DPW Blog

You started our grassroots campaign to save our state from Scott Walker, who attacked not just the rights of Wisconsin workers, but also our shared values and proud Wisconsin institutions.

In just 12 days, you could represent your county by being the one who delivers the petitions to recall Scott Walker from your community.

Keeping track of Scott Walker's failures as a leader and his attacks on working families is no easy task. He has let down Wisconsin in myriad ways and does everything he can to hide his missteps in a veil of spin and deception. But we've developed a tool that can help make it easier to keep track of the governor and his failures over the last year.

Today, we are marking Wisconsin's Lost Year under Scott Walker, when Wisconsin lost jobs at a historic rate, endured historic cuts to education and health care and went through a historic year of political division unlike anything our beloved state has seen since Joseph McCarthy.

Putting a punctuation mark on the dishonesty of Scott Walker's Lost Year is a new television ad that just debuted today.

Wisconsin suffered through one of the worst years in her history in 2011 as a direct result of Scott Walker, the most divisive political figure here since Joseph McCarthy.

The radical Republican agenda, which is salting the earth for jobs-creation and blowing a hole in our budget, included never-before-seen cuts to education and health care. They attacked those supporting institutions that had over decades and in bipartisan fashion been built up to create to high standards of living for everyone in Wisconsin, as well as world-class universities and trade schools that led to job growth.

By cutting $2.6 billion from public education, Scott Walker and his Republicans signaled that they want to turn Wisconsin away from a path of high-tech sustainable job creation to a low-wage, low-benefit plantation of the large corporations that, incidentally, poured unprecedented mountains of sleazy cash into Walker's defense.

Despite his promise to oppose any and all tax or fee increases, Scott Walker's budget raised taxes on working families to the tune of nearly $70 million, giving Wisconsin the dubious distinction of being one of the only states to raise taxes on their neediest families, according to a study from the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that was reported in the Appleton Post Crescent:

On Wednesday, Scott Walker held a press conference touting that he was going to lift a cap he imposed on Wisconsin's Family Care program, which offers services to the elderly and the disabled. Advocates for the disabled and the poor and the elderly were overjoyed and Scott Walker was eager to take credit for his about-face.

But it turns out that Scott Walker was actually ordered to lift the cap on Family Care because the Obama Administration called out his plan as reckless, dangerous and possibly in violation of federal statues.

Wisconsin's next governor will be quite different than Scott Walker.

We are in the final stages of collecting the signatures necessary to recall Walker, in a vast, people-powered movement fueled by an historic rejection of his radical agenda.

Walker's strategy will be to prolong the period before the recall is certified, with wasteful lawsuits and other shabby game-playing, but it will not hold off the inevitable.

The question will then turn to the candidate who will replace him. I have no doubt Walker's successor will be able and qualified. And I know, whoever emerges, he or she will be much more than that -- because that is what Wisconsin is now demanding.

Thinking back over this past year, it is easy to get disheartened, discouraged ... even upset. Wisconsin has changed dramatically, and there is much I no longer recognize about our state.

Wisconsin used to be among the leading states in the nation in education, in health care quality and access, and we had a reputation for clean and open government, civil dialogue and reasonable political solutions.

As 2011 comes to a close, unfortunately we now lead the nation in job loss. We are second in the nation in cuts to public education. And, we lead the nation in political polarization. Wisconsin is, sadly, a state divided.

Scott Walker’s corporate-backed mining bill is a prime example of how Scott Walker has shut the public out and has worked in secret with corporate lobbyists to ram through extreme legislation that enriches out-of-state donors at the expense of our shared Wisconsin values. If we don’t recall Scott Walker, the result will be that the environment and the people of Wisconsin will suffer for generations if the mining bill makes it into law.

A new report shows that last month Scott Walker ranked #1 in the country in job losses thanks to his extreme, divisive agenda that has failed to produce jobs for Wisconsin families.

But rather than take responsibility for costing 34,900 Wisconsin workers their jobs in the last five months Scott Walker and his administration have been blaming others, blaming you and even blaming the jobs data itself.