The California Teachers Association spent $211,849,298 on lobbying and political spending to get its way in California in 2009. Along with the CTA, the Calif. State Council of Service Employees and 13 other organizations spent a total of one billion dollars on political lobbying of the State House at Sacramento. All of these special interests have helped push California to the brink of insolvency.
But, according to the California Fair Political Practices Commission, the two unions mentioned above far and away top the spending of the other top lobbying spenders in California. The next closest in spending was the Big Pharma clocking in at $104,912,997 on its political spending with various and sundry Indian casino groups whose spending was in the less than $85,000,000 range.
Commission Chairman Ross Johnson said in a press release, “This tsunami of special interest spending drowns out the voices of average voters and intimidates political opponents and elected officials alike.”
The FPPC fully details the spending of these special interests and unions evoking outrage and proving why voter’s will is meaningless to politicians, not just in California, but across the country.
Here, for instance, is how the FPPC breaks down the teachers union spending:
Ballot Measures: $144,116,835
Candidates: $16,716,386
Political Parties: $6,613,834
Other Campaign Committees: $5,885,936
TOTAL SPENT INFLUENCE VOTERS: $173,332,991
TOTAL SPENT LOBBYING OFFICIALS: $38,516,307
GRAND TOTAL SPENT: $211,849,298
On one level, one might ask why such spending is so wrong? After all, even The Federalist Papers spoke of “factions,” “interests,” and associations of voters getting together to influence their representatives in Congress. Why should a real American be all upset over such spending meant to influence Congress? Shouldn’t lobbying be considered a quintessentially American political convention?
There is one reason and one reason only that this situation is detrimental to our Republic and it isn’t that lobbying exists. It is because government is too powerful and has been allowed to take on too much authority. Lobbying wouldn’t be the problem it is if government didn’t have the power it has to warp and destroy our lives, the power that these lobbying groups court.
Of course, where it specifically relates to the teachers and the service employees unions we are talking about organizations that shouldn’t even be allowed to exist at all. There should be no such thing as a public employees union as the existence of these entities is wholly against the health of our Republic. Still, that aside, if government didn’t have so much power, even these illicit public employees unions wouldn’t be as destructive as they are.
Of course, California, as always, is just the worst, most obscene example of this outrage of Big Government. The truth is that every state in the union is drowning in this sort of morass to one degree or another.
The solution to all of this is to take power away from government.
Carol Platt Liebau posted a piece on RealCleaPolitics.com that also clangs the warning bells over the unsustainable situation that the various states find themselves in between their public employees unions and the states’ fiscal obligations. She focuses on California, but nearly every state in the union is quickly approaching the mess California is in.
Liebau writes of the effort that the teachers union in California led to get kids as young as five-years-old out of school so that they could be bussed to the state capitol in Sacramento in order to protest school budget cuts. Me, I think she races by this outrage too quickly.
It is outright disgusting that these teacher thugs wanted to slight these kid’s day of education in order to use them as political pawns. It is infuriating that these people thought so little of these children that they’d do this to them. And did these union thugs tell the parents that this was going to happen? I don’t know, but likely they didn’t.
Fortunately, the school Superintendent decided that there would be a “safety issue” and nixed the union’s idea.
Still, Liebau did want to get to the more important matter and that is the undeserved riches that these union members are seeing. Liebau reports that California’s teachers make 145% more than other teachers in the nation yet they are still carping and whining about budget cuts.
… a California teacher’s salary is 145% that of an average worker in the state (who works 12 months per year!). What’s more, California teachers are the most highly paid in the entire nation, even as the state teeters on the brink of fiscal collapse. And yet, the prospect of any cuts to state government spending elicits nothing but a storm of protest.
Sadly, even as the state is drowning in red ink, the Democrats in power just keep voting for tax increases as if that is the answer.
Liebau sums up thusly…
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the system, as it exists, is unsustainable. The state’s fiscal crisis is reaching proportions that will require real and significant cuts to avoid an economic meltdown. Making the changes necessary to save the state will necessitate resisting the destructive influence of public sector unions. And that’s fine. It’s long past time that public sector unions start working to serve Californians, rather than demanding that Californians work ever harder to serve them.
And she could be talking of New Jersey, Illinois, or nearly any other state. Public employees unions need to be eliminated as they are destroying our country.
Not long ago union advocate Stewart Acuff penned a piece for the Huffington website that was filled with soaring rhetoric about unions “creating the middle class” and pleading for voters to pressure Congress to pass the absurdly named Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). He claimed that this piece of… legislation would “restore the right to form unions and bargain collectively.”
Despite Acuff’s urgent pleading, however, he misses an elephant in the room. No one has taken anyone’s “right to collectively bargain” away from them. Of course that wasn’t the only thing that Acuff was factually incorrect about.
Why is it that union folks have to lie about everything, anyway?
Acuff starts out with a whopper.
America’s broad, deep Middle Class, indeed, the American Dream was formed in the 20-25 years after the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 which codified the right of workers in America to freely form unions and bargain collectively.
Unions created the middle class? Unions got some mythical right by the Wagner Act? I’ll let friend to the blog David Denholm answer to this one…
Mr. Acuff must be from some alternative universe. The 1935 Wagner Act – the first National Labor Relations Act – didn’t give workers the right to form unions or to bargain collectively. Those rights existed all along. What it did was to compel employers to bargain with unions and give unions the right to impose representation on workers who didn’t want it.
Denholm notes that the middle class existed before unions ever did. In that he’s 100% correct. After all, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about the extensive and prosperous middle class in America in the 1830s. That was a year or two before the 1935 Wagner Act passed, wouldn’t you say?
Additionally, if unions were so necessary to support an extensive middle class how come we have one of the biggest populations of middle class folks in the world yet unions are down to about 20 some percent of the total U.S. workforce?
Acuff whines that the middle class is disappearing because unions have somehow lost a right they didn’t really lose. Denholm again helps us with that claim. After giving us a link to some economic stats, Denholm writes…
This information is expressed in both current and constant dollars. There’s good news for those who fear a shrinking middle class. In constant 2007 dollars, average household income is up in every quintile. The growth isn’t steady and it isn’t uniform from quintile to quintile, but it is up across the board.
But Acuff doesn’t spare with more whoppers. He claims that the EFCA will fix everything (or is it fix what ain’t broken?).
Most importantly, we are very close to getting the support necessary to pass the Employee Free Choice Act which would simplify and streamline organizing, effectively punish employers who violate workers rights with $20,000 civil fines and triple damage back pay for firing workers, and force the Financial Elite to bargain in good faith with unions by allowing unions to seek arbitration for recalcitrant employers.
Not true at all. What the EFCA would do, however, is take away the right of every prospective union member to have a secret ballot when he casts his vote for or against unionizing, it would open that employee up for union thugs to visit his home to “encourage” him to vote yes, and it would cause government to involve itself to force a contract on union and employer alike. It would also further damage our business community by making it even less competitive than it currently is today.
Sadly, just about every scare word in Acuff’s piece is a lie. No one’s right to organize has been taken away. But unions have been slowly disappearing from the work force, it is true. Of course, it isn’t because of forces outside of unions that are destroying them. It is the over reach, sloth, bad business sense, and mistreatment of their own membership that is causing the downfall of unions, not the lack of passage of the EFCA.
Unions have served their purpose. It’s time to let them fade into history.
At the blog YidWithLid.blogspot.com Sammy Benoit has posted an interesting piece about the mess befalling so many failing union pension funds across the nation. The post includes a very useful chart that shows the trouble in which some of the largest union pension funds find themselves.
The upshot is that these pensions are on the verge of total collapse which will leave millions of retiring union members and those already retired bereft of the pensions that they had assumed would carry them into their golden years.
The list is extremely scary. This is a disaster for many people. But what is the solution? Naturally the unions are hoping that government is the solution. But the problem with a government bailout is that should a bailout happen the unions will not learn the important lesson that they should learn from the necessary collapse, necessary to reign in their excess. Sadly, many will be hurt by this reigning in of unions, but these same members should never have allowed their unions to get so out of hand in the first place!
So, courtesy of YidWithLid…
The list of 108 union pension plans below is from the Moody’s September 2009 report. The ones in green print are at the endangered level, the ones in red are critical.
.
.
Union Pension Plan
% Funded
.
Alaska Hotel & Restaurant Employees Pension Plan
79.70%
.
American Federation of Musicians & Employers Pension
78.90%
.
Teamsters Local 639 Employers Pension Trust
76.10%
.
Producer-Writers Guild of America Pension Plan
75.90%
.
Ohio Operating Engineers Pension Plan
75.70%
.
Laborers District Council and Contractors Pension Fund of Ohio
The left is constantly attempting to wave its hand dismissively at our claims that they are socialists and communists. They claim they are true blue Americans and we are lying about them. Unions are one of the biggest perpetrators of this misinformation.
Well, it appears that in Detroit, unions came out in support of a goof ball that claimed himself to be a socialist. They all stood in the Michigan cold saying their “yeas” as he spoke about getting a free university degree, and as he touted a socialist “right” to food and their own house.
Here we see members of the AFT and the SEIU nodding in appreciation of this socialist’s ideas. They stood by his side as he pronounced these socialist “principles.”
Anyone that tells you that unions aren’t socialists and communists needs to explain why unions came out in support of this un-American nut in Detroit.
