Tuesday, February 5, 2013

No County, For Old Men

Sheldon Lubar is an octogenarian multimillionaire who has many good and philanthropic things for Milwaukee County and the surrounding area.

He has also done many evil things.

He might not have intended for the evil things he's done to be evil, but that does not make them any less evil.

One of the most obvious evils he has visited upon the region is being one of the main people involved with the desecration of the county grounds and the threatening of the Monarch Trail - one of the few places in the country where the Monarch butterflies stop during their annual migration.

The pretense for this abominable action is to purportedly build an engineering school on the grounds.  They also plan on high end apartments, a motel a restaurant, a strip mall and who knows what else.  The thing is that no one but these money bags wanted the school there.  This was ramrodded through for no other reason that to profiteer off of the land and the taxpayers who are paying more and more into this foolish venture.

And to think that this guy who is soaking the taxpayers for tens of millions of dollars once complained of generous government giveaways. He must have meant government giveaways to the undeserving, like the poor and the middle class.

Lubar came out of his gold-plated ivory tower five years ago when he came out with the idea to "blow up" Milwaukee County government.  With his fellow Greater Milwaukee Committee members - most notably current Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele - he had commissioned the Public Policy Forum to device the best way to end Milwaukee County.

They are actively working to put their maleficent plan into reality as they hired State Representative Joe Sanfelippo to abuse his new role in state government to craft a bill which will gut the operating budget for the Milwaukee County Board.

In a gushing lovefest article about Lubar, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel inadvertently lays bare the real reason Lubar, Abele and the other plutocrats are seeking the end of the county board:
In a perfect world, Lubar says the board, now composed of 18 supervisors, would be sliced by two-thirds and the body would no longer act like "sand in the gearbox."

"I know the bill for the whole bunch of them is over $6 million and all they do is impede so we can't go forward," says Lubar, a driving force behind efforts to reform the board.
In those two lines, he really says a mouthful.

His idea of a perfect world is one where the Voter Fairness Act does not apply. His utopia is where minorities and poor people don't have equal or effective representation in government. After all, why should the pissant common person be allowed to have representation when it only serves to get in the way of their superiors, like Lubar.

Don't these people understand he's getting old and has an unknown amount of time to rack up even more wealth?!

What Lubar, Abele and the other plutocrats are dreaming of is a county board that has no analysts, no researchers and supervisors with no time to do the work themselves so that they will act like sockpuppets who will just rubber stamp whatever the plutocrats put before them. They don't want to be bothered with what is in the best interest of the community, of the poor or of the taxpayers. They only are concerned with what is for their interest.

Or to put it yet another way, the plutocrats want to put Montgomery Burns in charge of Springfield.

But their plan just might backfire.

If their puppet Sanfelippo can ever craft a bill that will gut the board and still pass legal muster, this could end up bringing everything to a grinding halt.

 What good representative of the people could vote for a bill - regardless what it is - if they don't have a factual, independent analysis of the bill, including the social and economic impact of said bill? I know for a fact that I could never trust Abele's word and would take any report presented by his people with a grain of salt.

The only way the plutocrats will have their rubber stamp board is if they buy a majority of the seats and have them filled with their own people. This could end up being very costly for them in the long run.

I've said this before, but if they were really, truly interested in saving money and in making government more efficient, they would look at removing the county executive's position.

But I'm afraid that their money- and power-fueled egos won't allow them to think that far ahead.

1 comment:

  1. Let's recall Abele I am sick to death of this bait and switch bulls***.

    ReplyDelete