New Site Tracks $1.5 Billion in Public Union Political Spending Over Two Decades

The Center for Union Facts has launched a new website, www.PublicUnionFacts.com, to track more than $1.5 billion in public sector union political spending over the past two decades. It found that these unions give 90 percent of political funding to Democrats. Democrats in California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Oregon alone received more money from public unions than Republicans did nationwide.

"There's a growing disconnect between how public unions are spending money and what workers actually want," Charlyce Bozzello, the center’s communications director, said. "The breakdown of union members who support Democrats versus Republicans is likely not 90 to 10, as years of union spending would have us believe. With access to more facts, employees can hold their representatives accountable." The majority of union spending of $1.2 billion occurred at the state and local level. In all 50 states, public unions spent more on Democratic candidates than on Republicans, the center found. Of the $1.5 billion that was sent directly to Republican or Democrat parties or candidates, 90 percent went to Democrats.

The first of its kind, PublicUnionFacts.com provides an easily searchable database for employees to learn about the political spending of their unions. The site is part of a greater campaign to provide transparency of the nation’s labor movement. Employees can type their union name into the PublicUnionFacts.com database to learn about its political spending history. The site compiles 20 years of data on public-sector union political spending. More than 385,000 political contributions from nearly 5,000 labor unions have been made easily searchable and sortable for users. The site also features top analysis highlighting disproportionate amounts of member dues that unions have sent to Democratic causes over the last 20 years, the center notes. To date, public-sector unions are not required to file financial disclosures with the Labor Department, unlike most private-sector unions, which are required to do so. The best way to determine a union's spending habits is by finding out information on its political giving, the center notes. But this may prove difficult because the information is often spread across multiple difficult-to-access databases, which is why the center says it created PublicUnionFacts.com.

The site combines information from six different data sets covering both state and federal spending based on information provided by the National Institute on Money in Politics. The data was compared by hand-matching local unions with a national or international affiliate to identify union political spending at both the national and state level. In Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public workers were no longer required to make "fair share" payments to unions in lieu of joining the union as a full member. The court prohibited unions from forcing nonmembers to pay for collective bargaining and other nonpolitical expenses, ruling the mandatory fee violated the nonmembers’ First Amendment rights. "Now, workers can choose to keep the portion of their dues that would have gone to support predominantly left-leaning causes," the center says.

According to recent annual reports filed with the U.S. Department of Labor, within one year of the Janus ruling, two of the largest public sector unions in the country lost more than 90 percent of their fee-paying members. Since Janus, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) lost 98 percent of its agency fee-paying nonmembers in 2018. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) lost 94 percent of its fee-paying nonmembers. Combined, AFSCME and SEIU lost more than 210,000 agency fee members after the Janus ruling.

Unions reported little changes in their full membership numbers, with increases attributed to retirees joining. "And that's exactly why the Janus case was so important for worker freedom," Eric Boehm at Reason magazine wrote. "Individuals who choose to support a union can continue doing that, and those that do not want to fund union activities are no longer forced to do so. Far from being an outright attack on the right of workers to unionize – which is exactly what unions claimed the Janus case was – the Supreme Court's decision allows all workers to do as they please."

Ongoing lawsuits against unions include former fee payers seeking refunds, and individuals and groups challenging the unions’ ability to represent nonmembers or limit when former members can stop paying dues.

https://freebeacon.com/issues/new-site-tracks-1-5-billion-in-public-union-political-spending-over-two-decades/

U.S. Intelligence Institutionally Politicized Toward Democrats

Former CIA analyst says agencies dominated by liberals

The CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have become bastions of political liberals and the pro-Democratic Party views of intelligence personnel have increased under President Donald Trump, according to a journal article by a former CIA analyst. John Gentry, who spent 12 years as a CIA analyst, criticized former senior intelligence leaders, including CIA Director John Brenan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former deputy CIA director Michael Morell, along with former analyst Paul Pillar, for breaking decades-long prohibitions of publicly airing their liberal political views in attacking Trump. The institutional bias outlined in a lengthy article in the quarterly International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence risks undermining the role of intelligence in support of government leaders charged with making policy decisions.

Gentry stopped short of saying the widespread liberal bias of intelligence officials has influenced intelligence reports and products. However, he concludes that "bias may have crept into CIA analyses." "A considerable body of evidence, much of it fragmentary, indicates that many CIA people have left-leaning political preferences, but less evidence shows that political bias influences CIA analyses," Gentry concludes. In the past, intelligence politicization was defined as either skewing intelligence to fit biases or manipulating intelligence by those outside the intelligence community. "But in 2016 observers of U.S. intelligence began to wonder if the CIA's once-firm prohibition on partisan politics had changed, and to ponder whether a new kind of politicization had arisen: namely, institutionally embedded, partisan bias," Gentry wrote.

Gentry points to the activities of senior retired intelligence officials during the 2016 campaign that "universally" criticized then-candidate Trump and supported Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. "The attacks on Trump were unprecedented for intelligence officers in their substance, tone, and volume," he stated. "Critics went far beyond trying to correct Trump's misstatements about U.S. intelligence; they attacked him as a human being."

Gentry, currently a professor at Georgetown and Columbia Universities, provides a detailed analysis of whether the 16-agency U.S. intelligence community and the CIA in particular have become institutional partisans supporting the Democratic Party. He reached no definitive conclusion on whether intelligence reports and activities were politicized and found no proof "intelligence products have been politicized to mislead or to avoid helping President Trump." CIA spokesmen did not return emails seeking comment.

The article was written before the conclusions of the investigative report on Russian collusion by special counsel Robert Mueller were made public by Attorney General William Barr, who told Congress the Trump campaign was spied on by the U.S. government. The Justice Department is investigating whether the FBI and senior officials acted properly in launching a counterintelligence investigation of ties between President Trump and Russia based on information contained in a Democratic Party-funded dossier. Gentry said in an interview that he has not seen any movement within the intelligence community to address the institutional politicization. "My guess is the issue is not going to go away," he said.

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/u-s-intelligence-institutionally-politicized-toward-democrats/