Candidate Of Light and Hope Favors Deregulation?

It looks like Barack Obama has taken a page from the Republican playbook, as he's pledged to loosen the federal reins on American business.  And which industry does the Senator believe to be in most dire need of deregulation?  Nuclear power?  Healthcare?  Financial Services?

Nah - that's the "old politics".  A New Kind of Politician deregulates organized labor.  Specifically the historically corrupt, mobbed up Teamsters union.

Sen. Barack Obama won the endorsement of the Teamsters earlier this year after privately telling the union he supported ending the strict federal oversight imposed to root out corruption, according to officials from the union and the Obama campaign.

It's an unusual stance for a presidential candidate. Policy makers have largely treated monitoring of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters as a legal matter left to the Justice Department since an independent review board was set up in 1992 to eliminate mob influence in the union.

As for whether Obama's unusual endorsement bait represents a reasonable policy shift, the campaign notes that the Teamsters are in fact less mobbed up than in the past.

... John Coli, vice president for the Teamsters central region, who brokered the Teamsters endorsement, said Sen. Obama was "pretty definitive that the time had come to start the beginning of the end" of the three-member independent review board that investigates suspect activity in the union. Mr. Coli said that Sen. Obama conveyed that view in a series of phone conversations and meetings with Teamsters officials last year.

Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor confirmed the candidate's position in a statement to The Wall Street Journal, saying that Sen. Obama believes that the board "has run its course," because "organized crime influence in the union has drastically declined." Mr. Vietor said Sen. Obama took that position last year.
...
[Teamsters President James] Hoffa has spent much of the past month campaigning for Sen. Obama in Pennsylvania and Indiana, which holds its primary Tuesday. Mr. Hoffa has toured the state in a noisy brigade of 18-wheel trucks, stopping at warehouses and distribution centers along the way to praise Sen. Obama.

The special oversight to which the Teamsters are subjected was voluntary, a condition they accepted in order to escape a racketeering charge 20 years ago.

... Teamsters agreed to federal oversight in 1989, signing a consent decree to settle a racketeering lawsuit brought by the Justice Department. The consent decree required the direct election of the union president and other officers by rank and file members, in an election overseen by a court-appointed election officer. (Before, the president was elected by delegates.) It also set up a three-member independent review board to investigate corruption within the union.

But Teamster corruption and mob ties are a thing of the past, right?

Teamsters officials say that over the past 16 years, the influence of organized crime has been largely eliminated from the union, and the consent decree is now an unnecessary burden. The union says it spends $6 million a year to comply with the decree.

The review board's caseload has dropped significantly over the years, to eight cases in 2007, from 70 in 1992. In 2006, one union member was permanently barred from the union for associating with a known member of organized crime.

And if they've managed to whittle down the rate of suspicious incidents to a mere eight/year under a watchful Justice Department, just imagine how squeaky clean they could be if everyone just left them alone.