at Pravda.ru
Scott Walker: Satan's Candidate
July 20, 2015
At the beginning of my recent article, Will Wisconsin's Ignorance Become America's Ignorance Again? (Pravda.Ru, 03/04/2015), I stated, "Ever since America's politicized, corrupt, unethical, corporate-controlled Supreme Court decided the cases of Citizens United vs. FEC (2010) and McCutcheon vs. FEC (2014), I have written numerous articles for Pravda.Ru describing how these two decisions destroyed the ability of working class Americans to exercise their once fundamental right to freedom of speech and unleashed a torrent of unbridled political corruption that is rapidly replacing democracy with corporate fascism."
As the machinations of Wisconsin governor, and newly announced presidential candidate, Scott Walker graphically illustrate, these words are not hyperbole.
A recent article by Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News (Walker Goes Scott-free As State Judges Shut Down Fundraising Probe) reveals that, during a 2012 recall election, Walker met with Wall Street billionaire Paul Singer, and with a deputy of hedge fund billionaire Stephen Cohen. After these meetings, Singer donated $250,000 and Cohen one million dollars to the pro-Walker group Wisconsin Club for Growth.
Isikoff also writes that other contributions were made by entities with "major interests before Walker's administration." These included a $700,000 dollar contribution from a "Florida-based mining company seeking an iron-ore concession from the Wisconsin state government, and more than $1.5 million from home appliance magnate John Menard Jr., whose firm later received $1.8 million dollars in tax breaks from Walker's economic development agency."
But even this wasn't enough for Walker. David Sirota and Andrew Perez of International Business Times revealed that Walker, a college dropout, "championed a high-profile proposal to spend a quarter of a billion dollars to help finance a new Milwaukee Bucks arena-all the while pushing to slash roughly the same amount from funding for higher education. One of the primary beneficiaries of this proposal is Jon Hammes, a part owner of the Bucks and "a longtime Walker donor and Republican financier who has just been appointed by the governor to head his presidential fundraising operation." Hammes' real estate firm has "also bought parcels of downtown land near the location of the proposed new arena."
Walker reelected
So how did Wisconsin voters react to these outrages? Walker not only won the recall election, he was reelected governor in 2014. And just a few days ago, as if to underscore how thoroughly and unabashedly the corruption unleashed by Citizens United and McCutcheon has polluted every branch of government, the Wisconsin Supreme Court-described by some as the worst in the United States-not only terminated a criminal investigation into Walker's fundraising, it also ordered that all documents related to this investigation be destroyed. What makes this decision especially egregious is that, according to Isikoff, at least two of the so-called "justices" who ruled in Walker's favor had themselves been elected "with $10 million in contributions from outside advocacy groups, which don't disclose their donors and which were the very subjects of the Walker investigation."
In my Pravda.Ru articles Democracy In the Hands of Idiots, Parts I, II, and III, each written in the wake of one of Walker's election "victories," I queried how voters could be so accepting of, or oblivious to, the undermining of democracy and the political corruption propagated by Walker and his cronies. Now I think I have found the answer: For some esoteric reason political beliefs, like religion, appear to be deeply internalized and personalized to such an extent that an attack on them is frequently viewed as an attack on a person's very essence; therefore, the more illogical a person's political beliefs are shown to be, the more tenaciously they cling to them. This, in turn (in a perverse, and often destructive, paradigm of reverse psychology), means that far too many voters would rather support corrupt and mendacious politicians than admit they were duped.
Great lies are not recognized until it is too late
As Adolf Hitler wrote, great lies are usually not recognized by the masses until it is too late. The same holds true for great evil. Tragically for America, what this means is that Scott Walker, despite all the corrupt machinations that have catapulted him into the national spotlight, may actually have a chance to capture the presidency. And, while I know that one article by a lowly Pravda.Ru writer cannot prevent this, I want to go on record as stating openly that a Walker presidency will unleash an evil upon the United States, and the world, that may be impossible to recover from.
This is why I call Scott Walker Satan's candidate. I'll admit, I put a great deal of thought into doing this. I know that labeling someone as satanic carries with it connotations of religiosity and absolutism, perhaps even fanaticism, that is not conducive to the more analytical punditry that often surrounds political discourse.
But then I remembered a hypothesis I've expressed in several previous Pravda.Ru articles: Evil is the primary motivating force behind much of human behavior; consequently, most conflicts, and choices, are not between good and evil, but between greater and lesser evils.
I also realized that if the world can acknowledge that some people personify goodness to such a degree that they are called saints, then it logically follows that some people personify evil to such a degree that they can be called satanic. To sugarcoat such evil allows tyrannies to be born and/or prosper.
This sugarcoating also means that telling the difference between the saintly and the satanic is not so easy, especially since both often claim to have the support of God. Walker, in fact, is already playing the "God" card to divert attention from his corruption, mendacity, and hypocrisy.
But, if one is astute enough, the difference can be discerned. Saintly people act selflessly and ignore their own egos and ambitions for the greater good. By doing so, they usually encounter vociferous and violent opposition from the rich and powerful.
Satanic people place their own egos and ambitions above others, yet are adroit at concealing this fact by feigning selflessness. But they can still be spotted because they are promoted, protected, and insulated by other satanic people-like Walker's political cronies on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
So, in closing, I cannot help but paraphrase the words of Arthur Kirkland, the idealistic attorney played by Al Pacino in the 1979 movie And Justice For All: If Scott Walker and his billionaire backers succeed in their putsch for the presidency, then "something really wrong is going on here."
David R. Hoffman, Legal Editor of Pravda.Ru
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This article appeared
at The Nation
How Scott Walker Built a Career Sending Wisconsin Inmates to Private Prisons
In his years as a state legislator, Walker repeatedly pushed for higher incarceration and a bigger role for the private prison industry.
By Scott Keyes
February 26, 2015
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (AP Photo/Morry Gash, File).
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is perhaps best known for dramatically weakening public and private unions in his state—something that has propelled him to the top of the 2016 Republican presidential field.
Over Walker's long career in state politics, he also accomplished another transformation: increasing Wisconsin's incarceration rate while making sure private companies had a larger role managing those prisoners.
He rarely talks about it anymore, but Walker's efforts as a young legislator didn't just change the Wisconsin criminal justice system—they helped fill Walker's campaign coffers with money from private prison operators as he ascended from the state legislature to the governor’s mansion.
During his nine years in the state house, from 1993 to 2002, Walker often campaigned as a tough-on-crime Republican who promised new efforts "to protect our families, our senior citizens and our property."
Walker pushed dozens of proposals in the state house to lengthen criminal penalties, for everything from perjury to privacy invasion to intoxicated boating. In just the 1997–98 legislative session, Walker authored or co-sponsored twenty-seven different bills that either expanded the definition of crimes, increased mandatory minimums for offenders, or curbed the possibility of parole.
Walker's biggest victory in this area was the state's "Truth-in-Sentencing" legislation, which ended parole opportunities for many categories of prisoners, and increased prison time for others. "The time has come to keep violent criminals in prison for their full terms," Walker said in 1996 as he advocated for the bill. Later, as chair of the state assembly's Committee on Corrections and the Courts in 1998, Walker shepherded the legislation into state law.
At the time, Walker openly credited the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) for Truth-in-Sentencing's success. "Clearly ALEC had proposed model legislation," Walker told American RadioWorks in 2002. "And probably more important than just the model legislation, [ALEC] had actually put together reports and such that showed the benefits of truth-in-sentencing and showed the successes in other states. And those sorts of statistics were very helpful to us when we pushed it through, when we passed the final legislation."
While Walker advocated imprisoning more people, he was also paradoxically decrying overpopulation in Wisconsin's prisons. "Massive overcrowding threatens our public safety," Walker announced in a press release less than a month after Truth-in-Sentencing was passed. Indeed, by the early 2000s, there were more than 20,000 prisoners in a prison system originally designed for 10,000.
Walker conceded that his bills imposing harsher sentences exacerbated the problem. "Criminals will be spending more time in jail, and that means the population will increase as well," he told the Wauwatosa News-Times.
His solution wasn't to stop imprisoning nonviolent offenders, however, but to put them in private prisons. Walker, like many state legislators during this time, argued that private prisons cost less yet deliver the same quality as their public counterparts.
Decades of research, however, have shown the opposite to be true: across the country, private prisons have been plagued by lax security, falsifying records to cover up understaffing, rampant prisoner mistreatment, and in many cases actually cost taxpayers more money than public prisons.
Private prisons also have a clear incentive to increase prison populations—in fact, most private prisons demand a "lockup quota" whereby the state guarantees that most private prison beds will be filled (or would pay for unused beds if crime rates dip). The quota is typically 90 percent, though in some instances can be as high as 100 percent.
Walker still wanted private prisons to play a big role in Wisconsin. But the tricky part was that Wisconsin laws forbid private prisons inside the state. So Walker found a pretty good work-around. In 1997, he voted to allow the Wisconsin Department of Corrections to ship inmates to private prisons in other states. This built off legislation Walker co-sponsored in 1995 that first allowed Wisconsin to ship inmates off to public prisons elsewhere.
Following the bill's passage, when the DOC formally proposed a contract in 1998 to ship inmates to out-of-state private prisons, Walker was a vocal advocate, boasting online about his work on the matter. "This plan keeps inmates locked up and it saves taxpayers money," Walker said.
Throughout 1990s and early 2000s, with Walker at the helm of the assembly's Committee on Corrections and the Courts, Wisconsin shipped around 5,000 inmates to Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Minnesota. Most of the prisoners, along with almost $45 million in Wisconsin taxpayer money, went to private prisons operated by one company: the Corrections Corporation of America.
CCA is the largest private prison operator in the country, running more than sixty prisons with over 90,000 beds across the country, and generating $1.7 billion in revenue. It's the biggest player in a private prison industry in the United States that has spent $45 million in the last decade on political contributions and lobbyists.
In states across the country, the private prison industry was pushing legislatures to send more prisoners its way, and this was certainly the case in Wisconsin. When ALEC was providing the text for the Truth-in-Sentencing, CCA was a corporate member of the group. (It left ALEC in 2010).
CCA was also a major contributor to Scott Walker's political career. During Walker's decade in the State Assembly, just fifteen people gave the maximum contribution to his campaigns. Two worked for CCA, including then-CEO Doc Crants and then-board member Henri Wedell, who owns $25 million in CCA stock. Both men live in Tennessee, not Wisconsin. Over the course of Walker's political career, CCA executives have contributed more than $7,500 to his campaigns.
Though Walker later conceded that CCA stood to benefit from Truth-in-Sentencing, he shrugged off any notion of pay-for-play. "Often times that's your greatest challenge, as a legislator, is trying to weed through what everybody's hidden agenda is, and figure out who’s giving you credible information and in many cases playing one interest off of another to try and figure out what the truth is," Walker said. "More information to me is better."
After Truth-in-Sentencing passed and Wisconsin began alleviating its overcrowded prisons by shipping inmates to out-of-state prisons run by CCA, Walker still wanted to open private prisons in Wisconsin.
"We are sending thousands of inmates to public and private facilities in other states," Walker said in December 1998. “It only makes sense that we allow a private firm to build and operate an accredited facility in our own state. The jobs and taxes that come from a prison should stay in our own state.” In the following legislative session, he proposed at least three separate bills to privatize prisons in the state.
Each one failed, in part because labor unions opposed them. Democrats, who controlled the state Senate, also opposed the prison privatization bills, and even fellow Republican and then-Governor Tommy Thompson didn't approve of Walker's plan.
In the meantime, Walker still did his best to ensure the flow of Wisconsin inmates to out-of-state prisons. For instance, he proposed delaying the opening of a new public prison—despite his earlier outrage about overcrowding in state prisons—in order to prevent the return of Wisconsin inmates from out-of-state private prisons. In recent years, Wisconsin has sent fewer and fewer inmates to out of state prisons as the overall incarceration rate dropped, though it retains the legal ability to ship inmates out.
In 2002, Walker left the State Assembly after getting elected Milwaukee county executive, but his affinity for private prisons continued. Though he was no longer in a position to legalize them in Wisconsin, there were still favors that could be doled out to companies like CCA. In 2007, for example, Walker's budget proposal included an initiative to privatize the county's prison transport service. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "Walker's budget lists a $1.5 million cost to hire TransCor for the last 10 months of 2008." TransCor is a wholly owned subsidiary of CCA. The county's finance committee unanimously rejected Walker's prison transport plan.
Despite his significant achievements in pushing more incarceration and more privatization of prison services in Wisconsin—surely among the top achievements of his early career—Walker never boasts about it these days.
In fact, by 2010, Walker disavowed his earlier support for private prisons. "We're not going to outsource correctional officers…because that's obviously a vital public safety issue that should be done by public sector employees," he said during a radio interview, sounding markedly different from state representative Walker.
When the host pressed him on his past support for privatization, Walker said it was simply a "safety issue" due to prison overcrowding. He did not mention his legislation increasing prison sentences, his opposition to new public prisons or the contributions he received from executives at CCA.
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Scott Walker For America
How Many Lies Can Scott Walker Cram Into One Ad?
Further reading:
Obama, in Oklahoma, Takes Reform Message to the Prison Cell Block
This article appeared at
the Tomato Bubble
The president is intent on improving life behind bars. To make his points, he became the first sitting president to pay a visit to a federal prison.
REBUTTAL BY
With regard to this issue of excessive sentencing for non-violent drug offenders, we 'Law and Order' paleo-conservatives here at The Anti-New York Times are in total agreement with the bleeding heart libtards. Justice should always be tempered with mercy. The idea of taking a non-violent young man - who just needs a good strong kick in the rump and a solid year of boot camp with moral rehabilitation - and locking him up in the small cage of a larger madhouse is as cruel as it is counter-productive.
But as it is with all things Marxist, Obongo's new drive to grant amnesty to "non-violent" prisoners is not what it appears to be. Far from being fooled by the Big Zero's sudden outburst of compassion for such cases, we are alarmed by it.
The cunning and cold-hearted Demonoid Obongo surely wants something in return from these prisoners in exchange for releasing them.
The article quotes Obongo:
"We have a tendency sometimes to almost take for granted or think it's normal that so many young people have been locked up. It's not normal. It's not what happens in other countries. What is normal is teenagers doing stupid things. What is normal is young people making mistakes....
When they describe their youth and their childhood, these are young people who made mistakes that aren't that different than the mistakes I made and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made."To pacify those concerned about the possible release of violent felons, the Homo-In-Chief added the obligatory:
"There are people who need to be in prison, and I don't have tolerance for violent criminals."The unseen danger of this 'turn-em-loose' initiative lies in what it might grow into. Beyond the approximately 12,000 federal prisoners serving excessive sentences for drug crimes, there are much larger numbers of inmates in state and local prisons who, by the same standards, should also be liberated. That would add up to about 500,000 prisoners that could, theoretically, be turned loose if new sentencing guidelines are retroactively enacted by Obongo and the Republican't Congress.
Then what?
What's wrong with a mass release of prisoners if they are non-violent, you ask? Well, there are several problems:
1. Obama wants to grant them "voting rights". Add another 500,000 Marxist Democrats to the voting rolls.
2. Given the sorry state of rehabilitation and support structures in their communities and society at large; and given their long job absences and criminal records, these men, unless placed on the welfare rolls and given a rent-free apartment (possibly in suburban areas), will soon turn back to crime.
3. Here's the kicker: many of these prisoners only appear to have been excessively punished. The dirty little secret that Sulzberger the Seditious and Obongo the Merciful know, but won't tell you about, is that many of these "excessive sentences" were actually the result of law enforcement officials using whatever means possible to take some very dangerous actors off of the streets, including suspected murderers. Just like the brutal but evasive gangster Al Capone was finally incarcerated for the relatively minor offense of "tax invasion", so too were some of the 500,000 "non-violent" prisoners that could be set free if Obongo's logic plays out fully.
The potential prospect of 100's of 1000's unemployable Black men suddenly being set free and cared for by America's Phony Pharaoh is chilling indeed. From their loyal ranks, the Big Zero's Black right hand man who runs Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson, could secretly recruit and train an ISIS type army of cutthroats. Even if just 100,000 of the 500,000 have violent inclinations, imagine what type of organized havoc they could wreak at the behest of the Demon in the White House.
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The openly Communist activists from the Ferguson, MO "Black Lives Matter" protest of 2014 chanted:
"Won’t Be No Police Brutality, When the Revolution Comes. Won't Be No Mass Incarceration, When the Revolution Comes."
Could this be the beginning of that "Civilian Defense Force" that Obongo let slip during the 2008 campaign? Remember this line:
"We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."
Obama Civilian Security
Far fetched, you say? Hardly! The thing to remember about Obongo is that he is an immoral, soulless, Communist monster who is capable of anything - including genocide. If he thinks he can get away with martial law and genocide; he will try it. That is why his masters installed him - to do the things that even lesser devils such as a Bush or an FDR wouldn't stoop to - like opening up the prison doors of America.
Bane Impression (Prison Scene) [SPOILER!]
Predictive programming? In the 2012 film, 'The Dark Knight Rises', the villain known as "Bane" liberates and arms the prisoners of Gotham.
* * *
Boobus Americanus 1: I read in the New York Times today that Obama wants to release non-violent prisoners.
Boobus Americanus 2: It's about time. I would never hire one of them, but they should be set free.
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