image courtesy IBEW

Paul Blumenthal at the Sunlight Foundation has a list of  bailout fund recipients that spent money lobbying in the 4th quarter of ’08.  Near the top of the list are AIG and Bank of America, who — as Sam Stein reports  — were on the same October 17 call where Home Depot’s Bernie Marcus said CEOs who didn’t give money to oppose Employee Free Choice "should be shot; should be thrown out of their goddamn jobs."  Bank of America hosted the call along with Rick "how’s the wife and kids" Berman, three days after taking $25 billion in bailout money. 

Kagro recalls the enthusiasm of the GOP for the Istook Amendment of the 1990s.  It targeted non-profits and "left-leaning" organizations and tried to prohibit them from lobbying lest it "lead to exploding deficits."  "Where’s the Republican opposition to this wasteful use of public dollars now?" he wants to know.

Matt Cooper says there is one part of the business community that won’t be jumping on Berman’s anti-Employee Free Choice bandwagon — private equity.  According to Private Equity Council, in 2007  "the top 20 public pension funds, representing nearly 10 million retirees in states including California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, had a collective private equity investment of nearly $140 billion."  It would be a really painful time to have that yanked I suppose.

Peter Laarman calls on the religious community to help pass Employee Free Choice:

For a long time we’ve been hearing that the Religious Right played the same role in maintaining nearly 30 years of Republican hegemony that the labor movement once played in maintaining Democratic hegemony. The Religious Right is now in some considerable disarray, though by no means disabled. What better time, and what better way, for religious progressives to help spur a big turn in our politics than to lend some help right now in restoring the central role of a progressive labor movement in advancing social justice?

Preachers, start your engines!

Gregg Sargent says Obama will host labor leaders at the White House tomorrow where he will sign "executive orders that are friendly to organized labor."  No word yet on which Republican is holding up the Hilda Solis nomination.  David Atkins (thereisnospoon) continues his quest to unearth the culprit and I should read my own blog more often.

Meanwhile, union membership nationwide is up for the second year in a row.  Unionization in the South held steady despite the economic downturn, but is still at 5.3 percent compared to a national average of 12.4 percent.  I’m going to keep linking to this article until everybody reads it, but it is important for big unions to be able to leverage their national influence to help organize workers in the South, where 54% of the country’s black population lives and right-to-work laws make unionization exceedingly difficult.