Richard Trumka is a thug’s thug, and a crafty one at that.

The AFL-CIO boss believes the end justifies the means. Breaking the law is acceptable if it advances the cause. Unions should “forget about the law; this is about more than that,” he said at the “Future of Unions” roundtable in Detroit on April 7th.

Like many union leaders, occasionally the slippery Trumka pretends to like capitalism. He supports vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, not because he actually believes in them but because his members work in industries that depend on their enforcement. Turning a blind eye to the manufacture of counterfeit machine parts could put union members out of work.

But unlike most high-profile leftists, Trumka doesn’t even make an effort to conceal his radicalism. “Being called a socialist is a step up for me,” he told Bloomberg News in June. In 1994, Trumka proudly accepted the Eugene Debs Award named after the five-time presidential candidate and labor organizer who founded the Socialist Party of America.

As an AFL-CIO executive, Trumka helped to create “Union Summer,” a program for training young people as organizers and political activists. Participants were made to recite a pledge called “Working Class Commitment” that included the Marxist idea “that we [union workers] produce the world’s wealth … [and] will end all oppression.”

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We told you, a couple of weeks ago, that following the release of SEIU’s internal “Contract Campaign Manual” we’d continue exploring the tactics and dirty tricks it exposed. And we feel we owe it to you reader (and USAS members, if you’re still around) to give you a little background on this internal manual. For that reason, we’d like to share with you a few extracts from a Labor Watch report on the SEIU that provides an extremely accurate and relevant insight into the development of the union’s tactics.

First, let’s give a little context to the highly controversial manual. It appears that the tactics it teaches are not exactly new in America. Beyond pure politics, their first widespread use began with the rise of the “New Left” in the 1960′s and campus-based activists groups such as Students for a Democratic Society. But for the introduction and systematization of corporate campaigns among unions’ repertoire of strategies, we must turn to John Sweeney, SEIU’s president between 1980 and 1995.

John Sweeney had the brilliant idea of taking the concept of corporate campaigns and structuring and formalizing it in a way that could be systemically useful for unions’ seeking recognition. In the process, he penned the “Contract Campaign Manual” we - and others – previously exposed on this blog. As a 2002 report by Labor Watch and the Capital Research Center put it:

“Corporate campaigns are coordinated assaults on a company’s reputation. The union goes outside ordinary procedures for seeking representation or pressing its grievances. Instead, it mounts a full-scale political and public relations campaign, often enlisting other social and religious groups as allies and threatening the employer with an economic boycott. The implicit threat: We unionize your workforce or we destroy your reputation. Under Sweeney, SEIU helped bring corporate campaigns into the mainstream of union organizing tactics.”

These few sentences could hardly do a better job at summing up what the SEIU has been all about in its campaign against Sodexo. The grand strategy is here: coerce by any means possible a company into recognizing a union by directly pressuring management instead of trying to convince employees. And the Contract Campaign Manual is at the center of this strategy, just look at how the tactics it outlines are relevant to the campaign:

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People on the left are constantly asking Andrew Breitbart who funds his “operation.”  It’s grown to become rather amusing, actually.  For those of us who are bloggers on The Bigs, we know the truth, we see how things operate. We know there’s no giant conservative-leaning lump of cash greasing this machine.  If that were the case, I for one think Andrew would probably be home with his family even more, rather than traveling around, worrying about advertising or other ways of self-funding this little “hobby” of his, as the left often like to refer to it.

But let’s just look for one moment at where some of that line of thinking comes from on the other side.  I’ve written previously about the birth of Media Matters as a spawn of Rob Stein’s Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix road show, from which the Democracy Alliance was born.  It’s through this organization from which much of the organization’s funding had come; in recent years, more has been spread out across other progressive organizations, but the funders often remain the same names in most cases.  For instance, The Tides Foundation gave Media Matters and their Action Network over $175,000 just last year.  In earlier years, groups like Montclair, New Jersey-based (hometown of Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert) Schumann Center for Media & Democracy gave the organization $500,000.

The donors’ list is vast and diverse, and we plan to cover that in detail in the future.  So I’ll focus in on one set of donors to Media Matters, which is the Labor Unions.  More specifically, in light of some recent posts regarding the Kenneth Gladney incident, I thought it appropriate to revisit donations made to Media Matters specifically by the Service Employees International Union.

When you look at the timeline of events and the media calendar in general leading up to the Gladney incident last August, it’s difficult not to conclude that there was collaboration amongst White House staff, components of Big Labor, and certain liberal media outlets.  However, we know that all will continue to deny it.

Further, just as the flurry of media activity finally starts to wind down a bit around October last year, this is when SEIU makes three separate donations to Media Matters totaling $50,000, under the classification of “Communications”, according to the SEIU LM-2 report. (In reviewing other LM-2s for several previous years, this appears at least to be the first time that SEIU has donated to Media Matters, and there does not seem to have been another donation recorded since these.)

This is the type of funding that I would question in return to Media Matters.  With their membership being so low and their unfunded pension expenses so high, can the SEIU really afford to be randomly donating funds to an organization like Media Matters?  Perhaps SEIU purchased advertising on Media Matters’ website, but then I’d think it would be categorized as such, as others ad expenses in the LM-2 were.  If not advertising, if not random donations,  then what’s the reason for SEIU having donated these funds?  One could logically conclude that Media Matters performed a service in return.  Only they can answer that.

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President Obama’s Department of Labor just ended disclosure of the lavish perks enjoyed by his Big Labor Boss supporters. But this should come as little surprise as Obama’s Labor Secretary Hilda Solis in a recent speech to the AFL-CIO tacitly acknowledged that she has turned the U.S. Labor Department over to them.  

The Obama Labor Department has been positioning themselves to rollback recent changes to the congressionally mandated union financial disclosure reports for unions with receipts of $250,000 plus.

And now they have announced that they are eliminating disclosure designed to protect millions of workers who are forced to pay dues as a condition of employment.  The specific disclosures being rescinded, among other things, exposed labor boss perks like John Sweeney’s alleged million dollar payment in 2000.  Now, Big Labor Union Bosses who receive special payments can continue to hide these payments from workers who are forced to subsidize them.

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