Shadowbosses: How Government Unions Control America and Exploit Taxpayers | Political Corruption & Taxpayer Rights | Must-Read for Civic Engagement

I had never heard of Mallory Factor before coming across this book. People said so many good things about it last month that I felt the need to read it myself. I wasn't disappointed, not in the least. In 2010, I read a work that compared the actions of Soviet Union era apparatchniks to those of the union leaders here in the United States, and Shadowbosses is a fine conceptual companion piece for that book. Indeed, its far more expansive and thorough.The theme of the authors is that the union hierarchs (SEIU, NEA, UAW, AFL-CIO, etc) run leftist politicians today--not the other way around. They call the shots and drive the Democrats agenda. Never was this more evident than over the summer when the DNC turned to the unions to make up for the deficits they had in their funding: No unions, no convention. The unions made it happen. Factor wrote this book before that particular event, but hundreds of others are covered in these pages.Factor illustrates that when politicians don't do what the union wants--as Blanche Lincoln didn't in 2010--the unions back someone else and that candidate loses in the Democratic Party primary...which is precisely what happened to Lincoln. The behaviors of private sector unions are not our collective business, and if they succeed in breaking an industry there is not much we can do about it. The public sector unions are another matter altogether. We, the taxpayers, pay them, and often we pay them far more than we make ourselves. It's a complete scandal.There is no better statistic in this book than the one revealing that nearly 500,000 federal bureaucrats make over 100k a year in salary. That's outrageous. They're not public servants, but rather, public scammers. There's no reason to overpay them as they steal liberty from us, and any president who was serious about solving the budget crisis would lower the maximum federal wage to $74,000. This would allow all the lawyers and overlords we currently possess in the federocracy to "scratch buy" on a wage that's still far higher than most of us make.Overall, this book is outstanding. It's erudite and an inspiration. We, the people, are the ones who should run the country...not the Shadowbosses. Let's put some light on them, and free ourselves in the process.