The main stream media gladly jumped on the phony scandal of what amounted to be $100,000 in contributions to the Chamber of Commerce by international companies (which was thoroughly discredited) alleged by a pathetically desperate Democrat party that is about to be trounced at the polls. The same so-called news organizations were nowhere to be found in 2008 when the Obama campaign raised more than $400 million from undisclosed sources, neither are they anywhere to be found in 2010 when one union alone, AFSCME, is spending more than $87.5 million (naturally 100% on Democrat candidates).
Apart from the media hypocrisy, here is the problem. AFSCME is the union government workers belong to. Hence, all the dues that go into union campaign war chest are tax payer money. For those slow on their feet, that is you and I paying to get progressive candidates elected. Considering that conservatives outnumber liberals by 2:1, this if anything, is the real scandal that repeats every election cycle.
As FDR said "The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service". A public employee strike, he said, "looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable." Roosevelt understood, public employee unions' interests are directly the opposite of those of taxpayers. Public employee unions want government to be more expensive and government employees to be less accountable.
Public employee unions have collected big-time from the Obama Democrats. The February 2009 stimulus package contained $160 billion in aid to state and local governments. This was intended to, and did, insulate public employee union members from the ravages of the recession that afflicted those unfortunate enough to make their livings in the private sector.
How it benefited the society as a whole is less clear. State governments in California, Illinois, New York and New Jersey are facing enormous budget deficits and much, much greater pension liabilities. Much of the life of their private-sector economies has been sucked out by the public employee unions, with a resulting flight of middle-income citizens unable or unwilling to bear such burdens.
Public employee union members have become, as U.S. News and World Report Editor Mortimer Zuckerman writes, "the new privileged class," with better pay, more generous benefits and far more lush pensions than those who pay their salaries -- and who are taxed to send money to their leaders' favored candidates.
FDR may have been a huge progressive liberal, but even he understood that there is an inherent conflict in government employee unions getting involved in elections. Too bad that such integrity cannot be encountered in today's Democrats.
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