Let’s begin with soon to be ex-Governor Gavin Newsom of California, famous in recent days for its ungovernable wildfires and government supported unions.
The super-sane Washington Examiner notes in a recent
editorial – “Government unions show Newsom who’s really
in charge of California” –
that Newsom “is incapable of getting his employees to show up to the office
more than two days a week.”
He tried and failed: “This March, just weeks before the
state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office projected current and ‘persistent’ deficits
of between $10 billion and $20 billion a year, Newsom issued an executive order
directing all agency heads to update telework policies to require staff to be
in their offices four days a week rather than two days, as is now the case.
Agency heads were given three months to get this done, with an implementation
deadline of July 1.”
Alas, it was not to be: “California’s government unions,
SEIU Local 1000 most prominent among them, vowed to block Newsom’s order, and
many elected Democrats in Sacramento joined the fight on the unions’ side.
Several government employee unions filed grievances with the state, while
others sued. The unions spent more than $30,000 on billboards that were posted
in Sacramento attacking Newsom for supposedly creating traffic jams by forcing
workers to go to their place of work.”
Newsom caved on the implementation deadline: “He delayed the
return to work by a year, giving unions more time to flex their political
muscles and prepare for another fight.”
No guts or glory there; just the usual political genuflection
towards sainted California unions. Democrats in California and elsewhere in the
nation know, as my mother, now a saint herself, used to say, “which side their
bread is buttered on.” Republicans, as a rule, have been less slavishly devoted
to state employee unions.
Democrats here in Connecticut, reliant during election
periods upon union campaign contributions and door knockers, are only slightly
less deferential. Connecticut is nursing a massive state debt, a large portion
of it deferred pension and benefit payments. In a September 2024 CTMirror story, Keith Phaneuf
noted, “Connecticut’s spending on pensions in the 2021-22 fiscal year represented
51.5% of payroll, which was the fourth-highest rate in the nation (emphasis
mine).” And despite a sustained effort to pay down pension debt, “Connecticut
entered this calendar year with more than $37 billion in unfunded pension
obligations, a problem created by more than 70 years of improper savings by
governors and legislatures between 1939 and 2010.”
(The debt represents a lifetime per capita fine imposed by
spendthrift politicians upon present and future taxpayers until it is paid off
– not by Gold Coast millionaires, but rather by work-a-day taxpayers who have
not yet out-migrated from Connecticut to less tax punishing states. The rest of
us find ourselves imprisoned for life in a union-made dank dungeon in which
justice, intelligence and mercy have been replaced by neo-progressive campaign
propaganda.)
Like California, government unions in Connecticut are big
business, “Combined,” the Washington Examiner tells us, “the California Teachers Association, California
Federation of Teachers, California School Employees Association, American
Federation of State and Municipal Employees, SEIU 1000, and other public safety
unions have more than a million members in the state, paying more than a
billion dollars a year in dues. Between 15% and 25% of this money is spent
maximizing the unions’ political power, including direct donations to
Democratic Party campaigns, ballot measures, political staff, lobbyists in
Sacramento, and ‘issue advocacy.’ That comes to $150 million of union dues
spent every year influencing government policy.”
Newsom, it would appear, is governor of some of the people
–politically muscular union bosses -- most of the time.
Corresponding figures in Connecticut are not readily
available, but the breakdowns in both states are likely similar. When Democrats
say “money talks” in politics, they are not accusing state labor union bosses of
usurious greed, an accusation reserved solely for billionaires. Most
neo-progressive Democrats excluded millionaires from the sleight when Vermont
socialist Senator Bernie Sanders’ net worth rose above one million.
In many instances, Connecticut has become a political mirror
image of California. Both are one-party states subservient to both unions and an
alien political ideology. Indeed the winds of change for change’s sake continue
to blow hotly among Democrat coastal elites. U.S Senator Chris Murphy has yet
to earn his golden spurs, but his comrade in the U.S. Senate, the white-hatted
Dick Blumenthal – residence, Greenwich, Connecticut – is a millionaire several
times over; U.S. Representative John Larson of the 1st District may have passed
the millionaire’s mark – who’s counting?; and the politically immortal Rosa
DeLauro of Connecticut’s 3rd District bade goodbye to poverty ages ago.
While the end goal of some politicians on the left appears
to involve the monetization of socialism, others are more ambitious.
Zohran Mamdani, flirting with Communist doctrine, recently
won a Democrat Party primary for mayor of New York City. Addressing a Young Democratic Socialists of America
conference, Mamdani told the crowd, “But then there are also other issues that
we firmly believe in, whether it's BDS or whether it is the end goal of seizing
the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this
very moment."
The goal of the communist movement from Marx onward has
been, some have noticed, to “seize the means of production.” Mamdani here
modestly acknowledges that sufficient support for his end goal is lacking “at
this very moment.” But tomorrow, blossoming with a renewed effort to accomplish
the goal, is just around the corner.
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