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Dec. 28, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:40
December 28, 2012, Friday, Hour #2
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Let's open this hour of the program by spending a moment to remember one of the most larger-than-life Americans recent times.
General Schwarzkopf died in the past 24 hours.
Norman Schwarzkopf, 78 years old.
What a figure.
You go back to that period in the Gulf War.
He became an American icon.
True.
The war that we fought, that war, the first war in Iraq, was the one in which we didn't have to do the difficult part.
We went out and we cleaned up the Iraqi army and we marched on, you know, and we marched to Baghdad, but we didn't have to do the difficult part of displacing Saddam and putting in place a new government and holding the peace.
That had to happen in the Second War.
But that wasn't Schwarzkopf's fault.
He was given a task to liberate Kuwait and to go to Baghdad and force the Iraqis to accept that.
And the battle plan that he came up with, the war plan that he came up with, was brilliant.
But I think Schwartzkopf's great contribution is something other than that.
You've got to go back to that Iraq war and realize what the American psyche was with regard to wars.
You had a lot of people who thought that that was going to be a disaster.
It was going to be a quagmire and they thought we were going to lose.
The reason they thought that is because Vietnam was still hanging over us.
Remember the Gulf War was 1990, 1991?
That was only 18 years or so after the Vietnam War ended.
There was this sense that our military was beaten down, that our military couldn't deliver anymore.
That tremendous victory, that total routing of the Iraqis with very limited American casualties, got us once again to feel good about American military power.
There was a wave of patriotism that swept America.
It wasn't just that he achieved his military goals.
He did so at such small loss of life.
The number of casualties in that war, I don't remember what the number was, but it was small.
I don't think we'll ever be able to repay the debt that we owe him for the tremendous war plan that he came up with, achieving those military goals, but also, I think, rebuilding Americans' confidence in our military and rebuilding the appreciation that we rightly have since shown to all of the people who serve our country.
Norman Schwarzkopf died in Tampa 78 years old.
So while his passing is obviously a sad moment, it's an opportunity for us to reflect on what it was that made him great.
And rather than simply mourn his death, I think that we need to look back and realize what an incredible contribution General Schwarzkopf did make.
It's Friday on the Russian Limbaugh program, and that can mean one and one thing, one thing only.
Live from New York City!
It's open lives Friday!
I am in New York, three days away from New Year's Eve.
No, I'm not going to stay.
The audience doesn't know a lot about my personal life.
My audience in Milwaukee knows a few things.
But I'll tell you one thing.
The last place in the world I would ever want to be, December 31st, is in Times Square in New York.
Everything about that scene, the hassle, the pushing and the shoving, the mob scene, the standing around to see really nothing, the whole pointlessness of the whole thing, I wouldn't want any part of it.
They've already got the barricades up and they've got the places where people are standing.
It's just a remarkable scene.
Oh, you'd want to go there.
Bo Snerdley says it's a great place to be sociable.
You would want to be at that.
You would go.
You did do it one time.
Really?
Fast.
And you liked it.
I was asking the question.
Anyway, we've got a big segment coming up about halfway through this hour at the bottom of the hour.
I'm going to be joined by Mallory Factor, who's written a brilliant new book, Shadow Bosses.
Whatever you think about the clout of public employee unions in the United States, you're underestimating it.
I'm excited about the interview.
Bo Snerdley came up with this idea for the program.
And normally I would, okay, he's a big shot around here.
Grit my teeth and Bo Snerdley wants us to do this segment.
I'll do it.
I'm enthused about it.
This is going to be good.
Mallory Factor, very, very important book.
We're going to talk to him at the bottom of the hour.
It is Open Line Friday, as I mentioned.
It's also the day that the fiscal cliff is back on page one because Boehner and McConnell and the rest of the congressional leadership is going to go to the White House and meet with the president in a couple of hours.
One last chance to avert this crisis of going off the cliff.
The House of Representatives itself isn't even in Washington, but Boehner said, I want you to show up on Sunday so that if necessary, you can meet and vote on whatever it is that we can vote on on New Year's Eve, which is Monday the 31st.
I am so bored with this whole discussion of what the Republicans should and shouldn't do and what tactics are going to be employed because I think it misses the entire point.
The first hour of today's program, I mentioned my belief that President Obama doesn't see the fiscal cliff as a problem because he's more motivated by raising taxes than he is strengthening the American economy.
So if you've got that situation in place, if you've got a guy who doesn't mind if we go over the cliff, you can't cut a deal with him.
So the Republicans shouldn't be torturing themselves asking how much we need to concede and how much we need to give up because there's never going to be a deal that's going to be good enough for him unless they go so far that they destroy the soul of the party.
I don't think he wants a deal since he doesn't want a deal.
There's no reason for them to keep breaking themselves up about the whole thing.
There's one way in which I could see that I'm wrong.
There's only one way that I see a deal coming around, and that is if the Senate cuts a deal itself.
I don't think it's going to happen because I don't think Harry Reid wants a deal.
But if some of the Democrats who I think are sincerely interested in averting this crisis, maybe Schumer of New York and a few others, if they got together with Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader from Kentucky, and they could strike a deal and push it to the House, I don't know how Obama could possibly veto that.
I don't think that's going to happen, but it's the only scenario that I could see in which some sort of an agreement is going to be made before we get around to January 1st.
I don't think most people know how many taxes are going to go up, though, on January 1st.
You take a look at the list of these things.
I mean, everything's going up.
The capital gains tax is going up.
The dividend tax, which is one of the most obnoxious taxes that we have, dividends, are going to be taxed at ordinary income.
The child care credit's going to go away.
The increase in tax rates is significant.
It's just a bad, bad thing.
And it's something that you shouldn't do to a country if the economy was booming.
If we were running a surplus right now, this would be a bad idea.
To do it when we've got 7.7% unemployment, when we have a growth rate of 1.5%, and that's compared to a bad year, when you have American businesses that are sitting on all of this cash, afraid to It to work when you've got Obamacare, which terrifies corporations looming over us to come in with this type of a tax increase right now is unbelievably stupid.
So I understand it's a crisis.
The point that I'm trying to make here about my pessimism about making a deal to avert the crisis is I think that this is a crisis that Barack Obama wants, that he couldn't care less if we send the economy back into a recession if it means that he was able to get a lot more money out of the checking accounts and investments of higher-income Americans.
Open Line Friday, let's go to the phones there for Minerva, Ohio.
And Keith, Keith, it's your turn on EIB with Mark Belling.
Hi, Mark.
Good to talk to you.
Thank you.
Just wanted to make a comment on President Obama on his plans for the United States.
He campaigned completely different in 2007 as to what he's enacted.
If he would have done as he said he was going to do in 2007, this year, instead of seeing Frosty the Snowman, we'd have seen the Barack Obama men in everybody's front yard.
But we don't.
His idea is to tear this country down to nothing and then rebuild it in a monarchical way where he is the king.
Those beneath him are bought to a point as to where they can have a certain amount of power, but then no more power because he is the one who will decide what is best for everybody.
This fiscal cliff, he wants to ride over it.
He'll be waving at everybody as we go to the bottom, and then he'll put it on steroids to accomplish his agenda of making the rich take care of the low-information voter that Rock always or excuse me.
That Rush always talks about.
Rush always talks about.
Keith, a lot of people, when they hear rhetoric like this, and you know, I talk to liberals, I talk to moderates, and they hear some of the stuff that's coming from talk radio callers and talk radio hosts, and they think that we're losing it, that we're over the top with this overheated talk.
What do you mean the president doesn't want the country to succeed?
What do you mean that the president's trying to tear everything down?
Nobody believes that.
Have you people lost it?
But people do believe this.
And I don't think Obama wants everyone to be miserable.
I don't think that.
What I do think is that he wants America to be run very differently from the way that we have been run.
I think he looks at Europe and some of the societies over there and thinks they do it pretty doggone good.
The fact that Europe is a basket case, the fact that the finances of Europe are melting down, I don't think it matters so much to him because in Europe, they confiscate as much wealth as they can.
In Europe, you get most of the things that you need from the government.
In Europe, you're dependent upon the government for your every need.
The government runs just about everything over there.
That's why the creation of health care was so big, was such a big deal for President Obama.
We have always been different.
The United States of America was set up on an ocean of free market capitalism, and we've had this creep over the last 80 years in which government gets a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger, and you become more and more and more dependent upon the government.
Social Security, which was created to be a fallback for elderly people, has turned into this giant monster that spends so much money and requires so many taxes.
Medicare, Medicaid, mass transit aid, federal highway grants, all of this stuff, bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
And we have changed from the type of country that we were before, but nowhere near where Obama wants to take us.
I think he believes that we need to have the kinds of taxation policies that create the socialist economies of Europe.
I think it's what he believes.
He campaigned on it, for heaven's sakes.
The one thing he didn't campaign on was refusal to address spending.
He said over and over and over in the campaign against Romney that he supported a balanced approach.
Yet in these negotiations on the fiscal cliff, there hasn't been any of that balance there.
He's proposed no cuts in spending at all.
Medicare and Social Security and Medicaid are completely off the table.
He hasn't itemized one way in which he'd reduce spending at all.
He's talked about moving this forward and kicking the cannon to 2013.
So where is that balanced approach?
Now, maybe he'd be willing to accept some spending cuts if he got all the taxes that he was looking for.
I just think that you've got a president here who doesn't care about the negative consequences of going over the fiscal cliff because he's motivated by taking us over the cliff so he can get more of our money.
That's what drives him.
It's what drives American liberals.
It's what drives people who are like-minded with the president.
And the fact of the matter is, is that our side did not do a good enough job in explaining that to the American public.
And he did win.
And we're stuck with this current situation.
It doesn't mean that we have to acquiesce.
It doesn't mean we have to agree.
And it certainly doesn't mean that the Republicans have to roll over and abandon all of their principles.
Because while Obama keeps saying, you know, I won, the House Republicans won also.
And they stand for certain things.
I don't think we're ever going to get to a point, though, at least not anytime soon, where the Republicans have to vote on some terrible, terrible deal.
Because I don't think the president wants to offer the Republicans right now anything that they would agree to.
He wants to get us into the new year so we have this fiscal cliff, which he then thinks he can use to his advantage.
My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush, one of the many marks that fill in here on the Rush Limbaugh program.
For whatever reason, well, I know what the reason is.
Rush always takes vacation between Christmas and New Year's.
I always seem to do the program the Thursday and Friday between Christmas and New Year's.
And I always have a cold when I do the program, the Thursday and Friday between Christmas and New Year's.
It happens every single year.
I would love to figure out what causes that.
I do the show in the summer.
I did the show at Thanksgiving.
I had no cold then.
Bo Snerdley now has the same cold.
We only saw each other yesterday morning.
There's no way I gave it to you.
We have the same cold.
So I'm in a crabby mood to begin with, but I'm not going to allow it to affect the quality of my program.
I owe it to the Rush audience to go beyond my short-term pain here.
As for the fiscal cliff, let me make a serious point about this.
This isn't good.
We haven't even talked about the cuts that occur, some of which aren't good because of sequestration.
This isn't good for America.
You've got a lot of people right now for whom this cliff, these tax increases, are going to cause hardships for them.
You've got a lot of people who are pretty much spending most of the income that they have coming in.
They're going to have to scale back.
The person who's making $75,000, $80,000, $85,000 a year, who sees a big cut in his paycheck because the withholding goes up, that person isn't going to be able to spend the money that he's spending on at least some things.
It's going to slow down our economy.
I mentioned the dividend tax because it's so obnoxious.
Right now, because of Fed policies on interest rates, about the only way that people can invest for income, which is primarily people 50 and up, is to go and buy stocks of companies that pay decent dividends.
By under the, you know, reverting back to the old tax rates, those dividends end up being taxed at the same rate as ordinary income, even though the companies themselves have already been taxed.
That's a significant cut in the amount of money that's going to go to the people who are living off of those stocks.
This isn't a good thing.
There are going to be consequences for it.
And it's, frankly, rather pathetic that we live in a country right now in which I think the president of the United States doesn't much care about that.
Now, maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe he'll cut a deal.
Maybe he'll get reasonable.
Maybe he'll offer something to the Republicans that they can accept.
Maybe he'll scale back all of the tax increases and actually offer some cuts.
I just don't believe that's where he's coming from.
Crofton, Maryland, and John John, you're on the Rush Limbaugh show with Mark Belling.
Yeah, wait, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year.
I think we're in trouble.
I saw a guy that I would rather have negotiated with Obama, and that's Donald Trump.
The guy knows how to negotiate.
He's done it in real life.
He's written a book about it, The Art of the Deal, and he said that everybody thinks that Obama is holding all the cards when Boehner, the Republicans, have the best card in the deck, and that has to do with the need to raise the national debt limit, which is coming up.
I think Tim Geithner made a mention of that yesterday.
And this is something that is critical for the operation of the government.
You make a very good point there.
Well, this is Donald Trump making a point.
I don't want to take credit for it.
Well, I mean, you're rolling with it here.
I'm sure it happens to Rush all the time.
You know, I get callers on my program that will call up and make the exact same point that Rush said, and they never say, I heard Rush Limbaugh say today.
No, they grab the point and run with it themselves.
You are right about this.
If the debt ceiling isn't raised, the government does have to shut down some operations because it doesn't have the ability to issue credit.
They do have that out there.
The problem with it is that they're terrified, I think, of using that lever because they fear that the public's not going to like them.
Oh, my goodness, we're shutting down this operation, that operation, because you Republicans won't, you know, raise the debt ceiling.
It didn't work well when Newt Gingrich tried to play that card back in 95.
But I think they've got to stop worrying about who's going to look good and who's going to look bad.
One of the things that's liberating about this is that Obama did win the presidential election and we're two years away from another election.
They ought to go out there and use the best tactics that they have.
Now, you mentioned Trump and his negotiating.
I don't think, though, Donald Trump would be able to reach a deal with President Obama because it's my belief he doesn't want a deal.
Now, the point, though, that you make about the debt ceiling, that is significant.
And it may be the one problem in this fiscal cliff that the president doesn't want to have to confront.
Coming up in our next segment, we're going to be talking to a guy named Mallory Factor.
He's written a fascinating book.
It details just how powerful government unions are.
However, powerful you think they are, I think you're wrong.
You'll find out coming up next.
This is good stuff.
There's a new book out.
The title is Shadow Bosses.
I want to read to you, though, and our guest is going to explain what that means.
I want to read to you the subhead on the cover of the book.
This isn't pulling any punches.
Government unions control America and rob taxpayers blind.
Mallory Factor is the author of the book.
And I'll admit that I wasn't aware of it until Bo Snerdley suggested that we do it as a segment on the program.
Started reading the book, started reading the background material that Mallory Factor sent us.
I thought I knew a lot about the clout of public employee unions because I'm from Wisconsin and there's been a war in my state, won by the Republican governor, in dealing with those unions.
And I thought I had seen everything.
Some of the points that are made in here about the political power of these unions and how they're spending their money, fascinating stuff.
I also see that the book is endorsed by Leesar and Grover Norquist, David Keene, Rand Paul, Steve Forbes, Michelle Malkin.
Pretty good people here.
Gives it a lot of credibility.
So I'm joined right now by Mallory Factor.
Mallory, good afternoon and welcome to The Rush Show with Mark Belling.
Mark, thank you so much for having me.
I want to get right to it here.
Your title, the subhead on the book, Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind.
Is that hyperbole, or can you back that up?
Government unions control America.
Well, let's look at it.
Let me put it in perspective.
In 1962, January 62, President Kennedy wanted to figure out a way of having a permanent piggy bank for the Democrat Party.
And he passed an executive order.
Executive order's number was 10988.
And what that basically did is it allowed huge amounts of unionization in the public or government sector.
And what that has done is that has created huge revenue streams for these unions.
These unions now take in over $14 billion a year just in dues.
$14 billion.
That's the size of the economies of a lot of countries.
And they say they only use 20 to 30 percent to represent their members.
What do you think they do with a lot of it?
They use it for political purposes.
And I think that that part and some of the numbers that you have in the book are stunning, really.
I think most Americans think that the union dues that these government unions are charging, they're using it for the union organizing, and they're using it when they have an arbitration hearing in the workplace, and they're using it when they bring in the negotiator and they negotiate the new contract with the school board and so on.
You state, however, that that's only where a fraction of the money goes, that three-quarters of the money that they're taking in dues, they're using for other stuff.
Tell us where it goes.
I'm not saying they say it themselves.
It's their reporting, right?
Yeah.
I'm just reporting what they say.
Where does the money go?
A lot of it goes for political purposes.
I mean, President Obama would not have been reelected president if it were not for the money and organization that the unions put in.
It is that simple.
They made him the president.
Defend that point of view.
We did hold an election, and more people voted for him than voted for our guy.
Defend that point of view that the unions are the reason he won.
Yeah, let me just give you a couple of minor statistics.
The unions spent on that election over $500 million.
Now, they talk about super PACs, and nobody even came close.
They put 400,000 people on the streets to work for Team Obama.
A single union, the SEIU, which was a union that the president originally was an organizer for prior to him going into political office, they reported that they put 100,000 volunteers on the ground for Team Obama.
But let's just take a state, if I might.
Let's take the state of Ohio as an example.
In just Ohio, and Ohio was won big by Obama.
And big means he won it by about 150,000 votes.
The AF of L CIO, just the AF of L CIO, registered over 70,000 union household voters, and they got the vast majority to the poll to vote for Obama.
And we believe they voted for Obama since they registered them, and they say they were for Obama.
On top of that, the SEIU had 2,300 full-time volunteers.
And we can talk about volunteers if you want later.
And these people just focused on the African-American share of the vote and the Latino share of the vote.
On top of that, the AF of L CIO contacted 800,000 voters during the last four days before the election in just Ohio alone.
There is no way.
There's no way the Republican Party could ever match that.
You're talking about something that can only be done if you have thousands and thousands and thousands of people to do this.
And I think you're implying here that the majority of them weren't volunteering, that this was money that was spent for the purpose of having this monstrous effort in place to get out the vote for Obama in Ohio.
Absolutely.
Well, we have emails to their members where they say that we need you to volunteer.
And if you volunteer, we'll pay you $50 for three hours plus lunch, and we'll even throw in a T-shirt.
We have one where they're going to throw in a turkey.
One of the things that I think led to a lot of us being wrong in analyzing the election, and I argued for a year and a half on Russia's program here that I thought that Obama was going to lose.
I argued it on my program in Milwaukee, I thought Obama was going to lose.
I looked at the 2008 election and I saw almost a sense of evangelism on the part of a lot of voters, particularly minority voters, to get out and elect Obama.
Young voters, passionate.
They liked Obama.
They thought that he was a cool guy.
And you had Republicans who were dispirited.
They weren't satisfied with McCain.
You had the banking crisis, all of that stuff.
It seemed like a perfect storm.
And I detected none of that enthusiasm here in 2012.
The magic was gone.
The Obama supporters, who were so inspired by the soaring rhetoric of 08, instead, you had this guy that was running this harshly negative campaign.
Young voters, a huge percentage of whom don't even have jobs right now, seemed to have soured on him.
In the meantime, there were these huge crowds that were turning out for Romney.
It seemed as though there was this big enthusiasm gap that favored the Republicans.
A lot of people who predicted that Romney would win bought into that and they thought that there was much more enthusiasm on the Romney side.
Your book has, for the first time, explained to me why I was wrong in that.
Whether or not the voter is enthusiastic or not, you're suggesting that the public employee unions had such a massive ground game in identifying these voters that they found them and got them to the polls.
Whether you're enthusiastic about voting or whether or not you're dragged in by somebody who works for a public employee union, your vote counts the same.
And I think that that manpower effort that they have, this explains how the Obama turnout was as high as it was.
You're absolutely right.
You summed it up better than even I could.
In Shadow Bosses, we go into the detail of how this all works.
But nobody could compete with that ground game.
No one can.
And nobody has the money that these unions have.
It is just shocking.
And they get 75% of their money, almost 75%, from the forced dues states.
Those are the states that say you can't have a job if there's a union there unless you pay union dues.
You have no choice in the matter.
You have to pay the union to keep your job.
And a union is a private organization.
I want to get to that point.
I want to get to that point in the forced dues in a minute.
But your point is that they have the money.
Whether it's compulsory dues or not, they have the money.
So it's fascinating, though.
They've been able to justify to their members charging dues that are way, way, way beyond what they need to take care of the actual union business at the local level and have decided instead to become a political animal.
How do they justify that to their members?
Well, first of all, they don't.
Remember, only less than 7% of union members ever voted to have a union or to not have one.
So what happens is you join it, or you take a job and you have to pay the union to keep your job.
And the bosses of these unions are there for 10, 20, 30 years.
They're like dictators of third world countries.
Once they're there, you can't get rid of them.
They have these huge resources at their disposal.
And the members have no idea.
Most members, if you look at who are the most union-supported politicians in America, they are some of the most leftist socialist liberals you can ever find.
Union members are not like that.
Actually, in some of the polling done, 60% of union members would not support many of the candidates that the unions heavily support.
But they have no choice in the matter.
You mentioned Kennedy in 1962 and the push toward government unionization.
How did the government union movement transform from something that mostly dealt with workplace issues, which is what I think most union members are more focused on?
You know, their gripes with the employer and the arbitration hearings and negotiate a good pension and all of that stuff.
How did they transform into something in which the primary focus of the union isn't taking care of the needs of the members, but instead becoming this massive arm of the Democrat Party?
Well, what happened was that unions in the 30s, we can argue, served a very important purpose.
And also unions in the 30s, you didn't have to join a union to get a job.
You did it because the union was providing a service and you paid them.
What happened is union membership in the private sector has been in huge decline.
Only about 6% of workers are members of unions in the private sector.
But 41% today, 41% of government workers are now members of a union.
Shocking number.
This has resulted, it seems to me, the AFL-CIO, which used to be primarily private sector unions, that was their thing.
The AFL-CIO has been co-opted by the government unions simply because so many of the members of the FL-CIO now are government people.
And the goals of somebody who works for, say, an auto company or a steel worker may not be the same as a government employee union.
And the AFL-CIO, I think, has started to sell out some of the private sector unions.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
Oh, yeah.
We have a chapter in Shadow Boss about how there's actually a split between the government employee unions and the private sector unions.
Problem is most of the unions, even the private sector unions, recognize that, remember, they're private organizations, that in order to grow, they have to take on members from the government and from the government area because the private sector, in terms of unionism, is in decline.
So today, government unions represent everybody from Peace Corps workers to university professors, from zookeepers to NASA scientists.
That's where the growth is, and they're going after the growth.
The clout they have in the Democratic Party is clearly because they have all the money.
Therefore, it seems to me that the only way you can address that clout is to go after the money, and that's where compulsory dues membership becomes a big thing.
And this is the thing that we saw fought out in my own state of Wisconsin.
I want to carry you over through the break here because I want to address that question of this mandatory dues payment thing because it's fascinating.
It's the only way I think that you can turn this around.
We're being joined right now by Mallory Factor.
The title of the book is Shadow Boss's Fascinating Expose of the Amount of Money Being Spent by Government Unions, Primarily Government Unions on Political Activism.
I'm Mark Belling, sitting in for Rush.
Mark Bellingin for Rush.
We're talking with Mallory Factor, the author of Shadow Bosses, an expose of government employee unions.
In my own state of Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker, as his first major act as governor, came in and proposed legislation that restricted the ability of the unions to bargain on anything other than wages, also required them to kick in for their health insurance and their pensions.
But the thing that made the unions so angry and what brought a civil war to Wisconsin was Walker also included in the legislation language that said that if you didn't want to be a member of the union or pay dues to the union, you didn't have to.
Since that legislation has passed and the ability of the unions to bargain on things has gone away, there's been in Wisconsin tremendous erosion of union membership.
Thousands of people who were paying union dues have stopped doing so, and some unions have been decertified.
It seems to me, Mallory, that this type of legislation is the only way that we can try to cut into the clout of these unions.
If they don't have the dues, they don't have the money.
Mark, you're so right.
I'm going to say something that's a little bit unusual, but I would blame the election of Barack Obama to the success of Scott Walker and Rebecca Klasish.
What happened is the unions recognized that it was do or die for them, and they doubled down, and that's why they put over a half a billion dollars, which I mentioned earlier, and put 450,000 people on the street for Barack Obama, paid volunteers, because they saw what happened in Wisconsin.
So in some ways, Scott Walker is responsible for the re-elect of Obama, though I am a major Scott Walker fan and would not want to change anything.
Michigan, that's what they saw the light, that their money, their revenues, their stream of dollars could be shut off if people had the choice to be part of the union or not.
The Michigan state legislature just passed right to work legislation, which also says you don't have to join the union or pay dues to the union if you don't want to.
And again, the same sort of apocalyptic reaction from the unions.
This is the one thing they do not want.
And I think it's the one way that the Republicans can fight back and try to level the playing field is to go after the money of the unions.
Well, it's very interesting.
People say, the unions say you're anti-worker when people talk about right to work, but that's all right to work says is to keep your job, you don't have to pay a union tribute, or as they call it, dues.
but they hate it because they know a lot of people will not want to be part of that union for a whole bunch of reasons.
You've made a remarkable contribution here because I think that this is the best case yet that I've seen that summarizes the power of the unions and how they've moved away from being, well, let's just represent the rights of the workers and instead become an operation to elect Democrats, especially far liberal Democrats.
Thank you very much, Mallory Factor.
The name of the book again is Shadow Bosses.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush Limbaugh.
Every talk show host knows when an interview is really good as opposed to one that's dragging, and that is when you're looking at the clock and you're hacked off because you're running out of time and you have all this material that you still want to get to.
So I'm going to make an executive decision here.
I'm empowered to do it because it's Open Line Friday.
We're going to have Mallory Factor stay with us for the first parts of the next hour of the program.
And if any of you would like to ask him a question about some of the points that he's making about government unions and their incredible clout, I'm going to throw out the phone number right now, 1-800-282-2882.
And Mallory's going to stay with us and answer a couple of your calls.
The point that he makes that if you want to know why Obama won, despite all of the problems in his first term, and despite the fact that the economy was so bad, that he had this incredible army supplied by the unions that the Republicans couldn't match, it's a fascinating thesis.
And it does explain the big unanswered question of how in the world the president actually won.
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