Sunday, December 16, 2012

The Corporate Media In Action!

The other day, Scott Walker sat down with the editorial board and some reporters of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

It truly is a thing to behold.  The panel would lob softballs at Walker.  When he answered, most often with a lie or at best a half-truth, the panel would just nod in agreement.  No confrontations on his lies, no hard hitting questions.  Seeing how the once watchdog of the state has turned into a group of lapdogs is truly disgusting.

In fact, David Haynes, chair of the editorial board, can be seen actively promoting the false propaganda that has come out of the Walker administration/campaign. Although I reckon that shouldn't come as a surprise.

Fortunately for the gentle reader, there are places like Cog Dis where we still speak to truth to power.  And since it is over an hour long, I will give you some of the highlights, or more accurately, lowlights of the interview.

The interview starts out with the question of whether Walker would pass the Right to Woe Law.  He kept insisting that he wouldn't do that, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Of more significance, a point which the entire panel let slide, was that Walker continued with his blaming of the protests on why there aren't more jobs.  He said the "uncertainty" of the protests and recalls kept businesses from expanding.  But the protests have been over for more than a year and a half and the recalls ended six months ago.  Yet we're still losing jobs.

The fact is that business will not expand if there is not a demand and there will not be a demand if people don't have the money to spend on the business' product or service.  And that is why Forbes Magazine has said that we will be the second worst state in the nation in job growth.

Meanwhile, the panel was silent.

Side note: Walker did say that if there were a Right to Woe law, it would be a matter for the next election.  He then said he didn't know if he would run in another election.  Was that a tacit admission to the fact that he is John Doe?

The second subject was the issue of residency.  Walker beat around the bush on it, but basically admitted that he is again going to wrest away local control and eliminate residency rules.

The next topic was what to do with the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex.  Walker said he was all for shutting it down and putting all of those people into the community.  The thing he didn't mention is that there currently aren't resources for them.

He also said that the facility itself is old and broken down.  He fails to mention that he was the one that made it so by years of deferred maintenance and letting repairs slide until the state and the feds started doing inspections and audits.  Even more unbelievably, he bragged about trying to get the complex to move to the old St. Michael's Hospital which was even older and more broken down.  (If you guessed that it would have meant a lucrative contract for a campaign donor, pat yourself on the back for being correct.)

The panel, which had often wrote about how Walker, then the county executive, should fix it, said nothing.

The discussion then went to the past election. Again.  And again, Walker focused on the success of their gerrymandering, claiming it was because of their "positive message."  He explained away the fact that Democrats actually had more votes.

Someone, I think it was Jason Stein, actually asked a question.  When Walker gave a rambling non-answer answer, no one said a word.

Walker then went on, about the 21:30 mark, to give us a preview of the presidential bid speech.  To save the gentle reader the grief, it's basically the same one that he used for the recall, falsely stating that "It's working!"

Interestingly, Walker was also saying that Republicans should only run on economic issues instead of social issues.  If Walker is to believed, the people aren't interested in social issues like abortion, rape, domestic violence, workers rights, women's rights, and so on.

When the subject turned to redoing the way redistricting, Walker's agreed it was a problem, but he's not going to do anything about it, meaning he didn't think it was really a problem.

The rest of it was how he wants to ram through the mining bill, how he wants to make the education system into a giant form of corporate welfare where it becomes nothing more than a mandated training system for his corporate campaign donors, bragging about his nonexistent budget surplus.

He waited until the end to drop the bombshell that he wants to make the ACT test, a voluntary test used to gauge a college applicant's qualifications, into a mandatory test for all students.

He admitted that this would lower the states test results, but that he wanted to use it to set up a "pay for performance" plan.

In other words, what he wants to do is manipulate the education system in such a way to be able to overtly give more taxpayer money to privatized schools, which don't have to take special needs children and aren't held up to the same standards as public schools.  The reason the private schools aren't held to the same standards is for the simple fact that they don't match up well with public schools when all other things are equal.

Yet no one on the panel said a word.

Most notable by its absence was any questions about Walkergate.  Not one.

And these are the people that we are supposed to trust to keep government transparent and open and honest.  How can they do that when they aren't themselves?

3 comments:

  1. I recall when there was an actual daily in Milwaukee.

    At least the ferment of other media is reaching the younger generations.

    Feeling optimistic right now

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  2. I would love a transcript of these videos. I agree there was no confrontation. Yet I wonder if that was the JS's way of letting Walker expose himself for who he is.

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  3. ACT as mandatory testing? There isn't another state that does that! There's no way in hell special ed kids should be taking that test! It is intended to benchmark HS students going to college. "Pay for Performance"? Is he daft? He's really trying to "F" up the educational system.

    As for the Milwaukee "Urinal" That's exactly where that paper belongs. They pander to the rich and empowered. Don't expect to learn any thing but the sports scores.

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