Forget the Chamber, it’s the Public Employee Unions!
Posted on 25 October 2010
While taking a long drive on my way to a relatively short soccer game yesterday, I couldn’t help but notice a new crop of political advertisements on the radio. For the first time in several weeks, it wasn’t campaign ads where the candidate “approves of this message”. No, these were full throated “all of these Republicans which we will name are bad” and you should vote for the Democrat alternative. And the two most notable were the National Education Association and a public employee’s union. The Washington Examiner comments on what is going on:
On Friday, however, we learned courtesy of the Wall Street Journal that the biggest political spending in 2010 is by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. AFSCME will have funneled an estimated $87.5 million into the campaign by Nov. 2, all of it going to Democrats and an amount far exceeding the chamber’s $75 million. More millions are being poured into Democratic campaign coffers by other public-sector unions. On Friday, for example, the National Education Association spent $500,000 on ads aimed at helping Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak defeat former Rep. Pat Toomey, the Republican in the Pennsylvania Senate contest.
The Sestak ad was definitely one of the ads I heard. But the Examiner makes a good point:
But there is a fundamental problem here that FDR understood years ago and that AFSCME President Gerald McEntee inadvertently highlighted when he told the Journal: “We’re spending big. And we’re damn happy it’s big. And our members are damn happy it’s big — it’s their money.” Actually, it’s not simply “their money.” Every dollar paid to a unionized government worker was taxed away from somebody who earned it in the private sector. So when these unions spend millions to elect Democrats who will vote for bigger government, they are literally using money from the productive part of America to enable more government taxing and spending. FDR might well have had this inconvenient fact in mind when he wrote in 1937 that “meticulous attention should be paid to the special relationships and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government … the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”
We have noted before the wholesale purchase of politicians in the State of New Jersey by public sector employee unions. And now we are seeing the blatant us of our taxpayer funds funneled as an arm of one political party. President Obama can say all he wants to make me be afraid that the older ladies and gentlemen who meet at our local diners (Chamber of Commerce) are subversives plotting to overthrow our liberty and security. Perhaps New Jersey and Pennsylvania voters should consider who is paying the tab for these advertisements and wonder exactly what they are getting in return from the candidate. The candidate wins, the union fat cats win, and you the taxpayer lose.
Read the Examiner article here.