HuffPo: Scott Walker's budget "like a guided missile, and its target could not be more clear"

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Howard Schweber | Associate Professor of Political Science and Law, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Posted: March 2, 2011 11:07 AM

Scott Walker's War on Equality

The first thing that is likely to happen is that families who can afford it will flee the public schools; Walker's budget is the best advertisement for Wisconsin private schools that could be imagined. One local private school in the Madison area reports double the number of inquiries compared with a year ago -- and that was before the budget was unveiled.

***

The budget that Governor Walker announced today cannot be described by any of the usual terms. This is a budget that is targeted like a guided missile, and its target could not be more clear: Governor Walker wants to destroy the state's system of publicly funded education and replace it with charter schools (teaching certification not required), private schools, and private funding.

This would be shocking anywhere -- in Wisconsin it is inconceivable. Let me tell you something about Wisconsin. We like to think we are not just another state. At the University of Wisconsin we talk a lot about "the Wisconsin Idea," the idea that we have a specific mission to serve the public of our state in the tradition of the land grant colleges. Every semester I have been here I have met at least one student who has told me that he or she is the first person in their family to go to college. Those students are the best thing about teaching at a public university. They are what public education is all about. They come from small towns in the northern part of the state, often from families that operate farms or small businesses in their communities. They leave here and they go on to become lawyers or scientists or teachers, or to start businesses of their own.

This is what the Tea Party's capture of the Republican Party has brought us. Right here in Wisconsin we are sounding the death knell for the single greatest mechanism of social and economic mobility that the world has ever known.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-schweber/scott-walkers-war-on-equa_b_830239.html

[al_liberal]

1. And you're surprised?

The goal of the right is to suck the blood out of everything they can. If someone spends money on something, no matter how small of an amount, the right wants that entity to be privatized. They want every cent to flow to their masters and cronies. Until we realize the cancer that they have become, we don't stand a chance at beating them.

[bigmonkey]

2. The monetization of all human activity facilitates this.

Once the activity is monetized, they go after it.