Walker, Intolerant Far-Right Driving Away Entrepreneurs, Creative People
[Updated 1:45 p.m.] So Wisconsin is not where young people want to start their businesses.
Surprise? Hardly.
Scott Walker and his party's far-right-financed talk radio megaphones are driving an increasingly tolerant, diverse and environmentally-sensitive generation to run for the borders - - Chicago, the Twin Cities, further, anywhere to escape the propaganda, the policies and the anger behind the GOP/Tea Party message:
'We politically dismiss the very cities in which you have been studying and where you'd most likely live should you start a business here.
'We obstruct the modern urban rail lines upon which you and your car-free friends are favoring, and we have been doing that to Milwaukee for nearly two decades. We know many young college graduates prefer transit and bike lanes, but we starve those modes over road-building because that's where we get a lot of campaign money, and other big GOP funders own the fossil fuel sector.
[Side note: Urban writer and thinker Richard Florida heard complaints years ago from an invited group of young business people in downtown Milwaukee who'd returned to Wisconsin, and liked the Big City/Third-Fifth ward walkable lifestyle, but who said out loud on their relocation here: "Where's the light rail?" True story. I was there.]
'We are working overtime to make it harder for minorities to vote, as well all city-dwellers, because we know you tend to vote Democratic.
'We fear your diversity. We have outlawed same-sex marriage. We even debated secession at our most recent state party convention because we suffer from Obama Derangement Syndrome, a form of one-party hysteria.
'We much preferred an America that looks, behaves and feels like 1952, where everyone knew their place. We are crushing public health and reproductive services for women. We openly disrespect Native Americans by legalizing disparaging school logos at the very time there is pressure in the Nation's Capital to end the practice.
'Our narrow definition of outdoors enjoyment has less to do with low-impact stewardship and more to do with what consumptive and destructive lobbies want, like more ATV trails, gun ranges and the use of dogs and traps to help kill wolves considered spiritually crucial to Ojibwe people who are among the original inhabitants here and who ceded the very lands up north now being heavily disrespected and exploited.
'For good measure, Wisconsin government under Walker has allowed a mining company run by political donors to help write a special bill to enable their out-of-state coal-mining business to dig the world's largest open-pit iron mine very close to the Bad River Ojibwe's reservation and wild-rice, water-dependent rice beds.
'The company was allowed to monitor the proposed mining site with assault-rifle-toting-but-not-properly-licensed 'guards' even though the site owners receive tax breaks in exchange for keeping it open to the general public. Then the same special-interest water carriers wrote another bill which Walker signed to close off that access.
'In fact, Walker and his people are discouraging everyone's access to the outdoors, and state waters which are Constitutionally-held in trust for the public, by filling wetlands, mining polluting sand, expanding mega-daries with waste disposal problems, de-regulating groundwater supplies, allowing decades more algae pollution in streams by turning the state's environmental regulatory agency, the DNR, over to what Walker called "a chamber of commerce mentality.'In a nutshell, Walker and his allies are saying to young, visionary, open-minded young people - - 'hit the road' - - and are continually widening over-built and expensive highway lanes at the expense of other state spending, clean air, water land and open space - - to facilitate their escape.
9 comments:
Nicely said!
Thanks, Ed.
In a nutshell, Walker and his allies are saying to young, visionary, open-minded young people - - 'hit the road' [...]
Good thing our terrible public schools don't teach 'em to read, write, and do math -- not like they going to launch hugely successful business ventures with their poor educations anyhow.
Brilliant that Scott Walker has found a way to move 'em out-of-state!
Add the assault on schools (and future talent) with a jobs policy entirely based around giving established corporations all the breaks, and I'll show you a place that will stagnate.
People with talent and new ideas aren't going to look at Wisconsin with this crew in charge. Then again, WEDC's head of Entrepreneurship said it best last year, "We suck, we're bad ."
"In a nutshell, Walker and his allies are saying to young, visionary, open-minded young people - - 'hit the road' [...]
Good thing our terrible public schools don't teach 'em to read, write, and do math -- not like they going to launch hugely successful business ventures with their poor educations anyhow.
Brilliant that Scott Walker has found a way to move 'em out-of-state!"
Your ignorant post is full of grammatical and spelling errors, unsurprisingly so, dummy.
"Our narrow definition of outdoors enjoyment has less to do with low-impact stewardship and more to do with what consumptive and destructive lobbies want, like more ATV trails, gun ranges and the use of dogs and traps to help kill wolves considered spiritually crucial to Ojibwe people who are among the original inhabitants here and who ceded the very lands up north now being heavily disrespected and exploited."
You forgot one. We allow gun and bow hunting and trapping in our state parks within feet of trails. Watch so the little ones don't stray too far.
Also, legalizing marijuana doesn't look like it's gonna happen.
My wife, with a freshly-minted PhD, and I recently left Wisconsin for opportunity in a notoriously red state. We couldn't wait to leave Walkerville Wisconsin as it regresses. As lifelong residents of a state we both love, I'm sorry to say we haven't regretted our decision at all.
AnonyBob
As a high school teacher of an Advanced Placement Calculus, I work with the top 1% of the student population in the suburban Milwaukee school district where I teach. In the past three years, nearly two-thirds of my students plan to leave Wisconsin for college and NEVER RETURN. Many are going to college in the Twin Cities where they ALREADY realize they have more employment opportunities than anywhere in Wisconsin.
This is a relatively new phenomenon. Until the 2010 elections, most of my students went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and came home to begin their professional lives.
These students have seen Wisconsin literally "divided and conquered by Scott Walker" and don't want to be a part of that bitterness and ugliness in their adult lives.
With the near universal animosity directed towards me as a public school teacher in Wisconsin, I am really happy to see these students, the future leaders of Wisconsin, leave this state for greener pastures. When they talk about leaving Wisconsin, I encourage them to go. Turns out that MOST of the teachers at my high school are doing the same.
I am betting that teachers across Wisconsin are also encouraging the best and brightest students at their high schools to leave Wisconsin ASAP.
So very sad, but so very true, I am afraid. If Walker wins again, my husband and I are likely moving our family out of Wisconsin. We already run one business and are on the verge of launching another, but we won't do it here with Walker at the helm. He's created just too destructive of an environment and indeed has moved our state (and all of us) backward. To make our business idea work, we need a lively city with a strong and thriving younger demographic, many of whom would rely on public transportation and not cars. We've narrowed down our chosen cities to a couple in Minnesota and a couple in Iowa. I wish Wisconsin topped the list, I really do. It's my home.
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