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Scott Walker Cuts Higher-Ed Budget, Funds Corporate Welfare

Scott Walker Cuts Higher-Ed Budget, Funds Corporate Welfare

Meet Scott Walker, corporate whore and lousy gambler (with taxpayer money, of course).

The Wisconsin governor says he should be America’s next president because he’s a proven budget whacker who, by golly, has dressed down teachers, slashed funding for higher education, busted unions, and gone after welfare recipients. He’s the Koch brothers’ favorite because he’s tough on government “moochers” — unless, of course, you’re a corporate moocher. If a corporation wants public money, well, then Walker’s your go-to Wisconsin whore.

Wesley Edens could vouch for the governor’s willingness to bestow public favors on big men with big money. Edens is a New York City hedge-fund gazillionaire who bought the Milwaukee Bucks pro basketball team last year. Showing the usual ethical perversity that afflicts “private enterprise” sports owners, this flimflamming carpetbagger immediately demanded a $250 million subsidy from Wisconsin and Milwaukee taxpayers to build a sparkling new sports palace for him. Now, one gamble that’s a more certain loser than throwing your money at Las Vegas casinos is letting public officials throw our tax dollars into building new stadiums for profiteering owners of sports teams. And Scotty was willing to take that bet.

Walker and officials of Milwaukee County are betting the farm to subsidize a flashy basketball arena for the Bucks. “Oh golly,” one can imagine Scott squealing at Edens with unseemly delight, “it will be my exquisite pleasure to ramrod the deal through my Republican legislature for you, and I’ll also schmooze secretly with Democratic officials of Milwaukee County to get them to put out for you!” Edens did his part to consummate this back-alley affair by doling out ownership shares of his basketball team to prominent Republicans, including Jon Hammes, a developer who just happens to be co-chairman of the national finance committee for Walker’s presidential run.

The governor told the public that the $250 million bet of their money was “just simple mathematics.” But his glib assurance just explains why these scams are sure losers — officials such as Walker are dupes for corporate hucksters, and taxpayers lost the bet that Walker made on their behalf. From The New York Times: “Based on state legislative estimates, and talks with negotiators, the real public cost of the Bucks arena, with interest payments and risky bond offerings tossed in, stands at about $500 million, or nearly twice what was proposed a year ago.”

Plus, team owners are being sold an $8 million piece of land for $1, getting millions of dollars worth of site-development costs for free, being given a $35 million parking garage (from which they’ll collect half the revenue) and getting about $120 million for selling the naming rights for the public arena.

Worse, in brokering this corporate bonanza, Walker let the Bucks owners nix a public demand to have a referendum on the gamble. He also let them ignore the city’s demand that they pledge not to move the team out of Milwaukee during the 30-year lease on the arena. That part is particularly egregious, since hedge funds make their money by underpaying for a property, goosing up its value with things like public subsidies, then selling it at a premium, and skedaddling with the profits. Even though the owners would have to pay a penalty for selling and scooting out of town, under Walker’s loose deal they’d still pocket about $700 million in profit. If you’re keeping score, that’s negative $500 million to the taxpayers and upward of $700 million in the plus column for Walker’s corporate buddies.

In mid-August, the simultaneously beady-eyed and sleepy-eyed governor signed this $250 million (or closer to $500 million, counting all the little “perks”) giveaway of public money into law. Compounding his sleaziness is the fact that, only one month earlier, Walker had slashed $250 million from the budget of the University of Wisconsin. So, again, if you’re keeping score on Scott, corporations get the goldmine, students get the shaft. And this dupe now wants America to trust him to negotiate with Russia, Iran, and China? If a hedge-fund huckster can snooker him, think what Putin could do!

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: Republican presidential candidate Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (C) listens to Steve Small following a town hall meeting at the Xtreme Manufacturing warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada on September 14, 2015. REUTERS/Las VegasSun/Steve Marcus

5 Things To Remember About ‘The Donald’

5 Things To Remember About ‘The Donald’

For years Donald Trump has boasted about what a great president he would make, brashly calling out pols as finks and phonies while never actually running for any elected office himself. That came to an end Tuesday morning with a rally at the Midtown Manhattan tower that bears his name.

“I don’t like what I see happening to America,” Trump said in a video released by his campaign. Over footage of America’s infrastructure collapsing, businesses shuttering, and unemployment, he continued: “Our politicians are all talk, no action.”

Echoing comments he made in January, when he vowed to make a “beauty” of a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, Trump said: “Millions of people are flowing across our southern border. We need to build a real wall.“

“With all of this, our country has tremendous potential,” he concluded. “Let’s make America great again.”

Trump, the tycoon who parlayed his own cartoonish imperiousness into a successful reality television career, enters a highly congested Republican primary field. What he lacks in political bona fides he will try to compensate with money ($9 billion in assets), name recognition, and swagger.

As he enters his first political campaign, here are five things from The Donald’s formidable career to keep in mind.

1. He likes to file for bankruptcy.

Trump has repeatedly said that he would run the country the way he’s run his businesses. Which is not exactly inspiring given that, despite his considerable wealth, Trump has filed for corporate bankruptcy four times.

The Donald himself has largely emerged from these bankruptcies with his personal wealth intact because when these LLCs, limited partnerships,and corporations go under, it’s rarely his money at stake, according to a 2011 report in Forbes. 

“I’ve cut debt — by the way, this isn’t me personally, it’s a company,” Trump said. “Basically I’ve used the laws of the country to my advantage and to other people’s advantage … just as many, many others on top of the business world have.”

Trump praises himself for “great timing” by jumping ship from his grandiose projects when they’re about to fail.

2. He built his political following by becoming a “birther.”

In the run-up to the 2012 election (in which he did not run), Trump garnered publicity — and drove up his ratings for The Apprentice — by being one of the most outspoken, prominent Republicans to insist that President Obama was born in Kenya.

“We don’t know a thing about this guy,” Trump said at the time. “There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president.”

Shortly after President Obama released his long-form birth certificate in April 2011, he proceeded to roast a stone-faced Trump in merciless fashion at the White House Correspondents Dinner:

No one is happier — no one is prouder — to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like: “Did we fake the moon landing?” “What really happened in Roswell?” and “Where are Biggie and Tupac?” All kidding aside, obviously we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example… in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice… you fired Gary Busey. And these are the kinds of decisions that would keep me up at night.


Continue reading: He believes in nothing but Trump.

3. He doesn’t stand for anything except Trump.

Trump’s record of political donations and stances on the issues makes it clear that there’s only one thing he’s truly, passionately, steadfastly in favor of — Trump.

Despite casting himself as the model “bootstrap” businessman and constantly railing against government handouts, his own empire has relied heavily on corporate welfare — the kind that bolsters the real estate industry.

Before becoming a loud, vitriolic birther, Trump was actually a supporter of Barack Obama in 2008 — and that isn’t even the most dramatic flip. While he has donated to both parties, he has given money to more Democrats than Republicans: In the 2010 election cycle, he gave $10,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, compared with $25,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

“I’ve always been very political because I need zone changes,” Trump has said. “When you need zone changes, you’re political. Like, to build Trump Tower I needed a zone change. So, you know, I’ll support a Democrat, a Republican, whatever the hell I have to support, I need that zone change.”

4. He doesn’t want people looking at his books.

It’s long been speculated that the reason Trump never ran (until this year) is that he didn’t want to subject his tangled financial history to the scrutiny that comes with running a presidential campaign.

When Trump declared he would not run in 2011, Wayne Barrett, who has been writing about Trump’s shady dealings for a long time, laid out the case for why Trump would never dare make a bid for the presidency. Writing in The Daily Beast,  Barrett outlined two decades of Trump’s empire building with a “catalog of criminals and cads,” which featured multiple ties to organized crime; a partner who had been prosecuted for human trafficking; associates implicated in drug charges and stock swindles; and more.

At the time, Barrett wrote that “a gang of questionable associations like this would’ve converted a candidacy into a scandal, damaging his star status,” had Trump decided to run.

5. He does not believe that human activity causes climate change — or in environmental protection of any kind.

Trump has been pretty unequivocal on this point. He has loudly and proudly called the whole climate problem a hoax, openly mocked anyone who disagrees, and once referred to the science behind climate change as “very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullsh*t.”

In his long, rambling announcement speech on Tuesday morning, Trump referred to a Chinese “military island in the middle of the South China sea” and then decried the environmental regulations that he said would prohibit Americans from doing such a thing, because “we would never build in an ocean.”

Oh, and he hates windmills. He unsuccessfully went to court to try to get them removed from the area surrounding his golf course in Scotland. He believes they are an aesthetic crime, a “horrible intrusion” that is “ruining communities,” and a killer of bald eagles (a metaphor, perhaps?).

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

GOP’s Libertarians Aren’t All That Libertarian

GOP’s Libertarians Aren’t All That Libertarian

In Republican primary politics, the libertarian brand carries cachet, which explains why many of the GOP’s presidential candidates are battling to position themselves as the one true standard-bearer of small government conservatism. But a funny thing is happening on the way to the Republican primaries: The whole notion of small government libertarianism has been hijacked by politicians who often represent the opposite.

Take Lindsey Graham, whose political action committee is staffing up for the South Carolina Republican senator’s possible presidential run. In an interview with an Iowa newspaper earlier this month, Graham said: “Libertarians want smaller government. Count me in. Libertarians want oversight of government programs and making sure that your freedoms are not easily compromised. Count me in.”

Yet, despite that rhetoric, Graham has been one of the most outspoken proponents of mass surveillance. Indeed, in response to news that the National Security Agency has been vacuuming up millions of Americans’ telephone calls, there was no sign of Graham’s purported small government libertarianism. Instead, he said in 2013, “I’m glad that activity is going on” and declared, “I’m sure we should be doing this.”

Similarly, Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz has reportedly raised millions for his presidential bid, after launching his campaign on a promise of smaller government.

What Cruz doesn’t say in his speeches railing on “unelected bureaucrats” is that he has spent much of his professional life as an unelected government employee, first as an appointee in George W. Bush’s administration, then as an appointee in Texas’ state government. Also unmentioned in Cruz’s announcement speech at Liberty University was data showing that the conservative school has received one of the largest amounts of government Pell Grant funding of any nonprofit university in America, according to the Huffington Post. That fact can be described with a lot of words, but “libertarian” probably isn’t one of them.

Then there is Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, the candidate who most openly embraces the libertarian brand.

As a senator, he more than others has strayed from GOP orthodoxy and taken some genuinely strong libertarian positions — most notably against the ongoing drug war, surveillance, and the militarization of America’s domestic police force. He has also tried to foment a discussion about the taboo topic of government subsidies to corporations. In January, he said that “we will not cut one penny from the safety net until we’ve cut every penny from corporate welfare” and last month he said that if elected president, he’d slash business subsidies “so I don’t have to cut the Social Security of someone who lives on Social Security.”

However, Paul’s pledges about corporate welfare apparently do not extend to the Pentagon, which has often been a big repository of such welfare for defense contractors. As Time reported in March, “Just weeks before announcing his 2016 presidential bid … Paul is completing an about-face on a longstanding pledge to curb the growth in defense spending.” The magazine noted that he introduced legislation “calling for a nearly $190 billion infusion to the defense budget over the next two years — a roughly 16 percent increase.”

Additionally, Paul is anti-choice on the abortion issue. That’s right, for all of his anti-big-government rhetoric, he supports using the power of huge government to ban women from making their own choices about whether or not to terminate pregnancies.

While few believe across-the-board libertarianism is a pragmatic governing strategy, some of that ideology’s core tenets — like respect for privacy and civil liberties — are valuable, constructive ideals. But when the most famous libertarian icons so often contradict themselves, those ideals are undermined. They end up seeming less like the building blocks of a principled belief system and more like talking points propping up a cheap brand — one designed to hide shopworn partisanship.

David Sirota is a senior writer at the International Business Times and the best-selling author of the books Hostile Takeover, The Uprising, and Back to Our Future. Email him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. 

Photo: U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Gage Skidmore via Flickr)

Your Dollars At Work — For The Rich

Your Dollars At Work — For The Rich

Conservative pundits and politicians routinely divide our U.S. economy into two totally distinct spheres. We have the noble private sector over here, they tell us, and the bumbling, bloated public sector over there.

In reality, of course, we have just one economy, with the private and public sectors inextricably entangled. Each year, in fact, hundreds of billions of tax dollars end up flowing directly into the private sector.

The federal government alone, a new Congressional Budget Office report calculates, annually spends $500 billion — that’s half a trillion dollars — to purchase goods and services from private companies. State and local governments spend many billions more on top of that.

We’re not talking trickle here — we’re talking cascade, as our elected leaders rush to privatize services that public employees previously provided.

This massive privatization of everything from prisons to public schools hasn’t done much of anything to make the United States a better place to live.

On the other hand, this privatization has paid off quite handsomely for America’s most affluent. They’re collecting ever more generous paychecks, courtesy of the tax dollars the rest of us are paying.

In Washington, D.C., for instance, top officials of the private companies that run many of the city’s charter schools are taking in double or triple what traditional public schools take in, or even more.

The CEO at one company that runs five of these charters, The Washington Post recently reported, pulled in $1.3 million in 2013. That’s nearly five times the pay that went to the top public official responsible for the District of Columbia’s 100-plus traditional public schools.

America’s taxpayer-funded military contractors would, of course, consider that chump change. The CEO at Lockheed Martin, for one, personally pocketed over $25 million in 2013.

So do you like this idea of executives in power suits raking in multiple millions of your tax dollars?

Rhode Island state senator William Conley sure doesn’t. He and four of his colleagues have just introduced legislation that would stop the stuffing of tax dollars into the pockets of wildly overpaid corporate executives.

Conley’s bill directs Rhode Island to start “giving preference in the awarding of state contracts” to business enterprises whose highest-paid execs receive no more than 25 times the pay of their median — most typical — workers.

Back in the middle of the 20th century, only a handful of top corporate executives ever made more than 25 times the pay of the average worker. Today, by contrast, only a handful of top execs make less than 100 times median pay.

If Conley’s bill becomes law, the ramifications could be huge.

That’s because we may soon know, for the first time ever, the exact ratio between CEO and median worker pay at every major American corporation that trades on Wall Street.

Five years ago, legislation that mandates this disclosure passed Congress and made it into law. Intense corporate lobbying has been stalling its enforcement, but the stall may soon end. The federal Securities and Exchange Commission finally appears ready to issue the regulations needed to enforce full pay ratio disclosure.

CEO-worker pay comparisons for individual companies will likely start hitting the headlines the year after next. With these new stats, taxpayers will be able to see exactly which corporations feeding at the public trough are doing the most to make America more unequal.

With this information, average taxpayers could then do a great deal. They could, for starters, follow Senator Conley’s lead in Rhode Island and urge their lawmakers to reward — with our tax dollars — only those corporations that pay their workers fairly.

OtherWords columnist Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, edits the inequality monthly Too Much. His latest book is The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970.

Distributed by OtherWords

Photo: Brendan Hoffman via Flickr