As an Englishman who has made America his home, I often wonder how the greatest nation in human history ended up on a fast track to national decline. I have seen this happen before in my own country, which was once a global power but is now a shell of its former self, overrun with socialism and urban blight. The principal cause of Britain’s decline was the trade unions, which brought the country to its knees from the mid-20th century through the 1970s.
Unfortunately, I see America on a similar path, racing toward socialism and everything that entails: autocratic government, fiscal and moral bankruptcy, and national decline. Once again, the root cause is government unions, which have rigged the game in their favor, giving themselves lifetime employment at a ruinous cost while delivering less and less every year to the citizens they supposedly serve. Government unions have become so greedy and unaccountable that the system itself is on the brink of collapse.
These unions steal over a thousand dollars each year from individual public employees, forcibly taking money from those who do not want to give it to them. They have even resorted to forging signatures on union membership cards. The Freedom Foundation is pursuing 15 forgery cases against government unions, including one involving Kristy Jimenez.
Kristy lives in Yakima, Wash., and takes care of her son, who is battling cancer. She has been paid to do this since 2015 by Medicaid dollars so that her son can remain at home, under his mother’s care, rather than be institutionalized. However, Washington state forcibly unionized these care providers without permitting them to vote on whether or not they wanted to be unionized. So while Kristy never signed up with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the laws of the state of Washington mandated that she pay dues. In 2020, she signed an opt-out form from the Freedom Foundation to stop paying union dues, but the SEIU refused her request, claiming that the opt-out window had closed. The SEIU had forged Kristy’s signature to prevent her from leaving the union and taking her dues with her.
The Freedom Foundation sued the SEIU and attached RICO claims to her case. RICO is the law that prosecutors use to go after the mob, and it is entirely appropriate in this case. The SEIU is acting like a desperate mobster, and judges need to consider these fraudsters in the context of organized crime. Kristy’s lawsuit is still wending its way through the courts, but even if the Freedom Foundation does not get the result it wants, the bottom line is that this lawsuit will cost the SEIU many millions of dollars in legal fees and probable penalties.
Kristy’s case is not unique. Incidents of forgery are adding up, and the unions are getting desperate. They have become so powerful and extracted such a huge share of the resources we provide to the government in taxes that our system is on the brink of collapse. America cannot survive much longer with government unions having more control of government than voters and taxpayers do. Ending the undue influence of government unions is the most important thing we can do to restore the basic functioning of government in our country before it’s too late.
As someone who came to America legally from another country, I see opportunities that native-born citizens take for granted. I am living proof that the “blessings of liberty” are still alive here in this country we love. However, I can’t help but see echoes of my native Great Britain here in the United States. For all its problems, America is light years better off than the U.K., and I was proud to take the oath of citizenship and make this my homeland in 2021.
