From: https://tinyurl.com/2s3shmkj (amgreatness.com)

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How Unions Have Betrayed America

Government unions control and corrupt public services; private sector
unions betray the worker

By Edward Ring
August 16, 2023

Anyone suggesting there is no role for unions in America today might first
consider a fact of history: more than 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 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 more than a decade of work and more than $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 more than $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 have 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 originally formed
to oppose?
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