If transparency is one of the Obama administration's highest orders of business, it hasn't made much of an appearance at the Department of Labor (DOL). On January 20, immediately following the inauguration ceremony, President Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, issued a memorandum advising federal agencies to extend by 60 days the effective date of all regulations not yet published in the Federal Register. That gave the DOL under Secretary Hilda Solis exactly the wiggle room it needed to rescind new requirements to the annual financial reporting form for larger unions, LM-2, finalized during the waning days of the Bush administration.
Readers of Union Corruption Update may have noticed something recently: a shortage of references to criminal investigations by the Labor Department's Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS). That's not a figment of the imagination. The main source of these references - 
Like any cabinet-level agency, the U.S. Department of Labor under the Obama administration has its share of political cronies. And the department has given more than a few indications that it intends to remake DOL into a vehicle for union advocacy. The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTW) for the past year has sought the full story. It's one of the less publicized aspects of the apparent lack of accountability in the current administration. This past December, attorneys for the Springfield, Va.-based foundation 
It's no secret that many union-sponsored pension plans lack the assets needed to cover liabilities. And a major reason for this lies with the gullibility, and on due occasion dishonesty, of their fiduciaries. Major case in point: the theft of tens of millions of dollars from six union pension plans entrusted to Chicago-based equity fund manager 
