California Conservative

After more than 25 years as a union member of the Los Angeles Police Protective League (LAPPL), I tried to register onto their website this morning. When I pressed ENTER a pop-up appeared: MEMBER NOT FOUND.

This typifies my relationship with the union.

Codes of Silence

I had a similar experience in 1992. After I broke LAPD’s “code of silence” to question Warren Christopher’s legitimacy as he blamed his client’s excessive force policies on four LAPD officers, City Attorney Jim Hahn retaliated with false charges against me. When I asked my union for a lawyer, they gave me one who had no trial experience. As a career investigator who had worked with dozens of lawyers, I sensed this one’s incompetence almost immediately. When I asked for a replacement, union officials told me to use him or pay for my own. I kept him because I had no other financial resources.

As a result, I was convicted, sentenced, and fired from the LAPD. Suddenly unemployed with a mortgage, a family to feed, and employers unwilling to hire convicted ex-cops, I begged my union for another lawyer to appeal my case. After blaming me for my conviction (I refused to accept a lesser charge), they reluctantly provided one who not only confirmed my first lawyer’s incompetence, but also the misconduct of the judge and prosecutor. I returned to work in 1994 and retired honorably in 2000.

Retaliation is not unusual for union members. Unions use membership dues to silence those who break rank, often paying six-figures or more to silence those who survive it.

I’m not saying that my union should be disbanded. If I dropped out tomorrow, I wouldn’t be entitled to the resources that occasionally help other officers. So despite their consistent record of using my dues to pay for legislation and candidates I oppose, I pay so that others might get the help they need.

Other Unions

This is not exclusively an LAPPL problem, but a failure of unions throughout the United States. Members who break rank and uncover corruption or other workplace problems are routinely targeted for retaliation, and those who ask questions face similar risks. It is this coercion that makes Proposition 75 so important for union workers.

During the 1980s, I arrested dozens of union workers for heroin intoxication outside of the Van Nuys General Motors Plant. Had an employee approached someone above his union representatives about junkies nodding off while welding Cameros together, they could have expected the most primitive forms of retaliation. GM didn’t close that plant because of corporate greed, but because they could no longer afford to employ workers who built substandard products and slammed heroin during their coffee breaks.

If you want to see these things for yourself, get a union job as a teacher, firefighter, nurse, or cop. It’s there and everyone knows it.

The Contract

The uniforms and smiling faces we see on the “No on 75” campaigns are either actors or members compensated by their union leadership. When clerics join those against 75, you’ll often find America’s enemies and unions nearby. Large crowds of school children are coerced into marching not because they support union positions, but because they like the extra credit for excused truancies far from campus environments infested with incompetent teachers, drugs, and gang shootings.

Two hundred years ago, democrats controlled slaves by making it a crime to teach blacks how to read and write. By keeping them dumb, poor, and barefoot, blacks were powerless to gain their deserved freedoms. Like today, educated blacks were despised by the slaves they left behind, and the slave owners who lost control over them.

Whether intentional or not, the Democratic Party’s control of public schools throughout America does the same thing to powerless and mostly low-income students today. As teachers dumb down and indoctrinate our children, they create the senses of failure, isolation, and entitlement necessary to repopulate the disaffected class that keeps the Democratic Party alive. This is why teachers and politicians who send their children to private schools oppose school vouchers and privatization for their low-income neighborhoods. In this way, the Democratic Party retains slave ownership of the disaffected while their religious and political leaders corral and direct their herds. And like the KKK, the unions have become the enforcers of this contract: That uneducated people surrender to unions for guaranteed wages in exchange for their democratic vote. For these people and their children, freedom is as challenging today as it was one hundred years ago.

Why Democrats Oppose Prop 75

Proposition 75 is about control: Democrats need the media to indoctrinate, handlers to lead, and union bosses to enforce, populate, and control their disaffected base. They rely on Freedom’s foreign and domestic enemies to help them perpetuate the corporate greed mythology. And as long as the media convinces individuals of their powerlessness, Democrats will control their constituency.

To break free from these mechanisms of poverty, Americans must end the Democratic Party’s union stranglehold on our public schools and civil servants. If union workers vote for Proposition 75, it stands to become their Emancipation Proclamation for the 21st Century!

Vote YES on PROPOSITION 75!

Clark Baker is an author, filmaker, father and retired LAPD officer. He is a senior contributor to CaliforniaConservative.org. You may read more of his work here and here.

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