California's recent string of bankruptcies - San Bernardino among them - resulted from public-employee unions having a mafia-like stranglehold on democratically elected officials.Tony Soprano would be proud.
Back in the good times, when the public wasn't paying attention, public-employee unions bestowed election endorsements on candidates and flooded their coffers with campaign cash. These ever-organized unions also provided the people power needed to coat a city with candidates' yard signs.
Residents - oblivious to local politics and issues - based their votes on which candidates had the most yard signs. Residents blissfully went on with their lives as long as the cops responded to their calls and the city picked up their garbage.
And poof! Candidates deeply in hock to the public-employee unions kept winning elections. They repaid their political debts by giving unions as many taxpayer dollars as they wanted at negotiation time.
Public employees went onto to enjoy salaries and benefits doubling those of the taxpayers they were supposedly serving.
As cited in a recent San Bernardino Sun article, one in four San Bernardino city employees have six-figure salaries.
The process worked great until the Great Recession, when taxpayers hit a saturation point and refused to coughup the tax money needed to keep the machine turning. That's when taxpayers began paying attention to local issues.
Now, for the
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first time, elected officials are being forced to stand up to the public-employee unions whose greed triggered our current mess. Bankruptcy is the consequence. Many cities are expected to soon join San Bernardino, Stockton and Mammoth Lakes in the Golden State sick bay.Californians are only now paying attention because their financially ill cities are the laughingstock of the country. They are now at risk of losing police protection and garbage collection because of the incestuous public-employee, elected-official relationship.
(Ironically, I'm now reading almost as many articles about San Bernardino in the Wall Street Journal as I do in the Sun and the Redlands Daily Facts anymore.)
Both public and private unions have parasitic relationships with their employers. The difference is private unions know they die if their company dies. That's not a concern with public unions.
Their employers are the local government, which can stay alive indefinitely by constantly draining ever more money from taxpayers.
The financial disaster Californians are experiencing never would have happened if voters had paid attention to local issues and demanded that their dollars go toward fixing potholes and improving parks instead of lavishing even more benefits on public employees.
Fortunately, life is rife with second chances. For Californians, a chance to repent for decades of apathy comes in November when Proposition 32 will be on a statewide ballot.
If approved, that measure will block corporate and union contributions to state and local candidates; ban contributions by government contractors to the politicians who controlled and awarded the contracts in the first place; and, most significantly, prevent unions and corporations from automatically deducting wages for political purposes.
In other words, the same measure that the union bullies fought so hard in Wisconsin in June is coming to California in November. The public-employee unions are going to dig up every body and find every skeleton, real or imagined, to fight this proposition. Their fear-mongering might include such impossibilities as Mitt Romney wanting to take away your air conditioning.
Figures vary, but unions are expected to spend $30 million to defeat a ballot measure that has already turned around the fortunes of the Badger State.
And with good reason - If Prop. 32 wins, Tony Soprano would be angry.
John F. Berry
Redlands