Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels:
making questionable claims on secret donors' dime.
Indiana Republicans aren't just pushing an anti-union law through the state legislature at warp speed, they're running an ad campaign featuring Gov. Mitch Daniels to try to persuade the public that this is the right move.
The ads are funded by a shadowy group that calls itself the Indiana Opportunity Fund. Public records show the group has spent $600,000 on the “right to work” for less propaganda. But, the group—founded by Republican party activist Jim Bopp—is not required to divulge the source of the cash and Daniels has ignored requests from Hoosier working families, the media and others to disclose whose deep pockets he is dipping into for the advertisements.
It's not just the source of the funding that's a mystery. In the ads, Daniels makes the unsubstantiated claim that "The good is when Indiana gets a chance to compete for new jobs, we're winning two-thirds of the time. But we get cut out of a third of all deals because we don't provide workers the protection known as right to work." Where does that one third figure come from? No one knows, and Daniels isn't telling. One Indiana newspaper editorializes:
Mr. Daniels, you've mentioned that one-third figure several times. And Mr. Bosma, that same logic made right-to-work legislation the Indiana House GOP's top agenda item - one that promises to consume just about every ounce of political capital available at the Statehouse this session.
We ask: What businesses ignored us because Indiana isn't a right-to-work state? And where did those businesses land during this recession? We'd like to get them to tell Hoosiers their side.
Right now, the arguments for right to work are held up as if on clouds. Have faith, Hoosiers; Indiana will be better off as a right-to-work state.
This is the foundational claim of Republican attempts to sell RTW as good for workers, yet they have offered absolutely no evidence to back it up. They've offered tortured, misleading statistics suggesting that RTW states do better economically, but they can't even gin up that level of false evidence about a third of companies not wanting to move to Indiana because of its labor laws. But $600,000 of advertising is a nice big platform for a lie.
