“…California remains one of the best places in the world to start a successful small business. All you have to do is start with a successful large business”
US Rep. Tom McClintock; (R) Rocklin (CA)
This week, the ordinary American citizens known as Tea Party Patriots– the pesky nemesis of power-drunk, spendthrift politicians–have laid down a gauntlet, building on the momentum of the protests in towns all across America as well as the 1+ million Tea Partiers who took part in rallies across the country on September 12th.
Making the transition from single-event political protest rallies to a sustained political activism campaign, the Tea Party Patriots have filed an initiative to appear on the November 2010 ballot in California. The initiative is the first official act within the true grass roots’ political activism platform we’ve titled “The Citizen Power Campaign”.
What is the first target the Tea Party Patriots’ ‘Citizen Power Campaign?’
The heart of the political machine that is bankrupting the once Golden State: politicians extracting money from taxpayers to increase the size of government and the recipients of this largesse, the public sector union bosses rewarding these politicians with generous campaign funds. This is a rigged game where public sector union bosses amass hundreds of millions of dollars each year in political war chests to finance candidates and liberal causes that neither the rank-and-file union member not the public at large would otherwise support. It has created a situation where no politician, Republican or Democrat, can stand up to the enormous power and influence that taxpayer money is being used for–often against the best interests of the taxpayers!
The Tea Party ballot initiative will create a constitutional amendment making it illegal for the State of California to forcibly extract monies from public employees to give to unions for political activities.
Says Mark Meckler, the California Coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, and one of the initiative’s five Proponents, “It’s time to unplug the machine, and make liberal politicians have to pursue campaign funds the same way everyone else does: make your case to the people, and convince them to write a check!”
Of the dire circumstances California is facing, Chicago columnist Warner Todd Huston noted “[W]e have a bankrupt state trying to stay alive by cutting the costs of government…Certainly these sorts of cuts are common in real life; that where business is ruled by the reality of economic forces, but here we are in the fantasy world of government where only an upward projection of revenues, wages, and benefits is apparently possible despite any such silly thing as ‘reality'”.
That “fantasy world” exists solely because the union bosses live in a sort of parallel universe where they do not have to worry about the sources of the money they spend, nor the consequences of their largesse. In his soon-to-be released book “Plunder! How Public Employee Unions are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives, and Bankrupting the Nation”, political journalist and author Steven Greenhut states “By its nature, government is not subject to the profit-and-loss test…of the free market…[and] is unique…in attaining its revenue via the coercion of taxpayers. Hence, government suffers no worries about losses or bankruptcy; it need serve no one but itself.”
This fight is crucial, as this machine has driven California to the brink of bankruptcy, with few alternatives remaining to continue funding the exorbitant union dues and pension benefits other than cutting many services and raising taxes–a historically guaranteed recipe for disaster.
The initiative will require collecting over 1.1 million petition signatures–over 700,000 of which have already been pledged by thousands of Tea Party activists across the state. This unprecedented early momentum will mark the first time in the nation’s history that all of the required petition signatures will be collected through a purely grass-roots’ effort; meaning no money required for professional signature gathering organizations.
And this Tea Party revolution is happening much to the consternation of the union bosses in Sacramento (as well as Washington), who had been believing its own arrogant presumptions of the public being either too stupid or too distracted making an honest living to even pay attention, let alone stand up to the plundering to taxpayer funds. Bankrupting the state through diverting billions into self-serving political activities is a gross violation of the public’s trust. The union bosses will soon find that the silent majority is silent no more.
Two of the leaders of the initiative effort are career public employees and former union members. These individuals, active Tea Party Patriots, are fed up with not only the corruption they witnessed within their own union, but also the expanding size and power of government, excessive taxes, and diminishing liberties.
Politics makes for strange bedfellows, indeed. Should be a very interesting fight to watch, to say the least.