Main Street

Kasich’s first 100 days

100 days in, this is Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s record:

Eliminate the right to bargain collectively for public employees.

• Privatizing economic development through the creation of JobsOhio. He was sued in the Ohio Supreme Court yesterday over that act.
• Proposing a two-year, $55.5billion budget that addressed an $8billion deficit without raising taxes. The budget also includes the sale of five prisons, privatizing liquor sales, large-scale changes to education and Medicaid and more than $1billion in cuts to schools and local governments.

Privatize, privatize, privatize. And he hopes he’s just getting started with that.

About that JobsOhio lawsuit.

House Bill 1, which Kasich signed into law in February, created a nonprofit headed by Kasich and eight board members he will appoint. JobsOhio will be responsible for reaching out to existing companies and firms thinking about expanding into Ohio, negotiating economic incentive packages and helping to commercialize research and technologies developed at the state’s universities.

As a private entity, the group will not be subject to the state’s open meetings and records laws, ethics and conflict of interest rules or other requirements that generally affect state agencies. Instead, JobsOhio will be required to have four public meetings annually and will have to disclose contract information, employee salaries and other details in an annual report.

So JobsOhio replaces the Ohio Department of Development with something completely under the governor’s personal control, and their actions remain secret. I can’t think of anything that could go wrong with that! Can you? I mean, it’s not like Gov. Kasich is known as an abusive jerk intent on trampling anyone who gets in his way.

Oh, wait…this is the guy who waited less than two days after the election to say this:

“If you’re not on the bus, we’ll run over you with the bus,” he said. “And I’m not kidding.”

And the guy who in the course of one meeting:

thrice referred to a Columbus police officer who issued him a traffic ticket in 2008 as “an idiot.”

Even rocking a 30% approval rating, Kasich can do a lot of damage as long as he doesn’t care what the people of his state think. And he obviously doesn’t. But that fact should be liberating—if there’s no chance of compromise, there’s no reason to do anything but fight tooth and nail to block his agenda.

Tags: Ohio