Written by Mark Bucher

This past week, a growing group of Californians are signing up to support the Citizen Power Campaign, an initiative that will finally pull the plug on the corrupt political machine created by the public employee unions and the Sacramento politicians they own.

Everyone in politics knows that the public employee unions are the most powerful special interest group in this state -- even the L.A. Times' editorial page admitted as much when they endorsed Prop. 75 in 2005. Worse, these union bosses and Sacramento politicians, have rigged the game by essentially funnelling your tax dollars into union political coffers, through the paychecks of public employees. This self-perpetuating cycle gives the unions more pay, perks, and power, while taxpayers are left holding the bag. This simple diagram says is it all.

This campaign is all about returing political power back to California's citizens. To do that, the Lincoln Club of Orange County has stepped up with seed money, while Tea Party Patriots and volunteers from all over the state are spearheading a grassroots effort collect signatures to qualify the initiative for the November 2010 ballot.

Conventional wisdom is that the unions are too powerful to take on, but I can remember when people said the same thing about the Soviet Union, another tyrannical power that fell 20 years ago this week when the Berlin wall came crashing down.

I was in Berlin within two weeks after the wall came down. I flew there because I had to see it for myself. I traveled in the Soviet Union just six months earlier and concluded that the Eastern Bloc countries would never see freedom, at least not in my lifetime. The Soviet Union was just too powerful, or so it seemed.

At the time I was there, soldiers in the East German military were still officially under orders to shoot anyone who came near the wall. The world had completely changed, but no one had made it official. I wanted pieces of the wall so I bought a sledgehammer and chisel and was hacking away when a soldier snuck up on me. I thought for sure I was going to be arrested. Instead, he took the tools, gave them to an East German woman who was standing nearby, and told me to get out of there. He left, and she turned around and said “These aren’t mine” and handed them back to me. I went back to knocking pieces off the wall.

I have seen firsthand the oppression of tyranny and also how the most powerful tyrannies can fall faster than anyone thinks is imaginable. The citizens of this state have more power than they realize – it’s time to take this state back.