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I'm not sure what Politico's Ben White's background is, or if he's ever worked at a job where you were really glad you had a union in place to join, because you work in a dangerous environment, and because of those protections provided to you by the union, you could speak out about conditions on the job without fear of being fired or retribution, but it sure didn't sound like it after hearing his crass statements on MSNBC's Now With Alex Wagner.

I'm also really disgusted with the rest of the panel that was on there with him this Friday, because even though they made a lot of really great points about just what Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and his cohorts in the legislature were doing with passing this right to work for less legislation in their lame duck session, they let him get away with a really key issue that Rep. Brandon Dillon laid out so well during his speech this week.

The supporters of "right to work" don't really care about anyone's right to a job. What you're doing, as Ken already explained here, is arguing that it should be allowed that nonunion workers to get benefits that unions negotiate without having to pay their share for the process. And as Ken noted in that same post, "Proponents of 'right-to-work' laws argue that without such 'protections', workers can be forced to join unions, which is not true and is illegal under federal law and has been since 1947."

If Politico's White wants to have an honest debate about unions, rather than giving Republican taking points, maybe he could explain why it's fair for someone to benefit from the work and negotiating and legal representation a union is forced to give that employee, without that employee paying for those benefits, rather than the union being allowed to tell them that if they don't want to join, they're on their own. I thought Republicans loved the idea of someone "pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps." But now they think it's perfectly acceptable for a union to protect them and pay legal fees and negotiate for fair wages for them, without them paying to make sure that union has enough money to conduct business?

And as much as I really like Joan Walsh and Joy Reid and agree with the points they made during this segment, they missed the ball by not making that exact point to White when he was so terribly concerned about the choices and benefits of these workers and whether it's unfair to have them pay their union dues or not. Here is the question he should have to answer. Is it fair to force a union to represent free riders who want representation, but refuse to pay for it?

I thought Republicans were all about personal responsibility. I guess not if it means someone being allowed to freeload from a union so you can bust them financially. Then it's perfectly fine in the name of "freedom."

If anyone would like to try to get White to respond as to why he thinks his comments here were acceptable and that unions should be forced to spend money representing those who don't want to pay to join, and why those that refuse to join should reap the benefits of what those unions negotiate for, you can let him know at @morningmoneyben.

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Dave already touched on the protests and police response to the Michigan right to work for less law that their legislators decided to go ahead and jam through in a lame duck session. Here's more from Rep. Brandon Dillon (D-Grand Rapids) who did his best to describe the legislation for what it is -- a right to freeload.

Rep. Brandon Dillon (D-Grand Rapids) Speaks Out Against "Right-to-Work" Legislation:

In this clip, State Rep. Brandon Dillon (D-Grand Rapids) explains his opposition to House Bill 4054, a proposal to make Michigan a "right-to-work" state. The proposal was pushed through the House in one day without a single committee hearing and without taking a single word of testimony.

These Republicans all love personal responsibility unless it means an opportunity to sock it to the paychecks of everyday working Americans and to bust a union. I'm not sure if the tide can be turned back through legislation or ballot initiatives which reverse or invalidate all or at least part of what just happened here, but I would suspect that is the next move we'll see from labor to try to counter this.

Here's more from the AFL-CIO on this rotten legislation: Breaking: Michigan Senate Passes ‘Right to Work’ For Less Bill:

The Michigan State Senate just passed the “right to work” for less bill. The House passed a similar bill earlier today and Gov. Rick Snyder (R) says he will sign the legislation that rolls back workers’ rights.

The measure passed on a 22-16 vote Thursday after hours of impassioned debate. Four Republicans joined all 12 Democrats in opposition.

After months of claiming “right to work” for less was not on his agenda, Snyder changed course this week and began a rapid push to move the bill through the legislature. The Nation’s John Nichols writes that the Michigan action is “part of a bold anti-labor move launched in coordination with a Koch Brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity project to ‘pave the way for right to work in states across our nation’.”

GOP legislative leaders had plotted behind closed doors with Governor Snyder, to have Michigan join the traditionally lower-wage states that decades ago enacted “Right-to-Work” laws to thwart the rise of a labor movement that promoted civil rights, women’s rights and economic justice.

The Michigan State AFL-CIO released the following statement:

....The only ‘freedom’ gained for Michigan workers will be the freedom to make less, the freedom to be disrespected at work, the freedom to struggle to pay their bills and the freedom to be left out of the American dream. This bill is a blatant attempt by the richest in Michigan to silence the voices of working families in our democracy, build their own power, and make the growing gap between the rich and everyone else even bigger.

Should Snyder sign this legislation, he will join a list of other governors – John Kasich, Scott Walker, and others – who have signed over the future of their respective states to big corporations and CEOs, making a decision to leave working families behind. Regardless of what might happen, working people have made it clear they will continue to fight for our vision of a better, stronger Michigan and work to hold elected leaders accountable.

More than 3,000 union members and workers' rights advocates rallied against the legislation and for several hours police shut the doors to the Capitol, keeping protesters out of the House and Senate galleries. Several people were maced as they tried to enter.

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Former Bush budget director and Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels was more than happy to tout his state's union busting as a model for the country during his interview on Fox News Sunday, but when asked about Indiana's ranking as 46th in state worker gross salary, the best he could come up with is to pretend he'd never heard those stats before.

Daniels bragged that his state has been "rated as one of the best jobs climates in the country by everyone now." I'm guessing "everyone now" means businesses that would like a race to the bottom on wages and benefits and not the workers whose collective bargaining rights he just destroyed.

WALLACE: Well, let's look at what you have done as governor of Indiana. It is a long list. Let's take a look.

In 2005, you ended collective bargaining rights for state workers on first day in office. In 2011, you restricted teachers bargaining rights. In 2012, this year, you signed a right to work law that said people don't have to join a union to get a job.

It sounds, Governor, like a pretty concerted effort to break public and private unions.

DANIELS: I don't see it that way at all. Now, I will say that on the government side, we felt if we were going to do right by taxpayers and if we were going to make government work effectively as it does in Indiana, there was a survey last year in which 77 percent of Hoosiers said they thought the state government was effective. It's the second highest number in the country. If we do those things we have to have freedom to move resources where they were need, move people where they were needed, pay people on the basis of their performance and not simply their seniority, and we are doing that in the state now, I think to a very positive affect.

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Republican Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels on Sunday suggested that all public worker unions should be dismantled and that the recent elections in Wisconsin were a "turning point" in curbing their rights.

During an interview on Fox News, host Chris Wallace asked Daniels if Gov. Scott Walker's (R) win in Wisconsin had given governments a "green light" for curtailing unions across the country.

"I hope it means some kind of turning point in trying to address the balance," the Indiana governor explained. "There's a reason that defenders of labor -- from Franklin Roosevelt to George Mead and many others -- always said that unionism had no place in the public sector, that it was a necessary freedom -- and it is -- in the private sector, that it was a bad idea in government."

"Are you saying you would like to see no public worker unions?" Wallace wondered.

"I think really government works better without them. I really do," Daniels insisted.

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Thankfully, it does look like we got some union solidarity from the National Football League Players Association when it comes to Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and his union busting with the recent passage another god awful right to work for less law in the state that is going to be hosting the Super Bowl this year.

The bad news is how difficult the struggle will be to overturn this union busting with the strength of unions being diminished with every law like this that passes, along with the flood of money pouring into our elections from the Citizens United debacle and the unfettered corporate influence and the ability of the richest among us to buy our elections.

Add that to voter disenfranchisement, on a scale we haven't seen in decades, electronic voting machines we should not be trusting to vote on and and compliant media that cares more about the horse races and conflict than telling anyone the truth, and we've got a long, long way to go to clean up the mess we're in right now and being able to put a stop to what just happened in Indiana and with the union busting across the country, whether our votes will be counted, and whether those who are voting are informed, and not just propagandized by right-wing media and misinformation which has filled our airways.

Here's more from Democracy Now, with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales as always, keeping up the fight on the side of the working class on the actions that are being planned for Super Bowl Sunday.

Occupy the Super Bowl: Indiana’s New Anti-Union Law Sparks Protest at Sport’s Biggest Spectacle:

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Republicans apparently are counting on the American public to have short memories, or to not be aware of who Mitch Daniels is and what policies he's endorsed since they decided to tap him to give the response to President Obama's State of the Union Address this Tuesday evening.

Daniels attacked the President for not turning the economy around quickly enough, ignoring the fact that he's personally responsible for a good deal of the debt and deficit we're dealing with now during his time working in the Bush administration.

From Steve Benen back in February of last year -- The Record Mitch Daniels Doesn't Want to Talk About:

A couple of days ago, David Brooks praised Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) for his record of fiscal responsibility. That record, in Brooks' vision, starts in 2004 when Daniels was elected to statewide office.

But there's also that inconvenient period in which Daniels was Bush's budget director, and the U.S. government began the most fiscally irresponsible period in American history. [...]

It's true that Daniels, as Bush's budget director, was helping shape the books during an economic downturn, but I seem to recall Republicans concluding that these details are irrelevant -- Obama inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression, but as far as the GOP is concerned, that's not a good excuse for large deficits.

For that matter, Daniels is correct that his tenure also included 9/11 and the launch of two wars, but every president in American history raised taxes to help pay for previous U.S. wars, to prevent deficits from spiraling out of control. Bush, with Daniels' blessing, approved two massive tax cuts that ultimately added $5 trillion to the debt in just eight years.

It's that same debt that Daniels believes will destroy the country. Funny, he didn't think that way when he was directly responsible for making the problem worse.

Daniels also claimed during this speech that it's his party that wants to "save" our social safety nets, but this is the same man who called Social Security "a Ponzi scheme." And as Media Matters Political Correction posted last May -- GOP "Savior" Mitch Daniels Wants To Voucherize Medicare, Slash Social Security Benefits.

Daniels also claimed his party is concerned about restoring "hope and upward mobility and greater equality" for Americans, but he's been busy pushing "right to work" legislation through his state that would have the opposite effect.

The fact that this man is one of the people that the Republicans and the beltway Villagers in the media are still touting as some sort of "savior" for the Republican Party just speaks to how extremely weak their field of candidates are right now.

I'm sure there will be a lot more fact checking of this speech as people have time and pointing out the lies by Daniels that were made here and his utter hypocrisy, which it deserves. I'll just leave it there for now with the text of the speech below the fold for anyone that would like to weigh in further at this point.

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Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann elicited cheers, boos and some heckling from the lawmakers in New Hampshire Wednesday after she encouraged the Legislature to enact right-to-work legislation.

All of the five GOP hopefuls appearing before the lawmaking body were greeted with respectful applause, but only Bachmann's speech was met with loud disapproval.

"This body can have a significant impact on the people of New Hampshire's ability to fully restore their economic liberty by making New Hampshire a right-to-work state," Bachmann said, pausing for almost 30 seconds while lawmakers reacted.

"Just a few more votes and we'll be there, New Hampshire," she announced. The comment was followed by several more seconds of whistles and boos.

"Because you see, it's a proven fact right-to-work states have created more jobs than those that are not," Bachmann stated as the boos continued. "Facts are stubborn things."

"We're free people!" someone in the audience shouted.

Later Wednesday, the New Hampshire House was scheduled to attempt an override of Democratic Gov. John Lynch's veto of their right-to-work legislation.

House Speaker Bill O'Brien (R) told NHPR that he was uncertain that the override would be successful.

"It really depends who shows up," he explained. "If all our supporters show up, we get it overridden. If as in other House sessions, we see they haven’t show up, it’s going to be difficult to bring it forward and be successful."

The Professional Fire Fighters of New Hampshire (PFFNH) has accused O'Brien of "using Republican presidential candidates as lobbyists to further his personal anti-worker agenda."

"The speaker is orchestrating a dog and pony show, using GOP presidential candidates to generate support for a right-to-work bill that doesn't have support in the New Hampshire House and would do nothing more than erode the rights of New Hampshire workers," PFFNH president Dave Lang said in a media advisory.

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During the GOP Weekly Response, Senator Lamar Alexander attacked and distorted the National Labor Relations Board's decision to stop Boeing from punishing their workers and moving one of their plants to South Carolina in retribution for a pair of strikes over the last six years.

Here's more from Think Progress on that -- Gov. Haley Defends Boeing’s Union-Busting: ‘It’s Called Capitalism’:

The National Labor Relations Board last week filed a complaint against the airplane manufacturer Boeing, noting that, according to public pronouncements by the company’s officials, the construction of a new plant in South Carolina was intended as retribution against workers in Washington who have engaged in a pair of strikes over the last six years. One senior Boeing official, for instance, said during an interview, “The overriding factor [in moving to South Carolina] was not the business climate. And it was not the wages we’re paying today. It was that we cannot afford to have a work stoppage, you know, every three years.”

Under national labor law, retaliating against workers for striking is illegal union-busting, but several Republican lawmakers have attacked the NLRB and the Obama administration for initiating the complaint. “This is nothing more than a political favor for the unions who are supporting President Obama’s re-election campaign,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). “The Obama administration is now dictating where companies are allowed to create new jobs,” wrote former Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN).

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) took to the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page today to decry the NLRB’s decision, saying that it circumvents capitalism and falsely claiming that the NLRB “wants Boeing to produce the planes only in Washington state“.

More there so go read the rest.

Alexander went on to tout how wonderful it was that foreign auto manufacturers were coming in and employing people in his state and he blamed the unionized workers rather than management decisions for American auto companies not being able to compete with them.

This weekly response by the GOP seems completely tone deaf to me unless they think that somehow praising foreign companies and calling them "American" auto companies and touting a race to the bottom on wages in this economic environment is going to be a winning message for them in 2012.

Transcript via the LA Times below the fold.

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Around 4300 people attended the Working Families Rally at Kiener Plaza in St. Louis, Mo., this Friday to protest corporate greed and the push to turn Missouri into a "right to work" state. I attended the rally and took quite a few photos, which I wanted to share with the readers here at C&L.

The video above is from one of our local stations, which decided to give "right to work" advocate and former State Senator John Loudon some equal time, all in the name of being "fair and balanced" don't you know. According to the St. Louis Beacon, there was a pro-right-to-work rally held in St. Charles, Mo., this Friday as well, but KSDK didn't air any footage from that "rally." I have to wonder if it's because almost no one showed up there.

Here's more from the St. Louis Beacon on the rally at Kiener Plaza -- Thousands of union workers turn out to protest 'corporate greed' and attacks on bargaining rights:

Thousands of area union members -- from teachers to janitors -- packed Kiener Plaza this afternoon, to protest actions by corporations and Republican-led state governments that speaker after speaker called "an attack on the middle class."

"Now is the time to send a powerful message to the enemies of working men and women," declared Jo Wanda Bozeman, president of the Parkway National Education Association.

She asserted that the nation was witnessing "a methodical and planned assault" on the collective-bargaining rights of union workers.

The crowd roared as Bozeman shouted, "We're not going to take it anymore!"

Bob Soutier, president of the Greater St. Louis Labor Council called the turnout -- the official count was 4,300 -- the biggest local labor gathering he's seen in years.

Although smaller than union crowds in some other states with labor fights, including Wisconsin and Indiana, Soutier said the local rally -- organized in a few days -- was evidence that "people in St. Louis are fed up, not just by Washington, but in Jefferson City."

The rally was aimed, in part, at sending a message to Missouri legislators in the state Capitol. The state Senate is slated to take a floor vote Monday on a proposal, officially called "right to work," that would bar union shops, in which all workers at a business must pay dues if a majority have voted to be represented by a union.

Soutier and other area labor leaders plan to be in the Capitol for the Senate vote, even though it's unclear if the state House will take up in the issue. It's also doubtful that Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, would sign it.

Even so, the "right to work" fight -- initiated by Senate President Pro Tem Rob Mayer, R-Dexter -- has galvanized unions and many business groups.

Mayer and his allies contend that "right to work" will make it easier for the state to attract and retain businesses. Union leaders dub the measure "right to work for less" and say it's aimed at reducing worker wages, particularly since the Legislature also is voting on a proposal to curb the state's minimum wage.

Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, headlined a pro-right to work event held earlier Friday in St. Charles. (Click here to read the Beacon's advance coverage, including an interview with Mix.)

I know there are a lot of St. Louis union members planning to go to Wisconsin to support the protesters there and the speakers talked about that at the rally today. If anyone has any photos to share of rallies in your area or information on groups in your area supporting the workers in Wisconsin, please share them in the comments section.

Photos I took of the event in St. Louis below the fold.

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As Ed Schultz noted tonight, the GOP governors appearing on the Sunday bobblehead shows all had their talking points ready and were on the same page with their defense of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker -- Wisconsin is broke, Democratic Senators are cowards and public employees have it way too good.

But as Ed noted, one Republican governor in Maine let the cat out of the bag with what their real agenda is: enacting so-called 'Right to Work' laws and busting unions.

LePage: 'We're going after right-to-work':

Maine Gov. Paul LePage said Saturday he would push forcefully ahead with right-to-work legislation in his state, even if it means a Wisconsin-style fight with unions.

In an interview at the National Governors Association, the Republican praised Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and couched his own proposal in the language of liberty loved by tea partiers.

"He's got a big challenge, and quite frankly, once they start reading our budget they're going to leave Wisconsin and come to Maine because we're going after right to work," LePage told POLITICO.

"I believe that the Declaration of Independence says 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,'" he said. "Whenever someone forces me to do something against my will, they're infringing upon my freedoms and my liberties. And that's what I think we're doing in Maine when we have fair share, which means that you are required to belong to a union, you're required to pay dues but you don't want to participate. I find that to be against everything the United States of America stands for." [...]

LePage said he's "never inspired by a fight," but that Wisconsin is unquestionably an impetus behind a renewed GOP push to demand concessions from public-sector employees and to go after union power. [...]

LePage said people who want to join unions have that right, but stressed that no one should be forced into the decision.

"I believe if an individual wants to join organized labor and work under a union contract, they should have the legal right to do so," he said. "At the same token, a person who does not want to work under organized labor and wants to work should have the ability to do so without the threat of having to join and having to pay dues to organized labor."

"It's that simple," he said. "It's all about freedom and liberty."

"Freedom and liberty" huh? I don't think so, Governor LePage.

As Ed pointed out, Maine workers cannot be forced to join a union already:

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