Chavez Linda - Betrayal: how union bosses shake down their members and corrupt American politics

CONTENTS

For Sale: The Democratic Party, the American Worker, and the United States Government

Marriage of Convenience: Unions and the Democrats

An Affair to Remember: Bill Clinton and the Unions

Putting the Public at Risk

Teachers Unions: Deep-Pocketed Protectors of Mediocrity

Legalized Terrorism

Money, Mansions, and Mobsters: Union Corruption

Choking the Golden Goose:
How Big Labor Harms the American Economy

Ending the Cycle of Corruption

For my sons, David, Pablo, and Rudy,
who make me proud.
L. C.
To Stephen, Chelsea, and Jason,
who make it all worthwhile.
D. G.

CHAPTER 1

For Sale: The Democratic Party, the American Worker, and the United States Government

Imagine you pick up your newspaper one morning and read that the Republican Party has given control of George W. Bushs reelection campaign to Halliburton, the oil and gas company that has taken on the specter of Darth Vaderlike evil to the American Left. It turns out that Halliburton is spending millions of corporate dollarsnone of it collected from voluntary contributionsto finance ads and grassroots activity for the Republicans. Halliburton employees also dominate the Bush campaign staff; they are on loan as full-time volunteers, though they continue to draw their Halliburton salaries. In exchange for the huge amounts of money and other support Halliburton is providing, the president and his staff meet with Halliburton executives to coordinate the message for the reelection campaign. More important, the GOP has granted Big Oil veto power over the Republican platform, refusing to formalize the partys public policy positions and campaign strategies until Halliburton and other oil-company donors have given their approval.

No doubt the nation would erupt in a furor if such an arrangement were revealedand justifiably so. Armies of reporters would go to work investigating every iota of evidence of the ties between Republicans and their fat-cat patrons in corporate America, with each revelation a front-page story, the lead item on the evening news, and the subject of round-the-clock coverage on the cable news channels. Indignant politicians would call for congressional hearings, a special prosecutor, perhaps even the presidents impeachment. Whatever formal steps the government took, the media circus and the outrage over the revelations would ensure that the Bush presidency was over in everything but name....

Amazingly, such a scenario actually played out pretty much as describedexcept the president running for reelection was not a Republican but a Democrat, and the powerful group pulling the strings in the campaign was not Big Oil but Big Labor.

Even more shocking, the national media and the political establishment barely reacted to the revelation that Americas union bosses had systematically bought their way into control of the Democratic Party. There were no calls for congressional hearings, no outrage, no intensive media campaign.

Welcome to the world of modern American politics. Simply put, the leftist labor unions have the Democrats in their pockets. And as a result they wield extraordinary political power at all levels of governmentfederal, state, and local. Big Labor has corrupted not only the electoral process but also our system of governing. And were all paying the price.

THE CORRUPT BARGAIN

By now most people simply take it for granted that the labor unions are active in Democratic politics. But unions are no longer labor organizations that dabble in politics; labor bosses have so radically shifted their approach in recent years that unions have become political organizations that deal only incidentally with workplace issues.

Union leaders have never been less effective in their founding purpose: to represent their members to employers. And they have never been more effective inand dedicated totheir tacit goal of subverting the American political system to their own ends. Few people realize the extent of the unions political activity or influence. While it has been said that unions are an adjunct of the Democratic Party, now it is more accurate to say that the Democratic Party has become a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Labor.

The American labor movement provides Democratic candidates and the Democratic National Committee with hundreds of millions of dollars in funding every year. In the 2000 election cycle alone, according to one estimate,1 unions spent $800 million, much of it in critical campaign support that goes unreported in the form of manpower, mailings, advertising, get-out-the-vote drives, phone banks, and much more. And what do the labor bosses get in return? The power to call the shots in Democratic campaigns and on party policy.

This is not mere speculation. A 2001 investigation by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) exposed the quid pro quo arrangement between the unions and the Democrats. According to the FEC, Big Labor has become an equal partner with key Democratic organizations like the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in formulating Democratic Party policy and electoral strategies. The Democratic Party has put on its all-important National Coordinated Campaign Steering Committee representatives from the two biggest union playersthe American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), which is made up of more than sixty affiliated unions,2 and the National Education Association (NEA), the nations largest union.

The FEC uncovered an internal DNC document from the 1996 campaign that laid out what the Democratic Party called the Rules of Engagement: When the DNC and its National partners including... the AFL-CIO and the NEA agree on the contents of a plan, each national partner will give their funding commitment to the state. The document further explained that before any campaign plans could be implemented, they had to be submitted with a signature page showing the formal sign off of the AFL-CIO and the NEA. As the FECs final report put it, the unions had authority to approve or disapprove plans, projects, and needs of the DNC and its state parties.3

In other words, the Democratic Party gave the deep-pocketed unions unprecedented authorityveto power over its election plans.

Unfortunately, no one paid much attention to the FECs dramatic revelation. In part this was because both the Democratic Party and the AFL-CIO quickly sued to keep the FEC from releasing the Rules of Engagement document and other evidence to the public. Obviously Democrats dont want the details of their unholy alliance with Big Labor known to the American people, but union leaders also need to cover up their infiltration of the Democratic Party. Labor bosses continue to speak in terms of fighting for the rights of working men and women, trying to endow their mission with a noble purpose that elevates unions above other so-called special-interest groups. Thus they obscure the fact that they have essentially abandoned the interests of those working people in order to enhance their own political power.

In the few days before the Democratic Partys and the AFL-CIOs armies of lawyers secured a court order to seal the DNC documents, the details did actually leak to the Associated Press, which gave some indication of the Democrats corrupt bargain with Big Labor. But the details unearthed in the course of the FECs 2001 investigation are just a tiny part of a much larger storya story that until now has not been fully told. And while the FEC investigation focused on the 1996 election, when Democrats Bill Clinton and Al Gore were reelected, the corrupt bargain continues today.