Walker Agency Was Campaign Prop: Now Needs Propping Up

Little wonder that Scott Walker, board chair at the economic development corporation he put together to please business executives and trade association directors who'd installed him as Governor, finds the operation of the development corporation in tatters:

It was set up less to do actual, fine-tuned lending and job-creating and more to serve as a campaign-promise delivered and ideology validated:

"More power to the private sector: see how it works."

Somehow this new private-sector-dominated, quasi-public state agency, fed Free Market magic management beans, would turn our tax millions into business activity and jobs.

The watchword at the agency set up by people who hate regulation and oversight and Nanny Statism wasn't "prudence."

It was "Presto!" And the state was open for business, of sorts.

As the Journal Sentinel puts it:

For more than a year, the state's flagship jobs agency lost track of millions of dollars in past due loans for a simple reason: The new agency never designated staff or created a department to keep tabs on repayment of its portfolio of hundreds of taxpayer-funded loans totaling $69 million.

And to prove how this replacement for the traditional Department of Commerce - could auto-pilot itself to results, perhaps greatness, the board chair - - our Governor - - would spend an inordinate amount of time flying around the country pumping up reactionary candidates, sucking up right-wing cash and re-telling his tale of union-slaying while his corporate experiment back home was turning from folly to fiasco.

So we've had a part-time Governor running an agency that can't track its loans or satisfy the feds who sent in a lot of the money that the agency is being legally or responsibly-run.

Part-time stewardship; full-time embarrassment.