Remember: it wasn’t an attack on unions, it was budget-balancing:
An Ohio group has been cleared to continue its effort to push a ballot initiative that would keep workers covered by labor contracts from having to join a union or pay dues.
Attorney General Mike DeWine on Wednesday said Ohioans for Workplace Freedom has provided a “fair and truthful” summary of its proposed right-to-work amendment.
The approval comes the same day Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels signed a right-to-work bill, making it the first Rust Belt state to enact such a law.
The Ohio proposal emerged this fall, days after voters rejected a law placing restrictions on public employee unions.
We were told for more than a year that the conservative assault on public sector unions had nothing to do with conservative opposition to unions, but instead was about state budgets. That was obviously a lie. That pundits of all stripes swallowed the lie whole does not make it less of a lie. Is there going to be any attempt to correct the record here? Because this is important. We’re going into an election year and conservatives are waging a full-out war on both public sector and private sector unions in state after state after state.
This nonsense about “tone” isn’t helping to inform, but is instead offering them cover:
A year after a coterie of new Republican governors swept into the statehouses and put in place aggressive agendas to cut spending and curb union powers, sparking strong backlashes in many places, many of them are adopting decidedly more moderate tones as they begin their sophomore year in office.
There hasn’t been any moderation of their positions. None. In fact, they’re ramping up. The lie that this was about state budgets was repeated for 6 months. Can I now get six months of repetition of the facts now that the larger objective has come clear to even the most deluded and trusting observer? Or are we now going to focus on “tone”, whatever that means?
Newt Gingrich’s biggest donor, Sheldon Adelson, is, among other things, virulently and specifically anti-union. Sheldon Adelson will directly and personally benefit if labor unions disappear. Newt Gingrich’s biggest donor has indicated that he will switch to Mitt Romney if Mitt Romney is the nominee.
Testifying before the Nevada state ethics commission in 1998, Shelley Berkley, who is now a Democratic congresswoman for Nevada, and who had worked for Adelson in the nineties as his vice-president of legal and governmental affairs, said that Adelson had told her that “old Democrats were with the union and he wanted to break the back of the union, consequently he had to break the back of the Democrats.”
Three years ago, at an event in Washington, D.C., celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Adelson, who was being honored that evening, told the audience about the time he had spent with William Bush, the brother of George H. W. Bush, during the 1988 election. “He explained to me what Republicanism was all about . . . so I got to learn about it and I switched immediately!” Adelson said. But it was only after he went to war against the union that he became so partisan. He began donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Republican National State Election Committee.
The Republican primary will be moving to Midwest states here shortly. Is the across-the-board aggressively anti-union national conservative agenda going to get any attention from political media? Because this is different than in presidential years past. It’s much, much more aggressive and it is uniform and it is directed at both public sector and private sector unions. I do think it would be nice if people were actually informed on what’s happened since we were all sold the budget-balancing lie regarding public sector unions. What’s happened is, conservative immediately went after private sector unions. This was then and is now about destroying unions. All unions. Everywhere.
It took six years for the GOP war on voting to make national headlines. If it takes 6 years for the GOP war on unions to make national headlines, there won’t be any unions left.