The Observation Deck

A nice little payback to the union officials

The Obama administration, which has boasted about its efforts to make government more transparent, is rolling back rules requiring labor unions and their leaders to report information about their finances and compensation.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/200 ... nsparency/

Labor Unions are not government. Government is not being made less transparent by rolling back the additional 2007 stationery Bush required of labor union stewards.

the article mentions the transparency rules being rolled back to the rules the Bush Administration instituted in 2003. The article does not cite any instances or alleged instances of the 2007 regulations catching corruption or abuse of labor union workers. The article does not list any specific abuses or alleged abuses that occurred before Bush's 2007 regulations.

They couldn't even find a volunteer union steward with a bank account in the Cayman Islands!

Charlie Page wrote:A nice little payback to the union officials

The reversal of the rules is only part of the pay back. There will also be the nonenforcement of laws regulating union expenditures. Let the looting begin.

The biggest payback so far is the pay back to the UAW. Obama has promised to ignore bankruptcy law and force secured debt holders to take an inferior position to unsecured debt holders.

The immediate effect is that the UAW will own GMC and Chrysler. The long term effect will be to increase uncertainty in the bond market which will make it harder and more expensive for private companies to secure loans. That uncertainty will increase dependence on government which will increase the power of government which is what this is all about.

The elimination of the secret ballot is another long term goal of the administration but for now the effort has been stymied.

Look to Argentina.

"Since fiscal year 2001, OLMS investigations have yielded a total of 1,004 indictments with 929 convictions and court-ordered restitution of more than $93 million. We are confident that the changes we are making will both discourage embezzlement of union members' money and make such embezzlements harder to hide," said Deputy Assistant Secretary for Labor-Management Standards Don Todd.

http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/esa/ ... 090065.htm

This is why transparency is needed. Interesting how the Obama administration and democrats are for less regulation when monitoring their union buddies. Equally interesting is how this wasn't carried in the mainstream media.

Maybe this answers why the democrat congress cut the OLMS budget in 2007.

http://www.reason.org/blog/show/1005223.html

Charlie Page wrote:

"Since fiscal year 2001, OLMS investigations have yielded a total of 1,004 indictments with 929 convictions and court-ordered restitution of more than $93 million. We are confident that the changes we are making will both discourage embezzlement of union members' money and make such embezzlements harder to hide," said Deputy Assistant Secretary for Labor-Management Standards Don Todd.

http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/esa/ ... 090065.htm

This is why transparency is needed. Interesting how the Obama administration and democrats are for less regulation when monitoring their union buddies. Equally interesting is how this wasn't carried in the mainstream media.

Maybe this answers why the democrat congress cut the OLMS budget in 2007.

http://www.reason.org/blog/show/1005223.html

The required Stationery is being rolled back to the stationery The Bush Administration approved in 2003. Citing indictments since 2001 is not justification for keeping the 2007 stationery. You have to cite indictments and convictions since the 2007 stationery and compare them to indictments and convictions before and after 2003 for some kind of meaningful justification for the 2007 stationery.

The Ayn Rand Magazine (http://www.reason.org)listed the President of the leading teacher union (National Education Association) makes five times($272,000). as much as the average teacher. that's comparable with the salary of leading lobbyists, heads of "think tanks", etc.

I'm pretty sure my 401(k) wasn't holding the assets of any labor union.

Is the American Bar Association a Union or a Guild?

It would be great to know all of the income and income sources of the bond raters who rated all the bonds making up mortgage backed securities so many banking executives made billions of dollars of personal income trading to each other. I'd like to know more about that. I'd like to see that in the news more. that's kind of important. I wonder why it isn't in the news more. Is there any existing stationery for gathering that information?

ryan costa wrote:The required Stationery is being rolled back to the stationery The Bush Administration approved in 2003. Citing indictments since 2001 is not justification for keeping the 2007 stationery. You have to cite indictments and convictions since the 2007 stationery and compare them to indictments and convictions before and after 2003 for some kind of meaningful justification for the 2007 stationery.

Maybe the Obama administration should have done this analysis to justify weakening the disclosures. But no, they just side with their union buddies and do whatever they ask. Why bite the hand that feeds them? Corruption and unions go together like peanut butter and jelly. It’s been that way since the beginning of unions. The last thing union officials want is to disclose to the rank and file members where their dues are being spent.

Charlie Page wrote:

ryan costa wrote:The required Stationery is being rolled back to the stationery The Bush Administration approved in 2003. Citing indictments since 2001 is not justification for keeping the 2007 stationery. You have to cite indictments and convictions since the 2007 stationery and compare them to indictments and convictions before and after 2003 for some kind of meaningful justification for the 2007 stationery.

Maybe the Obama administration should have done this analysis to justify weakening the disclosures. But no, they just side with their union buddies and do whatever they ask. Why bite the hand that feeds them? Corruption and unions go together like peanut butter and jelly. It’s been that way since the beginning of unions. The last thing union officials want is to disclose to the rank and file members where their dues are being spent.

Are you saying the 2003 stationary the Bush Administration instituted has no value? The article you posted only says they rolled back the required stationery to the 2003 stationery.

So far i've never been ripped off by a union. I paid UFCW dues and USWA dues. When I'm ripped off it will be by a mutual fund manager or a banker. I consider myself having been ripped off by Hewlett Packard and Microsoft for having bought a new laptop loaded with Windows Vista. I will not be purchasing a new computer again or a new Windows operating system again.

ryan costa wrote:Are you saying the 2003 stationary the Bush Administration instituted has no value? The article you posted only says they rolled back the required stationery to the 2003 stationery.

That's not what I said or intended to convey. Unions claimed the 2007 rules were too "onerous". What happened next? The democrat congress cut the OLMS budget. Now the Obama administration is relaxing the rules to appease the union money machine. Clinton did the same thing shortly after he came into office.

ryan costa wrote:So far i've never been ripped off by a union. I paid UFCW dues and USWA dues. When I'm ripped off it will be by a mutual fund manager or a banker.

Depends on what you mean by ripped off. If you pay union dues in return for a consistent yearly raise with all kinds of perks and benefits then the union takes that money and hires ten family members to do the job of two people or buys office supplies at three times the market value from a father in-law, do you consider that getting ripped off? You got your raise, perks and benefits. What do you care if there is corruption?

How do you know that the dues you paid as a union member were never misused some how?

ryan costa wrote:I consider myself having been ripped off by Hewlett Packard and Microsoft for having bought a new laptop loaded with Windows Vista. I will not be purchasing a new computer again or a new Windows operating system again.

I feel for you there. We still have XP and I’ll hold on to it for as long as I can.

Years ago I was an auditor for the pension fund of a major construction industry union.

I travelled across the country auditing the contributions and expenditures of various union administered funds. The audit teams were discovering about $2 million dollars a year in underpayments or unauthorized payments. The audits themselves cost about $1 million per year.

One audit in particular taught me a great deal about how the system worked.

I was asked to perform a special audit of a particular fund. The administrators in Washington D. C., the local union, the local union benefit fund management team and the international were in some kind of cat fight over a jurisdictional issue.

My manager asked if I would hop on a plane and go south for a couple of weeks to “take a lookâ€