The new Labor Department rules are designed to root out corruption.
By Paul Pringle, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 30, 2008
Labor union trusts that provide a variety of benefits for workers must disclose detailed financial information under new federal rules designed to root out corruption, officials said Monday.
In announcing the requirement, the U.S. Labor Department cited several cases in recent years of union officers stealing from trusts established for retirement funds, job training and disaster relief.
It was not immediately clear how the rules might apply to a Service Employees International Union local in Los Angeles, whose spending practices are the subject of a criminal investigation. The United Long-Term Care Workers has a related health trust and worker-training charity and is associated with a housing corporation that was founded as a nonprofit to help low-income workers.
Meanwhile, Willis Edwards, vice president of the Beverly Hills/Hollywood chapter of the NAACP and a member of the organization’s national board, said the FBI has questioned him about $25,000 in consulting fees the local paid him last year.
Edwards said the payments were for work on a website and the NAACP had not been involved. “I earned every penny of it,” he said. “I did nothing wrong.”
He appears in a brief video extolling the work of Tyrone Freeman, president of the United Long-Term Care Workers, who later was removed from the union payroll because of internal corruption allegations. Freeman has denied any wrongdoing.
Edwards said the $25,000 had nothing to do with his participation in the video, which has been posted on YouTube.
The video also features tributes to Freeman from the Rev. Eric P. Lee, head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles, and Charisse Bremond Weaver, president of the Brotherhood Crusade.
In 2007, the local made $11,000 in donations and non-itemized payments to the Brotherhood Crusade and about $15,700 to the SCLC Dream Foundation, according to the union’s financial filings with the Labor Department.
Earlier this month, Weaver said her role in the video was unrelated to any union money her group received. She also said she would withhold judgment about Freeman until more information about his actions becomes public.
“I’ve had a good working relationship with Tyrone and the union,” Weaver said. She could not be reached late Monday.
Lee has not returned phone calls seeking comment. Freeman has told The Times that all the local’s consulting payments, such as the one made to Edwards, were proper.
An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment Monday.
The disclosure requirements for trusts take effect in January, but the information generally will not be public until 2010, when unions file the first annual forms with the Labor Department. In many respects, the requirements mirror those already imposed on unions, which must disclose most salaries and itemize other expenditures.
The rules for trusts will apply to unions with at least $250,000 in annual receipts.
“With meaningful disclosure, the department hopes to deter potential misuse of union trusts . . . and allow union members to know exactly where their hard-earned dollars are being spent,” Don Todd, a Labor Department deputy assistant secretary, said in a statement.
Unions have accused the Bush administration of adopting punitive disclosure rules because of an anti-labor bias, and the AFL-CIO has challenged some in court.
Attempts to reach officials with the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and the SEIU’s state council were unsuccessful Monday.
Last month, The Times disclosed that the United Long-Term Workers and the charity have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Freeman’s wife and mother-in-law. The union has spent similar sums on a Four Seasons Resort golf tournament, restaurants such as Morton’s steakhouse and an exclusive Beverly Hills cigar lounge.
The Times’ reports have led to the criminal investigation and a congressional inquiry. In one of its internal charges, the SEIU has accused Freeman of violating record-keeping standards for the charity, the housing corporation and a union health trust.
Confessions of a criminal… well, that is what this new memoir should be titled, but it isn’t. The Bellingham Herald (Washington State) is reporting on the publication of a new memoir by Joe Miller who was once a lobbyist for various unions and Democratic Party candidates. In it he admits that he broke the law “all the time” in pursuit of legislative/financial wins for the left.
In “The Wicked Wine of Democracy,” Miller records his 40 years as a lobbyist, starting as a political operative for Henry “Scoop” Jackson in the 1960s, and the tales he gives us shows how corrupt the whole system has gotten to be.
Miller writes that he passed envelopes of cash to lawmakers, converted campaign checks into hard-to-trace cash, illegally shifted campaign expenses onto the books of labor unions, and did campaign work while on a union payroll.
“I broke the law all the time,” he said in an interview. “Everybody was doing it, and you couldn’t survive unless you did it.”
While the article seems to assure us that Joe “Smiling Joe” Miller is a nice sort, we still come away realizing that despite his backslapping personality, he is as low as the worst of them. After all, even as he reveals his own criminal behavior, he stands proud of his nefarious work.
He says he’s not remorseful for what he did because everyone else was doing the same, and then some. He also says grand schemes to reduce the role of money in politics would likely be ineffective or, if too strong, would hinder democracy in action.
Now, it seems to me I remember getting a whoopin’ from my Mom when she caught me smoking in 1972, but my excuse of “but everyone’s doin’ it” didn’t elicit much sympathy, I have to say. Nor should it have. Wrong doing excused by everyone else doing it essentially eliminates anything even being wrong at all.
Anyway, what we have here is just another example of the corruption endemic in lobbying, unions and the Democratic Party.
What’s the solution? The solution isn’t “getting money out of government” like campaign finance laws keep claiming. The solution is getting government OUT of our lives. If government didn’t have the power it has to affect our lives, the lobbyists wouldn’t find that they have to get involved with government officials as much as they do. Get rid of government influence and we get rid of corruption in government.
It’s really that simple. Smaller government is the cure, not more regulation.
Bill Fletcher is all about the wringing of hands over the corruption scandal of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and is afraid that it will get in the way of the upcoming presidential campaign. Fletcher, a long time union activist, pseudo “Africanist,” anti-American, and anti-Jew agitator, who is also a self described “socialist,”, was interviewed recently on the website of the extremist organization Democracy Now.
Little of what he had to say is of much surprise or interest nor is there any truth to it. It is filled with your run-of-the-mill psychotic hate for business and the U.S.A. like the content of all of his interviews. But, his lament about the troubled SEIU is interesting… maybe even heartening for those who wish to see the union curtailed.
Talking about the late split between the AFL-CIO, Fletcher likened that instance to some of the troubles the SEIU is having with the Washington Office’s attack on its California Local, the United Healtcare Workers-West (UHW-W).
In SEIU, as you mentioned, what we’re witnessing is, in the West Coast there have been allegations of very serious corruption among locals that have been allied very strongly with SEIU President Andy Stern, and in the middle of this, this absurd attack on one of the largest SEIU locals by the SEIU President Andy Stern—and this is United Healthcare Workers-West–an attack that comes at absolutely the worst time, in an attempt to trustee the local, that is, to take it over by the international.
Fletcher says how earlier in the year, many in the labor movement had thought the UHW workers were being “paranoid” with their worry that Andy Stern of the SEIU was out to get them. Fletcher remembers saying to members of the UHW that, “No, no, no. You’re paranoid. This is ridiculous!” But, now that Stern has pretty much proven that he is, indeed, out to get them, everyone is shocked and surprised as well as saddened.
On one hand, Fletcher is worried that this whole thing will detract from the unions being effective in helping out Barack Obama’s campaign for the White House and, on the other — and as is his boringly prosaic penchant — he thinks it ultimately comes down to race.
I know. Race, you ask? It makes your head spin, right?
First his thoughts on the SEIU’s internal fight:
… if SEIU goes forward with this ridiculous idea of a trusteeship of United Healthcare Workers-West, they are going to have to dedicate many staff to dealing with this situation, because the members of that local are very, very clear: they’re not accepting a trusteeship. So what that means is that people that could otherwise be around the country working on various campaigns are going to be tied up in trying to impose this trusteeship. This is going to be absolutely horrible.
Let’s hope that this internal fight really does distract the power mad, thug in the SEIU’s Washington office, Andy Stern, from exerting his baleful influence on the elections. Stern is definitely proving that he’ll allow NO other voice but his own to be heard in his little fiefdom. His sort of dictatorial attitude is not needed in politics.
But, more absurdly, Fletcher sees the racist boogyman behind the SEIU’s internal fight. See, it isn’t mere power that is driving the SEIU fight, it’s “racism.” Why, it MUST be thinks Fletch. After all, if these union members weren’t all racists, why they’d put aside their petty differences to elect Barack Obama to the White House. That they are allowing their little power grabs to distract them, well it’s all because they are racists, Fletcher posits.
Just look at the mental sickness that is Fletcher…
But the other problem that goes a little bit beyond this, Juan, is that within the union movement there is this question of race that is starting—a few months ago, started to be raised by some leaders, including, and very notably, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka, but also by other leaders who have encountered resistance among a segment of the white membership to the idea of backing Obama for the presidency. And we can see it around the country, that there is this squeamishness in some sectors about pushing the envelope in terms of supporting the Obama candidacy. Actually, more than anything else, this concerns me. The SEIU situation in California is horrible, and I think it’s absurd that there would be any thought of a trusteeship, but this issue of race, which for years union leaders have refused to talk about, beyond this idea of diversity–you taste my food, I’ll taste yours–we haven’t confronted this issue of race.
And so, now what do we have? People saying, “Well, you know, I’m not sure whether I really want to support him,” when the basic question is simple: are you better off now than you were eight years ago? And if you are not, then you had better be supporting Senator Obama. Yet, this is–there’s some squeamishness, as I noted. And so, I think this, over the next several weeks, this will be the critical question. And I’m hoping that unions on both sides of the split will be forthright in tackling this question. Let’s not play any games. The race card, the race issue, is central in this race. There’s no question about it.
Have you ever seen a more convoluted, absurd conspiracy theory in your life? In a nation where blacks head the largest corporations, are the most famous entertainers, politicians, teachers and artists… this guy thinks we are all racists? Have we not come an inch past 1950? For that matter is this still a climate just like that of the Antebellum South!?
Remember an important point here. Fletcher isn’t talking about we Republicans. He’s talking about his own, Democratic Party, union members. It is they he is claiming are the racists.
I dearly, dearly hope that this agitator, this socialist hate spreader, does succeed in spreading his bile in amongst unions. It can only serve to really help put them at each other’s throats in vitriolic self-hate. They are beginning to feed on each other folks. Let’s hope they keep it up!
The L.A. Times has really got it out for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), I have to say. On September 26, the Times published another one of its investigations into the corrupt union activities, this time revealing that SEIU union bigwigs have funneled millions of dollars to little companies owned by family members for “services” being provided the union.
The investigation also showed that union chiefs are starting their own side companies only to get millions of dollars in “contracts” from the union.
It must be nice to be a chief directing budgets of millions upon millions of dollars right into your own pockets and that of you family members!
Here are just some of the shady “services” and payments union chiefs made to their wives, daughters, sons and other family members:
The SEIU and its political affiliate contributed $3 million to America Votes, an advocacy organization that was headed by Cecile Richards, wife of an aide to SEIU President Andy Stern, at the time the payments were made.
Melissa Mullinax was an SEIU political director when the political consulting firm she held a 20%-to-25% stake in, The Edison Group, was paid more than $1 million, including expenses. In addition, the SEIU has spent about $41,000 on a graphic design company owned by Mullinax’s husband, Jason Abbott.
The union paid about $520,000 to a consulting firm co-founded by Democratic Party and labor strategist Steve Rosenthal, the husband of another SEIU director, Eileen Kirlin. Rosenthal, a longtime friend of Stern, also headed America Coming Together, a get-out-the-vote nonprofit that received $23 million from the union.
Pamela Kieffer, wife of a third union director, David Kieffer, has received about $70,000 in consulting fees and in separate payments from a firm that provided recruitment services to SEIU.
In addition, the SEIU and an associated nonprofit paid roughly $210,000 in consulting fees over four years to Don Stillman, husband of the union’s outside legal counsel, Judith Scott. Stillman helped edit a 2006 book written by Stern, a publication that has generated controversy because of how the union president profited from it.
It looks like the best way to become a millionaire these days is to marry a union chief of the SEIU!
And Andy Stern, president of the SEIU and the man at the head of all this corruption thinks he is qualified to advise Barack Obama on the best way to run business and the economy!?
There has been a pretty vicious fight in Colorado over several Amendments that will appear on the ballots aimed at putting a collar on rampant union violations of worker’s rights this year. The unions have imported all sorts of outside groups and money to defeat these worker freedom Amendments.
Here is a page from the latest anti-worker rights the unions have sent out.
Amendment 47: How does giving firefighters the right to choose whether they want to join a union take their equipment and tools away? Amendment 47 will only take away power from Union Thug Bosses from strong-arming firefighters to join a union. The amendment actually protects an individual firefighter’s right to choose what’s in his best interest.
Amendment 49: Doesn’t dictate how hardworking firefighters spend their paychecks. It prohibits Union Thug Bosses from stealing money out of firefighter paychecks. It requires Union Thug Bosses to ask before taking money from our hardworking Colorado firefighters.
Amendment 54: Closes campaign finance loopholes for corrupt, scumbag corporations who presently can spend millions of dollars in campaigns to get crooked politicians elected and then can be rewarded by those politicians with multi-million dollar NO-BID government contracts. Small businesses actually benefit from an Amendment 54 even playing field allowing them to compete for those same government contracts. Working families benefit because our tax dollars don’t go to crooked politicians paying off corrupt, scumbag contractors with multi-million dollar political favors. In addition, Amendment 54 sets up a statewide searchable database that allows us, the hardworking Colorado families, to see which politicians are handing out NO-BID government contracts and which contractors receive them. We should be able to see exactly how our tax dollars are being spent.
In any case, these union thugs will go to any lengths, including lies apparently, to win the fight.
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review had an interesting story of a former union official that appeared at a rally to support Republican John McCain for president. The man, Joe O’Connell, a former AFL-CIO Local leader, stumped for McCain in Youngstown, Ohio.
The paper quotes other union officials saying that O’Connell’s support for McCain is “a problem.” But, the most absurd claim, from university professor Frank Stricker as well as current union officials, is that it’s all because of racism. If you don’t vote Obama you are a racists, they say!
First of all, O’Connell is quoted as being a big McCain supporter.
“I am a lifelong Democrat, an intelligent Democrat, who is supporting John McCain,” O’Connell said last week as a crowd of 7,000 waved “Another Democrat for John McCain” signs and roared its approval.
And, as I mentioned, the paper quotes union officials as to their worry over O’Connell’s McCain support.
It’s the kind of statement that Pennsylvania AFL-CIO President Bill George does not want to hear.
“It’s a problem,” George admits, “but we are in an all-out effort to educate our members that the Democratic Party is the only one for working families.”
Apparently this union thug imagines that a former head of his own union is suddenly “uneducated.”
George also sees racism as the cause.
George narrows the problem down to race. “There is no question, earlier in the primary campaign the racial issue was there, just like the gender issue was with Hillary for some unions,” he says.
There is another response to this situation from a university professor that sees “racism” everywhere he looks.
Frank Stricker, a history professor at California State University and a union expert, says race is a key to what alienates segments of the labor movement, especially in Ohio and west of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania.
This is the newest meme from the left. If you don’t support the socialist direction that Obama wants to take the USA, then you are a racist. This is the meme that unions are pushing, warning their members that if you don’t vote Obama then you will be thought of as a mean, rotten racist.
It looks like the left is gearing up to have a whole new reason to hate the USA if Obama loses and it turns out to be their fall back position, the one they have used since the 1960s. If you don’t go with us, you are a racist, that position states.
You should read this article. It gives a whole lot of claims and not one single statistic or quote from a “racist” to back up the suggestion that all union folks who vote against Obama are “racists.”
Anyone following the print media will know that newspapers are falling on hard times everywhere in the country. The Internet has damaged newspaper’s once dominant position as the source for daily local and national news. In this day when papers are folding everywhere and many more are firing people right and left (well, just “left” because there are few on the right in that business!) one would think that everyone involved with any particular paper would be bending over backwards to help keep the doors open and the printing presses rolling.
Well, apparently, unions would rather see everyone lose their jobs instead of compromising, at least in the case of two New Jersey papers, anyway.
It seems that the Mail Delivers Union and the truck drivers that delivers The Star-Ledger in New Jersey refuse to come to an agreement with the troubled paper and the the Star-Ledger is saying that it will have to quit publication by January of next year because of it.
This is a small illustration of the hidebound position that unions take all too often. They’d rather see a business destroyed completely then compromise. Cutting off the nose to spite the face comes to mind.
It’s like some sort of spy novel gone bad where the Soviet Agents are somehow the good guys. A grocery store worker and union member that makes over $20 an hour “quits” his job and starts a job in another grocery store making only $10 an hour just so he can cajole his new workplace into joining the union from the inside, pretending to be one of them. In fact, the union “supplements” this activist’s pay while he invades the other store to agitate for unions there.
At issue is the organizing of the Fresh & Easy grocery chain in Huntington Beach, California. Fresh & Easy is a British chain that not long ago launched 83 stores in 3 states, one of them California, and ever since the United Food and Commercial Workers union has been agitating for the chain to become unionized.
The company offers health-care benefits to employees that work only 20 hours a week, but the unions want more, naturally. The chain says it stand behind its benefits and pay scale.
But here is the interesting part. The unions are not just presenting their union idea to Fresh & Easy employees for an honest and open debate about the value of the union, they are sneaking employees into the stores to act as inside agitators.
Helping organize Fresh & Easy workers in Huntington Beach is Graham Ozenbaugh.
The 19-year Vons employee started working at the store as a $10 an hour “customer assistant” in December with the specific goal of getting the workers to form a union.
Todd Conger said the use of undercover union lobbyists such as Ozenbaugh is typical in “major campaigns” waged by labor organizations.
Conger said these workers, who take a leave of absence from their union-grocery jobs, are given supplemental pay. Ozenbaugh earns $20.80 an hour as a Vons supervisor.
This underhanded, sneaky move is supposed to make people comfortable that unions are interested in fair representation? I don’t see how anyone can trust such an organization that would engage is these sorts of tactics?
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has made its first determinations in the Tyrone Freeman spending and influence peddling scandal that plagued a California Local. Freeman has been removed from the SEIU payrolls.
The L.A. Times launched a major investigation revealing the fraud and misuse of funds tied to Freeman and his close associates that we’ve discussed at length here on the blog. But, the SEIU report had a few new allegations, too.
Most of the union’s findings mirror The Times’ disclosures. But an SEIU report contains new allegations that Freeman spent dues-payers’ funds on his 2006 wedding and a Santa Barbara resort, and improperly drew payments from an affiliated local and a housing corporation.
The nine-page report, from union trustee John Ronches to SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger, spells out seven charges accusing Freeman of violating the union’s corruption statutes.
The SEIU report alleges that Freeman’s dealings with the housing firm and worker-training charity amounted to a “misuse of the funds of these nonprofit corporations by his disregard for the specific nonprofit missions for which they were created.”
The L.A.Times reports that an unnamed union official says that more charges will be forthcoming.
What gets lost so easily in this discussion of Freeman’s corruption is that he was a protege of SEIU president Andy Stern. Freeman was the sort of man that Stern wanted as a leader. It shows the sort of person that Stern takes under his wing causing worry about his other proteges.
At least, though, this one corrupt union thug is getting his just deserts.
The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) donated nearly $5.5 million to three non-profit, leftist political groups to beat Republican politicians in Florida, Michigan and Ohio this year. AFSCME gave to Campaign Money Watch, Patriot Majority and Patriot Majority Midwest.
AFSCME’s role, however, was not well known until now. Detractors say that this shadowy financial support violates the spirit of campaign finance reform and open government.
Allowing non-profits to raise and spend unlimited union or corporate funds violates the spirit of laws aimed at curbing special interests in elections, said Meredith McGehee of the non-partisan watchdog Campaign Legal Center. “These groups can play the role of a hit man in a campaign and do it in a way that’s not very transparent,” she said.
Labor groups are hiding “behind shadowlike front groups to prop up their candidates of choice,” said Ken Spain, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. This week the group asked the FEC to investigate Patriot Majority, saying it should not operate as a non-profit.
And here is the main problem. Unions reaching out far past their role for the mere reasons of personal power.
In any case, it should be remembered that these sorts of reporting agencies and laws that brought such union funding for politics to light are the sorts of agencies that Barack Obama has promised his union pals that he will revisit in order to eviscerate them giving unions a freer hand to meddle in politics unseen and unknown by the public.
How money marked for education in Texas is diverted by teachers unions courtesy of www.empowertexans.com. Believe me, it isn’t much different anywhere else!
Bill Fletcher is all about the wringing of hands over the corruption scandal of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and is afraid that it will get in the way of the upcoming presidential campaign. Fletcher, a long time union activist, pseudo “Africanist,” anti-American, and anti-Jew agitator, who is also a 
