Unions Going Broke
What’s worse they spent getting Obama elected which is resulting in bankruptcy for the country.
‘We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama,” declared Andy Stern last month, and the president of the Service Employees International Union wasn’t exaggerating. The SEIU and AFL-CIO have been spending so much on politics that they’re going deeply into debt.
That news comes courtesy of federal disclosure forms that unions file each year with the Department of Labor. The Bush Administration toughened the enforcement of those disclosure rules, but under pressure from unions the Obama Labor shop is slashing funding for such enforcement. Without such disclosure, workers wouldn’t be able to see how their union chiefs are managing their mandatory dues money.
Alarm is coming even from inside the AFL-CIO — specifically, from Tom Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, who sits on the AFL-CIO’s finance committee. Bloomberg News reports that he is circulating a report claiming the AFL-CIO engaged in “creative accounting” to conceal financial difficulties heading into last year’s Presidential election. As recently as 2000, the union consortium of 8.5 million members had a $45 million surplus. By June of last year it had $90.6 million in liabilities, or $2.3 million more than its $88.3 million in assets. “If we are not careful, insolvency may be right around the corner,” Mr. Buffenbarger warned.
How disgusting is this? These union thugs are taking money from average workers, borrowing more and spending it on political races that not all of their members agree with.
On the other hand, corporations are barred from supporting candidates or political causes. What is misreported as corporate political giving is actually money given by people that are employed by those businesses. That’s why you often see “businesses” supporting both candidates in a race.
At least that first quote by the SEIU, “We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama,” explains Obama’s wild spending spree, most notably the stimulus bill. The SEIU is the largest union of government employees in the country. They went to the wall for Obama and Obama is spending us into bankruptcy to pay them back.
I think it’d be a lot nicer if Obama were to open his own checkbook and pay them back that way. But being liberal means not spending your own money.
This also shows why the unions are so desperate for card check. They need forced unionization in order to get more suckers paying more money in that they can mismanage.
It’s the same reason why Obama is always about raising taxes. He can’t spend money responsibly.
