What the Union Fight is Really About: Defunding the Left

from Mother Jones:



When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker took on his state's public-sector unions last January, it seemed to require no explanation. Republicans are sympathetic to corporate interests and opposed to organized labor, and challenging public-sector workers' pay and benefits appeared to be just one more skirmish in a longstanding ideological battle.

But Walker went one crucial step further. He deliberately sparked a dangerous, months-long war by proposing to end the public-sector unions' collective bargaining rights entirely. Why take that risk?

Here's why: Politics in the United States is a game played on multiple levels, and ideology is only the first. Walker was playing on a second, deeper level, where the issues are secondary. Here, the goal is not so much to advance one party's agenda, but to actively undermine the infrastructure that allows the opposing party to exist at all. And on this level, one of America's two political parties routinely outplays the other: Defunding the left is a longtime goal of the smartest and savviest Republican strategists, and they've pursued it for decades.

The old-school version of this tactic began in the '70s and '80s with the right's campaign to undermine private-sector unions, traditionally one of the Democratic Party's biggest sources of funding and campaign support. In the early '70s, a newly aggressive and politicized Chamber of Commerce, joined by newcomers like the Business Roundtable and a new breed of "union avoidance" consultants (PDF), took advantage of divisions on the left and the decline of manufacturing industries to block labor reforms and gut rules against union-busting. All this made it nearly impossible to organize new workplaces in the growing service sector, which led to unions' long, steady decline: Since 1970, private-sector union membership has dropped from 29 percent of the workforce to less than 7 percent. And with that decline, the Democratic Party has lost a major source of its funding. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/04/scott-walker-defunding-democratic-donors

I was kinda hoping labor would wake up and stop funding Democrats for a cycle m'self, since they get so little in return.

It also makes it possible for organization such as Planned Parenthood to create PACs that fund Republican candidates without Reich-wing Evangelical awareness.

and weaken the Democratic Party so badly they will
not be able to win elections for years in the future.

This is why Acorn had to be destroyed. It was not
so much what Acorn did but the fact it supported
and worked for Democratic Party during elections.

The Unions are being attacked in every state
where there are unions.

Once they (GOP) have power and no collective bargaining
salaries can be lowered enough to compete and maybe
they can convince Business it will be just as economical
to put jobs in this country. This is long term.