Progressives And The Unionization Of Tax Dollars

According to a headline on Capitol Report pointing to a story in CTMirror, “Malloy Basks,” Governor Dannel Malloy, two days before the Fourth of July, was basking in the glow of his endorsement by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

When you want a service in the private market place, you buy it. The same holds true in the political market place: When you want the support of a powerful public employees union such as SEIU, you buy it with the prevailing coin of the realm, political favors.

Political favors go a long way in politics. In return for political stroking – Mr. Malloy earlier had facilitated the unionization of day-care workers and personal-care attendants for persons with disabilities through an executive order – SEIU turned the floodlight on Mr. Malloy.

Just in time too. Education and Democracy Party gubernatorial candidate Jon Pelto appeared to have been supping at Mr. Malloy’s dish before the Connecticut Education Association and SEIU voted. And now, having lost teacher union support and the support of SEIU, this little yapping dog has been shoved back into the doghouse.

               

The endorsement of the SEIU was cheap at any price. In his first contest for governor, Mr. Malloy won office by the slenderest of margins, a little more than 6,000 votes furnished to Mr. Malloy by union activists in New Haven and  Bridgeport, Connecticut’s Detroit, according to recent surveys measuring the relative indebtedness of large U.S. cities. Mr. Malloy, naturally, did not want to stand idly by while Mr. Pelto ran off with his bone. And so…

Through executive order, Mr. Malloy purchased SEIU’s affection by making it possible for the union to gain a toe-hold within the day-care workers and personal-care attendants businesses – which may be, according to a recent Supreme Court decision, unconstitutional. Mr. Malloy’s executive order redefined the affected employees as state employees for collective bargaining purposes. Spin doctors within the Malloy administration, aided by spin doctors within the administration of U.S. Congress defying President Barack Obama, are now fondling the decision in an attempt to construe it in their favor.

The political favors parceled out by Mr. Malloy to his union subalterns should be regarded as yet another chapter in Mr. Malloy’s crony capitalism epic. Crony capitalism – the doling out of tax dollars to mobile, gypsy businesses – is all of a piece with the effort to buy campaign votes by doling out tax dollars to powerful public union honchos in return for votes.

Mr. Malloy is neither a woman nor a black African American – and he certainly lacks the charisma of Mr. Obama, for the moment the least favorite American president – but, even so, Mr. Malloy has followed to the letter the winning campaign playbook of Mr. Obama. That playbook includes a Saul Alinsky attack on political opponents: Demagogue them, marginalize them, kill them. And the playbook also instructs incumbent progressives to create new coalitions of power through fictional narratives that seem convincing to a left of center media: Republicans hate children, the poor, women, gays and, not incidentally, progressives. Little does it matter that in the Northeast, and especially in Connecticut, a Republican resistance to progressivism is but a distant memory. Elsewhere in the country, one finds indications of a push back; in New England, there is no enemy to the right.

The strength and power of new temporary coalitions rests upon a now inert “moderate” center: Both Republican and Democrat centrists, considerably reduced in numbers, continue to vote, somnolently, for each of their parties, while defectors from the parties continue to swell the ranks of unaffiliateds. What used to be called “the vital center” has been captured by radical interests: The Sun has been taken prisoner by Pluto. More and more often, elections are determined by elliptical interests and temporary coalitions of power.

During his first and second budgets, Mr. Malloy simply dispensed with the Republican Party. He dealt directly with unions, and the Democratic majority in the General Assembly conferred upon him the necessary plenipotentiary power to do so. Most of Mr. Malloy’s significantly flawed penological reforms were pushed past the General Assembly in implementer bills.  Mr. Malloy’s is the most secretive state government in living memory. It is the inattention of small “d” democrats that swell the arrogance of potential tyrants. In Merry England during the age of strong monarchs, young heirs to the throne were advised, “To be the King, play the King” – a lesson that has not been lost on aggressive progressives.

It is said that the poet William Blake, a fiercely radical republican, once drew in the margin of one of his poems a line of turds ending in a king. In the Northeast, there are numerous kings about, all threatening to save us from ourselves – and no William Blakes.