THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

As he so often threatened, now The Evil Koch Owned Homunculus Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker is now officially in the race for the bottom of the Republican primaries. And like that other famous failed Governor from Kansas he has a record of failure in his state that he will try to put enough lipstick on to sell it to the rubes. Some of the worst shit he is prod of include:

Leads all-out war on workers, but fails to generate jobs and higher wages: In recent months, Walker has intensified the assault on workers, the poor and most vulnerable with punitive new laws and provisions of his new two-year $73 billion state budget. Since taking office, Walker has been staging this relentless war on worker rights and wages, despite already-declining household incomes—especially sharp in Wisconsin-- and the shrinkage of union power.

• Walker’s attacks on union rights build upon his 2011 “Act 10” which simultaneously abolished almost all collective bargaining rights of public employees to union representation and drove down the take-home pay of public employees by over 10%. These attacks on public employees clearly carried a sub-text of white antagonism toward African-Americans and Latinos, argue professors Hannah Walker and Dylan Bennett because of minority workers’ concentration in the public sector and the economic anxieties of whites.

• This spring, Walker’s signed a new anti-union “right-to-work” bill—contradicting previous promise to labor leaders and the public—that will surely further weaken the already-limited bargaining power of private-sector unions. The aim of this bill, with deeply racist roots, is to drive union membership in Wisconsin to Southern-style microscopic levels.

• Walker’s new state budget severely weakens “prevailing wage” protections for construction workers on public projects, outright elimination of the living wage concept which had been central to setting the state’s minimum wage, and the erosion of tenure and layoff protections for UW faculty.

• Walker’s anti-worker attacks and lavish corporate subsidies handed out by his newly-privatized and scandal-wracked Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation have failed to produce the family-sustaining jobs long promised by Walker. WEDC has been involved in providing funds for major firms shipping family-supporting jobs to offshore sites, along with aiding major Walker donors.

• He also has attacked the ‘living wage’ concept in state law. The new budget eliminates entirely a requirement that the governor consider what constitutes a “living wage” in working to establish an appropriate minimum wage for Wisconsin. Wisconsin’s minimum wage in the Walker years has been stuck at the $7.25 federal-set level, while 29 states and numerous cities have enacted far higher minimums ranging as high as $15 an hour...

Undermining Wisconsin’s prized public education system. Public education in Wisconsin has ranked as among the best in nation, where it is widely viewed as a foundation of a democratic society. However, since in office, Walker has sliced funding for K-12 schools while consistently boosting funding and loosening standards for privatized voucher schools. He has also widened his attack by orchestrating a “hostile takeover” of powers held by the democratically elected Milwaukee Public School board, by usurping and transferring them to neo-liberal County Executive Chris Abele. He has also lowered the standards for teachers, with the new state budget eliminating qualification requirements for hiring teachers.

Walker hasn't stopped there, however. He's taken his anti-union agenda to the state university system, where he has tried to recast it as a narrow pathway serving ould-be employers and not a center of academic inquiry. He's tried to replace a century-long university mission of the search for truth and public service with a narrow, pro-corporate new vision of “providing state workforce needs.” While Walker initially claimed that he and his staff had no role in this proposal, media investigations showed the direct intervention of his staff in pushing the new budget language.

Walker also is imposing $250 million in budget cuts on the highly-esteemed University of Wisconsin system, ranked 19th best in the world. Other provisions call for virtually eliminating tenure and strengthening university administrators’ power over faculty, which is pandering to the long-held right-wing gripe that universities are hotbeds of liberal thought. Among the already-emerging results are older faculty seeking to flee UW and promising young professors steering clear of UW because there is no guarantee of tenure.

Poverty and ignorance are the ultimate goal for workers in his new world. And this just scratches the surface of what he has been ordered to impose on us by his oligarch owners.