Obama Administration Moves To Shut Down Disclosure Of Big Labor-ACORN Connections – Big Government

Even before U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis was sworn in, Big Labor insiders like AFL-CIO lawyer and Obama appointee Deborah Greenfield were busily dismantling useful union financial disclosures produced by former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. It’s another Big Government – Big Labor partnership aimed at keeping individual workers, whom they claim to represent, in the dark.

Why the hurry? Perhaps Union Bosses wanted to prevent the Virginia GOP and inquisitive people like Patrick Semmens from visiting DOL’s UnionReports.gov website that clearly reveals the Big Labor-ACORN collusion. Semmens discovered that teachers’ union bosses gave about $500,000 to the same Brooklyn ACORN office exposed on BigGovernment.com. Both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) awarded ACORN service contracts.

That’s right; union bosses gave teachers’ forced union dues to the same ACORN that appeared to have no problem facilitating child prostitution. No wonder Solis’ Big Labor friends want to shutdown financial disclosure!

In fact, UnionReports.gov provides detailed union financial reports and is a primary source for many union members, reporters, columnists, bloggers, and researchers. But, the days of disclosure are numbered. Big Labor has commanded Labor Secretary Solis to shut it all down.

Will Big Labor’s ties with ACORN be hidden again?

In 2003, some sunlight began to shine on union financial disclosure revealing payments to groups like ACORN.

Itemized ACORN payments were previously hidden somewhere in reports like the 2004 NEA LM-2 report below. A quick comparison of NEA financial disclosure reports appears below illustrating the value of the reformed 2008 report verses the 2004 pre-reform disclosure. (For the entire reports, please click the following links: 2004 and 2008 NEA LM-2 reports.)

NEA Disclosure before Bush Administration Reforms (2004)

Somewhere in the NEA’s 2004 LM-2 Schedules 12 and 13 are disbursements to groups like ACORN, but how was anyone to know? Where did the union dues go?

After years of battling big labor lawyers, the Bush Administration prevailed in court creating a LM-2 financial disclosure report that union members and researchers have found informative. The image below is just one of the several hundred 2008 itemized NEA disbursement.
NEA Disclosure after Bush Administration Reforms (2008)

“Nonpartisan voter registrant*CONTRIB DONATIONS/GIF”, Really? Well, at least the reformed disclosure provides the recipient ACORN and its address.

Note: In 2003, the AFL-CIO’s disdain toward ‘informed’ workers was apparent in its 2003 official comment to the Labor Department. It claimed that these reports would be too confusing for union members:

Such enormous masses of data do nothing to simplify, condense and aggregate financial information into meaningful totals that unions’ members could use to understand the financial status of their union. Rather, the proposal would disclose massive amounts of non-material financial data, with the result that union members will be distracted and confused in their efforts to parse out what is meaningful in the LM-2 versus what is simply noise.

U.S. Big Labor Department swings into action

Instead of focusing on the economy or the alarming unemployment trends, Obama’s Big Labor Department seems to have focused little on the men and women behind those numbers. Instead, Secretary Solis has focused like a laser beam on eliminating disclosure of labor bosses perks and their spending of money collected as a condition of employment from millions of workers.

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