Sometimes union thugs wear pinstriped business suits. Investment banker Ron Bloom is one of those thugs.

He decided in the 1970s to devote his life to helping labor unions stick it to America’s corporations. As an organizer, negotiator, and researcher for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Booth observed that many union negotiators didn’t have the skills they needed to bargain effectively with management.

“Unions were being backed into corners by companies and couldn’t understand on a sophisticated level, the company’s arguments … Labor needed to be armed with the equivalent skills.”

A longtime leftist, Bloom acquired the skills he needed to run circles around management. He went to Harvard Business School and built up his resume.

Bloom, who was President Obama’s car czar and then manufacturing czar, excels at wheeling and dealing. Last year Time magazine fawned over Bloom, naming him as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” Bloom’s “role in brokering the rescue of General Motors and Chrysler while preserving more than 100,000 jobs demanded a synergist who could work both sides of the equation with authority and respect.”

Although it is true that Bloom was one of the principal architects of the auto industry bailout, Time failed to mention that he made certain that the deal enriched the United Auto Workers at the expense of bondholders. Bondholders accept low rates of return on their investment in the expectation that if the company goes belly-up they will be among the first creditors paid back, but Bloom and his colleagues in the Obama administration upended that ancient rule of repayment priority in the name of so-called “social justice.” They made sure that President Obama’s allies in the labor movement got far more than their fair share.

In his career as an investment banker, Bloom has used his considerable skills as a negotiator to engineer deals that benefit trade unions.

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Voter fraud is not a figment of your imagination, says former Congressman Artur Davis (D-Alabama).

The use of absentee ballots makes massive electoral fraud possible, Davis told the Daily Caller’s Neil Munro in a startling interview.  Davis’s comments came months after a Tunica County, Miss., jury convicted local NAACP official Lessadolla Sowers on 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots.  Sowers received a five-year prison term.

“Most voter fraud doesn’t happen on Election Day,” Davis said.  “Very few folks are going to walk into a polling place and claim they’re somebody they’re not.  It happens with the absentee ballots and counties in my old congressional district.  Sometimes 50 percent of the votes cast in Democratic primaries were absentee ballots.”

“There is no reason that half the vote in a community ought to be absentee ballots when the number is 0.01 percent in most communities in the United States,” he said. “How do you get 50 percent of the Democratic primary electorate being absentee in the natural course of things?  You don’t get that.  That comes about when there’s a strategy of cooking the books at the polls, voting people named Donald Duck and manufacturing ballots.”

Davis can’t understand why those on the left oppose voter ID laws such as the law recently enacted in his home state of Alabama.

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The United Steelworkers (USW) Marxist president Leo Gerard believes if Big Labor can’t get what it wants through the ballot box it’s time to start cracking skulls.

The Canadian-born Gerard loves a brawl. In 1999 he helped the violent anarchists protesting in Seattle block access to the World Trade Organization meetings. USW sent 1,400 goons to shut the talks down. Gerard’s agitation helped to push Algoma Steel of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, into bankruptcy in the 1990s.

As the USW president since 2001, Gerard wholeheartedly supports the labor-backed Occupy Wall Street movement and wants it to become even more violent.

“You’re damn right Wall Street occupiers speak for us,” he recently told left-wing radio host Ed Schultz. “They do in Pittsburgh, they do in Chicago, they do in Oakland, they do in San Francisco, they do all across the country. And I think what we need is, we need more militancy.”

But occupying cities isn’t enough in the view of this man who began his career in labor activism at age 11 by handing out leaflets before a strike.

Gerard explained that the left needs to start a “resistance” movement. “If Wall Street occupation doesn’t get the message, I think we’ve got to start blocking bridges and doing that kind of stuff,” he said.

“And no wonder people are occupying. We ought to be doing more than occupying parks. We ought to start occupying bridges. We ought to start occupying the banks, places themselves.”

Gerard is a member of the AFL-CIO’s executive committee and chairman of its public policy committee.

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Richard Trumka is a thug’s thug, and a crafty one at that.

The AFL-CIO boss believes the end justifies the means. Breaking the law is acceptable if it advances the cause. Unions should “forget about the law; this is about more than that,” he said at the “Future of Unions” roundtable in Detroit on April 7th.

Like many union leaders, occasionally the slippery Trumka pretends to like capitalism. He supports vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, not because he actually believes in them but because his members work in industries that depend on their enforcement. Turning a blind eye to the manufacture of counterfeit machine parts could put union members out of work.

But unlike most high-profile leftists, Trumka doesn’t even make an effort to conceal his radicalism. “Being called a socialist is a step up for me,” he told Bloomberg News in June. In 1994, Trumka proudly accepted the Eugene Debs Award named after the five-time presidential candidate and labor organizer who founded the Socialist Party of America.

As an AFL-CIO executive, Trumka helped to create “Union Summer,” a program for training young people as organizers and political activists. Participants were made to recite a pledge called “Working Class Commitment” that included the Marxist idea “that we [union workers] produce the world’s wealth … [and] will end all oppression.”

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One of the boldest labor thugs in America today is Stephen Lerner, a crafty economic terrorist who manages to sound like a folksy self-improvement seminar leader while he explicitly calls for the overthrow of capitalism.

“People are ready to move,” said Lerner, an organizer with the radical Service Employees International Union (SEIU). “We have solutions. We just have to build it bigger and larger,” he said during a panel discussion Oct. 3 at the Take Back the American Dream conference in Washington, D.C.

If we are really serious about movement building then we think one part is we have to act heroically, that we have to inspire people by our actions and we have to be willing to take incredible personal and collective risks, that that’s the time and there’s moments where history shifts and we’re going to decide if it shifts. That’s where I think we are and it’s a wonderful place to be because for the last couple of years it’s been shifting the other way.

An SEIU board member, Lerner is one of the architects of a subversive plan that aims to destroy the nation’s financial system through intimidation, mass protests, and the mob violence that accompanies it. As part of it, Lerner targeted JPMorgan Chase for attack earlier this year because the bank would be “a really good company to hate.”

Lerner told a receptive union audience that it is necessary to demonize people like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in order to generate hatred and envy that will help to foment revolution. “We’ve got to be clear on the human beings who are bad,” he told the SEIU 775 convention in Seattle on Sept. 22. Wealthy corporate leaders must be made into social outcasts, despised even by their children, he said. “How do we make it so politicians don’t even want their money because their money’s toxic, it’s dirty, it’s evil.”

“It’s one thing if we say JPMorgan Chase crashed the economy. It’s another thing if we say Jamie Dimon makes $20 million a year, who is involved in the opera and all these philanthropies, and thinks he’s a nice guy, and he’s destroying our lives.”

Lerner also calls upon state and local governments to stop doing business with banks that refuse to pay their “fair share” in taxes, slash interest rates, and forgive overextended homeowners’ mortgage principal. He urges students and local governments –which employ many public sector union members— not to pay back “[u]nfair [d]ebt” unless interest rates are lowered. Such a loan strike “would threaten CEO bonuses and bottom lines of the banks.”

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Evidence suggests that ACORN, the left’s premiere astro-turfing organization, has been paying people to participate in the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Astro-turfing campaigns can generate big money, and ACORN’s lucrative protest-for-profit program is nothing new. As I note in my book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, ACORN has acquired great expertise in manufacturing so-called grassroots protests.

Left-wing billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler, the founders of World Savings Bank, gave ACORN affiliates close to $11 million to manufacture mobs to protest their competition in subprime mortgage lending. The United Federation of Teachers paid ACORN $500,000 to create a spontaneous uprising against charter schools in Manhattan.

The SEIU-funded Working Families Party, a front group for ACORN, placed a want ad on Craigslist dated Sept. 26. The ad indicates that WFP was recruiting activists to carry out “direct action,” leftist argot for a variety of activities aimed at forcing sociopolitical change.

The line between direct action and violent terrorism can become blurry. Extreme forms of direct action can lead to bodily injury and sometimes death. The labor movement is no stranger to assault and killings. Left-wing activists David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin participated in an attack on an armored car that left two police officers and a security guard dead. Two anarchists tried to disrupt the 2008 GOP convention with Molotov cocktails. The eco-terrorist Sea Shepherd Conservation Society admits both to attacking whaling ships with acid and sinking them.

WFP’s ad is titled, “FIGHT TO HOLD WALLSTREET [sic] ACCOUNTABLE NOW! MAKE A DIFFERNENCE [sic] GET PAID!” It states:

The WFP is seeking immediate hires.

You must be an energetic communicator, with a passion for social and economic justice.

Only outgoing, articulate dedicated, determined candidates will be considered for the positions.

For those candidates that qualify WFP offers substantial paid-training provided by senior leadership, on varied issues such as: advocacy, public speaking, mobilizing, fundraising, networking and organizing. We invest in passionate people with excellent communication skills and a full benefits package is offered to those candidates that qualify. In addition, there is opportunity for advancement and travel to our satellite chapters and out of state affiliates.

This is not a policy job! Through direct action you will be shaping NY state politics for the next 20 years.” [emphasis added]

As previously reported, WFP has been involved in organizing the Occupy Wall Street protests since the beginning.

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The Working Families Party, an infamous ACORN front group notorious for corruption, was instrumental in organizing the Occupy Wall Street protests, according to radical journalist Laura Flanders of Free Speech TV.

The protests, which have spread to several other large U.S. cities, are part of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke calls an “anti-banking jihad.”

Working Families Party (WFP) organizer Nelini Stamp has “been here since day one and she is part of the organizing team and the outreach team that has managed to bridge the distance between that first day and this day and between the grassroots folks here and the labor movement,” Flanders said at the protest in lower Manhattan.

We are “actually trying to change the capitalist system we have today because it’s not working for any of us,” Stamp told Flanders in an interview. Demonstrators are asking “how do we really reform and bring revolutionary changes to the states?”

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It hasn’t taken long for the socialist-organized “occupation” of Wall Street to jump the shark.

In a surreal news conference at the United Nations, anti-American radical and rogue financier George Soros (net worth: $22 billion) threw in his lot with the thousands of Communists, anarchists, eco-feminists, malingerers, and professional protesters who have been baiting and taunting police in lower Manhattan as part of a mass demonstration that began September 17.

The protests, which have spread to other large cities, are part of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke calls an “anti-banking jihad.” Not surprisingly, the remnants of the ACORN network are deeply involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. New York ACORN’s new front group, New York Communities for Change (NYCC), led by veteran ACORN enforcer Jon Kest, is one of the major protest groups leading the effort to turn America into one big socialist armpit.

Kest explained why NYCC is involved by using what has become the standard Marxist boilerplate about the financial collapse. “When the big banks tanked our economy they took away millions of people’s shot at achieving the American Dream,” he blogged. “It’s about time all these people come together and hold Wall Street accountable for what they’ve done to our futures and the future of this country.” Of course Kest didn’t bother to mention the role that ACORN played in creating the mortgage bubble by strong-arming Fannie Mae, pushing the financial affirmative action scheme known as the Community Reinvestment Act, and blackmailing banks that didn’t want to lend money to people who wouldn’t be able to pay it back.

SEIU board member Stephen Lerner has vowed to do his part to drive a stake through the heart of capitalism and drag the populace into economic misery. Lerner says he wants to “bring down the stock market” through a campaign of disruption. Last year George Goehl, executive director of Chicago-based National People’s Action, said that “the banking crisis” was “the next big thing,” and “the way to build a big economic justice movement in this country.”

Soros said he sympathizes with the rabble. “Actually I can understand [the protesters’] sentiment, frankly,” said the preeminent funder of the American activist Left in remarks to reporters.

But anyone who has followed Soros’s life wouldn’t dare to describe him as a working class hero.

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President Obama has given ACORN $729,849 so far this year and billions more in federal cash may be in the pipeline.

The president’s new economic stimulus package, the so-called “jobs bill,” contains as much as $15 billion for radical left-wing groups such as ACORN (his former employer). Obama has been using his presidential bully pulpit to demand that Republicans in Congress “pass this bill,” even though there is no bill yet. Despite all the rhetoric, the proposed “American Jobs Act of 2011” apparently hasn’t even been introduced in Congress.

Credit: Leo Alberti

Meanwhile, longtime ACORN ally Shaun Donovan, who heads Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), has been showering ACORN with your tax dollars. The money has gone to Affordable Housing Centers of America Inc. (AHCOA), which is the new name for ACORN Housing. Like a con artist trying to escape his past, ACORN Housing legally changed its name last year.

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Only a week into the job, Washington, D.C. mayor Vincent Gray’s deputy chief of staff resigned from her position after admitting she committed what appears to constitute voter fraud. The resignation of Andrea “Andi” Pringle comes as several U.S. states initiate a much-needed crackdown on rampant electoral fraud.

Pringle acknowledged she voted in the September 2010 primary election in the District of Columbia even though she was residing at that time in Montgomery County, Maryland. The county abuts the District. In her resignation letter Pringle said she was quitting because she had “become a distraction from the important work of” Gray’s administration, the Washington Times reports.

Andrea Pringle (photo by Alan Suderman, Washington City Paper)

Like Mayor Gray, Pringle is a Democrat. She was campaign manager for former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun (D-Ill.) when she ran for president in 2004. Barack Obama helped to elect Braun to the U.S. Senate in 1992 when he ran a successful get-out-the-vote effort for ACORN unit Project Vote.

Pringle worked on both of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns and for his group called the National Rainbow Coalition.

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One of the co-conspirators in a White House-approved plot to use federal resources to produce partisan propaganda to advance President Obama’s policy agenda has been chosen to lead an Obama 2012 get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort.

The Obama operative chosen to head the GOTV effort, Buffy Wicks, was deputy director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. In that capacity she participated in a now-infamous 2009 conference call in which Obama officials urged artists to create art that would help advance Obamacare and the rest of the president’s policy objectives.

Wicks will head a GOTV effort named after the branch of ACORN that employed Obama in 1992. Perhaps to honor Obama’s radical roots, the “campaign-within-a-campaign” will be named “Project Vote,” according to Politico’s Mike Allen.

Obama’s storied performance as head of Project Vote in Illinois during the 1992 campaign was widely credited with getting the radical left-wing Democrat Carol Moseley Braun elected to the U.S. Senate. It also helped Obama cement his reputation as a master community organizer.

The original Project Vote is part of the ACORN network. It continues to operate out of ACORN’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, and works with the new ACORN front groups created after ACORN, the shell corporation that ran the network, filed for bankruptcy last November.

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ACORN wants a cut of the huge international remittance business, valued worldwide at US$444 billion.

So the organized crime syndicate is trying to shake down the financial services companies that handle those international money transfers.

In Canada, the local arm of ACORN is trying to shake down Money Mart and Western Union. ACORN, which used to employ President Obama, is hitting these two companies because it wants them to pay it protection money. The corporate shakedown is just one of the dubious methods ACORN uses to victimize businesses.

ACORN Canada’s new president Kay Bisnath complains the fees banks and other companies charge for money transfers are “exorbitant.” Ostensibly to help poor people, ACORN is demanding that Western Union charge no more than 5 percent for overseas remittances.

Canada’s biggest daily newspaper, the Toronto Star, which is left-wing even by Canadian standards, is helping ACORN’s Canadian affiliate by providing political propaganda disguised as news. (Canada’s taxpayer-funded TV network, CBC, is also doing its bit to promote ACORN.) The Red Star, as some Canadian conservatives half-jokingly call it, is home to America-hating socialist writers such as Thomas Walkom and Linda McQuaig.

The pairing actually makes a lot sense. Both the Star and ACORN are on the far left and both have an impressive record of union-busting.

In the latest in a series of pro-ACORN puff pieces, the Star’s immigration reporter, Nicholas Keung, wrote a feature article that used Rassel Mohammad, a Bangladeshi immigrant to Canada, as a prop.

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We keep hearing from the usual suspects on the Left that voter fraud is virtually non-existent, a figment of the collective imagination of racist vote-suppressing Republicans.

And yet more evidence of voter fraud keeps surfacing.

In Wake County, North Carolina, Shelia Ramona Hodges, Kierra Fontae Leach, Brandon Earl McLean, and Lela Devonetta Murray have been charged with voting twice, a felony.

According to TV station WRAL

McLean and his fiancee Leach admit to participating in early voting in the 2008 election. Unsure about the process on Election Day, they said they went to the polls to make sure their vote counted.

“I was confused and did not know,” McLean said. “This is my second time voting for a president in my life.”

Leach said she even told a poll worker about it.

“We told her we had already early voted, and we just wanted to make sure it counted,” Leach said. “She said, ‘If you have a ballot, then go ahead and vote.’ And that is what we did. We did not think anything of it.”

McLean said they were not trying to cheat the system.

District Attorney Colon Willoughby said he’s not finished yet. “One of the bedrocks of our democracy is that we have fair and open elections, and I think this goes to the fabric of fairness and the public’s perception of the credibility of open elections.”

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After pleading guilty to voter fraud in Las Vegas in April, ACORN will be sentenced Wednesday for participating in a massive conspiracy.

The organized crime syndicate, which used to employ President Obama, may be fined as little as $1,000. Because ACORN, the shell corporation that ran the corrupt ACORN network, is in bankruptcy, it may end up paying nothing at all.

ACORN was convicted of felony-level unlawful compensation for registration of voters. With the full knowledge of upper management, ACORN illegally offered cash bonuses to its voter registration canvassers in a scheme called “Blackjack.” Canvassers received extra money if they hit the magic number of 21 registrations in a day.

Senior ACORN executives Amy Adele Busefink and Christopher Howell Edwards were also convicted for their roles in the scheme. ACORN cared so little about the conspiracy that its voter fraud division, Project Vote, put Busefink in charge of the group’s national get-out-the-vote drive in 2010 while she was under indictment in Nevada.

Mickey Mouse, Mary Poppins, and various celebrities living and dead have been registered to vote over and over again precisely because ACORN has been allowed to get away with polluting the nation’s voter rolls for so long.

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It is a time-honored tactic of radicals to accuse their enemies of what they do in order to convert a negative into a positive, as the master of political agitation Saul Alinsky taught.

This explains the Left’s newfound interest in the lie that the Tea Party is comprised of “terrorists.”

Unless you think petitioning the government for lower spending is somehow akin to flying airplanes into buildings, you’ve got to agree with Sarah Palin, whose recent salvos on the topic are dead-on.

As President Obama and his merry band of Marxists continue driving America off a cliff, Palin (and columnist Charles Krauthammer) have been pushing back hard against the liberal talking point that Tea Party supporters are terrorists.

Her comments came after Vice President Joe Biden, Congressman Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), and their socialist buddies at MSNBC recently breathed new life into the “terrorist” smear. Because President Obama, who himself has ties to real, live terrorists, has not upbraided the vice president, we can safely assume he agrees with Biden.

Said Palin on Fox News Channel:

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As I write this it is difficult to hear myself think over the sound of congressional Republicans high-fiving each other over the debt ceiling deal.

They would do well to remember the words of a British parliamentarian uttered during the Revolutionary War. After the British General Lord Cornwallis won a squeaker of a tactical victory in 1781 by losing a quarter of his army, Charles Fox pointedly observed, “Another such victory will ruin us.”

Surely this is the case with the new debt ceiling compromise in Congress. GOP partisans obsessed with political expediency keep parroting the line that the deal which will pave the way for trillions more in spending is somehow a Tea Party “victory.” They have a strange definition of victory.

There is no evidence that this bizarre deal of at least questionable constitutionality (e.g. the “Super Congress”) will actually lead to any real cuts. Nor is there any evidence that it will prevent the U.S. government from losing its long held triple-A credit rating.

There is a promise of spending cuts, but overall federal spending will continue on its upward trajectory because Official Washington operates in the make-believe world of “baseline budgeting.” According to this crackhead accounting, both a cut and an increase may count as cuts.

Confused? You’re supposed to be.

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Nobody ever said all the criminal street thugs at ACORN were bright.

The left-wing astroturfers of ACORN’s new front group in California, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), were behind a garbage-dumping stunt at a branch of Wells Fargo bank in San Jose, Calif.

News reports consistently depict the players as angry homeowners who spontaneously erupted in a spasm of righteous indignation.

As if.

These “homeowners” were reportedly unhappy about the upkeep at a foreclosed property they thought Wells Fargo was responsible for so they decided to dump uncollected garbage at the bank. The problem is that while Wells Fargo is listed as a trustee for the property, it is actually owned by Bank of America, a longtime ACORN ally. (In recent years Bank of America Charitable Foundation Inc. has given $5 million to the mortgage bubble generators at ACORN Housing Corp.)

In a still from a TV news report on ACORN’s act of political theater (shown above) an angry protester can be seen holding a sign that reads: “MAKE THE BANKS PAY! ACCE.” (Full video is here.)

Whoops.

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Does President Obama approve of the SEIU/ACORN-led economic terrorism campaign that is now directed at JPMorgan Chase?

It seems like a reasonable question to ask. SEIU is President Obama’s favorite union and ACORN is his favorite community organizing outfit.

The campaign, engineered by SEIU board member Stephen Lerner, is designed, in Lerner’s words, “to disrupt and create uncertainty for capital, for how corporations operate … there are actually extraordinary things that we could do right now that would start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement.”

According to White House visitor logs, “Stephen Lerner” paid four visits to the Obama White House. On two of those visits he apparently met with then-White House political director Patrick Gaspard, a former executive vice president at the militant SEIU Local 1199. Gaspard, a longtime ACORN operative and Alinskyite, is now executive director of the DNC where he oversees the odious Organizing for America project.

I wonder what they talked about. Hmmmm.

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