Milwaukee coalition to hold press conference exposing  Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson's record on W-2

Posted: 08 Jan 2001

The Coalition for a Ban on Winter Evictions, a coalition of three Milwaukee community groups, will hold a press conference Saturday, Jan. 13 to call on Wisconsin Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl to deny Senate confirmation for Thompson's appointment to Health and Human Services Secretary. The call is based on Thompson's shameful and racist record on W-2 and other public policies in Wisconsin.  

The coalition, A Job is a Right Campaign, Repairers of the Breach and Women and Poverty Public Education Initiative, will sponsor the press conference at the Henry S. Reuss Federal Plaza, 310 W. Wisconsin Ave. (3rd & Wisconsin), Milwaukee, WI. at 1 p.m.  

Community activists, public-policy experts, legislators, students, those affected negatively by W-2, and others, will share testimony and statistics that prove W-2 has meant virtually nothing but devastation and misery to those it was supposed to help. Speakers will also address Thompson's atrocious record on reproductive rights, healthcare, prisons, the environment, education, his membership in far right organizations like the Council for National Policy (CNP), the role of the Bradley Foundation and Hudson Institute in relation to W-2 and more.  

Thompson was elected in 1986 on a viciously anti-welfare platform. Since that time the states welfare rolls have been slashed 92 percent, the sharpest reduction in the country. Claiming this a "success" Thompson and other W-2 proponents have conveniently failed to disclose what will be exposed at the press conference.  

Thompson's main program, Wisconsin Works, or W-2, eliminated Aid to Families with Dependant Children (AFDC), replacing it with a system meant to fail that forces virtually all recipients to work, regardless of their circumstances. Thousands of new mothers on AFDC, many of them with severe obstacles to working, never transferred over to the new system. For those able to find jobs-many of them at temp agencies (which number 210 in Milwaukee)-the average wage is just $7.60. For those unable to "succeed" in this system there is no safety net. Thus homelessness has skyrocketed, as has the number of children taken into the states foster care system.

W-2 is anti-woman and anti-children to the extreme. The racism embedded within W-2 is glaring as various public policy advocates have documented. For example, in the first year of W-2, the Black infant mortality rate in Milwaukee city shot up an incredible 37 percent.  

Far from being a program to reduce poverty, W-2 creates a low-wage, captive work force that means super-profits for private businesses. It opens the door wider to massive privatization of government services and it helps to obliterate the concept that the government has any inherent obligation to "promote the general welfare." And those achievements, not the elimination of poverty, were the real goals of W-2.

We cannot allow Thompson to carry out these anti-working class and racist policies nationwide. Therefore we call upon the community to join with us in opposition to a man who is the enemy of working people everywhere. We also call upon the community to become engaged in a mass movement for social justice to reject individuals like Thompson and public policies like W-2.  

Individuals or organizations wishing to endorse or speak at the protest please contact the Coalition for a Ban on Winter Evictions via A Job is a Right Campaign at (414) 374-1034.

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