AFL-CIO Blog Counts on Readers Not to Look at the Links It Furnishes

American Crossroads President Falsely Claims Unions … – AFL-CIO

By mixing up Groucho and Harpo with Chico, perhaps the Big Labor propagandists at the AFL-CIO are hoping to show they are not Marxists after all?

For decades, poor-mouthing union officials and supposedly nonpartisan monitors of political spending like the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) have fostered a false impression that Big Labor spends less on politics and lobbying than Big Business. Fortunately, it is is gradually getting harder for union propagandists to keep up the charade.

A recent blog post on the AFL-CIO web site (linked above) tries.  Specifically, it attempts to brush aside a July 10 Wall Street Journal article confirming, unimpeachably, that Big Labor spends more than billion dollars on electioneering and other ideological activities per federal campaign cycle. The Journal article, by Tom McGinty and Brody Mullins, was based largely on a review of the LM-2 reports that all private-sector (and a number of government-sector) unions with annual revenues exceeding $250,000 are required to file electronically with the U.S. Labor Department. As McGinty and Mullins explained, LM-2 reports filed for the years 2005 through 2011 captured $3.3 billion in “political activity†above and beyond the $1.1 billion unions spent on federal PAC contributions and registered congressional lobbying over the same period. The $3.3 billion consisted mostly of dues and fees that, under federal or state law, workers are forced to fork over, or be fired from their jobs.

The Big Labor political and lobbying expenditures reported on LM-2’s cannot legally go straight into federal candidate or federal PAC coffers in the form of contributions. But forced dues-fueled union treasuries can pay for political phone banks, get-out-the-voted drives, propaganda mailings, and much more.

A so-called “rebuttal†of the Journal article prepared by the AFL-CIO hierarchy does not deny any of this. Instead, it effectively suggests that Big Labor lobbying and politicking should be regarded differently than lobbying by businesses and trade associations, because the motives of union lobbyists are pure. In reality, the agenda union lobbyists are pushing for is more Big Labor power to force individual workers to accept monopoly union “representation,†whether they want it or not, and to force such captive passengers to pay union dues or fees as a condition of employment.

Last week’s AFL-CIO blog post furnishes a link to this “rebuttal,†implying that it shows Big Business really does spend more on politics and lobbying than the $4.4 billion the Journal very conservatively estimates unions spent over the past seven years. It does nothing of the kind.

More fittingly than AFL-CIO propagandists perhaps realized, the post on union political spending features an illustration with a famous quote by Chico Marx from the 1933 comedy classic Duck Soup: “Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?†The illustration is a movie still not of Chico, but of Duck Soup’s famous “mirror scene†in which Groucho faces off with Harpo (dressed up as Groucho). If you can’t even trust the union bosses to get their Marx quotations correctly, can you trust them about anything at all?