Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Walker Uses Poor As Pawns In Political Ploy

I mentioned earlier, as part of another post, that Milwaukee County has 717 positions that are fully funded, but are not being filled. Even with not having spent this money, Walker is claiming that the County has a $6 million deficit to cover. I have yet to hear any explanation on where that money went, except that the cronies Walker had hired to fill the cabinet position of Economic Development has failed to do their job.

In this morning's paper, we see that Walker has another reason for not filling these positions. It is so that he can give these lavish contracts to private agencies, amazingly again, with no sign of having taken bids for the contracts.

Walker has willfully failed to fill positions in the call center, artificially causing huge delays in services being provided. The delay in these services have caused people that are in desperate need of aid in getting food on their table the help for which they are eligible.

In other words, people are being denied the help they need and qualify for, kids are going hungry, and parents are going through high levels of stress wondering how they're going to feed their children, just so Walker can try to score some political points in his perpetual run for governor.

To top it off, UW-Milwaukee has already been handing out flyers to county workers, encouraging them to apply. The promised starting salary being offered by UWM is higher than the maximum salary under the County system. Walker doesn't want to save the taxpayers money, he wants them to have to pay more, as long as someone else is doing the actual tax raising. What a weasel!

As we have seen with the community-based support programs for the mentally ill, Walker is willing to withhold necessary services, just in an effort to coerce community advocates to bend to his will. He is now withholding needed aid for people that truly need it, just to get agencies, like the Hunger Task Force, to capitulate to his way of thinking and have them endorse his wrong-headed and wrong-hearted political posturing. This is just a form of political blackmail, folks.

I urge you to call your County Board Supervisor and tell them to restore the services to the more financially and socially responsible public sector. You can find their contact information by following this link.

1 comment:

  1. It is interesting to see that these very same workers may end up at UWM and just cost us all more.

    ReplyDelete