We prefer to write about what has happened rather than what might happen. But some probabilities, accusations, and conjectures are likely enough and interesting enough to be noticed before they’re certainties.

Which is why we’re drawing attention to a story about a trade union official’s suspected connection with terrorism both in South America and in the Middle East.

Investor’s Business Daily reports and comments:

The FBI raids the Chicago home of a local union leader looking for terrorist connections as the union’s former chief is investigated for corruption. Why are we not surprised?

Thuggery and corruption are not quite synonyms for unionism, but it gets very close when you consider the Service Employees International Union, formerly led by Andy Stern.

That’s the extreme left revolutionary Andy Stern who was reported last October, 2009, to be more often received by Obama at the White House than any other visitor.

From being involved in fraudulent voter registration in Texas to beating up Tea Party activists outside town hall meetings in Missouri, SEIU’s reputation is well-established.

Now we can possibly add a linkage to terrorism.

On Friday, the FBI searched eight addresses in Minneapolis and Chicago. Among those addresses was the North Side home of Chicago anti-war activists Joe Iosbaker and his wife, Stephanie Weiner, whose home was searched for 12 hours.

The agents said they were looking for evidence relating to terrorist activity. Warrants suggested agents were looking for links between anti-war activists and terrorist groups in Colombia and the Mideast. An FBI statement said those investigated were suspected of activities “concerning the material support of terrorism.”

The national media largely ignored the story, and the Chicago media reported it as … anti-war activists being intimidated and investigated and manhandled by oppressive law enforcement. …

Iosbaker is … the Chief Steward for SEIU Local 73. One would think that a high-ranking union official linked to support of international terrorism would be national news …

But no. The mainstream media will ignore the story if they can, and if they can’t, spin it as a story of mean right-wing anti-union bias.

(We confess to anti-union bias. One of the great achievements of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was, in our opinion, her victory over the economy-wrecking British trade unions, especially the National Union of Mineworkers in 1985.)

As we all know, people of Andy Stern’s and Iosbaker’s political persuasion are not union leaders for the love of the workers: they are left revolutionaries who hope to use the unions as a means to their ends. Read about Andy Stern here.

Iosbaker and Weiner were active members, with Barack Obama, of the New Party in Chicago. Read about it here at Gulag Bound. It was formed by an alliance of three organizations:

• The Democratic Socialists of America – the largest Marxist organization in America
• ACORN
• SEIU

Also heavily involved were the Communist Party USA breakaway group Committees of Correspondence and far left ‘think tank’ the Institute for Policy Studies.

Obama “not only worked closely with these New Party candidates”, he himself was a member of it.

All of which should have been made known to the electorate by the media during the presidential campaigns of 2008, but was not.

It’s useful to bring it up now, when Obama and his Democratic hurrah-chorus are calling Constitutionalists, Republicans, and Tea Party people “extremists”. (See here and here.)

How does the seemingly benign campaign, figureheaded by Michelle Obama (see our post Great ideas from the pumpkin patch Janury 29, 2010), against childhood obesity, serve the socialist agenda of Barack Obama?

Michelle Malkin explains how. She writes:

Behind every seemingly good deed in the Obama White House, there’s a deep-pocketed, left-wing special interest. Take first lady Michelle Obama’s crusade against childhood obesity. Who really benefits from the ostensible push for improved nutrition in the schools? Think purple — as in the purple-shirted army of the Service Employees International Union. Big Labor bigwigs don’t care about slimming your kids’ waistlines. They care about beefing up their membership rolls and fattening their coffers….

The East Wing is now in full campaign mode — leaning on the nation’s mayors, traveling with the surgeon general and meeting with Congress and cabinet members to reauthorize the Lyndon Johnson-era Child Nutrition Act, which provides government-subsidized meals to more than 30 million children. It’s part of the Obama administration’s self-proclaimed “cradle-to-career” agenda for America’s youth.

For decades, school administrators have criticized this Great Society relic for outgrowing its initial conception. The program was originally created to use up post-World War II food surpluses… While spending on youth nutrition and wellness have ballooned, so have the kids. Nearly one-third of U.S. children are now overweight or obese. The feds spend $15 billion a year on nutrition in schools; the White House wants at least a $1 billion increase this coming fiscal year.

The well-intended program to feed poor kids has morphed into an untouchable universal entitlement with a powerful school-lunch lobbying coalition of Department of Agriculture bureaucrats, food-service industry executives and union bosses. Enter the SEIU. Headed by the White House’s most frequent visitor, Andy Stern, the powerful labor organization representing government and private service employees has an insatiable appetite for power and growth. Working alongside the first lady, the SEIU unveiled a major ad campaign this week demanding reauthorizing and funding increases in the Child Nutrition Act.

What’s in it for Big Labor? SEIU Executive Vice President Mitch Ackerman explains: “A more robust expansion of school lunch, breakfast, summer feeding, child care and WIC (the federal Women, Infants and Children nutrition program) is critical to reducing hunger, ending childhood obesity and providing fair wages and healthcare for front line food service workers” (emphasis added).

There are 400,000 workers who prepare and serve lunch to American schoolchildren. SEIU represents tens of thousands of those workers and is trying to unionize many more. “More robust expansion” of the federal school-lunch law means a mandate for higher wages, increased benefits and government-guaranteed health insurance coverage …

They are casting food-services workers as indispensable saviors. The union has rallied behind P.R. efforts casting them as superheroes “serving justice, and serving lunch.” Opposing the union means opposing children’s health. SEIU propaganda features New Jersey school cafeteria workers like Leslie Williams of Orange, N.J., lamenting: “I love my work, but it’s getting harder to prepare nutritious meals on the low budget we’re working with. … It breaks my heart to see a child who’s hungry. As I see it, part of my job is to make sure the kids are well-fed.”

Actually, that’s the primary job of parents. Mom? Dad? Remember them? But the more responsibility we demand of parents, the less power and influence SEIU bosses are able to grab. Unionized school dietician and nutrition jobs are booming. And in addition to school breakfast and lunch, the SEIU is now pushing subsidized dinner plans and summer food service to create a “stronger nutrition safety net.” Translation: Perpetual employment for big government and its public employee union au pairs.

Cede the children, feed the state.