Hey Paulie, explain how Wisconsin's economy is "doing better"

Seriously, what the hell is Paul Ryan talking about here?

.@SpeakerRyan "in WI we saw problems, @GovWalker offered solutions.Our economy is doing better than everyone else's" pic.twitter.com/Sg5CRdSwnI

— Jessica Arp (@news3jessica) July 18, 2016

I know Purty Pau-LIE is a fraud, but does the guy ever look at, you know, ACTUAL NUMBERS? We certainly don't lead when it comes to looking at the 50-state coincident indexes produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, which bases its number on the following.

The four state-level variables in each coincident index are nonfarm payroll employment, average hours worked in manufacturing, the unemployment rate, and wage and salary disbursements deflated by the consumer price index (U.S. city average).

That stat says Wisconsin has the worst economic growth in the Midwest since Walker took office in January 2011.



And it isn't job growth, we're dead last in the Midwest for that as well, according to the "Gold Standard" Quarterly Census on Employment and Wages.



And I'm guessing Ryan isn't talking about how the fact that even under the "Obama Economy", the Walker jobs gap is 85,000 behind the US rate as of May, even with a fluky narrowing of that gap in 2016.





Oh wait, an underperforming economy that leads to wage deflation, overwhelming corporate power and eventual fiscal disaster is exactly what Koch Boys like Paul Ryan and Scott Walker want. Now it makes sense...

WisGOP Bubble Worlds become clearer in the real one

As I pick up from the weekend, I want to pick up on a story that was completely unsurprising yet reflected good, enlightening journalism, the Capital Times’ Jessie Opien got to the bottom of who attends Gov Scott Walker’s invite-only “listening sessions.” Walker has held 50 of these taxpayer-funded events since December, which are closed to the public, with the media usually only allowed in after the meeting is done.

Walker made a memorable gaffe last month when he blamed the media for his lousy poll numbers, claming it didn't match what he heard at these listening sessions. What Opien found out is that the crowds are supportive because they include a lot of Walker appointees, Chamber of Commerce types, lobbyists and other people who lean to the right politically.

Why the disconnect? Critics of the governor's administration say it's because the listening sessions are composed of overwhelmingly friendly audiences and, in general, people more involved in politics than the average citizen.

About 15 percent of adults nationwide say they've donated to political candidates in recent years. Among the attendees for 21 listening sessions from December 10, 2015, through March 29, 2016, about 32 percent have donated to political candidates or causes.

Attendees who donated have made about 3,800 total donations totaling about $1.1 million, according to state campaign finance data. Those donations overwhelmingly — at more than 80 percent — favored conservative and Republican candidates and causes.

Such an “Unintimidated” guy, isn’t he? And you wonder why everyone outside of GOP Bubble World can’t stand him anymore?

Then again, it’s not like the typical Republican is known for having a clue about what the “Real America” looks like. Check out this selfie from another Wisconsin GOP showing off the party’s Capitol Hill interns, and try not to be blinded by the whiteness.



How can you trust anyone so disconnected from 21st Century reality with running anything, let alone give them the keys to this country's government? This a clueless crew that desperately will not try to man up and deal with what their destructive ideology and policies have wrought. And they all deserve the boot as a result.

Chillin in Chitown

Lounging in Chicago this weekend, gettibg ready to head back out for more.

I'll break down more of the Marquette Poll later, but I'll just say that if the Senate or Presidential races were really tightening, you'd be seeing a lot more ads and events in Wisconsin than we are seeing.

Back to the fun outdoors. Do the same before it heats up next week.

Record rains shows problem with WisGOP's condoning of pollution

You may have heard that the area in Wisconsin near Lake Superior has taken quite punch from Mother Nature this week. As I type, 8 counties are under a State of Emergency after up to 10 inches of rain hit on Monday, with many main roads washed out, and at least 2 deaths resulting from the floods and rushing streams.

Bayfield County officials are estimating that the damage to their roads could be as high as $2 million. And the washed-away roads aren’t the only problem to deal with in the storm’s aftermath. NBC 15 in Madison talked to UW Professor Patty Loew, who is on the Bad River Reservation in nearby Ashland County for a Native American outreach program, and Loew said other types of infrastructure were deteriorating in the area.

"There was a gas rupture and now there's no gas to any of the residences or businesses in Bad River."

To add insult to injury, they also lost power.

"The lodge and casino have emergency generators but nobody else has electricity.

Then the sanitary system maxed out.

"There's some parts of the reservation where people are telling me that there's raw sewage bubbling up from their basement," says Loew.

This sounds like a massive cleanup project with after-effects continuing well after the flood waters have subsided. The local governments are hoping for disaster assistance from both the Feds and the state government, but those funds will merely help offset what is damaged today.

The Northwoods weather disaster reminded me of another story that appeared in the news from that part of the state this week. In a unfortunate bit of irony, this article appeared on Wisconsin Public Radio news Monday, before the torrential rains came. It dealt with the local government of Bayfield County being blocked by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources from implementing regulations on a massive proposed Combined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) near Lake Superior.

The ordinance was intended to anticipate potential pollution issues related to livestock operations. Bayfield County residents are divided over the 26,000-hog operation Iowa based Reicks View Farms wants to establish in the town of Eileen. Opponents of the proposal are concerned this CAFO would endanger drinking water in the watershed of South Fish Creek, which flows into Chequamegon Bay in Lake Superior.

The creek currently has elevated phosphorous levels, which researchers attribute to existing farms in its watershed. But the impact of this pollution also extends to the over 9,000 residents of the city of Ashland who rely on Chequamegon Bay for their drinking water.

In July 2016, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources rejected Bayfield County's ordinance. County officials are appealing the decision, and are working with the DNR to see if they can revise the ordinance to make it acceptable to the state….

[Wisconsin] law's prevention-oriented language might have been the rationale for striking Bayfield County's ordinance. The DNR's reasoning basically comes down to this: The ordinance isn't necessary to achieve water quality standards because there isn't a CAFO currently contributing to pollution in the South Fish Creek watershed."

Yes, because why would we want to stop pollution of waterways before the runoff and other complications start? What’s the statewide interest in that?

And it’s not like we don’t have recent evidence of what kind of runoff damage to the streams happens due to these CAFOs and other mega-farms. We just saw it last week in northeastern Wisconsin after they got hit with a downpour.

A manure runoff in a northeast Wisconsin killed fish in a nearby creek after employees of Shiloh Dairies spread thousands of gallons of manure on a hay field, then heavy rains washed much of it into the creek.

It's impossible to tell how much manure got into the Plum Creek, which runs into the Fox River in northern Calumet County, but anytime there's a fish kill, it’s a serious incident, said Ben Uvaas, a state Department of Natural Resources agricultural specialist.

"Most of the fish species that are dead, you're looking at suckers, minnows, shiners, those kind of species," Uvaas said. "We estimate that the fish kill in the most heavily impacted stretch of this creek is going to be a pretty high percentage of the creek."

Both Calumet and neighboring Kewaunee counties have high concentrations of concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. Some families in the area can't drink the water from their wells….

Shiloh Dairies will face some level of enforcement, but the DNR must first finish an investigation, Uvaas said. Shiloh Dairies is working with the DNR to clean up what manure it can from Plum Creek.

For more on the runoff problems with Shiloh Dairy and other areas of the 920, and the crookedness that goes with it, read MAL's excellent rundown of the issue.

Which goes to a bigger point. How can we be surprised by this situation when Attorney General Brad Schimel’s Department of “Justice” constantly sides with big agribusiness (donors) over the needs of everyday Wisconsinites? The Wisconsin State Journal’s Steven Verburg had a long, front-page article this week discussing how the Environmental Protection unit at the DOJ is now down to 6 people from 10 in 2008. Not coincidentally, the state is handing out a lower number of fines and taking fewer actions against polluters in recent years, even with the news of several atrocities similar to last week's manure spills.

The DNR sent between 105 and 179 violations to environmental protection unit lawyers annually between 1989 and 2009, according to data compiled by DOJ, but the number has topped 100 only once since then.

Last year, total fines against polluters dropped to their lowest point since at least 1994, falling below $1 million for only the second time during that period, the data show.

“It is very apparent that there are very few major violations being referred to the Department of Justice,” said Carl Sinderbrand, a Madison lawyer who once worked in the environmental protection unit and has since represented the DNR and private groups in regulatory lawsuits and served as mediator in pollution cases the DOJ filed against companies.

Last week’s major rains in Northwestern Wisconsin are sadly becoming more common, as there have been record floods in many areas of the state over the last 10 years (remember when I-94 was closed between Madison and Milwaukee for several days in 2008?). This makes it all the more critical to have drinking water kept clean and potential hazards such a manure runoff from CAFOs reduced.

Instead, Brad Schimel and the rest of the Wisconsin GOP have looked the other way, and allowed the dangers to increase by giving a wink and nod to their donors allies in CAFO agribusinesses. And we shouldn’t need to wait for the next natural disaster to be reminded that clean water shouldn’t be a concern in the 2010s- it should be a RIGHT, and something that should be a constant, top priority of any government. It is not these days in Wisconsin, and that is a dereliction of duty that must be fixed ASAP.

WEDC gag order par for course for secretive Walker Admin

Gee, these actions don't seem sketchy in the least.

The proposal could have barred members of the Wisconsin Economic Develop Corp.'s board of directors from publicly divulging information about its taxpayer-funded operations and subjected them to discipline if they spoke to reporters.

Shortly after the Journal Sentinel posted a story about the proposal online Wednesday, WEDC Chief Executive Officer Mark Hogan told his fellow directors that he was shelving the proposal based on "feedback I have received from various board members."

Christa Westerberg, an attorney and vice president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, said the policy had seemed to put more emphasis on the uncompensated board members than on WEDC itself and its two-year budget of $65 million.

"That (discipline) provision I find troubling because it seems like the focus of the policy is the conduct of the board members, not the agency," Westerberg said. "If anything, we need more oversight of the agency, not less."

Props to the Journal-Sentinel's Jason Stein for drawing attention to WEDC's attempt to hide information from the public (interesting that they dig for this story, but ignore the M&A tax giveaway details), and the fact that GOP donor Mark Hogan pulled the proposal after WEDC Board members gave "feedback" is a dead giveaway on how this came down.

These orders came from the Walker Administration, and like many WisGOP maneuvers on open records, it was an attempt to sneak through the changes before anyone could figure out what they were trying to do. It's reminiscent of how the Walker Administration tried to exempt WEDC from open records laws when it came to giving information about a prospective grantee's finances. Because when you're handing out millions in taxpayer dollars to businesses, what right do the people have when it comes to evaluating their financial fitness?

That proposal was pulled back as it was brought to the public's attention via a Legislative Fiscal Bureau memo (sound familiar?). I mean, it's not like there are stories in the paper which describe how a GOP mega-donor might not give all the needed information on a business that has no track record, and get more than $1 million in taxpayer dollars from WEDC.

Paul Piikkila, of Appleton, admitted committing conspiracy to defraud his employer Horicon Bank of more than $700,000, according to a plea agreement filed in U.S. District Court in Milwaukee. Piikkila originally pleaded not guilty and a hearing on his change of plea is scheduled for July 22.

As part of the deal, Piikkila agreed to testify in the case involving De Pere businessman Ron Van Den Heuvel, who pleaded not guilty to a 13-count grand jury indictment related to the case filed in April....

According to the plea agreement, “all of the witnesses agree that Ron and Kelly Van Den Heuvel lived a high-end lifestyle including an expensive house, another residence in Florida, expensive automobiles, a live-in nanny, expansive use of credit cards and a private plane. All this despite little evidence of actual business activity by any of Ron’s business entities.”...

Van Den Heuvel was able to secure more than $1 million for one of his many companies, Green Box NA Green Bay, from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. in September 2011. Van Den Heuvel didn’t disclose previous lawsuits in his application, and a WEDC staff review stated the application’s only weakness was that it was a startup.The agency gave Green Box more time to repay the loan in September 2014 before declaring the loan in default in early 2015. A judge has placed the company in receivership, but so far the money has not been repaid.

And this is far from the only time that the Walker Administration has tried to hide from the public, whether it be in the notorious 999 motion that tried to gut the state's open records law 1 year ago this month, and Walker's lame attempt to change open records law in court (which was also shot down in the "Wisconsin Idea" case this May).

That's what makes this whole lame attempt to hide WEDC information and put a gag order on WEDC Board members such an absurd two-fer. Not only does it reiterate that WEDC is nothing more than a GOP slush fund, but it also reiterates the Walker Administration's contempt for the people who pay the taxes that pay for WEDC's handouts. And it's likely to continue as long as this Reign of Error continues, because the members of this administration from the Governor on down continue to try to deceive and hide from the public that pays their salaries, instead of changing their way of doing (monkey) business.

Which also helps explain why Walker's approval rating continues to be below 40%, I suppose.

GOP's "Stick it to Obama" pose on broadband kept rural Wisconsin behind

Another day and a look at the state's news sites have more stories how the shortsighted decisions of Wisconsin GOP elected officials to suck up to oligarchs and pose against the Obama Administration continue to leave this state behind. You may recall that the Walker Administration turned down $23 million in 2011 that would have gone toward establishing more broadband capability in underserved areas of Wisconsin, particularly in schools, libraries, and for emergency response communications.

I want to go back over that decision, and take a look at the lame reasoning they gave back then.

But state taxpayers would have been on the hook for the entire $23 million if the state could not meet the grant's precise requirements, Mike Huebsch, secretary of the state Department of Administration, said in a memo to school and library associations.

"This is simply not an acceptable risk," Huebsch wrote.

Wisconsin received the grant [in 2010] from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. It was part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which included about $7 billion in grants, loans and loan guarantees to extend broadband to underserved rural areas and was compatible with President Barack Obama's goal of making high-speed Internet available to 98% of Americans by 2016.

The money would have been used for the BadgerNet Converged Network, which brings the Internet to schools, libraries, and state and local government agencies. It would have paid for 200 miles of fiber-optic cable, improving the Internet connections at hundreds of public facilities.

BadgerNet, however, runs on infrastructure owned and managed primarily by AT&T Inc. - and that became a sticking point with federal officials who were not used to public-private partnerships, according to the state.

Let's leave aside the fact that the Walker Administration was paying back favors to AT&T more than having any kind of principled, reasoned decision, and discuss where the state's coverage is today. 5 years later, take a look at the rumblings that are coming from Western Wisconsin, where broadband telecommunications access is still sparse in many places.

Audience members voiced frustration over years of discussion on broadband with still no foreseeable developments.

“I have received more calls on this than anything else put together,” said Michael Kahlow, a Pierce County Board supervisor and chair of the Information Services committee. He described some of the language callers use as “colorful.”

Lack of broadband access can reduce the property value of a house in Pierce County by $10,000 or more, he added. “That’s a real substantial impact.”

The situation is so dire and improvements are so needed that both of Wisconsin’s U.S. Senators are in a rare moment of agreement in asking federal agencies to make broadband more accessible.

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson and Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin are among 26 senators to sign onto a letter, sent Monday, encouraging the FCC to use its Mobility Fund to develop and improve mobile broadband service in underserved rural and agricultural areas.

The fund is part of the FCC's Universal Service Fund, collected essentially as a user fee on phone bills. It was designed to help wireless carriers cover the cost of bring service to rural areas. The commission is considering changes along with the question of whether the fund is needed at all.

The senators argue it is necessary, noting in particular how important broadband service is for farmers and ranchers….

"The expansion of rural broadband should be a top priority of federal and state policymakers, as expanded deployment in rural areas will address important economic, educational, health care and public safety goals," the letter reads.

The Walker Administration has finally taken some steps in recent years to remedy these broadband gaps, setting up a Broadband Expansion Grant Program in the 2013-15 budget and currently giving $1.5 million a year to give “reimbursement for equipment and construction expenses incurred to extend or improve broadband telecommunications service in underserved areas of the state.” But way too little and far too late. That $1.5 million in state funds pales in comparison to the $23 million in federal funds in 2011, and the federal funds didn’t require state tax dollars to match.

Take a look at this article from a Walker propaganda stop in Viroqua last week. In addition to reporting on a crowd of protestors who ripped Walker for avoiding the public in the “listening session”, check out what’s going on across the river to our west, as we break out the party hats for adding $1.5 million of broadband.

Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton has budgeted $20 million to improve broadband in the Gopher State, and he advocates spending another $100 million from the state’s surplus.

Attending the press conference was Senate Minority Leader Jennifer Shilling, D-La Crosse. She also welcomed Broadband Forward’s certification measures.

“It streamlines the application process so communities will know how and where to apply,” Shilling said.

However, the measure “is not nearly enough” to meet Wisconsin residents’ needs, she said.

This is how the Walker folks roll, with short-term “win the day” headlines and political stances that might get the approval of talk radio and dimwitted dead-enders who want to stick it to those smarty-pants Dems. But those poses haven’t made life in Wisconsin any better, and it has left this state behind while other places that accepted the federal investments grow, and have much more stable budgets on top of it.

It is very reminiscent of another stupid Walker pose on a stimulus project, where he and his talk radio allies encouraged the Wisconsin DOT to turn down over $800 million for a high-speed rail line connecting Madison, Milwaukee, and Chicago. That line would be up and running today if not for the Walker boys and Koch/ALEC crew striking a pose against Obama, and instead millions of state dollars have been spent in recent years to upgrade rail lines while hundreds of millions of other state dollars have to be borrowed to fix Wisconsin’s roads.

And now we end up spending more for investments like broadband in later years to remedy problems that could have been fixed 5 years had ago had the WisGOP crew just been smart enough to shut up and take the money from DC. Had enough of this, yet?

Walker still ignores reality on how invest in, create jobs

Interesting article in the Capital Times today, which follows up on last month’s decision by the Wisconsin GOP members of the Joint Finance Commmittee to move $8 million from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation’s [WEDC] fund for start-ups, and instead use it for giveaways incentives to existing companies (I discussed that action in this post).

In the article, author Erik Lorenzsonn talked to entrepreneurs and academics in addition to WEDC officials to give a wider view of the issue, and he found that actual job creators say they don’t need tax credits to grow. Instead, they’d rather have policies that grow human and physical capital.

Max Lynch is the co-founder of Ionic Framework, a Madison startup that's created a mobile developer platform. He says that for his own company, the shifting of tax credits really doesn't matter — such incentives have been irrelevant to Ionic. He believes there are other actions the state could take that would be more effective at nurturing the entrepreneurial environment.

"We as a company want to see more tax money going into public infrastructure and the university," he said. "We want smart people to come work for us."

University of Wisconsin economist Steve Deller said that research by and large supports the idea that tax credits aren't great tools for promoting growth.

"People aren't really that susceptive to small changes in tax code," he said. "Businesses are the exact same way. If they're offered a tax break, it won't change things all that much."

And you’re even starting to see versions of these statements coming out of the mouths of the audience at Gov Scott Walker’s hand-picked “listening sessions.” Take a look at what’s buried at the end of this report on Scotty’s trip to the Eau Claire area yesterday.

Throughout his speech, Walker portrayed the shortage of talented workers to fill available jobs as the No. 1 challenge facing Wisconsin….

Among the diverse topics raised by participants in Altoona were UW System funding, the worker shortage, schools, technology, broadband, roads, water quality, the state’s wolf population and government efficiency, said [Eau Claire Area Chamber of Commerce president Bob] McCoy, who noted the link between education funding and the skills gap.

“If you don’t have a good educational system, you don’t have a basis to create a good workforce,” he said.

Scotty must be seeing a similar result from polls, because even he is talking some game about increasing aid to the UW System in the next budget. But naturally, instead of admitting that this year’s cuts may have gone too far, Scotty can’t just do the right thing and reinvest in higher education. Instead, the governor mentioned that any UW increase would come with strings attached.

The governor slashed UW System funding in each of his previous three budget bills, with a controversial $250 million reduction approved as part of the 2015-17 budget. The cuts have resulted in program and employment cuts at campuses across the state, including the loss of 179 full-time-equivalent positions at UW-Eau Claire and 55 at UW-Stout.

Walker cautioned that any increase in funding would be tied to performance and efforts to prepare graduates for high-demand fields. He cited UW-Eau Claire’s efforts to increase its four-year graduation rate and UW-Stout’s 97.3 percent placement rate as examples of strong performance that can result in more quality workers for Wisconsin employers.

Such efforts send an important message to students, Walker said, adding, “We want you to get a great education, but we also want you to get employed so you can use those skills not only to support yourself and your family, but to support our economy, to support our communities.”

You can see how that contrasts with what the real job creator in Madison and the Chamber of Commerce guy in Eau Claire were saying. The Walker Administration’s economic strategy continues to be based around the wants of established businesses and campaign donor oligarchs instead of increasing Wisconsin’s economic competitiveness through improving the talent pool and boosting start-ups. Does anyone doubt that this “performance-based” aid for the UW would be given with a heavy amount of input from Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce and Koch-related organizations, and that they’d be more interested in generating head-nodding worker drones instead of dealing with increased competition from entrepreneurs and innovators?

So ignore the election-season “moderate” talk from ALEC/GOP- these guys either still don’t get how to add jobs in the 21st Century, or they’re too paid off to want to get it. If you want the strategy to change in Wisconsin, you need to change the decision-makers and the politicians.