Saturday, April 6, 2013

Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain

In life, we devise plans and strategies for dealing with the difficult issues we are facing.  Whether it is the loss of employment, a sick child, financial struggles, whatever it is we are facing, people take a bad situation and work to solve the problem. Sometimes we are successful and sometimes we just get by.

When Scott Walker took the governor’s office and the Republicans took over the majority of both houses of the legislature in 2010, the people were forced to deal with issues they wouldn’t have had to if there was not a very elaborate well thought out plan setting the agenda in motion.  A strategy developed not to deal with difficult issues but to create difficult issues.  A person does not do this unless they are at war. How do you create a strategy to “drop a bomb” on the people you are supposed to be “governing”? How do you get to that place where “divide and conquer” is your weapon of choice upon the people you were elected to oversee the common good of?

The divide and conquer strategy is the only thing working in Wisconsin.  Yet the people continue to buy into the extreme right agenda to funnel our tax funds to their private corporations and realize Wisconsin, Inc.



How else could Scott Walker fulfill the Greater MilwaukeeCommittee’s (GMC) prophecy right under our noses? In 2009, County Executive Walker touts 4 “criteria” that, if met, would quantify their agenda to “eliminate county government and transfer the assets to the state”.

  • Think about that. What would it take to render the people so oppressed that they would actually help him further the agenda?
  • Forcing a wage and benefit structure change on state employees (divide and conquer)
  • Reforming service delivery: education, transit, fire department, etc (eliminate services)
  • County assets transfer to privatization (remove revenue capability and local control)
  • Reform budget process (eliminate accountability to the people)



Scott Walker admits he has been working on this agenda for years with the GMC prior to running for governor. The people were sleeping in 2010 and I remember a lot of people in Milwaukee demanding to know why the people in the rest of the state would elect someone who decimated the largest county in WI under his watch.  I also remember the people in surrounding counties wondering where the people of Milwaukee County were in 2010 when Scott Walker “pulled the wool over their eyes”.  How could they not be screaming about what he did?

For the same reason Patience Roggensack retains her seat on the Supreme Court after openly admitting taking bribes is acceptable for a judge in the same election Tony Evers was re-elected to Superintendant of Public Education after denouncing the attacks on public education.

Keep the people looking at the left hand not knowing what the right is doing.  “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”



Time and again Scott Walker manipulates the numbers to create a problem and then with the slight of his right hand slips millions into the pockets of his corporate interests. In effect, with the campaign donations and the legal defense fund, he has successfully forced the tax payers to fund them.

How about those jobs?

He takes advantage of the people’s outrage on government to manipulate them into thinking they should not trust the Department of Labor statistics, they should trust what the employers report on employment.

Only there is one big problem, now we have a declining unemployment rate because one employed person working 2 and 3 jobs becomes 2 or 3 employed people. What comes with that declining unemployment rate? With the Republicans' shiny A.L.E.C. bill, it is a drop in benefits, when the people need it the most to sustain the economy and keep them in their homes, providing food on the table, they will lose 2 weeks of benefits for every ½ % increase in the unemployment rate. As long as Walker looks like he is creating jobs, the people will receive their insurance benefit, as long as they have applied for 4 jobs a week and jumped through all the hoops. He creates the problem with a deficit in the Insurance Trust Fund and forces the cut to services to fix it. And the people buy into the trigger words: Waste! Fraud! Abuse!



Don’t look at what my right hand is doing, look at all those people taking advantage of the system. Did we forget you have to meet certain criteria in order to qualify for unemployment benefits... like… have a job you lost through no fault of your own?

Republican voters will buy it hook, line and sinker; they will even blame the Democrats for losing their benefits.  By all means, don’t look at that man behind the curtain.

1 comment:

  1. We have got to get rid of Robin Vos, the ALEC man behind the curtain. He's THE most dangerous man in Wisconsin. I hope Peter Barca recognizes this fact now.

    ReplyDelete