Sunday, July 3, 2016

O'Donnell Park concrete fatality forgotten by Walker, GOP legislators

GOP ideologues who are running Wisconsin by running it into the ground have singled out the UW system for program and budget cuts to undermine the appeal of liberal arts they do not understand and to simultaneously hobble the economies and quality of life in predominately Democratic cities.

The ruling party is also content to let the state's roads and bridges turn to potholes and dust because major financiers of the Republican Party prefer to construct new, taxpayer-funded major highways and addition  lanes instead of settling for smaller contracts to simply repair what infrastructure we already have.

But even the most cynical among us would never have dreamed that Gov. Scott Walker and his legislative robots who put together the most recent two-year budget which included huge cuts to the UW system and infrastructure repairs all over the state would have refined this punitive public policy by eliminating all borrowing for major maintenance and repairs on the UW physical plant statewide.

Money that had been previously budgeted, and which is now needed to deal with leaking roofs, broken elevators, toxic asbestos - - and crumbling concrete steps, as shown in a photo accompanying this blockbuster Sunday Journal Sentinel story.

Right, parents of high school seniors: this is where you want your kids to go to school, go to classes and risk taking a bad fall- - precisely the message intended by the privatizing Walkerites who are literally degrading public education in this state.

You would think that Walker and the image-makers in charge of reviving his post-presidential campaign caricature as Punter-in-Chief would be loathe to forget what happened the last time their guy was close to young people and bad concrete, but if someone gets hurt, or worse, at least we'll know that the spinners will take their direction and PR instructions from the man at the top:
As live television coverage of the tragedy continued, an email was sent from Russell to other staffers, reading: "Harold Mester, the County Board PR flak was just on Channel 6 expressing the chairman's concern about the backlog of maintenance and politicizing this. I strongly think SKW needs to shoot back at him with both barrels for politicizing this."
Another email from the Friends of Scott Walker Campaign to Kelly Rindfleisch - Walker's top aide at the time reads: "The political concern about blame for the tragedy is clear. Make sure there is not a paper anywhere that details a problem at all."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't think they have forgotten so much as they believe we have forgotten. The Walker Administration hires a lot of PR flaks whose main job seems to be forging talking points and testing the winds for public opinion.

Anonymous said...

It wasn't Scott Walker that forgot, IT WAS THE RIGHT-WING MEDIA ECHO CHAMBER THAT BLANKETS WISCONSIN and this is lead by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

And our pro-Walker shills didn't forget, they have worked hard to make sure it is never mentioned and is flushed down the memory hole. You can blame Walker for his inability to govern which led to this tragedy, but only the media is responsible for it now being "forgotten" (more accurately, it was deep-sixed by a compliant network of media).