Pelosi: $26 Billion Teachers’ Union Bailout Good Value
By Scott Ott on unions
ScrappleFace
News Fairly Unbalanced. We Report. You Decipher.
(2010-08-09) — Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, who called the House back into session this week to pass a $26 billion bailout bill to help cash-strapped states pay for 140,000 teachers, said the legislation’s price tag “may sound like a lot of money, but the value of having all of those union members on our Democrat campaign team makes it well worth the investment.”
“Most people don’t understand all of the good that these union members do,” said Rep. Pelosi. “These people make the phone calls, give the money, do the door-to-door work because they have a personal financial stake in the reelection of Democrats. You can’t get that kind of commitment out of mere volunteers. Without them, Democrats might lose their majority in Congress, as well as in many state legislatures.”
The Speaker said that once the American people understand the return they get for their investment in big public-sector unions like the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, “the only complaint they’ll have is ‘Why didn’t you give them $52 billion?’”
“It’s a quid pro quo arrangement,” Rep. Pelosi explained. “The public-sector unions make sure we get elected, and we make sure they get ever-increasing salaries, and sweet guaranteed pension deals for life, no matter what the economy does. It’s a classic win-win situation.”
The California lawmaker added that “the genius of our Founding Fathers was to establish this relationship whereby we the people of the Democrat Party are sovereign, and we negotiate mutually-beneficial collective bargaining agreements with our union supporters. It’s a system of checks and balances that protects us all from the tyranny of the public.”
. |
