Progressive Thinking

Wisconsin should follow the lead of Minnesota and make crucial investment in all levels of education. During a recent legislative forum in Chippewa Falls, Rep. Kathy Bernier (R-Chippewa Falls) walked out because of comments made comparing Minnesota and Wisconsin. Sen. Kathleen Vinehout shares why the conversation was important to the overall discussion of school funding.

CHIPPEWA FALLS, WI - “We hired a great inorganic chemistry professor last year,” Mike, a UW-River Falls chemistry professor, told me. “Unfortunately she’s leaving in May for St. Olaf.” I visited St. Olaf in Northfield, Minnesota. They have a great chemistry department.

Mike told me his department used to have 15 professors. They now have 11 – soon to be 10. They plan to replace the person leaving but it’s getting harder to recruit and retain faculty.

The consequences of deep budget cuts to education are disparate but all around us.

Deep budget cuts to the UW system results in fewer course offerings and programs, larger classes and less staff. UW Extension is proposing to remove extension agents from many rural counties. The UW Madison Ag program announced the loss of the only dairy sheep program in the country. Faculty are moving on to greener pastures.

There is a similar story in K-12 education.

I spoke with Katie, an Eau Claire special education teacher who serves on the district’s compensation committee. The committee is working to find money to keep teachers. Katie said, “No raise in seven years is really hard for a lot of families.” Katie worked with an “amazing” special education teacher hired seven years ago who makes less than recently hired teachers.

Like so many other school districts, Eau Claire is considering options for a fall referendum. With declining state aid and rising costs, people across the state have voted to raise property taxes to keep their schools operating.

Alma passed a 38% increase in the school portion of property taxes to pay for a new furnace and keep the lights on.

Other school districts’ referenda aren’t successful. Prescott just lost a referendum to cover operating costs. They now face $1.5 million in additional cuts – over 10% of the district budget. Local people worry more teachers will leave for Minnesota – a state making significant investments in education.

At a recent Chippewa Valley legislative forum with local school officials, one of my colleagues abruptly left the event upset about a school board member’s comments that Minnesota was doing better financially than Wisconsin.

Specifically the board member mentioned Minnesota’s $1 billion budget surplus, funding for education and the big difference between the two states with regard to the prison population. The two states have a similar population and crime rate but Wisconsin incarcerates more than double the number of individuals.

My legislative colleague thought it unfair to compare. But is it?

According to the National Center for Children in Poverty, in Wisconsin 87% of children with at least one parent lacking a high school education are likely to be living in poverty. In Minnesota, 32% of children live in poverty while 39% of Wisconsin children live in poverty.

Among the risks of poverty is lack of education achievement, which can negatively affect life opportunities. Studies show that low education attainment and low incomes can increase the risk of incarceration. Minnesota incarcerates fewer individuals while Wisconsin spends more on prisons than on the UW system.

It is wiser to invest in breaking the cycle of poverty.

Poor children need resources – books, teacher time, health care, and food – things that cost money, which brings us back to school funding.

At the forum, we discussed needed changes to the school funding formula. I reminded everyone that State Superintendent Tony Evers submitted in his budget a proposal to change the formula called Fair Funding for Our Future.

Mr. Evers described his proposal as containing “a number of provisions to fix the funding formula by investing in all students, protecting rural and declining enrollment districts, making adjustments in the aid formula to account for poverty, providing property tax relief and increasing general school aid.”

This is the third time he introduced this proposal. It is the third time Governor Walker and the Majority in the Legislature chose not to pass it.

Education budget cuts end up costing us more. As state funds shift from education to safety (prisons and law enforcement), it becomes harder to break out of the cycle.

But break out of it we must. The investments we make in a child’s future don’t just help one family. The investments help all of us.

Speech originally presented before Lake Mills Progressives Informed and Engaged on February 26, 2016.

LAKE MILLS, WI - Thanks, Leslie, and Progressives Informed and Engaged, for inviting me. I would have come anyway, but the lure of homemade pies made it absolutely irresistible since pies are my favorite things to eat.

I’ve been baking my own fruit pies for 30 years now, and if you need to know, I use a blend of Organic Valley butter and that old standby, white coagulated Crisco, for my shortening, and it works every time.

You know, I could talk about pie all day, or about birds, since I’ve been a birdwatcher for 50 years, and it’d be a lot more diverting than the topic at hand, which is the plight of democracy in Wisconsin.

But that’s why we’re here, and that’s why we all do the political work that we do:

because we believe in democracy,

and we cherish Wisconsin’s historic reputation for clean government,

and we’re appalled at the destruction that the Scott Walker Wrecking Crew has wreaked on our beloved state in the span of just five years.

The fact is, we’re in the midst of a counterrevolution right now.

Our state has been taken over by people who don’t give a damn about democracy.

They don’t give a damn about clean and open government.

They have no respect whatsoever for the public good.

There’s a wholesale assault on democracy in Madison right now, waged not only by Gov. Scott Walker but also by Speaker Robin Vos and your very own Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and by the corrupt justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court – and they’re all doing the bidding of the corporate powers behind them.

When I said they don’t give a damn about democracy, that’s obvious by the fact that they passed one of the strictest Voter ID laws in the country.

I don’t if you saw the recent John Oliver segment on his HBO show ridiculing your own Joel Kleefisch, but it was a thing of beauty. He showed Kleefisch on the floor of the Assembly denouncing people who vote more than once in an election, and then Oliver showed him voting twice on one bill, once for himself and once for an absent legislator. Oliver also showed that Sauk City’s DMV is only open on the 5th Wednesday of every month for registering to vote, and there are only four months with five Wednesdays this year.

That’s how they disenfranchise people. And they do it in other ways, too.

Republicans have also gotten rid of weekend voting before the elections.

And they’ve done away with allowing the League of Women Voters, or anyone else, for that matter, to be deputized to register people to vote.

They even won’t let the city clerks conduct voter registration efforts in public libraries.

Another way they’re assaulting democracy is by drawing some of the most rigged electoral maps in the country. This gerrymandering has got to stop! In secret, in the offices of a high-priced private law firm in downtown Madison, the Republicans met in 2011 to devise, with some fancy computers, some devious electoral maps that stuffed Democrats into fewer and fewer districts. As a result, even though Republicans in the Assembly lost the overall popular vote, they gained 60 of the 99 seats.

I said they don’t give a damn about clean and open government. That’s clear by their repeated efforts to curtail our open-records laws. You’ll remember that Speaker Vos led a sneak attack on these laws on the weekend of July 4 th last year, which showed his appreciation for irony, I suppose.

Fortunately, the people of Wisconsin, and the editorial page writers, rose up and gave legislators a piece of their mind, so they had to back down. But Vos, who has that lean and hungry look, keeps scheming about ways to accomplish this goal even to this day.

They also showed their hostility to clean and open government by drastically rewriting our campaign finance laws so that candidates can coordinate with outside groups, which can raise unlimited amounts of money and never disclose where it’s coming from. And big donors who give directly to candidates no longer have to say where they work so it’ll be harder to tell which piece of legislation is bought and paid for by which company.

And I said they had no respect for the public good. Actually, in their crude and selfish ideology, everything public is bad, and everything private is good. They don’t like public workers; they don’t like public schools. Hell, they don’t even pay for public parks anymore.

So what do they believe in?

They believe in power, and all they want to do is grab as much as they can as fast as they can . And to reward their paymasters and their corporate crony friends, whether it’s the Koch Brothers, or ALEC, or Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce. There isa sinister symbiosis at play here. The politicians who rule our state get the money that keeps them in power from these corporate groups, and then these politicians dutifully push through legislation that benefits these corporate groups, which then turn around and give more money to these same politicians. The leaders in the legislature have turned our government into an ATM for their corporate cronies. And that’s what most of the legislation they pass is all about.

Just this week, they passed a bill that helps debt collectors. You know, when these guys were running for office, I didn’t hear them saying we’ve got to make life easier for debt collectors!

There’s no public demand for most of the bills that I see flash across my computer every day.

Were people really demanding the right to carry switchblades?

Were they really demanding the right to allow payday lenders to sell more products to desperate consumers?

Were they really demanding the right for bankers to offer misleading sub-prime loans, which were immortalized in “The Big Short?”

Were they really demanding the right of pipeline owners to exercise eminent domain and boot you out of your house?

Were they really demanding the right to give landlords more power to evict people?

Were they really demanding the right to let huge factory farms have less regulation over their high-capacity wells?

Were they really demanding the right to have more lead in our paint?

Of course not. These are all special-interest bills, written for and sometimes by, they very groups that would benefit from them. They are not written for, or by, you--I can you promise you that.

This is not how democracy is supposed to work.

This is happening not just in Wisconsin, but around the country. And it’s not a new problem:

Thomas Jefferson warned us 200 years ago almost to this day, when he said: “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of the monied corporations.”

150 years ago, Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Edward Ryan warned us that "there is a looming and new dark power. . . .The enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of unexampled capital, boldly marching, not for economic conquests only, but for political power. For the first time really in our politics money is taking the field as an organized power. …

Well, money has really taken the field these days and it wins almost all the time.

Edward Ryan continued: “The question will arise, and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine:

“Which shall rule — wealth or man?

“Which shall lead — money or intellect?

“Who shall fill public stations — educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?"

You know who picked up on this “feudal serf” line? Not just Fighting Bob La Follette, who fought corporate power his whole life.

No, a more recent Wisconsin politician, a Republican named former State Senator Dale Schultz. He was the Senate Majority Leader for the Republicans for a while. And when he decided not to run again, he said that many legislators have become, and these are his words, “feudal serfs for folks with a lot of money.”

People get this in their gut.

This is a bipartisan issue. The people by a huge bipartisan margin, already understand that big money plays too big a part in our political life. In a recent poll:

84 percent agreed that money has too much influence over politics.

And 80 percent of Republicans agreed with.

78 percent said money spent by outside groups in campaigns should be limited.

And 73 percent of Republicans agreed with that.

People understand a fundamental truth: We no longer live in a functioning democracy.

As Jimmy Carter told Thom Hartmann last year, we’ve become an “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.”

Two years ago, two political science professors, one from Princeton and the other from Northwestern (Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page) studied 1,779 policy issues between 1981 and 2002 and what they found was startling: “It makes very little difference what the general public thinks…They have little or no independent influence on policy at all. … In our findings, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.”

Why don’t they teach that in seventh-grade civics class, or in high school social studies? Because there it is: Our democracy is not working anymore.

We’re finally hearing about this in our Presidential race.

Oddly, Donald Trump has talked about this. Remember in his first debate he said how easy it was for him to buy favors from elected officials? Hell, he bragged that he got Hillary Clinton to sit in the front row of his wedding. And that’s the least of it. Usually, tycoons give money not for vanity’s sake but because they want government agencies to give them something in return. And they get it! Now Trump says he’s not taking money from anyone else—that he’s self-financing, and therefore uncorrupted. Last night, he made the point again, saying he knows politicians because he gives them money, and he gives to candidates from both parties because he’s a good businessman. It’s heads I win, tails I win. And for proof, he mentioned the $5,000 check he’d written to Ted Cruz.

On the other side, Bernie Sanders talks about how the political system is rigged by Wall Street every time he says good morning. And he’s been saying it for at least 15 years now, God bless him, if you’ve heard him at Fighting Bob Fest, year in and year out, as I have.

And he’s gotten Hillary to start talking about it, too.

Both Hillary and Bernie are on record that they would make sure their Supreme Court appointees would vote to overturn Citizens United.

So let’s look at Citizens United for a second.

That decision said corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money to elect this candidate or defeat that candidate. And it contained the two most naïve statements ever written in a Supreme Court decision:

“Independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”

And “The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.”

What planet were those five justices living on when they came up with those whoppers?

Fortunately, people right here in Wisconsin haven’t fallen for them.

In 60 villages, towns, cities, and counties all across this state (including here in Lake Mills!), the people or their representatives have voted by overwhelming margins in favor of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to say, once and for all, that corporations aren’t persons and money is not speech. (The vote of the town board on Sept. 10, 2013, here was unanimous, by the way.)

But this movement is not just about overturning Citizens United; it’s about overturning 140 years of absurd Supreme Court precedents that grant personhood to corporations.

Amending the Constitution is the fundamental solution to the problem of money in politics, and I hope I’ll live to see such an amendment pass.

I’m an impatient man . I don’t want to wait for the pendulum to swing. I want to give it a big Badger shove in the pro-democracy direction.

As Fighting Bob La Follette put it 100 years ago, “The cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.”

We need more democracy, now, in this country.

And we need more democracy, now, right here in Wisconsin.

And no, I don’t get discouraged. I know that nothing is static, and that these guys won’t be in power forever, and that democracy surges forward unexpectedly – but especially when we give it a shove.

I’m a student of Howard Zinn’s, the great people’s historian, who chronicled these surges from below. And he once wrote:

“ TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. To live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

So, yes, let’s defy all that is bad around us!

And yes, let’s affirm all that is good!

What is good?

Well, things are starting to move.

Nationally, there’s the Fight for $15 movement. Who would have thought, just a few years ago, that people would have been walking off their jobs, en masse, at McDonald’s and Burger King and demanding $15 an hour? And who would have thought they’d be winning, as they have already in Seattle and elsewhere?

There’s the Black Lives Matter movement, focusing attention on police brutality in a systematic way that we haven’t seen since the 1960s.

Or look at the movement to end climate change: It stopped the XL Pipeline, let’s not forget.

And then there’s Bernie’s campaign, whether you’re voting for him or not, you’ve got to admit he’s drawn attention to some of the key issues of our day: like our rigged economy and our rigged political system, and our rigged media. And he has caught on in a way that few could have predicted.

Here, statewide, you’ve got the success of United to Amend, the group that’s working so hard to overturn Citizens United.

Plus, Walker’sapproval rating is barely above the freezing mark, and that of the Republican legislators is actually below freezing.

And here’s another thing: The Walker Wrecking Crew wasn’t able to get everything that it wanted in this session.

It didn’t get:

--to impose limits on school referendums

--to allow individual landowners to excavate Native burial grounds

--to allow AquaAmerica, a Pennsylvania company, to have an easier time buying up public water utilities

--to allow people who own property on a lake to dredge up and haul away three truckloads of sediment every year.

Here’s another ray of hope: The district attorneys of Dane County, Iowa County, and Milwaukee County are appealing the horrendous Wisconsin Supreme Court decision on the John Doe straight up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where I think they’ll actually win!

But more than any other reason, I’m hopeful because over the last year, I’ve met some really amazing people in the pro-democracy movement here in Wisconsin.

Some of the amazing people are in the state legislature, such as JoCasta Zamarripa, who stands up for immigrants and poor people, or Chris Taylor, who exposes ALEC and defends women’s health. Every day, they defy the high school bullies who rule the Capitol. And there are some courageous Republicans in there, too, like Senator Rob Cowles, who voted against the Campaign Finance bill and blocked some of the worst elements in the latest shoreline giveaway bill. Or Assembly Rep Todd Novak, who voted for nonpartisan redistricting and against the budget.

And some of the amazing people are in the nonprofit sector, like Christine Neumann-Ortiz, of Voces de la Frontera, who last week led 20,000 people in the “Day Without Latinos” rally.

Or people like Jay Heck of Common Cause, or Andrea Kaminski of the League of Women Voters, or Kerry Schumann of the League of Conservation Voters, or Kim Wright of Midwest Environmental Advocates, or George Penn of United to Amend, or Astar Herndon and Martha de la Rosa of 9to5, or Robert Kraig and Anita Johnson at Citizen Action, or like Dana Schultz and Colleen Gruszyinski at Wisconsin Voices, or Scott Foval at People for the American Way, or Peter Skopec at WisPIRG.

These are people, many of them a lot younger than me and with a lot more energy, who are working together as never before to get this state back on track.

We’ve torn down our silos, we’ve shelved our egos, we’re meeting and strategizing together on a regular basis, and we’re all rowing in the same direction. And we’ll get there yet!

So let me leave you with one final quote:

Seamus Heaney, the great Irish poet who died two years ago, wrote a beautiful poem called “The Cure at Troy.” I’m not going to read the whole poem to you but one line sticks in my head: He wrote, there are times in our lives when “hope and history rhyme.”

Let’s make hope and history rhyme again in Wisconsin.

Let’s turn things around here so we can say, once again, that we’re proud to be from Wisconsin.

Thank you.

Just what we need to control costs & provide single payer healthcare for all!

STOUGHTON, WI - The Democratic debate in Milwaukee on February 11th was not one of the best nights for either Sanders or Clinton when it came to explaining their competing healthcare plans for America.

Bernie’s plan basically is the Medicare for All bill supported by progressives for years in our Congress.  This plan would revolutionize healthcare into a single payer system in the US.  The Federal government would tax individuals and employers and with these taxes pay all the healthcare bills for every man, woman and child in America.

In a recent poll 51% of Americans support single payer while 37% oppose it.

Clinton’s plan is basically trying to improve on Obama’s Affordable Care plan by charging additional taxes to pay for incremental changes and expansion of that system.  Basically Clinton keeps the present broken healthcare system of insurance companies, drug companies and for profit and non-profit hospitals in control.

The single payer Medicare for all has gotten nowhere in the past because of continued  campaign finance corruption - whereby healthcare special interests dump bags of money into the political campaigns of politicians supporting the status quo.

Clinton repeatedly asked Sanders where does the money come from?  How much does it cost?  Will it raise taxes?  And of course she states her plan is superior to Sanders’.

Sanders’ plan, including additional taxes, is on his website hiding in plain sight.  It’s a few pages long: berniesanders.com/issues/medicare-for-all/

I am sure Clinton’s staff has studied it well.

It would replace the present US healthcare system with a new single payer system where the Federal government pays all the costs for the system and raises various taxes to pay the bill.  All Americans would receive complete healthcare including prescriptions, dental, mental health and long term care.  Americans would have no more co-pays, no more deductibles and no more arguments with insurance company clerks.

Present total healthcare cost is estimated at about $3.2 TRILLION/yr. for about 323 million people in the USA or about $10,000/yr. per person.

Proposed Medicare for All system cost is estimated to cost about $1.4 TRILLION/yr. with likely additional startup costs.

Taxes:  All present government revenue presently spent on healthcare would be placed into the Medicare for All account.

The following new taxes are added and get placed into the same federal account.

• 6.2% income based healthcare tax by employers – estimated revenue $.63T/yr.  (Example:  For a person earning $50,000/yr. the employer would pay $3,100/yr.  On average an employer today pays $12,600/yr. for family health insurance.  Sanders plan would save the employer about $9,500/yr.)
• 2.2% income based tax on households – est. rev. $.21 T/yr. (Example: Per Sanders, a family of 4, after taking the standard deductions, would pay 2.2% on their taxable income for healthcare.  That 2.2% would equal $466/yr.  Presently a family pays about $5,000 in premiums plus about $1,300 in deductibles for a total of $6,300/yr.  Thus the family would save over $5,800 annually.)

How can both the employer and the worker save substantially each year and still have quality healthcare?  Because the high money earners (both salary and unearned income) and the wealthiest Americans will pay higher taxes.  And various tax breaks related to company healthcare spending would be eliminated.

• Increase marginal income tax rates – est. rev. $.11T/yr.

o   To 37% on incomes over $250,000/yr.

o   To 43% on incomes over $500,000/yr.

o    To 48% on incomes over $2 million/yr. (the top 0.08% or approximately 113,000 households)

o    To 52% on incomes over $10 million/yr. (the top 0,01% or approximately 13,000 households)

• Tax unearned income (capital gains and dividends) the same as income from work – est. rev. $92B/yr.
• Limit tax deductions for families making over $250,000/yr. – est. rev. $15B/yr.
• Place a new tax system on the estates of the wealthiest 0.3% of Americans with estates over $3.5 million – est. rev. $21B/yr.
• Savings from health tax expenditures.  Per Sanders plan “Several tax breaks that subsidize health care (health-related “tax expenditures”) would become obsolete and disappear under a single-payer health care system…” – est. rev. $310B/yr.

Total additional federal revenues per year equal approximately $1.388TRILLION or about $1.4TRILLION.

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All single payer healthcare plan is a healthcare plan that’s smart for kids, working families and seniors.  It’s smart for American corporations facing an unlevel playing field in developed nations that already have single payer healthcare for their workers.

Sanders’ Medicare for All is a revolution I am in favor of.  Are you?

Read more at berniesanders.com/issues/medicare-for-all/ to help you decide how to vote Tuesday, April 5^th in the WI presidential primary.

ALTOONA, WI - Gandhi said: “Our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world as in being able to remake ourselves.”

For years I’ve been blessed to be asked to travel the state to speak to every imaginable kind of group. Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve had the chance to do way more listening than speaking. I was inspired to write a book and Blue Jean Nation was formed because of what I kept hearing.

Everywhere I’ve gone I hear something else too. Sometimes it sounds defeatist. Other times powerless. Every once in a while hopeless. Or even helpless.

I get where these feelings come from. So many barriers to true democracy and real representation have been erected. Voter suppression. Gerrymandering of political boudaries. Consolidation of control over news media in fewer and fewer hands. Ever-greater sums of money in politics. Secrecy and hostility to open government laws and traditions. Courts packed with partisans.

These obstacles are formidable. I’ll grant you, the odds are not in our favor.

But the odds have never favored common folk. The odds didn’t favor the abolitionists or suffragists or the civil rights movement either. Or the progressives and populists who were up against the robber barons in the Gilded Age, or exploited West Virginia coal miners, or children working in textile mills, or the original Republicans who gathered in the little white schoolhouse in Ripon Wisconsin, or the women’s rights movement or gay rights movement, or Gandhi in his time or Malala Yousafzai in ours.

Remember, the abolitionists ended slavery. The progressives beat the robber barons. The suffragists got women the vote. The coal miners got unions. The textile mills eventually were forced to respect child labor laws. The original Republicans drove a major party to extinction. Civil rights activists ended Jim Crow. Gandhi led the Indian people to independence. Malala is making it possible for girls to go to school all around the world.

Remember, the obstacles we face today are not new. They are as old as the hills. Voter suppression and gerrymandering were not invented in 2011. These practices are as old as the republic.

The effects of gerrymandering won’t be overcome in Wisconsin by enacting Iowa’s redistricting system here. Those in office won’t pass such a law. It’ll be overcome by political realignment, by changing enough hearts and minds of enough voters to thwart the willful rigging of elections.

We won’t beat money by amending the constitution, we’ll amend the constitution by beating money . . . by breaking its grip on our minds.

All the political professionals and consultants and others with the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” mentality call this unilateral disarmament.

I’m not saying you should unilaterally disarm. I’m saying we should fight with different and more powerful weapons.

We won’t beat money by doing what money does. We’ll beat it by doing what money can’t do.

As the song says, “money talks, but it don’t sing and dance, and it don’t walk.”

Money don’t love either. It don’t marry. It can’t nurse a sick child . . . or comfort a dying loved one.

We don’t need what all that money buys. We don’t need pollsters to tell us what to think. We can think for ourselves. We don’t need speechwriters and teleprompters to put words in our mouths. We can speak for ourselves. We don’t need ad agencies to sell us to our neighbors the way they sell laundry detergent and hair care products and beer and potato chips. We can build relationships.

This is why I say that if Blue Jean Nation could only do one thing, my choice would be to contribute in every way we can to loosening and eventually breaking the grip of the political consulting industry that lords over our democracy and our society.

When democracy in America is rescued, it won’t be political consultants and professional politicians who do the rescuing. It’ll be saved by people who don’t practice politics for a living, people with a life outside of politics, people with the odds stacked against them.

Good people can make a difference to bills moving swiftly through the legislature, like AB 554 where overwhelming constituent contact in legislative offices stopped action on a GOP proposal to allow an out-of-state corporation to buy and operate public water utilities. Sen. Kathleen Vinehout writes about the speed with which bills are moving through the Legislature and how people’s action has made a difference.

MADISON - “What can we, as ordinary citizens, do to keep the legislature and the governor from passing/signing house bill 554? It scares the heck out of me,” wrote Claudia from Eau Claire.

“I know that Kathleen will vote against this terrible bill, but no doubt against the odds,” Sarah wrote from Eau Claire.

The “terrible” bill was AB 554, a bill that would allow out-of-state private corporations to buy public water and sewer utilities. The bill would eliminate a required public referendum to approve the sale.

There is good news for all the folks who wrote asking me to oppose the bill.

Recently the Senate was set to vote on final passage of the bill. However, when time came for the vote, Majority Leader Fitzgerald asked that Assembly Bill 554 be returned to committee – a way to stop the bill.

He later told WisPolitics news service the bill was, “not going anywhere.”

Assembly Bill 554 caused many people to contact elected representatives. My office received 41 calls or letters in just two days. People also attended town hall meetings and researched what their legislators said about the issue.

“What was very telling about this privatization of public services is the New Jersey law passed just a few days ago,” wrote Telford from western Wisconsin. He attended a town hall meeting held by his senator and heard comments supporting the bill. He looked up the bill and found not only had the bill just passed in New Jersey but, in his words, “In the article are the same pro talking points my Senator used in the…listening session.”

WisPolitics described the efforts to get votes for the bill: “Senate Republicans had been working on an amendment to get members comfortable with the bill, but couldn’t reach a consensus.”

Good for Telford and everyone else who paid attention. You made a difference.

Speed and secrecy have plagued the Capitol in the last few months. Bills just introduced are rushed to committee hearings. Complete re-write of bills – called substitute amendments – are introduced just before a public hearing and those who came to testify wondered if their concern was addressed or not. Substitute amendments introduced just before a vote left lawmakers with no time to study the new bill before voting. An Assembly higher education committee voted on bills that had no public hearing. Some bills were voted out of committee just minutes after they had their first public hearing. Some Assembly bills voted on by the full Senate did not have a Senate committee vote.

In one day, 30 committees held public hearings. At least 254 bills passed the full Senate and/or the Assembly in just three days. To put this perspective, only 127 bills were enacted into law during the previous 13 months of this current two-year Legislative Session.

These bills needed public scrutiny. Some took away local powers – like the bill that would not allow counties to issue identification cards. Another took away local powers to protect tenants or set up historic districts. Bills eliminated natural resource protections including many changes to water and shoreland rules. Another repealed the state’s moratorium on new nuclear power plants. Some bills were aimed at elections, such as taking away special registration deputies and new on-line voter registration.

It’s no wonder people worry there is nothing they can do to slow things down. But there is – and people are acting in ways that make a real difference.

Recently two protests brought many first timers to the Capitol. A few weeks ago, Native American Wisconsinites protested the digging up of Native burial grounds. Shortly after the protest, the Assembly Speaker announced he had no plans to move the bill.

More recently, 20,000 Latinos and supporters descended on the Capitol opposing an anti-immigrant bill passed by the Assembly and the bill taking away counties’ ability to issue ID cards. The second bill is headed to the governor. But the first bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate.

So, whatever you do – write, call, attend a town hall, research a bill and tell the world – do it. In the words of Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”