Whatever you do, don't sleep on Wisconsin because, I tells ya, there's a new scam breaking out every couple of days, and the place is still the ultimate lab rat for what the oligarchs and their political sublets in the various legislatures, state and federal, want to do to the rest of us. Back in February, when he presented his budget, Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus who was hired by Koch Industries to manage their Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, slipped a little tidbit into his budget whereby he proposed that a law banning the sale of large tracts of land to foreign corporations would be overturned. That law passed in 1887, when the people of Wisconsin knew damn good and well what happens when you hand your state over to big corporations, and when they stood up and showed the rest of the country how to fix it. Of course, that was before the genius of Free Trade descended upon us all.

State law already exempts many foreign investors from the land ownership limits under international treaties. But Werwie said last week the law needed to be changed because it conflicted with language in those treaties, specifically the General Agreement on Trade in Services, a 1995 World Trade Organization treaty. Werwie said a recent call from a Croatian official to Walker's office highlighted how some foreign investors aren't aware that the law exempts countries from the limits if they have a treaty with the United States such as favored-nation status. "I think it's causing confusion out there," Werwie said. "Then the effective result of doing what we did is nothing, other than to help (foreign investors) understand what applies to them."

What can Scott Walker do? Free Trade is making him do everything he wanted to do in the first place, poor dear man. The most precious thing that Walker's selling off for parts up there is Wisconsin's proud progressive history of creating and maintaining a viable political commonwealth for all of its people.

Now, lo and behold, there might have been a foreign corporation in the woodpile, all along. Quelle surprise, as we say in the beer halls of Pulaski.

Last November, UBS AgriVest, a unit of the Swiss banking giant UBS. paid $67.5 million or nearly $7,000 per acre for about 9,800 acres in southwest Wisconsin. The sale of the Grant County land by investor and philanthropist Ray Eckstein of Cassville was not widely reported and didn't get much exposure until a story last month in the New York Times noting the bull market for farmland...Either way, farmland is apparently the new gold for some long-term investors. The idea is to purchase land and then rent it back to farmers through professional managers, with the owners pocketing the rental income.

Even leaving aside the awful effects a land bubble will have on small farmers, this deal will differ from tenant farming, to say nothing of sharecropping, how, exactly? Maybe we'll get a new generation of bluesmen out of the deal.

Not that there isn't room in Wisconsin these days for several bag jobs to be running at once.

A 7-year-old private real estate investment trust (REIT), the AgriVest fund has been buying huge chunks of farmland in the Mississippi Delta, the Rocky Mountain states, Georgia and now Wisconsin. The fund's 27 investors are mostly pension funds ranging from the Orange County Employees Retirement System in California to the Anchorage Police & Fire Retirement System. Given the interest among big pension plans in investing in farmland, the Farmland Investor Center is now speculating that money manager TIAA-CREF is behind Walker's shadowy land ownership proposal.

No kidding. Zut alors, as we say at the Friday night fish fry in Pewaukee.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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