RESULTS OF SPECIAL ELECTION
RESULTS OF SPECIAL ELECTION:
PUBLIC UNIONS WIN—CALIFORNIA LOSES
by
Ken Eliasberg
I was brought up to be a gracious loser, but when that loss is the result of total and complete dishonesty, graciousness doesn’t even begin to describe my feelings re this election, the results of which are both distressing and deplorable. California’s public unions spent well over 100 million dollars on a propaganda campaign that was, almost in its entirety, a shred of lies. I would not even grace their statements by calling them positions—there was nothing honest, let alone rational or reasonable, about any conclusion which they managed to palm off on an all too gullible and lazy public. Their conclusions were not merely exaggerations or distortions; they were flat out lies. Indeed, for fleeting moments I had the eerie feeling that Joseph Goebbels was in charge of their disinformation campaign.
The Governor’s proposals were an extraordinarily bland and benign effort to accomplish just what we elected him to do—reform a pathetically broken system. And I use the terms bland and benign because I can’t imagine how anyone who even superficially examined these propositions—74 through 77—could find anything that might be classified as either unfair or unreasonable, let alone sinister (which is exactly how the Unions struggled to portray them). What is wrong with asking a 22-year old (even an excessively competent and qualified 22-year old) to wait 5-years before giving him (or her) a life-time employment position? And, what is wrong with concluding that 2 unsatisfactory notices renders a job applicant eligible for dismissal (and not without review or in some summary manner as the Unions would have you believe—they lied, pure and simple).
The teachers unions are exactly what’s wrong with our public education system. California’s declining educational fortunes can be traced almost precisely to the rise of teacher’s unions. Why? Because these unions don’t care about children, parents, or even teachers. All they care about is holding on to their jobs, while blaming everything that’s wrong with our educational system on insufficient funds—notwithstanding that we pour more money into public schooling than almost any other society that is remotely comparable in its evolutionary status—AND GET WORSE RESULTS THAN VIRTUALLY ALL OF THEM!!
Proposition 75—now there’s a really unreasonable proposition—asking someone for permission before you spend his (or her) money on some political cause or person that he would not spend the money on if given a choice. Would you like to have someone spend your money on a candidate or cause that you don’t support? Yet that’s exactly what’s happening with Union members—40% of them vote Republican, but 95% of Union money (lots of Union money) goes to Democrats and Democratic causes. In addition, Union members are donated in large numbers to get-out- the-vote efforts. I don’t know about you, but I believe that there’s something wrong with this picture. Prop. 75 was a very simple and vanilla effort to bring it into focus. Obviously the Unions could not allow that to happen.
Proposition 76 merely advanced the seemingly obvious position that we should not spend more than we either earn or have at our disposal. Don’t we try to regulate our own lives along these lines? The Unions tried to make it look like Arnold was setting about to establish some sort of monarchy. All that the proposition was trying to do was to authorize the governor ( any governor, not just Arnold) to declare an emergency when financial circumstances (in accordance with reasonable criteria) reached a certain point. Thereafter, the legislature was to be convened and had 45 days to make things right. If they failed to act—and only in the event that they failed to act—was the governor empowered to act. What’s wrong with that? If our legislative children cannot attend to the people’s business in a manner calculated to avoid bankruptcy, then, hopefully, an executive adult should be empowered to step in and spare us this financial indignity.
Proposition 77 was no more than an effort to empower voters with the right to elect their legislators rather than authorize legislators to elect themselves. This notion seems to comport with fundamental notions of electoral fairness.
There are 2 unpleasant conclusions that one is almost irrestibly drawn to on the basis of a fair-minded analysis of this election. Unions, a once noble creation designed to save competent employees from unfair and arbitrary treatment, may have outlived their usefulness, becoming little more than a refuge for the incompetent. It also says a great deal about us—that we were too lazy to conduct an inquiry, relying totally on the outright falsehoods of a bunch of shameless liars—our public unions.
Where does that leave us? With a governor who has just taken a sound thrashing and, as a consequence, has very little leverage when bargaining with these “girlie men” who are totally in the tank for the public unions that bankroll them. In other words, when the smoke finally clears after next year’s election, there’s a good chance that all that we shall have accomplished in these last few years is to return Arnold to Belair and a financially troubled State to the very people who put us in a 38 billion dollar hole to begin with. It is a vicious circle: Public Unions contribute massive amounts of money to Democratic legislators, and they in turn provide lavish compensatory arrangements—current and deferred—to members of the Public Unions in question. And who pays for all this? You do!! Are we getting results commensurate with this extravagance? One need only look at California’s educational ranking among the States to realize that the Teacher’s Unions are much more concerned with perks than educating our children.
This election confirms my concerns with the Recall election (and why I was against it). I believed that California was in such deep trouble that it would take a miracle to get us out, and that miracle would have to include cooperation on the part of the Democrats. I was virtually certain that such cooperation could not be secured, and the result of not getting it would be a Republican governor with egg on his face. And, while Arnold has done a very good job—greatly surpassing my modest expectations - that’s exactly what has happened and where we now find ourselves. And you and I will pay the price for this fiasco.
And, in all fairness, we can blame no one other than ourselves; we keep electing legislators who get right into bed with the Unions. Actually, by we I don’t mean all of us—I just mean the Democrats, because there are approximately 1 million more of them than Republicans in California, so the deck is pretty well stacked against any kind of meaningful reform.