Monday, May 25, 1998

This anti-union bill takes the cake

By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN - California, whew: Sometimes I think we ought to hang a cowbell around it to let the future know to shut the gate.

Its latest lunacy is the "campaign reform initiative," Proposition 226, also called "the paycheck protection initiative," and if there were any truth-in-packaging laws in politics, its sponsors would be in Folsom Prison. Proposition 226 should properly be called the "let's put the unions out of business initiative." It has no more relation to campaign-finance reform or paycheck protection than it does to quantum physics. This is a full-blooded, blue-bellied, get-the-unions move sponsored by the zooiest collection of extremist right-wing money you ever saw.

According to anti-Proposition 226 forces, three of the leading backers are Richard Mellon Scaife, the Pittsburgh millionaire famous for funding right-wing conspiracy nuts and Paula Jones' lawsuit; J. Patrick Rooney, the Indiana insurance millionaire and Gingrich backer who supports a host of right-wing causes; and Grover Norquist, the all-purpose right-winger and head of Americans for Tax Reform, which is itself under Senate investigation for violating campaign laws in the '96 election.

Some actual Californians are also involved: The May-June Mother Jones says an Orange County pro-school-voucher group called the Education Alliance, which focuses on electing conservative Christians to local school boards, came up with the idea for the "paycheck protection initiative" after the California Teachers Association helped defeat a school-voucher initiative five years ago. This Education Alliance in turn gets most of its funding from Howard Ahmanson, a wealthy businessman who reportedly funnels millions to radical-right groups and is linked to James Dobson's fundamentalist organization, Focus on the Family, in Colorado Springs, Colo.

The plan is simple: If the initiative passes, unions will have to get written permission from each member every year to use union dues for political activity. What's wrong with that? Absolutely nothing, as long as corporations are also required to get written permission from each shareholder every year before the corporation can use any money for any political activity. But this proposition is aimed only at unions. It would cost the unions millions of dollars and untold amounts of time to get these annual permission slips, and that, of course, is the whole point: to weaken the political power of unions, which are already outspent by business. Just what the country needs, complete domination of politics by corporations and the only organizations that speak for American workers shut out entirely.

Theoretically reasonable newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune have actually endorsed this travesty. The unions started 50 points behind on this cunningly packaged "campaign reform initiative" and have now fought back to within hailing distance, but the election is June 2, and polls show many voters still think this has something to do with campaign-contribution reform.

For those who are interested in how unions actually work, they do spend millions in independent campaign expenditures - $35 million in '96 - mostly on producing their own TV ads about Medicare, Social Security and so on. But the Citizens for Responsive Politics reports unions were still outspent 11 to 1 by business. However, they are forbidden by law from contributing directly to federal campaigns except through political action committees. PAC money has to be raised separately from union dues and so would be unaffected by Proposition 226.

Dee Simpson, the veteran Texas organizer for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, has been dispatched to California for the duration and finds it inexpressibly strange - and this is a man used to South Texas politics. He believes Gov. Pete Wilson is disingenuous. Anyone familiar with the anti-union sentiment in Texas will not be surprised to learn everything from Teamster corruption to the way labor skates dress is being used against the unions in this battle.

Peter Schrag's excellent new book, Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future, is a sobering examination of how California went from being the Golden State, No. 1 in almost every area of governance, to its current abysmal condition: It spends more on prisons than it does on universities. Sadly enough, the answer is a series of these propositions - faux-populist, catchy, bumper-sticker ideas misleadingly presented with hideous unintended consequences.

Proposition 226 is like a poster child for Schrag's argument about how a great state was ruined.

Creators Syndicate, Inc.