Skip to content
chip-rogers-nathan-deal

Gov. Nathan Deal pays Chip Rogers how much? To do what?!

Governor Nathan Deal has sewn a $150,000 per year golden parachute for disgraced former Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers by creating a new Executive Producer position for him at Georgia Public Broadcasting. This 760-percent taxpayer-funded raise will make Chip Rogers the second highest paid employee at GPB.

Rogers’s new “dream job” will be to produce a show focusing, rather blatantly, on the successes of the Nathan Deal’s job creation initiatives.

So, it works out for everyone, right?

Well, not everyone.

Since Governor Deal has assumed office, he has cut the budget to the Georgia Public Telecommunications Commission, the agency that oversees GPB, by more than 14 percent. Rogers’s salary became public the day after Gov. Deal released his budget proposals, which offered, for the sixth year in a row, no raise for state employees and massive cuts across the board.

Tell Georgia Public Broadcasting to Fire Chip Rogers Today.
Click to sign and share the Petition!

In November of last year, Chip Rogers resigned from the State Senate in shame after Better Georgia filmed his bizarre meeting purporting that President Obama was trained in the art of liberty-grabbing mind control.

Rogers’s extremist views were criticized nationally. Conspiracy theories aside, it was no surprise to see Rogers leave the Senate. He had for some time, been a controversial and embarrassing figure for the state Republican Party.

In less than two years’ time, Rogers was rebuked by the Christian Coalition for his past as a sports gambling tout, proposed legislation to keep the government from implanting microchips in people and from using mind control to take your land, and was sued over a a shady land deal with U.S. Representative Tom Graves (R – Ranger, GA).

But, in the immediate wake of Rogers’s resignation, Nathan Deal kept the details of his piecemeal cronyism telecommunications job creation close to his chest. Now we know why.

Chip Rogers’s extreme views on — well, everything — aside, this type of cronyism has no place in Georgia politics.  The Governor ended his State of the State Thursday with a lofty call for a Government that the people of Georgia can trust.

He called for an end to shady deals and behind-the-scenes corruption, by claiming, “the vibrations of distrust will crack even the strongest foundations.”

In the state of Georgia, we’re seeing that there is no ethical foundation. Rogers’s new job as Nathan Deal’s mouthpiece couldn’t make that clearer.

GPB has a rich history of educational programming that we all grew up on, and should not be used by the Governor to spin his floundering economic policies into job-creating success stories.  Governor Deal should have used the extra $150,000 a year he magically found during a slow economic recovery to do anything else.

 

Share this post