If you want to get rid of public education, unions, and the teaching profession, Scott Walker should be your candidate. As this article shows, he dances to ALEC’s tune.
He prides himself for breaking public sector unions in Wisconsin. At one campaign stop, he said that his victory over the unions proved that he could beat terrorism.
He is a wrecking ball for public education. He has expanded charters and vouchers. He is a cheerleader for privatization.
He is ALEC’s boy.
What is ALEC? Read here. It is the organization that works on behalf of deregulation, corporate profits, and privatization. It writes model legislation for states. Inexplicably, the IRS allows it non-political, charitable (c3) status, although it is deeply partisan.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Sarah Palin clone mimbo.
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The quickest—and perhaps best—tutorial on ALEC, and how it functions is this parody of SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK’S “I’m Just a Bill”:
For those non-Baby-Boomer, or non-Generation-X-ers, this is the original video that’s being parodied:
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This is part of an article By Naureen Khan, Al Jazeera America:
“The governor’s [Scott Walker] detractors note that his policies of cutting taxes, giving subsidies to firms through the troubled Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. and slashing government spending — most prominently through Act 10, the 2011 budget repair bill that ended collective bargaining for public sector unions and prompted weeks of turbulent protests at the state Capitol — have failed to produce tangible benefits.
At the end of his first term in office, Wisconsin ranked 35th in the nation for private-sector job growth and in the middle of the pack — in a four-way tie for 21st — for private-sector wage growth, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
More glaringly, Walker repeatedly vowed during his 2010 gubernatorial campaign to create 250,000 private-sector jobs and challenged voters to hold him to it. His administration made it only a little more than halfway to that goal, with 131,000 jobs created in Wisconsin in his first four years in office.
A study released earlier this year from the Pew Charitable Trusts found long-simmering trouble for Wisconsin’s middle class: from 2000 to 2013, the percentage of households making 67 percent to 200 percent of the state’s median income dropped from 54.6 percent to 48.9 percent — the biggest drop for any state in the nation. In those years, the median income itself dropped 14 percent.”
I do not understand why anyone would vote for Scott Walker. He is destruction.
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Neighboring Minnesota is doing much better with a more progressive plan.http://blogs.mprnews.org/newscut/2015/01/minnesota-economy-beats-wisconsin-7-charts-1-table/
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Legislators, Governors and others who are members of ALEC cannot think for themselves nor do they properly represent the people elected them to their high positions. They are not allowed to think for themselves. Once a member of ALEC a person has to bow down to whatever ALEC says and does. Just another way of leading American Democracy down the road to destruction. ALEC is a cancer that is growing at a very fast destructive rate.
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I wish it was just “Scott Walker”. More and more I think Scott Walker is the only one admitting what he plans to do. Other than Bernie Sanders, is there a single candidate on either side that supports employees having ANY voice or leverage in the workplace? Not just showing up at a labor rally every 4 years- “support” as in real, concrete actions.
All I hear are droning, scolding lectures on how the US workforce have to meet the high, high expectations of politicians and their donors.
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Exactly. Rather than discussing politicians closely associated with ALEC, we should look for those that aren’t. Turns out that is a very short list indeed.
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I believe NYS’ so called leader, Governor Cuomo, has taken the majority of his moves against public education from Scott Walker’s playbook. The labels may be different but similar outcomes are desired
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Reblogged this on National Mobilization For Equity and commented:
ICYMI ~ Scott Walker, WI union busting and ALEC refresher via Diane Ravitch
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In an article from the August 16, 2012 edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Alison Bauter wrote about Walker’s admin. earmarking more taxpayer dollars for corrections facilities than for the University of Wisconsin System.
“For 2011-’13, Gov. Scott Walker and GOP lawmakers allotted just under $2.1 billion to the state’s public universities and $2.25 billion to the Department of Corrections. It’s a gap that is unlikely to close any time soon.
It’s also not the work of a single budget and not the decision of a single party. Rather, the gap is the culmination of years of policy changes and shifting priorities, spanning Democratic and Republican governors, crisscrossing political lines and reflecting national trends, a Journal Sentinel analysis of more than 20 years of state budgets shows.
The UW System has long been among the top three recipients of state funds, alongside state aid to K-12 schools and local governments, and medical assistance programs such as Medicaid. In the 2011 biennial budget passed in June 2011, corrections surpassed UW, making the state’s prisons and correctional system the No. 3 taxpayer priority.
These days, the growth in corrections spending has slowed; the department surpassed universities in the current budget not because of increasing correctional spending, but because of continued cuts to the UW System.”
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“In 2003, Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, pledged to end Wisconsin’s prison-building boom, but corrections spending didn’t immediately slow. Late in his second term, Doyle’s proposed early release programs took effect, only to be repealed one year later.
Prison costs kept climbing throughout the decade, markedly slowing in the middle of the decade, but still topping $1 billion before Doyle was out of office – largely because prison spending is hard to cut once a facility is built and filled with inmates who must be guarded, fed and given medical attention.
“You have to pay prison guard salary and benefits; you can’t do much in the way of laying them off, as it is a function of prison population,” said Todd Berry, executive director for the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
In 1990, the prison population was just under 7,000. Now, it tops 22,000.
Today, state spending on corrections isn’t rising. Recent cuts to prison workers’ benefits and changes to rules governing overtime and sick leave – stemming from Walker’s bill eliminating most union bargaining for most public workers – have held prison budgets largely static. But significantly cutting prison costs will be difficult without decreasing the prison population.
For comparison, UW System enrollment has grown about 10% over the past decade, topping 181,000 as the system receives an increasingly smaller portion of its funding from state taxpayers. UW’s Board of Regents responded to this budget’s cuts by increasing systemwide tuition by 5.5% – that meant an annual tuition hike of $422 at UW-Milwaukee and $681 at UW-Madison for the coming academic year.”
Scott Walker is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Koch Bros. That we have sunk to this level as a “nation” is both absolutely abhorrent and inexcusable. I wonder what this “cesspool” will look like in ten years?
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