Unions: Money Laundering for the Democrat Party

By Douglas V. Gibbs
Author, Speaker, Instructor, Radio Host
When I refused to join the union for a city I worked for, I was beaten up twice, and my pickup truck was vandalized a number of times.  I thought that was the kind of thing that only happened in the movies, or way back in the early twentieth century.  I thought the thuggery I was experiencing was only the kind of thing of mob bosses and Depression Era Teamsters.

The SEIU helped stoke the fires of riots when Ferguson, Baltimore, and various other cities blew up with racial tension.  But, where did SEIU, and other labor unions, get all that money?

In places where “right to work” laws are not in place, there is no choice regarding union membership.  Membership is mandatory, by law, if you want to work, which means your dues are also a necessary part of the bargain.  The money, however, doesn’t only go into activities by the labor unions.  Regardless of your political ideology, most of that money goes into the pockets of hard left Democrat Party politicians, and their political machine.

According to Fox News, “Big labor groups have sent over $1 billion to left-leaning groups since the start of the decade without prior approval from the unions’ members, according to eye-opening new research.  The report from the Center for Union Facts (CUF) showed that a total of more than $1.1 billion in member dues was sent to groups such as the Democratic Governors Association, Planned Parenthood and the Clinton Foundation from unions including the AFL-CIO, IBEW, UNITE HERE and many others. The CUF said that under current labor law, union officials can send money obtained through member dues on political advocacy without obtaining any sort of “opt-in” permission.”

What that is saying is that above and beyond what is already going into the official Democrat Party apparatus, a billion bucks has also gone into leftist organizations that are not officially a part of the Democrat Party, but do what they can to bolster Democrats into elected positions.

Fox continues, “For decades, union officials have betrayed working Americans by spending their dues dollars to advance a left-wing political agenda—without prior approval,” Luka Ladan, spokesman for the Center for Union Facts, told Fox News. “Big Labor is now the ATM of the Democratic Party, whether employees agree or not.”

Big Labor has always been the ATM of the Democrat Party.  The Democrats can’t win in the arena of ideas, so they use thuggery, and a whole lot of money (and quite a bit of voter fraud) to force their way into position.  It is literally a raping of the American People by the Democrat Party.

Fox News reports, “Included among the top recipients are the Democratic Governors Association with over $14.1 million, America Votes with near $13 million, and the Center for American Progress with over $6.2 million.  Among the hundreds of other organizations that received money from big unions are aligned party groups like the Working Families Party, Progressive Majority, Media Matters for America, Brennan Center for Justice, and Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.”

Talk about skewing the playing field into their favor.  Yet, they attack the “Citizens United” case, because they realize that’s how the GOP gets a large part of their funding . . . from corporate donors whose monies are not being tapped into by unions.

Then, when a State pushes for right-to-work legislation, which takes away the requirement to be in the union in order to work, the leftists of the unions and the Democrat Party don’t just protest, it becomes a violent response.  Unions make sure corporations are put into jeopardy to hand out overcompensation through pensions, and other freebies, and also because of the importance of the fact that union dues are essentially a Democrat money laundering operation.  Hey, I get it, a worker wants a better wage, a good pension plan, and so forth.  You’ve worked hard, and it’s nice to be able to fall back on what the unions say they got for you.  But is it worth it when those same union bullies are dropping the corporations to their financial knees and you wind up without a job because they close their doors?  Is it worth it knowing that your dues are going into a political party that has been colluding with communists and the Russians for the last hundred years?

Union thuggery squeezes money out of people who would never have supported the union, in the first place, and then they send a lot of the money to the Democrats, even if the member doesn’t agree with the party’s leftist policies.

How does the Democrats pay them back, aside from forcing through legislation that benefits the unions?  “In Wisconsin, 90 percent of the stimulus money in Wisconsin went to unions, public sector unions. … Teachers didn’t lose their jobs, while everybody else did,” Rush Limbaugh has explained. “And since they kept their jobs, they continued to pay dues. And the dues are what end up being donated back to the Democrat Party or used by the union to fund advertising to elect Democrats.”

There are a number of State lawmakers trying to pass legislation that would allow union members the right to determine where their dues are going.  The laws emerging would protect employees by requiring union leadership to obtain prior approval before spending dues money on political advocacy. A separate study by the CUF shows that about 80 percent of Americans – including those in union households – support a paycheck protection provision as well as other ERA reforms.

The big labor response to those attempts have been violent, of course.

My big thing is this: Where in the U.S. Constitution does it authorize the federal government to have this kind of relationship with entities like labor unions?  The Constitution was written to stop this kind of collusion and mercantilism.  The Democrats, however, say otherwise – since they interpret the Constitution to mean what they want it to say, and if you argue, they’ll find a judge somewhere to slap you down.

– Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary