At the beginning of my recent article, Will Wisconsin's Ignorance Become America's Ignorance Again? (Pravda.Ru, 03/04/2015), I stated, "Ever since America's politicized, corrupt, unethical, corporate-controlled Supreme Court decided the cases of Citizens United vs. FEC (2010) and McCutcheon vs. FEC (2014), I have written numerous articles for Pravda.Ru describing how these two decisions destroyed the ability of working class Americans to exercise their once fundamental right to freedom of speech and unleashed a torrent of unbridled political corruption that is rapidly replacing democracy with corporate fascism."
As the machinations of Wisconsin governor, and newly announced presidential candidate, Scott Walker graphically illustrate, these words are not hyperbole.
A recent article by Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News (Walker Goes Scott-free As State Judges Shut Down Fundraising Probe) reveals that, during a 2012 recall election, Walker met with Wall Street billionaire Paul Singer, and with a deputy of hedge fund billionaire Stephen Cohen. After these meetings, Singer donated $250,000 and Cohen one million dollars to the pro-Walker group Wisconsin Club for Growth.
Isikoff also writes that other contributions were made by entities with "major interests before Walker's administration." These included a $700,000 dollar contribution from a "Florida-based mining company seeking an iron-ore concession from the Wisconsin state government, and more than $1.5 million from home appliance magnate John Menard Jr., whose firm later received $1.8 million dollars in tax breaks from Walker's economic development agency."
But even this wasn't enough for Walker. David Sirota and Andrew Perez of International Business Times revealed that Walker, a college dropout, "championed a high-profile proposal to spend a quarter of a billion dollars to help finance a new Milwaukee Bucks arena-all the while pushing to slash roughly the same amount from funding for higher education. One of the primary beneficiaries of this proposal is Jon Hammes, a part owner of the Bucks and "a longtime Walker donor and Republican financier who has just been appointed by the governor to head his presidential fundraising operation." Hammes' real estate firm has "also bought parcels of downtown land near the location of the proposed new arena."
So how did Wisconsin voters react to these outrages? Walker not only won the recall election, he was reelected governor in 2014. And just a few days ago, as if to underscore how thoroughly and unabashedly the corruption unleashed by Citizens United and McCutcheon has polluted every branch of government, the Wisconsin Supreme Court-described by some as the worst in the United States-not only terminated a criminal investigation into Walker's fundraising, it also ordered that all documents related to this investigation be destroyed. What makes this decision especially egregious is that, according to Isikoff, at least two of the so-called "justices" who ruled in Walker's favor had themselves been elected "with $10 million in contributions from outside advocacy groups, which don't disclose their donors and which were the very subjects of the Walker investigation."
In my Pravda.Ru articles Democracy In the Hands of Idiots, Parts I, II, and III, each written in the wake of one of Walker's election "victories," I queried how voters could be so accepting of, or oblivious to, the undermining of democracy and the political corruption propagated by Walker and his cronies. Now I think I have found the answer: For some esoteric reason political beliefs, like religion, appear to be deeply internalized and personalized to such an extent that an attack on them is frequently viewed as an attack on a person's very essence; therefore, the more illogical a person's political beliefs are shown to be, the more tenaciously they cling to them. This, in turn (in a perverse, and often destructive, paradigm of reverse psychology), means that far too many voters would rather support corrupt and mendacious politicians than admit they were duped.
As Adolf Hitler wrote, great lies are usually not recognized by the masses until it is too late. The same holds true for great evil. Tragically for America, what this means is that Scott Walker, despite all the corrupt machinations that have catapulted him into the national spotlight, may actually have a chance to capture the presidency. And, while I know that one article by a lowly Pravda.Ru writer cannot prevent this, I want to go on record as stating openly that a Walker presidency will unleash an evil upon the United States, and the world, that may be impossible to recover from.
This is why I call Scott Walker Satan's candidate. I'll admit, I put a great deal of thought into doing this. I know that labeling someone as satanic carries with it connotations of religiosity and absolutism, perhaps even fanaticism, that is not conducive to the more analytical punditry that often surrounds political discourse.
But then I remembered a hypothesis I've expressed in several previous Pravda.Ru articles: Evil is the primary motivating force behind much of human behavior; consequently, most conflicts, and choices, are not between good and evil, but between greater and lesser evils.
I also realized that if the world can acknowledge that some people personify goodness to such a degree that they are called saints, then it logically follows that some people personify evil to such a degree that they can be called satanic. To sugarcoat such evil allows tyrannies to be born and/or prosper.
This sugarcoating also means that telling the difference between the saintly and the satanic is not so easy, especially since both often claim to have the support of God. Walker, in fact, is already playing the "God" card to divert attention from his corruption, mendacity, and hypocrisy.
But, if one is astute enough, the difference can be discerned. Saintly people act selflessly and ignore their own egos and ambitions for the greater good. By doing so, they usually encounter vociferous and violent opposition from the rich and powerful.
Satanic people place their own egos and ambitions above others, yet are adroit at concealing this fact by feigning selflessness. But they can still be spotted because they are promoted, protected, and insulated by other satanic people-like Walker's political cronies on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
So, in closing, I cannot help but paraphrase the words of Arthur Kirkland, the idealistic attorney played by Al Pacino in the 1979 movie And Justice For All: If Scott Walker and his billionaire backers succeed in their putsch for the presidency, then "something really wrong is going on here."
David R. Hoffman, Legal Editor of Pravda.Ru