What are they going to do? Fill your mailboxes with more flyers threatening attacks by Godzilla? Nope, they’re doing what all mature Progressive Socialists do when they lose. They’re suing!

In today’s Rocky Mountain News, Tom Lucero, former-Campaign Manager for Amendment 54, explains why special interest groups hate the choice Colorado citizens made:

Real change never comes easily – particularly when it means pulling at the purse strings of a political establishment that will fight at all costs to preserve the status quo.

Take the fight over Amendment 54, Colorado’s recently passed clean-government law.

Even though the people have heard the arguments and made their decision, the special interests are now filing lawsuits aimed at gutting the new law of its key provisions.

Amendment 54 provides transparency allowing us, the citizens, to see where and how our tax dollars are being spent. The special interests suing against Amendment 54 will lie try to tell you that it crushes their free speech. They’re lying; read the Amendment 54 text for yourself.   Truth is, it crushes their sole-source, government contract kickbacks that come from bribing corrupt politicians… like Godzilla stepping on a fire station.

With all the initiatives on the ballot this year, it might be hard to keep them all sorted out. So, being the helpful folks that we are, we here at PPC have put together a sample ballot for the amendments and referenda in the 2008 Colorado elections.

On our sample ballot, you’ll find a quick summary of what each ballot measure is about, our recommended vote, and our reasons behind that recommendation. We’ve even provided a handy printable version [PDF] that you can print out and use for reference while filling out your ballot.

GODZILLA!!!!

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Right.  These guys are so full of crap that it’s actually getting old.  I know they raised like $30 million dollars and they think that we Coloradans are stupid enough to fall for their out-of-state Union Scam. Now I don’t want to necessarily silence their free speech, but wasn’t decimating the economy of one state enough for these Unions?  Anyone here want to turn out like Michigan? 

Say it with me kids…

Amendment 49 brings ethical standards to government and makes PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS collect the dues from their members directly by prohibiting the PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS from using our tax dollar paid government employees from being their bagman. Vote YES on Amendment 49!

Amendment 54 stops the culture of corrupt bribery between scumbag contractors and corrupt politicians, and it also sets up a statewide database of no-bid government contracts allowing we the people to see who our politicians are handing our tax dollars to.  Vote YES on Amendment 54!

I’m going to start a weekend campaign right here, right now.  Apparently facts don’t matter to the Union Thug opponents to 49 and 54, so why should we worry about them now?  So, remember when you vote this year: IF YOU LOVE BABBIES AND PUPPIES, THEN PROTECT THEM BY VOTING YES ON 49 and 54!

Wow, this is pretty easy.  Maybe Protect Colorado’s Culture of Corruption Future is hiring?

Colorado Concern, a collective of self-important VIPs who are doing just fine under the current system of corrupt no-bid awards and lack of transparency, is the source of an e-mail desperately trying to coerce $3 million from its membership – with a $10,000 minimum contribution and a helpful suggestion that members could throw up to $100,000 of their company’s money at protecting entrenched interests.  $3 million, by the by, is the price tag the business community paid for bribing Unions to remove their latest round of vile ballot offerings.  It somehow doesn’t seem that Colorado Concern is tremendously concerned about the voice of the little guy. 

But why would they be?  Their own website describes them as, “an exclusive alliance of top executives” and brags about its “unprecedented access to opinion leaders and elected officials” as well as its “impressive ability to financially support issues and candidates”.

Wow, it must be nice to be part of the rarefied ranks of the Concerned.

But they hardly represent the concerns of real Coloradans.  On their site, they’ve published an annual poll of their own members, where they are downright proud to admit that 50% of them think TABOR is the “principle cause of the state’s budget problem”, 87% support a 5-yr extension of Ref C and 76% support an “indefinite” extension for C.

So, what exactly is Colorado Concerned so darn concerned about?  For one, they’re all uppity that Amendment 54, for Clean Government Colorado, will adversely effect non-profits who hold no-bid contracts.  But if these non-profits are doing such great work and are so gosh darned wonderful for the community, why do they need the protection of no-bid guarantees?  To be very clear, 54 won’t deny anyone the right to bid on a contract.  It will strengthen that very right by opening up the bidding process and preventing the most politically entrenched businesses from improperly leveraging that influence to buy contracts.

Devolving further into the ‘spurious and furious’ category, the e-mail frets that rural areas will be decimated.  Apparently, the smaller communities in the state just don’t have enough businesses that are “able/equipped” to bid on contracts.  According to Colorado Concern, this makes no-bid contracts not just unavoidable but a good thing for rural Colorado.  Hmmm…why do I have a sneaking suspicion that Colorado Concern would like to write the standards by which companies and their bids are judged?  In fact, suggesting that smaller businesses, particularly in rural areas, just can’t handle the bidding process, let alone the actual contract, is a deeply offensive and patronizing idea.  In an open, competitive bidding system, a company that can’t handle the work isn’t going to win the contract.  Compare that to what we have now, a system where vital services are provided not by the most competent but by the best connected.

The bottom line is that Colorado Concern is an alliance of business owners who stand to lose if competition, transparency, and honest bidding comes to Colorado government contracts.  They aren’t interested in supporting any business growth other than their own.  In fact, they’re gladly willing to mortgage our economic future to finance a narrow set of illicit special interests.  They’ve even gotten in bed with Union thugs to protect their no-bid goodies.

PPC says make good use of one thing Colorado Concern an Unions can’t buy – your vote.

 
The commercial busts Senator Abel Tapia on his secretive No-Bid government contracts from the Colorado State fair totaling $481,483.  For years this politician has been using his oversight of the State Fair to funnel hundreds of thousands of our tax dollars to his engineering firm in No-Bid contracts – other Colorado engineering firms didn’t even get a shot at these contracts.  Backroom sketchy deals like that are what we expect from Castro or Chavez, not a Colorado State Senator. 

Amendment 54 Chair Tom Lucero noted, “Frankly, we shouldn’t have to wait for a 9News Investigation to find out how our tax dollars are being spent.  The public has a right to know these matters and YES on Amendment 54 will open up the government contracting process.  Coloradans are tired of footing the bill for backroom deals for political insiders.”

“YES on Amendment 54 is just good common sense,” Lucero continued, “Having a searchable database is the perfect disinfectant for corrupt NO-BID contracts. A searchable database will put elected officials on notice that every time a NO-BID contract goes out the door, taxpayers will be watching. Ultimately, the goal is for every government contract to be competitively bid. YES on Amendment 54 makes taxpayers the real winners.”

No, I don’t mean the implicit violence in depicting a boy and a woman symbolically torn in half.  I mean the Spanish. Where is the rest of the Spanish?

If you are a Colorado voter who can only read Spanish, all this flier from Mi Familia VOTA tells you is that Amendment 46, Amendment 47, Amendment 49, and Amendment 54 are “attacking our students” and “attacking our teachers”, as if paragraphs of dense legislative verbiage had suddenly metamorphosed into living beings and launched themselves on mindless gibbering rampages of verbal assault through the lunchrooms and faculty lounges of our local schools. Beyond the alarming (and dishonest) scare lines, there’s no explanation of how or why these ballot measures purportedly “attack” students and teachers.

Why, it’s almost as if Mi Familia VOTA didn’t see a need to give Spanish speakers the whole story. As if they just assumed the Spanish speakers would be easily alarmed and easily led to vote against these amendments. As if they felt the Spanish speakers didn’t require (or deserve?) any effort to persuade them - just marching orders.

Interesting.

It’s just as well, I suppose, since the arguments made (in English only) are so blatantly dishonest and deceptive that translating them would only have insulted the Spanish speakers’ intelligence, too.

On the page with the violently torn-in-half boy, Mi Familia VOTA alleges that Amendment 46 would prevent thousands of Hispanic students from attending Colorado’s best colleges. How, exactly? If the admissions standards and scholarships are racially and ethnically blind, and are applied in like fashion, the students getting into Colorado’s best colleges will be…Colorado’s best students. The right way to ensure representative demographics in Colorado’s colleges is not to perpetuate racial and ethnic quotas and preferences, but to make sure the admissions process is colorblind, and that an equally colorblind K-12 education system has prepared students who desire to go to college to earn, fairly, a place in a college suited to their interests and abilities, and to compete for merit-based scholarships to pay for it.

Mi Familia VOTA also claims to speak for all teachers here, by claiming that “the teachers of Colorado” are against it. Really? All of them? Surely there must be some teachers who recognize that Amendment 46 is a good idea – I guess their opinions don’t count. I think if I were still teaching kids, I would resent that.

On the page with the violently torn-in-half woman, Mi Familia VOTA trots out the standard leftist/union anti-capitalist boogeyman to scare (English speaking) voters into believing that corporations are going to take away the rights of teachers and hoard them up like magic beans to empower themselves to who knows what nefarious ends. (Big corporations – is there anything they can’t do?!?) But Amendments 47, 49, and 54 will not take away the rights of teachers or anyone else to fight for better schools – these measures protect the rights of teachers and others by preventing unions from forcing them to join a union as a condition of employment, save taxpayers money by eliminating the expense of collecting and processing the unions’ dues for them gratis, and protect all Coloradans from the effects of dirty campaign donations and quid-pro-quos by removing a corrupting influence from state government. What Mi Famila VOTA isn’t telling voters (neither the English speaking nor the Spanish speaking ones) is that opposition to Amendments 47, 49, and 54, the organization is tacit approval of workplace coercion, the state subsidizing of union finances, and continued corruption of public officials by special interests…that’s something they’d rather not discuss in ANY language, I bet.

And let’s be clear what is meant here by “fighting for better schools”: they mean government schools dominated by unions, with dues collected (at taxpayer expense) from teachers who often have little choice in the matter. Mi Familia VOTA is not fighting for the rights of individual teachers or even all teachers as a group, but to protect the power base of teachers’ unions, which all to often work against the interests of teachers and students alike.

(Hmm…how interesting. I inadvertently typed in the URL www.mifamiliavota.org, and it took me to an abandoned domain containing a page titled “People for the American Way“. Gee, you think maybe there’s a connection between Mi Familia VOTA and PFtAW? The About page on the .net site doesn’t say…)

Protect Colorado’s Culture of Corruption Future (as they’re known here at PPC) has been sending out flyers chock full of misleading and plainly dishonest allegations about these amendments, with images of police and firefighters carefully crafted to appear as if these folks are in uniform. The intent behind these images seems to be to give the casual reader the impression that the positions presented in the flyers represent an official position of police or fire departments, but with the “plausible deniability” that someone looking closely at the uniforms would recognize that they weren’t the real thing.

Clearly, though, the flyers’ authors rely on the fact that most people who find one of these things in their mailbox will look only at the hang-dog faces on the people who nobly protect our communities, read the misleading text to find out what has them looking so upset, and take away the impression that “The Police Department” and “The Fire Department” officially oppose Amendments 54, 49, 47.  But if anything, when the pictures are studied carefully, it’s actually a union position that’s being represented.

As a refresher, Protecting Colorado’s Culture of Corruption’s Future’s first flyer slamming Amendments 54, 49, and 47  stated:

For officers like Jeff Shaw – our safety is his top priority.

But at 2:00am when he responds to a call – Officer Shaw shouldn’t worry whether or not his vest can take that bullet.

But that’s EXACTLY what Amendments 47, 49, and 54 will do.

These amendment swill stop Officer Shaw from joining with other officers to advocate for better body armor and modern equipment – giving him the tools he needs to protect and save lives. 

If you look closely at the pictures in that flyer, you’ll notice that Officer Jeff Shaw isn’t quite wearing a uniform, but a black police-uniform-style shirt with what appears to be a name bar and police badge on it – a badge which bears the letters “F.O.P.”, the acronym of the Fraternal Order of Police.  While the central body of the F.O.P. doesn’t explicitly describe itself as a union, it performs many of the functions of one. I’ve got no problem at all with citizens organizing into professional associations or unions – especially if those groups put the interests of their members before the interests of the group’s leaders.  

But…when you read their words, Protect Colorado’s Culture of Corruption Future’s argument is that only by stopping Amendments 47, 49, and 54 will our state’s police and firefighters be able to participate in organizations like F.O.P. They imply organizations like F.O.P. – unions, in short – are the only route for securing the workplace safety of our policemen and firefighters. For getting them the body armor and modern equipment they need.  For obtaining the tools they need to protect and save lives. 

One might construe from that that the F.O.P. is concerned about safety, right? Well…Take a peek at the current F.O.P. Sherriff Lodge 27′s collective bargaining agreement.  Here are a few sample pages (full document can be found at FOP Sheriff Lodge 27′s website):

Full, legible document here [pdf].  

Since we’re all about looking at things closely, we took a close look at this document. 

In this collective bargaining union agreement, the words “pay”,  ”payroll”, “paydate”, or “salary” appear no fewer than 92 times, the words “vacation”, “leave”, or “sick leave” appear no fewer than 108 times, and the word “overtime” appears no fewer than 8 times. 

Since this is an employment agreement we’re talking about, it’s obviously going to include text about pay and benefits. That’s part of what an employment agreement is for, right? But in contrast, throughout the entire agreement, the word “safety” does not appear once; nor do the words “bulletproof” or ”vest”. 

Not. Once.

It’s a completely bogus argument to claim that Amendments 47, 49, and 54 will prevent anyone from joining any union or professional organization they choose – in fact, securing that element of choice is exactly what Amendment 47 in particular is about – or that workers will be unable to organize to negotiate better conditions or the right equipment for the job. It’s also questionable to imply that those unions are the sole route to workplace safety, when the union leaders don’t bother to mention safety alongside hundreds of pay and benefit provisions in their collective bargaining agreement.

You’d think if collective bargaining were the sole means available for securing the safety of their members, the union leadership crafting that collective bargaining agreement would have seen fit to mention it, even just once .

In a confidential internal memorandum obtained by Face The State (PDF), the Colorado Democracy Alliance outlines a roster of “operatives” who worked for Democratic victory in the 2006 general election. The document outlines specific tasks for various members of the state’s liberal infrastructure, including a campaign to “educate the idiots,” assigned to the state’s AFL-CIO union. Among the operation’s intended targets: “minorities, GED’s, drop-outs.”

Individuals named in the document, marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” “for internal use only,” and “DO NOT DISTRIBUTE,” are high-level elected Democrats including House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, former Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald, as well as Gov. Bill Ritter’s press aide and former campaign chief Evan Dreyer. All are specially marked as “off-the-record or covert.”

 

Let’s read between the lines of this fair campaign:

* Is it really for the welfare of the worker, as the union elite claim with every campaign, or “increasing CO union power”?
* How powerful is your campaign message if you feel the smart people just won’t vote for you?
* And — this is as obvious as pie — you’re calling minorities “idiots”?????????? Who, they apparently believe, can be hoodwinked to serve any cause just by appealing to said alleged idiocy????


YIKES!

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Honesty just isn’t one of Protect Colorado’s Culture of Corruption Future’s strengths.  Taking their Page 4 LIES one by one (click the links to read the actual Amendment text on the Colorado Secretary of State’s webpage):

Amendment 47: How does giving firefighters the right to choose whether they want to join a union take their equipment and tools away?  Amendment 47 will only take away power from Union Thug Bosses from strong-arming firefighters to join a union.  The amendment actually protects an individual firefighter’s right to choose what’s in his best interest.

Amendment 49: Doesn’t dictate how hardworking firefighters spend their paychecks.  It prohibits Union Thug Bosses from stealing money out of firefighter paychecks.  It requires Union Thug Bosses to ask before taking money from our hardworking Colorado firefighters.

Amendment 54: Closes campaign finance loopholes for corrupt, scumbag corporations who presently can spend millions of dollars in campaigns to get crooked politicians elected and then can be rewarded by those politicians with multi-million dollar NO-BID government contracts.  Small businesses actually benefit from an Amendment 54 even playing field allowing them to compete for those same government contracts.  Working families benefit because our tax dollars don’t go to crooked politicians paying off corrupt, scumbag contractors with multi-million dollar political favors.  In addition, Amendment 54 sets up a statewide searchable database that allows us, the hardworking Colorado families, to see which politicians are handing out NO-BID government contracts and which contractors receive them.  We should be able to see exactly how our tax dollars are being spent. 

Protect Colorado’s Culture of Corruption Future is shameful and dishonest.  They send out mailers full of LIES on Amendments 47, 49, and 54.  They LIE to Colorado voters’ faces about Amendments 47, 49, and 54.  They refuse to publicly debate Amendments 47, 49, and 54 to defend their LIES.  Unfortunately for Protect Colorado’s Culture of Corruption Future , we Colorado voters actually use our heads and see through the LIES.