Last night Scott Walker proved, once again, that there is less to the man than meets the eye.
Exhibit A, uttered less than a minute into his remarks: “There are more people working in Wisconsin than at nearly any other point in our history…”
The sheer emptiness of such a sentence…baffling…mind boggling.
The words are correctly arranged to create a syntactically literate English language sentence, but this thought-balloon is empty. It means nothing.
Walker never qualifies this soap-bubble beauty. He never provides it any dimension, any context, never anchors it to a single, relevant statistic (He did surround it with fairy dust numbers in a sloppy imitation of rigor). In short, he never breathes meaning or life into it. Walker’s exhalation is a unicorn fart.
His benefactors and handlers, to be sure, made sure he never anchored the statement in reality. For instance, he never acknowledges that prior to European conquest, the native population density was low, so yes, fewer people were working, but there is the additional stumbling block that his definition of “work” just didn’t apply to their lifestyle. Even after, say, 1840, the population of Europeans just wasn’t that high. So...duh!
And Walker never revealed how far back in time such a statement could be reasonably proven to have arisen from solid data, never qualified whether his assertion includes part-time workers and whether that percentage of the labor force has risen during his reign of error, never commented about average income for those laborers and how it has failed to keep place with inflation AND has fallen, thanks to him and the GOP-dominated legislature, and he never admitted that the economic mis-engineering he and the GOP committed continues to impoverish ordinary citizens. They now have less discretionary income, lower levels of rainy-day savings for emergency expenses, less investment capital, including retirement investments and other retirement savings instruments, hence less retirement security and insulation from poverty during retirement.
Walker never addressed the damning statistic that the middle class is vanishing in Wisconsin faster than it is vanishing in any other state of the union. Pause for applause, Scotty...
Walker never took responsibility for imbuing the statement with content and meaning. But who, knowing Walker’s track record, is surprised. His political slipperiness (and cleverness is not a synonym for intelligence), married to ignorance, is a conjugal abomination conceived in the dark recesses of a damaged, malevolent mind.
It’s as if work, even for wages that cannot meet expenses, even without benefits or insurance or job safety protections or dignity, labor with erratic and shifting schedules that enriches business owners but not the laborers themselves, is all that matters.
Say, I know where I’ve seen such dystopian rapture before. It was encapsulated in a German expression: “Arbeit macht frei.” Now where did I see that…
Here are some damning statistics anchored in reality, economic reality. For every quarter from 2011 to 2015, per capita personal income (total income divided by total population) in Minnesota has averaged some $5000.00 higher than per capita personal income in Wisconsin. Even worse news for Wisconsinites is that personal income (differs from per capita personal income in that it does not factor in total population) in Minnesota is some $8000.00 to $10,000.00 higher than personal income in Wisconsin.
Pause for applause, Scotty. And have the clowns from your party who pollute the senate and assembly chambers join you in taking a bow… if they can pause a moment from gorging on public monies...
How to explain the prosperity gap? Minnesota has a democratic governor, and a legislature that practices bipartisan compromise and places the needs of ordinary citizens above the avarice of the monied elite. Faced with a budget deficit, state government created two new top-tier income taxing brackets to correct the underpayment of taxes (unearned welfare) wrongly awarded to Minnesotas’ wealthiest residents. True, some billionaires might- horror of horrors!- have been reduced to the status of mere millionaires, but none of them jumped from their high rise office buildings when confronted by legislative “downsizing”...
It means nothing, this fairy-food Walker utters for his fantasy-loving flock of fools, these misnomered “legislators” who assemble in, and who routinely foul, dishonor and disserve, a people’s chamber where good government once reigned.
And so this pretty sentiment, Walker’s diaphanous employment bubble, unchained to reality, floats over his enraptured devotees, leaving them slightly sticky and slippery when it bursts.
Ah, but no matter. Their hollow hero has moved on. He begins to utter a chain of soap-bubble sentiments, apologizing when he talks over the pre-planned pause for applause(!).
Witness here political theater so creaky, so clumsy and transparent, so stodgy, perhaps deliberately so, that it invites the inattention of ordinary citizens, who let the confederacy of Republican dunces and sociopaths continue their theft of taxpayer monies and render state government opaque and unaccountable.
Wisconsin may become permanently trapped in the clutches of Republican caretakers, who are, now, taking great care to assure their majority is permanent, their representation is token, and that no one-percent whim will go unmet, and will be funded by taxpayers who have no input.
Listeners who strained to hear concrete evidence that Walker and the state GOP would finally pay even scant attention to efforts and initiatives aimed at long-needed economic recovery, rather than securing a permanent Republican majority, were sorely disappointed. Walker frittered away his time behind the podium offering window-dressing “reforms” that he hawked as if they were pure innovative genius, rather than “fussing-at-the-fringes” measures that obliquely acknowledge the economic doldrums he helped foment.
Exhibit B, another soap-bubble sentiment:
“Not only are more people working, new business formations were up 3.6 percent last year. The economic impact of tourism increased 5.5 percent.
To continue this kind of growth in jobs and commerce, employers want stability. That's why we work so hard to get our fiscal house in order. It also ensures that the government will not be a burden on future generations.”
Walker avoids describing the economic impact of the startups because doing so would nullify the reason for even trying to foist such a statistic upon the public as if it were a positive sign: such economic impact is minuscule. Only time will tell whether any of these startups will have even modest local impact. As such, the sentence is a space-filling time-waster that hints, implies, but cannot truly prove, that Walker and the state GOP deserve any credit for an increase in startups, and that such credit has substantial value. It doesn’t.
“The economic impact of tourism increased 5.5 percent,” Walker says with earnest vacuity.
This statement, assayed for value, actually turns out to be fool’s-gold for Walker and his fellow fools. That’s because the economic impact of tourism, a seasonal and unreliable source of economic stability and growth, has increased as a percentage of overall economic growth because economic growth from other industries and by other means has shrunk!
So much for putting lipstick on a pig…
“To continue this kind of growth in jobs and commerce, employers want stability.”
Sadly, far too many employers want something less reasonable. They want power over labor. They want a pliable workforce they can pay as little as possible, a powerless pool of laborers that can be worked as little or as often as demand requires, and dismissed when not needed or when they begin to expect dignity, a living wage, job safety or time for leisure and family. Far too many employers don’t want government watching over their shoulder or acting as a shield for laborers.
“That's why we work so hard to get our fiscal house in order. It also ensures that the government will not be a burden on future generations.”
The conceit that government needs to “get out of the way” is a Republican touchstone. A doddering idiot named Ronald Reagan popularized it, on orders from his handlers. Like Walker today, Reagan had no concept of what he was advocating. Of course, a smaller, underfunded government cannot protect its citizens from other power centers, those being corporations and the ultra wealthy, who treat the purchase of legislators and corruption of government operations as a form of amusement, and seek to purchase each state and make it a feudal estate.
And “getting our fiscal house in order,” as Walker and the state GOP conceive of it, means cutting taxes on that very subset of Wisconsinites, the top income earners, who already pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than do the middle class...that vanishing middle class! But like a rabid dog chasing its tail and biting it every chance it gets, Republicans are hell bent on fomenting economic self-destruction. Indeed, they are eager to march into economic hell. The feudal paradise their masters foam at the mouth about is nigh.
“In order” also means defunding public education to the point that it affects the quality of public education, then blaming public education for failing to meet educational needs and “Voila!” The GOP will misdirect still more public monies into unaccountable charter schools. See some circular reasoning at work in those Republiclown minds?
And what about student achievement? Why, it will be “measured” using a new rubric that guarantees the appearance of improvement. Yeah, read that again.
And “getting our fiscal house in order” has been code for years now at the WEDC, that agency conceived as a means by which public monies are, without oversight, explanation, merit or justification, shoveled into the pockets of Walker supporters who need do nothing in return.
For ordinary Wisconsinites, the state of the state address was a sad reminder that state Republicans relish and continue to wield their ability to abuse the power and authority of public office to serve the least deserving; the already-wealthy, the out-of-state, fringe-element, social-darwinist benefactors (who are welfare recipients and predators of the lowest order), the Bradley Foundation, WMAC, Wisconsin Club for Growth, and similar cabals of the undeserving, and that the state GOP will not serve ordinary citizens or stimulate broadly-shared economic recovery.
Government for the sole benefit of the one-percent, with its attendant abuse and corruption, lack of transparency and accountability, will continue, they assure us. The cancer that is the state GOP, with its economic feudalism and elitist agenda, has metastasized…