Transparently opaque

Incompetence or another of the Obama administration’s stonewalling tactics? The Office of Labor Management Statistics has yet to release its annual report on union corruption.

The Office of Labor Management Statistics (OLMS) was supposed to release an annual report tracking labor unions and evidence of corruption in union leadership in January 2010 but still hasn’t released the document.

OLMS, which falls under the Department of Labor, has released no such tracking report since George W. Bush’s administration, something that has the conservative nonprofit organization Americans for Limited Government (ALG) up in arms. ALG filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the 2009 report, and OLMS denied the group’s request by saying it needed more time to complete the report. Originally, however, those reports were publicly available on the OLMS website.

ALG’s current head of research, Don Todd, who led OLMS during the Bush administration, told The Daily Caller he doubts it would be too difficult for the Obama administration to release that information, as they’re supposed to keep track of it all year long. He also said that this administration’s failure to release the report is “freakishly incompetent.” He suspects politics is to blame.

“It’s got to be a political decision,” Todd said in a phone interview.

Not a surprising conclusion, given that Hilda Solis, the Secretary of Labor, has historically been a strong partisan of organized labor. When she was nominated by Obama for the post, she had previously served several terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, where she racked up a perfect 100% AFL-CIO voting record in her last year as a congress-critter.

Of course, there is a delicious irony in voting 100% of the time in favor of organized labor’s platform, while apparently remaining uninterested in the well-established history of labor leaders’ fleecing of the rank and file, the ties of some unions to organized crime, and the increasing violence manifested by outfits such as SEIU. Why, a cynical sort of fellow might even advance the notion that’s Ms. Solis’ ostensibly pure-hearted commitment to labor had more to do with votes and power than with the plight of the working man.

Release the report, Secretary Solis. What have you got to hide?