Ariz. tea party leader compares Hitler to unions

A tea party stooge planned to deliver a Hitler Valentine to Arizona Republicans who support workers. At the last minute he backed off.

The Arizona Capitol Times reported yesterday,

This morning, Stephen Viramontes, the state director of FreedomWorks in Arizona in 2012, wrote on his Twitter page that he would “be down at the Capitol shortly to give a few legislators some (Valentine’s Day) cards.” The post included a photo of a card that featured a drawing of Hitler along with the words “Be Mein.” 

He later posted that Hitler was one of six different dictators featured on a set of cards he planned to distribute to “all those (lawmakers) needing some help in supporting and passing #PaycheckProtection.”

(Paycheck deception laws are aimed at weakening workers' rights by making it hard for unions to collect dues.)

Umm, let's get this straight. Stephen Viramontes belongs to a front group that gets secret funding from billionaires. It's an offshoot of a Benedict Arnold Koch brothers front group. The group is part of a vast, shadowy billionaire-and-CEO conspiracy that bullies state lawmakers. Their goal is to  pass bills that empower corporations, destroy workers' rights, privatize government services, subvert democracy and raise taxes on everyone but the wealthy.

And Viramontes has greeting cards designed that compare democratically elected unions to a dictator? A dictator who abolished trade unions in May 1933? 

Nazi SA entering a trade union building in
Berlin on May 2, 1933 to seize Union assets:

Let's get the record straight, because billionaires' lackeys like Viramontes will try to confuse it: Hitler needed to appease and confuse the masses. He eliminated trade unions, jailed their leaders and seized their assets. He then formed the German Labor Front and called it a union. It wasn't a union. It lowered wages, eliminated collective bargaining and abolished the right to strike. That's not what unions do.

Today, billionaires and CEOs try to do pretty much the same thing. They claim they're trying to empower workers when they're actually crippling workplace democracy. Right now they're hell-bent on passing so-called "right-to-work" laws in Missouri, Pennsylvania, Maine, Ohio and Kentucky.  (They failed two days ago in New Hampshire.) The laws they want confer no rights on workers, but take them away. And like the German Labor Front, they lower wages and all-but-eliminate collective bargaining and the right to strike.

Check out what else those charming folks at FreedomWorks are up to: Mother Jones just reported they produced a video showing a fake panda performing a sex act on a woman wearing a Hillary Clinton mask.

Fortunately it isn't bad taste that's timeless.

Fact check on Koch-whore ads finds they are LYYYIIIIINNG!!!

The Koch-whore group FreedomWorks says it's spending $5.6 million on ads to smear unions. We took a little time to figure out just how they're lying. It didn't take long. 

The first thing they lie about is the palm trees. As ThinkProgress points out,

The advertisement tries to paint union protesters in Ohio as violent thugs. One problem: the ad uses footage from an old union protest in California.

How do we know? This is the same footage from California, which features palm trees, that was used by Bill O’Reilly just days ago. He used it to argue that the protesters in Wisconsin were violent thugs.

Here's the second thing: The ad starts out with the statement, "How do government unions plan to get Ohio out of debt?" Then it shows an angry man yelling "every once in a while you need to get out in the street and get a little bloody." Who is that man? An Ohio union member? Hardly. It's a Massachusetts congressman, Rep. Michael Capuano.

And remember this -- their statement that the ad campaign was to target

“the rampant abuse of power that organized labor has engaged at the state and federal level to impact elections and the public policymaking process”????

Check out this list of the top 20 spenders on lobbying the U.S. government between 1998-2010. Not a union in the list. All multinational corporations that spend billions bending the federal government to their own needs. (That money, by the way, came out of your phone bill, health care bill, utility bill, gas money and federal income taxes.)

(NOTE: All lobbying expenditures on this page come from the Senate Office of Public Records. Data for the most recent year was downloaded on January 31, 2010.)

Top Spenders (1998-2010)

US Chamber of Commerce  $738,825,680
American Medical Assn  $243,277,500
General Electric  $236,580,000
AARP  $197,752,064
Pharmaceutical Rsrch & Mfrs of America  $195,143,920
American Hospital Assn   $194,316,789
AT&T Inc  $161,557,725
Blue Cross/Blue Shield  $159,178,718
Northrop Grumman  $159,175,253
National Assn of Realtors  $155,997,380
Exxon Mobil  $151,336,942
Verizon Communications  $148,974,841
Edison Electric Institute  $147,075,999
Business Roundtable  $142,824,000
Boeing Co   $139,424,310
Lockheed Martin  $135,124,293
Southern Co  $117,840,694
PG&E Corp  $117,680,000
General Motors   $116,379,170
Pfizer Inc  $107,267,268

Just makes you sick, doesn't it?