Yesterday, TABOR opponents kicked off their campaign to continue spending our children’s and grandchildren’s future. About 50 people attended their little rally on the steps of Portland City Hall.
These TABOR opponents have joined together as “Citizens United for Maine’s Future”, but their primary concern is protecting their taxpayer-funded government handouts.
Every person or organization present was either a member of Augusta’s permanent political class or in synchronous orbit around Augusta’s political class. Let’s look at some of them, shall we?
The Maine State Employees Union. MSEU is a local of the Service Employees International Union. If you’ve been watching the news, you already know of the deep ties between SEIU and ACORN and you’ve seen SEIU members applying the muscle at health care town halls around the country.
The Maine Education Association. MEA is the teachers union. While I admire teachers and the profession of teaching, MEA is organized for one purpose only: to acquire more power and money for itself at the taxpayers’ expense with scant thought given to maintaining an economy that will keep our educated kids in Maine.
Maine Peoples Alliance. MPA is an all-purpose action group that’s funded through USAction, which bills itself as the largest “progressive” action organization in the nation (we’ll talk more about USAction in upcoming posts). USAction shares office space at 1825 K Street in Washington, DC with at least two dozen other affiliated groups. Jesse Graham, executive director of MPA, sits on USAction’s national board.
Steve Johnson. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Steve Johnson, former Colorado state legislator and currently a Colorado county commissioner. He’s an import, courtesy of the Maine Center for Economic Policy, another group that works tirelessly against Maine’s economy and our children’s future. Johnson was spinning tales of woe of what Colorado’s version of TABOR has supposedly done to that state. As we’ll discuss in future posts, TABOR has actually helped make Colorado prosperous, as the million plus people who have moved there in the last decade or so will attest.
As I said, a rather motley group of people and organizations that make their living milking other peoples’ cows. Groups that claim to stand for Maine’s citizens but really hold them in contempt and believe that the average Mainer is too dim to vote on matters that might personally affect his or her own family.
For an audio palate cleanser, here’s AJ Higgins’ description of the anti-taxpayer Portland rally yesterday, courtesy of Maine Public Broadcasting:
