Imagine This
Posted on April 21, 2006 at 8:13 pm by Chuck Muth
“Imagine you pick up your newspaper one morning and read that the Republican Party has given control of George W. Bush’s reelection campaign to Halliburton, the oil and gas company that has taken on the specter of Darth Vader-like evil to the American left. It turns out that Halliburton is spending millions of corporate dollars-none of it collected from voluntary contribution-to finance ads and grassroots activity for the Republicans.
“Halliburton employees also dominate the Bush campaign staff; they are on loan as full-time ‘volunteers,’ though they continue to draw their Halliburton salaries. In exchange for the huge amounts of money and other support Halliburton is providing, the president and his staff meet with Halliburton executives to coordinate the message for the reelection campaign. More important, the GOP has granted Big Oil veto power over the Republican platform, refusing to formalize the party’s public policy positions and campaign strategies until Halliburton and other oil-company donors have given their approval.
“No doubt the nation would erupt in a furor if such an arrangement were revealed-and justifiably so. Armies of reporters would go to work investigating every iota of evidence of the ties between Republicans and their fat-cat patrons in corporate America, with each revelation a front-page story, the lead item on the evening news, and the subject of round-the-clock coverage on the cable news channels.
“Indignant politicians would call for congressional hearings, a special prosecutor, perhaps even the president’s impeachment. Whatever formal steps the government took, the media circus and the outrage over the revelations would ensure that the Bush presidency was over in everything but name….
“Amazingly, such a scenario actually played out pretty much as described-except the president running for reelection was not a Republican but a Democrat, and the powerful group pulling the strings in the campaign was not Big Oil but Big Labor.
“Even more shocking, the national media and the political establishment barely reacted to the revelation that America’s union bosses had systematically bought their way into control of the Democratic Party. There were no calls for congressional hearing, no outrage, no intensive media campaign.
“Welcome to the world of modern American politics. Simply put, the leftist labor unions have the Democrats in their pockets. And as a result they wield extraordinary political power at all levels of government-federal, state, and local. Big Labor has corrupted not only the electoral process but also our system of governing. And we’re all paying the price.”
- Excerpt from “Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics” by Linda Chavez and Dan Gray
