President Obama came to Michigan to talk about his plan to
put the country on a
permanent path to fiscal ruin avert the fiscal cliff and
took the opportunity to slam the state’s Right-to-Work law bill–if
all goes well, insha allah­­–will be signed into law in less than
24 hours. Both the House and the Senate approved separate bills
last week that will be reconciled and put to another vote tomorrow–
and the final bill will be sent to Governor Snyder who has vowed to
sign it immediately. But Obama lambasted the effort to make
Michigan the 24^th right-to-work state in the country. He
said, reports the Business Insider:

“What we shouldn’t be doing is try to take away your rights to
bargain for better wages and working conditions…We don’t want a
race to the bottom.” 

Right-to-work laws “have nothing to do with economics” and “have
everything to do with politics.”

Obama should know what he is talking about given all the
forcibly extracted membership dues the unions funnel into the
Democratic Party. This year, unions
pumped a whopping–and I don’t use the term lightly–$400 million
to re-elect  him and other Democratic legislators.

But if you want to know the lengths that unions will go to
support Democrats, consider what the American Federation of State,
Country and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) did in 2010 to arrange
$87.5 million to help Democrats hang on to the Congress. Not only
did it empty out $16 million from its emergency account–it actually
took a $2 million loan,
according to the Wall Street Journal.

This isn’t crazy if you consider the potential payoff. In the
2009 stimulus and other legislation, the WSJ noted,
Democratic lawmakers sent more than $160 billion in federal cash to
states, aimed in large part at preventing public-sector layoffs.
“If Republicans running under the banner of limited government win
in November, they aren’t likely to support extending such aid to
states.”

So, yes, RTW laws are about politics–it is about the politics of
how unions use memberhsip dues to extract sweet deals for
themselves at taxpayers’ expense.