1 percent of the state’s population.

That the ultra-rich already were doing most of the talking in elections didn’t stop the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal Election Commission from offering them a helping hand in recent days. The nation’s highest court stepped into an ongoing election in Arizona and blocked the state from distributing public matching funds to candidates who forego big-money private fundraising.

Meanwhile, the FEC treated the corporate advocacy group Citizens United as a media organization and gave the Republican Party surrogate a “press exemption” from federal disclosure requirements. This was second time in a matter of weeks that Citizens United and the FEC were in the news, coming on the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC giving corporations a free rein to spend as much as they want to influence elections.

To find a period in American history with a concentration of power, corporate influence and political corruption comparable to today’s you have to go back to the late 1800s. There was Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. There were the robber barons. That’s what they called the likes of John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, John Jacob Astor and Cornelius Vanderbilt. There was Mark Hanna, the Cleveland industrialist and politician who befriended Rockefeller at a young age. It was Hanna who famously said: “There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.”

Mark Twain coined the term, “Gilded Age,” to describe that corrupt era.

It’s odd how our nation’s highest court now says corporations are people, yet today’s captains of industry have never been more faceless and the companies they run have never been more inanimate. Rockefeller, Carnegie and Vanderbilt became household names in the Gilded Age.

Who can name the current CEO of Exxon Mobil or the investment bank Goldman Sachs or insurance giant AIG? Which top BP exec was that again who talked of caring about the “small people” whose lives are being ruined by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?

No doubt remains that we are reliving the Gilded Age. The only question is what name the historians will finally settle on for this latest era of rampant materialism and blatant corruption. Maybe ours should be called the Stilted Age. The name fits a time when a comfortable few rest easily above the floodwaters while an afflicted many watch jobs and homes and savings and ways of life wash away.

Or perhaps the Jaded Age, so named for a society overindulged, exhausted by overwork, dulled by excess. So named for a time when truth competes so poorly in the marketplace of ideas, when opinion is exalted over fact, when ugly propaganda becomes innocuous “spin.”
Light will appear one day at the end of the tunnel. But knowing that is small comfort when you’re feeling around in the dark. History is scariest when it is being made.

Mike McCabe is director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a nonpartisan watchdog group that tracks the money in state politics and works for clean, open and honest government. The group’s website is www.wisdc.org.

Anyone with a little gray hair who has known Wisconsin for a lifetime can't help but feel that we're being taken on some Clarence Oddbody alternate reality tour. This can't be Wisconsin. Must have gotten some bad liquor.

That feeling swept over me again this week when we issued a report showing donations from so-called "payday lenders" to four campaign fundraising committees controlled by legislative leaders. It was hard not to notice both the size and timing of the donations. Three-quarters of the money given to the Assembly Democratic Campaign Committee, for example, was delivered either the day before or a few weeks after Assembly Speaker Mike Sheridan announced he no longer thought it was a good idea to limit the interest rates on cash advances and other forms of payday loans. A 36-percent rate cap goes "too far," the speaker informed us.

This in a state that for years and years had usury laws that limited the interest any financial institution could charge to 18 percent. In 1996, this law was passed by the legislature and signed by the governor repealing the limit. Not coincidentally, the number of payday lending establishments has skyrocketed, growing from just a handful in 1996 to well over 500 today. Not coincidentally, these outfits now charge interest rates routinely exceeding 500 percent.

Wisconsin used to have meaningful consumer protections and a vibrant financial sector with countless locally owned lending institutions. Now we have legalized loan sharking and financial institutions mostly controlled by out-of-state interests.

Get us back, Clarence. Get us back.

Mike McCabe is executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a Madison-based, nonpartisan watchdog organization that tracks the impact of money in politics.

The narrowest of majorities on the U.S. Supreme Court legislated from the bench Thursday, effectively enacting a radical vision of the First Amendment and a bastardized version of democracy that has never been approved by elected representatives of the American people and strays far from the ideals spelled out so elegantly by the nation’s founders.

The court majority’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is a continuation of the judicial activism on election finance that began in earnest in the 1970s and substantially expands the scope of this policymaking by unelected and unaccountable judges for life.

Boiled down to its essence, five of the nine justices ruled that money is speech, corporations are people, public offices are commodities and elections are the marketplace where these commodities are bought and sold.

The majority opinion asserts the appearance of big money influence over elections will not cause the public to lose confidence in the Democratic process. The cluelessness demonstrated by such a declaration begs the question: What planet do these justices live on?

This ruling further chips away at both the letter and spirit of the federal McCain-Feingold law and favors the corrupt status quo in national politics.

The five justices overlooked the corrupting effects of allowing massive sums of wealth to be brought to bear in election campaigns. Their ruling throws century-old law on the use of corporate and labor union treasury funds to influence elections on the scrap heap.

On the other hand, a super-majority of justices upheld the constitutionality of disclosing money spent on elections. This leaves the door open to meaningful disclosure reform at the federal and state levels.
Unaddressed in this case and untouched by Thursday’s ruling are public financing programs like the one just enacted for state Supreme Court elections in Wisconsin. Such programs remain on sound constitutional footing and now become all the more important as one of the few remaining tools to guard against political corruption and ensure the voices of ordinary citizens are heard.

It is also important to note that this case involved a challenge to a federal law, not any state law in Wisconsin. However, Thursday’s ruling does have state-law implications, which we will be assessing in the days and weeks to come.

Mike McCabe is executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, a Madison-based, nonpartisan watchdog organization that tracks the impact of money in politics.