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September 26, 2012

Romney on Teachers and Their Unions: Silence Them!

By John Nichols

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Cross-posted from The Nation

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Mitt Romney has absolutely no problem with billionaires buying elections. In fact, had it not been for billionaires' buying elections, he would not be the Republican nominee for president.

But Romney has a big, big problem with working people's participating in the political process. Especially teachers.

America's primary proponent of big money in politics now says that he wants to silence K-12 teachers who pool their resources in order to defend public education for kids whose parents might not be wealthy enough to pay the $39,000 a year it costs to send them to the elite Cranbrook Schools attended by young Willard Mitt.

"We simply can't have a setting where the teachers unions are able to contribute tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of politicians and then those politicians, when elected, stand across from them at the bargaining table, supposedly to represent the interest of the kids. I think it's a mistake," the Republican nominee for president of 53 percent of the United States said during an appearance Tuesday with NBC's Education Nation. "I think we've got to get the money out of the teachers unions going into campaigns. It's the wrong way for us to go."

That's rich.

So rich in irony, in fact, that it could be the most hypocritical statement uttered by a candidate who has had no trouble scaling the heights of hypocrisy.

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If Romney wanted to get money out of politics altogether and replace the current crisis with a system where election campaigns were publicly funded, his comments might be taken seriously. But that's not the case. Romney just wants "reforms" that silence individuals and organizations that do not share his antipathy for public education.

Romney is troubled that unions such as the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association voice political opinions. But he is not troubled by Bain capitalists' pooling their resources in Super PACs and buying election results.

Indeed, if it had not been for massive spending by the lavishly funded Romney Super PAC "Restore Our Future" on Republican primary season attack ads -- which poured tens of millions of dollars into the nasty work of destroying more popular rivals for the nomination.

When he was facing a withering assault by "Restore Our Future" in Iowa, Gingrich said Romney would "buy the election if he could."

Romney could. And he did.

Never in the history of American presidential elections has so weak and dysfunctional a candidate as Romney been able to hold his own as a presidential contender solely because of the money donated by very wealthy individuals and corporations to the agencies that seek to elect him.

Yet he now attacks teachers who are merely seeking to assure that -- in the face of frequently ridiculous and consistently ill-informed media coverage, brutal attacks by so-called "think tanks" and neglect even by Democratic politicians -- the voices of supporters of public education are heard when voters are considering the future of public education.

Romney is the most consistently and aggressively anti-union candidate ever to be nominated for the presidency by a major American political party. His disdain for organized labor has been consistently and aggressively stated. He's an enthusiastic backer of moves to bust public sector unions, he supports so-called "right-to-work" laws as a tool states can use to bust private-sector unions and he wants to do away with guarantees that workers on construction projects are fairly compensated and able to negotiate to keep job sites safe. The Republican platform on which Romney and Paul Ryan are running goes so far as to call for the "enactment of a National Right-to-Work law," which would effectively undo more the 75 years of labor laws in this country.

That's extremism in the defense not of liberty but of plutocracy. But there are points where Romney goes beyond extremism.

When it comes to the role of teacher unions, the Republican nominee's royalist tendencies come to the fore. Unable to recognize the absolute absurdity of a nominee who would not be a nominee were it not for the support he has received from billionaires and millionaires seeking to prevent kindergarten teachers from pooling small donations to defend their schools, his message is the modern-day equivalent of the monarch of old sneering at the rabble and ordering his minions, Silence them!

Some Republicans do support unions" when a labor lockout gets in the way of their football game, that is. Check out Dave Zirin's take on Scott Walker and the NFL.

Authors Bio:

John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Online Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.

Nichols writes about politics for The Nation magazine as its Washington correspondent. He is a contributing writer for The Progressive and In These Times and the associate editor of the Capital Times, the daily newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and dozens of other newspapers.

Nichols is a frequent guest on radio and television programs as a commentator on politics and media issues. He was featured in Robert Greenwald's documentary, "Outfoxed," and in the documentaries Joan Sekler's "Unprecedented," Matt Kohn's "Call It Democracy" and Robert Pappas' "Orwell Rolls in his Grave." The keynote speaker at the 2004 Congress of the International Federation of Journalists in Athens, Nichols has been a featured presenter at conventions, conferences and public forums on media issues sponsored by the Federal Communications Commission, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Consumers International, the Future of Music Coalition, the AFL-CIO, the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the Newspaper Guild [CWA] and dozens of other organizations.

Nichols is the author of the upcoming book The Genius of Impeachment (The New Press), as well as a critically-acclaimed analysis of the Florida recount fight of 2000, Jews for Buchanan (The New Press) and a best-selling biography of Vice President Dick Cheney, Dick: The Man Who is President (The New Press), which has recently been published in French and Arabic. He edited Against the Beast: A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire (Nation Books), of which historian Howard Zinn said: "At exactly the time when we need it most, John Nichols gives us a special gift--a collection of writings, speeches, poems, and songs from throughout American history--that reminds us that our revulsion to war and empire has a long and noble tradition in this country."

With Robert W. McChesney, Nichols has co-authored the books, It's the Media, Stupid! (Seven Stories), Our Media, Not Theirs (Seven Stories) and Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy (The New Press). McChesney and Nichols are the co-founders of Free Press, the nation's media-reform network, which organized the 2003 and 2005 National Conferences on Media Reform.

Of Nichols, author Gore Vidal says: "Of all the giant slayers now afoot in the great American desert, John Nichols's sword is the sharpest."

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