"First they ignore you, then they fight you...."

Via TomPaine.com I learned of a column by Marie Cocco in the March 29 Newsday (NY) showing that

[s]upporters of President George W. Bush's plan to privatize part of Social Security are losing the public relations war. Some of them have decided to fight dirty.

What's happened is that organized labor "is enjoying a rare moment of success." Through demonstrating and lobbying, the AFL-CIO has

managed to get some big investment firms to back out of business coalitions that provide financial and lobbying support for the White House Social Security effort. The firms manage billions in union pension assets.

And, one by one, they've been deciding that their union business is a plump bird in hand compared with the uncertainty of a deal on Social Security promoted by Bush.

Labor, that is, is doing what corporations have been doing all along: Using its financial muscle to advance its interests. And Big Business and its White House toadies, used to having no competition, don't like it one bit.

Two top Republicans on the House Education and Workforce Committee recently demanded a Labor Department investigation into union political activity on Social Security. The stated reason for this interest by the panel's chairman, John Boehner of Ohio, and the head of its subcommittee on employer-employee relations, Sam Johnson of Texas, is that organized labor's persistent protests against the Bush plan raise questions about whether laws have been broken. ...

[T]hey sought an inquiry into one issue: whether labor pressure on financial firms breaches the "fiduciary duty" that union pension funds owe to beneficiaries.

This loony argument was apparently dreamed up by one Derrick Max, a top lobbyist for the business groups being hurt by the union campaign. He has argued "to anyone who would listen" that

the unions had breached their "fiduciary duty" to choose fund managers solely for financial reasons.

But not only doesn't the charge apply to the AFL-CIO (it runs no pension fund and thus has no "fiduciary duty"), it's ridiculous even applied to individual unions that do have funds: To be even remotely sensible by stretching of the law, the charge would have to be based on the claim that lobbying for dismantling Social Security is in the best interest of beneficiaries. If instead you maintain that such a dismantling is actually harmful to beneficiaries, you could argue that by not opposing such lobbying the unions would be failing that same "fiduciary duty."

(Interestingly, the term "fiduciary duty," while usually equated with "maximization of return" nowadays, actually refers to a requirement to act in the best interests of those for who you are a trustee. There is no reason why such interests must be financial gain and even less reason why the union whose members are the beneficiaries should be bound by such a limitation. After all, don't the beneficiaries have the "freedom," the "choice," to determine what they think is in their best interest?)

To show you how absurd this whole thing is, Boehner and Johnson even raised the claim that unions' public protests against sacrificing Social Security to the whims of Wall Street may violate a ban on "secondary" picketing! Now, the rules about secondary labor actions are rather complex, but one thing they're all concerned with is an on-going labor-management dispute, not public policy issues.

But logic and reason, of course, are not the point: Power is. The intent here is not actually to win some idiotic prosecution and no way is it to protect union members' pensions. (Feel free to giggle at the notion.) It's about trying to browbeat unions, to make them drain resources and energy into defending themselves, to make them back off. It is, in short, a political version of a SLAPP, and it's just as underhanded. As Cocco says in closing,

[m]aybe there's been some dark plot by organized labor to bring Wall Street to its knees and harm its own members' pensions in the process.

Or maybe this is just what it seems to be: a union lobbying campaign that has so far turned out to be more effective than the one business mounted. In the logic of Washington, it's payback time - with public resources used for the retaliatory hit.

But it does bear repeating one more time, just to help keep it in mind: This is happening not because we're losing but because, at least on this, we're winning.