Rush Limbaugh Program - December 28, 2012, Friday, Hour #2

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Dec. 28, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program

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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 twenty-four hours.
	Norman Schwarzkopf, seventy-eight 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 Schwartzkoff'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 Schwartzkoff'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 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 sell 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 could we'll ever 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 Schwartzkoff died in Tampa, 78 years old.
	So while his path 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 Schwartzkoff did make.
	It's Friday on the Rush Limbaugh program, and that can mean one and one thing one thing only.
	Live from New York City.
	It's open line Friday.
	I am in New York, three days away from New Year's Eve.
	No, I'm not going to stay.
	I don't I I 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 thirty first 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.
	There are they've already got the barricades up and they got the places where people are standing.
	It's just a remarkable sea.
	Oh, you'd want to go there.
	Bose nerdly 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 I was asking the I was asking the question.
	Anyway, we've got a big uh 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 cloud of public employee unions in the United States, you're underestimating it.
	I'm excited about the interview.
	Both Nerdly came up with this idea for the program, and normally I would, okay, he's a big shot around here, grip my teeth, and Bos Nerdly wants us to do this segment, I'll do it.
	I'm in 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 thirty-first.
	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 I w 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 uh 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 let 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 credits 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 in to a country if the economy was booming.
	If we were 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 one and a half percent, and that's compared to a bad year, when you have American businesses that are sitting on all of this cash, afraid to put it, you know, put 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 he mean 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 uh 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 monarch 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 br or excuse me.
	That uh Rush always talks about.
	Yeah, Keith, a lot of people when they hear rhetoric like this, and you know, I I 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.
	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 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 eighty years in which government gets a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger, and you get 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 canon of twenty thirteen.
	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 any time 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's so we have this fiscal clip, which he then thinks he can use to his advantage.
	My name is Mark Belling, and I'm sitting in for Rush Lembo.
	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 yes, you know, yesterday morning.
	There's no way I gave it to you.
	We have the s we have we have the same cold that I 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, the 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, 80, 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, the 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, late Merry Christmas and happy New Year.
	I uh think we're in trouble.
	I saw a guy that uh I would rather have negotiate with uh Obama, and that's Donald Trump.
	Uh the guy uh 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 uh everybody thinks that Obama is holding all the cards when Boehner, the Republicans, have uh the best card in the deck, and that has to do with the uh need to raise the uh national debt limit, which is coming up.
	I think Tim Geitner made a mention of that yesterday.
	And uh this is uh something that is critical uh for the operation of the government.
	You you make a very good point there.
	Well, this is this is uh uh Donald Trump is making a point.
	I don't want to take credit for it.
	Well, you mean you're rolling it, 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 you know 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 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 New Gingrich tried to play that card back in ninety-five.
	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 so.
	Don 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.
	Uh 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 Bosnerdly 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 cloud 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 these are into 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, uh 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 let's look at it.
	Let me put it in perspective.
	In nineteen sixty-two, 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 1098.
	And what that basically did is it it allowed huge amounts of unionization in the public or government sector.
	And what that has done is that is created huge revenue streams for these unions.
	These unions now take in over 14 billion dollars a year just in dues.
	Fourteen billion.
	That's the size of the economies of a lot of countries.
	And they say they only use twenty to thirty 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 negotiate the new contract for the with the school board, and so on.
	Your 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 it.
	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 re-elected 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.
	He 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 give you let me just give you a couple of minor statistics.
	The union spent on that election over 500 million dollars.
	Now they talk about super PACs and nobody even came close.
	They put four hundred thousand 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 getting put in going into political office, they reported that they put one hundred thousand volunteers on the ground for Team Obama.
	But let's just take a state of if I'm if I might.
	Let's take the state of Ohio as an example.
	In just Ohio, and Ohio was one big by Obama, and big means he won it by about a hundred and fifty thousand votes.
	The AF of L CIO, just the AFL CIO, registered over seventy thousand union household voters, and he got 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 said 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 uh and these people just focused on 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 eight hundred thousand voters during the last four days before the election in just Ohio alone.
	I mean, there's no way massive.
	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 em we have emails to their members where they s where they say that we need you to volunteer, and if you volunteer, we'll pay you fifty dollars for three hours plus lunch, and we'll even throw in a t-shirt.
	We have one where they they're even gonna 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 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.
	They 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 You're absolutely right.
	Um you summed it up better than even I could.
	In shadow bosses, we go into the detail of of how this all works, but nobody could compete with that ground game.
	No one can.
	And nobody has the money that these that these unions have.
	It is just shocking.
	And they get seventy-five percent of their money, almost seventy-five percent, from the forced due states.
	Those are the states that say you can't have a job and s 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 force in the force 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 seven percent of union members ever voted to have a union or to not have one.
	So what happens is you join it, you join 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 they're like dictators of third world countries.
	You can't once they're there, you can't get rid of them.
	What 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 in some of the uh polling done, sixty percent of union members would not support most of many of the candidates that the unions heavily support.
	But they have no choice in the matter.
	You mentioned Kennedy in nineteen sixty-two 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 you know 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 has been uh in the private sector has been in huge decline.
	Only about six percent of workers are members of unions in the private sector.
	But forty-one percent today, forty-one percent 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 private sector union unions, that was their thing.
	The AFL CIO has been co-opted by the government union simply because so many of the members of the FLCIO now are government are government people, and the go you know, the 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 we have a chapter in Shadow Bosses or we have um about how there's actually a split between the government employee unions and the um and the private sector unions.
	The problem is most of the unions, even the 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 uh government unions represent everybody from Peace Corps workers to uh university professors from uh zookeepers to NASA scientists.
	The that's where the 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 Bosses Fascinating Expose of the Amount of Money Being Spent by Government Unions, primarily government unions and political activism.
	I'm Mark Belling sitting in for Rush.
	Mark Belling and 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 made 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 discertified.
	It seems to me, Mallory, that this is that this type of legislation is the only way that can be 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.
	But uh I would blame the election of Barack Obama to the success of Scott Walker and Rebecca Clayfish.
	Um what happened is the unions recognized that it was do or die for them, and and they doubled down, and that's why they put over a half a billion dollars, which I mentioned earlier, and put four hundred and fifty thousand people on the street for Barack Obama paid volunteers, because they saw what happened in Wisconsin.
	So in some ways, um 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.
	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 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 and 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 fire 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 in the for the first parts of the uh 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, uh 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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