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He blamed union officials, who he said have repeatedly tried to delay negotiations in court unsuccessfully, including asking a judge at one point to jail Bing for contempt. Bing said he is sensitive to the rank-and-file city employees but said the city is in a “financial crisis”.

Bus driver Nelson earned $159,258 in 2009, including $109,892 in overtime and other pay. He and his colleague, driver Greg Tatman, who earned $125,598, were among the city’s top 20 earners for 2009, city records show.

They’re among the seven bus drivers who made more than $100,000 last year thanks to a union contract that lets the most senior drivers who have the highest base salaries get first crack at overtime.

Critics warn a living wage advantage for more than $500 billion in government contracts could harm small companies, with case studies showing cities that enacted similar policies in the 1990s faced major financial losses. Business groups who oppose the plan say also it would increase government procurement costs.

When the White House released its visitor logs last October, Stern was found to be the most frequent guest, stopping by 22 times—more than advisor John Podesta or former Majority Leader Tom Daschle—to visit Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, budget chief Pete Orszag, and seven times, President Obama.
Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) has requested that the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Channing D. Phillips, investigate Stern for the visits.

posted at 9:30 am on February 24, 2010 by Ed Morrissey via Hot Air The SEIU’s Andy Stern may still get his weekly tete-a-tete with the President’s staff, and the industry he represents may share something in common with the President besides a radical agenda.  A new poll by Pew Research shows that the labor movement’s popularity among Americans has plummeted over the last three years.  In January 2007, unions had a favorability gap of 27 points with a solid […]

Project Vote (a.k.a. Voting for America Inc.) is the voter registration/get out the vote arm of the ACORN empire of activism. Obama’s campaign paid another ACORN affiliate more than $800,000 to do voter work during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign.

Following the report Republicans slammed the proposal, with Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma referring to it as “backdoor card check.” Other critics, led by Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, worry the new rules would increase the cost of government contracting by as much as 20 percent, or more than $100 billion annually, while further slowing the procurement process.

But the Weekly has found, in a five-month investigation, that principals and school district leaders have all but given up dismissing such teachers. In the past decade, LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.

The latest findings expand on a report the committee issued last year, which said that ACORN used overlapping charitable organizations to cover up that they were using their public funding for partisan political ends. The new report details both tactics and financial transactions between ACORN and its affiliates.

“Perceptions that ACORN is a charitable organization are simply wrong and part of ACORN’s efforts to deceive the American people,” Issa said.