Emails show Walker campaign treasurer John Hiller got inside information on real-estate deal

The campaign treasurer for Gov. Scott Walker got detailed financial information from a top Walker aide about a real-estate deal he was bidding on, according to correspondence included in thousands of emails released Tuesday related to the closed John Doe investigation.

The probe, which began when Walker was serving as the Milwaukee County executive, showed real-estate broker John Hiller lobbied for the county to sell its City Campus building then got detailed information from a top Walker aide around the time bids were being evaluated to provide office space for workers to be displaced by the sale.

The emails show that Walker personally helped orchestrate the deal to benefit Hiller, who was representing a real-estate trust that owns the Reuss Federal Building in Milwaukee. That company sought to increase the amount of space rented in the building by Milwaukee County.

The emails show that Hiller, Walker’s campaign treasurer, was given information by Cindy Archer, director of the Department of Administration and that Hiller repeatedly lobbied Walker to adopt his offer.

Scuba --

Really. The Republican National Committee thinks we're stupid.

Earlier today, RNC co-chair Sharon Day appeared at a rally for Scott Walker. Speaking about how close this election will be, nonsense poured out:

"It's not going to be an easy election, it's a close election. Like I said, much closer than I can even understand why. I don't want to say anything about your Wisconsin voters but, some of them might not be as sharp as a knife." 1

Comments like this just confirm the same thing people tell me every day -- the GOP doesn't care about solving the problems of everyday Wisconsinites.

Help us get this message out by chipping in $10 or more today.

I'm lucky to be a part of the rising excitement and engagement as we get closer to November 4th. Everywhere I go, it's easy to see that people here in Wisconsin are frustrated with the status quo.

With your help, we've put together one of the best ground games in the country. We're hard at work getting voters to the polls and expanding our base of support throughout the 7th District.

Any way you slice it, she's wrong about Wisconsin voters. We're smart enough to make the right decision.

Thanks for standing with me,



Kelly

1 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Playing For Change
Connecting The World Through Music

"I was walking down the street in Santa Monica, Ca, and I heard the voice of Roger Ridley singing the song 'Stand By Me'. He has so much soul and conviction in his voice. I asked him if I could come back with some cameras and recording equipment to record him performing 'Stand By Me'.

Mark Johnson, Founder

Playing For Change is a movement created to inspire and connect the world through music. The idea for this project came from the common belief that music has the power to break down boundaries and overcome distances between people.

Dr. Walter Tsou, past president of the American Public Health Association and the former health commissioner for Philadelphia, says that the Ebola crisis shows the skewed priorities of the U.S. health care system. “Our chronic disease-oriented health care system is ill-equipped to address an acute infectious disease outbreak,” Dr. Tsou, a board adviser to Physicians for a National Health Program, tells The Progressive. “We don't have enough biocontainment units, sufficiently trained experts on how to control for highly infectious disease agents, trained sanitation crews who can clean up and properly handle waste disposal.”

Tsou says that the Ebola epidemic has uncovered big flaws in the global health system, too. “We have known about Ebola since 1976 and yet we still have no vaccine or treatment,” he points out. “The fact that we are now scrambling to find some type of vaccine and treatment only speaks to the paucity of research that we have invested in the developing world. In the cruel economics of the pharmaceutical industry, unless the drugs promise a significant return on investment, they are unwilling to invest in it essentially condemning most of the developing world.”

The Ebola crisis has also made apparent the impact of drastic health budget cuts. Bloomberg News reports that there’s been a nearly one-fifth reduction in public health employees at the state and local levels in just the last six years, with 60,000 fewer people employed than in 2008. This manifests itself in many ways.

...

“The World Health Organization is a shadow of what it should be and is unable to mount a ‘boots on the ground surveillance, mitigation and quarantine program,” he says. “The United Nations has called for the world to donate $1 billion to confront the Ebola crisis, but we only have $100,000 in the bank so far.”

The federal minimum wage of $7.25 is now worth 30 percent less than it was in the 1960s, after adjusting for inflation. It is quite literally a poverty wage — if you support a child, working full-time at the federal minimum will land you $650 below the federal poverty line; supporting two kids will put you more than $4,000 beneath it.

We’ve noted before that low-wage employers shift some of their labor costs onto the backs of taxpayers by encouraging their workers to apply for public benefits. These employers are the true “welfare queens,” their profits indirectly subsidized by the public, which allows them to keep prices artificially low. We’ve argued in the past that this is one of several reasons why conservatives who oppose spending on the social safety net should favor raising the minimum to a point where workers can get by on their own labor.

A report released this week by the Economic Policy Institute quantifies just how much taxpayers would save by raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour, as Barack Obama has proposed. The full report can be downloaded at the Economic Policy Institute’s website. Here’s an infographic that summarizes its findings..