California Prop 75 - More Misleading Ads

I just got a piece in my mail today from the Donkey Party. They want me to vote against Prop 75. Here are their arguments:



"If Prop. 75 passes, who will stand up for patients?" says the nurse's union representative.



I have a lot of respect for nurses. My mother became a nurse at 52 (retired now and in another state), and my stepmother has been one for almost forty years. But my stepmother is voting yes on 75 because even though she's a Democrat, she's tired of being forced to spend her money to support the politics of her union leadership. It's not about standing up for patients. They can do that, and they can talk to other people who love to do that. The unions can go to voluntary adjunct PACs. But they don't want to because then they have to limit stuff to what the membership will voluntarily contribute to.



"If Prop 75 passes, who will stand up for our kids?" Says the teacher's union representative.



How about the parents, who also have no conflict of interest? I have about two months experience right now with public schools, and I am already disgusted beyond belief.



In college, one of the good history profs had us do a history of literacy project. The 30 second version is that ancient China and ancient Egypt had thousands of symbols for a written language. As a result, it took a lifetime to achieve literacy and literacy levels were very low. Even the noble classes were rarely fully literate. Later, humans moved to syllabaries of about 1500 symbols, and literacy rates went up, and anybody of significant wealth became at least partially literate. Finally, we went to alphabets that create phonemes and literacy became easy and literacy rates went through the cieling because now anybody can learn to read, and in a relatively short period of time. Until after World War Two, this was the method taught in our schools here and everybody who went to school in the United States learned to read. But it requires a certain amount of boring drill and repetition.



Whole language is more fun and less boring for the teachers, and it "respects the children," but it moves us backwards along the literacy curve at least to the Phoenicians. Nonetheless it is what is taught in our public schools, and the "sight-words" the teachers insist upon teaching are a whole language idea.



This situation is what is behind the commercial success of the "Hooked on Phonics" movement. It might as well be a direct subsidy. Actually, a direct subsidy would be better, because then we wouldn't need to pay for teachers and classrooms to teach the less effective "whole language" method. But it is the teacher's unions and professional educators who want to teach "whole language." And this is "Standing up for our kids"? I don't think I've ever seen the CTA or NEA "stand up for the kids." I've seen many individual teachers do so, but never the unions. What they stand up for is pay raises and less work and political machinations to get them, and political machinations on the part of whichever politicians that the union leaders see as more supportive of their power.



"If prop. 75 passes, who will stand up for safe communities?" The Firefighters union representative. He does have part of a point. The employment related speech of Union representatives is legally protected in ways that ordinary workers are not. But he doesn't need to spend union members dues collected at the point of a metaphorical gun on political contributions in order to do it. The union rep who has a real safety issue can call any news provider, down to and including me, and get free press for any real safety concern or improvement. And what they're doing the vast majority of the time is standing up for (you guessed it) more money and the benefit of politicans that are perceived as being more receptive to union leaders.



I've been an elected local-level union leader. Twice. Right here in San Diego. But we had a Political Action Committee where the workers contributed dollars voluntarily instead of having them mandatorily deducted from their paychecks whether they want to or not. It gave the leadership motivation to keep it real and keep it focused on our issues. And it was successful. I've never seen any other union wage such a sucessful political campaign so cheaply. So I suspect that Proposition 75 is really going to prove a long-term blessing to union activism.



So far, I have seen no argument against Proposition 75 that passes logical muster. (Don't even get me started on that nonsense about extending it to corporations. You will bleed by the time I'm done.) I have even tried to construct them. I can't. Maybe I am not properly motivated, you say. Then construct one. Or vote "Yes".