October 28, 2010: Labor Leader Reverses Position, Says DISCLOSE Act Would Be ‘Good for the System’

In light of a flood of recent media advertisements attacking Democratic candidates paid for by corporate donations, and recent media stories revealing that the US Chamber of Commerce may be using foreign monies to pay for political attack ads against candidates it opposes (see October 2010), AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka says he now believes the country would have been better off if Congress had managed to pass the DISCLOSE Act, a bill that would have forced the disclosure of the identities of corporate and union donors for campaign purposes (see July 26-27, 2010). Trumka and his labor union organization did not support the DISCLOSE Act when it was up for consideration, and Democrats were unable to break a Republican filibuster of the bill in the Senate. “That’d be good for the system, I think,” Trumka tells reporters. “Because the system is awash—there’s more money in the system than there was oil in the Gulf, quite frankly. [Trumka is referring to the recent catastrophic spill of crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico by BP, a multinational oil corporation.] It’s from people that you don’t know. You eventually find out I guess, but it’s this mysterious money coming in and targeting at three, four, five times what either of the candidates are doing.” Trumka says that the union organization never opposed disclosure as an objective: “What we did was say if you’re going to do it, make sure it applies to everybody—that we were being totally disadvantaged while other people weren’t being disadvantaged.” However, three weeks ago, Trumka released a statement saying that the AFL-CIO “must reluctantly oppose [the DISCLOSE Act] because it would impose extraordinarily costly and impractical new record-keeping and reporting obligations on thousands of labor and other non-profit membership organizations with regard to routine inter-affiliate payments that bear little or no connection with public communications about federal elections.” AFL-CIO political director Karen Ackerman says: “What’s heartbreaking is there’s an imbalance here. So there’s not an equal playing field with the amount of money that corporate America has to protect their own interests, and protect their tax breaks, and protect their trade deals, and protect their profit-making… there are not comparable institutions or interests—moneyed-interests—on the side that represents working people.” [TPMDC, 10/12/2010]