Charles P. Pierce -Quibbling about the price (Scott Walker)
Last Friday, rather late in the day, there came a massive document dump in connection with the investigation into the most recent corrupt campaign conducted on behalf of Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest facility formerly known as the state of Wisconsin. Some of the more piquant of these had to do with e-mails in which Walker importuned various individuals and companies to kick into the Wisconsin Club For Growth, a pro-Walker front run by one of his former aides, in order to help fund the campaign to keep the voters of Wisconsin from tossing Walker out on his ear. Some of the more piquant details of these piquant documents involve a $700,000 donation to the WCFG by Gogebic Taconite LLC, the company that proposes to dig a monstrous four-mile open-pit mine in the woods of northern Wisconsin.
The hundreds of pages of documents that became available Friday afternoon also showed Walker's team sought to solicit funds for the Wisconsin Club for Growth from an array of nationally known donors to fend off his 2012 recall. Real esate developer Donald Trump, industrialist billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, and casino mogul Sheldon Adelson were all targets. Mining company Gogebic Taconite LLC's $700,000 contribution to the Wisconsin Club for Growth was not publicly known until Friday. "Clearly, Club for Growth favors economic growth in Wisconsin and has favored mining, so contributions to organizations that have a shared purpose, a shared interest, that is really all there is to it," Bob Seitz, a spokesman for Gogebic, said Friday. Seitz said that he did not know the source of the funds. Gogebic is owned by Chris Cline, a billionaire coal mine operator.
The Gogobic mine has always been one of the more embarrassingly obvious items in the all-u-can-pollute yard sale that Walker has made of Wisconsin's natural resources. Walker and his pet state legislature let Gogebic's people help write the bill that opened the loophole in the state's mining regulations that will allow the company to dig there. Since then, there have been a number of confrontations between angry local residents, environmentalists, and, in one memorable case, masked and armed company goons. These swell fellas were from Bulletproof Securities, a company-goon-for-hire agency run by a payday loan magnate in Arizona. Given that he's done everything except deliver a State Of The State Address festooned in Gogebic logos, it's hard to believe that Walker ever had to ask the company for anything. But there we are with the e-mails, so that's that, right?
Ah, no.
Walker didn't know a thing about it. Honest.
700 large for issue ads? How'd that happen?
more
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/Scott_Walker_And_The_Mine
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"Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest facility formerly known as the state of Wisconsin."
rec
