MADISON-Wisconsin’s Republicans must be celebrating the Chinese New Year today, given their record and their willingness to cede the 21st Century to the emerging power.
From Ron Johnson, who outrageously praised Red China’s economy at America’s expense and who owns stocks in state-owned companies, to Sean Duffy, who would see Wisconsin’s wages lowered to China’s levels and jobs shipped to China; to Scott Walker, who seeks to disinvest in Wisconsin’s education and to turn away from 21st-Century technologies, Republicans here have put our future in peril.
Let’s start with Ron Johnson, who in one of his rare interviews with the press, outrageously claimed to a Wisconsin Radio Network Reporter that, ““the climate for business investment is far more certain in communist China than it is in the U.S. here.” Then, the public learned that among the multi-millionaire’s many foreign stock holdings were several in companies run by China’s State-owned Assets and Supervision Commission. This is not to mention Johnson’s statement that the process of Wisconsinites losing their future to China was a positive act of “creative destruction.”
Sean Duffy not only pledged to support tax loopholes for Wisconsin companies that shipped jobs to China when he signed a “Tea Party” pledge, Duffy also showed his belief that Wisconsin’s wages should be lowered to the pennies on the dollar paid to workers in the Communist state, calling himself a “free-tradeer” in the Abbotsford Record Review last February.
And finally there is Scott Walker, whose recent “State of the State” address presaged deep cuts to the University of Wisconsin System as well as education statewide. Top Republicans are even militating against four-year-old kindergarten, a proven and true path to success in the global marketplace. And of course, there has been Walker’s hostility to clean energy investments, from wind, to biofuel, to transportation investments, all of which are seeing massive investments by China.
At the end of the day, it might not be that Republicans like Johnson, Duffy and Walker want to cede the future to China. But, given their record, their promises and their actions against building a modern economy right here in Wisconsin, it is becoming increasingly harder to make that case.
