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From the May 2013 issue of the Capital Research Center publication Labor Watch:

President Obama nominated Thomas Perez, head of the civil rights division of the Justice Department, to be Secretary of Labor. As we go to press, Perez’s nomination faces hurdles. Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) has put a “hold” on the nomination and demanded that Perez answer questions about his failure to enforce requirements in the 1993 “Motor Voter” law that keep dead persons and other ineligible people off states’ voter rolls.

Meanwhile, congressional Republicans have charged that Perez cut a “secret deal behind closed doors” with officials of St. Paul, Minnesota. Allegedly, Perez dropped cases involving bad paperwork on “stimulus” projects—cases that might have returned $200 million to the federal government—in return for the city’s dropping its appeal of a housing case.

Why was the housing case important? Because it could have given the Supreme Court an opportunity to overturn the doctrine of “disparate impact,” which allows the government to make false charges of racial discrimination based on racial bean-counting. (Among other things, Perez has used “disparate impact” to sue banks and force them to make loans to people who aren’t credit-worthy.) Leftists like Perez don’t want the Supreme Court to hear such a case—at least, not until President Obama gets a majority on the Court.

On March 28, Michigan officially became a right-to-work state, although it will take a while for everyone to benefit from the new law as union contracts expire and are re-negotiated. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy spearheaded the research that showed the advantages of right-to-work. Now the Center has created a new website on the issue: MIWorkerFreedom.org, which includes a feature that lets workers generate a letter invoking their right to stop paying union dues.

In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker and supporters of state-level union reforms chalked up another victory. Previously, unions targeted Walker, his lieutenant governor, pro-reform state legislators, and even state Supreme Court justices who voted not to strike down the reforms. But the reformers have won almost every contest, and the issue appears to have been settled for the near-future by the victory—with 57% of the vote—of Supreme Court Justice Patience Roggensack. That means the state’s highest court has a 4-3 majority in favor of respecting the reforms, a majority that’s likely to continue for some time.

Pro-reform forces also defeated unions in two local elections, including one in the union stronghold of Milwaukee County, where membership in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees fell from about 9,000 in 2011 to roughly 3,500 now. Statewide, public-sector union membership fell from 50% to 37% in just one year, 2011 to 2012. Nothing reveals more clearly how trapped workers have been by union bosses.

In Indiana, the state’s Supreme Court threw out by 5-0 a teachers’ union challenge to the state’s voucher program. In Colorado, the state Court of Appeals upheld that state’s only private school choice program, in Douglas County.

Many voucher programs across the country target students who attend failing schools, as determined by drop-out rates, test scores, etc. Meanwhile, in some jurisdictions, test scores now help determine teachers’ and administrators’ salaries. The result? In many places, manipulation of data or outright cheating.  As the Wall Street Journal noted, “When Florida passed voucher legislation in 1999, 78 schools received failing grades. The next year, miraculously, there were none and thus no one qualified for a voucher.” In Atlanta, an investigation caught teachers using X-Acto knives and lighters to open and reseal test booklets, or holding parties where students’ answers were corrected. Some 180 teachers and administrators are believed to have participated; 34 have been indicted. Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers blamed the tests, saying the Atlanta case “crystallizes the unintended consequences of our test-crazed policies.”

Today’s Washington Times carries an op-ed by Capital Research Center president Terrence Scanlon:

SCANLON: Bubbles out of the bottle
The nannies aim the hopeless soda-pop war at food stamps

By Terrence Scanlon

The history of welfare programs in the United States is chock full of restrictions on how recipients go about their daily lives. Some are reasonable and in the public interest, but others are heavy-handed and unduly intrusive.

For example, the recent push to block food-stamp recipients from using their benefits to purchase carbonated soft drinks reeks of overreach.

Hopping on New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s anti-obesity bandwagon, South Carolina Republican Gov. Nikki Haley has gone too far, proposing to curtail what food-stamp recipients may purchase in her state.

“You are looking at $1 billion that will no longer be put toward candy and chocolate and sodas and chips, but may be put into apples and oranges and things that are healthy.”

It is wishful thinking to expect that forbidding food-stamp users to buy soft drinks with their benefits will stop them from buying soft drinks altogether.

Food-stamp benefits may currently be used to buy “any prepackaged edible foods, regardless of nutritional value (e.g. soft drinks and confections),” according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program), the formal name of the food-stamp program, whose benefits are distributed by individual U.S. states. Items available in “fast-food restaurants and similar retail settings” cannot be purchased with food stamps.

A 2007 USDA report concluded that prohibiting the use of food stamps to purchase specific items would probably be pointless.

Read all »

Unfriendly Persuasion

Will the Labor Department disarm employers in their struggle with the unions? (Labor Watch, May 2013 – PDF here )

By Diana Furtchgott-Roth

Summary: At the behest of unions desperate for new members, the U.S. Labor Department plans to make a major regulatory shift. The change has no basis in existing law or precedent, and it will harm labor-management relations while costing billions of dollars. 

A shocking change in American labor relations is brewing at the U.S. Department of Labor, which is expected sometime soon to alter a major regulation. The change involves a new interpretation of the “advice exemption” of the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act. Specifically, businesses would have to disclose the names of, and fees paid to, attorneys and consultants who advise them on union-organizing activities. In turn, attorneys and consultants providing such advice would be required to disclose their client lists and the fees they receive.

In making this change, the administration would sweep away over a half-century of precedent and contravene both the clear intent of Congress and the law’s express language. This new regulation would violate Read all »

Richard Windsor, aka Lisa Jackson

What’s in the secret e-mails of the head of the EPA? (Green Watch, May 2013 – PDF here)

By Christopher C. Horner

Summary: Transparency used to be a treasured goal of the Left. But the current administration, especially where environmental issues are concerned, has worked hard to prevent sunlight from disinfecting its machinations. Recently, the discovery of secret e-mails may have prompted the resignation of EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

People on the Left say they love transparency—which they do, except when it inconveniences them, as it does increasingly today.

For a long time, the Left trumpeted transparency as a core value of liberalism. By the early years of the twentieth century, “open government” was a policy demanded by those who called themselves Progressives. Before Woodrow Wilson nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis coined a famous metaphor for transparency: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

Similarly, Justice William O. Douglas once quoted from a New York Review of Books article by historian Henry Steele Commager: “The generation that made the nation thought secrecy in government one of the instruments of Old World tyranny, and committed itself to the principle that a democracy cannot function unless the people are permitted to know what their government is up to.” That quotation has a near-perfect liberal pedigree: an iconic liberal jurist quoting an iconic liberal historian writing in an iconic liberal publication. Yet as with so many progressive agenda items, “transparency” proved to be about other people. Read all »

Contrary to the mainstream media’s reporting, Progress Kentucky, the left-wing super PAC that allegedly taped Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), has close ties to the Democratic Party. Although party officials have tried to distance themselves from the taping, which may have been illegal, the executive director of Progress Kentucky, Shawn Reilly, is a notable Democratic Party activist and veteran community organizer. As CRC discovered, Reilly was a delegate to the 2012 Democratic convention and was a past member of the state party’s executive committee. In 2007, he was a “field organizer” for Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, a group that reportedly silenced McConnell by heckling him at a public event that year. Progress Kentucky was also accused of racism after its tweets mocked the Chinese ethnicity of McConnell’s wife, former U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao.

Project Vote deputy director Amy Busefink is lobbying Texas lawmakers in an effort to prevent state officials from verifying if Texas voters are registered in multiple states, J. Christian Adams reports at PJMedia.com. Of course, Busefink shouldn’t be anywhere near electoral integrity issues: she was convicted two years ago of being a voter-fraud ringleader during an ACORN voter drive in Las Vegas. That wasn’t the first time Busefink was involved in shady electoral dealings. Even while under indictment in Nevada she ran the 2010 national voter drive for Project Vote, which was President Obama’s employer in 1992. Project Vote and ACORN, which went bankrupt in 2010, had long been indistinguishable.

Read all »

Going Soft on Juvenile Crime: How the MacArthur and Casey foundations distort youth offender policies

By Fred Lucas (Organization Trends, May 2013) (PDF here)

Summary: Although the young still commit outrageous crimes, two multi-billion-dollar foundations have spent years working to make the juvenile justice system more lenient. Now the Obama Justice Department has also joined in the effort.

The family of Antonio Torres didn’t feel better after the January 24 sentencing of James Lee Allen, now 18. In 2011 Torres was murdered at the age of 42 by a group of four teenagers in Oakland, California. Prosecutors said the armed teens were “hunting” for someone to rob. They stole a gold chain and an iPod from Torres before fatally shooting him in the back as he tried to run away. Allen didn’t shoot the gun that killed Torres, but he was charged as an adult with murder and robbery for participating in the crime, the Oakland Tribune reported.

Allen ultimately pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to 12 years, too short for the Torres family. “My concern is that he is going to come out [of prison] and hurt another family,” said Maria Torres. “They not only took my brother’s life away, they took a part of each of us.”

Some advocates would oppose ever trying these four offenders as adults, despite their horrific crime. Forget the question of whether 12 years is too light a sentence. These advocates do not want any incarceration for crimes committed by offenders under the age of 18, and their thinking has begun to influence our legal system.

Over the last eight years, the courts have made juvenile justice, even for the worst offenders, more and more lenient. This gradual evolution follows what Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has called, “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”

Those evolving standards have largely been driven by two left-wing philanthropies, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. These two funders have battled the get-tough-on-crime approach of the 1990s and pushed for alternatives to incarceration for youth offenders. They have also opposed trying minors as adults. These organizations and their allies have had their way in abolishing the death penalty for juveniles (thanks to Justice Kennedy), and eliminating—in most cases—life sentences for youth murderers. They have also forged a tight-knit relationship with the Obama Justice Department and swayed the thinking of a majority of states across the country (red and blue) on the issue of crime and punishment for minors.

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The R Street Institute, a pro-free market think tank based here in Washington, D.C., has hired the brilliant Zach Graves to serve in the newly created position of director of digital marketing.

Based in R Street’s headquarters, Graves will be responsible for the group’s online marketing, social media, blogger outreach and various other projects to elevate the organization’s brand in the digital space.

Prior to joining R Street, Graves was manager of new media at the Cato Institute where he had a very successful run overseeing Cato’s social media following across dozens of project feeds; outreach to bloggers and other think tanks for Cato’s policy research; online advertising on Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube.

It appears author Steven J. Milloy of JunkScience.com was right when he quipped that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “owns” the American Lung Association (ALA). Taxpayer money may be indirectly financing lobbying campaigns aimed at banning smoking in public places. Since 2001, the EPA has given the ALA more than $20 million in grants, and the ALA, in turn, has been passing on grant money to local governments to encourage such bans. For example, smoking is now banned on the beaches of Fenwick Island, Delaware, after its town council accepted a grant from the ALA. Officials in nearby Dewey Beach are planning to ban smoking on their beaches, too, and are seeking money from the ALA to promote the ban.

“A blockbuster congressional investigation of campaign finance activities by corporations, trade associations, and high net worth individuals may be coming,” warns Covington & Burling, a law firm that focuses on election law. According to its latest report, not only 501(c)(4) groups and trade associations may be congressional targets, but also 501(c)(3) nonprofits. The chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Carl Levin (D-Mich.), has announced he will “tackle … the use of secret money to fund political campaigns.” Levin is notoriously tough, and his new ranking member on the other side of the aisle is Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who is famous for his willingness to have Congress restrict political speech.

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The W.K. Kellogg Foundation: Subverting democracy and balkanizing America

By Kirk MacDonald (Foundation Watch, May 2013) (PDF here)

Summary: Founded in 1930 by breakfast cereal tycoon W.K. Kellogg with the goal of improving the lives of impoverished children, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation today funds a great deal of left-wing activism, especially attacks on so-called “white privilege” and “structural racism.”

Americans who insist that elections should be honest, fair, and free from undemocratic vote-rigging, and who believe it’s not unreasonable to require voters to provide valid photo ID before they mark a ballot, received a rude awakening last year. Advocates of honest voting were smeared as Jim Crow-era racists, and worse, by the Applied Research Center (ARC), a New York-based “racial justice think tank that uses media, research and activism to promote solutions.”
ARC produced a steady stream of vicious propaganda aimed at conservative and Tea Party groups like True the Vote through its www.ColorLines.com website. The site currently includes a collection of left-wing articles that promote organic food and vegetarianism, and blast proposed budget cuts, guns, anti-illegal immigration groups, and even singer Justin Timberlake, who is supposedly “appropriating black music.” ARC executive director Rinku Sen claimed that efforts such as implementing state level ID laws, and monitoring polling stations amounted to “attempts to deny the vote to communities of color.” (ARC was profiled in the March 2013 Foundation Watch.)

The think tank worked closely with the far-left Nation magazine in its campaign against so-called “voter suppression” and “voter intimidation,” and it has accepted grants from the Service Employees International Union for “consulting” ($200,000 in 2011), as well as the Tides Foundation ($1.1 million), and George Soros’s Open Society Institute ($715,000).

These donations were certainly generous, but they pale in comparison to the incredible $5.2 million in grants that were provided by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan, between 2010 and September 2012.
Writing in these pages six years ago, Capital Research Center senior fellow Martin Morse Wooster noted that the Kellogg Foundation “does not take the lead role in any of the areas it funds” and is “the most obscure—and least significant—of the big foundations,” and yet its funding represents a “reflexive, deeply entrenched liberalism.” Since that time, Kellogg launched an Orwellian-sounding, 5-year, $75 million “American Healing” initiative in 2010 that amounts to throwing money at radical activists and academics to combat so-called “structural racism” and “white privilege.”

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At PhilanthropyDaily.com, I have a new post on a gun-control group’s complaint that the federal budget doesn’t have enough loose change in it to grease the “bribes” necessary to buy the votes of Members of Congress.

“Bribery isn’t what it once was,” said an official with one of the major gun-control groups. “The government has no money. Once upon a time you would throw somebody a post office or a research facility in times like this. Frankly, there’s not a lot of leverage.”

Mayor Bloomberg also comes in for criticism. Read the full post here.