Sunday, November 18, 2012

The Worst Kept Secret Ever: Walker/ALEC 2016

After Scott Walker won the special election in 2002 to be Milwaukee County Executive, he spent the first couple of years making good with the people that got him there. He gave lucrative contracts to his benefactors. He even went so far as to illegally offer office space in the Milwaukee County Courthouse to his goons at Citizens for Responsible Government.

Then he spent the next six or seven years campaigning for governor. He's pretend to be a fiscal conservative when all he was doing was kicking the can down the road for someone else to clean up later. He'd take his "Executive Rides," which were nothing more than campaign tours thinly disguised as tourism promotions. He gave out even more lucrative county contracts to campaign donors. He made circuit tours of all the Lincoln Day Dinners, just because he shared the same sediment.

Then, as the gentle reader is already sadly aware of, his friends at the Bradley Foundation and the Koch Brothers were able to buy the governor's seat for him in 2010.

And the cycle started to repeat itself.

Walker has spent the last two years paying back his benefactors. He gave hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks to corporations that sponsored his campaign. He allowed businesses like the mining companies to write their own laws. He allowed businesses to pollute our drinking water, our rivers, our land and our air without restraint. He tried to take out the unions, the biggest defense against having a complete corporate takeover of the state.

After Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan lost their bid to buy and/or steal the election, I predicted that Walker would be ready to enter the next phase of his agenda:
The really bad news is that Romney's defeat means that Scott Walker is going to double down on his bid for the presidency.

We'll have to be girded for the fight against oddly termed "right to work" legislation, further raping of our environment (including the mining in the Northwoods and fracking everywhere else) and further attempts at voter suppression, anti-women and anti-LGBT legislation.

Walker's going to have to show the American fascists why he is the right tool for them.
And that, gentle reader, is exactly what he is doing.

On Friday, he gave a speech at the Reagan Library and Zombie Amusement Park, a traditional venue for right wing extremists to launch their campaigns. They love the symbolism of it, even though it shows their idiocy and ignorance. While they tout Reagan for his supposed fiscal conservatism, they ignore the fact that he raised taxes and blew up the federal deficit more than almost any other president, second only to George W. Bush.

Sidenote: Since the Reagan Library and Zombie Amusement Park is in California, is this Walker's big trip to Cali?

The speech was nothing less than the kick off to his first presidential bid, saying all the things that his corporate masters want him to say.

Walker started off by throwing red meat to the teahadists by talking about lowering taxes:
"We think if we want to continue the economic success we've had over the last year and a half, again one of the best ways to do this is to put money back in the hands of entrepreneurs, more money back in the hands of small business owners, more money back in the hands of our consumers," Walker said Friday during his hourlong speech, a video of which was posted on YouTube.

"So we're going to continue to lower our property taxes, and we're going to put in place an aggressive income tax reduction and reform in the state of Wisconsin because we believe we can continue to be one of the leaders in the country, not just in reform but ultimately in results."
One of the problems with this statement is the fact that he didn't lower the property taxes for most Wisconsinites, nor did he put more money in anyone's hands but the big corporations and the wealthiest of the wealthy, like Ms. Conquer and Divide herself, Diane Hendricks, who came along for the trip to California.

What the teahadists can't seem to get through their thick tea-hazed minds is that the reason their taxes are too high is because they are paying not only their share, but also the taxes that people like Hendricks should be paying, but aren't.

The other problem is that Walker's agenda has already had the predictable results - less jobs than when his policies took effect and a state that is at the bottom in regards to economic productivity. And this is while the rest of the country is growing and recovering from the Bush/Cheney driven recession.

So, in other words, since Walker's austerity measures has been an absolute failure, his answer is more austerity! Sadly, there are too many people that cannot see beyond their noses and will still buy into Walker's bunk, even as their taxes go up and their jobs go away.

Walker's other big promise has to do with the further desecration of our educational system:
Walker also said he wants to require the state's public schools, including the technical colleges and the University of Wisconsin System, to meet performance-based targets to receive increased state funding - similar to programs in Florida and Pennsylvania. The first-term Republican governor said he will push to expand the state's voucher program for private schools and further streamline the state's rules and regulations.
Here again there are two problems.

The latter one, the profiteering at the expense of our children's education, has been proven time and time again not to work. At best, school choice kids fare no better in grades as public school kids, and they do not gain the other intangible benefits that they receive from public schools.

The only thing school choice is successful at is siphoning off money meant to be used to educate our children and putting it in the pockets of the "entrepreneurs" who abuse the system.

And the whole business about the universities and schools being put on a "merit system" should sound familiar. Especially given how Walker was praising Jeb Bush, of all people.

It was Jeb Bush who got a quarter million dollars from the Bradley Foundation for his "hard work" at "reforming" his state's educational system. It was also the Bradley Foundation that published the Bell Curve, which was the use of manipulated statistics to argue that children from poor families, especially minorities, weren't worth trying to educate.

Florida is also famous for letting the Koch Brothers buy the rights to make hiring decisions at Florida State University.

Can the selling out of our children's education be made any more clear than that?

Now, if the gentle reader is like me, they are scratching their head and thinking, "WTF? Didn't Walker just see his friends Romney and Ryan get rejected for their corporate driven austerity campaign?"

Well, Walker did, but he is either so delusional, so stupid and/or so malevolent that he, like many other right wingers, cannot accept the truth laid out before him. Instead, he blames the messengers:
But in an interview with the Ventura County Star at the Reagan library, Walker was critical of Romney and his unsuccessful presidential campaign.

"Our future nominee needs to do a better job in articulating the views that we commonly hold as Republicans and to talk more optimistically about freedom and about prosperity, and the fact that we want every American to be able to live his or her piece of the American dream," Walker said. He continued, "I don't think (Romney) did an effective job, nor did his campaign of communicating that with the majority (of) voters in my state and others."
I would beg to differ. Romney and Ryan and even Walker himself had communicated their agenda very clearly. And that is why they were so resoundingly rejected.

And despite what Walker thinks, he is not a better communicator and his message will again be rejected. This is especially true when people can compare his extremism to the way Governor Chris Christie showed himself willing to work with President Obama.

On top of that, Walker won't be getting as many passes on the difficult questions - like the ones surrounding Walkergate - as he has gotten from the corporate media in Fitzwalkerstan.

And most significantly, it'll be awfully hard for Walker to run a campaign from a prison cell.

2 comments:

  1. And most significantly, it'll be awfully hard for Walker to run a campaign from a prison cell.
    Amen to that!
    And another thing,It's not just the old white rich guys who run the country anymore, Rmoney was sounded rejected by "the people",blacks,hispanic's, women, gays, the ones who actually live in this country! Good luck Scott Walker and Lyin' Paul Ryan, the ship has left the port and your not on it!

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  2. I think if we take the time to educate our selves and then educate others to see the corruption of dirty corporation, then we the people can make the diffrents and fight back.
    Everybody must pass this, see the Koch Brother Exposed documentary com.

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