On public dime since '93, Walker rips government dependency

If you preside a Fortune 500 CEO's lifestyle in a generously-staffed 34-room, 20,000-square foot lakefront mansion in a tony, leafy suburb and enjoy gaudy perks including the best downtown office suite, a brace of personal assistants plus drivers, cars, pilots and airplanes at your 24/7 beck and call, you might be tempted to feel like you're living a version of The American Dream.

But if taxpayers are picking up that tab, and you've only held government jobs for the last 23 straight years - - basically your entire adult life - - and you enforce austerity on everyday people while showering other perks on CEO's and high earners, the last thing you'd expect to hear from such an inveterate public trough freeloader is a high-profile speech bashing government dependency.

But that is exactly what the afore-mentioned mansion occupant and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was doing Saturday, inveighing at a Koch brothers American Dream event near Disney World in Florida against government dependency.

And bragging about all the thousands of poor people he had cut off food aid and touting the extra humiliation of a mandatory drug test Walker put into state law which some aid applicants must pass before receiving subsistence benefits from taxpayers that pale in comparison to the millionaire lifestyle which tax dollars provide to him.

All in a state, mind you, which still has the state-enforced poverty-enforcing, American Dream-killing $7.25/hr. minimum wage already raised in many states because Walker does not even believe in the concept, also believes $7.25/hr. is a livable wage and will not allow any increase.

Props to the Florida blogger who provided the details of Walker's speech which also explained why we didn't see Walker parading around Lambeau Field in the red shirt from the University he never attended, but whose budget he slashed and public-service mission he sneakily and dishonestly tried to erase.

Further thanks to and the Capital Times for featuring the Florida report today about Wisconsin's Hypocrite-in-Chief.

SUNDAY, AUGUST 28, 2016

Anti-transit ideology, fantasy still rule region, Walker budgets

[Updated] I want to add one more item to nearly two weeks' blogging that tries to expand the context in which citizens and opinion-makers and officials discuss the recent violence in and reporting about Milwaukee, including these blog items:

* A summary post about the many intentional state and regional financial, policy and legal decisions over decades which kept the City of Milwaukee land-locked and its predominantly-minority residents segregated by race and income from regional housing, business development, job opportunities and transit in the wealthier, whiter surrounding suburban counties;

* A followup post focusing on then-Milwaukee County Executive and now Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's long disinterest in Milwaukee employment and hostility to the city and Milwaukee County's transit deficits and solutions.

Then a blog reader reminder me of a post I'd written in February, 2007 about Walker and transit.

I was grateful for the reminder, as I sometimes forget what I've posted here - - there are more than 17,000 posts just since June, 2010, when Google began keeping score - - but shame on me for not going back further in the archives to find something relevant.

And relevant to more than the discriminatory disconnects and disregards and damage done to Milwaukee through public policy choices and spending that marginalize the state's biggest city.

The story told in the posting sheds more light on the mindset - - a term used advisedly, and generously - - of Scott Walker which he'd tipped us to nearly ten years ago, and a good three years before he was elected Governor.

A Governor who is willing to starve state transit, borrow to the hilt, ram through, despite denials and double-talk even more highway expansion on the west side where residents don't want it and please the road-builders with a blank check because he told us in 2007 he wants everyone in Milwaukee to own and drive a car.

Even though before the Great Recession deepened, data showed that 23% of City of Milwaukee households were without access to a vehicle.

As ludicrous is the poor en masse magically getting flush enough to buy cars - - does Walker - - he with the private transit taxpayers r\give him 24/7 since January, 2011 via state-paid cars, drivers, airplanes, pilots - - see the contradiction and his cause-and-effect responsibilities as he keeps the minimum wage frozen at a poverty-enforcing $7.25/hr? - - given the upfront purchase, licensing and registration costs to owners, plus operating and maintenance expenses, the greatly expanded car ownership Walker fantasizes about does underscore his hostility to transit and 'justify' the added highway expansion he supports that would reward his road-building pals.

Talk about a win-win for ideologically-blinded free marketers.

So if you still need a "Eureka Moment" to grasp who Walker is and to explain, shall we say, his 'philosophy' - - if his audible dog whistles about the poor, or his warning to upper-income exurban Waukesha County exurbanites about letting Wisconsin 'become another Milwaukee,' or his presence at a secretive and under-reported right-wing summit anointing him for leadership didn't already supply that nugget you needed to grasp who Walker really is, I give you the 2/24/2007 posting, in full below (and if I can get a link to the Journal Sentinel roundtable cited, I will pass that on, too):

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Scott Walker: County Executive of Fantasy Island

Politicians say the dumbest things when the spin machine is making too much noise in their heads.

Case in point: Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker, who trashed Mayor Tom Barrett's recently-announced bus-and-trolley transit improvement proposal.

In a County with a declining transit system organized around outmoded buses, why would the County Exec. dump on a plan that would benefit the system and the county, too?

Here's what the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Walker told the paper's editorial writers Tuesday about why he opposed transit improvements in the county he purportedly leads:

"...Walker said he would like to grow the local economy enough so lower-income people don't have to rely on transit and could instead afford to buy cars if they chose."

As a friend quipped to me Friday night, right - - so they can drive their cars to jobs in Waukesha?

Walker even invoked the ghost of light rail, killed in Milwaukee by talk radio and the Thompson administration nearly a decade ago, to demagogue against Barrett's proposal - - which is not a light rail plan.

I know Walker knows the difference, but when have the facts ever driven the local debate about transit?

In Milwaukee County politics, talk radio sets the agenda, then Walker, knowing his lines, reacts with rigidity, fantasy and spin.

There's a slogan you can write down and put on your refrigerator [echoing Walker's 2002 campaign mantra].

SATURDAY, AUGUST 27, 2016

Documenting Walker's hostility to Milwaukee jobs, development

In the wake of GOP Gov. Scott Walker's pledge of $4.5 million in aid to Milwaukee's job-depressed north side after violence there two weeks ago, I noted on this blog that Walker in 2010 campaigned against and helped forfeit federally-funded Amtrak rail line expansion work worth more than $800 million which included train assembly and maintenance work underway and targeted at low-income north side Milwaukee residents.

I also wrote several posts - - one summary, here - - pointing out that Walker has long been a champion of spending more than $6 billion on the freeway system in the Milwaukee areawhich keeps the region heavily segregated by race and income by routinely omitting transit upgrades that could help Milwaukee workers in a city land-locked by state law connect with jobs and other opportunities in the suburbs.

I also want to remind readers of Walker's disinterest in and outright hostility to Milwaukee job creation when he was a GOP state legislator representing suburban Wauwatosa and, later, as Milwaukee County Executive:

* From his legislative perch, Walker sided with other suburban politicians and killed and helpedkill a light rail system in Milwaukee that would have provided construction work, plus housing and business development at stations and along the rail corridors - - a job-creating phenomenon which has occurred in other cities when light rail was built and expanded.

In 2008, I wrote:

Years ago, Walker promised his handlers on local right-wing talk radio programs that he would stand rigid with them against rail - - in an anti-urban stance that earned him the nickname "Scott Waukesha."

Walker told The Milwaukee Journal in a 1999 story that it would be OK with him if multiple, major transportation projects in a package that might include Milwaukee rail had to die together to keep light rail from being built...

That transportation package did not produce urban rail of any kind, thanks to the stonewalling by Walker and his talk radio lieutenants - - but did lead to the rebuilding of the Sixth St. Bridge, the removal of the Park East Freeway spur, the construction of the Lakeshore State Park just off the Summerfest grounds, and the provision of seed money that jump-started the Marquette Interchange project.

Here is the story [the link is now dead, but the quote is accurate] and the key quote is:

"Building a limited light rail system could cost as much as $180 million. Diehard light-rail opponents, such as Waukesha County Executive Daniel Finley and state Rep. Scott Walker (R-Wauwatosa), immediately objected to spending any of the money on a rail transit system. Walker said he would be willing to sacrifice everything else in the package to stop light rail, because he fears the system would be expanded at taxpayers' expense."

* The County had an economic development office into which Walker inserted Tim Russell, a long-time campaign gofer and and county staff aide, as the $83,000-a-year assistant manager.

Walker tried to get the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors to appoint Russell as the top economic development office administrator, but supervisors balked, so Walker created yet another job for Russell - - managing, against county ethics officials' advice - - a non-profit veterans organization embedded into county government.

Russell later pleaded guilty to stealing from that organization and went to jail in the so-called John Doe I prosecution which used evidence seized from a secret email system Russell helped to install in Walker's county executive office suite.

See this outstanding summary by David Umhoefer, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter.

* When asked twice during a 2010 gubernatorial debate with challenger and Milwaukee Mayor Barrett, Walker could not name a single job he had created in Milwaukee's central city.

Obviously, it was not his priority. Getting elected Governor was.

But ad the question been asked a little more broadly, Walker could have answered:

I did find work for Tim Russell.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 26, 2016

Walker's $4.5 million grant does not cover lost train work

I'd said in a posting earlier today that I might have more to say about Scott Walker's post-Sherman Park violence $4.5 grant and other aid to Milwaukee he spelled out in the city coincidentally (?) as police shooting victim Sylville Smith's funeral Friday morning was unfolding, and I did want to get a couple of more things on the record:

* $4.5 million is a real, beneficial sum of money, if leveraged and invested strategically, and I am confident that all the officials and groups involved will do just that.

But here's how a local expert suggested looking at that sum of money: $4.5 million is a lot less than the value and multiplier impact of millions and millions of dollars in expanded Amtrak operations statewide, in good-paying Milwaukee-based, long-term train set assembly and maintenance jobs,

Assembled in Milwaukee's low-income, jobs-hungry 30th St. corridor, banned in Wisconsin, shipped to the Northwest, with future train business and expansion in Milwaukee and statewide barred by Scott Walker

in several years of rail, train bridge and station construction or upgrades across the state, infuture Midwest High-Speed Rail contracts. and in spinoff blue-and-white-collar consulting, supplier and technical work that were all lost to job-deprived Milwaukee neighborhoods whenWalker intentionally cancelled the Talgo operation, and with it, a budding state train industry - - just for ideological, partisan and Walker's personal, political agendas.

For goodness sake, $4.5 million is less than half of what the state had to pay Talgo just for breaking an initial, two-train set assembly contract - - and Talgo got to keep the trains!

On which the state spent $50 million.

* Walker would have looked more sincere today had he simply come to the city and said, 'Milwaukee is part of the state, and the state is glad to be doing the right thing for the people in our largest city,' instead of setting up future political ads in which he could book-end tough-guy images of his National Guard activation of a couple of weeks ago with the condescending language right off his official Governor's webpage today that looks especially ironic in light of his Talgo/Amtrak factory and employment cancellation in Milwaukee, and the failure of his 250,000 new jobs campaign pledge now overdue by more than 18 months:

"This is all about helping people move from government dependence to true independence through the dignity that comes from work.”

As if Talgo assembly, maintenance and Amtrak construction and operations workers - - and people across the city and state engaged in productive and useful work already - - needed that reminder.

* Sidebar: Powerful language about the regions segregation that appeared in the Journal Sentinel's hard-copy edition today about Walker's grant, and which was also intact in early online editions has been edited out by this afternoon as the story developed today, but I had copied it into an earlier post today, and have placed them on my blog's face page, left margin, because the wording was spot-on truthful and worth memorializing.

Here it is, again:

"Milwaukee and its suburbs are one of the most segregated areas in the nation, and the inner city has been devastated by the effects of lost manufacturing jobs and high rates of unemployment and incarceration…

"[GOP WI Gov. Scott] Walker, a longtime former resident of Wauwatosa, has related better to the conservative suburbs of Milwaukee than to its liberal urban core, first as county executive and then as governor."

- - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 8/26/16