04/23/2012:

TODAY'S MUST-READ: How a Single Fiction Helps Scott Walker and His Allies, by Paul Fanlund

And that fiction is... (drum roll, please)... government employees have it better than everyone else, and they're stealing money from YOU.

As someone who served the State of Wisconsin for eleven years (1995-2006), I can tell you that the "golden days" of being a state employee ended about ten minutes after Jim Doyle became governor in January 2003. Doyle had strange ideas about how to make state government more efficient, such as cutting positions in critical areas like information systems (and roadkill removal) and piling up expensive sinecures in affirmative action and human resources. Entire deparments were reorganized and re-reorganized, apparently for no other reason than to please the Reorganization Fairy. You never knew what Doyle was going to do next, except that it wouldn't make any sense to any rational person.

Jim Doyle didn't hate state employees; he just didn't care about them. State government was Doyle's personal Erector set, and he loved nothing more than to assemble and reassemble it just to see what would happen. If a few hundred or thousand people lost their livelihoods in the process, oh well.

Scott Walker was different from the start. He made his abject hatred of ALL state, county, and municipal employees* (from the administrators of the largest state agencies to the folks who drive your snowplows and school buses) his calling card, making screwball statements that government workers were "thugs" and "fat cats" who had to be taught to feel "real pain." He employed the same classic Machiavellian move as Adolf Hitler, devolving power away from a large segment of Wisconsin's working class while finding a scapegoat to blame nearly all of the state's problems on. And thanks to his scores of wealthy out-of-state patrons, he has had access to many, many millions of dollars with which to hammer home his message.

The frightening thing, of course, is how many conservatives (just like Hitler's "ordinary Germans) didn't see through this gambit from the start, and instead are following Walker right over the cliff to embrace a chilling new American totalitarianism.

*Except for the ones he appointed himself

Posted by Alois on

Comments

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