Dale Kooyenga at War With Milwaukee
Poor Milwaukee. Despite being the largest city in Wisconsin, hosting the fairgrounds, Summerfest, and being the home to 2 professional sports teams, the rest of the state hates us. We have jobs, create tax revenue disproportionately and we even have a lower carbon footprint per capita. There is a lot of racism involved in the disdain, and a lot of opportunism that is also racist but in an institutional way. One such opportunist is former State Senator Dale Kooyenga, who used his influence as a politician, and has continued to wage war on Milwaukee since leaving office.
In 2008 Kooyenga was deployed to Iraq where he served as “the 4th Infantry Division's Officer in Charge of Economic Development in Baghdad, Iraq.” This was his first experience in a role where he wielded rightwing power to serve American business interests. You see, Iraq was recovering from the devastation of Shock and Awe warfare, and that “economic development” was really a nice way of saying that he assisted in the dismantling of Saddam Hussain’s planned economy towards a privately owned US vassal state. This Chicago School-style meddling would earn Kooyenga a Bronze Star.
Returning home Dale Kooyenga would put his Milton Friedman style economic theory into practice locally. We have to highlight this man and his warpath on our city and state, because he is a person who is taken seriously, despite no longer being an elected official. He was recently praising a move by new Milwaukee Public Schools Director, Brenda Cassellius, that moved central offices back to the schools. MPS Teacher’s Union stood on the other side of that decision, and if Cassellius is reading this, then I would like her to understand that he is not the one you want on your side!
The MPS Takeover
In 2015, Kooyenga coauthored a proposal with Senator Alberta Darling to privatize public schools in Milwaukee while serving as a State Representative. Republicans are always going after public schools in favor of business friendly charter schools. They prefer this system because it undermines elected officials whose policies they do not like, and can more easily dismantle powerful teacher unions. Thankfully this attempt failed, and the Opportunity Schools and Partnership Plan never came into fruition (because of technicality.)
Having recently read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine it was unnerving to see the actions Dale Kooyenga has taken come straight from The Chicago Boys playbook. This ideological cult was behind over half a century of economic “shock therapies,” including the invasion of Iraq. Among the Chicago Boys many political victories was the seizure of the New Orleans Public Schools. After the city was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, opportunists like Kooyenga took advantage of the situation to completely privatize the entire school district, the first in the nation.
This year is the 20th anniversary of that storm, and the subsequent privatization that followed. The system has been slowly reformed (and improved) by reintroducing public oversight and ownership of the system. Public schools have reopened in the district, though they are still outnumbered by private/voucher schools, and the district is once again under control by an elected school board. As the school system improves, proponents of the private program may try to claim their Friedmanite reforms a success, but should be stopped from doing so. Free market fetishists also claim that the reforms under Reagan were due to his conservative policies (they weren’t, he steadily undid his tax reforms.) and that the Chilean Miracle was due to Pinochet’s deregulations (similar to Reagan, the reforms that were successful were most opposed to the freemarket expansion.)
We need to continue to defend MPS from people like Dale Kooyenga, Alberta Darling, Cavalier Johnson, Brittany Kinser and anyone pushing voucher programs. They do not work.
The Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce
As a Republican member of the Legislature Senator Kooyenga was an enemy of Milwaukee. These days Kooyenga is using his position as the president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC) to continue to exploit the city. The organization has lobbied for a pro-robot dystopia, as described in Milwaukee Beagle’s recent article, and generally they love cops. They have also targeted the Clean Air Act (cuz it is a burden on Southeastern Wisconsin Industry - allegedly.)
Dale Kooyenga does not live in Milwaukee County, or the City of Milwaukee, so it seems weird that he should have that role, right? In fairness this isn’t exactly hidden, their website transparently states that MMAC serves the WOW counties as well as Milwaukee County, but this grouping together gives the business class in the suburbs a disproportionate lift over Milwaukee and is an extension of practices that allow the suburbs to syphon wealth away from MKE residents.
The Chamber of Commerce is a national entity of which MMAC is an affiliate. Its purpose is not altogether sinister, especially if small business is your thing. They can provide support and networking for small businesses in local communities which they serve, though one must pay a fee to join. More often than not the work of the CoC serves the ultra-wealthy, and this is especially true of MMAC, who spend a lot of effort lobbying for Milwaukee, and Wisconsin to cut taxes for the rich.
According to the National Chamber of Commerce website “Above all, we serve as their ally and champion on Capitol Hill, in the courts, in the state houses, and in markets around the world. No matter who or where our members are, we are their seat at the table and voice in the debate.” In practice, this looks like one of the largest lobbying firms in our nation’s capital. Nationally, they are expressly anti-regulation, especially as it concerns something like the Environmental Protection Agency and restricting corporations carbon emissions. Occasionally, the CoC can do something helpful like opposing Donald Trump’s Tariffs, and to Kooyenga’s credit, he has been vocally (if ironically) against the president on these issues.
Local CoC’s can do good things, especially in small towns and communities. Many ethnic communities have their own CoC, such as the Hmong CoC right in our town which serves to promote business interests in that community. However, the majority of the CoC’s funding comes from huge multinational/multibillion dollar companies who do not generally speak to the needs of the small business, and these smaller community orgs do seem more like PR.
The Zionism
MMAC does not serve the average citizen of Milwaukee. Dale and people like him use the organization to do their own bidding which can even cause harm beyond Milwaukee. One such example is their partnership with The Water Council, an organization that has been linked with Mekorot and the ongoing water apartheid in Palestine.
Kooyenga is no stranger to supporting Zionism. In 2017, he and failed US Senate* candidate Leah Vukmir worked together to pass legislation to prevent Wisconsin from supporting boycott, divest, and sanction (BDS) policies. The language of the bill specifically prohibits state agencies from terminating contracts, or refusing to make deals with Israel “if the refusal or termination is intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or limit commercial relations with Israel or the territory.”
Under this legislation it is illegal for an institution like University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to divest from Israeli economic interests (that thing all those rad people occupied the campus for.) Knowing that Democrats in Wisconsin and beyond overwhelmingly disapprove of the genocide in Palestine, a “democratic trifecta” really should target this bill and dismantle it.
The Water Council has worked to distance themselves from previous support of Zionist policies, and have removed several pages from their website that mention their partnership with Mekorot. We have the receipts for Kooyenga’s Zionist sensibilities however, and they are unacceptable.
Free Speech
I suppose a little news site like ours need not live in fear of someone as important as Dale Kooyenga coming after us for our very true and well researched articles. Although Kooyenga does have a history of going after free speech, so who knows? However, you just read 1000 words about a guy who sucks, and it was important to talk about. He still has an outsized influence on Milwaukee (the Journal Sentinel quotes him in articles about MPS funding) and we didn’t choose to give him that power.
In 2022 Kooyenga decided that he didn’t want to continue his career as an elected official, citing family, army, and private business commitments. Thanks to the internet and national reporting outlets like The Intercept, it is much easier than ever to keep an eye on someone like Elon Musk, and national trends destroying healthcare and housing opportunities like private equity. Local monsters like Dale Kooyenga can still wrap themselves presentably and walk among our communities, and that just shouldn’t be the case. When we see him in public we should tell him that he sucks, he should not feel welcome in Milwaukee.
*Original posting of this article incorrectly stated Vukmir ran for governor. Statement has been changed to the correct statement that she ran for US Senate.
