The looters liberals ignore:
Part II
Michelle Malkin (archive)
August 27, 2003
Three months ago,
this column
wondered if the
New York Times
would ever cover the
abominable Democrat
teachers' union scandal in
Florida. Investigators from the
FBI and Miami-Dade's Public
Corruption Task Force raided
the powerful United Teachers
of Dade headquarters at the
end of April. In July, they
raided the Tallahassee home
of union President Pat
Tornillo.
This week, Tornillo -- the Ken
Lay of the Left -- finally
confessed to massive looting
of teachers' union dues.
Here, in its 69-word entirety,
is what the nation's paper of
selective record found fit to
print on Aug. 26: "Pat Tornillo,
the longtime leader of the
Miami-Dade County teachers
union who had been accused
of billing the union for
$650,000 of luxuries, pleaded
guilty to filing a false tax
return and mail fraud in
exchange for a two-year
prison sentence. Court
records showed he billed the
union for four Caribbean
vacations, several cruises, a
trip to the 2000 Olympics in
Sydney and other first-class
travel expenses."
The Times' news brief,
recycled from an Associated
Press dispatch, was buried on
page A16.
The national significance of
this public education
corruption should have been
screamingly obvious to the
scribes at the Times. With a
new school year opening and
renewed cries of chronic
public school underfunding,
the Miami-Dade fiasco
belongs on the front page.
The cash-strapped
Miami-Dade public school
district is the fourth largest in
the nation. The implications of
Tornillo's pending
imprisonment -- and the
indelible taint the scandal has
left on the Democrats'
campaign cash flow -- are
even more newsworthy.
The four-decade imperial
reign of Tornillo has had a
profound influence on Florida
politics. He led the nation's
first statewide teachers'
strike, built the largest labor union in the South,
amassed a $4 million annual payroll for his
organization, lavished Democrat Party coffers with
those union funds, and wielded his clout in dozens
of Democrat elections from school board to
governor. In last year's Democratic gubernatorial
race alone, Tornillo's union and its local affiliates
donated nearly $300,000 to the state Democrat
Party, plus more than $50,000 in in-kind donations
and more than $15,000 in direct contributions to its
favored (and ultimately losing) candidate, Bill
McBride. Tornillo lent the McBride campaign two
top union officials and secretly spent more than $2
million on McBride political ads.
When he wasn't bullying union members into
sending students home with notes endorsing
Democrat candidates and causes, Tornillo oversaw
a disastrous spending binge on real estate and
used the union's political and economic clout to
secure lucrative construction and insurance
contracts for cronies. Miami Herald reporters
unearthed records showing "how Tornillo lived the
life of royalty on the union's dime, expensing
everything from round-the-world vacations, $20,000
hotel bills and antique furniture. The union also
paid for his phone, cable and power bills, his
housekeeper and his home insurance."
While teachers pleaded for pay increases and
fought layoff measures, Tornillo used their union
dues (at $843 per year, they're the highest in the
nation) to buy tailored suits from Hong Kong and
python-print pajamas from Neiman-Marcus. The
Herald also reported that after Tornillo returned in
1995 from an extravagant African safari junket with
executives of a troubled health maintenance
organization, Health Insurance Plan of Greater New
York, he awarded the company a $195 million
insurance contract against the recommendation of
union staff.
Rank-and-file educators and parents have
demanded federal disclosure rules to stop future
teachers' union plundering. Damaris Daugherty,
founder of the Teacher Rights Advocacy Coalition
in Miami, testified before a Senate committee in
June:
"We need federal legislation that will wrest from (the
United Teachers of Dade) and similar corrupt
unions the power they have inappropriately
usurped from the workers. We need you to come to
the aid of workers in this country so that workers
can reclaim their organizations and return them to
their lofty goals. Without federal intervention,
corrupt union executives will continue to manage
dues monies as their personal expense accounts."
Will the New York Times editorial writers -- never
ones to miss drum-beating about disclosure when it
comes to corporate looters -- support the workers?
Or will they stand aloof with the union thugs in
snakes' pajamas?
8 responses total.
This seems like an internal union scandal. I don't see that it deserves the same kind of coverage as, say, the Oakland school board scandal that just broke. In that case, it was taxpayer money being used to fund expensive vacations.
It deserves the same kind of coverage the corruption in a Teamsters local would get.
"Absolute power corrupts absolutely" comes to mind.
Re #1: Scandal, yes, internal, no. It's a case of the public's money (extracted by the union shop under threat of strike) being used to feather people's nests and oppose the public interest as well as that of the teachers. As long as the teachers are employed by the government (taxpayers), it's a public issue.
Well, yes and no. It's only taxpayer money in the sense that anything a teacher buys with his/her salary is bought with "taxpayer money." Don't get me wrong, they should go after this guy, but I don't see how it's materially different than any other union scandal.
(I wouldn't be arguing this, except that pvn's title for this item suggests he's arguing that because one teacher's union local is corrupt, we need to cut public school funding.)
(I'm suggesting that throwing more money at the problem is not the solution and never has been. It just tends to cause the above mentioned and similar. Look around, often for example the most modern building in a school system is the "administration" building. Often disproportionate amount of money/staff is "administration". Only an insane person keeps doing the same thing expecting different results.)
oh...i absolutely agree that school monies move in the wrong direction.
You have several choices: