Tyrone Freeman, the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) California Chapter 6434, was found guilty on 14 counts of embezzlement last week, and faces a maximum of 180 years in prison when his sentence is announced in April.
Hand-picked by SEIU president Andrew Stern (shown) to “consolidate” numerous local chapters in California, Freeman succeeded in expanding membership among home healthcare workers through a combination of persuasion, coercion, and fraud. All he was doing was following the dictum of his boss: “We use the power of persuasion first. If it doesn’t work, we try the persuasion of power.”
Along the way Freeman lavished himself and his family with union funds extracted from workers making an average of $9 an hour. Some of his schemes involved buying $175 glasses of cognac, $250 bottles of wine, and a lavish — all-expenses-paid-for-by-the-union — trip to the NFL’s Pro Bowl in Hawaii for him and friends.
These were just incidentals. The egregious theft of funds involved supporting a golf tournament to the tune of $418,000, billed as a fundraiser for the union but which turned out to fall more than $100,000 short of even meeting its expenses. He arranged for his union to pay companies owned by his wife and his mother-in-law amounts exceeding 10 percent of the union’s entire annual budget. This was in addition to his $213,000 salary and his wife’s $50,000, earned while she was a union staffer. Some of the companies the union “hired” were shell corporations, or didn’t even exist, according to court records. For instance, one company, the Long Term Care Housing Corporation, listed a Bell Gardens address that is owned by Freeman’s former chief of staff, who no longer lives there.
The strategies used in California to grow the membership were similar to those used in Connecticut. As reported by Health Bridge Management, the tactics of intimidation were horrifyingly successful:
July 17, 2012: In the hours leading up to the strike by the New England Health Care Employees Union, District 1199 SEIU (the Union) against five Health Bridge Management Health Care Centers in Connecticut, Union members engaged in multiple illegal and dangerous acts against Center residents.
Residents’ wristbands were removed and discarded. Names on patient doors and wheelchairs were changed. Stickers indicating how residents could safely be fed were removed. The names of residents in memory care units were switched. The perpetrators took these actions deliberately, with the clear knowledge that they would put residents at severe risk of receiving the wrong medications, improper dosages of medications, or foods they should not eat.
This is par for the course with SEIU in its “persuasion” strategy to unionize — terrorize — homecare workers into joining the union. The article at Health Bridge went on to explain:
These acts are among the most serious violations listed in the state’s Public Health Code — considered class A and B violations, on a scale of A to F with A being the most serious….
They put some of Connecticut’s elderly and most vulnerable residents in danger, and [this occurred] at several different Centers across the State.
They also bear more than a passing resemblance to strike-related sabotage against nursing homes during a strike by the same Union in 2001, during which the Hartford Courant reported that “equipment and sterile medical supplies had been tampered with, patient identification bracelets were removed, drugs were missing and a door to a supply room containing oxygen had been glued shut.”
When Ivan Osorio, writing at openmarket.org about Freeman’s conviction, asked rhetorically if Andrew Stern knew about any of this and further mused whether the incoming secretary of the Department of Labor, who the president is about to appoint, would do anything about it, his question lacked little, if any, understanding of what is really going on and what type of people he is addressing.
Trevor Loudon, a New Zealander and author of Barack Obama and the Enemies Within, devoted many pages of the results of his investigations to the subversive links tying Obama to radical socialist and communist activists over the years. Stern’s name kept popping up as a highly regarded and effective radical in his attempts to collectivize the healthcare industry. This brief snippet may suffice, from page 263 of Loudon’s monumental resource: “Stern is one of the US labor movement’s new breed of leftist leaders trained by the Chicago based and Democratic Socialists of America-controlled Midwest Academy.”
And from the discoverthenetworks.com website about Stern comes an understanding of just how strong a link there is between Stern and the White House:
In 2008 Stern supported Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy. His SEIU spent approximately $60.7 million to help elect Obama to the White House, deploying some 100,000 pro-Obama volunteers during the campaign.
Stern went on to become an immensely influential advisor to the Obama administration. As of October 30, 2009, Stern had visited the White House 22 times since Obama’s inauguration — more than any other individual.
Wikipedia updated that record, noting that through February 2011, Stern had visited the White House 53 times.
Is there any doubt that whoever replaces Freeman as head of the California SEIU, or whoever is named the new Department of Labor secretary, will have been vetted by the socialist radical Andrew Stern? Freeman was expendable. He got caught. Stern is part of Obama’s inner circle. He is exempt from prosecution no matter how vile his purposes, strategies, and tactics may be. That’s the real lesson.
Photo of Andrew Stern: AP Images
A graduate of Cornell University and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
