Bob Corkins believes in free markets. He worked at a succession of think tanks in Kansas that preached the gospel of limited government.
Corkins' experience advancing the libertarian views of industrialists, such as the ultra-rich Koch brothers, made him an ideal candidate to run the state's public schools. Or so the Kansas Board of Education thought when right-wingers comprised the majority.
Corkins' run as education commissioner lasted about a year. He resigned after an election tilted the board in a moderate direction, sparing Kansas schoolchildren from having to learn from science textbooks that had God's big, magic finger on the cover.
Though he has built his career promoting the infallibility of market solutions, Corkins is back on the state payroll. He's now the chief legal counsel at the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services. A department spokesman said Corkins started on Tuesday.
Corkins' path from market idealist to hey-those-are-some-nice-benefits bureaucrat is pretty typical. Newt Gingrich built his power on the idea that "Washington" is synonymous with sin and oppression. But did Gingrich open a canoe livery in his home state of Georgia when his time in Congress came to an end? Of course not. He lives (with his third wife) in Virginia, a short drive from the D.C. bureau of Fox News and all the fine Georgetown restaurants.
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Corkins is best known for being such an asshole, that even moderate Republican legislators didn't want to talk with him when was a junior lobbyist for the Koch-dominated state Chamber of Commerce.
He was an executive with the Koch's Flint Hill Center for Public Policy, now the Kansas Policy Institute, their flagship in the chain of 85 reactionary propaganda factories, a.k.a., "think tanks" to which they contribute, sometimes as the dominante donor.
He took the helm of the Department of Education in the waning days of the lunatic fundamentalist majority before the ouster of the larcenous Connie Morris and their failure to replace the perhaps senile Iris Van Meter with her carpetbagger son-in-law from Idaho. Corkin's task there was no doubt to destroy the K-12 education system by forcing the taxpayers to pay for the education of the children of the wealthy and upper middle class and at the same time reducing the Kochs' state and local tax obligations by progressive destruction of public schools and disempowerment of the unions and professional associations representing teachers.
The only reason to give Blusterbob this appointment would be with the intent to wreck the state SRS. To the best of my knowledge, no one, not even his close friends, has ever claimed that he possessed the smallest degree of competence in any useful endeavor. His brief tenure as Commissioner was marked by numerous sweetheart contracts he awarded to his radical reactionary friends and ideological compatriots that were beyond oversight and board review.
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