Why California Will Take America Down

By Nicholas Contompasis 

I pulled the following information from a website that does research on how the 
Left works. It illustrates the people, organizations and tactics used to gain 
control of an organization including local and state governments. 
Being a Californian for over 25 years I'm well aware of the powerful California 
Teachers Association which should be more appropriately called the California 
Socialist Party. You may not live in California but as you read how this union 
has taken over the most populous state in the country, it should be a warning to 
all of it's insidious and diabolical intensions. 
Some of the issues that the CTA pushes which most will see have nothing to do 
with teaching are bankrolling a wide range of left-wing causes, such as the 
implementation of a single-payer health-care system in California; the 
prohibition of photo-identification requirements for voters; the placement of 
limits on the government’s power of eminent domain; and support for the 
legalization of gay marriage.
As you read further you'll see that the former and now again Governor of 
California Jerry Brown, signed into law decades ago a mandate that 40% of the 
states budget must be spent on education. Of course, all know that the school 
system in California is a shambles with one of the highest dropout rates in the 
country. 
All of this spending on a failed educational system has done nothing for the 
students of California. Unfortunately, it has pushed a socialist agenda onto our 
children and has taken control of the states legislators.  
The state of California is sinking fiscally with no end in sight. Just this week 
the city of Stockton will be filing for bankruptcy with nearly a billion dollars 
of debt. Now multiply that number by nearly fifty or maybe a hundred other 
cities in California and than you'll understand the state of the State of 
California. 
The American people should understand that this twisted way of thinking and 
spending is destroying our country. 
Who will bail out California? Will a taxpayer in Georgia want to send their 
money to a socialist state that has sunk itself only because it failed to adhere 
to sound economic policies. It abandon our capitalist system for failed policies 
that are now potentially destroying the world economy as I write.  
Someday in the not too distant future your congressman will be asked to bail out 
California, will you tell them yes?

From their website - discoverthenetworks.org   http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/default.asp 
is the name of the website and address of the organization that researches this 
information. 

California Teachers Association 

Largest labor union in California
Spends enormous sums of money to fund its ever-expanding political activism
Largest supporter of the Democratic Party in California


An affiliate of the National Education Association, the California Teachers 
Association (CTA) is the Golden State's largest labor union. Founded in 1863, 
CTA currently represents some 325,000 teachers, counselors, librarians, social 
workers, psychologists, nurses, office workers, bus drivers, and maintenance 
staff employed in approximately 1,000 K-12 school districts statewide. Other CTA 
members include community-college and California State University faculty.

As recently as the 1960s CTA was a politically moderate entity that eschewed 
labor activism, as reflected by then-executive director Arthur Corey's 1962 
declaration that: “The strike as a weapon for teachers is inappropriate, 
unprofessional, illegal, outmoded, and ineffective. You can’t go out on an 
illegal strike one day and expect to go back to your classroom and teach good 
citizenship the next.” The union began drifting leftward in 1975, however, when 
California Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill permitting the state's teachers to 
bargain collectively. Over the ensuing 37 years, CTA staged more than 170 
strikes.

Among the most well-funded institutions in America today, CTA derives most of 
its revenues from mandatory annual dues that, in some cases, can amount to more 
than $1,000 per member. The Association's income in 2009 exceeded $186 million, 
all of it tax-exempt.

For many years, CTA has used its massive resources to fund its ever-expanding 
political activism. In 1988, for example, the union helped win the passage of 
Proposition 98, an initiative that compelled California to spend more than 40% 
of its annual budget on public education. Because this mandate was not 
contingent upon merit or achievement, it eliminated schools’ incentive to 
operate in a fiscally responsible manner. More and more of CTA's funds were 
directed toward pet causes whose overriding objective was to promote the growth 
of the union itself, rather than to improve the quality of education.

In the early 1990s, for instance, CTA spent $12.5 million on a massive 
negative-publicity campaign that helped defeat Proposition 174, a ballot 
initiative that would have given California families universal access to school 
vouchers. Some CTA members used physical intimidation to dissuade citizens from 
supporting the measure; others sought to throw into chaos the 
signature-collection process for the Prop 174 petition; and still others offered 
a $400,000 payoff to a key organizer of the Prop 174 campaign, in hopes that he 
would agree to give up the fight. In 2002, CTA spent an additional $26 million 
to help defeat yet another school-voucher proposal. To this day, the union 
contends that voucher programs “hurt students and schools by draining scarce 
resources away from public education.” 

In 1996 CTA devoted $1 million to an ad campaign touting the benefits of smaller 
class sizes for children in the early grades. This effort led to the passage of 
a measure providing subsidies to schools with classes of 20 children or fewer. 
Not only did the program fail to improve student performance, but it arguably 
reduced the quality of education statewide by making it necessary for schools to 
hire many new teachers as quickly as possible (in order to maintain a low 
student-to-teacher ratio). According to City Journal, “The program cost 
California nearly $2 billion per year at its high-water mark, becoming the most 
expensive education-reform initiative in the state’s history. But it worked out 
well for the CTA, whose ranks and coffers were swelled by all those new 
teachers.”

In 1998 CTA spent almost $7 million to defeat Proposition 8, which sought to 
make student performance a criterion for teacher reviews. That same year, the 
union earmarked another $2 million for a bid (which was ultimately unsuccessful) 
to continue bilingual-education programs in the public schools.

In 2005 CTA spent $58 million to defeat a set of initiatives designed to cap the 
growth of state spending, require unions to get their members’ consent before 
using dues for political purposes, and make it easier to terminate incompetent 
teachers. Indeed, CTA has long used its influence to create a complex web of 
procedural roadblocks making it almost impossible to fire public-school teachers 
for any transgression short of outright criminality. Consequently, the cost of 
trying to terminate a single teacher in California is approximately $500,000. 
This expensive and laborious process dissuades most school districts from ever 
trying to fire anyone. For instance, the Los Angeles Unified School 
District—which employs 33,000 teachers—dismissed only four during the ten-year 
period of 2002-2012.

CTA also bankrolls a wide range of left-wing causes unrelated to education, such 
as the implementation of a single-payer health-care system in California; the 
prohibition of photo-identification requirements for voters; the placement of 
limits on the government’s power of eminent domain; and support for the 
legalization of gay marriage.

Between 2000 and 2010, CTA spent over $210 million on political campaigning—more 
than any other political donor in the state. In fact, this total exceeded the 
combined political expenditures of the pharmaceutical, oil, and tobacco 
industries during that same period. From 2003-2012, only eight-tenths of 1% of 
CTA's political contributions went to Republicans. The rest went to Democrats, 
making CTA the largest supporter of the Democratic Party in California.

CTA contends that the state's high earners are not “paying their fair share” in 
taxes and are thereby depriving the public-education system of much-needed 
revenues. Thus, in 2011 CTA organized a “State of Emergency” week to agitate for 
higher taxes on wealthy Californians. A CTA document encouraged teachers to 
promote this cause by means of such tactics as shadowing state legislators 
wherever they went; shutting down major transportation arteries; boycotting 
companies that backed school vouchers; and creating chaos in politically 
strategic locations. In the spring of 2012, CTA president David Sanchez was 
among 100 demonstrators who were arrested for illegally occupying the California 
State Capitol in Sacramento.