From The Union Label Blog – Exposing Union Corruption One Post At A Time.
Glenn Beck has really gotten his teeth into the corruption at ACORN and its connection to SEIU. He admits that he believes the connection is very complicated and designed to be so. He is correct. ACORN has 330 tentacles with two of them reaching in to Andy Stern’s SEIU. Why? Because SEIU locals 100 and 880 are run out of the same address on 1024 Elysian Fields Avenue in New Orleans.
It is important to understand how the money flows from SEIU Locals 100 and 880 to ACORN. Employment Policies Institute has highlighted the money flow in its piece, Rotten Acorn. I am going to let the EPI discuss it in their own words.
SEIU Member Money Feeding ACORN Coffers
As with most ventures ACORN is involved in, it would take a forensic accounting expert to track all of the money flowing from one ACORN group to another. But the financial disclosure forms from ACORN’s unions shed some light on their cash flow.
Local 880’s Department of Labor financial filings from 2005 show a pattern of loans and payments to ACORN-run organizations:
- A loan receivable from SEIU Local 100, which started the year at $11,500 and ended the year at only $500—a note shows the loan wasn’t repaid in cash, but rather “reduced to in-kind service”
- “Gifts” totaling $151,694 to the L880 Political Action Committee, which is run out of ACORN’s Louisiana office
- Local 880 received $36,425 as a “contractual fee” from the L880 Political Action Committee
- Representational activities included $6,388 in non-itemized payments to the Chief Organizer Fund (Chief Organizer is Rathke’s title for most of his positions) at ACORN’s office and $66,870 in non-itemized payments to Citizens Consulting Inc., ACORN’s multi-use organization
- $177,430 paid to Citizens Consulting for “Accounting and Administrative Support” and non-itemized transactions for “General Overhead”
- $10,102 paid to Citizens Consulting for “Union Administration”
Local 100’s filings show:
- $8,098 in overhead paid to Citizens Consulting
- $9,523 paid to the “Peoples Equipment Resource Corp,” which is registered to Rathke at ACORN’s headquarters
- $6,300 to the Elysian Fields Corporation
- Accounts payable records show $73,984 to the Elysian Fields Corporation; $34,241 to Citizens Consulting; $13,795 to the Fifteenth Street Corporation; and $9,072to the 4415 San Jacinto Corporation—all of which are run out of ACORN’s New Orleans headquarters
- Loans payable included its original $11,500 debt to Local 880 and $8,907 to the Association for the Rights of Citizens—a group run by Local 880 and ACORN.48 Loans to these two organizations were reflected as early as 2000, with as much as $47,000 of money from members in Local 880 being used to support its less-successful sibling.
Here is more information on the partnership between ACORN and SEIU.
Hiring ACORN to attack Wal-Mart isn’t cheap. Financial disclosures show that the SEIU headquarters paid $500,000 in two installments to the “Wal- Mart Organizing Project.” The checks were sent to ACORN’s headquarters in Louisiana.
As part of a labor disagreement in Illinois, ACORN and SEIU have launched a campaign to attack the reputations and apply logistical pressure to Advocate and Resurrection hospital chains. They’ve gone beyond what affected doctors consider responsible, and have brought people “by the vanload” to the hospitals’ emergency rooms in a bid to harass the healthcare providers.
And The Other McCain has this from Kevin Mooney at The Washington Examiner:
While the organization’s complicated structure makes is difficult to determine how many affiliates and subsidiaries are tied in with ACORN’s vast apparatus, its connection with organized labor, especially the Service Employees International Union, is well-established, Vadum observed. SEIU Locals 100 and 880 are identified as allied organizations on ACORN’s web site. U.S. Department of Labor LM-2’s (financial disclosure forms) point to over $600,000 in transactions between these same SEIU locals and other ACORN operations. A 2007 LM-2 form shows SEIU Local 880, which is active in Illinois and Minnesota, donated $60,118 to ACORN for “membership services.” Organized labor has kicked it back in the form of gifts and grants to ACORN totaling $2.4 million, the LM-2’s reveal.
It gets worse. California is on the brink of bankruptcy requiring them to cut prevailing wages. What is SEIU doing to California? They are attempting to block stimulus money for California by exerting pressure on the Obama administration.
ABC News Follows Up On SEIU Role In CA And Obama Administration
We’ve been covering the SEIU’s troubling role in lobbying Obama administration to withhold $6.8 billion in stimulus funding to California. As part of the state’s budget deal, Governor Schwarzenegger and the legislature agreed to cut pay for home health workers (who are SEIU members) by two dollars an hour, totaling $74 million.
The SEIU, enraged by this move, protested to the Obama administration. Much to the concern of California officials, the Obama administration officials actually invited the SEIU to participate in a conference call between federal and state government officials.
ABC News followed up on this incident with their own report, which featured a noteworthy observation by a spokeswoman for the California Department of Health and Human Services: “This is an unusual situation. It is incredibly unusual in our experience to have stakeholders on a call like this.”
A SEIU spokeswoman offers an audacious defense of the call, claiming that “when it came time for a call, all the parties involved were included. This is an example of transparency.” It’s doubtful that the SEIU would say the same thing if a corporation with their contract at stake was invited to participate on a conference call with government officials.
This episode makes clear that the SEIU – and labor in general – can and will exert influence with the Obama administration.
Why is all this important? Because Obama appointed Craig Becker, the associate general counsel at Andy Stern’s Service Employees International Union to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Becker is a radical on unions. His opinion are well known.
Mr. Becker has other ideas. In a 1993 Minnesota Law Review article, written when he was a UCLA professor, he explained that traditional notions of democracy should not apply in union elections. He wrote that employers should be barred from attending NLRB hearings about elections, and from challenging election results even amid evidence of union misconduct. He believes elections should be removed from work sites and held on “neutral grounds,” or via mail ballots. Employers should also be barred from “placing observers at the polls to challenge ballots.”
More extraordinary, Mr. Becker advocated a new “body of campaign rules” that would severely limit the ability of employers to argue against unionization. He argued that any meeting a company holds that involves a “captive audience” ought to be grounds for overturning an election. If a company wants to distribute leaflets that oppose the union, for example, Mr. Becker said it must allow union access to its private property to do the same.
This is pretty strong evidence that ACORN’s and SEIU’s influence reaches not just to the White House but all the way into the Oval Office.
http://theunionlabelblog.com/2009/05/16/seiu-acorn-and-the-white-house/
