You mean you shouldn't go after corrupt union leaders unless you are a Democrat like JFK and RFK?
BTW, Chavez's error was Ron Carey's as well.
***** The Fight at UPS: The Teamsters' Victory and the Future of the "New Labor Movement" by Dan La Botz
...Following his own vision, Carey pushed his olive branch strategy as far as he could. Only when most Old Guard Teamster leaders made it clear that they wanted nothing to do with Carey, and moreover that they would do everything they could to sabotage both his regime and union reform in general, did Carey challenge the Old Guard by abolishing the regional Teamster Conferences that formed their power base. The Teamster Conferences represented a great drain on the union's economic resources, served no useful function, and helped prop up Carey's political opponents.
Among its many challenges, the Carey administration faced one particularly difficult problem: the handling of corrupt local unions. Where the U.S. Justice Department or the Carey administration had removed corrupt union officials, the Teamsters International union had to take over the unions and run them, a practice known as trusteeship. Out of about 600 local unions, by 1997 approximately sixty unions had been put in receivership. (The Courts directly oversaw two trusteed locals.)
While corrupt local unions had usually been dominated by the mob, employers and corrupt officers, the problem of corruption often reached down into the membership. Corrupt officers may have involved some local members in labor-peace payoffs, embezzlement from health, welfare or pension funds, extortion, hijacking, robbery, gambling, drugs, prostitution or other crimes. The majority of rank-and-file members were often fearful of gangsters, union officials and the employers, ignorant of their union rights and without any experience in union democracy.
The goal of a good trustee is to weed out the crooks, establish democratic functioning of the union, and help to develop local leaders who can manage their own affairs. Under any circumstances it would have been difficult to find scores of honest, reform-minded, effective, strong leaders to undertake this difficult work. Unfortunately, Carey appointed some trustees and trustee supervisors who came over from the old regime when he held out the olive branch, and who are not committed to union reform. Partly because of this, the clean-up and reform of the sixty trusteed locals has not been altogether successful....
<http://solidarity.igc.org/teamster/teamster.htm> *****
Consequently, Carey didn't survive long as the Teamster president. -- Yoshie
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