Fitzwalkerstan A Year Later, Democracy Smashed

After being in what can only be described as something similar to a political coma for the past year I finally felt compelled to issue an update as to the state of things in what was once Wisconsin. What we now have is essentially a unitary state where the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government have effectively been coopted and neutralized by the forces of oligarchic kleptocracy. This has been accomplished by a combination of three processes: gerrymandering on the legislative level which means a state that voted for Obama for president and Tammy Baldwin for United States senator has a legislature controlled by corporate controlled nuts, voter supression which reinforces gerrymandering, and of course most importantly money, tons and tons of money.

The immediate effects of all this are apparent in the push for unregulated environmental destruction in the forms of sand fracking and iron sulfide miining in the western and northern parts of the state where extractive interests outside of the state will be given free reign removed from local and state ordinances protecting public health and safety. Other instances include Walker's turning away federal money for Medicaid which means upwards of 90,000 people will be without health insurance and further compounded by the state's refusal to establish an insurance exchange in a cynical effort to try and crash the Affordable Care Act. In the area of education the ongoing effort to destroy public education after the demonization of the teaching profession continue with the voucher program which is accompanied by further deregulation and loss of local accountability.

I would hope maybe the Democratic Party would finally learn from the debacles of the past four years and put forth someone who clearly stands apart from the status quo.So far there is one candidate of record , Mary Burke, who quite frankly seems to embody neo-liberal policies of class surrender and incremental corporatism. There is an alternative which is a worthy primary challenger that the party needs if it hopes to reclaim the energy and promise of the uprising, namely Kathleen Vinehout. More on her to come.