Romney on Teachers and Their Unions: Silence Them!
John Nichols  
September 26, 2012 - 9:59 AM ET
http://www.thenation.com/blog/170166/romney-teachers-and-their-unions-silence-them

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.

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 seventy-five 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.

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