Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind (30 page)

The congressional report shows that the SEIU has donated millions of dollars to ACORN across the country to do the political organizing work that it did so well. ACORN and the SEIU even shared office addresses, employees, and leadership in some cases.
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“SEIU and ACORN are financially and politically codependent,” the report stated. “Documents show the clear exchange of funds goes back and forth between the two organizations depending on who needs money at the time.”

Although the SEIU is ACORN’s most well-known supporter, many of the other government employee unions also gave millions to support ACORN in its heyday—including the teachers unions, which contributed $1.3 million to ACORN since 2005.
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AFSCME was also an ACORN supporter, although the union’s support in one notable case
failed to reach ACORN. The head of an AFSCME local union in Milwaukee pleaded guilty to embezzling $180,000 of union funds intended for an ACORN affiliate, which the union official used instead to fund her gambling habit.
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Our federal government supported ACORN, particularly with respect to its affordable housing subsidiary, Acorn Housing Corporation, to which it gave a reported $16 million from 1997 to 2007.
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You will recall that the SEIU is probably the government employee union that is closest to President Obama. He has appointed numerous SEIU officials to White House jobs and commissions, including former SEIU president Andy Stern to the Deficit Commission, former SEIU associate counsel Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board, and former SEIU Local 1199 political director Patrick Gaspard as White House political affairs director.

But Obama was close to ACORN also. Obama worked right out of law school at SEIU Local 880 in Chicago, which just happens to have been founded and run by ACORN. He later brought a lawsuit on ACORN’s behalf for increased access to the polls in Illinois. And his 2008 Presidential campaign paid an ACORN umbrella organization a reported $832,000 for get-out-the-vote efforts.
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So, while the congressional report concludes that “ACORN and SEIU work together as one corporate conglomerate,”
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we should bear in mind President Obama has worked closely with both organizations on voter registration efforts himself.

Another of the report’s principal findings was “ACORN, as a corporation, is responsible for thousands of fraudulent voter registrations throughout the United States.”
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As the report strongly pointed out, “Responses from various state election offices show that ACORN’s late filings of voter registration cards and the sheer amount of fraudulent cards obstructed election administration efforts in many states.” The report emphasizes, “Fraudulent voter registrations are not isolated incidents; they reflect ACORN’s criminal motive to compromise the system of free and fair elections promised in the Constitution of the United States.”
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ACORN was a big player in the 2008 elections. After all, it had a big stake in Barack Obama’s election. Obama certainly didn’t forget his earlier benefactors when he geared up to run for president. In a speech
to ACORN leaders in 2007, Obama gushed: “I come out of a grassroots organizing background… I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. I’ve been fighting alongside of ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”
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ACORN became important to voter turnout in many states in the 2008 elections. One key state was Nevada, a swing state. In 2008, the police received reports that there was fraudulent voter registration emanating from the ACORN Las Vegas offices. So they raided it. Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said he saw “rampant fraud in the 2,000 to 3,000 registrations ACORN turns in every week,” with nearly half of those forms being “clearly fraudulent.”
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Soon, local election officials noticed strange names cropping up in voter registration forms submitted by ACORN, including the entire starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys. It turned out that ACORN had hired prison inmates, some of whom had been convicted of identity theft, to supervise the voter registration effort. Some joked that ACORN was doing election fraud right—they had specialists doing the work.
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In April 2010, two top ACORN officials pleaded guilty to conspiracy in the Nevada case.
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It is reported that at least fifty-four ACORN officials have been convicted of voter fraud across the nation.
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Senator Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, declined to hold hearings on ACORN voter fraud, stating that he did not want to distract lawmakers from more important priorities, specifically passing health-care reform.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal
was scathing in its denunciation of Reid’s action: “Do Sen. Reid and congressional Democrats really believe that if they just ignore the big mess their pet bear has dumped in the middle of the room, it’ll somehow stop stinking?”
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ACORN went belly-up before the 2010 elections—thanks to independent journalist James O’Keefe. O’Keefe busted ACORN in a sting operation in which he and colleague Hannah Giles posed as a pimp and a prostitute and visited ACORN offices all over the country. At almost every ACORN office they visited, the ACORN officials offered them advice on how to hide their income and set up a house of prostitution using underage Latin American girls. In the ensuing furor,
Congress voted to cut off millions in federal funding to ACORN and related groups, and ACORN declared bankruptcy. Within a year, the former leadership of ACORN had reportedly set up new front groups to carry on its mission under different names.
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The labor movement has a much longer and stronger tradition of questionable governance practices than corporations and other organizations. The Association for Union Democracy, a pro-union group aimed at protecting democracy within unions, explains, “In many unions democratic rights are as real and unquestioned as in most of American society. They are written into federal law, enshrined in union tradition, extolled by union leaders. But in large sections of the American labor movement these rights are trampled upon and must be restored.”
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Securing the right of union members to control the governance of their union and eliminating the culture of corruption in the union movement should be the goals of any true friend of the labor movement, but this does not seem to be the direction in which the movement is headed.

Unions remain some of the most secretive organizations in America. And the Democrats consistently protect union secrecy—keeping important information from union members and from the public. During the Bush Administration, then secretary of labor Elaine Chao increased financial reporting requirements for union officials, requiring them to report how much they received from the union and union trust funds.
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She also required shop stewards, union officials in the workplace, to file financial disclosures so that rank-and-file members could see how much stewards were getting paid for their union work. But President Obama’s Department of Labor halted these types of disclosures.
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Soon after President Obama entered office, Chao explained, “the new leadership at the Labor Department moved to delay implementing a regulation… that would have shed much-needed light on how union managers compensate themselves with union dues.”
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The regulations were designed to promote greater transparency and stop union fraud and embezzlement—and the Obama Administration
stopped those regulations dead. Things are so much simpler and cleaner for the Democrat-Shadowboss complex when the little people and the taxpayers don’t know what’s up.

But what about you? Yes, you, the nonunion member. The person who doesn’t work for the government, or even aspire to work for the government. Should you worry about any of this? Absolutely. The government employee unions have plans for you, too, as we’ll see next.

S
O what?” you ask. “What’s the difference? I’m not a union member; if the unions get some tax dollars, good for them. If they control some politicians, that’s their prerogative. I’m not paying dues.”

Well, Virginia, get ready. Soon you, too, may be a member of a government employee union. You’re not a government employee? Don’t worry—the unions have a fix for that. The unions are reaching far and wide to organize the unorganizable, and to force people under union control who can’t be unionized under current law.

We’ve seen again and again how government employee unions have been able to get political favors and special treatment from government that ordinary Americans aren’t able to win for themselves. But now, in their relentless quest to increase their membership and the amount of dues they collect, government employee union officials are doing the unthinkable—they’re targeting citizens who aren’t even government employees for forced unionization and calling in political favors to get it done.

The mechanism for this latest union power grab is extremely clever. First, unions work with friendly politicians to relabel groups of independent workers as “government employees.” Then, with a few tweaks of the law, they unionize them.
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With favors from government officials, the unions can unionize
almost anyone
.

Union growth has exploded thanks to this new model for
organizing—which we will call Government Employee Unions 2.0. As we will see in this chapter, government employee unions have already captured home health-care workers and home child-care providers—who are often just parents receiving government benefits to take care of their disabled children or people taking care of their own elderly parents.

But the government employee unions have bigger plans—to unionize other groups that receive payments from the government related to their work. Unions have their sights set on the millions of health-care workers who will receive government funds under Obamacare and the large groups of Americans that receive government benefits.

No doubt unions will try to extend the model as far as possible, since it’s filling their bank accounts with additional union dues.

But first, let’s look at what the government employee unions have already done to home-care providers in many states across the nation.

Andy Stern, the SEIU’s president until 2010, is widely considered a union visionary. During his tenure, Stern is credited with developing the new strategy for unionizing whole new groups of workers.
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Stern always has seemed a little too white collar to be a hard-elbowed union official—he is the son of a lawyer from New Jersey. Unlike labor leaders of old, “Stern was part of a generation of idealistic union leaders who came to organized labor from college, not the factory floor,” the
New Republic
reports.
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Stern went to the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania, where he started at the Wharton School of Business, but finished up with a degree in education and urban planning.
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He quickly climbed the ladder of success, finally taking over the presidency of the SEIU in 1996.

Stern and the new generation of labor officials like him, referred to sometimes as the “Ivy League Amigos,”
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used their business training to turn their unions into competitive and growing enterprises. Stern cleaned house, merged many local affiliates, and centralized power in the SEIU Washington headquarters. The result has been a more modern and efficient union that stays on message. But Stern has many
critics within the union movement, who say that Stern operated his union like a dictatorship and didn’t pay enough attention to the interests of rank-and-file members.
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Stern has a history of innovative union tactics. In one case, after trying aggressive tactics to unionize nursing homes owned by Beverly Enterprises in the 1980s and early 1990s, Stern tried a new strategy—selling the employer on the SEIU’s value as a political operative and lobbyist. Stern explained, “With Beverly, we could both appreciate that there were certain things we did better together—lobbying for more staffing and higher wages. That was the basis of our partnership.”
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Once Stern explained to employers the benefit of partnering with the SEIU—that the union could call in its political clout on the
employer’s
behalf—employers often chose to let the SEIU unionize their workforces without a fight. The SEIU’s move deeper into lobbying was a win-win for unions and employers. Of course, it was a loss for taxpayers, who had to pay for the government largesse lobbied for by the SEIU—but Stern and Co. weren’t exactly concerned about those poor souls.