Support Your Local Armed Tax-Feeders Union

For decades, some elements of the conservative movement have improvidently depicted the “local” police as a bulwark against revolutionary forces — not merely the street-level, activist left, but also cultural Marxists seeking to control the “commanding heights” of various public institutions. The “local” police, from this perspective, were the stalwart Thin Blue Line holding the Red Hordes at bay. How will conservatives of that persuasion react now that police unions — as they have in Wisconsin — have cast their lot with the rest of the tax-feeder cartel in its coordinated assault on the property rights of tax victims?

Police union “solidarity” with the rampaging tax-feeders in Wisconsin is not limited to the on-site refusal by police to clear the occupied state Capitol building. “Jack Dunphy,” an active LAPD officer who writes a pseudonymous column for National Review, describes his dismay over learning that the Los Angeles Police Protective League had united in solidarity with MoveOn.org and the SEIU in supporting the government employee union protests. More shocking still was the fact that the Los Angeles-area police union urged officers to participate in the nationwide “Rally to Save the American Dream,” which was co-sponsored by “National People’s Action, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, USAction, the Daily Kos, Media Matters, and every other leftist fringe cabal this side of the Socialist Workers Party.”

The notice from the LAPPL “concluded with a stirring exhortation: `Our brothers and sisters in Wisconsin are under attack. They need and deserve our support. The time to pull together is NOW,'” Dunphy laments. “They might have gone with something a bit punchier, like `Workers of the world, unite!'”

Dunphy reports that many other police officers who share his conservative political inclinations contacted the leadership of the LAPPL to express disgust over the suggestion that they “pick up a picket sign and march alongside a bunch of leftist kooks and government bureaucrats to demand our slice of the pie … under the dubious theory that these leftist kooks and government bureaucrats can in some way be described as our `brothers and sisters.'”

“They are not our brothers and sisters,” Dunphy indignantly insists — but this is not because they are loathsome collectivists plundering the wealth of the productive. Instead, he denounced leftist government employee unions as “our competitors for resources to be drawn from a shrinking public fisc. And it is shrinking due in large part to the liberal policies advocated by MoveOn.org, the SEIU, and all the other organizations under whose banners we were asked to march….” In other words: Those leftists were from the wrong tribe of tax-feeders.

This doesn’t mean, however, that Dunphy rejects “collective bargaining” in principle: “[W]hile I refuse to link arms with MoveOn.org, I also disagree with conservatives such as Jonah Goldberg (to whom I am indebted for opening the door to me over at National Review Online) who advocate for the elimination of public employee unions.” After all, police unions — for which there is no higher priority than “officer safety,” especially safety from effective accountability — are indispensable if the State’s punitive priesthood is to continue enjoying the blessings of official impunity. This is why Dunphy commended Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker for exempting police officers (and firefighters), which he sees as an indication of Walker’s eagerness “to reward [their] sacrifices as generously as possible under current economic conditions.”

The union-extracted “rewards” to which Dunphy refers include termination guidelines allowing corrupt, abusive officers to enjoy paid vacations lasting two years or longer — raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars while sitting at home drinking beer and watching internet porn — before being permanently separated from the force.

Dunphy’s treatment of this issue underscores and validates my observation that unionized police are among the “takers,” rather than the “makers”; in Lenin’s “who/whom” formula, the police are firmly on the side of the “who” — the tax-feeders — rather than the “whom” — the tax victims. Who’s going to break this unwelcome news to conservatives who recite the “Support Your Local Police” mantra, when the “local” police are devoted entirely to the interests of their local?

 

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3:58 pm on February 28, 2011