Today the Las Vegas Sun looks behind conservatives' curtains and exposes the true intent of corporate-funded attacks on worker organizing drives.  Corporate-backed adman Richard Berman is known for attacking Mothers Against Drunk Driving and for claiming that second-hand smoke does not cause cancer, but his latest targets are teachers' unions.  Though he purports to fight for workers through his Center for Union Facts front group, Rick Berman betrayed his true intent:

What's not in doubt is that when Berman goes after the teachers, it will be brutal.

At the Sparks conference, he approvingly quoted mobster Al Capone: "You can get further with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word."

Political and labor observers are watching closely because as Berman acknowledged in his Sparks speech, his attack on teachers unions is really a small front in a much bigger battle over the future of the labor movement and its role in American politics. It's not clear Berman cares at all about education policy. His real target is the broader labor movement. 

What's obvious is that Berman fronts for anti-union forces who are afraid of workers, but it's not clear who's funding the multi-million dollar campaign:

Berman refuses to say who's backing the anti-teachers union campaign; he never discloses his financial backers, allowing large, mainstream companies to fund him without having to associate their brand names with his sharp-elbowed approach.

Lawsuits and a whistleblower, however, have revealed some of his past backers: Philip Morris, and then Tyson Foods, Coca-Cola, White Castle and Outback Steakhouse, once he began attacking foes of obesity.

After getting money from corporations, Berman's nonprofit groups pay millions of dollars in fees to Berman & Co., an influential Washington lobbying firm also headed by Berman.

Berman's recent attacks show that his anti-union corporate funders are terrified about the prospect of more workers standing up for themselves.

Berman's campaign is nothing new, said Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Labor has been the subject of coordinated attacks consistently during the past century, notably in the 1930s, when large corporations such as DuPont and General Motors formed the "Liberty League" to challenge the newly minted Wagner Act, which gave workers the right to organize and bargain collectively.

From 1933 to 1938, union membership doubled, and it almost doubled again by 1947.

Lichtenstein, who also directs the university's Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy, said anti-unionism usually comes at times when labor asserts itself or enters new territory. Now, he said, is such a time.

Despite the fact that union density is at an all-time low (12 percent), labor experts predict reforms such as the Employee Free Choice Act could lead to explosive growth. "It's always darkest before the dawn," he said. He called Berman "extraordinarily clever" and "disgusting."