I’ve been blogging and decrying the current actions of GOP lame duck lawmakers instituting laws and resorting to other last minute tactics under the clock of darkness/ secrecy to diminish the power of incoming Democrats who will be seated in January 2019, in the states of Wisconsin and Michigan.

I have been theorizing that many of the republican losers have been acting in undemocratic ways to limit the incoming democratic lawmakers’ power, has to do with big corporate donors having just spent a lot of monies to help GOP candidates win, only to find their millions going down the toilet as the voters preferred to elect Democrats. Now these big money donors are upset about this result to where they have been demanding that the GOP legislators take action. They don’t care about these power grabs being disrespectful of the voters’ wishes.

It is my opinion that all this craziness started with a US Supreme Court decision in 2010 called Citizens United v. FEC which allowed corporations to donate monies like an individual to political candidates. There are loopholes which allow these donors to donate anonymously.

Now, “we the people” are having the power of our votes diminished because GOP elected officials are being bought and sold by these big donor guys.

One case study/ analysis has to with Walgreens. Guess who will be writing a letter to Walgreens CEO, and guess who will not be stepping one foot into any of their pharmacies, anytime soon?

These corporations are stealing our democracy from us.

Here is the rest of the story…

On December 9, 2018, David Leonhardt of the New York Times penned the following opinion piece, “The Corporate Donors Behind a Republican Power Grab” (“Walgreens and other major companies are key supporters of the Wisconsin legislators now trying to undermine democracy.”)

Excerpts:

“Walgreens portrays itself as the friendly neighborhood drugstore. It gives flu shots to children, helps communities after storms, donates to charity — and makes feel-good advertisements trumpeting its various good deeds.”

“But Walgreens also has a tougher side, one you won’t see in those ads. To protect a tax break, the company has allied itself with Wisconsin’s brutally partisan Republican Party. That party is now in the midst of a power grab, stripping authority from Wisconsin’s governor and attorney general solely because Republicans lost those offices last month. The power grab comes after years of extreme gerrymandering, which lets Republicans dominate the legislature despite Wisconsin being a closely divided state.”

“Wisconsin’s Republicans really are trying to undo democracy. When I asked Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — the political scientists who wrote the recent book “How Democracies Die” — about the situation, they agreed that the Wisconsin power grab was the sort of move their book describes. If it continues, it can lead to the breakdown of a political system.”

“So you might think that an organization that claims to care about community values would speak up. But Walgreens has not. Neither have other corporate supporters of Wisconsin Republicans, like Microsoft, Dr Pepper Snapple, J.P. Morgan Chase or Humana. It’s yet another example — alongside soaring C.E.O. pay and stagnant worker wages — of corporations abdicating the leadership role they once played in America.”

“The story of Walgreens and Wisconsin has its roots in a decade-old court case.”

“In 2008, the State Supreme Court ruled in favor of an aggressive tax strategy by the company, in a case known as Walgreens v. City of Madison. When calculating the property taxes it owed, Walgreens used an artificially low valuation of its stores. It did not pay taxes based on the actual value of those stores, as reflected by their purchase price and rent. Instead, it took into account the value of vacant stores nearby.”

“The court ruling allowed this “dark-store” practice — by Walgreens and other retailers — costing cities and towns millions upon millions of tax dollars. The resulting budget shortfalls, local officials point out, have caused taxes on families and small businesses to rise more in Wisconsin than in neighboring Minnesota.”

“The Walgreens loophole is deeply unpopular, based on the results of a nonbinding ballot initiative across Wisconsin. And last year, a bipartisan group of state legislators began a push to change the law. But then, somewhat mysteriously, the effort died. The legislature’s Republican leaders — including Robin Vos, the Assembly speaker, and Scott Fitzgerald, the Senate majority leader — appeared to play a crucial role in the demise of that measure.”

“A few weeks later, Walgreens donated $1,000 to Vos. Over the summer, it donated another $6,000 to the Committee to Elect a Republican Senate. A couple of weeks before Election Day, the company gave $1,000 to Fitzgerald. These donations weren’t simply a matter of spreading money around. Walgreens did not donate to state-level Democrats this year, as it has in the past.”