Craig Becker: Big Labor's Billion Dollar Consolation Prize?

A Billion Dues Dollars Spent &

All We Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.

With a plot full of intrigue, special interests, and morally bankrupt politicians, if this were a movie, 2010 is shaping up to be a blockbuster.

Here's the plot:

A group of cigar-chomping bosses spend hundreds of millions of dollars (of other people's money) to buy all the politicians possible to get a couple of laws passed that will line the bosses' pockets with even more billions...At the last minute, the public gets wise to the ploy and, after a confronting the bosses and their political patsies, elects some guy in a pick up truck to put the brakes on the bosses' scheme. 

With their aims exposed and all-but-blocked, the bosses fall back on their political friends to throw them a bone...an appointment of one of their own, an enforcer, to help give them a leg up on their opponents.

After union bosses across America spent an estimated $1.5 billion on the 2006 and 2008 elections in order to have their political cronies nationalize health care and pass the job-destroying and hallucinogenically-named Employee Free Choice Act, their hopes to get either passed in 2010 became all but dashed with last week's election of Scott Brown to the Senate.

Now, attention is being turned to what can only be considered a consolation prize for union bosses to pin their hopes on...that is, President Obama's re-nomination of Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board.  According to The Hill on Monday.

Becker, an associate general counsel to both the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the AFL-CIO, is being treated by business trade groups as someone who could institute parts of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) through executive action if confirmed, a bill favored by unions but opposed by the business community.

Unfortunately, few have explored the potential conflict of interest regarding Becker's being an employee of both the AFL-CIO and the SEIU, then sitting as a member of the NLRB.  As a member of the NLRB, Becker will be hearing disputes between companies and his former employers (a total of approximately 64 unions).  Given Mr. Becker's previously noted biases, it is impossible for remains highly doubtful whether Mr. Becker can be viewed as anything other than a servant to the union bosses that have kept him employed.

However, with the nationalization of health care hanging by a thread and EFCA all but dead, it appears that union bosses' billion-plus dollar investment to buy American politics has been reduced to a consolation prize...and a potentially conflicted one at that.
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"I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes." Thomas Paine December 23, 1776

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