I knew something was up when the following day, Fortune magazine editor Nina Easton, a neighbor of the targeted residence, published an account of the incident and was almost immediately attacked by what seemed like practically a coordinated dogpile of writers from several specific sources.

In almost mirror fashion to the Town Hall events last August, when both the Huffington Post and Media Matters seemingly tried to cover up and dismiss the violent acts that SEIU committed against Kenneth Gladney, the same players were again out in full force.  As our Larry O’Connor wrote, both outlets behaved less like journalists and more like arms of the SEIU press office, dismissing SEIU’s bad behavior and attacking an innocent party with fabricated conflicts of interest as a method of distraction and intimidation.

Bob Borosage, Erica Payne, and John Podesta

And now we learn this:  Erica Payne, the guest who was invited to appear Friday on Megyn Kelley’s Fox News show and proceeded to blame the Tea Parties for the behavior of SEIU?  She was co-founder of Democracy Alliance, the very organization that spawned and is a donor to Media Matters.  SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger is also the Vice-Chair of its Board.

Payne’s appearance was a lucky development for SEIU – it fit right into the union’s media defense plan.  First came the regurgitation of SEIU talking points from Huffington Post and Media Matters, and now this TV appearance from Payne.  As it turns out by the way, Payne is also a Huffington Post blogger herself, and a glowing fan of Media Matters, among several other progressive associations that are too many to note in this post.

Throughout her several minute segment, as our Larry O’Connor explains, Ms. Payne repeatedly distracts viewers away from the real story to fixate instead on an obscure lone incident that was supposedly related to the Tea Party movement.  (She also repeatedly implies that a house’s gas line was cut by that individual when in reality, it was the gas line to an outdoor barbecue grill that was allegedly vandalized).  The attempt was entirely transparent and laughable.  Her rhetoric was scripted and her points forced into the storyline in a clumsy and awkward fashion.  So much so that as I watched it myself, I became suspicious.  I realized I had seen her name before, and I knew Ms. Payne definitely had an agenda.

That’s what led me to look through my research and recognize Payne’s name as the co-founder of Democracy Alliance (before she departed and became involved with helping some of the other progressive infrastructure groups get started).  The main founder Rob Stein, is a former Clinton Treasury official who was Chief of Staff in the Department of Commerce from 1993 through 1995.

Oddly enough, before taking his position at Bank of America as Deputy General Counsel for the company’s Bank Regulatory and Public Policy legal group, Gregory Baer, the target of SEIU’s protest,  also served in the Treasury Dept. under President Clinton where he was Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions. There, Baer coordinated Treasury policy on the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, and led the development of presidential initiatives on financial privacy and consumer protection – not unlike the new position that Eric Stein holds today. Baer also previously served as managing senior counsel at the Federal Reserve Board.

Other than the fact that he works for Bank of America, why target Greg Baer?

In 1999, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act passed and portions of the Glass-Steagall Act were repealed to allow banks, brokerages and insurance companies to merge in order to provide a full array of financial services to consumers.  Baer had direct responsibility for policy in this area, and as a Democrat, his views on deregulation are today often criticized by the more liberal-progressive Democrats.

In fact, the Huffington Post published a piece last November by Robert Scheer, who was critical of deregulation and even specifically called out Greg Baer for what Scheer perceives as Baer’s role in the financial crisis.

“Baer went to work as a corporate counsel for Bank of America, which announced his appointment with a press release crediting him with having “coordinated Treasury policy” during the Clinton years in getting Glass-Steagall repealed. As a result of deregulation, B of A too spiraled out of control and ended up as a beneficiary of the Treasury’s welfare program.”

I won’t use this post to debate the merits of Mr. Scheer’s arguments one way or the other, rather I include his article to demonstrate the public criticism of Baer from members of his own political party.

Further, I point out that again, the information came courtesy of one of the same two outlets that seem to have become a ubiquitous support mechanism to the SEIU.  It’s interesting, to say the least, that so many of the same people involved with the Boards and funders and patrons of these two organizations are now popping up as players in the public eye of this protest incident.

• We’ve already seen the example that illustrates the funds paid by SEIU to Media Matters, along with a timeline of the articles that were published by Media Matters just prior to those donations.
• We’ve already seen the example that illustrates the outstanding debt that SEIU owes to Bank of America
• We’ve already seen examples of the union’s prior intimidation in their efforts to force unionization of bank tellers.
• Below, you’ll see an example of SEIU’s contributions to Democracy Alliance, an organization for which SEIU’s Anna Burger serves as Vice-Chair, and that provides funds to Media Matters
• Below, you’ll see an example of SEIU’s patronage to Huffington Post.  Their purchase of a subscription service is most likely for some form of legitimate advertising or email campaign services; but this establishes that SEIU has a working relationship with HuffPo as a customer.

I’m especially curious to know why Greg Baer was selected in the first place.  Who suggested him and for what reasons?  And did it have anything to do with Baer’s time in the Clinton administration, where his policies on deregulation apparently became a more current trigger for some of the progressive rage regarding the financial crisis?  Did any of the progressive new media outlets, through their mutual relationships with one another,  have any input or advance knowledge of Baer as a target?

It may be a tangled web of progressive organizations out there, but the same few always seem to make their way to the surface.  Perhaps it’s too soon to tell if there’s any conflict of interest in any of their activities, but we’ve got plenty more research we’re holding onto.  One thing is for certain, we will keep watching and waiting.

Nina Easton just became the left’s latest target.  Why?  So that SEIU can hide from the truth about its financial liabilities to Bank of America (more on that after the jump).

Easton, a Washington Editor for Fortune Magazine, wrote a column early morning Wednesday, addressing the outrageous protest organized by SEIU and National People’s Action, where 700 protesters stormed the front lawn of the private residence of Greg Baer, deputy general counsel for corporate law at Bank of America.

As I wrote in my post yesterday, “SEIU Storms Private Residence, Terrorizes Teenage Son of Bank of America Exec,” Easton is actually a neighbor of Baer.  When she was startled by the loud, screaming, bullhorn-rattling protesters, she called Baer’s teenage son to check on him.  Home alone, the frightened teenager had locked himself in the bathroom.  After witnessing the entire incident as it unfolded on her neighbor’s private property, Easton criticized the SEIU and left wing groups in her article for crossing the line this time.

Alinsky’s Rule # 12 states,

“Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)”

In almost coordinated lock-step fashion, the 12^th Rule was promptly and firmly applied.  As Larry O’Connor posted on Big Journalism yesterday, a series of several posts soon followed the publication of Nina Easton’s article:

• Late Wednesday evening, John Vandeventer of SEIU posted “Nina Easton & the Bank Lobbyists: Too Close for Comfort” in response.  Conveniently, Vandeventer distracts readers by recounting the sob stories of foreclosure “victims”, then quickly focuses the attention on Easton and polarizes his target.  He proceeds to play a guilt by association game to tie her husband to Bank of America through Business Roundtable.  You can read my post from yesterday about that here.
• Then came Arthur Delaney’s piece from the Huffington Post, with the headline: “Nina Easton, Fortune Columnist, Compares Bank Protesters To ‘God Hates Fags’ Group.”  He ends his piece with a link to an open letter to Easton penned by Al Marshall, SEIU Local 1021 shop steward in Oakland, CA.  Marshall begins his letter by mentioning that he flew out to DC for the protest  from CA because “Wall Street caused” his wife to lose her job, and then him and his wife to lose their house.  (I’d like to know how he could possibly afford those plane tickets, in that case).  The whole tenor of the post is undoubtedly less jovial than his prior day’s, when he gleefully bragged about the whole event.
• And then, the much anticipated and expected Media Matters post: “Attacking SEIU, Nina Easton fails to disclose husband’s ties to Bank of America“.

Of all of the responses, not a single one of the posts actually addresses any of the issues. None will account for the fact that the protesters were on the private property of a private citizen, though Vandeventer tries to rationalize their actions as acceptable because the police supposedly followed the crowd to the location.  Then, he paints the picture that Baer is lurking in the crowd trying to blend in; rather, the man was trying to get to his front door without creating a scene so that he could get to his frightened son inside as quickly as possible.

Perhaps the most important piece of information of all that was left out of the posts from SEIU, the Huffington Post, and Media Matters is the fact that Bank of America is one of SEIU’s major creditors.

In 2007, the SEIU owed Bank of America nearly $95 Million.

By the end of 2008, SEIU owed more than $156 Million in total outstanding liabilities.  Only six years prior, its liabilities were $8 Million.  And we’re not even addressing their debts to other banks, like $15 Million with Amalgamated Bank.

Perhaps all that campaigning for President Obama has emboldened the union to think that they deserve a free pass on their debts to Bank of America, and encouraged them to employ their usual thuggish shakedown tactics.  Typical Chicago political machine style.  At the very least, Huffington Post and Media Matters should disclose that their beloved union is part of that machine.  And it’s looking more and more every day like there could be validation for suspecting that there’s a bigger reason why SEIU paid Media Matters some nice cash last year.

More importantly though, who could possibly defend this sort of behavior?  Let’s review the facts here and remember there’s a teenager home alone inside that house, frightened by all of the screaming crowds on his front lawn.  As his father arrives home from his other son’s Little League game, with his younger son in tow, they arrive to this mob scene.  The father is forced to park his car around the corner and leave his younger son behind, while he tries to wade through the crowd to reach his teenage son inside the house.  He asks the protesters to make way for him to get to his frightened son, but the mob is more concerned about making a scene for their own selfish manufactured rage than they are for the safety of a child.

I lost my job in late 2007 at the start of the crisis, then became ill for over a year and unable to work.  I did the responsible thing when I was facing foreclosure:  first I called my bank every week.  They gave me 8 months of reprieve and worked with me on a plan.  And when it seemed I’d be in it for the long haul, I got rid of every luxury – cable, cell phone, car, I sold my furniture.  And I even got a roommate.  In the end, I made it out of the red.  I had to make the effort and sacrifice, but I did it.  I know I am not the only one with such a story.

So why do we only see SEIU’s side of the drama playing out in front of the cameras today?  We see this intrusion on personal private property all too often nowadays.  Have all our left wing “advocates” lost their souls entirely for a cause that is nothing more than a facade?  When and where will this madness stop?

By now, you’ve probably seen the mob-scene that developed on the front lawn of the private residence of Greg Baer, deputy general counsel for corporate law at Bank of America.  This was planned for some time by the SEIU as part of a larger national event, their Showdown on K Street, which was shared with National People’s Action and thousands of other activists from MoveOn.org and other left-wing groups.

Prior to the main event on K Street in Washington DC, SEIU and company made a little pit stop.  According to Fortune magazine Washington editor Nina Easton, 14 busloads of riled up protesters unloaded on Baer’s private property and stormed up to his doorstep, while his teenage son was home alone.  Easton is a neighbor of Baer’s and had called to check on her neighbor’s son when she heard and saw all the commotion outside. Easton writes,

“Waving signs denouncing bank “greed,” hordes of invaders poured out of 14 school buses, up Baer’s steps, and onto his front porch. As bullhorns rattled with stories of debtor calls and foreclosed homes, Baer’s teenage son Jack — alone in the house — locked himself in the bathroom. “When are they going to leave?” Jack pleaded when I called to check on him.

Baer, on his way home from a Little League game, parked his car around the corner, called the police, and made a quick calculation to leave his younger son behind while he tried to rescue his increasingly distressed teen. He made his way through a din of barked demands and insults from the activists who proudly “outed” him, and slipped through his front door.

“Excuse me,” Baer told his accusers, “I need to get into the house. I have a child who is alone in there and frightened.”

Imagine what you would have done if your child were inside that house and that mob was on your front lawn as you tried to reach him.

Amazingly, the SEIU has actually taken aim at Easton for reporting on this incident.  Their defense? Easton’s husband is a Republican strategist and has a lobbyist as a client – oh, the horror!  (Especially considering that the SEIU itself is also a lobbyist).  In their post “Nina Easton & the Bank Lobbyists: Too Close for Comfort,” SEIU’s crack Googlers researchers break the case wide open:

“The really interesting question here is: why is Ms. Easton so angry? And why has she decided to use her position as a member of the media to air her own personal rant at the people who showed up to share their foreclosure stories?

Nina Easton’s husband’s firm has Business Roundtable as a client, a special interest group that counts giant banks like Bank of America as members.

One Google search clears it up pretty quickly. Her husband is Russell Schriefer, Republican strategist and consultant to several big corporate interest groups. In fact, her husband’s client list includes the Business Roundtable, a special interest group that counts Bank of America and other Wall Street banks among its members.

Ms. Easton’s husband used to be a corporate lobbyist himself, before he started his own consulting firm for Republican politicians and corporate interest groups like the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce. Now, according to his website, he helps garner positive media for “a wide range of corporate clients including Fortune 500 companies and national associations.”

Wow.  Amazing.  That kind of muckraking puts my time working at LexisNexis to shame.  Perhaps I should take SEIU’s employment recruiters up on one of their recent job offers sitting in my email inbox. (really, they are hiring, and they did email…can you imagine that job interview?)

But what’s even more interesting, to use SEIU’s phrase, is the labor union’s odd relationship with its own business and advocacy partners.  They specifically mention above their disdain for Business Roundtable, for their part as what they term as a Republican corporate interest group.  But, just like Bank of America – which is a lender to SEIU, mortgage partner to ACORN, and is also the leading lending partner to SEIU advocacy partner, Center for Responsible Lending – one of SEIU’s own partners is also Business Roundtable.

“Today, three of the nation’s leading consumer, business and labor organizations announced that they will work together to urge action from political leaders in a partnership called Divided We Fail.  AARP, Business Roundtable and SEIU will use the influence of their over 50 million combined memberships to amplify the message that attaining health and long-term financial security is vital for all Americans and these issues must be included in the national political debate.

Divided We Fail is a national effort designed to engage the American people, elected officials and the business community to find broad-based, bi-partisan solutions to the most compelling domestic issues facing the nation – health care and the long-term financial security of Americans.”

Ouch, talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

The current circumstances are also rather interesting because recently, Tea Party and 912 Project groups have been protesting Bank of America, too.  For SUPPORTING the financial regulatory reform bill currently in Congress.  You know, the one that Big Labor is supporting with Democrats – the one that proposes the big banks and government spy on your bank accounts and report your loan info to a big government database for all to see?  Yeah, that bill.  Bank of America lobbyists have been busy lobbying Democrats and donating money to Democrats.

I think the folks at SEIU may be a bit confused over there – first they storm private property and intimidate a teenage child, then they bite the hands that feed them, and they overlook all the money flowing into the Democratic coffers on this bill and selectively go after only seemingly Republican targets.  Only, their targets aren’t Republican at all.  This one in particular – definitely not a Republican, as Easton describes Baer:

“Instead, a friendly Huffington Post blogger showed up, narrowcasting coverage to the union’s leftist base. The rest of the message these protesters brought was personal-aimed at frightening Baer and his family, not influencing a broader public.

Of course, HuffPost readers responding to the coverage assumed that Baer was an evil former Bush official. He’s not. A lifelong Democrat, Baer worked for the Clinton Treasury Department, and his wife, Shirley Sagawa, author of the book The American Way to Change and a former adviser to Hillary Clinton, is a prominent national service advocate.”

Just imagine if the union of We the People mobilized its own protests to put a stop to the tactics of domestic terrorism of today’s leftist unions.

——–

Also be sure to catch this related post from LaborUnionReport titled “The SEIU, the NPA & Organized, Premeditated Intimidation“.

The really interesting question here is: why is Ms. Easton so angry? And why has she decided to use her position as a member of the media to air her own personal rant at the people who showed up to share their foreclosure stories?

Nina Easton’s husband’s firm has Business Roundtable as a client, a special interest group that counts giant banks like Bank of America as members.

One Google search clears it up pretty quickly. Her husband is Russell Schriefer, Republican strategist and consultant to several big corporate interest groups. In fact, her husband’s client list includes the Business Roundtable, a special interest group that counts Bank of America and other Wall Street banks among its members.

Ms. Easton’s husband used to be a corporate lobbyist himself, before he started his own consulting firm for Republican politicians and corporate interest groups like the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce. Now, according to his website, he helps garner positive media for “a wide range of corporate clients including Fortune 500 companies and national associations.”

For the past four years, the highest profile Big Labor Boss was Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Andy Stern.  Stern has deliberately parlayed his controlling style as that of a New Labor Boss, and he has painstakingly worked on the SEIU “purple brand.”  And yet, Stern and the SEIU union have failed to live up to the New Labor Boss identity that he claimed in his New York Times Magazine and CNN/Fortune Magazine articles.

Stern tried to separate himself from the herd of “old-styled” labor bosses in several ways, most noticeably with his dress.  He conscientiously wore his beloved SEIU purple with its slight pinkish hue.  Apparently, Stern is trying to replicate for his union what brown does for UPS.

Stern’s limitless purple attire led some to refer to him as the Lavender Labor Leader.  And recently, SEIU’s Anna Burger looked very chic in her purple suit as Congressman Patrick McHenry (R-NC) grilled her about SEIU’s relationship with ACORN.

Whatever color of scarves, suits, or hats Andy Stern decides to wear, you cannot deny his influence with the White House, U.S. Congressional King Pins, the Democrat National Committee, and ACORN among others.  But, has Stern’s smash-mouth organizing and relationship to ACORN begun to turn SEIU’s purple into black and blue? You bet it has!

Clearly, ACORN’s partnerships with SEIU and other Big Labor outfits has begun to drag down SEIU’s image.  SEIU has decided, now that ACORN is damaged goods, to cut ties for now.  But, that will be very difficult because ACORN and ACORN’s training programs are totally interwoven into the purple fabric that makes up SEIU.  

From 2005 through 2008, SEIU spent $9 million on ACORN training programs and contracting out ACORN organizing services.  SEIU even hired ACORN founder Wade Rathke to command SEIU national organizing programs.   The ACORN listings below illustrate that the SEIU-ACORN relationship is much deeper than SEIU may want publicly known:

ACORN is not the only Brand Destroyer for SEIU

But, SEIU cannot blame its deteriorating image solely on it incestuous relationship with ACORN.  The “New Labor Boss” Stern has failed to live up to the image he created.

New Boss Stern is the same as Old Big Labor Bosses that Robert F. Kennedy described in his book, “The Enemy Within.”  Those Old Bosses would consolidate power and control over local unions by placing and threatening to place locals into trusteeships (Taking over operations of a local union and ousting of the elected union officials).  In addition, these bosses would cut deals with employers that allowed union members to be paid below contract rates.

Local SEIU officers  have claimed that Stern aggressively eliminates local autonomy via trusteeships and approved payoffs (e.g.An indictment alleged that in exchange  for payments, SEIU local president Danny Iverson’s resigned so that Stern associate Debra Timko would became president.); and, at least one SEIU contract allows an SEIU contracted employer to pay below contract rates (of course, workers are still forced to pay SEIU union dues and fees for its representation):

“In any instance where the Company signatory hereto desires to submit a bid to perform unit work at a building being serviced by a contractor not a party to a collective bargaining agreement with the union which would cover the work in question, it is agreed that the wage and fringe benefit provisions of this Agreement may be waived …”

Stern’s internal self-serving tactics have resulted in minimal public image damage because most of these actions primarily involve SEIU internal politics.  However, internal struggles combined with SEIU’s ruthless corporate campaigns and associations with groups like ACORN are causing even mainstream columnists like Kathleen Parker to question why anyone would want to be associated with SEIU.  She wrote:

While everyone in Washington is suddenly pretending they’ve hardly ever heard of ACORN, they might want to pretend they’ve never heard of the SEIU, one of the nation’s largest unions.

Since the 1990s, SEIU used ACORN-type tactics in so-called “corporate campaigns.”  As previously mentioned, ACORN trained SEIU organizers, and ACORN founder Wade Rathke spearheaded SEIU national organizing campaigns. 

During these corporate campaigns, SEIU coordinates personal attacks against employees, customers of targeted employers, and the employers.  SEIU organizers systematically increase their attacks with assistance from outside pressure groups in accordance with SEIU’s corporate campaign stratagem. 

Here is the real kicker in SEIU’s corporate campaign; SEIU’s harassment is not designed to force the employer into allowing employees a secret ballot union representational election, but SEIU pressures employers to sign away employees’ opportunity to have a secret ballot election.  That’s right; SEIU developed the corporate campaign to prevent employees from having a secret ballot election. 

SEIU, along with its partners ACORN, Justice for Janitors, Interfaith Worker Justice, and others stage disruptive demonstrations, place derogatory ads, hand out offensive flyers, send defamatory letters, and pressure politicians.  SEIU organizers have even used children to hand out nasty flyers as they trick-or-treat.  All of these actions are designed to irritate everyone in the community and hopefully focus the unrest on the employer, not SEIU.  And, in the end, it’s all about money – union dues extracted from workers for the privilege of having a job. 

All of SEIU’s in-your-face activities in numerous communities across the country has dramatically begun to weaken SEIU’s own brand. 

Here’s three quick true life SEIU corporate campaign sagas that span across America over two decades:

1. In the 1990’s, Sacramento’s Randy Schaber endured an SEIU four-year battering of his company and his employees.  SEIU’s attacks on Schaber included coordination with a Clinton Administration Big Labor appointee inside the U.S. Department of Labor that resulted in a Congressional investigation, headed by Rep. Pete Hoekstra, documenting SEIU’s corporate campaign and the removal of the SEIU insider. 

2. In Indianapolis, David A. Bego, author of The Devil at My Doorstep, had an SEIU organizer tell him, “we enjoy conversation, but we embrace confrontation,” shortly before SEIU goons began to ratchet up the pressure.  Bego’s book provides a concise description of his three-year SEIU ordeal, and details of hard-to-believe ACORN-modeled intimidation.  SEIU even had trick-or-treating children handout out offensive flyers in Bego’s and a customer’s neighborhood. 

3. Houston’s Brent Southwell story, as posted on BigGovernment.com by Bret Jacobson, repeats Schaber’s and Bego’s stories but with his own twist.  Southwell filed suit against SEIU claiming, among other things, that a top SEIU organizer “has stated directly to Professional Janitorial Services (PJS, Southwell’s company) that SEIU wants ‘to kill’ PJS.”  Certainly, this SEIU organizer was not concerned about the welfare of PJS employees.  The lawsuit against SEIU is currently ongoing.

Conclusion

To borrow a phrase from ACORN’s Wade Rathke, no matter how you shake and bake it, a nationwide campaign that embraces confrontation and irresponsible personal attacks will eventually stick to the SEIU brand.  Constantly filing unsubstantiated accusations with enforcement agencies and then using these SEIU-generated unsubstantiated claims to force politicians to act eventually hurts the credibility of the accuser. 

Remember the childhood story of the boy who cried wolf?

In the end, SEIU’s smash-mouth, no-holds-barred organizing, internal power struggles, and associations with the likes of ACORN have irrefutably begun to bring down Stern’s SEIU purple brand.

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