A new video released Thursday by Illinois Freedom PAC, the union-backed group protesting Bruce Rauner's bid for governor, paints the Republican venture capitalist as a "Chief Executive Outsourcer."
The clip shows footage from a July rally in Rockford, Ill., where protesters gathered to condemn Rauner's affiliation with companies that outsourced jobs from American factories. It draws a comparison between Rauner and Mitt Romney, whose CEO history and no-he-didn't 47 percent comment overshadowed his unsuccessful campaign to unseat President Barack Obama.
"This is about keeping one of these vulture capitalists who thinks it’s a good idea to pack up our jobs and move them somewhere else, to keep him from being in the governorship of Illinois," says Tom Gaulrap, who two years ago lost his job at a Sensata Technologies plant when Bain Capital, co-founded by Romney, transferred production to China.
"They don't understand that when they pull these jobs out of a community, that they're destroying people's lives," he adds.
Another protester, revving up the crowd, yells: "Bruce Rauner says he wants to go to Springfield and run it like a business. Do we want him to go to Springfield and run it like his business?"
We've heard all this before, but it's quite another thing to see it. The clip is effective propaganda in the vein of Michael Moore, a master at humanizing the struggles of America's middle class in documentaries like 1989's Roger & Me, which took on corporate greed in blue-collar Flint, Mich., and 2009's Capitalism: A Love Story, which focused on Wall Street meltdown and the Great Recession.
If you're anti-Rauner, or on the fence about the fast-rising GOP star, these two minutes are meant to make you sad, make you mad and lure you to the ballot box to support Gov. Pat Quinn this November.
