Posted on 07/05/2004 2:41:52 PM PDT by neverdem
COMMENTARY
Big Labor's ties to the Democratic Party are no secret, but the way in which unions will use their members' dues to influence this year's presidential race may be the most ignored political story in this election.
Like corporations and other groups, unions collect voluntary contributions from their members for their political action committees, which then make donations to specific candidates or political parties.
In 2000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign finance watchdog organization, union PACs donated $85 million to Democratic candidates and the Democratic Party.
That's a hefty sum, but, in fact, direct contributions such as those make up only a fraction of total union spending. A much greater sum — estimated at $500 million to $800 million — is paid out in indirect contributions and services in the election cycle, and all of it comes from the tax-free dues of their union members.
Of this money, more than 95% typically goes to help elect Democratic candidates, even though as much as 40% of the union vote historically has gone to Republicans. Is that reasonable?
More important, no one knows how much of this spending actually violates campaign spending laws. From my own experience as a union official in the 1970s and 1980s, and from current union members' reports, I believe that many unions routinely break the law.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
From Publishers Weekly
America's labor unions pour money into the Democratic Party in pursuit of a "socialist," big government political agenda and have abandoned their mission of collective bargaining, contend Fox pundit Chavez (An Unlikely Conservative) and Gray, a consultant for Stop Union Political Abuse.
What makes this worse than corporate bosses funding Republicans, they note, is that labor's pelf comes from the "forced dues" of workers who don't individually consent to union political donations.
Chavez, a former union official and Bush labor secretary nominee, and Gray, a former National Right to Work Committee official, make some charges stick.
They show that unions do give a lot of money to, and wield a lot of clout with, Democrats, with the usual problems of corruption and favoritism that big money special-interest politics entails.
But by the authors' own accounting, unions spend less than 5% of their money on politics—a percentage that, they concede, workers can get refunded from their dues, albeit with some difficulty.
And when Chavez and Gray show unions sticking to winning better pay, better benefits and lighter workloads for their members, they damn them for bankrupting companies and driving jobs abroad.
At that point, the book's critique of unions' excesses shades into a one-sided attack on their very existence.
Who are the two biggest unions? NEA and AFCSME (government workers). When did it become acceptable for state employees to have collected bargaining? FIre the lot of them.
Democrat party vote fraud.
Althoguh I am a strong supporter of Bush, he was the one who signed the Campaign Finance law. He has no one but himself to blame on this one. We will jsut have to work twice as hard -- in other words, -- same 'ol, same 'ol!
I agree that Bush made a mistake. If he thought the bill was unconstitutional he shouldn't have signed it.
To give him a little credit, very few people thought that the Supreme Court would let it get by. SCOTUS has been flouting the law for the past forty years, but they seem to have shifted gears this past couple of years, and have gotten much worse. So now we have a constitutional right to buggery, a constitutional right to ban free speech (unless its pornography), and many other exceedingly novel findings. It's the same seven people, but they really seem to have lost it completely.
Yes, it's time to ignore them and their 'decisions'. Listening to them onl encourages them.
Many of the government entities which employ these folks have had it written into law that they can't be fired, except in the most rare of circumstances. Many of these unions are quite happy to shut down essential services such as mass transit.
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