Citizen’s Power Initiative Needs Your Help
By Nathan Mintz | February 8, 2010
The Citizen’s Power Initiative, colloquially known as the “paycheck protection” initiative, needs your help. This initiative would take away the ability of bureacratic public employee unions to use member dues for political purposes without their members permission. It is also officially sponsored and organized by the California Tea Parties, working together across the state to bring in signatures.
Each year, union leadership uses the power of the dues purse to effectively buy the votes of dozens of politicians (from both parties) and ensure that they get the best deals and contracts that money can buy. In the last election cycle, they donated close to 40 million dollars to state senate and assembly races, making them the largest donor in almost 25% of the races. This has allowed them to basically keep salaries off the table in the perennial budget debacle and to also feather their nests to create one of the most lavish pension systems in the free world: over 9,000 California pensionees receive pensions of 100K/year or more from the state and the number grows daily.
Similar initatives have passed in several other western states, including Idaho and Washington. Indeed, this initiative would put California law in line with federal law and the law in 40+ other states. It is an essential element of restoring the balance of power in Sacramento back towards the people and away from the bureacratic unions.
This initiative had the bad luck of getting kicked off a mere two weeks before the holiday season and suffered from significant lack of momentum as result. As of today, it is not on pace to collect the million signatures it needs to qualify for the November ballot. We need your help: I personally have 8 boxes of petitions in my living room that need to be distributed. If you are interested in helping out, let me know and I’ll bring them or mail them to you. So far, our little group, the southbayteaparty, has collected over 1000 signatures, with more coming in every day.
Please go to their official website and find out how you can contribute if you can.
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