As Goes Janesville

Walker steps in it again with vid clip about his collective bargaining plans

With only precious weeks left before the June 5 recall election it is hard to know if the revelations in the recent video clip of Governor Scott Walker talking with a well-heeled donor from Beloit in January 2011 just weeks before he began his march to eviscerate collective bargaining in Wisconsin will sway those four to five percent of undecided voters.

In the clip, Walker tells billionaire widow Diane Hendricks how he plans to go after the public-sector unions in response to a question by Hendricks about how to make Wisconsin a “right-to-work” state and to turn the state “red”.

The clip is just the latest evidence that confirms the true motivations of Walker and his crowd was not to “save” Wisconsin from budgetary disaster but to permanently marginalize unions and by extension Wisconsin Democrats. If he wanted to improve the state’s economy and create those 250,000 jobs he promised, why did the Republican majority spend the entirely of last session largely on social legislation?

Lost in the inflammatory clip is the real story and the reason the documentarian Brad Lichtenstein was there to catch the moment in the  first place – to chronicle the long slow death of manufacturing in Janesville and its impact on its citizens.

An extended trailer of the film is presented above, you can see a sneak preview this Wednesday at Discovery World in Milwaukee.

Check out some additional perspective on this documentary from  the stellar Cognitive Dissidence Blog