Craig Becker supports illegal alien workers

Over the weekend, President Obama announced 15 recess appointments. The most controversial of these is Craig Becker, a former SEIU lawyer. Becker was already in hot water because of his radical legal writings, including a 1993 piece arguing that workers should be forced to unionize. Now Naked Emperor News has dug up audio of Becker from a radio interview in 2001 voicing strong support for illegal alien workers.

BECKER: "SEIU, the largest union, and many of the other large unions now have a very, very progressive position on immigration and immigration reform, which, of course, unfortunately they didn't have 100 years ago. So it has a very great effect who we represent and who we're trying to represent on the politics of the labor movement."

HOST: "Can you be a little more specific about immigration? What do you mean a progressive policy on immigration"

BECKER "Well I think there's been a recognition that employer sanctions and the effort through punitive sanctions to prevent the hiring of aliens who do not have proper work papers has had a very deleterious effect. It's had a discriminatory effect. It's had a very harsh effect on a class of people who are here, who are going to remain here, who are going to keep coming here because of conditions which simply can't be affected through those kind of punitive sanctions. And then we have to have a different approach."

Becker's position seems to confirm what many have suspected for a long time: Unions are less representative of workers than progressive activists. Illegal aliens are horrible for American labor because they take blue-collar jobs and work for less. But instead of fighting for their members, unions are taking the standard progressive position. Obama has indicated that immigration reform will be his next project. It will be interesting to see which side the labor unions come down on.

Also interesting was Becker's contention that illegal immigration has changed who the unions are "trying to represent". Just how many criminal aliens are in the SEIU and AFL-CIO?

Becker's recess appointment places him on the National Labor Relations Board without a proper Senate vote. There he'll be one of five members who will shape labor relations for years to come.

Obama's AFL-CIO threatens to primary rep for acting in its interest

Rep. Stephen Lynch is a South Boston Democrat and former union ironworker. Yesterday, he announced that he'd be voting no on ObamaCare. Lynch has voiced several concerns, but his most serious is the bill's punitive tax on so-called Cadillac health plans. Such plans are often used by unions and would hurt their bottom line. That didn't sit well with Lynch, a labor Democrat with a very blue-collar constituency.

The unions aren't particularly grateful. Yesterday the blog Plum Line was sent the following from a source inside the AFL-CIO.

The AFL-CIO source sends over the list of House Dems who are being targeted:

Dennis Cardoza, Jim Costa, Daniel Lipinski, Stephen Lynch, Michael Michaud, James Oberstar, Steve Dreihaus, Charlie Wilson Marcy Kaptur, John Boccieri, Zack Space, Tom Perriello, Jason Altmire, Christopher Carney, Paul Kanjorski, Tim Holden, Jerry Costello, Alan Mollohan, Nick Rahall, Kathy Dahlkepmer.

The source says that the threat of a primary or third-party challenge will be implicit, particularly since the AFL-CIO is already supporting Arkansas Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter’s primary challenge to Blanche Lincoln.

Lynch is acting in the AFL-CIO's direct interest and they're threatening to primary him. It shows the extent to which many unions have become activist arms of the Obama Administration rather than organizations of workers. The Service Employees International Union, Obama's favorite union and the largest in America, is also working to primary ObamaCare apostates.

Patrick Corvington: Liberal sugar daddy

When you think of deep-pocketed sugar daddies funding Barack Obama and his cronies, George Soros is the most obvious example. But there's another money man you probably haven't heard of before.

His name is Patrick Corvington. He's the former head of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a "philanthropy" group in the same way that Soros is a "philanthropist". A list of the Foundation's grantees is a who's-who of left-wing organizations. Under just the "A"s comes the mega-union AFL-CIO, the radically pro-abortion Alan Guttmacher Institute, and, of course, ACORN. In the year 2008 alone, the Annie E. Casey Foundation donated more than $228 million.

With a record like that, it was high time for Obama to reward Corvington. Corvington was nominated to head up the government's Corporation for National and Community Service (yes, our government actually has one of those). He was confirmed last week, one of 29 nominations pushed through the Senate. Corvington also previously worked at the Urban Institute, another liberal think tank.

Big Labor throws a temper tantrum

Oops, the SEIU and the AFL-CIO are pissed off. We all know that BHO has spent much of his first year sucking up to his union cronies. He nominated a radical Secretary of Labor, reduced transparency requirements for labor unions, kicked back huge amounts of stimulus money to the unions, rewrote the laws governing government contracts to give labor ultimate control, tried to ram Card Check legislation through Congress, invited SEIU president Andy Stern to the White House every other week, called off Bush administration-era investigations into union officials, and practically let labor write a compromise on health care reform.

But it's just not enough. After Craig Becker, Obama's nutty nominee for the National Labor Relations Board was rejected by the Senate this week, the unions are blind with rage. John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, bleated, “Here’s labor getting thrown under the bus again. It’s really frustrating for labor, and a lot of union people are thinking: We put out big time in money and volunteers and support. And it seems like the little things that could have been aren’t being done.”

It's almost tempting to defend Barack Obama here. What more does he have to do to satisfy these people? Fortunately, if Big Labor remains petulant and whiny every time they don't get their way, Obama could lose his most potent and evil allies. Without Big Labor's big pockets, Obama would be just another Chicago pol.

Obama chooses the unions over school students

Barack Obama has always been a tool of the unions, from the SEIU to the AFL-CIO. His latest union cave came today when he decided to redesign the No Child Left Behind Act at the behest of the teachers' unions.

For years, teachers' unions have been complaining that NCLB tests schools and gives them a pass/fail grade based on teacher performance. (Heaven forbid.) Today, Obama announced that requirement will vanish as the president tries to broadly change America's education system. Instead, Obama is shilling out taxpayer money in the form of grants to whatever schools he chooses. In other words, spending, not standards.

Welcome to Barack Obama's latest retread: Yet another sinister, liberal, ACORN-defending old crony.

The man who took an unheard of senator and catapulted him into the Oval Office has himself been summonsed to the White House. After Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts last week, the powerful and dangerous David Plouffe, who managed Obama's presidential campaign from soup to nuts (at the exclusion of traditional Democrat groups) was just called to Washington to help Obama and the Dems prepare for the upcoming midterm elections.

Plouffe cut his teeth campaigning for Democrats, including New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli who dropped out of his next campaign because he was found to have accepted illegal gifts, making him too corrupt even for the Senate.

Plouffe will come to Washington not just with dirty hands, but also with a powerful weapon: a list of 13 million email addresses of the grassroots followers of Obama's 2008 campaign. Ominously, after Obama moved into the White House, Plouffe kept the list. It will no doubt return to Washington with him -- and doubtless will be called into action as Plouffe mails out his syrupy exhortations to come to the aid of the party. Obama may be unpopular right now thanks to his radical policies, but a granular database of 13 million people will be a galvanizing tool for even the most lacklustre campaign. And Plouffe has pulled it off before. The Obama campaign started in one room and succeeded because Plouffe never, ever took his eye off the prize.

Who the hell is Plouffe?

Plouffe is a lot like White House Political Director Patrick Gaspard. He's very shy and avoids press interviews whenever possible, despite the fact that he'll be joining the self-proclaimed "most transparent administration in American history". He doesn't brag or flaunt his intelligence. But he's powerful, ruthless and should never be underestimated. "Elections are nothing about doing well," he said. "You win or lose, and I love to win, and it feels absolutely terrible when you lose." Barack Obama has said of Plouffe, "There is nobody I trust more."

Since he bailed on college in the final semester, Plouffe has been entangled in the same mess of radical community organizing groups as the other cronies, crooks and creeps in the Obama White House. The political consulting firm where he works, AKPD Message and Media (founded by David Axelrod), has worked with the Working Families Party, ACORN's political front in New York City. Plouffe even defended ACORN directly, calling the outrage over the group's voter fraud crimes a "smokescreen." AKPD has also advised left-wing unions like the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. And to add insult to injury, their clients include those bloodsucking liberal fans at the Association of Trial Lawyers of America.

Obama Wines and Dines with his SEIU Cronies

The White House held its first state dinner last night in honor of Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh. America’s and India’s first families dined on a feast of meatless Indian cuisine along with 335 other guests – very few Republicans among them. House Minority Leader John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell were both invited, though neither attended. Governor Bobby Jindal made the guest list, presumably because he’s an Indian-American. But the political names at the dinner consisted almost entirely of Democrats. Journalists also showed up from all five of the major television networks…except for Fox News.

Obama wasn’t gracious enough to invite his former presidential rival, John McCain, but he did find room on the guest list for two SEIU hacks: Andy Stern, president of the organization, and Anna Burger, secretary-treasurer who is often described as the “Queen of Labor.” Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO was also in attendance. Andy Stern is no stranger to the White House, where he has been Obama’s most frequent guest since new president moved in.

It looks like that $31 million that the SEIU donated to Obama’s campaign really paid off.

In contrast, George W. Bush wasn’t throwing around state dinner invitations to NRA board members or Family Research Council spokesmen. The guest list for Bush’s last state dinner, honoring the Queen of England in 2007, was generally unremarkable, including mostly government officials and a small handful of prominent businessmen.

Rewarding prominent cronies and donors with prestigious White House invitations usually reserved for honorable and decent people? Sounds like classic Chicago politics to me.

And speaking of classic Chicago politics, the most awkward attendee at the dinner had to be former White House attorney Greg Craig. Craig was in charge of developing the legal framework for shutting down the Guantanamo Bay prison. As soon as the political winds began shifting on that issue, Obama unceremoniously kicked Craig to the curb.

Obama Administration hands the unions another gift, this time erasing 75 years of labor law

It’s fitting that our first post on Obama Watch News should be about Big Labor. After all, the unions bankrolled his campaign and there is no constituency to which Obama is more beholden.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The National Mediation Board, which oversees labor relations in the air and rail industry, this month moved to overturn 75 years of labor policy.
The board plans to stack the deck for organized labor in union elections. Under a proposed rule, unions would no longer have to get the approval of a majority of airline workers to achieve certification. Not even close. Instead, a union could win just by getting a majority of the employees who vote. Thus, if only 1,000 of 10,000 flight attendants vote in a union election, and 501 vote for certification, the other 9,499 become unionized.
This radical break with precedent is the handiwork of President Obama's appointees to the three-member board: Harry Hoglander, once president of a pilots union, and Linda Puchala, former president of the Association of Flight Attendants.
The board got a request to adopt the jerry-rigged voting standard from the AFL-CIO in September. Without a hearing or invitation for preliminary views, the Obama duo drafted the AFL-CIO demand and published it in the Federal Register. It's now subject to a 60-day comment period, after which Ms. Puchala and Mr. Hoglander will no doubt vote to inflict it on all the nation's airline and rail carriers.

In other words, it’s Card Check without the congressional approval. It’s also the latest product of Obama’s labor strategy, which has been working furiously to cut the regulatory ropes that hold unions down. (Deregulation of businesses wrecks the economy, but deregulation of shadowy labor bosses is okay, apparently.) The NMB is an independent government agency established in 1934, which is when the original certification rules were established. Obama’s appointees, at the behest of their cronies in the AFL-CIO, are the only ones since who have made such a radical change. This swings a wrecking ball at 75 years of labor regulation.

It’s no shocking development. The AFL-CIO was one of Obama’s earliest fans in 2008. A quick scan of independent expenditure donations to Obama’s campaign on Opensecrets.org reveals a campaign with coffers stuffed with union money. (Independent expenditures are made without the candidate’s coordination and aren’t privy to restrictive campaign finance laws.) The labor colossus Service Employees International Union donated close to $31 million alone. Their main claims to fame recently have been threatening legal action against a Boy Scout for cleaning up a union-controlled park and deploying hulking thugs to town hall meetings to bloody up conservative protesters.

Obama’s politics are nothing fresh and new. He’s engaging in the same political trick that’s been in play since ancient times: know who your friends are and pay them back once you’re in power. The top visitor to the White House during Obama’s tenure? Andy Stern, the president of SEIU. Big Labor created Barack Obama and now they want to be a loud voice in his ear.

You have to wonder how Amtrak Joe Biden will react to this. Then again Amtrak workers are already unionized, so ten bucks says he’ll be dancing down Pennsylvania Avenue.