Wisconsin hitting the wrong target

Columnist Ruben Navarrette thinks Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin is a real he-man. He can stand up to teachers! He can beat up working people! What a tough guy! How insightful of him to see the cause of all our fiscal troubles, our trade deficit, our unemployment, the long string of financial bubbles that have drained wealth out of our consumer economy, in the “astronomical” salaries paid to lazy slackers in public sector jobs.

I might refer Navarrette to Mussolini, a man I’m sure he admires. Mussolini called workers Communists and made them drink castor oil. Walker is more delicate: He just takes away their civic rights, but he’s in the same league if not on the same team. What gets lost in all these Lone Ranger comparisons is that Walker is anything but a lonely voice in the wilderness. Like all his compadres, such as Gov. Christie of New Jersey, he is really just a shill for tyrannical billionaire predators (in his case, the Koch brothers) whose one and only concern is to avoid paying taxes on their ill-gotten mountains of money and who are more than willing to destroy the American standard of living to achieve this.

If these people were taxed at anything like the levels they should be, our states would not be in deficit. If our corporations weren’t encouraged by law to export jobs overseas, we would not have the levels of unemployment we do. If politicians like Walker and Christie had real courage, they would call out the Kochs and Blankfeins of the world, condemn them for their thievery, point out that they have contributed nothing but ruin to the country, and force them to pay up.

Instead, these “courageous” governors choose to pick on working people who have nothing to sell but their labor. Navarrette quotes Christie as saying, “Leadership . . . has to be about doing the big things.” That’s what King George III told our ancestors. The answer they gave him would be as appropriate today as it was then.

Anthony Nelson

Rolling Meadows