Tag Archive for: unions

How Unions Have Betrayed America

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Anyone suggesting there is no role for unions in America today might first consider a fact of history: over a century ago, when oligarchs and the companies they owned had treated workers as if they were livestock, reduced to living in squalid pens with rationed food and water, it was unions that organized these workers to resist. It was unions who gave these workers back their humanity, and negotiated collective bargaining agreements and laws that eliminated child labor, enforced workplace safety, established an 8 hour work day, paid overtime, health benefits, and retirement pensions.

Unions today operate in a very different America. But how big labor has adapted calls into question their commitment to helping all American workers have a chance at a middle class lifestyle. In critical areas affecting everyone trying to thrive in 21st century America, unions have betrayed the American worker. In particular, their failure to challenge the globalist agenda of open borders and environmentalist extremism has inverted their priorities, putting them into alignment with the corporations and oligarchs they once so nobly opposed. This betrayal is most exemplified in the agenda of unions that didn’t exist a century ago, America’s powerful unions of government employees.

Government Unions Control and Corrupt Public Services

A distinction must be made between public sector unions, and the now less influential private sector unions. Public sector unions today have embraced a potent blend of toxic ideologies, centered around woke politics and environmentalist extremism. The most powerful public sector unions, those representing teachers and school employees, have forced this ideology into the public schools. This has not only indoctrinated a generation of young voters to vote for leftists, it has left them without the literacy and numeracy necessary to more easily grasp the nihilistic essence of leftism.

In critical ways, government unions don’t even fulfil the basic definition of a union. They don’t negotiate with independent management, they “negotiate” with politicians they elect. In California, public sector unions collect and spend nearly $1.0 billion per year, applying at least one-third of that spending to explicitly political activities such as lobbying and campaign contributions. Another third is spent on allegedly nonpolitical activities such as public education which almost invariably has a political objective. Even in a state as big as California, spending $1.2 billion every election cycle will buy a lot of politicians and profoundly influence public opinion.

Government unions also don’t have to rely on the profitability of the enterprise they’re negotiating with. Unions have to be more reasonable when negotiating with private employers because they can go out of business. But government agencies just increase taxes, and in “information campaigns” using public money, abetted by public union money, more taxes and more borrowing are repeatedly sold to voters. In November 2022, in deep blue, union controlled California, taxpayers approved 92 bonds totaling $23 billion in new local government borrowing, and they approved 152 local tax increases, set to raise another $1.6 billion per year in perpetuity.

Government unions, contrary to the essential notion of a union, are not fighting power structures. They are the power, and they use it to further their agenda – higher pay and more workers, which in-turn means more government programs and higher taxes. And thanks to their ideological preferences, the programs they promote, such as inefficient renewable energy mandates and counterproductive policies towards crime and the unhoused, repeatedly fail and in so doing require even more spending. Thus for government unions, failure is success, because the remedy is always more government. But what about private sector unions?

How Private Sector Unions Betray the American Worker

The problem with private sector unions is not because they want to maintain and increase their wages and benefits. There are compelling reasons why private sector unions, properly regulated, ought to be a necessary counterweight to private corporate interests. The problem is that the American oligarchy, which intends to flatten the world, erase national sovereignty, obliterate the middle class, and abolish borders, cultures, cash, small businesses, medium size businesses, and decentralized private ownership, has coopted private sector unions.

When was the last time anyone heard the leader of a national labor organization call for controlled immigration, which is a certain way to keep upward pressure on wages? When in recent years have any private labor leaders called for anti-trust legislation against the handful of trillion dollar hedge funds that are buying up America’s housing stock to turn us into a nation of renters, or called for the breakup of the cartel that controls the nation’s food supply? Where were the unions, when the nation was in lockdown for nearly two years, devastating small businesses and driving households into crippling debt and bankruptcy?

America’s private sector unions are vocal proponents of every item on the leftist agenda, but they are not doing anything to help the vast majority of American workers, even as they engage in a handful of labor actions, scattered across the country. And what every defender of leftism and unions must understand is that there is no longer any significant functional difference between “leftist” state ownership and “right-wing” ownership by monopoly corporations that have coopted the state. One is called communism, the other fascism. They are both authoritarian political models that are founded on centralized control. What the American oligarchy has evolved into is soft fascism. Soft, because with the high-tech tools available today, mass persuasion is easy. And it is here, where private sector unions have committed perhaps the biggest betrayal of all.

Instead of recognizing the so-called Green New Deal, or Great Reset, as a corporate tool designed to transfer upward and further centralize wealth at the same time as it reduces ordinary workers into living in micromanaged pens with rationed food and water, unions endorse it. Their endorsement finds expression in their support for policies guaranteed to achieve this pernicious goal. They support hundreds of billions, and ultimately trillions, in government spending to build, for example, large-scale CO2 capture facilities, EV charging stations, and floating wind turbines. They support urban rezoning to construct high-rise apartments, and light rail mass transit. All of these projects are staggeringly expensive, and not one of them will yield practical economic benefits downstream. Union construction workers will get jobs, big civil engineering firms will get government contracts, but the ordinary American will pay for these projects at a price they can’t afford. It isn’t as if there aren’t obvious alternatives.

Private sector union leadership has abandoned a common sense principle of fundamental importance: how public infrastructure priorities are set determines whether or not ordinary Americans are able to achieve and maintain a middle class lifestyle. California’s bullet train project is a classic example. After over a decade of work and over $10 billion already spent, not a single track has been laid. The cost for the first segment, which transits the emptiest, flattest stretch of the entire planned line, is estimated to cost over $200 million per mile. The entire project is now projected to cost $130 billion, with no credible completion date, and it will always be an economic drain on Californians.

In order to follow the path of least resistance private sector unions in California support this fraud. It is make work, designed to appease unions while preventing their workers from completing projects that make economic sense: widening and upgrading roads and freeways, upgrading existing railroad lines, bringing California’s remarkable system of water storage and transport into the 21st century, building wastewater recycling and desalination plants, upgrading the state’s capacity to engage in oil extraction and refining, increasing natural gas drilling and upgrading the distribution pipelines, and building more nuclear power stations. Much of this work could be accomplished with private funds. But the unions, and the corporations with which they have made common cause, will not challenge the extreme environmentalists, or the oligarchy that finds them so useful.

Private sector unions are one of the last special interest groups left in America that still has the power to change national policy. As the nation slowly transitions into a technology driven police state, with a workforce disenfranchised and impoverished by “climate” mandates, mass immigration, and intelligent machines, the potential will grow for unions to exercise bipartisan appeal. The only question that remains is will any of them have the courage to fight the trend and challenge the power. Or will they continue to be part of the establishment they were meant to oppose.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Unions Behind California Wealth Tax Proposal

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If at first you don’t succeed, try again. This adage applies well to ideas for new ways to tax Californians. Every election cycle we see new ways to be taxed, and higher tax rates, but rarely will we see a tax get repealed.

So it is that Assemblyman Alex Lee (D, San Jose) has introduced Assembly Bill 259, the Wealth Tax Act, which will impose an annual “worldwide net worth” tax of 1 percent on net worth above $50 million, rising to 1.5 percent on net worth over $1.0 billion.

Everything about this bill is goofy. It’s unconstitutional, it applies to intangible assets like goodwill or trademarks, it applies as well to assets that have subjective, wildly fluctuating values, such as fine art, and it even applies to equity owned in private companies that the holder may never convert into real money.

Already weighing in at nearly 16,000 words, AB 259 is riven with loopholes. And this typifies governance in California today — a state awash in laws and regulations so capricious and so complicated that they only reward those willing to laboriously scheme their way through the bureaucratic maze and opportunistically search for cracks in the walls, while penalizing those who aren’t sufficiently devious and instead prefer to do productive work. California is losing those good people.

A wealth tax will accelerate an exodus already in progress, as the wealthy will flee to more hospitable states, joining California’s small businesspeople, its vanishing middle class, aspiring youth, skilled workers, honest tradesmen and contractors, fixed-income retirees, and everyone else who can no longer afford to live here.

There’s a reason nobody can afford to live in California, and laying even more taxes onto the rich won’t fix it. But that isn’t the point, if you’re Alex Lee. Because taxes fund the state government, and the state government pays state employees, and labor unions collect dues from state employees. In the November 2022 election, apart from contributions from the State Democratic Party, every one of Lee’s top twenty contributors were unions, starting with the California Teachers Association.

Alex Lee and his union-controlled allies in the state legislature aren’t operating alone. As Lee proudly proclaimed in a press release issued January 23, AB 259 was issued “in coordinated effort with seven additional states,” Connecticut, Hawaii, Nevada, New York, Maryland, Illinois, and Washington. These bills vary, but all of them tax wealth.

There’s something else these bills share. As reported in the Los Angeles Times last month, “In the absence of a federal wealth tax, the State Innovation Exchange, a progressive nonprofit, and the State Revenue Alliance, which works with labor groups to call for taxing rich people, gathered a handful of states to create policy as part of the ‘Fund Our Future’ campaign.”

With what labor groups, you might ask? The State Innovation Exchange Board of Directors includes Mary Kusler, National Education Association, Michelle Ringuette, American Federation Of Teachers (AFT), and Brian Weeks, American Federation Of State, County, And Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The Advisory Committee for the State Revenue Alliance includes Amie Baca-Oehlert, Colorado Education Association, Marc Stier, who has worked as a campaign manager for the SEIU, and Charles Khan, the “Organizing Director at the Strong Economy For All Coalition, a Coalition of Labor Unions and Community groups.”

The other people overseeing and staffing the State Innovation Exchange and the State Revenue Alliance have backgrounds that typify big government and social justice activism — their resumes include copious references to familiar labor slogans — Defund The Police, Fight for $15, “campaigns for social, racial, and economic justice,” “racial equity,” “gender equity,” etc. As for the umbrella group “Fund Our Future,” it was founded by the American Federation of Teachers in 2019.

Behind this drive to impose a wealth tax is not merely a presumptuous resentment, i.e., the mission of the State Revenue Alliance is that “corporations and the ultra rich pay what they owe.” There is also a profound ignorance informing this movement. The “ultra rich” typically buy assets using after-tax income. Then if they collect dividends or rents off those assets, they pay taxes again.  If they ever sell their assets, they pay taxes on whatever gains they realize. There is already property tax on real estate, and we can thank the Biden administration and the 117th U.S. Congress for a new luxury tax on expensive planes, boats, and automobiles.

Based on current law, it might appear that America’s wealthy, especially those living in California, already “owe” plenty.

What unions in general, and public sector unions in particular, fail to understand is that in their drive for higher taxes on the rich and higher wages for their members, they are raising the cost-of-living for the rest of us.

The unions’ relentless push for more regulations and higher taxes make doing business more expensive, which translates into higher prices for goods and services. As such, union-backed taxes are regressive, and achieve the exact opposite of what unions purport to care about: they hurt working families.

Unions and their political front groups will never stop pushing these bad policies, however, because it runs contrary to their own financial interests.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

Who Owns the California State Legislature?

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There is only one answer to this question: Public sector unions. Anyone who argues otherwise is either misinformed or has a personal or professional motivation to delude themselves and others.

Before offering evidence of the financial power of public sector unions, consider the power these unions wield that is not explicitly financial. These unions operate the machinery of government, with everything that implies.

Public sector union members staff the countless local, regional and state bureaucracies that businesses depend on to obtain building permits and business permits. Among the functions of these bureaucracies is the power to enforce regulations, review mandatory reports from businesses, and conduct inspections. It only takes a few union zealots within these bureaucracies to decide to target any business that contributes to a politician or a cause that the union opposes.

The teachers union influences – many would say they control – what is taught in public schools. This means their political ideology and political agenda is marketed to children from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade and into public colleges and universities. Throughout their childhood and youth, California’s public school students are indoctrinated to support public sector unions and the political agenda they promote.

Make no mistake about the nature of the public sector union political agenda; it is inherently leftist. The bigger and more intrusive government becomes, the more unionized government workers are hired, and the more membership dues these unions collect.

The union influence is perennial. Politicians may oversee the administrative apparatus of government, but politicians come and go. If a politician opposes public sector union policies, they are targeted for defeat in the next election. By the time a politician has learned how things are run in Sacramento, they are termed out. But the union leadership remains intact.

Unions’ Financial Influence

Which brings us to the financial clout these unions wield. A study conducted a few years ago by the California Policy Center found that public sector unions collect and spend nearly $1.0 billion per year. About one-third of that money is used explicitly for political campaigns at all levels of state and local government, which is over $600 million to spread around every election cycle. That’s a lot, even in a state as big as California. And on top of that $600 million, additional funds are spent on lobbying, get-out-the-vote efforts, and massive public education campaigns that don’t qualify as reportable political advocacy but invariably carry a message and a goal.

Public sector unions in California are also overwhelmingly partisan, and this may be one of the root causes of California becoming a one-party state. The respected nonpartisan political news website Cal Matters recently published two articles, one covering “interesting” races this November for the State Assembly, and one covering races for the State Senate. What they did not cover, however, was the role of union money in supporting Democrats.

For example, they covered 13 Assembly races. For the most part, they chose the races that are considered competitive. Of those 13 “competitive” races, four were between two Democrats, and one was between two Republicans. That leaves eight close Assembly races this November where a candidate from each major party is pitted against the other.

It is a relatively easy, if tedious, exercise to view who the donors are to these candidates. On the California Secretary of State website there is a database, updated every few months, that shows campaign donations by candidate. From a review of the races in the eight competitive Assembly Districts identified by Cal Matters – 7, 22, 27, 40, 47, 70, 74, and 76 – it was clear that public sector unions are heavily biased in favor of supporting Democratic candidates. The data is unambiguous.

Simply by sorting the contributions by amounts, using spreadsheets that can be downloaded from the California Secretary of State’s website, of the top 20 contributors for each candidate, the Democratic candidates got almost all of the union money. For example, when totaling the 20 top contributions to each of these eight Democratic candidates, you have a total of 160 donations. For those Democrats, 108 of the donations, or 68 percent, were from unions, almost all of them public sector unions.

Peter Schiavo, running as a Democrat in the 40th Assembly District, received all 20 of his top 20 donations from unions. The Democrat getting the fewest donations from unions was Ken Cooley with seven union donations in his top 20, but another five of his top 20 were from the California Democratic Party. In most all cases, not only was union money heavily represented in their top 20 donations, but those donations were the biggest donations, appearing at the top of the list. Esmerelda Soria, for example, running for the 27th Assembly District, only got 9 of her top 20 from unions, but they were the top nine.

When it comes to union campaign support, Republican Assembly Candidates don’t do nearly as well. In the same eight races, they got a grand total of 6 donations in their top 20, or slightly less than 4 percent. Of those 6, there were 4 going to one candidate, Juan Alanis, the GOP candidate running in the 22nd Assembly District.

The story in the California Senate elections is the same. Cal Matters identified eight interesting Senate races. Half of them feature a Democrat running against another Democrat. Of the other four, with 80 top 20 donor slots to gauge, the unions filled 40 of them. For the four Republican candidates, only four of the 80 top 20 donations came from unions, just 5 percent, and all 4 went to Roger Niello, a veteran politician who is taking money from prison guard and police unions.

In general, the Democrats got donations from public sector unions, other Democratic campaigns, the Democratic party, and big individual contributors – certain individual names popped up repeatedly. The Republicans, on the other hand, had fewer individuals making big contributions, less party money, and instead took money from business interests.

Unions vs. Business

One might hope that money from business interests would counteract unions. It doesn’t. Business money goes to incumbents regardless of their party. Serious money from business only surfaces when they face an existential threat, such as the Uber and Lyft fight against AB 5, the independent contractor legislation. But in that case, these businesses didn’t try to correct the flaws in AB 5 for everyone victimized by it, but only sought to carve out an exception for themselves.

In reviewing donations in these races featured by Cal Matters, businesses under threat, such as California’s overregulated and water starved agriculture industry, were supporting candidates they thought might help them survive. But businesses in California have not unified to challenge public sector union power, and in most cases have in fact forged a symbiotic détente with them.

When pouring over a lot of data, usually if there’s a pattern, it becomes obvious. The trope frequently heard from unions is that they protect Californians from predatory businesses and wealthy “dark money.” But the reality is different. The perpetual flow of union money, sourced from the paychecks of public employees, is not matched by a perpetual flow from any opposing source.

Candidates that want to challenge the political agenda of unions have to raise their money one donation at a time. It has to be made voluntarily, once, then in the next cycle they start again from scratch. They have to convince big donors over and over that they can win, that the donor will not be alone and get targeted, and that they’ll actually be able to do anything, anyway, in a legislature that is dominated by union controlled politicians.

When it comes to getting elected to the California State Legislature, with rare exceptions, if you have union support, you win, and if you don’t, you lose.

This article originally appeared in Epoch Times.

The Union Card

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Until a few years ago, corporate political influence in the United States was balanced between those promoting a progressive, green agenda, and those still staying away from social equity issues while continuing to lobby for conventional energy policies. But the incredible wealth amassed by high tech companies over the past few years, all of them progressive and green, has completely overwhelmed that balance. America’s corporate establishment has now joined with the financial, academic, media, and government bureaucracies, to unequivocally support progressive politics.

Writing for the trade publication Natural Gas Now, Heartland Institute scholar and author Ronald Stein had this to say about the emerging “Environmental, Social and Governance” ethos that is sweeping through the business and government elites in the Western world:

“Allowing banks and investment giants such as BlackRock, led by CEO Larry Fink to collude to reshape economies and energy infrastructure is a very dangerous precedent. Their movement promotes the idea of a forcibly monolithic, regimented nation under the control of the investment community. It is scarily beginning to resemble the fascism that dominated the media in the past. The American people never voted to give banks this sort of control over our country.”

According to statistics kept by the St. Louis Federal Reserve, in 2021, 32 percent of the wealth in the U.S. was held by one percent of the population, while the bottom 50 percent of U.S. residents only held two percent of all U.S. wealth. This sort of distribution of wealth is not unique in American history, but what is unique today is the simultaneous drive on the part of the super-rich to make basic necessities unaffordable to ordinary Americans.

This isn’t news. The destruction of the middle class, the transfer of middle class wealth upwards to the one percent, the creation of a permanent underclass dependent on government; all of this is well understood by the remaining opposition, variously described as populists, national conservatives, or MAGA conservatives. But with the rise of the tech sector to become the most powerful force in what was already a progressive juggernaut, the opposition needs reinforcements.

With this in mind, the relationship between conservatives and organized labor requires serious reassessment, because labor unions are potential allies powerful enough to tilt the balance of political power in the United States back towards policies that support the interests of the American people. Without the power of organized labor, it may be impossible to counteract the influence of multinational corporations that have almost universally adopted an agenda designed to create scarcity of every resource fundamental to the existence of a thriving middle class: energy, water, transportation, and housing.

Organized Labor is Not Necessarily Anti-Conservative

The labor movement in America is fragmented, inexplicably united on only one thing: support for a corporate globalist agenda. This is primarily expressed in their indifference to immigration policies that undermine the labor market, and environmentalist inspired policies that make everything unaffordable. But if labor unions were to reembrace their foundational principals, they would see these policies for what they are: The priorities of an oligarchy on the verge of acquiring absolute political and financial power.

Meanwhile, Americans who have already awakened to the ongoing destruction of economic opportunities and political freedom by elected leaders who are supposedly looking out for their interests may find new alliances within the American labor movement. While it isn’t uncommon for anyone critical of organized labor to accuse them of being socialist, such criticism ignores an essential truth: All government, indeed society itself, consists of versions of collective behavior.

The many ways that individuals share the burden of coping with risk, chaos, and oppression, might all be considered forms of collectivist redistribution. When someone purchases an insurance policy, they are distributing the burden of an accident that may befall them onto a pool of similarly concerned individuals. When someone submits to government authority, they do so because the social contract they’re accepting, and the taxes they pay, enable them to live with increased safety and shared rules.

In this context, unions are just another form of organized behavior, accepted by individuals because it gives them a chance to live better lives. One may debate important details – should anyone be forced to join a union as a condition of getting a job, to offer one rather significant example – but the fundamental concept of collective bargaining is not some novel aberration, sprung from the bowels of Marxism. Unions can be a normal feature in a healthy democracy, and can embrace an agenda that supports even some of the most critical elements of conservative values.

The Problematic Aspects of Union Power

Whether or not a union is a necessity, or an unchecked and parasitical menace, can often come down to whether or not the union represents private sector workers or public sector workers. The hypothetical examples of Sarah (private sector) and George (public sector) illustrate this point.

Sarah has worked for a major grocery store chain for the past 25 years. Adjusting for inflation, she makes less now than she did over a decade ago, especially since her hours were cut in order for her employer to avoid being required to offer her health insurance. Even more difficult, she is “on call” most of the week, without a reliable schedule, which makes it impossible for her to take on a 2nd part time job to help make ends meet. Including benefits, Sarah is lucky to make $30,000 per year. Now in her early fifties, she will need to work for as long as there is strength left in her body to do the job.

George works for a fire department serving an affluent suburb on the California coast. Taking into account the vacation time he earns as a 25 year veteran, he works less than two 24 hour shifts per week before qualifying for overtime. Since five day weekends are overkill, he often works one or two extra shifts a week, doubling his pay. When he goes on calls, 98% of the time they are medical emergencies, not fires. Including moderate amounts of overtime and the employer’s payments for his benefits, George makes about $250,000 per year. Now in his early fifties, he will retire in a year or two and collect a pension and health benefits package worth well over $100,000 per year.

Both of these individuals are hard working, honest and conscientious. Both of them perform jobs that have a vital role to play in our society. Both of them deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. Neither of them wrote the rules. And both of them are represented by unions.

While these individuals and the work they do is beyond reproach, the unions that represent them leave much to be desired. In Sarah’s case, typical of tens of millions of private sector workers, the unions who represent her have ignored economic reality in pursuit of ideological fantasies. Almost universally, to cite a particularly wounding example, these private sector unions have supported immigration policies that increase the supply of semi-skilled workers who compete with Sarah for work hours. Also common are the pragmatic alliances these unions form with extreme environmentalist organizations who have bottled up development of land and energy, driving the cost of living beyond the reach of an ordinary worker. One may cogitate endlessly over what constitutes optimal and humane policies with respect to immigration and the environment. But to agitate for higher wages and benefits in a society awash in cheap labor and artificially inflated costs for basic necessities is a fool’s errand.

In George’s case, which is equally typical, at least in California, the unions that represent him should not even be permitted to exist. Associations of government workers that engage in collective bargaining are not unions in any traditional sense of the word. They elect their own bosses, they take money from taxpayers instead of competing for consumer spending, and they operate the machinery of government which lets them intimidate or co-opt any special interest that might oppose them. They have priced normal government services beyond the capacity of ordinary taxpayers, and bred cynicism about government into the heart of any financially literate American. And government unions have even less interest than private unions in acknowledging the complexity of issues such as immigration or environmentalist overreach. In both cases, policies that harm the aspirations of private workers have the opposite effect on them, enhancing their job security.

The reality today is that much of America’s labor movement has gone astray. Private sector unions often put ideological goals ahead of the economic interests of their members. And public sector unions, which are not unions in any traditional sense of the word, and which represent the economic interests of their members all too well, are an abomination. They have corrupted our democracy, they are a corrupting influence on government workers because they have exempted them from the economic challenges facing private American workers, they are driving our governments at all levels towards authoritarianism, they are bankrupting our cities and counties and states, and the pension funds they control are some of the most corrupt elements of America’s grotesquely overbuilt financial sector.

Which Unions Are Candidates for Realignment?

There are daunting challenges confronting conservatives that want to form alliances with unions. America’s public sector unions pursue an agenda inherently in conflict with the interests of taxpaying private sector households. But millions of government employees still embrace the ideals of public service and patriotism. This has been seen in the recent activism by police unions to push back against rogue district attorneys that have sown chaos into America’s cities, as well as by border patrol agents calling for more support to end human trafficking and drug smuggling. The excessive politicization of government programs, from law enforcement to homeless policy to public education, may eventually trigger a conservative insurrection even among public sector union membership. Conservatives should not dismiss this opportunity as unrealistic. Only grabbing a percentage of public sector union support for conservative policies could tilt the balance of power.

As for private sector unions, in most cases their policies are already doing more harm than good to the average worker. Ask the pipefitter, the iron monger, the heavy equipment operator, or any other worker who engages in building and maintaining America’s infrastructure who they voted for, and why, then ask them who their union endorsed. Private sector union leadership is out of touch with its membership in these sectors, and there’s no reason an insurgency from within could not realign their political priorities in favor of conservatives.

Reimagining how the labor movement might best operate in the interests of the American worker is difficult but necessary. It requires balancing libertarian and mixed-capitalist economic world views. Ultimately, labor union leaders, along with conservatives of all variants, might ask themselves just one question: Has America become a progressive oligarchy, and if so, what are we going to do about it? Against this extraordinary threat to freedom, prosperity, and national sovereignty, unions and conservatives can work together, and compartmentalize their ongoing conflicts over right-to-work and card check.

Unions, if they returned to their roots, could help bring manufacturing back to America, they could bring back a viable energy economy, they could stand up to environmentalists that want to pack as many Americans as possible into subsidized urban high-density housing, and they could support applying antitrust statutes to the business and financial monopolies that have corrupted and discredited capitalist principals. They could do these things in partnership with conservatives, creating a coalition powerful enough defeat the progressive juggernaut, and win state and national elections. In doing so, they would rescue America’s middle class from oblivion.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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How Unions Could Save America

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The general perception within Conservatism, Inc. and libertarian circles is that collective bargaining is a violation of the right of the individual to seek work without being compelled to join a union. That sounds good in principle, but there’s much more to the story.

A few years ago, the workers at a local grocery store chain in California went on strike. The reason they voted to strike was that management had implemented a new policy whereby most of the employees, including full-time career workers, had their hours reduced to fewer than 25 hours per week. At the same time, these employees had their health coverage taken away.

It’s easy enough here to simply proclaim that this is the free market working for the greater good. After all, consider the Walmart chain. By sourcing most of its merchandise from overseas, exploiting economies of scale, and offering minimal pay and benefits, consumers are able to purchase food and other goods at prices far lower than a local, unionized grocery store chain could possibly achieve. Survival of the fittest. Economic Darwinism. Creative destruction. What could possibly go wrong?

But when you talk with the people who decided to go on strike, the other side of the story becomes obvious. Not everybody is a freelance gig whiz who can move to a low-cost city while writing code at $100+ per hour to service clients all over the world. Some people just want to do an honest day’s work, earn enough to support a family, and live with dignity. And if they’ve put 30 years into a job, with a decade to go before retirement, and all of a sudden their hours are cut and their benefits are gone, who is going to stand up for them?

More than a century ago, the need for unions was more obvious. The industrial revolution had spawned a manufacturing economy where there were no protections for workers. Adults and children worked long hours in appalling conditions. The emergence of unions in those years was a necessary reaction. Unions played a vital role in securing the rights that workers today take for granted.

While it’s much easier today to adhere to pure free-market orthodoxy, the reality is that America is a mixed economy. The debate over how much government and how many regulations are appropriate is better served by recognizing that neither extreme—pure libertarian capitalism or pure state communism—is a desirable outcome.

Unions in America today come in many varieties. Public-sector unions, which elect the politicians who supposedly manage them, and live on the taxes we pay, may be more problematic than private-sector unions. But in either case, it would be a mistake for right-of-center political movements to not consider many of their members as potential allies.

Unions Don’t Need to Have Wings

The general perception of unions, backed up by plenty of evidence, is that they are invariably committed to left-wing politics. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Union membership, even in some of the most notoriously left-wing unions, is often right-of-center.

As reported in the Orange County Register in 2018, the California Teachers Association president admitted that about 35 percent of his membership is Republican. This is in a state where only 24 percent of voters are registered Republicans. The National Education Association teachers union study in 2006 found that 55 percent of public school teachers “leaned conservative.”

The politics of California’s teachers’ unions are unambiguous. Their campaign contributions favor Democratic candidates by a ratio that typically exceeds 20 to 1. Why isn’t it 2 to 1, or less, if you take into account independent voters? Wouldn’t that better represent the membership? And what if NEA spending represented its national membership? Instead of spending 5 to 1 in favor of Democrats in 2020, what if they had spent 55 percent of their money on Republicans? Wouldn’t that more accurately reflect the political sentiments of their members?

In California, up until the rise of the social media mega-billionaires, public-sector unions ran the show. Collecting and spending roughly $1 billion per year, California’s public-sector unions have perennial financial power dwarfing that of any other special interest group. But what if their spending reflected the sentiments of their membership instead of their leadership?

Why, for example, did the firefighters union leaders agree to send their members onto the streets of Los Angeles to march in solidarity with the United Teachers of Los Angeles? Does the ideological agenda of the teachers’ union actually align with the typical political leanings of the average firefighter in California? Probably not.

One may rightly ask why public-sector unions have made it their business to influence politics at all, rather than just concerning themselves with pay, benefits, and issues of job safety. But if they’re going to be politically active, might they at least focus on issues where they have expertise? Why aren’t California’s firefighting unions lobbying to bring back California’s decimated timber industry? Restoring California’s timber industry would create jobs, pay for forest thinning and clearing around the powerlines, fire roads, and fire breaks, and Californians would no longer have to import lumber from British Columbia.

When right-of-center pragmatic American activists are looking for allies to join their movement, it would be hard to find more powerful potential allies than, for example, the firefighters’ union. But who is asking? Why aren’t firefighters themselves demanding that their union focus on changing the regulatory environment so private timber companies can thin the forests, saving lives and the forests themselves? Why aren’t activists going to these union leaders and saying “help us, only you have the political power to stand up to the extreme environmentalists who have brought us to this point.”

Some public-sector unions have already moved right-of-center. This is exemplified in California by the police unions striking back politically against the new lunatic district attorneys who took office thanks to mega-billionaire campaign contributions and dirty campaigns that relied on attacking the incumbent while disguising the motives of the challengers. Crime-friendly idiots like George Gascón in Los Angeles and Chesa Boudin in San Francisco are the result, and police unions have had enough. Nationally, this move to the Right on the part of police organizations was demonstrated by their almost universal support for the reelection of President Trump.

Private-Sector Unions Can Offer Powerful Support to the Right

A fundamental conflict exists between conservatives and private-sector unions: Conservatives support right-to-work laws and private-sector unions see those laws as an existential threat. It’s hard to get past a disagreement that big, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth a try.

The approach would go something like this: We’re going to keep on fighting each other over the appropriate level of regulation to apply to private-sector unions, but meanwhile, we’re going to recognize together that America’s left-leaning establishment—co-opted by multinational corporations, mega-billionaires, and extreme environmentalists—is destroying the upward mobility of every working family in America.

This sort of rapprochement was evident in the long battle to open the Dakota Access and Keystone pipelines. After unions lobbied for years in support of these pipelines, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was merely “unhappy” when Joe Biden killed it. Is that the best he can do? Trumka and his colleagues need to conduct a serious assessment of what kind of infrastructure is going to truly help the American worker. Not just the workers who get jobs to build the infrastructure, but the rest of America’s workers whose ability to pay their bills is enhanced when the right infrastructure is built.

Here is where unions can save America. Enabling infrastructure that socializes the cost of basic necessities—transportation, energy, and water—is a use of public funds and union workmanship that lowers the cost of living for everyone. When that happens, no matter how much they make, workers can do more with their money. All workers.

Union leaders must ask themselves, what is going to help everyone more: High-speed rail or wider and safer freeways? Wind turbines and solar farms, or clean natural gas power and safe nuclear power? Dead trees and water rationing, or water recycling, desalination plants, and new reservoirs?

The coalition that is currently running America into the ground is too powerful to be stopped without help from America’s powerful unions. If they want to save America for its middle class and aspiring low-income communities, right-of-center pragmatists and union leaders need to put aside their differences and fight together for the greater good.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Biden’s Union Agenda Betrays American Workers

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The consequences of Democrat control of Congress and the White House are just beginning to be felt, as one of the most disruptive pieces of legislation in American history quietly moves from the House of Representatives to the Senate, where only a successful filibuster may prevent its passage. The “Protect the Right to Organize,” or “PRO Act,” goes a long way towards completing America’s transition into a corporate oligarchy. Because it will also make the elite captains of Big Labor more powerful than ever, they don’t care.

The PRO Act, like the more visible H.R. 1, is an example of disastrous legislation that is packaged and labeled as advancing the interests of the American people, when in fact they are designed by special interests to destroy democracy and deny upward mobility. The overall theme is simple and tragic: in America, big labor, big business, and big government no longer engage in healthy conflict. Rather than checking and balancing each other, on the biggest issues they display a corrupt unity.

Here are some of the provisions of H.R. 842, the PRO Act:

1 – Eliminates the secret ballot in union elections, replacing it with “card check.” In this new system, employers would be compelled to give unions the personal information about their employees, including their phone numbers and home addresses. Union operatives could then approach these workers, repeatedly, attempting to get them to sign a card approving unionization. Once signed cards were collected from a majority of the workers, the company would be automatically unionized. What could possibly go wrong?

2 – Imposes binding arbitration. The problem with this is when a union negotiator knows that after a certain limited period of time, arbitrators will come in and mandate the terms of a collective bargaining agreement, they can be as unreasonable as they wish. Corporate negotiators are forced to sign agreements that may eventually harm the company and the workers in order to avoid an even worse result from arbitration. And who controls the selection of arbitrators? Who can better intimidate the arbitrators? Who guarantees the arbitrators even understand the businesses whose fate they’re deciding?

3 – At the same time as the PRO act imposes binding arbitration on business negotiations with unions, it takes away binding arbitration in employee disputes. This means that every employee grievance, no matter how unfounded, becomes fodder for trial lawyers, whose business model relies on forcing business owners to settle cases without merit merely to avoid the expense of trials.

4 – Takes away the ability of businesses to stay open during strikes. Takes away the ability of companies to declare an impasse and lock out workers – no matter what. Takes away the ability of the business to hire temporary replacement workers.

5 – Removes restrictions on so-called “secondary strikes.” This means that labor protests and strikes and boycotts can be organized not merely against the target company, but against every vendor that supplies that company, and every customer that purchases that company’s products.

6 – Will treat a company that sells franchises as liable for violations of labor laws at any one of their franchisee’s operations. Now if any one of these independently owned franchises has a labor dispute, the litigators can also squeeze the national branding company. This so-called “joint employer” provision makes franchisors responsible for any alleged misconduct of every one of their franchises.

7 – Overrides the “right-to-work” laws which are still in effect in 27 states. These laws protect the right of workers who don’t want to join a union. In states without right-to-work laws, if you want to work in a unionized industry, you either join a union, pay dues, and subject yourself to their work rules, or you don’t work.

8 – Redefines what it means to be an independent contractor. Millions of Americans prefer being independent contractors because it allows them to choose their own hours of work and offer their services to multiple companies. Small companies often have no choice but to hire independent contractors in order to fulfill the diverse requirements of their business, because they aren’t big enough to hire full time employees to fill every type of job they need done. The PRO Act adds the following criteria to the definition of an independent contractor, “the service is performed outside the usual course of the business of the employer.” But you can argue that anything an independent contractor is hired to do would be inside the course of business of the employer, or they wouldn’t be hired. The PRO Act will reclassify millions of Americans as employees, subject to union membership or union organizing. This will kill small companies and wipe out millions of jobs.

9 – Not least, and not last, this incomplete list of the many PRO Act provisions must include the imposition of personal liability on corporate executives for labor violations, at the same time as it will undermine attorney-client confidentiality when seeking legal advice on labor issues.

The PRO Act is opposed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Retail Federation, along with a host of other business interests. But this opposition obscures the bigger trend wherein America’s most powerful corporations are at best indifferent to the rise of big labor. This is because on the issues bound to have the biggest long-term impact on the fate of America’s multinational corporations, big labor has come into alignment.

Where was big labor over the past fifty years while big business was lobbying for mass immigration to keep the wages down by flooding the job market with desperate, unemployed foreigners who would work for a fraction of what Americans were earning? That goes on to this day, and does big labor bother to object on behalf of the American worker?

Where was big labor, decade after decade, as big business shipped factories overseas, gutting America’s manufacturing sector and obliterating millions of jobs? That too, is an ongoing drain, with barely a peep from big labor.

Where is big labor today, fully aware that the provisions of the PRO Act will destroy small businesses, while leaving big businesses intact? Big business can adapt to a unionized workforce. Small businesses cannot. For the same reason overregulation actually works in the interests of big business, unionizing an industry also favors big business over their smaller competitors.

One of the biggest lies in 21st century America is the idea that Left is a movement that looks out for the interests of the disenfranchised, the disadvantaged, the downtrodden. It doesn’t. Those unfortunates are manipulated by the Left, conned into resenting America’s middle class as “privileged” instead of inspired to work hard to join the middle class.

In reality, the American Left is working in the interests of the most powerful corporations and the wealthiest individuals on earth, and their mission is to destroy the American middle class and further consolidate their own power. They even morally justify themselves by claiming, falsely, that America’s middle class lifestyle is ecologically unsustainable.

And on the issue of environmental politics, where is big labor? Apart from a few high-profile stands, such as to advocate for construction to begin on the Keystone Pipeline, big labor is absent from the debate. Why isn’t big labor advocating for practical enabling infrastructure that will create affordable water and energy, affordable new homes, and modern, uncongested roads? Instead they do the regressive bidding of the financial elites, who know that “renewables,” and other environmentalist restrictions create artificial scarcity, boosting their profits and bubbling up the value of their investments.

Unions, at least in the private sector, could play a decisive role in revitalizing America. But to do that, they are going to have to look out for the interests of their membership instead of their leadership. They are going to have to renounce their tacit partnership with big business and big government, and they are going to have to support policies that grow the economy and lower the cost-of-living, instead of blindly accepting policies that are tantamount to national suicide.

With the PRO Act, America’s unions not only betray the average American worker, they betray their own legacy.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Tom Steyer Proposes to Triple the Minimum Wage

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Usually when billionaires run for political office, it is reasonable to expect they have a basic understanding of economics. In the case of presidential candidate Tom Steyer, however, one cannot make that leap of faith. Either Steyer has no understanding of economics whatsoever, which is extremely unlikely, or he does and does not care, or he is a pandering liar.

On February 9, speaking in South Carolina, Steyer said “he would call for a $22 per hour minimum wage if elected president.” This ups the ante on Steyer’s competitors in the Democratic presidential primary race, who are calling for an increase to $17 per hour.

Currently, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. If Tom Steyer were president, that rate would triple. Examining the consequences of such a move brings into sharp focus the dangerous absurdity of Democrat proposals. It offers additional reasons to vote for Republicans not necessarily because they are Republicans, but because they are not Democrats.

Shown on the chart below is the history of the federal minimum wage since it was first established in 1938. The first column shows the actual, nominal, minimum wage in each year the amount was raised. The middle column displays the consumer price index in each of those years. The column on the right then calculates what the minimum wage was historically, if expressed in 2019 inflation adjusted dollars.

As can be seen, if the minimum wage set back in 1938, 25 cents per hour, were expressed in inflation adjusted 2019 dollars, it would only be $4.50. Also evident is that the highest level the inflation adjusted minimum wage ever got was in 1979, when it was set – in 2019 dollars – at $10.86 per hour.

It’s just fine to argue about the need for some minimum wage. There are good arguments on both sides of that question. But what Tom Steyer is proposing is at best ridiculous, and he knows it. The obvious consequence of a minimum wage this high is that it makes it impossible for small businesses to stay profitable. The restaurant industry is a prime example. Large corporate chains automate and raise their prices. Small mom and pop restaurants go out of business.

In general, the job killing impact of an artificially high minimum wage is well documented based on the experiences in cities where it’s been implemented. Businesses that can’t adapt simply change jurisdictions or they close shop. And it’s not only these small businesses that become victims of a high minimum wage. These entry level jobs that go away create unemployment for people who would otherwise be entering the workforce and beginning to earn income and acquire skills.

Less obvious but equally significant is the impact on indexed wage scales. A relatively unknown but very common feature of collective bargaining agreements is that negotiated rates of pay are automatically increased when the minimum wage increases. Raising the minimum wage at any level, local, state or national, automatically raises wages across unionized workforces in the private and public sector. The ripple effect is therefore significant. When the minimum wage goes up, it drives consumer prices up across a host of industries that have to pass through the increased payroll costs, it can challenge the ability of businesses to survive if they have unionized workers at any level of wages, it drives businesses offshore, and it increases government payroll expenses leading to higher taxes.

What Steyer, the other Democratic candidates, and their union backers are doing is justified by a cost-of-living for Americans that has not been matched by increases in the average wage. That is a powerful argument, but artificially increasing wages will not solve that problem. When driving companies out of business, increasing unemployment, driving up consumer prices, and driving up tax rates is the consequence of increasing the minimum wage, then increasing the minimum wage is a fool’s errand. There is another solution, which is to lower the cost-of-living, and to lower the supply of labor.

America Needs to Lower the Cost-of-Living, Not Raise Minimum Wages

The sad irony is that these solutions used to be part of the union playbook. In past decades, unions fought for efficiently ran public infrastructure projects. These projects, often publicly funded but not rife with the padded budgets and paralytic bureaucratic delays that we see today, were vital elements in delivering a lower cost-of-living to the average American. In past decades, enabling infrastructure such as freeways, connector roads, reservoirs, aqueducts, water treatment plants, schools and parks were built swiftly and largely out of operating budgets. As a result, cities could expand, and homes were affordable, utility bills were affordable, and taxes were low.

Today these enabling infrastructure projects cost two to three times as much, and take five to ten times as long to complete. Most of the time they are funded via assessments on private homebuilders and developers, greatly increasing the market price of homes. If public funds are used, the money comes not out of operating budgets, but via public bond financing. What happened?

In the simplest terms possible, what happened is that America’s unions stopped fighting for the interests of all workers, and, for all practical purposes, joined forces with the corporations who used to be their adversaries. Oh sure, there are still strikes, and management and labor still quarrel, but they both are representing groups who have acquired and keep their privilege thanks to over-regulation. Unionized employees receive over-market wages, and corporations consolidate their market share against competitors with less financial resilience.

In the government sector, it’s even worse. Across blue-state America, unions control local and state elections, electing their own bosses. Why on earth would these union controlled bureaucracies fund infrastructure out of operating budgets, when instead they can use that money to pay themselves over-market wages, and fund pensions that are worth several times what Social Security benefits are worth to private sector workers?

Unions also used to fight the environmentalist lobby, but today, in addition to reaching a rapprochement with monopolistic corporations, they have allowed environmentalists to dictate their agenda. And why not? Environmentalists may only approve of one in five badly needed infrastructure projects, but who cares if each project is going to incur labor costs that are five times what they might have been if budgets weren’t padded?

This is easily exemplified by two California examples (of course), high speed rail and affordable housing. Construction of California’s “bullet train” still chugs along at a snails pace, but unionized workers have already been paid hundreds of millions, if not billions, to construct a small, overbuilt fraction of this useless monstrosity. But the environmentalists love it.

Similarly, the average cost of government funded affordable housing in California is now over $500,000 per apartment unit. But who cares? Environmentalist attorneys collect lawsuit settlements, public bureaucrats collect astronomical permit fees, consultants cash in on the required studies by experts, nonprofits build their empires, developers get subsidies and tax breaks, and unions operate under project labor agreements which means a swollen headcount and swollen wages.

Everybody wins except the normal, underprivileged, general public and the taxpayer.

What this points to is something bigger than unions, but very much related to the call for a higher minimum wage. What proponents of big government have done is over-regulate the economy, creating artificial scarcity which translates into an unaffordable cost-of-living for ordinary workers. They made housing unaffordable, then brought in government to build unaffordable “affordable housing.” And to cope with the high cost of housing and pretty much everything else that can’t be imported from overseas sweatshops, the bring in government to raise the minimum wage.

There was a time when unions performed an invaluable role in American society, because they stood up for all workers and supported policies that benefit all workers. This isn’t to say there weren’t aspects of unions that were and remain problematic. But on two key issues, unions have abandoned their own legacy and they have abandoned their membership.

Unions in America today no longer offer a counterbalance to the environmentalist lobby and as a result they no longer support vital enabling infrastructure. Even worse, they are demanding a massive increase to the minimum wage instead of calling for realistic restrictions on immigration, which would naturally force market rates for labor to rise.

Many high-profile Democrats in America, such as the bird brained Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, do not properly understand history or economics. Their ignorance can be forgiven, if nothing else.

Tom Steyer, however, does not get a pass. He knows exactly what he’s doing. And while he will never, ever be president – and he knows that, too – the hundreds of millions he’s investing in the 2020 election will influence countless voters to vote against the interests of their own fortunes as well as the fortunes of this nation.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Contrasting Environmentalism & Unions

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a man who always stood up for the worker, once made this very contrarian statement “I would continue where others have stopped, and I would rise when others sleep.” This is an inspiring explanation of the moral worth of polemics, or being contrarian for its own sake. Because not only are polemics a potentially pointless, occasionally perilous game, tolerating the polemicist is the only reason we have political freedom. One might also add that indulging contrarian thought is the only way we preserve a glimmer of truth, during every time our world is seized with misplaced monolithic zeal, and consequently, nurturing the contrarian is a way civilization can better adapt and embrace disruptive and productive innovations and more quickly evolve. So how would workers or contrarians view our latest global panic, the war on CO2 emissions? In considering this question, the differences between unions, who care about workers, and environmentalists, who care about nature, become quite interesting.

Global warming policies and environmentalist policies in general are only in part about global warming or environmentalism, they are more generally about to what extent we redesign our government to give more rights to government and fewer rights to individual property owners. Environmentalists claim their policies benefit the economy, but one might just as easily argue that is not only false, but dangerously false. In the name of environmentalism we are not simply slowing our economy down, we are failing to develop and maintain infrastructure necessary to avoid natural disasters. A certain amount of environmentalist wisdom informing government laws and regulations is healthy, indeed essential. But restricting development of water infrastructure, power plants and freeways, forcing developers to only be permitted to approach heavily restricted lists of eligible property owners based on “urban service boundaries,” and litigating literally everything in the name of some environmentalist statute or presumed statute – is environmental extremism, not common sense environmentalism. Now we have the war on CO2. This imperils the global economy, it undermines attempts to improve human safety and security, and threatens the freedom of individuals and nations.

Two of the biggest drains on the United States economy over the past 30-50 years are environmentalists and labor unions. Both have reduced the efficiency of the economy in critical areas. Environmental laws and litigation have raised the costs for all resources, dramatically slowing economic development while only yielding marginal additional environmental benefits – if any. The power of big labor, in both the public and private sector, has reduced the ability of unionized workforces to right-size their entitlements in the face of lower revenues. This inflexibility in-turn causes larger than necessary shocks when large corporations or government entities postpone restructuring because of legacy obligations.

Unlike environmentalist policies, however, the impact of unions – in both the public and private sector – are at least economically progressive in a relatively egalitarian and competitive system that values project-merit, and therefore release money into a broader and more productive sector of the economy. Environmentalism, on the other hand, funds jobs for government bureaucrats along with astronomical fees for private service professionals – people who produce nothing and are motivated by their compensation to perpetually demand additional takings. Such environmentalism is regressive and slows economic growth, it raises costs of living for working people and transfers the wealth to far fewer, far more highly compensated, far less productive individuals. Environmentalism, at its idealist core, too often worships nature and marginalizes the aspirations of individuals, and consequently restricts building activity. Union organizing, at its idealist core, is to care above all for the common man who works to build things that create wealth.

Another crucial distinction between unionism and environmentalism is there is an inevitable end to the need to have unions, because the need for unions will wither away as per capita wealth increases. Since ever-advancing technology and slowing human birthrates guarantee that per capita wealth will always increase, eventually there will be enough overall wealth in the world to provide everyone with basic needs and more. Environmentalism, on the other hand, has no inevitable limit, it must be self regulating. And the more extreme environmentalist policies become, the less wealth we will have. Environmentalist doomsday predictions of resource shortages will likely occur, if they occur, precisely because we stopped developing resources in the name of protecting the environment. Balance has been lost in the discussion – the trump card is the alleged need to stop CO2 emissions – and the zealotry and propaganda mustered today to silence climate skeptics would make Francisco Franco proud, and others, in hopefully not all of their unfortunate worst iterations.

Of course we should prepare for climate change. The climate changes catastrophically all the time, these are called “storms,” and they are perfectly natural. Sometimes, since the beginning of time, we have had “extreme storms,” and this is also perfectly natural. As our ability to mitigate risk to humans increases through technology, our values and our priorities to upgrade publically available human protections increases apace. Of course we need to better prepare for droughts and extreme weather. But we need to do this regardless of whether or not CO2 is causing overall temperatures to increase – and excuse me if, Marquez-like, I would continue with my global warming skepticism where others have stopped. Along with underground HVDC electrical grid upgrades, we should be building freeways and aqueducts and offshore LNG terminals. We should be burying fiberoptic cable and moving electricity conduits underground, and eliminate the visual scourge and dangerous tangle of overhead telephone wires and telecom cables across the old suburbia. There are plenty of union jobs out there waiting to be done, and they create real value, but approving any of these developments requires prohibitive environmental compliance costs – billions and billions and by God, nowadays, trillions of dollars. The fact that unions and environmentalists are in the same political party in America is curious, to say the least.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez also said this, “I have learned that a man has the right to look down on somebody only when he is helping him to get up.” Environmentalists may claim to have this impulse, but unlike the unionists who clearly are empathic with ordinary people, environmentalist policies are now ignoring the needs of ordinary people in favor of elites. The environmentalist mantra ala stopping global warming at any costs will benefit the established oligarchal elites, not the working man, not unionists, not minority activists, nor free thinking liberals. Why then do those who claim to speak for working people continue to embrace extreme environmentalism, when its practice yields results that are opposed to their own core values and goals?  The way the workers will rise economically to the point where unions can willingly wither away will be when we implement infrastructure proposals and public policies designed to make energy, water, transportation and shelter less expensive, not more expensive. This will require reforming environmentalism.