Tonight a video was released that was made Jan 18th, 2011, in which Scott Walker, speaking to Beloit billionaire Diane Hendricks, who has since given $510,000 to the governor's campaign, explains that on his way to making Wisconsin a "red" state, he will use "divide and conquer" tactics, by first breaking up the public unions:
Here is a transcript that the Journal-Sentinel released after getting to view part of the whole film:
In the video, Hendricks told Walker she wanted to discuss "controversial" subjects away from reporters, asking him:
"Any chance we'll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions -"
"Oh, yeah," Walker broke in.
"- and become a right-to-work?" Hendricks continued. "What can we do to help you?"
"Well, we're going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill," Walker said. "The first step is we're going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer. So for us, the base we get for that is the fact that we've got - budgetarily we can't afford not to. If we have collective bargaining agreements in place, there's no way not only the state but local governments can balance things out . . . That opens the door once we do that. That's your bigger problem right there."
In film, Walker talks of 'divide and conquer' union strategy
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In other Wisconsin news, Walker projected a $154 million surplus by 2013, but conveniently tucked into the details are this caveat:
The projected surplus includes $78 million that was acquired by restructuring debt. A small amount of that comes from getting lower interest rates, but most of it comes from pushing off payments and allowing long-term interest costs to rise, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau.
Journal-Sentinel