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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