James Wigderson Lied About Walker's Record On Labor

On April 25, James Wigderson attacked Mayor Tom Barrett, saying that Barrett had lied when he said that Scott Walker was for right to work.  Wigderson emphatically declared that Walker is not in favor of a right to work legislation:

Walker supports private sector unions and even the “prevailing wage” for public projects, and he is opposed to Right to Work legislation.

As it turns out, it is Wigderson, not Barret, who is the bald faced liar.

As my co-author at Cog Dis, Jeff Simpson, points out, there is now footage of Scott Walker discussing making Wisconsin a right to work state.

Per the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article that Jeff cites, we see this exchange between Walker and Diane Hendricks, a big time right wing nut job who likes to associate with the same crowd as Walker (see Koch Brothers) and is reported to freely lend her private plane to Walker as he goes jaunting about the country collecting his bail money from those who would buy our state if we let them:

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."

The entire conversation was not released Thursday with a video trailer of the documentary, but Journal Sentinel reporters were allowed to view the raw footage, in which the governor goes on to talk about curbing liability lawsuits and government regulations.

If you don't believe that the paper accurately reflected the conversation, you can see it for yourself in this preview of the movie "As Goes Janesville." The conversation starts around the 7:40 mark.

The MJS article also notes that Walker sponsored right to work legislation as a freshman legislator in 1993.

But since Wigderson considers himself to be a reputable writer and has threatened anyone and everyone he perceives as impugning his reputation, I look forward to see him suing himself. After all, I'm sure he doesn't like that he made himself look even worse than he normally does.