Big Labor's Investment in Obama Pays Off

This is one of the unions wanting to control you and your job with government permission.
The UAW is right behind them...They want to come into your place of business or your job and make you sign a card to join their unions and will try to force you into signing it...This is not acceptable practices in my book!

By Michelle Malkin
Townhall.com

"We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama -- $60.7 million to be exact -- and we're proud of it," boasted Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, to the Las Vegas Sun this week. The behemoth labor organization's leadership is getting its money's worth. Whether rank-and-file workers and ordinary taxpayers are profiting from this ultimate campaign pay-for-play scheme is another matter entirely.

The two-million-member union, which represents both government and private service employees, proudly claimed that its workers "knocked on 1.87 million doors, made 4.4 million phone calls … and sent more than 2.5 million pieces of mail in support of Obama." It dispatched SEIU leaders to seven states in the final weekend before the election to get out the vote for Obama and other Democrats.

Through a series of local chapter takeovers and bully campaigns to destroy the reputation of executives who refuse to submit to their will, Stern and his scandal-plagued lieutenants have consolidated low-skill service workers to create a 21st century labor empire. The ubiquitous Stern now enjoys a prominent seat at the table of every major policy discussion at the White House, including economic recovery and health care radicalization.

Obama champions the SEIU's top legislative priorities: expansive government health care (paid for with regressive sin taxes) and the "Employee Free Choice Act" to do away with private-ballot union elections in the workplace. He has SEIU-blessed bureaucrats installed in every corner of his administration to carry out the agenda.

The SEIU scored not one but two Cabinet appointees: Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. The SEIU pitched in with maximum donations to Solis' first congressional campaign and lent her nearly 300 canvassers and ground troops. "I wouldn't be here, were it not for my friends in the labor movement," she gushed. Indeed, over four terms in Congress, Solis has pocketed more than $900,000 in union campaign contributions.

Former SEIU chief lobbyist Patrick Gaspard served as the Obama campaign's national political director and transition deputy director of personnel. During the 2004 election cycle, he led the George Soros-funded group America Coming Together (ACT) as national field director. SEIU poured $23 million of workers' dues money into ACT in its failed attempt to put Democratic Sen. John Kerry in the White House. Under Gaspard's tenure at ACT, the get-out-the-vote group employed convicted felons as canvassers and committed campaign finance violations that led to a $775,000 fine by the Federal Election Commission. Gaspard was appointed White House political director shortly after Election Day 2008.

SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger was appointed to the president's Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide advice on "boosting the sagging U.S. economy" (translation: imposing new employment regulations on companies and expanding union membership rolls).

Within two weeks of moving into the White House, Obama signed a series of executive orders championed by union bosses. The new rules authorized sweeping powers for the labor secretary that essentially blackball nonunion contractors targeted by labor organizers and blacklist nonunion employees in the private sector from working on taxpayer-funded projects. Such regulatory favoritism limits freedom in the workplace and raises the cost of doing business.

Another measure immediately adopted by Obama requires that when a government service contract runs out and there's a new contract to perform the same services at the same location, the new contractor must retain the old workers. Mickey Kaus of the left-leaning Slate magazine dubbed the move the "Labor Payoff of the Day."

The payoffs keep coming. Last week Obama slashed the Labor Department's funding to investigate union corruption -- a welcome move for Stern, who has seen three of his handpicked deputies resign in 2008-2009 over financial scandals involving cronyism, nepotism and embezzlement.

California officials also reported last week that the Obama White House gave the SEIU an unprecedented role in negotiations over federal stimulus funds. According to the Los Angeles Times, the union lobbied the feds to withhold nearly $7 billion in stimulus money from California unless it revoked a wage cut for unionized health care workers -- which had already been approved by Democratic lawmakers as part of a budget deal forged in February. Top SEIU officials participated in a conference call last month on the issue; the Obama White House backs the union demands.

SEIU's enforcers have set aside $10 million to un-elect any of its political beneficiaries who abandon their pledges to do the union's legislative bidding. The campaign money was raised by slapping an extra $6-per-member fee on top of regular dues payments -- and funneled straight to the union's political action committee. Meanwhile, after spending a fortune to put Obama in office, the union laid off a third of its D.C. field staff (in violation of its own employment protections, according to the workers) due to … budget troubles.

The laid-off workers are collateral damage in Big Labor's pursuit of power. The only jobs guaranteed by SEIU's merger with Hope and Change, Inc. belong to the brass.

Obama Tries to Stop Union Disclosure

By ELAINE L. CHAO

Fifty years ago, Congress passed the landmark Landrum-Griffin Act to protect rank-and-file union members from malfeasance by union leaders. Senate hearings had uncovered serious corruption and other unethical practices inside the labor movement, and a bipartisan coalition emerged to shine the light of disclosure on union practices.

Nevertheless, Democrats in Congress and in the executive branch have often attempted to undercut that law's financial reporting and disclosure requirements. Prior to reforms adopted in the George W. Bush administration, for example, one union could get away with reporting a $62 million expenditure as nothing more than "contributions, gifts, and grants to local affiliates" -- with no further explanation. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is already showing that it wants to return to this nontransparent standard of financial disclosure.

Within days of the inauguration, the new leadership at the Labor Department moved to delay implementing a regulation finalized in January that would have shed much needed light on how union managers compensate themselves with union dues. The regulation required disclosure of receipts for expenditures and for the purchase and sale of union assets -- disclosures that would help deter embezzlement. The administration has since moved even more aggressively, initiating proceedings to rescind this rule and others promulgated when I was secretary of labor.

The Labor Department's Office of Labor Management Standards (OLMS), created to enforce the 1959 law, also recently announced that it would not enforce compliance with the conflict-of-interest disclosure form (the "LM-30" form) that was revised in 2007. Labor's Web site states that "it would not be a good use of resources."

Instead, union managers will be able to file decades-old, less enlightening disclosure forms while the department considers whether to "revise" (i.e., gut) the current disclosure requirements. But what could be a better use of department resources than enforcing the laws under its jurisdiction?

From 2001-2008, the Labor Department secured more than 1,000 union fraud-related indictments and 929 convictions. This enforcement record was accomplished even though the enforcement office accounts for less than 0.1% of the department's budget. OLMS is the lone federal agency with the job of protecting worker interests in how their unions are managed. The last Congress increased President Bush's budget request for the Labor Department by $956 million even as it targeted OLMS for a budget cut.

This repeats the pattern we saw during the last Democratic administration. Under President Bill Clinton, staffing decreased more than 40%. The number of compliance audits dropped no less than 75% from fiscal year 1992 to fiscal year 2000. I would expect the current Congress to once again slash the OLMS budget, with the administration's blessing.

Union membership peaked in the 1950s, when more than one-third of American workers belonged to a union. Today, just 7.6% of American private-sector workers belong to a union. A Rasmussen Research survey conducted in March found that 81% of nonunion members do not want to belong to a union.

The response by union leaders and their Democratic allies to declining union membership is the Employee Free Choice Act. To increase unionization, it would deprive workers of private balloting in organizing elections, and it would substitute a signature-card process that would expose workers to coercion. The bill would also deny workers the right to ratify, or not ratify, labor contracts drafted by government arbitrators when negotiations in newly unionized workplaces exceed the bill's rigid timetable.

The Obama administration likes to say that it is "pro-worker." But something is amiss when its labor priorities are forcing unionization and labor contracts on American workplaces, and denying union members information on how their dues money is spent.

Ms. Chao was secretary of labor from 2001 to 2009 and is now a fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Obama to Secured Creditors: Drop Dead..Obama Working For The UAW

By Bill Frezza

Are you following the disembowelment of Chrysler’s secured creditors with an eye not just toward what it means for the moribund car company but for what it could do to the very concept of secured debt? Has it dawned on you what the consequences will be if the President gets his way and consideration is given to creditors not according to contracts, rules, and established legal precedents but according to which group is most politically favored? And do you believe the President advanced the cause of economic recovery by publicly excoriating “speculators” who once hoped to profit by lending money against hard assets to an ailing company?

Profit? There’s no profit to incentivize risk taking in this country, only sacrifice!

Law? There’s no law to protect the politically unfavored in this country, only derision!

According to U.S. bankruptcy code, secured creditors - that is lenders who have a contractual security interest or claim to specific collateral - have to be paid before unsecured creditors. Unsecured creditors' claims are prioritized according to explicit rules defined by law. With the exception of short-term payments approved by a bankruptcy judge to keep a company running during the reorganization process, each priority level has a right to be paid in full before creditors with the next lowest priority get a dime. That is why secured debt can be had at a lower interest rate than unsecured debt. In fact, that is why troubled companies have any ability at all to raise money. Credit flows because everyone knows the rules of the game, even in bankruptcy.

Well, at least they used to.

The system is not supposed to deliver equal outcomes or demand equal sacrifice. If it did money could only be borrowed at the highest rates of interest, if at all. Under the law, payment priorities can only be modified if all debtors agree. The ability to hold out and force a company into bankruptcy court is baked into the price of a loan or the discount at which bonds trade.

In Chrysler’s case the TARP-backed lenders – that is, banks-too-big-to-fail now living on the dole – chose to kowtow to the executive branch. What they “sacrificed” was the economic interests of their shareholders in favor of the political interests of their management. The non TARP-backed lenders, in this case a handful of hedge funds trying to protect the pension funds, university endowments, and insurance companies that invested in them, balked at getting lower consideration for their secured debt than the UAW is getting for its unsecured obligations. Hence, a trip to court and a tongue lashing by the president.

Forget about the law for a moment. Forget about right and wrong. This exercise should be getting easier now that pragmatism is the basis of government policy, right? So think for a moment only about the pragmatic consequences of the administration’s reorganization plan.

Why would anyone lend money to heavily unionized companies knowing that if things went wrong, the president and his men could trash their security interests by executive decree, hold them up to public vilification, and subject them to future retribution by regulators?

Why would anyone buy the shares of TARP-backed banks or invest alongside them knowing that their executives have proven their willingness to sacrifice shareholders’ interests and throw co-investors under the bus any time the president snaps his fingers?

Why would foreigners buy the distressed debt of American companies knowing that this debt cannot be secured by law but only by political clout?

How is the Federal Government supposed to unwind its ownership in the growing number of companies it has nationalized if prospective buyers know that should things ever take a turn for the worse, Uncle Sam will be back demanding extralegal “sacrifice” in the name of “saving” jobs?

How is private credit supposed to “start flowing again” if the United States of America morphs into a caudillo-run kleptocracy whose explicit policy is to “empower the workers,” chasing ever higher poll numbers by demonizing the very people whose job it is to provide credit?

The fate of Chrysler and its workers pale in comparison to the wrecking ball that would be taken to economic order if bankruptcy judge Arthur Gonzalez approves the administration’s plan to give Chrysler’s secured creditors the shaft. And what prize will we-the-people get in return? A doomed third-rate car company majority owned by its militant union run by Italian management building congressionally designed “green” cars no one wants to buy financed by taxpayers into perpetuity because no private investor in their right mind will touch the company with a ten foot pole. Is this supposed to be economic policy or comic opera?

How many more billions do you think will be flushed down this rat hole before the fat lady is allowed to sing?