Laboratory of Plutocracy

Just a portion of a much larger Center for American Progress chart illustrating the House's proposed budget: tax breaks for the elite, stolen from essential services for the poor and struggling.

While Kochs and the like have seen to getting their money's worth from the Congress they've purchased, they also have made sure that the staff at state levels are very busy, indeed.

Union-busting in Wisconsin and other states with Republican governors and legislatures is only one front in their class warfare.

The groundwork has been laid the groundwork by thirty years of propaganda joining the government-bad theme to CEO worship, to push the idea that government should be run like a corporation. No matter how the pretense works in reality—from the two terms of Decider Bush, to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's likely one-year tenure followed by recall—the necessity and unquestionable desirability of CEO government is the owners' message, long made into conventional wisdom by their political and media servants.

In real corporations, democracy is not the environment in which CEOs work their special magic. So Republican-controlled state legislatures are at work on any conceivable means of reigning in that pesky democracy, through the cherished GOP tactic of making sure the wrong people do not vote.

Of all the radical moves in all the laboratories around the country, Florida lends a particularly weird note.

Yes: it is Florida... Still, this guy?

An executive mansion, not jail, for someone who presided over the largest Medicare fraud case in history—and cannot even manage to pose for a photo without looking like the psychopath he clearly is.

But what we see is what Florida gets: an equivalent of Scott's previous career of doing "for hospitals ... what McDonald's has done for the food business"—

During Scott's tenure at Columbia/HCA, his cost cutting methods threatened patient care and safety:

- Susan Marks, a technician at one of Scott's hospitals, was forced to monitor 72 heart monitors by herself. Marks explained, "I have to. I've been told you either do it, or there's the door."...

- Scott downsized nursing staffs, created conditions where "babies were attended as infrequently as every three hours. Once, the only nurse caring for seven ill infants was so busy she failed to hear an alarm when a baby stopped breathing. A parent dashed to the baby and stimulated breathing, the state report said."...

...

In 2001, Scott would return to health care and the 'McDonalds model,' with a chain of urgent care clinics all over Florida. And as Tristam Korten explained in this two part series for Salon, it quickly replicated many of Columbia/HCA's favorite business practices.

This NYT story , Florida Republicans Are at Odds With Their Leader, at least has some amusing quotes—

"The governor doesn't understand there is a State Constitution and that we have three branches of government," said State Senator Mike Fasano, a Republican from New Port Richey who upset Mr. Scott with rough handling of his staff during a testy committee hearing. "They are talking about the attitude that he is still the C.E.O. of his former health care corporation, and that is not going to work in this state, in Tallahassee, in my district. The people believe in three branches of government."

...

"I think there have been some understandable growing pains because government doesn't function like a corporation," said Speaker Dean Cannon, a Republican from central Florida, taking a more measured tone than Mr. Fasano.

"I like Governor Scott a lot as a person and a leader," Mr. Cannon said. "I think he's going through the understandable adjustment of the transition from campaigning to governance."

"Transition"? To this guy, it means a fabulously golden parachute, as he moves on to plunder elsewhere.

Look out, Minnie! He's eyeing more booty than just your pocketbook!

Photo: Orlando Sentinal