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© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
On Jan 13, we posted an interesting video showing that union members in Massachusetts were being paid by the union to stand at Martha Coakley rallies and pretend to be supporters.
Well, by way of Smart Girl Politics, we find that not every union member in the Bay State has been turned into an automaton. Check out this great shot of an SEIU member rallying for Republican Scott Brown…
This Mass. special election to fill the people’s seat that Teddy Kennedy left vacant is verrrry interesting, isn’t it?
Union operative Melissa King of the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) has been arrested for stealing $42 million in union funds to support the lavish lifestyle to which she and her daughter have become accustomed. It is being called the biggest union theft in history. So why haven’t we heard of this union theft? Why hasn’t it been all over the news?
That would be a good question and Brian Johnson, for one, asked the question himself. Johnson makes an interesting point when he notes that the Old Media have lost its collective mind over the Bernie Madoff scandal, yet they’ve made barely a peep about this monumental theft by a union member.
Famously nicknamed the “sandhogs,” the LIUNA is a union that represents the workers that dig the tunnels that are networked throughout New York City. It is they that are responsible for sewer tunnels, the subway, and other such excavation work.
Melissa King had the opportunity to steal all that money because she administered the union’s benefit investments. As Carl Horowitz notes:
King, 58, a resident of Irvington, N.Y., through her home-based company, King Care LLC, handled all administrative functions for Sandhog benefit funds since 1980, and at an annual official compensation that eventually reached $540,000. That’s pretty lavish even for an international union president. Apparently, it wasn’t lavish enough. Starting in 2002, prosecutors charge, King illegally transferred about $42 million from three union accounts covering pensions, vacation pay and other benefits to accounts she personally controlled. A large portion of it, to put it lightly, was unrelated to union business. Of the alleged thefts, $7.2 million went to pay off American Express bills, more than $3 million to equestrian businesses (apparently she was grooming her daughter for an equestrian career), and $713,500 to a jewelry business. The criminal complaint states she also transferred $500,000 to an E*Trade Securities account without union authorization.
This seems like the sort of outrageous story that one might imagine would be all over the news. But have you heard of this story?
Nope, me neither.
I’d also like to ask a question about the non-existent reaction from the king of transparency, President Barack Obama. Now, I thought Obama was all about being the economic scold about abuse of large amounts of money? After all, he’s all about beating up bank executives for making what he thinks are undeserved bonuses, right? So, why isn’t all up in arms, why doesn’t he unleash his righteous indignation at this abuse of the public trust perpetrated by a union criminal?
Where is President Scold now?
I guess Obama’s too busy giving away $58 billion in the tax payer’s money to his union pals, huh?
As the Washington Times notes, if everyone got mad that a couple of Senators might have gotten $400 million in political bribes to vote for Obamacare, what will happen when people find out the President gave away $58 billion of the tax payer’s money to the unions?
And where is the Old Media to broadcast that sweetheart deal?
Questions, we have questions.
As if there were ever any doubts, the unions bosses that descended upon the White House earlier in the week appear to have succeeded in getting their members excluded from the so-called Cadillac taxes on expensive healthcare packages.
The Obama administration, having been bought and paid for by unions, agreed to demands that unions be excluded from the onerous taxation that many of the rest of us will be forced to pay to float Obama’s budget busting Obamacare plans.
The unions pretended themselves to meet Obama in the middle by agreeing to put a time limit on this sweetheart deal. It was agreed that the unions would be exempt from these taxes for the next 18 years after which they’d then have to pay the tax like everyone else.
But, come on. Does anyone believe that 17 years from now that the unions would not be right back up at the White House demanding to have that 18 years extended or the tax exclusion made permanent? And does anyone believe that their demands would not be easily agreed to by pliant politicians looking for Big Labor’s giant political donations?
If anyone doubts that once Big Labor gets an exclusion it will never be rescinded, then they are not very bright!
And what does that mean? It means that a tax that millions of union members should have to pay will be placed on the rest of us as always. It means that government has once again acceded to these thug’s threats and demands. It means that low quality, low productive, cost soaring unions have once again shown that they are a protected class despite the drag on the economy that they represent.
And why is this is? It’s because Big Labor has millions of dollars to donate to politicians’ campaign funds. That and only that.
-By Conn Carroll, Heritage Foundation
Yesterday, President Barack Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and nine other lawmakers met face-to-face for seven hours to resolve differences between the House and Senate health care bills. At the same time these talks were going on, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern and United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger met with other Obama administration officials in a separate room in the White House. This all comes after these same labor leaders met personally with Speaker Pelosi yesterday, and after they met face-to-face with President Obama in the White House on Monday. Despite then-candidate Barack Obama’s explicit promises to the American people, absolutely none of these meetings were open to the public or televised on C-SPAN. In fact, Politico reports: “Those involved in the talks sought to keep details of their progress under wraps.”
And just what deals were Big Labor, the leftist majorities in Congress and the Obama administration making behind closed doors? How to pay for President Obama’s likely $1 trillion health care plan without raising taxes on one of the President’s most loyal constituencies: labor unions. Specifically, Big Labor reportedly has struck a deal with health care negotiators to exempt union members from the 40% excise tax on high-priced health insurance premiums. By some estimates, the tax would hit one in four union members. Now Big Labor will get all of the big government health care spending they always wanted, but they will not have to pay for it.
And Obamacare’s Big Labor handouts don’t end there. The legislation also sets aside $5 billion to subsidize the costs of employer health benefits for early retirees. As Heritage fellow James Sherk notes, few nonunion employers, of course, pay pension and health benefits for workers to retire at 55. And then there’s the small business exemption from the employer mandate for businesses with less than 50 employees. At first this applied to all small businesses, but after aggressive lobbying by Big Labor, non-unionized construction businesses were unexempted. Big Labor lobbyists explicitly admitted they wanted to use Obamacare’s job-killing employer mandates as a competitive advantage to drive non-unionized firms out of business.
So where does the White House and Congress propose to regain the revenue lost from exempting unions from the health care excise tax? The people who fund job creation: investors. The Obama administration wants to apply the Medicare payroll tax not just to wages but to capital gains, and for the first time ever, to dividends and other forms of investment income. This tax will hit seniors the hardest since many of them live off their dividend and interest income, in addition to their pension and Social Security checks. But it also hurts us all since high taxes on capital gains, dividends, interest and business income increase the cost of capital, thus depressing investment at the very time the economy needs new investment to grow and create jobs.
Big Labor’s high wages and inflexible work rules have already bankrupted our nation’s once proud automobile industry. Across the country, their early retirement and exorbitant pensions are bankrupting states. The health insurance excise tax was once the signature health care spending cost cutter of Obama’s entire health care plan. Now it has been gutted at the altar of Big Labor power. The big loser in all of these cases is you, the American taxpayer.
See Every Heritage Foundation Morning Bell at http://blog.heritage.org/.
A who’s who of union heads trudged up to the White House on Jan 12 to press upon the President that his humongous tax hike on America to float his Obamacare proposals is not a good idea. At issue is the so-called Cadillac tax on supposed high-end healthcare plans, a tax that would hit many union members whose own healthcare plans would likely fall into the “Cadillac” category.
On the 8th we mentioned that some unions have about fallen out of love with The One and that they are upset over Obamacare. It isn’t a new bone they are picking, either. After the meeting the Associated Press reported the ire that the unions feel for their chosen candidate.
AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka threatened that the unions might turn against the president.
“A bad bill could have that kind of effect—a place where people sit at home”—as happened in 1994, when Democrats lost 54 House seats and eight in the Senate, costing them control of Congress, Trumka told reporters.
The threat from the unions that they will turn against Obama are empty, of course. However, what could happen is that the unions simply refuse to stump too hard for Obama when he comes up for reelection in 2012. There is a small chance that they unions might not work with gusto for his reelection and might cool on their current high level of support for his every whim (especially if Card Check fails later in the year). But it isn’t likely they will ever actively work against him.
The Wall Street Journal reported the guest list as follows:
- AFL-CIO’s Trumka
- Anna Burger of Change to Win [and SEIU vice president]
- Dennis Van Roekel of the National Education Association
- Leo Gerard of United Steelworkers
- Joe Hansen of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union
- Ed Hill of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers
- Jim Hoffa of the Teamsters
- Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers
- Andy Stern of the Service Employees International Union
- Terry O’Sullivan of the Laborers’ International Union of North America
- Gerry McEntee of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees
- Larry Cohen of the Communications Workers of America
Queen of the Internet tubuals, Michelle Malkin, published a letter from a Massachusetts reader that revealed the extents that unions are going to in order to keep in Democrat hands the Senate seat that Teddy “the lesser” Kennedy held. This seat appears increasingly at risk, though, if the latest polls are any indication. Unions are rallying to support Democrat candidate Martha Coakley, but it doesn’t seem to be helping.
This video shows that union members admitting that they are being paid to stand and rally for Democrat Coakley.
Not realizing he was being video taped, a member of the “Sheet Metal Workers” union, Local 17, admitting that he was being forced to come down to hold a sign, but he’s at least being paid $50. He also openly admits that he’s voting for Brown, then promptly “high-5′s” Angel.
By the way, it might not have been much help that candidate Coakley misspelled the name of her state in her TV ad recently! Hat tip to JammieWearingFool for that hilarity.
Eric Odom (Media Director)
Warner Todd Huston