Walker Whacks Wisconsin Taxpayers With Bill for Wackenhut After Illegally Asserting Powers

MARK KARLIN FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

BuzzFlash has been writing a series of articles exposing the Manchurian candidate that Scott Walker is, a man who costs taxpayers more than he saves, and whose goal is to be the errand master for his rich funders for crushing unions and privatizing public property in fire sales.

Kudos to Rachel Maddow for uncovering just one in many of Walker's wasteful stunts that left the taxpayers paying the bill. In essence, Maddow charges that Walker -- the then executive of the Milwaukee County Board -- did what he is doing now: claiming a fiscal emergency and taking action detrimental to people who pick up the tab; that is you and me.

It involves an unsavory private security company, Wachkenhut, that Greg Palast has exposed as an infamous union busting, low wage, low quality favorite of Republican privatizers (not to mention some Democrats too). Despite being prohibited by the Milwaukee County Board from firing public security staff employees, Walker unilaterally abolished a union contract and terminated the employment of security guards for the Milwaukee County Court House and two other buildings.

Walker replaced the guards with non-union Wackenhut, a division based in the UK. Walker claimed that there was a fiscal emergency and so he could do what he pleased. But, as Maddow reported, last month an arbitrator ruled that the county did not have a sufficient fiscal crisis at the time that would have allowed Walker to bypass the county board and cancel a union contract.

What should be more alarming to people who voted for Walker because they thought that he would save them money (which would never happen anyway, because whatever he "cuts" is going to show up in a rise in local or county flat taxes), but he overestimated the "savings" of busting the union by more than $300,000.

As Maddow notes, that's not all of the Walker damage to the taxpayer. The arbitrator ruled that the union security guards must be rehired and be paid a half a million dollars in lost wages, financed, of course, with taxpayer money. That's on top of the money already paid out to Wackenhut.

And who supervised the Wackenhut non-union employees? A man with a criminal record, who had done jail time, was appointed the security chief for Walker's replacement guards.

Those Wisconsinites who are concerned about how their taxpayer dollars are being misspent -- and their security endangered -- by Scott Walker better join the general uprising for democracy, because this is only one example of the privatized world of corporate sham artists, profiteers, and criminal supervisors, according to Maddow, that Walker has prepared for the people of Wisconsin.

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