Obama Union Pledge Raises Questions

The New Republic: Illinois Senator's Pledge To End Teamsters Oversight May Be Too Cozy

(The New Republic)  This column was written by John B. Judis.

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The Wall Street Journal recently reported that last summer, Illinois Senator Barack Obama told officials in the Teamsters union that he favored ending the Independent Review Board (IRB) that was created in 1989 by the federal government to rid the union of organized crime. Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for Obama, confirmed the story, saying that the candidate believed that the IRB had "run its course" because "organized crime influence in the union has drastically declined." The Teamsters subsequently endorsed Obama for president, in late February.

Obama and the Teamsters bristled at suggestions that any deal was made. The Obama campaign also circulated a tape of a speech that Senator Hillary Clinton made last March to the Teamsters saying "at some point the past has to be opened," but Clinton's statement, like those made by Senator John Kerry in 2004, stopped well short of committing her to end oversight of the Teamsters. Based on the statements the newspaper quoted, it is fair to assume that The Wall Street Journal got the details right.

There are two reasons to be concerned about Obama's actions here. The first is procedural. Obama's promise to close down the IRB suggests a Bush-like contempt for the customary relationship between government and the judicial process. The president himself can't shut down the IRB. He can only recommend to his attorney general that he recommend to the U.S. Attorney in New York that it be shut down. But in these kind of touchy matters, presidents usually defer to the judgment of their attorney generals. By coming close to promising a shutdown, Obama was putting politics above judicial procedure - which is just the kind of "Washington" behavior that he likes to criticize his opponents for doing.

The second reason for concern is more substantive. Labor leaders have made plausible arguments for shutting down the IRB, but a Chicago politician should be extremely wary of acceding to them. If there is continuing mob influence in the Teamsters, it is probably centered in the Chicago area. And in the last decade, the Teamsters in Chicago have shown little enthusiasm for rooting out corruption in their ranks. As a veteran Chicago politician surrounded by a veteran Chicago campaign staff, Obama had to have known this - and that makes his warm words to the Teamsters all the more disturbing.

The IRB achieved some success in policing the Teamsters. In its first decade, it suspended or ousted more than 500 individual Teamsters and recommended that the union place 27 locals under "trusteeship," which consists of replacing the local's leadership with outsiders appointed by the international. It also instituted democratic elections of the top officers in the union, and ordered the ouster of former Teamster president Ron Carey for accepting illegal campaign donations in his 1996 election defeat of James P. Hoffa, who succeeded Carey three years later, and continues to lead the union today.

But Hoffa and the Teamster leadership have chafed under government supervision. To build an argument for getting rid of the IRB, Hoffa set up his own internal oversight group. It was called RISE (or Respect, Integrity, Strength, and Ethics) and was run by a former federal prosecutor and organized crime expert Ed Stier. In August 2001, Hoffa said, "It's time for the government to move out. We've created programs where the union is clean, and it's time for us to get from under government supervision." And Hoffa, President Bush and Representative Peter Hoekstra, a conservative Republican who chaired a key House subcommittee, began an elaborate courtship aimed on Hoffa's part at disbanding the IRB.

But Hoffa's efforts were derailed by a sensational IRB report that appeared late that year detailing the efforts of Chicago Teamsters, working with a Chicago labor broker, Richard Simon, whom Stier would later describe as "having ties to organized crime," to undermine a Teamster local in Las Vegas by negotiating non-union, low-wage agreements to service the city's numerous business conventions. (I wrote an article, "Dirty Deal," about this investigation in The New Republic on April 1, 2002.) The arrangement was a clear breach of the union's commitment under the National Labor Relations Act to offer "fair representation" to its members. Yet Hoffa and his top leadership initially aided the scheme by firing Las Vegas Teamster officials who objected. Finally, the IRB expelled William Hogan, the President of local 714, the most powerful Teamster in Chicago, and forced the Teamsters to put a stop to the collusion between the Chicago officials and Simon in Las Vegas.

Meanwhile, Stier did feel that he was making progress in his first years on the job, and it was not out of the question to imagine that RISE could not merely supplement, but supplant the IRB. In 2002, Teamster Spokesman Bret Caldwell told me that once the IRB was shut down, RISE will "ensure that corruption is fully eliminated from the union." For Stier, however, those hopes were dashed the next year when he began investigating Chicago-area Teamster locals for corruption. As he later detailed in a report, Stier discovered "multiple issues related to organized crime [and] corruption" in Local 714, and similar issues in five other area locals. The report concluded, "Issues related to organized crime infiltration and associated corruption in the Chicago area are numerous and cut across jurisdictional lines." But in the fall of 2003, as Stier was still in the midst of his investigation, the Teamster leadership began objecting vociferously to it, and in February 2004, Hoffa shut it down.

That April, Stier and 20 other investigators and lawyers involved with RISE resigned in protest. In the report that Stier subsequently issued, he put the blame for his departure on Hoffa's Executive Assistant and on the president of Chicago Joint Council 25 of the Teamsters. He accused them of bowing to present from "the Chicago organized crime family - known as the Chicago 'Outfit' - [which] concluded that its interests in Teamster matters were threatened by IBT investigative activities and had ordered those activities shut down."

Hoffa and the Teamsters released a report of their own in 2005 dismissing Stier's charges. And that's where matters would have stood - except for the IRB. Last October, the IRB recommended that the Teamsters remove the leadership of the main target of Stier's probe, Local 714, and place the union in trusteeship. It detailed numerous abuses by the union's leadership. Stier told the Chicago Tribune, "I'm glad to see that the IRB is pursuing these corruption issues in Chicago. I think there is more to do." The IRB's actions, taken in the wake of Stier's resignation and the end of RISE, made a pretty good case that the IRB was still needed.

All of this may be new information for people who don't live in Chicago, but it can't have been unknown to Obama and the Chicagoans who run his campaign. Stier's resignation and the IRB investigation, and the charges of corruption and organized crime have been covered over the years by Chicago Tribune reporter Stephen Franklin and other local journalists. Yet the taint of corruption and of ties to organized crime seemed not to ruffle Obama and his campaign. According to the Journal report, the Obama campaign brokered the candidate's promise to end the IRB with John Coli, the Chicago-area chairman of Joint Council 25, whom Stier identified in his report as one of the people responsible for shutting down his investigation. (Obama's Federal Election Commission records also show a hefty contribution to his senatorial and presidential races from the same Richard Simon who hatched the Vegas scheme to undercut local union workers and who, according to Stier, has mob ties.)

Voters, of course, understand that in order to get endorsements, politicians often turn a blind eye to corruption. They employ lobbyists who have worked for nefarious domestic or foreign clients or whose private activities contradict the politicians' public pronouncements. But if Barack Obama wants to run as the candidate of good government and higher morality, the place to start may not be Washington, but his home town of Chicago.

[joyous88]

your are the perfect example of the republicon you do not know the difference between a TREASONOUS GREED that hurst our country and simply making a ''profit''

you are as loony and insane as truthyiness

[truthyness]

In a recent picture of Obama, he''s walking with a book in his left hand with his finger in between two pages as if to mark the page. The book is by Fareed Zakaria, entitled The Post-American World.....Post-American?? Post????
The idea here seems to be that as America''s power diminishes, we should set back and do nothing in the hopes that the rest of the world will like us so much that they''ll still let us be a world leader....a pretty wild liberal dream. This seems to go along with a lot of Obama''s ideas...like destroying our Nuclear Arms and them asking the rest of the world to destroy theirs as he said in the last debate he had with Hillary. No wonder he doesn''t want to debate Hillary any more. Open mouth and insert foot disease is not unknown to him. Perhaps the title of his next book.

Obama''s liberalism will lose him and the Democrates the White House.

America wants nothing to do with a POST American candidate.

Vote for America!! Vote for Hillary!!

(if not Hillary, then McCain)

[huanaco]

OBAMA,S OPINION ABOUT IRB SHOWS HOW IGNORANT THIS FELLOW IS REGARDING CORRUPTION. IT BEATS ME HOW OBAMA IS PROBABLY THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CANDIDATE WHEN HIS EXPERIENCE AS A LEGISLATOR IS CLOSE TO NONE . THIS REPUBLICAN DARK TROYAN HORSE IS ABOUT TO GIVE THE REPUBLICANS 4 MORE YEARS BECAUSE RACE STILL EXIST IN AMERICA . EVEN HIS NAME PLAYS AGAINST HIM : BARRACK HUSSEIN OBAMA PRESIDENT, GIVE ME A BREAK.

[joecoolswat]

joyous88.....Do you mean that Democrats, live for corporate "losses" ?....I mean come, be real...the point of a business is to make a profit, and employ people....What do you think pays American wages? Losses?...Excuse the Republicans for actually wanting American companies to be successful, instead of going out of business....You should re-acess your thinking

[joyous88]

what happened in the 1960''s have nothing to do with today, get you head out of the sand.

The republicon party has become fascist, they live for

te corporate profit, its time to end their era

Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for Obama, confirmed the story, saying that the candidate believed that the IRB had "run its course" because "organized crime influence in the union has drastically declined."

Well duh, that''s all the more reason to keep the IRB intact.

[onceagirl]

Most of you sound like the ultimate masochists...it''s sort of scary to hear such unfounded comments...get a life!

[ausus-2009]

joyous88, In the 1960s the Democrats had the White House and 2/3 majorities in both houses of Congress. It was a time of conflict, high inflation, high unemployment and political corruption. The first Daley machine was at its height in Chicago, the Longs still had a grip on Louisiana, the Pat Brown-Big Daddy Unruh machine was running California and Tammany Hall which had dominated the Democratic Party in many states was still around. The Democrats don''t have a monopoly on virtue and the Republicans are not the personification of evil.

Gotta love these socialist morons that need the state to take care of them. Since they have no skills or talents to fend for themselves all they can do is blame others for their own failures...

[joyous88]

artisan004,

is nothing but another republicon liar,

the democrats have a small majority they do not control the government,

the republicon president and his veto proof majority

control the government just like they have for 8 years

when the democrats control the government the USA will

stop wasting 12 billion dollars a month on a needless

war and paying un-needed republicon contractors--

greed driven republicon swine that ruin our country

[eroosevelt08]

It would be dumb unless Obama wants the corruption instead.

[eroosevelt08]

Getting rid of the IRB is a dumb thing for Obama to want to do.

*7 cents per gallon every 30 days

[greeneyes222]

A reasonable enough article for those of us who remember the whole Teamsters/organized crime business. It''s bound to not go over well with Obama followers, who appear to be too young to remember the Teamsters, the first Mayor Daly, and a lot of the bad that came out of that era. This isn''t "change", this is reversion to the bad old days.

Then again, Obama is from Illinois, and he most certainly was around for all that as the article says.

I''m not going to defend Bush; he''s done a lot that''s wrong. I''m not comfortable with McCain and his endless flip-flops either. But Obama is an equally bad choice for different reasons like this one. What in Hades are voters supposed to do when the choice is the devil or the deep blue sea?

Joyous, I see you on here everyday, with nothing more intelligent to say than whine BUSH, BUSH, BUSH ad nauseum, youre Democrat congress is responsible for oil prices. When the republicans (I''m a long time libertarian that didn''t vote for Bush either time)controlled congress gas went up 3 cents per gallon every 30 days. Since the glorious dems took control the price has gone up 70 cents per gallon. I may be a dummy but I can do simple math.

[sabniz]

Go away, Obama! We don''t need Obama type of change in US.

Go away, please, no anymore scary stories coming out about him!

[joyous88]

the only criminal organization worth mentioning these

days is the republicon party,

after 12 years of rape and pillage on the US treasury

the country in ruins, the economy down the drain

oil over 130 dollars a barrel today, you are wasting our time worrying about a few unions

keep your eye on the ball dummy

The only "change" Obama will give us will be the few coins left from the U.S. economy.

"Rich CEO''s have let us down every time, in the past"??? You must be an idiot. Rich CEO''s run the huge industries that create so many jobs. "In the past", they were allowed to build businesses that made this country the role-model of the planet. Now all of you whining liberal punks have made it so that there is less and less incintive for people to start businesses (and create jobs). The unions are nothing but criminal orginizations that cost jobs through hyper-regulation. It''s no wonder that whining liberal fascists love them, and it''s certainly no surprise that Obama supports them. He wants to further regulate free enterprise and free the the union crooks from scrutiny. Just another politician, just like all the rest of them. The only person he will help is himself and his criminal friends...

[joyous88]

McBushSame is the same kind of a veteran that GW Bush is,

little rich boys put into fighter pilot school by

their rich daddies, McSame''s mistake = he was not

as clever as Bush in avoiding combat, and not lucky

enough to avoid getting shot down,

he is a great guy for fighting back as a POW, but as a

a veteran he is merely unlucky, hardly a hero, and

hardly a president, just more of the same