Ancel uses the word, “salt” in relating the tactic. In union terminology, that would supposedly be an individual who goes to work at a company with the intent to organize a union. However, that is not the goal Ancel embraces, as the video makes clear. She informs students how one can use so-called salts to put a non-union company out of business entirely.

While demonstrating no concern at all for non-union employees and business owners certain to face financial hardship as a result of the deceptive tactic Ancel endorses to her class, she calls it “useful,” going on to cackle while pointing out how the tactic is largely frowned upon by the public, a majority of which is comprised of non-union taxpayers who actually pay Ancel’s salary given her employment at a public university.

Certainly tactics union organizers use, or have used, in the past are appropriate for discussion in a class on Labor and Politics. However, one would think a genuine educational experience would come with at least some balance and objectivity and perhaps a discussion of the broader repercussions of any tactic, especially one specifically designed to destroy an individual business owner’s livelihood, while leaving some number of other taxpayers out of work.

Unfortunately, Ancel demonstrates no such thing. Consequently, it makes her class look more like a lesson in union organizing 101, as opposed to a serious and appropriate college-level educational experience related to the Labor movement in America.

That raises the question as to why such a program would be aligned with any public university, where taxpayers, the majority of which are non-union, are forced to fund an alleged college-level education program geared toward destroying their own livelihood, potentially leaving them out of work at the hands of Ancel-trained union activists.

With still more video to come, along with this latest, ultimately one might wonder why efforts like Ancel’s aren’t supported through union funding as the union activist training seminars they very often appear to be, as opposed to forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for training some next generation of union activists intent on significantly altering, if not destroying, said taxpayer’s livelihoods.

The video above was just released by the Institute for Justice. It begins with an elderly woman lamenting:

When my son came back from Kuwait he couldn’t believe it.  He said, “Mom, what’s going on?” And I said, well they want to get rid of us and they’re finally doing it.  He was upset.  He said, “I’m sorry, I’m halfway around the world to help other people and I can’t even help my own mom keep her own home.”

For the past ten years, township officials in Mount Holly have been destroying a close-knit community called the Gardens.  They’ve been recklessly bulldozing select individual row-houses — even when they are attached to occupied homes — to make way for fancier homes for richer people.  The current owners have never been offered a place in the new redevelopment, or enough money to buy comparable home nearby.

A new Institute for Justice study, available here, shows that this redevelopment project may result in a loss of one million dollars every year, one tenth of the township’s budget.

Despite these terrible conditions, the community never gave up hope.  They continued to fight against all odds for their cherished neighborhood.   And on Wednesday, a federal court came to their defense.

The Third Circuit issued a ruling that prohibits the city from moving forward with eminent domain against the homeowners involved in the lawsuit until they have a chance to let their voice be heard in court.  The ruling likely means that the neighborhood has another year to fight for and save their community.

Without this ruling, the neighborhood would have likely been completely destroyed before the end of the month.

Activism expert Christina Walsh of the Institute for Justice has been working with the homeowners in their grassroots fight.   They launched a major billboard campaign (see above), generated positive local media coverage, ran full-page ads, held events, and more.  Christina has visited the residents numerous times over the past year, and described her experience in the Gardens recently in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Nancy Lopez raised five children on her own, and they have since gone on to college and joined the working world. She sometimes worked two jobs to afford the mortgage on her three-bedroom house in the Gardens. And now the township is telling Lopez that her home, her efforts, and her memories aren’t good enough.

Down the block, Leona Wright just turned 92. When she moved into the Gardens, her son was in the third grade. Her late husband was a World War II veteran, and they moved to the Gardens because they thought they could put down roots there. They bought two rowhouses and combined them into one, now meticulously decorated with family photos and memorabilia.

These women and their neighbors loved the Gardens. They relied on one another and helped raise each other’s children. Over the years, they’ve held block cleanup competitions, festivals, and talent shows. Their mutual concern for each other was the lifeblood of this community, and the township has drained it without a second thought.

And yet despite the best efforts of tax-hungry politicians and land-hungry developers, the Gardens will not be completely destroyed anytime soon.

Mount Holly shows us that more work is needed in our nationwide fight to end eminent domain abuse.  But it also shows us that a small band of committed activists, working together, can triumph over Big Government.

We are hopeful that with this week’s ruling the Gardens will ultimately prevail.

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Last month in Illinois at the Right Nation event, bused-in SEIU hordes coordinated with social justice activist ministers and Obama’s vaunted Organizing for America (formerly Obama for America) waving American flags that had been distributed to them by their “Community Organizers.”  The well-trained mob chanted “Stop the Hate” and wielded uniform, hand-crafted placards defaming Glenn Beck as a “liar” and a “hater.” What we were able to discover in short order, and quite predictably, was this group was “astro-turf” and with the provocation of simple questions, such as: “What does your sign mean?”, “Why are you here?”, the “Stop the Hate” rally devolved into spitting and inflammatory name-calling.

Someone, somewhere has had a plan to dress the union thugs up as pious and deeply patriotic now that a progressive socialist is in the White House, and to frame non-progressives, non-socialists and critics of the Obama Administration as out-of-tune with Jesus’s “Social Justice” activism (history revisionism at its worst) and un-patriotic.

When I was standing outside the News Corp. building Monday evening before my appearance on “Red Eye,” I saw a lone protester who looked not-unlike Scooby-Doo’s sidekick, Shaggy.  His name is Matt Sky.  He and his girlfriend are relatively infamous for being the most photographed supporters of the Ground Zero Mosque due to their constant, ubiquitous protests in front of the Cordoba House site.

In reading about Matt Sky, ubiquitous Manhattan protester, he’s been referred to as a math tutor and web programmer.  In what type of economy does a math tutor and web programmer have this amount of free time to do so much protesting?  In another less politically correct time, a reporter would start asking him whether or not he is actually employed or whether he is another statistic of the staggering unemployment brought on by the horrendous Obama economy.

In Matt Sky I noticed a now-familiar motif:  Leftist archetype (this time, a young hippie) holding a sign employing Alinski’s Rule 13 (Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it) in this case, Glenn Beck is the President and OFA’s #1 target, and Sky’s sign, like the ones we saw in Illinois, read “Glenn Beck Hates America.”  Also, Sky predictably employed the activist-left’s new favorite protest prop, the American flag.

Some highlights of my encounter:

• He comically and ironically calls for civility while proclaiming that Glenn Beck is an America hater, a nut job, and that Beck is scaring people.  Is it not uncivil to hold up a sign suggesting Beck is inspired by hatred of our country?

• He claims he’s neither politically left or right, but instead he’s for “civility,” but it’s all quickly revealed as a smokescreen.  “Civility” is not on the left/right political spectrum; civility is a tactic or a set of manners, not a political position.  He proves many on the left are ashamed to call themselves left or liberal. Or he thinks admitting his leftism will somehow diminish the effect of his protest. Later, he says liberals need to proudly proclaim their liberalism in a short interview when he sheepishly refuses to follow his own advice.

• Also, it’s worth pointing out that Beck and his supporters are provably more civil than the left; consider how those who attended the left-wing ONE NATION rally trashed the mall last weekend, while those who attended Beck’s rally left it pristine. Or the countless videos we have shown that have shown violence and hatred coming from Obama’s Organizing for America, the SEIU and MoveOn.Org.

President Obama, whose OFA helped organize the “anti-hate rally” in Chicago that devolved into his group hurling anti-gay epithets as they ran back onto their bus after being confronted with simple questions about the meaning of their protest, has shown he is petty enough to focus his presidential efforts by attacking his media critics.  One of his first acts as President was to go after Rush Limbaugh.  He has also shown a transparent disposition to re-invent and flaunt left-wing interpretations of Christian religiosity and American Patriotism.  He and the left are arrogantly trying to define patriotism as solely left-wing virtues.

I knew that when I confronted Sky that I would be met with an “Obama-bot”: Either a paid union thug, or, in this case, an ill-informed, cliché-spouting left-wing activist. The number of willing and able volunteers that were abundant during the 2008 Presidential campaign seem to be dwindling and our flag-waving progressive anti-Beckian, seems to be one of the last people to get the message that his savior is greatly to blame for our country’s doldrums and economic woes — and not the guy who appears on Direct TV Channel 360 at 5PM EDT (check your local cable listings for time and channel near you.)

Sky seemed like a nice enough guy, but his contradictory answers make for a humorous view into the sad state of Obama and Democrat support… there is very little these days.  There is only the predictable politics of personal destruction against those who are not in power, those who are not the Commander-in-Chief and those who are not the leader of the free world.  “Dissent is patriotic” has devolved into the most blatant attempts to shut-up and marginalize the other side of the debate.  How pathetically and predictably Left-Wing.  At least Hugo Chavez knows how to do it right.

Let this episode be instructive to all who witness it.  The noise and bluster we see from these pre-fab sign-holding, flag-waving malcontents is the beginning and end of their argument.  As soon as any intrepid citizen-journalist engages these pre-programmed agitators with a question or two, they reveal emptiness and contradictions as quickly as Sky did.

I’ll give this polite yet confused Obama supporter credit where credit is due:  At least he didn’t call me a homosexual like his peers in Chicago did.

Here are the details.

Last month, Houston’s Registrar accused a Democratic organization called “Houston Votes” of voter registration fraud. The allegations were recently detailed here, and make compelling reading:

When Catherine Engelbrecht and her friends sat down and started talking politics several years ago, they soon agreed that talking wasn’t enough. They wanted to do more. So when the 2008 election came around, “about 50” of her friends volunteered to work at Houston’s polling places.

“What we saw shocked us,” she said. “There was no one checking IDs, judges would vote for people that asked for help. It was fraud, and we watched like deer in the headlights.”

Their shared experience, she says, created “True the Vote,” a citizen-based grassroots organization that began collecting publicly available voting data to prove that what they saw in their day at the polls was, indeed, happening — and that it was happening everywhere.

. . . .

Their work paid off. Two weeks ago the Harris County voter registrar took their work and the findings of his own investigation and handed them over to both the Texas secretary of state’s office and the Harris County district attorney.

Most of the findings focused on a group called Houston Votes, a voter registration group headed by Sean Caddle, who also worked for the Service Employees International Union before coming to Houston. Among the findings were that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid.

The other registrations included one of a woman who registered six times in the same day; registrations of non-citizens; so many applications from one Houston Voters collector in one day that it was deemed to be beyond human capability; and 1,597 registrations that named the same person multiple times, often with different signatures. . . .

“The integrity of the voting rolls in Harris County, Texas, appears to be under an organized and systematic attack by the group operating under the name Houston Votes,” the Harris voter registrar, Leo Vasquez, charged as he passed on the documentation to the district attorney.

Guess who was active in recruiting for Houston Votes? That would be one Maria Isabel.

Does that name sound familiar? It should. She is a radical Obama supporter who ran an Obama campaign office that sported a picture of Che Guevara.

Maria Isabel (identified by Babalu blog) at Obama/Che HQ

Her name resurfaced when we reported here that Isabel had invited Roxana Mayer to a Sheila Jackson Lee town hall meeting. Mayer, of course, is the woman who pretended to be a doctor to lend credibility to her support for Obama’s health care reform.

Maria Isabel at town hall meeting

Maria Isabel, having invited Mayer to the meeting, was sitting right there with this fraud in the front row:

Isabel is a long-time Organizing for America activist.

Maria Isabel with Obama

(So, as it turned out, was Mayer.)

So last year, you had two Obama activists sitting in the front row of a Sheila Jackson Lee town hall meeting, one of whom invited the other via a listserv. One was a Che Guevara fan and the other lied about being a doctor.

Now the fan of Che Guevara and Obama is shown to have been involved (beginning as early as 2007) with an organization that stands credibly accused of rank voter fraud.

Doesn’t mean she had anything to do with it, of course. And she didn’t necessarily have anything to do with Roxana Mayer’s fraud, either. She just happens to keep popping up in the company of others who commit fraud. That’s all.

Or is it?

IJ’s first trip to the high court came in 2002 and resulted in a landmark victory for school choice.  We also won our second U.S. Supreme Court case, defending the American ideals of economic liberty and unfettered interstate commerce by striking down a ban on the direct shipment of wine.

Our third case changed America forever.  A local government in Connecticut decided to bulldoze an entire neighborhood and hand the land over to a politically connected private developer.  The law was stacked against the property owners in favor of the powerful special interests.  IJ, defending the property owners, lost in a controversial 5-4 ruling.

This was the infamous Kelo case, and it resulted in an explosion of outrage and grassroots activism all across the country.  Ed Morrissey recently wrote at Hot Air that it arguably set “the stage for the all-out eruption of Tea Party activism a few years later.” This epic battle to protect private property rights, ultimately vindicated by grassroots activists just like you, is one that will never be forgotten:

And now, as children nationwide get ready to begin a new school year, the Institute for Justice is defending Arizona’s innovative scholarship tax-credit program before the highest court in the land.

In a nutshell, the program encourages taxpayers to donate to organizations that provide scholarships to low-income children to attend better schools.  Every donor gets a dollar-for-dollar tax credit, up to $500.  As a result, thousands of needy families in Arizona have had the opportunity to escape poorly performing public schools and attend functional and thriving private schools.

The Arizona Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit claiming the program is illegal because parents may use their scholarships at religious schools if they choose.  The Arizona Supreme Court disagreed, as the money is given to parents rather than schools.  And importantly, it is the parents, not the schools, that choose where the money is spent.

Defiantly, the ACLU filed suit again, this time in federal court.  Unfortunately, the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the children.  This decision drew a strongly worded dissent from Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain, who wrote:

[T]he legislature could hardly have had the ‘purpose’ of endorsing religion when it set up a plan that, for all it knew, could have resulted in absolutely no funding for religious entities.

In May, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case for next term.  Tim Keller, Executive Director of the Institute for Justice Arizona Chapter and the lead attorney on the case, made the following statement:

This frivolous lawsuit is a desperate effort by those afraid of true education reform.  School choice gives thousands of low-income Arizona families the opportunity for a better education in schools that work for them, and thousands more eager families are on waiting lists.  There is no good legal or policy reason to take these scholarships away.  We are confident the U.S. Supreme Court will rule that this thriving scholarship program is constitutional.

Nationally, school choice is on the rise.  Last month alone, Oklahoma and Louisiana created new programs.  And while the teachers unions killed a highly successful school choice scholarship in Washington, DC, that benefits thousands of the poorest kids in the district, the head of DC’s public schools just announced that she is planning to create a new voucher program to help DC kids in need.

To learn more about IJ’s fourth U.S. Supreme Court case, click here.

The site, which has the address makenolaw.org, empowers grassroots activists from around the country that are standing up and saying no to unconstitutional attacks on free speech coming in the guise of campaign finance reform.  The site explains all the latest news and events going on in this increasingly complex area of law.  All of the writers are First Amendment attorneys and experts at the Institute for Justice (IJ)—the libertarian law firm dedicated to striking down campaign finance laws in state and federal courts.

The unfortunate reality is this:  Campaign finance laws are a way to regulate speech and silence speakers.  And they have seriously negative impacts on everyday Americans.

Consider Karen Sampson of Parker North, Colorado:

Karen and her neighbors opposed an effort to annex their town into a neighboring city because it would raise their taxes without providing them benefits.  So they printed up fliers and yard signs.  And then they got sued.

Under what basis?  Colorado’s campaign finance laws, which state that any group of individuals that spend over $200 magically become an “issue committee” that is forced to register with the state.  Further, they must track and report all their “contributions” and “expenditures” and disclose the identities of anyone who gives them money.

The result?  People took down their yard signs and stopped passing out fliers.

In 2008, a federal court upheld the lawsuit against Karen and her neighbors while admitting that Colorado’s campaign finance laws “had the effect of stifling political speech in violation of the First Amendment.”  The Institute for Justice appealed and is waiting for a decision.

In Seattle, Pat Murakami is fighting campaign finance laws that threaten grassroots activists with fines up to $10,000 for every act of free speech:

Pat heads up a diverse group of individuals that work together to fight eminent domain abuse.  She says that all the campaign finance laws do is “limit the political process to lobbyists and insiders.”  Moreover, they threaten her group’s very existence:

“For a volunteer organization like us, fighting to preserve our neighborhood is difficult and expensive enough as it is.  My organization cannot afford the time and lawyers necessary to correctly comply with Washington’s incomprehensible and complex law.”

36 states in America now use campaign finance laws to silence activism just like Pat’s.  And as bad as Washington state is, the situation is far worse on the east coast.  In New York such efforts are criminal, threatening people like Pat with four years in jail and several thousand dollars in fines—the exact same punishment handed out to arsonists.

Down south, campaign finance laws treat activists like Pat the same as people who kidnap children:  Alabama law says $30,000 in fines and 20 years behind bars.  [For more statistics, check out the report Mowing Down the Grassroots.]

The bottom line is that free speech on political matters is vital to our form of government.  And the right to talk about and participate in local politics is at the core of what the First Amendment was designed to protect.  Campaign finance laws don’t just affect politicians.  They restrict everybody’s speech, silencing the grassroots through red tape, regulations and punishment for speaking.

That is why we need to work together—which is where the new free speech site comes in. According to IJ campaign finance expert Paul Sherman:

“We are really excited about Congress Shall Make No Law.  It’s so important to bring the community of activists together.   For everyone interested in helping to protect free speech, there are four quick things you can do right now:  Bookmark, read, comment and share.”

That is:

1. Bookmark makenolaw.org
2. Read a few posts
3. Comment on them
4. Share with others

Sherman continued, “Our success in bringing together and educating people on free speech really depends on our activists.  Working together, with their help and support, we can save free speech from the regulators.”

The only thing Americans should need in order to speak out about politics is an opinion.  Join the free speech community and help IJ—along with grassroots activists from around the country—preserve our most cherished liberties.

One of the most pernicious attacks on the basic First Amendment rights to speak, associate and petition the government are so-called grassroots lobbying laws.  (For an overview of these laws and what makes them so bad, watch this brief video:  http://ij.org/ 3368.)  But what bureaucrats and campaign finance reformers call “grassroots lobbying” is nothing more than one of the most basic acts of self-governance:  citizens discussing issues of public importance among themselves.

As many as 36 states impose heavy burdens on grassroots political activism—burdens that discourage citizens from even bothering to participate in the political process.

For example, in Washington state, if you get together with a couple of friends and create an informal group to encourage others to contact their legislators and oppose more taxes, the government forces you to register and report the name, address, business and occupation of each of the group’s organizers, as well as the names and addresses of anyone with whom the group is working to spread its message.  The state also demands to know the names and addresses of each person who contributes as little as $25 to your efforts.  After the government collects this information, it makes your personal information and political activities available to anyone with a computer and access to the Internet.

Spending $500 in one month or $1,000 in three months—a couple of trips to Kinko’s to print flyers or hosting one community barbeque—will trigger the registration and reporting requirements of the law.

Put simply:  A citizen who spends even relatively minor amounts of money communicating with fellow citizens must register with, and provide information to, the government regardless of whether elected officials are ever reached by the efforts.

In Washington, failure to register can lead to an investigation, significant penalties (including treble damages, the costs of the investigation and the government’s attorney’s fees), and a revocation of the ability to engage in any political activity that might qualify as “grassroots lobbying.”

Other states back up their regulations with criminal penalties.  In New York, for example, the maximum criminal penalty for violating the grassroots lobbying law is $5,000 and four years in jail—the same maximum penalty as for arson or rioting.  In Alabama, the maximum penalty is $30,000 and 20 years in jail—equivalent to the maximum penalty for kidnapping under state law.

The effect of laws like Washington’s is that many grassroots organizations simply forego speaking because the burdens of disclosure are so high and the costs of incorrectly reporting so steep.  Average citizens are effectively shut out of the political process.  This is unacceptable under the First Amendment, which unreservedly protects political speech.

It does not look like this ominous threat to free speech will recede anytime soon—instead, it appears to be on the rise.

In 2007, the U.S. Senate considered adding a grassroots lobbying registration requirement to an existing federal lobbyist disclosure law.  The provision was supported by campaign finance “reformers,” who promoted it as a means to “increase transparency and provide a more accurate record of paid lobbying actions in Congress.”

A number of groups, however, successfully persuaded Congress that such a measure would be unconstitutional, and the Senate dropped the provision from the final bill.

But now, with the rise of the Tea Party movement as well as strong grassroots efforts both for and against President Obama’s health care reforms, there is a new push among the political elite and their campaign finance reform allies to regulate grassroots lobbying at the federal level.

The real irony of these so-called “lobbying” laws is that our nation’s history is replete with examples of anonymous grassroots speech and activism challenging the status quo and urging political change, beginning with the Federalist Papers.  Disclosure laws like Washington’s could have stopped many initially unpopular but vitally important movements from ever starting.

Grassroots lobbying laws are nothing more than the government’s attempt to monitor, collect and disseminate information about the political activities of private citizens—something the government has no business doing in America.