The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is well known as the most politically-engaged and radically leftist labor union in the United States today. SEIU frequently co-partners with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) on various legislative and political events, and was a close partner of corrupt leftist advocacy group ACORN, but is now attempting to also steer the course of Republican politics.
The union also donated over $28 million to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, making it the largest single donor to the Obama campaign, and is known as a particularly ruthless union. In April 2010, the National Labor Relations Board’s regional office in Winston-Salem, North Carolina issued a federal complaint against a local SEIU chapter for maintaining an “annual objection” policy designed to force nursing home workers into full union dues payments against their will. In January 2011, The National Labor Relations Board issued a report finding that SEIU unlawfully threatened Kaiser Permanente employees with loss of wages and benefits if a rival union won the election and that SEIU had engaged in various acts of physical force and violence against supporters of a rival union.
Despite these strong-arm tactics and links with radical communists, SEIU is also successfully infiltrating the Republican Party (e.g., Ohio Rep. Steve LaTourette, pictured above, who “stood with SEIU members…."), a tactic devised by Andy Stern, the former SEIU head, who actively worked with George Soros and other conspirators to enact a broad range of legislation such as the unconstitutional Employee Free Choice Act, and ObamaCare (which the union now, hypocritically, seeks exemption from).
Most recently, in the state of California, SEIU is seeking to influence GOP primary elections by backing and bankrolling moderate Republicans running against conservatives. The California SEIU says 87,000 of its 700,000 members are registered Republicans. With redrawn legislative boundaries looming and the creation of the top-two primary system, SEIU’s new leader Dave Kieffer has said this is the perfect time to start helping candidates extricate themselves from the grip of party extremists. SEIU is expected to launch its second ad campaign this weekend in the districts of current GOP legislators its officials believe could support Brown’s tax package. “I feel the far right, the tea party, is hijacking my party, and it’s saddening,” said John Orr, a parking officer at California State University, Fullerton and a registered Republican. “I hope through this PAC, this effort and the open primary that moderates can regain their voice.”
Not satisfied with its stranglehold over the Democratic Party, the SEIU is now seeking to wrest control of the GOP. The SEIU Republican PAC, which they call the “Golden California Committee,” is a clear example of an orchestrated attempt to neutralize resistance to the radical leftist agenda, and is not an entirely unknown phenomenon.
The national SEIU body claims that “SEIU represents more than 300,000 Republican members and together we are working to build a pro-working family Republican Party — engaging Republicans on the issues that matter to working people, electing pro-working family Republican candidates, and running for office themselves.” In 2006, they held their first Republican Member Conference, an ad hoc committee made up of members named by the SEIU President. SEIU Republican activists have served on the Committee from affiliates in Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Florida, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Idaho, Washington State, California and Nevada. In 2008, SEIU donated over $100,000 to the Republican Governors Association (RGA), and in the 2010 election cycle, SEIU donated nearly $250,000 to the RGA. In complete and utter disregard for conservative values, the RGA sacrificed principles in favor of money when they invited SEIU to join the RGA’s National Committee, the organization’s inner circle.
In addition, SEIU publishes a monthly newsletter entitled The GOP Note, and boasts of successful efforts at lobbying numerous mayors and state legislators throughout the country. Unsurprisingly, they also appeal to the pro-union tradition of liberals’ two favorite GOP presidents — Abraham Lincoln (an advocate of expanded federal power, and from the following words, an apparent early internationalist, who said, “The strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family relation would be one uniting working people of all nations and tongues and kindreds,” and Dwight Eisenhower (a leftist whose usefulness to communist onjectives was documented by Robert Welch in The Politician), who said, “Only a fool would deprive working men and working women from their right to join the union of their choice.”
SEIU also boasts of the numerous Republican allies it has in Congress, most of whom are members of the centrist Republican Main Street Partnership, an outfit funded by George Soros and affiliated with the “Republicans Who Care PAC,” which boasts of including conspirator David Rockefeller (who admitted in his memoirs to advocating one world government), former Blackstone Group CEO and Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) President Pete Peterson, Trilateralist Brent Scowcroft, and former N.Y. Federal Reserve Chairman John Whitehead. These congressmen include Ohio Rep. Steve LaTourette (pictured above, under SEIU logo) who “stood with SEIU members to protect Medicaid, lower drug costs, and give health care workers a stronger voice in patient care”; Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), an advocate of minimum wage laws; Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.), one of eight Republicans to vote for cap-and-trade; Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), an ardent environmentalist; Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa); and Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), one of the most liberal Republican Senators. SEIU also boasts of supporting Governor Butch Otter (R-Idaho), who recently came under fire for his support of China.
SEIU also admits that they have made numerous attempts at courting and engaging Republican presidential candidates:
Throughout the presidential primaries, SEIU Republican members attended Republican candidate events and debates to ask where Republicans stand on expanding healthcare for all and creating a new American Dream for workers. SEIU members invited Republican candidates to walk a day in their shoes, sit down to talk one-on-one about the issues that matter and discuss their healthcare plans at SEIU’s Presidential Forum on Healthcare. Former Presidential candidate Governor Mike Huckabee met twice with SEIU members in New Hampshire and Roy Brill, a Republican SEIU member in the state, appeared on billboards asking candidates to walk a day in his shoes.
SEIU is not the only labor union seeking to tactfully infiltrate and influence Republican politics. USW, the United Steel Workers labor union, urges their Republican members to “tell their party to stop stripping their rights,” and warns that “if you are a Republican, there is nothing wrong with that, but as union members, you should demand that your party stop their attacks on your rights as union working class people. Many USW members are Republicans; we should use them to communicate our interest to their party.”
Just as liberal organizations such as Planned Parenthood, the League of Conservation Voters, and the American Civil Liberties Union have successfully courted a significant number of Republican elected officials, the labor unions are attempting to utilize the same tactic to neutralize and eliminate all opposition to their nefarious agenda within the Republican Party, which has been generally supportive of right-to-work, and other free market, pro-growth policies within recent years. It is up to advocates of constitutionalism, liberty, freedom, and the free market to counter the threat posed by the SEIU and to work to advance true conservative principles within the Republican Party (as well as other parties).
