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Let’s begin with soon to be ex-Governor Gavin Newsom of California, famous in recent days for its ungovernable wildfires and government supported unions.
The super-sane Washington Examiner notes in a recent editorial – “Government unions show Newsom who’s really in charge of California” – that Newsom “is incapable of getting his employees to show up to the office more than two days a week.”
He tried and failed: “This March, just weeks before the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office projected current and ‘persistent’ deficits of between $10 billion and $20 billion a year, Newsom issued an executive order directing all agency heads to update telework policies to require staff to be in their offices four days a week rather than two days, as is now the case. Agency heads were given three months to get this done, with an implementation deadline of July 1.”
Alas, it was not to be: “California’s government unions, SEIU Local 1000 most prominent among them, vowed to block Newsom’s order, and many elected Democrats in Sacramento joined the fight on the unions’ side. Several government employee unions filed grievances with the state, while others sued. The unions spent more than $30,000 on billboards that were posted in Sacramento attacking Newsom for supposedly creating traffic jams by forcing workers to go to their place of work.”
Newsom caved on the implementation deadline: “He delayed the return to work by a year, giving unions more time to flex their political muscles and prepare for another fight.”
No guts or glory there; just the usual political genuflection towards sainted California unions. Democrats in California and elsewhere in the nation know, as my mother, now a saint herself, used to say, “which side their bread is buttered on.” Republicans, as a rule, have been less slavishly devoted to state employee unions.
Democrats here in Connecticut, reliant during election periods upon union campaign contributions and door knockers, are only slightly less deferential. Connecticut is nursing a massive state debt, a large portion of it deferred pension and benefit payments. In a September 2024 CTMirror story, Keith Phaneuf noted, “Connecticut’s spending on pensions in the 2021-22 fiscal year represented 51.5% of payroll, which was the fourth-highest rate in the nation (emphasis mine).” And despite a sustained effort to pay down pension debt, “Connecticut entered this calendar year with more than $37 billion in unfunded pension obligations, a problem created by more than 70 years of improper savings by governors and legislatures between 1939 and 2010.”
The debt represents a lifetime per capita fine imposed by spendthrift politicians upon present and future taxpayers until it is paid off – not by Gold Coast millionaires, but rather by work-a-day taxpayers who have not yet out-migrated from Connecticut to less tax punishing states. The rest of us find ourselves imprisoned for life in a union-made dank dungeon in which justice, intelligence and mercy have been replaced by neo-progressive campaign propaganda.
Like California, government unions in Connecticut are big business, “Combined,” the Washington Examiner tells us, “the California Teachers Association, California Federation of Teachers, California School Employees Association, American Federation of State and Municipal Employees, SEIU 1000, and other public safety unions have more than a million members in the state, paying more than a billion dollars a year in dues. Between 15% and 25% of this money is spent maximizing the unions’ political power, including direct donations to Democratic Party campaigns, ballot measures, political staff, lobbyists in Sacramento, and ‘issue advocacy.’ That comes to $150 million of union dues spent every year influencing government policy.”
Newsom, it would appear, is governor of some of the people –politically muscular union bosses -- most of the time.
Corresponding figures in Connecticut are not readily available, but the breakdowns in both states are likely similar. When Democrats say “money talks” in politics, they are not accusing state labor union bosses of usurious greed, an accusation reserved solely for billionaires. Most neo-progressive Democrats excluded millionaires from the sleight when Vermont socialist Senator Bernie Sanders’ net worth rose above one million.
In many instances, Connecticut has become a political mirror image of California. Both are one-party states subservient to both unions and an alien political ideology. Indeed the winds of change for change’s sake continue to blow hotly among Democrat coastal elites. U.S Senator Chris Murphy has yet to earn his golden spurs, but his comrade in the U.S. Senate, the white-hatted Dick Blumenthal – residence, Greenwich, Connecticut – is a millionaire several times over; U.S. Representative John Larson of the 1st District may have passed the millionaire’s mark – who’s counting?; and the politically immortal Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut’s 3rd District bade goodbye to poverty ages ago.
While the end goal of some politicians on the left appears to involve the monetization of socialism, others are more ambitious.
Zohran Mamdani, flirting with Communist doctrine, recently won a Democrat Party primary for mayor of New York City. Addressing a Young Democratic Socialists of America conference, Mamdani told the crowd, “But then there are also other issues that we firmly believe in, whether it's BDS or whether it is the end goal of seizing the means of production, where we do not have the same level of support at this very moment."
The goal of the communist movement from Marx onward has been, some have noticed, to “seize the means of production.” Mamdani here modestly acknowledges that sufficient support for his end goal is lacking “at this very moment.” But tomorrow, blossoming with a renewed effort to accomplish the goal, is just around the corner.
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