Posted on 04/22/2002 8:03:14 AM PDT by wcdukenfield
"Watch what we do, not what we say.” So spoke Bob Chase back in 1997, in a National Press Club address promising a “new” National Education Association committed to “action.”
Well, the folks at the Landmark Legal Foundation have taken the NEA president’s advice. And what they’ve found is that the money the teacher’s union devotes to politics fails to show up on the forms it is required to submit each year to the Labor Department. So Landmark today will file a complaint with Labor Secretary Elaine Chao asking for an investigation.
This is not just a technicality. The purpose of the LM-2 form is to hold unions accountable by letting the rank-and-file see where their dues money is going. And that’s the scandal. The NEA is one of America’s great political juggernauts, but from its Labor filings not even a diligent union member could figure out just how his cash is being spent on politics.
Landmark’s documents show that during the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign, NEA top brass attended meetings of a national Democratic Party steering committee. We also know from a Federal Election Commission probe that this committee and its state affiliates gave the NEA and other unions a virtual veto over the party’s platform. Likewise the NEA’s strategic plan for 2000 budgeted $386,000 in members’ dues for “organizational partnerships with political parties, campaign committees and political organizations.”
Most egregious of all are the 1,800 UniServ directors – NEA affiliate employees who ostensibly oversee collective bargaining but in reality operate as an army of paid political organizers and lobbyists. An NEA publication specifically charges the UniServ directors with “managing all political activities” within their area.
Yet you’d have no inkling about this from the NEA’s Labor disclosures. We know from the NEA budget for the 1996 election year that the teachers union dedicated a good chunk of its overall expenditure—about $40 million—to UniServ. Yet the LM-2 form has no category for UniServ, making the numbers they do give nearly meaningless.
So how has the NEA been allowed to get away with it? One reason is that Labor has been asleep at the switch for almost a decade. Apart from the military, the Labor office in charge of these disclosures is among the only parts of the federal government that the Clinton Administration cut. Over the Clinton years it went to 260 full-time employees from 325.
We aren’t objecting here to the NEA’s right to spend whatever it wants on politics. But especially because its dues are coerced, union members have a right to see what their money is buying. If we’re going to have a law requiring unions to report their activities in ways its members can understand, the least we can do is enforce it.
Laws only apply to conservatives and even coming close to breaking a law will result in movies made about you for decades by Follywood if you are a conservative.
Good luck on this, but I won't hold my breath!
Please keep representing the right side in the issues! We respect your constant battle against the illegals of the dark side, 99.999999999999999999999% of them.
From Jan 1993 to Jan 2001 more crimes were committed by the Rats in charge against America and American people than all of the other organized crimes committed during the same time period!
Just was reading this in the WSJ, wc, and am glad to see it had already been posted.
Don't know too many details, but I've read that Clinton wrote an executive order overturning this decision so that it became invalid.
....Oh, that man did so much good for this country.....NOT!!!!!!!
Well, if that is true, and I have no doubt that it is, and it can be proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he did it to inhibit investigations into union activities, couldn't he be charged under RICO?
I'm not a lawyer (my Daddy would decend from Heaven and beat me into next week, if I was), and I don't play one on TV, so some lawyer FReeper help me out on this one, will ya?
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