Where do Democrats get the big bucks? Unions, specifically teachers unions. Aaron Withe of the Freedom Foundation exposes the conflict of interest links.

Withe: Behind the scenes of even the most altruistic churches and charities, you’re likely to find a sophisticated fundraising and accounting operation. This is because, no matter how noble the objectives enumerated in your mission statement may be, it’s hard to accomplish them when the office lights are turned off and the windows are shuttered. The trick is balancing the level of resources necessary to cover reasonable overhead expenses with making sure the rest is allocated to advance the organization’s stated goal. And only that goal.

By that standard, while America’s largest government employee unions claim to be neither church nor charity, they’re not the selfless champions for working men and women their propagandists would have you believe, either.

Take, for example, the National Education Association, whose website describes it as an “advocate for education professionals” with a goal of “improving the quality of teaching, increasing student achievement and making schools safer, better places to learn.”

And yet the nation’s largest teacher’s union last year devoted only a measly 8.5 percent of its revenues to anything remotely connected with teachers and students, with the rest used to line the pockets of union leaders and advance a radical leftist agenda at odds with the views of many of NEA’s own dues-payers — and arguably most of the nation’s parents.

According to the most recent LM-2 form submitted by the NEA to the Internal Revenue Service, the union raked in a staggering $377 million in dues and agency fees during 2021 alone.

Of that total, however, only $32 million was earmarked for representational activity — ostensibly the NEA’s top priority. So where did the rest of all the teachers’ dues money go? By the union’s own accounting, it spent $66 million on political activities.

Let that sink in for a minute. The NEA diverted twice as much of its members’ dues money to greedy politicians as it spent on actual representational activities. And it didn’t bother asking which candidates and causes to support, either. Historically, the union backs radical liberals about 99 percent of the time, no matter what its members might actually prefer.

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But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The LM-2 also lists another $117 million spent for “contributions, gifts and grants,” that were primarily political in nature. Even more despicably, the NEA dispersed more than $55 million in benefits to union officers. That’s almost twice as much as it spent advocating for the teachers from whose paychecks the dues were confiscated…

The sad truth is that unions claiming to represent America’s teachers and millions of unelected public employees working at every level of the country’s government these days do only as little as necessary to maintain the illusion they care as much about their members as they do the radical leftist political agenda they fund with someone else’s hard-earned dollars.