Pushing plutocracy.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: Vox Populist

With widespread, entrenched joblessness in Michigan, working families there are mighty hard hit these days. But the state's new GOP governor, Rick Snyder, has reached out with a helping hand. Well, not a helping hand for workers. Instead, he handed out an 86 percent tax cut to corporations. To help pay for this giveaway, he snuck into law a provision that takes away six weeks of unemployment benefits for out-of-work Michiganders, plus he intends to tax the pensions of working class retirees.

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Across the country, the jobs, benefits, rights, and dignity of the workaday majority are under gubernatorial assault. Where do today's far-rightwing governors get such far-out, nasty, anti-middle-class ideas? Directly from an extensive network of corporate-backed wonk shops set up in every state.

In Michigan, the group is called the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Richly funded by such multibillionaire families as the Koch brothers, the Waltons of Walmart, and the DeVoses of the Amway fortune, Mackinac vigorously pushes the plutocratic agenda, including relentless efforts to disempower unions and to eliminate taxes on corporations and the rich.

In January, just as Snyder was taking office, Mackinac's dogmatists published four recommendations for turning Michigan into a corporate laissez-fairyland. In the package was an astonishingly tyrannical proposal to let the governor seize control of local governments and install corporate overseers with the power to cancel union contracts, rewrite budgets, sell off public assets, and bypass or even dismiss local elected officials. Snyder adopted all four of Mackinac's proposals, so this monster is now the law in Michigan.

Do you know ALEC? That's not a person, but the acronym for a secretive, corporate-funded state policy front group: the American Legislative Exchange Council. (See Mark Pocan's "Through the Corporate Looking Glass" in the March 2008 issue of The Progressive.)

ALEC's "exchange" is very straightforward. It takes about $6 million a year from corporate powers in exchange for linking them directly...