DPW Blog

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.

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.

Since Scott Walker signed his anti-worker budget into law this June, Wisconsin has had massive jobs losses for five months in a row. The numbers show that as a direct result of Scott Walker's regressive policies, more than 34,900 Wisconsin workers have been sent to the unemployment lines.

Despite the numbers, Scott Walker continues to claim that his "reforms" are working and that the state is making "progress."

The reality is Scott Walker's so-called "tools" and "reforms" have attacked middle-class families and have led to a mass exodus of good-paying jobs. Wisconsin workers are being laid off at an alarming rate while neighboring states, such as Illinois and Minnesota, are experiencing job growth.

In late September, Governor Scott Walker called a third special legislative sessions that was supposed to focus on job creation. Rather than focusing on legislation that would help kick-start job creation, the Republican-controlled Legislature used the sessions to push a radical right-wing agenda that threatens Wisconsinites young and old while still remembering to cater for Big Money special interests.