Unions Spent More Than $561 Million on The Mid-Terms: Was it worth it?: "
Over one million union members (1,169,154 to be exact) paid union dues for a full year to pay for the union expenditures during the mid-term elections. According to OpenSecrets, union bosses squandered a minimum of $561,193,945 of their members’ money on the 2010 election cycle. This number only represents the “major players” and not local union PACs, so the numbers are likely to be much greater.
You would think that members would be up in arms, demanding refunds. However, to date, there’s no such uproar coming from the rank and file, despite unions’ extremely poor election results (read: shellacking) on November 2nd.
Sure, Harrah’s Harry Reid can thank unions (and Harrah’s pressure on its employees) for winning his re-election for him. And, of course, Meg Whitman’s nanny who allegedly lied about her legal status on her application helped sink Meg’s campaign—but union members really didn’t need to waste their money on that as Gloria Alridge and the media would have helped sink Meg’s campaign for free. In New York, Mario Andrew Cuomo won by default as the choice came down to a Buffalo builder who dared people to call him “crazy” (they did on November 2nd), the Manhattan Madame, Jimmy McMillan of The Rent’s Too D*mn High Party, and a few other unknowns. By far New York’s most entertaining gubernatorial candidate was Jimmy McMillan (aka “Papa Smurf“), who had might have fared much better in the polls if he had more to spend on advertising, but his rent wasn’t too d*mn high. Other than those exceptions, though, voters nationwide rebuked a rather large majority of union-backed candidates and measures.
On Monday, the Examiner’s Mark Hemingway gave a good accounting of just how badly union bosses wasted their members’ money:
If voters sent any one message loudly and consistently, it’s this: They do not like unions. The American electorate availed itself of almost every chance it got to take a whack at organized labor.
Big Labor has been pushing hard in Congress to pass “card check” legislation, which eliminates secret ballots in workplace elections, allowing organizers to identify and bully workers opposed to unionizing. But voters in four states — Arizona, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah — ratified anti-card check initiatives requiring secret ballots in workplace elections.
With public-sector union pension plans around the country sinking under trillions of dollars in debt, six states — Alabama, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Wisconsin — elected governors who promised to transfer state employees from costly defined-benefit pension plans to 401(k) defined-contribution plans.
In Ohio, incoming Republican Gov. John Kasich is already talking about eliminating laws dictating union-scale wages for public projects and dropping certain bargaining privileges for police and firefighter unions. In Wisconsin, Gov.-elect Scott Walker recently said he’s considering abolishing public-sector unions in his state altogether.
In California, it was an electoral bloodbath for public-sector unions. The state’s public employee union pension plan is $535 billion in the red, or $36,000 in debt for every household in the Golden State. Voters weren’t pleased.
In seven cities — Bakersfield, Carlsbad, Menlo Park, Pacific Grove, Redding, Riverside and San Jose — voters approved initiatives curbing public pension costs. And a proposed sales tax increase in San Diego aimed at funding public-sector unions lost.
As more and more Americans realize the debt that union bosses have saddled their children with, it appears they are ready to turn off the spigot.
However, until union members how destructive Marxist union bosses have become to the nation’s future, and only they can turn off the union dues spigot, union bosses will likely continue taking members’ dues and spending it by the boat load on politicians who saddle our nation in debt and rob us of our freedoms.
_________________
“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776
No comments:
Post a Comment