Tom Daly, the Orange County Democrat loved by Republican businessmen, is at the center of a nasty dispute between the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and longtime OC labor leader Raymond L. Cordova.
Cordova, chairman of South County Labor, announced in an email last night that his “brothers and sisters” in LA booted his group from its membership after Cordova personally endorsed Daly's campaign to win a seat in the state Assembly.
Most California labor activists have never trusted Daly, a former Anaheim mayor and county clerk-recorder, whose method of fighting Republicans is to dine, drink and laugh with them.
]
Not surprisingly, labor groups preferred the candidacy of Julio Perez in the June election won by Daly and it angered them when Cordova's Daly endorsement appeared in a massive California Chamber of Commerce independent expenditure.
In case you've been out of the country for the last 40 years, please know that the Chamber is the bitter enemy of public employee unions that Cordova is supposed to cherish.
In his announcement, Cordova says he defended himself by telling LA labor leaders that he did not give the Chamber permission to use his name, although last time I checked the U.S. Constitution did not require them to get it especially given that he did indeed endorse Daly.
South County Labor is now affiliated with UA Local 250, where Cordova says he will continue to “serve as an education arm of the Trade Labor Movement and bring labors (sic) message to the local communities.”
Cordova has his fans but also Democratic Party opponents who have believed for years that he uses his position to aid personal friends at the expense of progressive policy advancements that benefit working class citizens.
How intense is the Chamber's desire to see Daly's election?
The Republican-tltling group has encouraged GOP voters in this race to vote against the Republican, Joe Moreno, and for Daly.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
