Reply #2: Is that the SAME Don Todd... [View All]

[Earth Bound Misfit]

"This financial restitution, as well as the convictions and indictments, highlight the vital role OLMS plays in protecting America's union members," said Deputy Assistant Secretary for Labor-Management Standards Don Todd. "We continue to be proud of our work to eliminate wrongdoing against unions, and our efforts have resulted in the successful prosecution of almost 850 individuals since 2001. We also have obtained almost 900 indictments and obtained court orders of restitution for more than $103 million in that time."
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http://www.aflcio.org/joinaunion/upload/landrum_griffin.pdf
Based on available information, Don Todd had never worked in government prior to arriving at the Labor Department in early 2001. He also appears to have little or no experience as an administrator. Not only does he have no known legal training but some employees who work for him believe he never attended college.

He lacks other skills, too, such as an accounting background or familiarity with administrative issues facing labor organizations that one might look for in a person chosen to run a $40 million plus agency with responsibility for overseeing the governance and financial integrity of the entire American labor movement.

But Todd had decades of experience in campaign communications and propaganda. It was clear from the beginning that he would rely heavily on those skills during his tenure at Labor. Todd’s initial efforts centered on reshaping the OLMS Web site and uploading literally millions of pages of extremely detailed information about the finances of individual labor organizations. He also instituted a data base beginning January 1, 2001, listing all legal actions taken in federal or state courts against any official or employee of a labor union alleged to have violated a law relating to OLMS jurisdiction.

What value this had in helping union members understand the activities of their unions is unclear. What is clear is that the Bush appointees at the Labor Department used the data heavily in statements they made about unions and that the data was used even
more heavily by outside organizations, which spent millions of dollars to publicize union corruption and misconduct...

In the early months of the second Bush administration, Don Todd was chosen to run the Office of Labor-Management Standards. Todd was neither an attorney nor an individual with extensive experience in labor issues. Many elements of his background remain unclear and he is one of only a few deputy assistant secretaries in the department who never posted a biography on the department website despite his more than six-year tenure in that position.

There are some things about Todd’s background, however, that are clear. Since at least the late 1970s he has been involved in the strident attack side of Republican campaign politics.

Todd’s most notable public moment came in 1988 when Lee Atwater asked him to head opposition research for the Republican National Committee. There he unearthed the fact that an inmate in the Massachusetts prison system had committed a murder while on a furlough he had been granted by prison authorities in return for information he provided against other inmates. At Todd’s urging, Atwater convinced the Bush campaign to make the ad a center piece of the George H.W. Bush campaign for president against Michael Dukakis.The ad was named after the inmate whose story Todd had discovered, Willie Horton, and was widely credited for Bush’s 1988 victory. In return, Todd was named the “RNC MAN OF THE YEAR.”

It did not take the new team long to move forward in adopting the policies that the assistant secretary in charge of the programs in the first Bush administration, Bob Guttman, had threatened to resign over. Their strategy appears to have had two principal objectives:

1)Greatly increase the time, effort, and expense to labor unions, their officers, and employees of complying with department reporting requirements.

2)Use information gleaned from Labor Department investigations of union officials and employees along with data from expanded union reporting requirements to launch a public relations effort to discredit unions and weaken their ability to organize and act on behalf of their members.