Yep, the Koch brothers again (scroll down to end for a refresher if you like).
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/
http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/
The author below has an interesting take on why the Democratic Party no longer represents working people. After the '60s, there was a cultural split between the "new left" of Baby Boomer anti-war, feminist, pro-environment, civil rights folks, and the FDR-type traditional unions and org's that donated to Dems and expected pro-labor legislation in return. Due to the George McGovern debacle, gradual dismantling of union power, and decline of US manufacturing, Dems candidates turned to business as their new lifeline, and they were all too happy to fill the void. Now it didn't matter which party was in power for them. So now is it any wonder why Clinton and Carter have done more for the rich than Bush Sr. and Ford? And what do we have as a result? Real wages for the non-rich have stagnated while costs for college/health care have soared, states and pensions are bankrupt, infrastructure and schools are falling apart, and progressive taxes, worker protections, and various regulations are being rolled back.
Despite its many faults, postwar America was a great nation and a "shining city on the hill" as Reagan put it. But the rich killed the dream, shook us down, gave little back in return (except for oil spills and oil wars), and now we are on a path to "banana republic, third world" wealth gap status (Kristof, Huffington). If the working classes actually had a voice in Washington (and like it or not, labor unions were the best available medium), instead of a virtual monopoly by rich corporatists, then maybe the shining city wouldn't have lost so much luster. Surely collective bargaining causes some corruption and inefficiency. People suffer because of that, but not nearly as much as the suffering due to the rich's excesses (wars, speculation bubbles, eco-disasters, layoffs, etc.). And let's not forget that the concessions won by self-serving labor unions actually improved life for all middle class workers and families. Those people are the real America, not the "corporate citizens" like Goldman and BP that Washington serves.
Koch, Walker, and others claim that unions are bankrupting states and companies, so they must be eliminated in order to restore fiscal responsibility. Well those org's would have more money to cover their negotiated OBLIGATIONS to workers if they didn't give it all away as tax breaks, dividends, and bonuses. Look what our leaders are trying to cut to control the deficit now; it disproportionately hurts the poor and working classes. Sure they killed that GE engine project (Boehner is serious about budget cuts except for pork in his own state), but it should have never existed in the first place. Of course tax hikes are absolutely third-rail, but there's no talk about ending subsidies to big oil and corn, or closing foreign bases either. Budget cuts may be necessary and painful, but we should spread the pain to everyone, not leave the most privileged exempt.
http://motherjones.com/
Big unions have plenty of pathologies of their own, after all, so maybe it's just as well that we're rid of them. Maybe. But in the real world, political parties need an institutional base. Parties need money. And parties need organizational muscle. The Republican Party gets the former from corporate sponsors and the latter from highly organized church-based groups. The Democratic Party, conversely, relied heavily on organized labor for both in the postwar era. So as unions increasingly withered beginning in the '70s, the Democratic Party turned to the only other source of money and influence available in large-enough quantities to replace big labor: the business community. The rise of neoliberalism in the '80s, given concrete form by the Democratic Leadership Council, was fundamentally an effort to make the party more friendly to business. After all, what choice did Democrats have? Without substantial support from labor or business, no modern party can thrive.
Here's why this is a big deal. Progressive change in the United States has always come in short, intense spurts: The Progressive Era lasted barely a decade at the national level, the New Deal saw virtually all of its legislative activity enacted within the space of six years between 1933 and 1938, and the frenzy of federal action associated with the '60s nearly all unfolded between 1964 and 1970. There have been exceptions, of course... And the courts have followed a schedule all their own. Still, one striking fact remains: Liberal reform is not a continuous movement powered by mere enthusiasm. Reform eras last only a short time and require extraordinarily intense levels of cultural and political energy to get started. And they require two other things to get started: a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress.
In 2008, fully four decades after our last burst of liberal change, we got that again. But instead of five or six tumultuous years, the surge of liberalism that started in 2008 lasted scarcely 18 months and produced only two legislative changes really worthy of note: health care reform and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. By the summer of 2010 liberals were dispirited, political energy had been co-opted almost entirely by the tea party movement, and in November, Republicans won a crushing victory.
Why? The answer, I think, is that there simply wasn't an institutional base big enough to insist on the kinds of political choices that would have kept the momentum of 2008 alive. In the past, blue-collar workers largely took their cues on economic policy from meetings in union halls, and in turn, labor leaders gave them a voice in Washington.
This matters, as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue in one of last year's most important books, Winner-Take-All Politics, because politicians don't respond to the concerns of voters, they respond to the organized muscle of institutions that represent them. With labor in decline, both parties now respond strongly to the interests of the rich—whose institutional representation is deep and energetic—and barely at all to the interests of the working and middle classes.
This has produced three decades of commercial and financial deregulation that started during the administration of a Democrat, Jimmy Carter, gained steam throughout the Reagan era, and continued under Bill Clinton... At nearly every turn, corporations and the financial industry used their institutional muscle to get what they wanted, while the working class sat by and watched, mostly unaware that any of this was even happening... Organized labor has become a shell of its former self, and the working class doesn't have any institutional muscle in Washington. As a result, the Democratic Party no longer has much real connection to moderate-income voters. And that's hurt nearly everyone.
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