Top Walker Donor Diane Hendricks

Diane Hendricks is a billionaire who donated $500,000 — the largest donation ever made in a Wisconsin governor’s race — to Walker this year, but the company she owns paid absolutely nothing in taxes from 2005 to 2008, the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future reports:

ABC Supply may be a huge money-maker for Hendricks, but the Wisconsin corporate income tax returns she files claim the company makes not a penny in taxable profit.

ABC Supply paid exactly $0.00 in state corporate income tax in 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008, according to the state Department of Revenue. Tax data for more recent years were not available when the information was requested from the department.

Hendricks gained notoriety earlier this month when Walker was caught on film admitting to her that he was planning a “divide and conquer” strategy with the state’s public sector unions. That strategy, which led to Walker’s signature union-busting legislation and massive protests outside the state capitol, is why Walker is now facing a recall.

Walker pitched the legislation as necessary for balancing the state’s budget, which was facing a $137 million budget deficit in 2011. According to IWF, businesses dodge $113 million in Wisconsin state taxes each year.

“It’s not known which loopholes ABC Supply used to avoid income taxes,” the IWF report said, but Hendricks has long been an advocate of lower taxes. In a 2010 editorial, she wrote, “Taxing job creators is a sure way to stop the engine of economic growth.”

Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) came into office on the promise to create 250,000 jobs in his first term. He then, of course, eschewed that goal in order to focus on busting Wisconsin’s public sector unions.

Wisconsin, in fact, saw the largest decrease in employment last year, making it one of only four states to lose jobs. But Walker on Saturday doubled down on his promise to create 250,000 jobs:

Gov. Scott Walker recommitted Saturday to his pledge to create 250,000 private-sector jobs by 2015, a promise all the more difficult to achieve since he first made it because of anemic job growth during his tenure. [...]

“It’s a commitment I made in 2010 and it’s a commitment I make today,” Walker said.

As Menzie Chinn noted as Econbrowser, Walker has a long way to go to make that happen. The green line represents the pace of job creation Walker needs to attain, while the blue line is what’s actually happening:

Of course, Walker could always use the trick pulled by Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) and simply pretend that his promise on jobs never happened (video evidence to the contrary).

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) didn’t campaign on union busting, and claimed that his now-infamous bill stripping collective bargaining rights from public sector unions was about fixing the state’s finances, not attacking organized labor. Indeed, it was called the Budget Repair Bill and Walker and his allies said it was a purely fiscal issue.

“You see,” Walker said in a February 11, 2011 speech. “Despite a lot of the rhetoric we’ve heard over the past 11 days, the bill I put forward isn’t aimed at state workers, and it certainly isn’t a battle with unions.”

Labor activists and Democrats, of course, claimed that the legislation’s true purpose was to break unions in the state, in order to help ensure more Republicans would get elected in the future. Now, a video released today by a Wisconsin documentary filmmaker should put any doubt to rest and show that Walker was lying through his teeth the entire time that he claimed his bill had nothing to do with undermining unions.

In the video, shot on January 18, 2011 — just before Walker introduced the Budget Repair Bill and a month before his speech — Walker tells a billionaire campaign contributor that the forthcoming budget bill is the first step in an elaborate strategy to “divide and conquer” unions in the state.

Speaking with Wisconsin billionaire Diane Hendricks, who has since become Walker’s single-largest campaign contributor and the biggest donor in Wisconsin history, Walker says the bill will help make Wisconsin a right-to-work and “completely red” state. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, which first reported the exchange, transcribed the conversation:

“Any chance we’ll ever get to be a completely red state and work on these unions -” [Hendricks asked]

“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.”

Watch the exchange, which is part of a documentary to be released soon:

While it’s by now almost universally understood that Walker’s intentions all along were to deliver a body blow to labor, the video confirms definitively that Walker pushed the legislation under false pretenses and in bad faith. This is, unfortunately, hardly shocking, as even Walker tacitly acknowledges it now, but shows that Walker intentionally deceived the legislature and the public.

Walker also claimed publicly all along that he’s not interested in making Wisconsin a “right-to-work” state, telling the Journal-Sentinel just last month, “Private sector unions are my partner in economic development.”

Thanks to this bill, Walker is now facing a recall election against former Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (D), who said of the video, “This is another colossal bait and switch that goes directly to his honesty.” “What he claims he is not in favor of publicly, to the person who has made the largest contribution in state history, he says exactly the opposite. You can’t trust him,” Barrett added.