Bailed-Out Bank Uses Taxpayer Cash to Fight Employee Free Choice

by Seth Michaels, Jan 28, 2009

When Congress entrusted billions of dollars to banks last fall, it wasn’t with the expectation our taxpayer money would be used to hustle for political campaign cash, spread disinformation and fight legislation aimed at improving the economy for everyone. Yet that’s exactly what Bank of America did last fall, coordinating CEOs and lobbyists to oppose the Employee Free Choice Act.

According to reporting by Sam Stein in The Huffington Post, within three days of being approved for $25 billion in taxpayers’ money, Bank of America officials hosted an Oct. 17 conference call with key corporate leaders to strategize about the upcoming election and how to fight the Employee Free Choice Act in the next Congress. Stein obtained audio of the call, led by mega-lobbyist Rick Berman and Bernie Marcus, founder and former CEO of Home Depot. The call, which included major finance industry figures and representatives from big corporations (including AIG, itself a recipient of $85 billion in taxpayer-funded loans), featured apocalyptic rhetoric and demands that those on the call donate to anti-Employee Free Choice Act politicians. (Click here and check out the audio samples from the call.)

The audio Stein obtained features a hysterical Marcus calling the Employee Free Choice Act “the demise of a civilization” and insisting that corporate honchos who didn’t donate big sums to anti-worker incumbent senators “should be shot, should be thrown out of their [expletive] jobs.”

In the audio of the call, Berman lays out the corporate lobbyists’ post-election strategy: to try and scare members of the Senate up for election in 2010, hoping to create the appearance of unpopularity and weaken senators’ resolve. The disinformation campaign is already under way, with a bevy of anti-Employee Free Choice Act front groups dropping huge sums of money from undisclosed corporate donors into TV ads and lobbying.

Why are these industry leaders so scared of the Employee Free Choice Act? Because they know the same thing that the bill’s proponents know: that right now, U.S. labor laws are badly tilted in favor of bosses, and under the Employee Free Choice Act, workers, not companies, would have a say in forming a union and bargaining for health care, pensions, fair wages and better working conditions. Bank of America and its fellow corporate cronies have been the only winners in our economy for a long time, and they’ll stop at nothing to keep it that way.

The better question, of course, is why, after being slated for billions from the federal government, Bank of America used its time and resources to coordinate a disinformation campaign aimed at soliciting political donations and preventing a stronger, fairer economy and the freedom to form unions and bargain. It’s a sign of the hubris and lack of accountability in the corporate community that Bank of America thought they could get away with this—and it’s a sign that we need the Employee Free Choice Act to restore fairness to the economy.

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