Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (33 page)

When Obama promised at the SEIU conference to “open up the doors of government and ask you to be involved,” he meant it.

Patrick Gaspard, former chief lobbyist for SEIU’s behemoth New York health care affiliate, Local 1199, served as Obama’s campaign national political director and transition deputy director of personnel. During the 2004 election cycle, he had led the radical, left-wing, George Soros-funded group, America Coming Together (ACT) as national field director. SEIU poured $23 million into ACT in a costly, unsuccessful attempt to put Democratic Senator John Kerry in the White House.
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Under Gaspard’s tenure at ACT, the get-out-the-vote group employed convicted felons as canvassers and committed campaign finance violations that led to a $775,000 fine by the Federal Election Commission—the third largest civil penalty levied in the panel’s history.
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Gaspard was appointed White House political director shortly after Election Day 2008.
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Obama named two of SEIU’s favored candidates to top Cabinet posts—Kansas Democrat Governor Kathleen Sebelius to head the Department of Health and Human Services and California Democrat Representative Hilda Solis to head the Department of Labor. “She probably will be the labor secretary that has been on more picket lines and rallied more in support of workers rights than potentially anyone in American history,” Stern gushed in his endorsement of the SEIU’s hand-picked candidate Solis.
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When the Solis nomination ran into trouble over her husband’s unpaid tax liens and lobbying activities (see chapter 4 for more details),
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the SEIU war machine turned up the heat
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—blasting e-mails,
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petitions,
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and a You Tube protest video from Stern.
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Republicans yielded. Upon her confirmation on February 24, 2009, the union crowed: “SEIU pushed for Hilda Solis to be confirmed as Secretary of Labor and took action to urge others to join in. More than 10,000 people called for Hilda Solis to be confirmed as our next Secretary of Labor—and now, she has been.”
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Less than a month after taking the oath of office in January, Obama awarded SEIU President Stern with a prominent place at the table for a “fiscal responsibility summit” focusing on health care. (A delighted Stern basked in presidential approval at the summit when Obama called on him to make a statement and then complimented the union boss on his jaunty purple scarf.) Stern also boasted via Twitter (the micro-blogging social network) that he was a special guest at one of the first White House Wednesday cocktail parties.
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The social gathering of union leaders and other left-wing groups was organized by Obama crony and chief adviser Valerie Jarrett
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to coordinate the message on “progressive” legislation such as card-check. A few weeks later, Stern was invited to speak at Vice President Biden’s “Task Force on the Middle Class” kick-off. Not long after that, Stern, SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger, and SEIU Healthcare Chair Dennis Rivera gave input during the White House health care summit.

Obama also appointed Burger to the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide advice on “boosting the sagging U.S. economy.”
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The SEIU secretary-treasurer praised Obama as a politician who “does not turn a deaf ear to the hurts and hopes of working people. He is a president who sees members of labor unions as part of the solution too.” She complimented Team Obama for showing the leadership necessary to “address the challenges working families face in a twenty-first century global economy, and create economic recovery that works for everyone—not just those at the top.”
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In October 2009, the White House tried to place radical SEIU lawyer, Craig Becker, at the National Labor Relations Board. He was cleared by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee without a hearing. Becker was dubbed “Andy Stern’s go-to guy,”
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and his anti-business views dated back to his days as a UCLA professor, when he argued that unions should not be subject to the same rules of democracy as everyone else. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, Becker was also the purported author of several White House executive orders broadening the Labor Secretary’s powers and cutting non-union workers out of taxpayer-funded contracts.

In February 2010, Democrat Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska (by then knee-deep in voter outrage over his support for the SEIUBACKED government health care takeover) announced he would oppose the Becker nomination. Senator Nelson refused to support Becker because “he would pursue a personal agenda there, rather than that of the Administration.”
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Senator Nelson joined all Republicans and Democrat Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas (also under fire from constituents for her support of the SEIUENDORSED ObamaCare plan) in torpedoing the nomination. Never ones to accept the regular order of doing business, Obama’s politicos installed Becker during the March 2010 spring break through a recess appointment along with fourteen other lucky winners in the White House game of transparency bypass.
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The
New York Times
approvingly dubbed it a “muscular show of his executive authority.”
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(When that authority was exercised by GOP President George W. Bush, of course, the
Times
editorial board called it a “constitutional gimmick.”)
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No doubt Andy Stern called it a “persuasion of power” victory.

Apparently content with the results of his all-out quest to put Barack Obama in power, Stern announced his resignation from SEIU in April 2010. Union heavies don’t just relinquish their control and throw themselves under the bus for the standard bogus Beltway excuses (the need to “spend more time with family,” etc.). Stern seemed to have lost a power struggle with his old nemeses at the AFL-CIO—which the SEIU had split off from at Stern’s behest in 2005. As
Washingtonian
magazine reported, the bosses were negotiating a re-merger of the Big Labor groups “into strategic alliance with Richard Trumka, the former United Mine Workers head who last September was elected to succeed retiring AFL-CIO head John Sweeney. . . . ‘You now have the first chance for every major labor union in the country to be in the same organization,’ Stern says.”
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It also appears that Stern was flushed away by an ocean of red ink. F. Vincent Vernuccio at the
Washington Times
found that

The union’s liabilities totaled $7,625,832 in 2000. By 2009, they had increased almost by a factor of 16, to $120,893,259. Meanwhile, SEIU’s assets barely tripled, growing from $66,632,631 in 2000 to $187,664,763 in 2009. A significant portion of SEIU’s current assets are from IOUs from hard-up locals. SEIU is $85 million in debt, down from its 2008 high of $102 million, and has been forced to lay off employees. Mr. Stern has led protests against Bank of America, calling for the firing of Chief Executive Ken Lewis. Yet the union owes $80 million to Bank of America and $5 million to Amalgamated Bank, which is owned by the rival union Unite-Here .
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So much for the lofty rhetoric. For all the talk of “change,” SEIU represents the very essence of top-down corruption and business-as-usual funded by the compulsory dues of its workers. The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ivan Osorio reported that, since abandoning the AFL-CIO in 2005, SEIU’s Stern “has sought to assert his union’s influence over private equity firms, centralize his authority within the union by forcing various locals to merge, and negotiate large deals with employers without member participation.”
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Three of Stern’s hand-picked operatives were forced to step down in 2008 to 2009 over financial scandals.

The union’s own rank-and-file members have revolted in disgust over mismanagement and thuggery. In March 2009, the SEIU notified the local that represents its Washington, D.C.-based national field staff and community organizers that a third of them would be laid off. The “Union of Union Representatives,” as the local is known, lodged an unfair labor practices complaint against the SEIU, alleging that it laid off workers without proper notice, banned union activities, and hired temporary workers. SEIU’s top brass insisted with straight faces that, after burning through $85 million of workers’ dues to elect Barack Obama, the powerful union can’t afford to keep paying seventy-five of its national field staffers because of budget troubles. In a delicious, petard-hoisting moment, the laid-off union workers protested outside SEIU headquarters in Washington, chanting: “How do you spell hypocrisy? S-E-I-U!”

Like the Obama White House, SEIU’s brass embraces a policy of self-exemption on ethics, transparency, and fiscal responsibility: Do as they say, not as they do.

THE BLAGO - SEIU - OBAMA CONVERGENCE

The “Illinois crew” and the SEIU friends that Obama so effusively praised are integral parts of the tainted Chicago political machine. In December 2008, those ties came under national scrutiny when federal prosecutors publicly released their criminal complaint against disgraced former governor of Illinois, Democrat Rod Blagojevich. SEIU figured prominently in Blago’s secretly taped musings on how to profit from his power to appoint Obama’s Senate replacement. So did a larger union umbrella federation, Change to Win, led by SEIU secretary-treasurer Anna Burger. Blago hatched a plan to snag a $300,000-a-year job as head of Change to Win in exchange for appointing a union-friendly successor to Obama.

The SEIU backed Blago for governor in 2002. SEIU’s political action committee donated $821,294 for his successful gubernatorial bid. In the 2005-2006 season, the SEIU Illinois Council PAC was the governor’s top contributor in his re-election effort, with $908,382 in donations. All told, according to research by the National Right to Work Foundation, “union PACs poured more than $8 million into Blagojevich’s two gubernatorial campaign coffers”—$1.7 million from the SEIU alone. In return, Blagojevich delivered an executive order clearing the path for SEIU to unionize nearly 50,000 home child care providers subsidized by taxpayers.
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He signed another executive order facilitating union organizing on public university campuses. At the time of his arrest, Blago was preparing another executive order to expand the union organizing abilities of an even larger portion of home health care workers targeted by the SEIU .
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Blagojevich did the country an extraordinary unintended favor. As health care analyst David Catron wrote: “He has made it clear to the meanest intelligence that [President] Obama emerged from a hopelessly corrupt political culture. Barack Obama oozed from the same stinking Chicago swamp that produced Blagojevich, and a man whose formative years were spent wallowing in the muck with such creatures isn’t likely to be long in White House before the stench of pay-to-play politics begins to pervade the place.”
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FBI Special Agent Daniel W. Cain detailed Blago’s conversations with Chief of Staff John Harris revolving around the SEIU in the federal criminal complaint, which documented a laundry list of charges of conspiracy to commit fraud and solicitation to commit bribery:

98. On November 7, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH talked with Advisor A about the Senate seat. ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that he is willing to “trade” the Senate seat to Senate Candidate 1 in exchange for the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services in the President-elect’s cabinet.

99. Later on November 7, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH discussed the open Senate seat in a three-way call with JOHN HARRIS and Advisor B, a Washington D.C.-based consultant. ROD BLAGOJEVICH indicated in the call that if he was appointed as Secretary of Health and Human Services by the President-elect, then ROD BLAGOJEVICH would appoint Senate Candidate 1 to the open Senate seat. HARRIS stated “we wanted our ask to be reasonable and rather than . . . make it look like some sort of selfish grab for a quid pro quo.” ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that he needs to consider his family and that he is “financially” hurting. HARRIS said that they are considering what will help the “financial security” of the Blagojevich family and what will keep ROD BLAGOJEVICH “politically viable.” ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated, “I want to make money.” During the call, ROD BLAGOJEVICH, HARRIS, and Advisor B discussed the prospect of working a three-way deal for the open Senate seat. HARRIS noted that ROD BLAGOJEVICH is interested in taking a high-paying position with an organization called “Change to Win,” which is connected to Service Employees International Union (“SEIU”).

HARRIS suggested that SEIU Official make ROD BLAGOJEVICH the head of Change to Win and, in exchange, the President-elect could help Change to Win with its legislative agenda on a national level. Advisor B asked why SEIU Official cannot just give the job to ROD BLAGOJEVICH. HARRIS responded that it would be just a big “give away” for SEIU Official and Change to Win since there are already individuals on the Change to Win payroll doing the functions of the position that would be created for ROD BLAGOJEVICH. HARRIS said that Change to Win will want to trade the job for ROD BLAGOJEVICH for something from the President-elect. HARRIS suggested a “three-way deal,” and explained that a three-way deal like the one discussed would give the President-elect a “buffer so there is no obvious quid pro quo for [Senate Candidate 1].” ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that for him to give up the governorship for the Change to Win position, the Change to Win position must pay a lot more than he is getting paid right now. Advisor B said that he liked the idea of the three-way deal. ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that he is interested in making $250,000 to $300,000 and being on some organization boards. Advisor B said they should leverage the President-elect’s desire to have Senate Candidate 1 appointed to the Senate seat in order to get a head position with Change to Win and a salary. Advisor B agreed that the three-way deal would be a better plan than ROD BLAGOJEVICH appointing Senate Candidate 2 to the Senate seat and getting more done as Governor.