The Battle of Baraboo: Privatizer Greed v. Seniors’ Health Care

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Even acrobats and clowns could not surpass the dazzling tent show playing out in Baraboo, WI this month.

Baraboo, Wisconsin, is known as the former home of the Ringling Bros. Circus‘ headquarters. But even that extravaganza of acrobats and clowns could not surpass the dazzling tent show playing out in Baraboo this month, starring the Sauk County Board of Supervisors. Only… you couldn’t have seen it, because the tent was zipped tight to keep the public out.

The Baraboo spectacle is one of several now playing across the Badger State, produced by health care profiteers trying to privatize county-owned nursing homes. These locally controlled public entities get 5-star ratings and are treasured by families in rural Wisconsin — so people overwhelmingly oppose privatization. Thus, to somersault over local democracy, corporate tricksters have joined with right-wing county officials to impose autocratic control.

Back in Baraboo, for example, people lined up to speak against any move by supervisors to sell the Sauk County Health Care Center. But terms of the sale had already been negotiated in secret, supervisors had decreed that the buyer would not be revealed until after the sale was approved, and the board’s discussion about the sale was held in closed session.

Adding to the mayhem, Wisconsin’s Republican nominee for U.S. Senate astonished people by declaring that old people in nursing homes should not even be allowed to vote, since they “only have five, six months life expectancy.”

Crazy, yet the right-wing’s Baraboo sellout succeeded, right? Not so fast. One, any maneuver affecting the county budget requires a two-thirds vote of supervisors — not the bare majority this clown trick got. And while devious supervisors arrogantly blocked the democratic will of the people, feisty locals are not surrendering to corporate greed and devious politicians. The Battle of Baraboo continues! Stay tuned!

How ‘Wonderful’ Is POM, Fiji Water and the Wonderful Company?

If you name your $4 billion food conglomerate “The Wonderful Company,” you probably should strive extra hard not to let it become the horrible company.

This outfit spends a fortune painting itself as an environmentally sensitive purveyor of healthy products — like its “POM” brand of pomegranate juice and its bottled “Fiji Water.” Moreover, its billionaire owners, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, have marketed themselves as generous philanthropists and powerhouse donors to the Democratic Party.

Wonderful.

But the corporation’s rap sheet includes false advertising, hogging of the public’s scarce water supplies, massive fossil fuel pollution and — most abhorrent — exploitation of the low-paid farmworkers who produce the crops that enrich the Resnicks.

Stewart, hailed as “the wealthiest farmer in the US,” has been spending lavishly on high-dollar lawyers and lobbyists, furiously fighting the United Farm Workers, who’re seeking fair wages, decent treatment and simple respect from him. Worse, the politically connected land baron is going all out to bust the entire union by pushing activist judges to outlaw California’s “card check” system. This is a democratic process enabling widely dispersed farm laborers to vote in unionization elections.

By trying to kill it, Stewart is engaged in a massive voter suppression effort to deny a smidgeon of justice to poorly paid oppressed workers. It’s a raw power play by Stewart and his brotherhood of billionaire agribusiness barons to further enrich themselves by taking away hard-won fair labor laws — and re-subjugating workers to the autocratic whims of owners.

What’s wrong with the Resnicks? They’re fabulously rich and their company is enormously profitable. Yet they’re trying to nickel and dime one of the hardest-working and poorly treated groups of workers in America. Nothing wonderful about that… or them.

Jim Hightower
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