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" If I wait long enough, and the campaign by Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage its Midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, to sell off the state piecemeal continues apace, I might be able to get the old Allen Bradley building on the lakefront with its huge clock at a decent number. To the surprise of approximately nobody, Walker has appointed a first class corporate &amp;#039;ho to a chair the state&amp;#039;s most important utility regulatory board. During his 12 years on the Legislature, [Phil] Montgomery received $24,540 in campaign contributions from energy-related companies and organizations and $10,800 from the companies in the telecommunications and computer sector, according to statistics from the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign&amp;#039;s database. The only sector that provided more to Montgomery than energy was manufacturing. &amp;quot;He was very friendly to industry when he was a legislator, and was seen as carrying water for the telecommunications industry and the utilities,&amp;quot; said Mike McCabe, executive director of the Democracy Campaign. &amp;quot;Consumer advocates would naturally have concerns about somebody who seemed so supportive of industry now being in a position of overseeing those industries.&amp;quot; No worries, though. Montgomery said the financial backing he received as a legislator would not pose any concern for him now that he will be a regulator. &amp;quot;No,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s about moving the state forward. It was not a concern in the Legislature; it&amp;#039;s not a concern now. It&amp;#039;s about moving policy forward.&amp;quot; And, in case you thought it couldn&amp;#039;t get any worse. Until January, Montgomery served on the board of directors of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a national organization that works on development of state-level polices that promote limited government, free markets and federalism.  Dammit, Journal-Sentinel, that last sentence is straight out of the ALEC promotional material. At the very least you could politely indicate that ALEC has grown somewhat controversial over the last few years. People are worried about the lunatic doings in Kansas, but Wisconsin is a far more interesting case study, given that state&amp;#039;s long, proud \u2014 and now apparently abandoned \u2014 history of progressive politics. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18086/phil-montgomery-wisconsin-public-service-chairman-040813/>