- Co-founder of America Coming Together (ACT) – the Shadow Party’s labor wing and its get-out-the-vote machine
- Helped pioneer the New Labor movement, which seeks to organize government workers – the fastest-growing and most politically leftwing sector of the US workforce.
- One of five key labor leaders in the Shadow Party – including Andrew Stern, John J. Sweeney, Gerald McEntee, and Gina Glantz – all of whom represent the rising power of the leftwing government unions now dominating American labor.
- Former Political Director of the AFL-CIO
Steve Rosenthal and feminist activist Ellen R. Malcolm co-founded America Coming Together (ACT) on August 8, 2003. Funded largely by government unions – such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) – ACT is the richest and most powerful of the Seven Sister organizations forming the core of the Shadow Party.
Focusing its efforts on 17 designated “swing” or “battleground” states, ACT provides the Shadow Party with foot soldiers – including thousands of volunteers and as many as 2000 full-time paid canvassers – to identify and mobilize likely Democrat voters, both by phone and in person.
The Shadow Party has taken an unusually aggressive approach to its voting drive. According to its Web site, ACT’s canvassers go door-to-door, using intrusive, high-pressure tactics. Not only do they register voters, but they compile extensive personal dossiers on them – including such private information as their drivers’ license numbers and social security numbers – information which can be retrieved on demand through the canvassers’ hand-helm Palm Pilots.
ACT canvassers extract “promises” from individual voters, then follow up to make sure that “promises are kept,” as its Web site states.
Such follow-ups may prove intimidating to many voters, especially in view of the fact that an undetermined number of ACT’s fulltime canvassers have been exposed as felons, convicted for crimes ranging from drug dealing to burglary, assault and sex offenses, according to a June 23, 2004 report by the Associated Press.
Biography
Rosenthal grew up in a union household. His father was a shoe salesman and union organizer in Brooklyn, NY. Company thugs once threw a brick through their window, as a warning to his father.
After graduating college, Rosenthal worked on various local, state, congressional and presidential political campaigns for the Democrats. During one of these campaigns, he met his future mentor Morton Bahr.
Bahr became president of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) in 1980, and promptly appointed Rosenthal CWA’s political director for New Jersey. In 1985, Rosenthal moved up to CWA’s Washington headquarters, where he served for six years, first as Director of Public Affairs and later as Bahr’s Administrative Assistant.
Rosenthal joined the Clinton campaign in 1991. He was appointed deputy political director to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) under Chairman Ron Brown and under political director Paul Tully on March 7, 1992.
From January 1993 to December 1995, Rosenthal served as Associate Deputy Secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor under then-Labor Secretary Robert Reich, whom Rosenthal advised on union matters.
Rosenthal left the White House in December 1995, to take a job with the American Federation of Labor - Coalition of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). President John J. Sweeney hired Rosenthal as AFL-CIO political director – a position he held for seven years.
The New Labor Movement
By going to work for Sweeney, Rosenthal had entered the vortex of the New Labor movement – a leftward shift in American labor on a scale not seen since the Communist infiltration of unions during the Great Depression. John J. Sweeney was the leader of this new infiltration.
Union membership had been in steep decline in America since 1955. Part of the reason is that “right-to-work” laws now permitted workers to refuse union membership, where before they would have been forced to join, often under threats of violence. Another reason for declining union membership was that businesses paying high wages to union workers had been going belly-up, unable to compete with businesses that employed non-union labor.
Nearly 50 percent of all workers in the private sector were union members in 1955. Today that figure has shrunk to 8.2 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
Big Labor might well have vanished from American life had it not been for the sudden emergence of New Labor. The turnaround began with John J. Sweeney’s appointment as president of the AFL-CIO in 1995. Sweeney – a Marxist ideologue – cultivated other likeminded leaders from among the member unions of the AFL-CIO, such as Gerald McEntee and Andrew L. Stern. Now Steven Rosenthal had become his latest protegé.
With the discipline and focus characteristic of hard-Left activists, the New Labor leaders quickly infiltrated the one sector of American labor that was growing in numbers: the government workforce.
Today, more Americans draw their paychecks from government service than from factories. Consequently, the two largest and fastest-growing unions in America today are the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) – of which Andrew Stern is now president – and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), whose presidency Gerald McEntee now holds. Both are aggressively organizing government employees, including health care workers paid through government programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. At the AFL-CIO, Rosenthal made his name by organizing and running grassroots get-out-the-vote campaigns, called Labor’96, Labor’98, Labor 2000 and Labor 2002. His high profile made him a contender in a massive power struggle shaping up within the AFL-CIO. Born in 1934, Sweeney was nearing retirement. McEntee, Stern and Rosenthal had already begun jockeying to succeed him as president of the AFL-CIO – the giant labor coalition of which SEIU and AFSCME are both members.
Rising tensions between Sweeney and Rosenthal resulted in Rosenthal’s resignation from the AFL-CIO in November 2002.
The Gang of Five
Gerald McEntee had previously maintained cordial relations with Andrew Stern and Stern’s ally Steven Rosenthal. Growing tensions between Rosenthal and his one-time mentor John Sweeney had led to Rosenthal’s resignation from the AFL-CIO in November 2002. But McEntee had remained friendly and supportive.
Indeed, when Rosenthal formed Partnership for America’s Families (PAF) – a grassroots, get-out-the-vote coalition aimed at mobilizing non-union, blue-collar voters – McEntee joined the group, provided $20 million of AFL-CIO money to fund it, and helped Rosenthal raise an additional $10 million. But things changed after Stern’s confrontation with Sweeney. When push came to shove, McEntee remained loyal to Sweeney. He began distancing himself from Stern and Rosenthal. The final break came in May 2003. McEntee staged what amounted to a public repudiation of Rosenthal. McEntee resigned from PAF, along with AFL-CIO executive director Linda Chavez-Thompson. Even worse, McEntee publicly charged that Rosenthal had been ineffective in reaching out to minorities. McEntee thus sent a message throughout the AFL-CIO that it was open season on Rosenthal. Cries of “paternalism” arose against Rosenthal from the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) and the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA), which objected to a white man “leading the charge” in minority turf. Various member unions began fighting over how Rosenthal’s $30 million should be allocated. Without Sweeney and McEntee to protect him, Rosenthal was helpless. “We are fighting among ourselves when there is a common enemy, a very strong common enemy,” complained Harold Ickes to the Washington Post on June 5, 2003. Gina Glantz added that the turf war was giving the Bush team, “a happy day for the White House. I'm sure they feel their voter suppression efforts have just been enhanced.”
George Soros Intervenes
It was at that point that George Soros intervened.
As described in the History section of the Shadow Party profile, Soros invited Steven Rosenthal and Ellen R. Malcolm to his Southampton beach house in July 2003 and listened to their vision for a voter outreach group that would encompass labor, pro-abortion and environmentalist forces under one big umbrella. Soros liked the idea. He pledged $10 million to it on the spot. Before the meeting adjourned, Soros convinced other funders in attendance to kick in an additional $12 million, for a total of $22 million.
It was an offer Malcolm and Rosenthal could hardly refuse.
On August 8, 2003, the New York Times announced the roll-out of a new political action committee called America Coming Together (ACT), naming as its co-founders Ellen Malcolm, Andrew Stern, Carl Pope, Cecile Richards and Gina Glantz.
John J. Sweeney and Gerald McEntee were out of the picture – at least temporarily.
The following month, ACT announced that Rosenthal’s Partnership for America’s Families would be absorbed into the larger umbrella group. Rosenthal would keep his job as CEO of ACT, but would also serve as president for Partnership for America’s Families, which would “focus almost exclusively on registration efforts in urban areas.”
Soros had neatly ended the turf war. More importantly, the Shadow Party had absorbed some of the most dynamic leaders of the New Labor movement, in the persons of Steven Rosenthal and Andrew Stern.
Rosenthal is also co-founder of The Organizing Group, a political consulting firm that helps labor unions and progressive organizations identify potential voters.
Personal Information
Date of Birth:
January 21, 1953 Place of Birth: Brooklyn, New York
Family:
Steven Rosenthal lives in Takoma Park, Maryland with his wife Eileen Kirlin and two children. Rosenthal met his wife while he was working for the Communications Workers of America (CWA). Kirlin was then a CWA organizer. Today Ms. Kirlin is director of the public employee sector of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
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