Mitt Romney. Image from http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/03/live-from-cpac/230475/
Mitt Romney has flip flopped his way through this primary season. And as he tries to convince the Tea Party that he is one of them, it will only get worse. So will the hypocrisy. On CNN, in a discussion with Jim DeMint, Mitt Romney said that labor unions that donate money to political candidates is “a form of corruption.” He managed to flip flop during this conversation too. Romney has expressed his support for unions once before, and now he has reversed himself. Here is the entire transcript.
DEMINT: Mitt, thanks for being here. Let’s start talking about unions. For me it’s becoming one of the biggest issues that we’re dealing with on the federal level because there’s such an insidious relationship between unions and the Democrat Party.
The president and the Democrats are trying to expand government unions at the state and the federal level because of the political support that comes back and we seeing the difficulty at the state level to make the reforms and cut back because of the resistance of government unions.
Where are you on unions? And I’ll put it in this context, there’s a federal law right now that requires an American to join a union if their work place is unionized. It’s only if your state opts out of that law that your people are free not to join a union.
And there are 22 states that have opted out, but there’s still a federal law that requires Americans to join unions and we have legislation at the federal level to repeal that with a federal right to work law.
I understand that you’ve said that’s a state issue and the federal government shouldn’t be involved. But the federal government is involved because they have the law that requires that.
Where are you on the federal right to work? And what is your opinion about government unions at the federal and state level?
ROMNEY: First of all, what I said was if a right to work piece of legislation reached my desk at the federal level I would sign it.
DEMINT: OK.
ROMNEY: And the right course I believe politically at this stage is to have states carry out their own right to work legislation. And as you know, right to work states, those 22 have created three million jobs over the last 10 years. The union states have lost about half a million jobs. So right to work is the way to go if you want good jobs. That’s number one.
Government unions — and unions play an important role in our country and can be — the Carpenter’s union, for instance, trains their people in ways to provide good services when people want to compare in a fair basis, that’s great.
When the government has people in unions, it presents a particular problem and there are a couple of ways it presents a problem in my view. When unions are allowed to collect money from members, and then one person, the chief executive of that union could give that to whichever candidate they want, that’s simply a violation of the personal rights of that individual, and that shouldn’t be allowed.
And number two, I really have the problem with the idea that one person is able to collect money from all their members and then give it to a party or an individual who that person made them be the one that decided on matters of legislation directing that union.
It’s almost like a form of corruption. I’ve got all this money I’m going to elect the person to give me what I want. So the power of unions in influence elections is a real problem and the place I would address it is with legislation saying that individual union members may not have money taken out of their paycheck to go into funds, which can then be directed by an individual in a way that might be different than what they would have preferred themselves. That should not be allowed.
And here is the video:
The hypocrisy in all this is that Romney claims that when unions spend money on a candidate, it’s corruption because the union donates money on behalf of the workers they represent, no matter what political affiliation the worker may have. But apparently when corporations give millions of dollars to candidates without the consent of their employees, it’s all fine and dandy. There’s definitely a double standard here. But the real reason Republicans are so against the donations of labor unions is because labor unions donate to Democrats. If unions donated to Republicans, they wouldn’t be as big of a target. Republicans need to stop whining about political donations since they were the ones that killed campaign finance laws.
In our investment portfolio, we make or lose money according to the value of the stock when we sell it compared to what we originally paid for it. No one makes us pay a fee which goes to support a candidate not of our choice. However, when my husband years ago was forced to join the teacher’s union in California or lose his job, part of our union fees were often used without our vote to support candidates or causes with which we did not agree. We were told we could “apply” for a refund based on a percentage that they figured was being used politically (the amount which we sincerely doubted when we saw how much was spent by the teacher’s union to defeat the school voucher referendum.) However, this ridiculous red tape of paperwork was required every month to apply for our refund, and the amount we were allowed back so minuscule that we finally gave up the fight. Also, if there is a corporation that takes a political stand we disagree with, we can choose not to give them our business or our investment. Not so with the forced union membership unless we want to lose our employment. Power corrupts and complete power corrupts completely whether corporate or union bosses.
An anti-union diatribe is pretty much what we’ve come to expect from the Republican Party — a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America.
Mitt can kiss my ass. He knows nothing of the value of Unions. I do.
In a word…Hypocrite!!!