The Basic Problem: The Public Employee Unions Use Your Tax Money For Their Political Contributions Without Having To Ask You

From prison guards to police, public school teachers to city bureaucrats, anyone employed by the government are public employees and all public employees are paid by taxpayer dollars.  

Public employees are forced by law (union shop) to join public employee unions and pay union dues or agency fees. The public employee unions have the right to automatically take those dues and agency fees and use them for state and local political campaigns and special interest legislation without having to ask union members for the money or what to spend it on.

The unions have created a way to force all Californians that pay taxes, to pay for their local and state political campaigns including the election of politicians who will do what the unions want and the passing of special interest legislation they support.

It’s this “special” power that creates the problems we now face in California and makes it impossible to improve our school system, fix our state's budget nightmare or secure the borders here, etc.

The hundreds of millions dollars the unions automatically take each year for California campaigns are used to elect “their” candidates, pass “their” initiatives, and bully and seduce politicians into voting for “their” agenda. Virtually every politician, Republican and Democrat, either gets union money to fund their campaigns or are too scared to stand up to the union agenda for fear of losing their next election when that union money is used against them.

What does the Union agenda include? Growing government, of course, by creating more government jobs, increasing their own pay, hiking their pensions and preserving lifetime health benefits, while we, taxpayers, are left holding the bag of literally billions of dollars in debt that will be paid off through huge tax increases or drastic cuts in services, or both, as is happening now.
 
It’s a vicious cycle, a corrupt political machine, that is bankrupting California. This how the vicious cycle works:




The following is a reprint of an article by Ken Mettler published in The Bakersfield Californian, Monday, November 2, 2009.

The Solution: State needs to ban public-employee unions from politics

The California tea party movement have a solution to create meaningful political reform in California. It is to reduce the disproportionate power of the public employee unions, which form the largest special interest in politics by far.

For example, the California Teachers Association alone has 300,000 members, each of whom are required to pay union dues of approximately $1,000. Out of these dues, approximately $300 goes for political campaigns -- a total of $90 million each year. Of course, the argument will be made that the public employees are not forced to make the contributions and can "opt-out," but that is only applicable to federal elections and campaigns.

Elected officials rarely have the guts to stand up to the unions, because anyone who dares gets voted out on the next election. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to take them on in 2005 with five initiatives that would have reduced the power of the unions and the size of government. The unions spent over $100 million defeating them all.

The result is that the public employee unions represent a permanent special interest group, advocating for more and more government, regardless of the consequences. Public employees were given the right to unionize in California in 1978, and it has gone from being a golden state with unlimited opportunities to bankruptcy. No matter how much noise we make about the issues facing California, the politicians will never listen because the vast majority, all the Democrats and most Republicans, are elected with the support of the public employee unions, and the rest are scared.

The solution is an initiative (i.e. a ballot proposition taken directly to the people), prohibiting the government from collecting union dues from public employee paychecks if any portion of the dues goes toward politics. Stated another way -- simply level the playing field by forcing the unions to get campaign contributions the way everyone else has to do it, by convincing someone to write them a check.

It is simply wrong for the government to use taxpayer funds to collect money out of the paychecks of government employees, which then ends up going right back into the political campaigns of the politicians who gave them that right in the first place. It is corruption, plain and simple.

The politicians in California will never support this type of initiative. Most of them have cut a deal with one or more public employee unions. The only way it will happen is if the people rise up, put it on the ballot, and then turn out to vote in large numbers. This would be historic, and would forever change the balance of power in California. The historic nature of a victory here would have a major national impact and circumvent corrupt politicians of both parties. This is a terrifying prospect for those power-hungry politicians who think that how we are governed is really none of our business.

We are committed to causing this to happen.

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