Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (36 page)

A year later, former president of SEIU Local 99 Janett Humphries was sentenced to five years probation and ordered to perform 1,000 hours of community service for her role in the embezzlement conspiracy. In addition to using teachers’ dues to support Ludlow’s campaign, Humphries (a delegate to the 2004 Democratic National Convention) pleaded guilty to using union funds to pay for a trip to the Virgin Islands for her daughters and a family friend.
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She too had been installed to oversee a trusteeship at the local—and left it under a darker cloud than when she arrived.

As United States Attorney Debra Wong Yang said in a statement following Humphries’s guilty plea: “Corruption in organized labor strikes at the very heart of the benefits that unions bring. We owe working men and women our full commitment to root out corruption in public office and in organized labor.”
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“ THE PERSUASION OF POWER ”

Asked about his organizing philosophy, Andy Stern summed it up this way: “[W]e prefer to use the power of persuasion, but if that doesn’t work we use the persuasion of power.”
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Stern and his shock troops have bullied companies—from private equity firms to Burger King to food management company Aramark—who have resisted SEIU’s attempts to organize their workers. The Purple People have staged aggressive protests and a “War on Greed” campaign to intimidate employers into submission.
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One of the besieged targets, security provider Wackenhut Services, battled SEIU’s attempts to gain exclusive representation for its employees. The company already had ten other unions representing its workers. Initially unbowed by a massive, malicious negative publicity campaign against them, Wackenhut blew the whistle:

The SEIU seeks membership growth through aggressive “corporate campaigns” that have a blunt message to employers, “Let us unionize your workforce or we will destroy your reputation.” This tactic has been used against a number of organizations to include Wal-Mart, Kaiser Permanente, Advocate Health Care, Catholic Healthcare West, and Sutter Health.

SEIU is attempting to coerce The Wackenhut Corporation and WSI to recognize it as the “exclusive” collective bargaining representative throughout Wackenhut. Wackenhut declined to enter into such an agreement. The SEIU responded with a corporate campaign that is intended to damage WSI’s reputation and relationships with our clients. Their campaign tactics include distributing misinformation, distortion and omission of fact through the media, conducting demonstrations in proximity of work sites in an effort to disrupt normal client operations, and aggressively attempting to intimidate or influence clients.
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But after filing a racketeering lawsuit against the SEIU, a weary and drained Wackenhut entered into an agreement allowing its employees in nine cities to choose SEIU as its bargaining representative. Behold the “persuasion of power.”

Showing an appalling lack of concern for the well-being of its members, the SEIU upped the ante in a representation battle with the University of Miami in 2006, where Stern’s organizers mounted a campus hunger strike. The union fought tooth and nail against a true, democratic unionizing election for campus janitors using a secure, federally monitored secret ballot. Stern personally escalated the dispute, joined the fasters,
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and demonized then university president Donna Shalala (yes, the same Donna Shalala who served in President Clinton’s cabinet). She lashed back:

We are devastated that the union is risking the health and well-being of our students and the Unicco employees by sanctioning an activity as drastic as a hunger strike. Hunger strikes have never been used in this country to oppose an election. We have urged both parties to continue daily discussions until this issue is resolved. A free election for or against unionization is a federal statutory right.
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In the end, the SEIU relented to a federally monitored election. But at what price? Five SEIU members were hospitalized, one with a minor stroke .
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Wackenhut Corporation chief operating officer Paul Donahue, expressing sympathy for the University of Miami’s plight, saw the big picture:

The bullying, protesting, harassment, contrived events and demands will continue indefinitely because the union has millions of dollars in dues money from hard working janitors and other service workers which can be spent on ruining the reputation of businesses instead of bettering the lives of those workers that contributed .
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Indeed, no one has felt the blunt force—and physical danger—of Stern’s “persuasion of power” more than workers themselves.

In Oakland, Stern and his Washington crew imposed a trusteeship on a 150,000-member local that had publicly opposed SEIU strong-arm tactics. The D.C. headquarters (knee deep in ethical mud) accused the local—known as SEIU United Healthcare Workers West (UHW West)—of financial malpractice and misconduct. The local fought back, charging the Beltway union leaders with manufacturing the allegations to retaliate and to distract from Washington mismanagement. The UHW West president, Sal Rosselli, quit the SEIU Executive Board and formed a new union in February 2009, which declared:

We’re tired of SEIU’s hostile tactics, threatening phone calls, their collusion with employers and governors like Blagojovich, and the corruption of Stern’s appointees like Local 6434 head Tyrone Freeman in Los Angeles, disgraced SEIU Executive Vice President Annelle Grajada, and the appointees who have just taken over what had been our local. We don’t trust them with our contracts, we don’t trust them with our dues—we just don’t trust them.
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In Philadelphia, Stern engineered the hostile takeover of a 150,000-member union representing garment and hospitality workers. Workers United had broken off from the national UNITE HERE union of 450,000 workers. Progressive
New York Daily News
columnist Juan Gonzalez, citing SEIU’s agreement with Workers United, called Stern “hellbent on using classic corporate raider tactics to bring a huge portion of the U.S. labor movement under his absolute control.” The pact included discounted member dues and legal and financial assistance to aid the breakaway group’s efforts to take control of the Amalgamated Bank, the nation’s only union-owned bank. One union official called the power grab “a breathtaking form of imperialism.”
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In Portland, Oregon, Ryan Canney, who worked for silicon chip manufacturer Siltronic, was subjected to union coercion and deception by labor organizers using a card-check scheme. According to the National Right to Work Foundation, which successfully represented Canney, SEIU Local 49 union officials allegedly tricked Canney and his coworkers into signing “information flyers” that were later counted as votes favoring unionization. Canney also charged that Siltronics overlooked outdated cards, promised benefits, and otherwise deceived and coerced employees into supporting unionization. The National Labor Relations Board intervened, ordering the local to abandon its fraudulent methods.
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The same union was involved in a similar attempted hijacking at Kaiser Permanente in Portland. Kaiser employee Karen Mayhew also staved off the deceptive takeover, winning an NLRB settlement that forced SEIU Local 49 officials to “renounce their illegally obtained monopoly bargaining power over Kaiser employees” and to “issue notices to employees alerting them of their legal rights (including the right to refrain from formal union membership)” and to “inform workers that the company will not bargain with union officials unless the employees chose to do so through the less-abusive NLRB secret-ballot election process.”
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The abusive system that workers like Ryan Canney, Karen Mayhew, and their colleagues suffered is what Andy Stern wants imposed nationwide—and what Barack Obama has promised to “make the law of the land as president of the United States” through the Orwellian-titled “Employee Free Choice Act.” It’s a system that would dragoon hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting workers into Stern’s platoons to transform the political landscape in the most radical and perhaps irreversible way. If Wal-Mart’s workforce alone were unionized and captured by SEIU, it would provide an additional 1.4 million bodies and $500 million more in forced dues.
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As SEIU Queen of Labor Anna Burger herself put it at the SEIU convention in 2008: “It is the fuel—the opening—for SEIU to change our growth curve from 100,000 to a million or more workers a year.”
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Unchecked corruption. Gagged dissenters. Corporate blackmail. A massive new infusion of coerced dues spent on Big Labor lackeys in Washington to seal the deal on a permanent political majority. This is the change they seek.

Even the most seemingly public service-minded initiatives from this White House have purple fingerprints all over them. In February 2010, First Lady Michelle Obama announced an aggressive new East Wing campaign against childhood obesity.

Mrs. Obama earned a State of the Union Address shout-out from her hubby for taking on the weighty public policy issue of students’ physical fitness. The East Wing launched into full campaign mode—leaning on the nation’s mayors, traveling with the Surgeon General, and meeting with Congress and cabinet members to reauthorize the Lyndon Johnson-era Child Nutrition Act, which provides government-subsidized meals to more than 30 million children. It’s part of the Obama administration’s self-proclaimed “cradle-to-career” agenda for America’s youth.

For decades, this Great Society relic has been criticized by school administrators for outgrowing its initial conception. The program was originally created to use up post-World War II food surpluses. In the late 1970s, New York principal Lewis Lyman skewered it as a federal “boondoggle” in a seminal essay for the education journal,
Phi Delta Kappan
. But Democrats demagogued the GOP’s responsible attempts at financial reform during the Clinton years as “starving the children.” While spending on youth nutrition and wellness have ballooned, so have the kids. Nearly one-third of U.S. children are now overweight or obese. The feds spend $15 billion a year on nutrition in schools; the Obama White House wants at least a $1 billion increase.

The well-intended program to feed poor kids has morphed into an untouchable universal entitlement with a powerful school lunch lobbying coalition of Department of Agriculture bureaucrats, food-service industry executives, and union bosses. Enter the SEIU. Working alongside the First Lady, the SEIU unveiled a major ad campaign this week demanding reauthorizing and funding increases in the Child Nutrition Act.

What’s in it for Big Labor? SEIU Executive Vice President Mitch Ackerman explains: “A more robust expansion of school lunch, breakfast, summer feeding, child care and WIC [the federal Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program] is critical to reducing hunger, ending childhood obesity, and providing fair wages and healthcare for front line food service workers. . . . ”
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There are 400,000 workers who prepare and serve lunch to American schoolchildren. SEIU represents tens of thousands of those workers and is trying to unionize many more. “More robust expansion” of the federal school lunch law means a mandate for higher wages, increased benefits, and government-guaranteed health insurance coverage (the more luxurious the better now that SEIU has negotiated its Cadillac Tax exemption from the Democrats’ health care takeover bill).

The SEIU’s front group, “Campaign for Quality Services,” is clamoring for “the right to sick days and training” for school food-services workers. Never ones to let a crisis go unexploited, SEIU sent its members to lobby in front of Chicago public schools last year and scare parents into supporting their labor agenda. They accused the school system of “putting our kids at risk”
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during flu season by resisting the SEIU’s sick day coverage demands. “Without sick days, I can’t take a day off, so I have to bring germs to school,” an SEIU janitor lamented.

Along the same lines, they are casting food-services workers as indispensable saviors. The union has rallied behind PR efforts casting them as superheroes “serving justice, and serving lunch.” Opposing the union means opposing children’s health. SEIU propaganda features New Jersey school cafeteria workers like Leslie Williams of Orange, NJ, lamenting: “I love my work, but it’s getting harder to prepare nutritious meals on the low budget we’re working with. . . . It breaks my heart to see a child who’s hungry. As I see it, part of my job is to make sure the kids are well-fed.”
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Actually, that’s the primary job of parents. But the more responsibility we demand of parents, the less power and influence SEIU bosses are able to grab. Unionized school dietician and nutrition jobs are booming. And in addition to school breakfast and lunch, the SEIU is now pushing subsidized dinner plans and summer food service to create a “stronger nutrition safety net.”
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Translation: Perpetual employment for big government and its public employee union au pairs. These Big Labor bigwigs don’t care about slimming your kids’ waistlines. They care about beefing up their membership rolls and fattening their coffers.

It’s just one more reminder that behind every seemingly good deed in the Obama White House, there’s a deep-pocketed, left-wing special interest at work. Which brings us to the left-wing special interest that made Obama who he is today: ACORN.

CHAPTER 8

OBAMACORN

A COMMUNITY OF ORGANIZED RACKETEERS NATIONWIDE

D
onna Hanks gathered friends in front of her foreclosed house in Baltimore to bemoan the ravages of the subprime crisis. Greedy lenders hiked her mortgage payments by “$300 in one month,” the despondent hotel restaurant worker told a local reporter for WJZ-TV. The bank refused to work with her, she explained, and cruelly kicked her to the curb. She was exactly the kind of downtrodden victim Barack Obama had promised to help if elected.