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.

For example, when Brazilian steel company Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (CSN) tried to merge with Wheeling-Pittsburgh Corp. in 2006, steelworkers feared the deal would decimate their ranks. Bloom, who joined the United Steel Workers (USW) union as a special assistant to the president in the 1990s, put together a hostile takeover bid by Chicago-based steel distributor Esmark to fend off CSN.

But like another pinstriped socialist, financier and radical philanthropist George Soros, Bloom believes that markets exist to be gamed by the powerful – including unions.

At a 2008 “distressed investors” forum, Bloom said:

Generally speaking, we get the joke. We know that the free market is nonsense. We know that the whole point is to game the system, to beat the market. Or at least find someone who will pay you a lot of money, ’cause they’re convinced that there is a free lunch. We know this is largely about power, that it’s an adults-only, no-limit game. We kind of agree with Mao, that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun.

Of course, Bloom isn’t the only Obama administration figure to quote Mao Zedong, who enjoyed silencing his opposition by a bullet to the head. Van Jones was part of a Maoist revolutionary group before he became President Obama’s green jobs czar. Anita Dunn, who was White House communications director, praised Mao by calling him “one of the two people that I turn to most.”

Bloom was also reportedly instrumental in the administration’s push to double fuel-economy standards for automakers to 54.4 miles per gallon by 2025. The regulation will almost certainly increase car-related deaths because automakers typically try to meet fuel efficiency targets by making smaller, lighter cars that are less capable of withstanding collisions.

Now the National Association of Letter Carriers has hired Bloom, who left the White House a few months ago, to devise a strategy to fleece the financially struggling U.S. Postal Service.

“We have retained [investment banking firm] Lazard and Ron Bloom to make sure we explore and expand the various range of solutions to address the postal service’s fiscal crisis as well as long-range business strategies not being pursued right now,” said Fredric V. Rolando, the national president of the union. “They have experience in analyzing large, financially complex institutions and crafting creative solutions.”

If by creative Rolando means anti-business, he’s absolutely right.

(This article was originally published by Front Page Magazine.)

Matthew Vadum is a senior editor at a conservative watchdog group in Washington, D.C. Vadum’s book on ACORN and its infiltration of the Obama administration was published in May 2011 by WND Books. The book is Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. Vadum is a nationally recognized expert on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and has written hundreds of articles on the group and hundreds of blog posts. His groundbreaking research on the organized crime syndicate was praised and cited by Michelle Malkin in her New York Times bestseller, Culture of Corruption. Malkin credits Vadum with being one of two people in the nation with the “foresight and insight in reporting on the [ACORN] story when no one else would.” Vadum’s work is also cited in David Freddoso’s New York Times bestseller The Case Against Barack Obama, Arianna Huffington’s Third World America, John Fund’s Stealing Elections (revised edition), and Peter Schweizer’s Architects of Ruin.

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.

“People who are progressives should never be afraid of more transparency and accountability,” Davis said.  “I always thought that one progressive core was that we want to know more and be more transparent about politics.  The progressives I know believe in more campaign disclosure in terms of who’s putting money into campaigns.  They believe in more disclosure in terms of how involved lobbyists are and special interests are in the process.”

“If you believe in more transparency around connections in politics and money in politics, how can you not believe in transparency when it comes to the core of politics which is voting?

Requiring people to identify themselves before casting ballots will cut down on voter fraud in Davis’s view.

“The right kind of voter ID law which of course will provide exceptions for old folks who don’t have licenses or people who are infirm and don’t have licenses, the right kind of ID law will provide free of charge an ID for people who want to vote,” he said.

“Those kinds of laws, they’re not suppressionary tactics.  They’re not things that we ought to fear.  They’re things that can make politics work better.”

ACORN and other left-wing groups have long argued that fraudulent registrations cannot become fraudulent votes.

“How would you know if people using fake names had cast votes in states without strict ID laws?” said GOP Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita, who in 2008 won an important Supreme Court case sustaining Indiana’s photo identification law.

“It’s almost impossible to detect and once the fraudulent voter leaves the precinct or casts an absentee ballot, that vote is thrown in with other secret ballots there’s no way to trace it,” said Rokita who is now a Republican member of the House of Representatives.

Former ACORN/Project Vote employee Anita MonCrief agreed.  “It’s ludicrous to say that fake registrations can’t become fraudulent votes,” she said.  “I assure you that if you can get them on the rolls you can get them to vote, especially using absentee ballots.”

As I report in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, at least 54 individuals employed by or associated with ACORN have been convicted of voter fraud.  Voter fraud, sometimes called electoral fraud, is a blanket term used by lawyers that encompasses a host of election-related improprieties including fraudulent voting, voter registration fraud, perjury, forgery, counterfeiting, impersonation, intimidation, and identity fraud.

And ACORN, which filed for bankruptcy in November 2010, was itself convicted of voter fraud in Nevada in April of this year.  ACORN was also banished from Ohio in 2010 when it settled a state racketeering filed against it by the 1851 Center for Constitutional Law, a project of the Buckeye Institute.  Under the settlement ACORN agreed never to return to the state.

The remnants of the ACORN empire of activism are gearing up to help President Obama, a former ACORN employee, get reelected next year.

ACORN’s voter registration and mobilization arm, Project Vote, continues to operate, and state ACORN chapters have taken new names.

Two of those ACORN front groups, New York Communities for Change (NYCC), and Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), have been very active in organizing the increasingly violent Occupy Wall Street movement.

Matthew Vadum is a senior editor at Capital Research Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C., that has been tracking ACORN’s activities since 1998. Vadum’s book on ACORN and its infiltration of the Obama administration was published in May 2011 by WND Books. The book is Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. Vadum is a nationally recognized expert on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and a frequent guest on Fox Business. His groundbreaking research on the organized crime syndicate was praised and cited by Michelle Malkin in her New York Times bestseller, Culture of Corruption. Malkin credits Vadum with being one of two people in the nation with the “foresight and insight in reporting on the [ACORN] story when no one else would.” Vadum’s work is also cited in David Freddoso’s New York Times bestseller The Case Against Barack Obama, Arianna Huffington’s Third World America, John Fund’s Stealing Elections (revised edition), and Peter Schweizer’s Architects of Ruin.     Follow Matthew Vadum on Twitter.

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.

He takes pride in the fact that the New York Times called him the “No. 1 scourge of free traders.” No wonder: A few days after Gerard visited President George W. Bush’s cabinet in 2001 the Bush administration slapped tariffs on imported steel. To help advance the protectionist agenda, President Obama named Gerard to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations.

Like Karl Marx, Gerard has an interest in economics. He had planned to become an economics professor before taking a job in the labor movement. But interest doesn’t imply aptitude, and like Marx, he apparently has little understanding of economics.

In an economically illiterate screed, Gerard proclaimed that America, with its $15 trillion in national debt and untold trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities, doesn’t “have a deficit crisis; we have a jobs crisis.”

He complained that the economic policies of the Obama administration aren’t statist enough. “In my own naiveté I was dumb enough to assume that a Democratic Congress and a Democrat in the White House would put us on a different path,” he said, arguing that massive government spending on the twin fantasies of clean energy and green technology would magically reduce unemployment.

If Obama won’t move forward with big new spending plans then it’s time to bring out the baseball bats, Gerard said. “We better face up to the fact that we have to hit the streets, kick some ass, and mobilize to do something about it,” he said.

I’m sick and tired of us whining about what the Democrats didn’t do. The tougher question is what are we doing, and do we have what it takes. Don’t worry about attacking Obama; attack the money! It’s Wall Street and the banks blocking a recovery and shipping our manufacturing abroad.

To Gerard, it is not radical leftist agitation that leads to violence but capitalism itself. Economic “inequality,” he says, “leads to instability and violence.”

And unions are on a holy mission to combat the evils of the market, he argues. “Unions are instruments of social and economic justice, and they’re instruments of democracy.”

Gerard has close ties to the neo-communist Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and to Canada’s socialist party, the New Democratic Party (NDP).

In 2007 the Chicago branch of DSA bestowed the Eugene Debs Award on Gerard. The honor is named after the five-time presidential candidate and labor organizer who founded the Socialist Party of America.

Other radical labor leaders and community organizers to receive the award are AFSCME Council 31 political director John D. Cameron (2011), SEIU executive vice president Eliseo Medina (2004), AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka (1994), Midwest Academy founder Heather Booth (1987), and United Farm Workers of America co-founder Dolores Huerta (1976).

It’s just a matter of time before President Obama gives Gerard the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

(This article was originally published by Front Page Magazine.)

Matthew Vadum is a senior editor at a conservative watchdog group in Washington, D.C. Vadum’s book on ACORN and its infiltration of the Obama administration was published in May 2011 by WND Books. The book is Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. Vadum is a nationally recognized expert on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and has written hundreds of articles on the group and hundreds of blog posts. His groundbreaking research on the organized crime syndicate was praised and cited by Michelle Malkin in her New York Times bestseller, Culture of Corruption. Malkin credits Vadum with being one of two people in the nation with the “foresight and insight in reporting on the [ACORN] story when no one else would.” Vadum’s work is also cited in David Freddoso’s New York Times bestseller The Case Against Barack Obama, Arianna Huffington’s Third World America, John Fund’s Stealing Elections (revised edition), and Peter Schweizer’s Architects of Ruin.

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.”

Trumka, a mine worker-cum-lawyer, admits he got involved in “the labor movement not because I wanted to negotiate wages,” but “because I saw it as a vehicle to do massive social change to include lots of people.” As he’s climbed the ranks of AFL-CIO leadership, Trumka has moved away from his modest roots. His 2011 compensation package at AFL-CIO totaled $293,750, according to LM-2 disclosure forms on file with the U.S. Department of Labor. Trumka apparently lives in a four-bathroom house assessed at $747,650 in Rockville, MD, a suburb of Washington, D.C.

He helped to turn the AFL-CIO away from boosting wages and improving working conditions. Now, the labor federation focuses on recruiting government workers who benefit from higher tax rates and bigger government, a growing constituency within the Democratic Party. The federation also blackmails employers by generating adverse publicity, harassing investors, and linking arms with the media and radical activists.

While at the helm of the AFL-CIO, Trumka helped repeal a longtime rule that banned Communists and fellow-travelers from leadership positions in the organization and its unions. The move to open the previously patriotic union to subversives delighted the Communist Party USA. “The radical shift in both leadership and policy is a very positive, even historic change,” CPUSA National Chairman Gus Hall said in 1996.

Trumka bears more than a passing resemblance to legendary gangster Al Capone, who ruled Chicagoland with an iron fist during the Prohibition Era.

Like Capone, Trumka stays close to his politicians. Trumka brags about his coziness with the Obama administration. “I’m at the White House a couple times a week – two, three times a week,” he said. “I have conversations every day with someone in the White House or in the administration. Every day.” Soon after being inaugurated, President Obama named Trumka to his Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which is akin to inviting an arsonist to advise on fire safety.

Both Capone and Trumka share an irredeemable corruptness. Capone bought and sold politicians by the dozen, while Trumka has on more than one occasion refused to cooperate with investigations into union corruption. Trumka indicated that he would have invoked the Fifth Amendment if he had been subpoenaed by Congress to testify about money-laundering schemes in 1998. His boss, John Sweeney, covered for him instead.

And like Capone, whose enforcer, Frank Nitti, educated Saul Alinsky in mob management techniques, Trumka uses violence and intimidation to work his will. (My book, Subversion Inc., details the sordid story of Alinsky and Nitti.)

Violence was commonplace when Trumka was president of the AFL-CIO-affiliated United Mine Workers of America from 1982 to 1995. In 1993, he told Illinois UMW members to “kick the shit out of every last” worker who violated the sanctity of his picket lines. Union goons damaged homes, fired gunshots at a mining company’s office, and killed the power supply for a mine, stranding 93 miners below ground.

After a UMW member shot and killed non-union worker Eddie York, eight UMW strikers threw rocks at security guards who came to check on the victim. Trumka not only refused to discipline the hoodlums, but used a metaphor to justify their behavior. “[I]f you strike a match and put your finger in, common sense tells you you’re going to burn your finger,” he said.

Trumka fought a lawsuit filed by York’s widow for four years and then abruptly settled out of court. The legal bargain came when federal prosecutors announced they planned to release evidence from the trial of Jerry Dale Lowe, who was previously convicted on conspiracy and weapons charges related to York’s murder.

Trumka encouraged and approved acts of violence by UMW strikers during a labor dispute in the late 1980s. As Virginia Circuit Court Judge Donald McGlothlin, Jr. declared, “The evidence shows beyond any shadow of a doubt that violent activities are being organized, orchestrated and encouraged by the leadership of this union.”

Of course President Obama is eager to help Trumka push his violent past down the memory hole. The White House website states that in 1990 Trumka received the Labor Responsibility Award from the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change “[b]ecause he consistently utilized non-violent civil disobedience throughout” strikes. Yasser Arafat’s claim to the Nobel Peace Prize enjoys roughly the same moral legitimacy.

It seems doubtful that Trumka could have gotten away with his shenanigans on the national stage in Capone’s day. But unlike in the Roaring Twenties, today there’s no Eliot Ness to go after Trumka. President Obama would never hire such an investigator and cross such an important friend and political ally.

Trumka has reciprocated by vilifying Obama’s adversaries, including the Tea Party movement that aims to restore fiscal responsibility to government. Sounding like crackpot actress Janeane Garofalo, Trumka says anti-Obama sentiment among voters may be blamed on “right-wing race-haters” who “just can’t get past the idea that there’s something wrong with voting for a black man.”

In the upcoming presidential election cycle, Trumka claims AFL-CIO will be more independent of Democrats because lawmakers in that party haven’t completely implemented Big Labor’s agenda.

“We’re going to use a lot of our money to build structures that work for working people,” he said. “You’re going to see us give less money to build structures for others, and more of our money will be used to build our own structure.”

Trumka is establishing a so-called super PAC that will allow AFL-CIO to pump limitless quantities of cash into politics. The goal is obviously to make sure the Democratic Party and President Obama don’t move rightward during election season next year.

For all we know, Obama told Trumka to do it.

(This article was originally published by Front Page Magazine.)

Matthew Vadum is a senior editor at a conservative watchdog group in Washington, D.C. Vadum’s book on ACORN and its infiltration of the Obama administration was published in May 2011 by WND Books. The book is Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. Vadum is a nationally recognized expert on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and has written hundreds of articles on the group and hundreds of blog posts. His groundbreaking research on the organized crime syndicate was praised and cited by Michelle Malkin in her New York Times bestseller, Culture of Corruption. Malkin credits Vadum with being one of two people in the nation with the “foresight and insight in reporting on the [ACORN] story when no one else would.” Vadum’s work is also cited in David Freddoso’s New York Times bestseller The Case Against Barack Obama, Arianna Huffington’s Third World America, John Fund’s Stealing Elections (revised edition), and Peter Schweizer’s Architects of Ruin.

“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.”

Tremendously respected and influential in leftist organizing circles, Lerner has reportedly visited the Obama White House at least four times. SEIU itself burned through a staggering $85 million to promote President Obama’s candidacy. The purple-shirted people beaters’ union even produced a movie called Labor Day to take credit for Obama’s election.

One of the more accomplished union goons in America, Lerner is also one of the leading lights behind the neo-communist Occupy Wall Street campaign. The action has been embraced by a growing chorus of radicals including President Obama, George Soros, Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi, self-described “communist” Van Jones, AFL-CIO thug-in-chief Richard Trumka, and longtime ACORN shill and Occidental College professor Peter Dreier.

Lerner urges activists to do whatever is necessary to collapse what’s left of the American economy in order to manufacture unrest and dissent.

If leftists really believe capitalism is in a “transformative stage,” they “need to confront this in a serious way and develop a real ability to put a boot in the wheel,” he said at a leftist confab earlier this year.

It seems to me that we’re in a moment where we need to figure out in a much more, through direct action, much more concrete way how we really are trying to disrupt and create uncertainty for capital, for how corporations operate. And it may sound like that’s a crazy thing that in a moment of weakness we could deal with it, but the thing about a boom and bust economy, is it’s actually incredibly fragile, because it’s … based on gambling and all of that. And so 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.

The “other side” most fears “disruption” and “uncertainty,” he said.

One of Lerner’s favorite pastimes is conflating often-violent labor activism with the civil rights movement of the 1960s. At the Sept. 22 SEIU pow-wow, he said:

When you look at every great movement in history from the abolitionists to the suffragettes to the auto workers who seized the auto factories to the civil rights movement to the immigrant rights movement, everywhere in the world, what do they all have in common? People willing to march en masse and people willing to go to jail in greater and greater numbers and if we really believe that the richest, most powerful people in the world, that their goal is to destroy us, then there’s an urgency that our actions and our words and the crisis all put together [creates].

Lerner led SEIU’s much-ballyhooed “Justice for Janitors” campaign. In 1988, the campaign went after employers in a dozen cities. In Washington, D.C., the campaign used political theater in order to make labor activism seem noble and public-spirited.

Like any good disciple of Saul Alinsky, Lerner dressed up union thuggery in priestly robes. He utilized tactics of civil disobedience and conducted an ecumenical church service, a 24-hour candlelight vigil, “human billboarding,” and provided Easter dinner for the homeless.

Lerner is an expert at cloaking union intimidation tactics in what Alinsky called “moral garments,” first offering the carrot, and then the stick if the victim doesn’t comply.

In an interview with Mergers & Acquisitions in 2007, Lerner said private equity firms should, in a sense, honor SEIU’s picket lines if –wink, wink— they know what’s good for them.

He held up the “Responsible Contractor Program” of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) as a politically correct model to be emulated in the financial world. Equity firms “can adopt a policy to hire only companies that respect the rights of their employees” as judged by Lerner and SEIU.

“It might seem like a small number of people who are being helped, but if all firms do this it can affect hundreds of thousands of workers,” he said. “I believe the poorest workers can do better and we can afford it.”

This is the same warmed-over “corporate social responsibility” mush that Ralph Nader has been peddling for decades, but this time it’s backed by Big Labor’s brass knuckles. It’s also a cousin of the “fair trade” movement that presupposes Third World coffee growers are too stupid to get the most they can get for their product on world markets – so they need liberals to strong-arm traders into paying artificially high prices.

Like all neo-communists Lerner, who used to work for Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers of America (UFW), is a control freak who aspires to bully others.

“We literally have a handful of billionaires that are marauding around the globe, buying and selling things, and they need to be held accountable,” Lerner told Australian TV in 2007 (How dare rich people spend their own money!).

Lerner is infected with a visceral contempt for economic freedom that rests upon a pathological hatred of human diversity. This viewpoint treats differing levels of intelligence, aptitude, and job skills among people as social aberrations that need to be remedied. Leftists like Lerner have long believed the mere fact that there is material inequality among people is proof of the supposed unfairness of capitalism.

It all boils down to a simple idea.

People like Lerner have no interest in teaching people how to fish so they might feed themselves for a lifetime, as the old adage goes. They prefer to teach people how to steal fish from their neighbors.

This is the principle that animates America’s parasitic public sector unions.

It is also the essence of so-called social justice.

(This article was originally published by Front Page Magazine.)

* * * * *

Americans need to know that ACORN is restructuring in time to help re-elect President Obama in 2012. Obama used to work for ACORN and represented the group in court as its lawyer. These radical leftists who use the brutal, in-your-face, pressure tactics of Saul Alinsky want to destroy America as we know it and will use any means to do it.

Buy my book Subversion Inc. at Amazon and in Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million bookstores. Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.

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.

As radical journalist Laura Flanders reported, 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.” Stamp said the protests are aimed at “trying to change the capitalist system” and bringing “revolutionary changes to the states.”

WFP organizer Matthew Cain also acknowledged the party’s involvement on Oct. 5th and helpfully provided a photograph of party staffers bearing a blue and white WFP banner during a march in lower Manhattan. Across from Foley Square,

several WFP field staff were standing on the steps. For some of the staffers, it was their first time at the square, but for many others they had already spent nights sleeping in the park. Even those who have been there for two weeks or more have not seen their spirits diminished – they’re every bit as committed as they were when they first showed up.

Of course WFP executive director Dan Cantor, a longtime ACORN operative, is pleased with Occupy Wall Street so far. Cantor told supporters in an email that “the spirit of Wisconsin and Tahrir Square is alive and well in New York City.”

Nowadays WFP goes to great lengths to try to convince onlookers that it is separate from ACORN, the disgraced Saul Alinsky-inspired activist group. The shell corporation that ran the 370-plus affiliate strong ACORN network filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy last November, but its state chapters changed their names and continue to operate. The vote-manufacturing nonprofit Project Vote, which used to employ Barack Obama as an organizer, is still in business. So is ACORN Housing, which changed its name to Affordable Housing Centers for America.

But the Working Families Party is ACORN. The minor political party shares an office address with ACORN a mile away from the Brooklyn Bridge. Among the party’s co-founders are ACORN’s former national chief organizer, Bertha Lewis. Her former right-hand man, Democratic National Committee executive director Patrick Gaspard, formerly an SEIU 1199 official and Obama White House political director, also goes way back with the party.

WFP’s confusing, ACORN-like organizational structure has been known to frustrate even the most dedicated investigators, allowing the party to keep some distance from ACORN.

Through the party’s multiple arms, WFP enjoys the “benefits of a political party (legitimacy in voters’ minds, ballot line), a non-profit (tax-exemptions, uncapped donation limits and tax deductions) and a for-profit (no disclosure requirements, ability to collect fees backed by taxpayer-supported matching funds from candidates),” notes Edward-Isaac Dovere of New York’s City Hall News.

The party has sister WFP-branded parties in Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Oregon, South Carolina, and Vermont. Like ACORN, WFP advocates more government spending, higher taxes, universal government-run healthcare, campaign finance restrictions, free universal higher education, rent control, same-sex marriage, an immigration amnesty for illegal aliens, and “greening” the economy by creating heavily subsidized union jobs in the energy sector.

Meanwhile, new front groups created by ACORN are also deeply involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. They include New York Communities for Change, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, Action United (Pennsylvania), Organize Now (Florida), and New England United for Justice (Massachusetts).

The protests, which have spread to several large U.S. cities, are part of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke calls an “anti-banking jihad.” ACORN allies are also involved in the protests, which aim to destabilize the nation’s financial system. SEIU board member Stephen Lerner said he wants to “bring down the stock market” through a campaign of disruption. He said last week that SEIU plans to terrorize bank executives at their homes.

With paid professional assistance from ACORN, Lerner’s work has become that much easier.

(This article was originally published by Front Page Magazine.)

* * * * *

Americans need to know that ACORN is restructuring in time to help re-elect President Obama in 2012. Obama used to work for ACORN and represented the group in court as its lawyer. These radical leftists who use the brutal, in-your-face, pressure tactics of Saul Alinsky want to destroy America as we know it and will use any means to do it.

Buy my book Subversion Inc. at Amazon and in Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million bookstores. Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.

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?”

As I note in my book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, the WFP is part and parcel of ACORN. In 1998 the party was officially recognized in New York State. WFP’s headquarters is at the same address as ACORN on Nevins Street in Brooklyn. WFP’s executive director is longtime ACORN operative Dan Cantor.

One of the SEIU-funded party’s co-founders is ACORN’s former national chief organizer, Bertha Lewis. Democratic National Committee executive director Patrick Gaspard also contributed to the creation of the party and sat on its board. Gaspard was a political director in the Obama White House and is a former SEIU executive. Gaspard was also an organizer for the radical New Party in the early 1990s. That party’s membership consisted largely of individuals from the Democratic Socialists of America, SEIU, and ACORN. The party endorsed Barack Obama when he ran for the Illinois State Senate.

WFP takes credit for raising taxes both in the city and state of New York and for pressuring the state’s congressional delegation to oppose Social Security reforms. The party has sister WFP-branded parties in Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Oregon, South Carolina, and Vermont.

Working with its radical friends at SEIU, WFP advocates more government spending, higher taxes, universal government-run health care, campaign finance restrictions, free universal higher education, oppressive rent control, same-sex marriage, amnesty for illegal aliens, “greening” the economy by creating heavily subsidized union jobs in the energy sector, and mandatory paid sick leave for all workers.

In 2009 Connecticut WFP sent busloads of thugs to confront American International Group Inc. (AIG) executives at their homes. The protests were calculated to intimidate executives who had been receiving death threats after the company reportedly paid out bonuses using taxpayer bail-out funds.

ACORN allies are also involved in protests aimed at destabilizing the nation’s financial system.

SEIU board member Stephen Lerner has vowed to do his part to drive a stake through the heart of capitalism. Lerner says he wants to “bring down the stock market” through a campaign of disruption. He said last week that SEIU plans to terrorize bank executives at their homes.

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.”

Meanwhile, ACORN’s new front groups are also deeply involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

In Pennsylvania, Action United said it plans to participate in Occupy Pittsburgh on Oct. 15. Organize Now will be occupying Orlando, Florida, on the same day.

New York Communities for Change (NYCC), led by longtime ACORN lobbyist Jon Kest, is one of the major protest groups leading the demonstrations in lower Manhattan. Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment is leading the Occupy L.A. protests.

New England United for Justice, which is headed by former ACORN national president Maude Hurd, is participating in the related “Take Back Boston” protests in Massachusetts, according to watchdog group Judicial Watch. Hurd is a close political ally of Boston mayor Thomas Menino.

The influence of ACORN on the Wall Street protests should have been clear by the unhinged nature of much of the demonstrations. The question is really only whether the radical outfit will push the mob into more and more extreme behavior. Determining the answer to this question will likely not be pleasant.

(This is a modified version of an article that was first published in Front Page Magazine).

* * * * *

Americans need to know that ACORN is restructuring in time to help re-elect President Obama in 2012. Obama used to work for ACORN and represented the group in court as its lawyer. These radical leftists who use the brutal, in-your-face, pressure tactics of Saul Alinsky want to destroy America as we know it and will use any means to do it.

Buy my book Subversion Inc. at Amazon and in Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million bookstores. Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.