On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!
Or it’s Cloward-Piven time.
Fight! Fellows! – fight, fight, fight!
Or it‘ll be our behinds!

I imagine you are aware of all those greedy capitalists in Moscow, Wisconsin, demonstrating so they can keep working in collusion, to siphon public money for their power hungry interests and their own bank accounts.

Sorry for the bad typing; make that government workers, in Madison. “Kill the bill!” they shout and likely spit when they do.  The name of it is the Budget Repair Bill, but much of the Marxstream media call it Gov. Scott Walker’s “anti-union bill.”

Fightin' Bob La Follette, progressive to the ends of his hair

I live forty-some miles northwest of Mad City, in the town where the nation’s first Progressive Party presidential candidate, Robert La Follette married his leftist, feminist wife, in 1881. Yeah, 1881. Politically precocious, we are, here in Badgerland. “Fighting Bob” learned his social justice from U. of W. president, John Bascom, who came from Massachusetts’ Andover Seminary (essentially of the same United Church of Christ denomination as the so reverent Jeremiah Wright).   Those Congregationalists stem from the Puritans, whom, as the name implies, had a soft spot for utopianism and legalistic perfectibility.

Progressivism, but also unvarnished Marxism made inroads very early here in Wisconsin, including within the state and region’s labor movement.  In 1904, the University of Wisconsin became the home of John R. Commons, one of the first progressive incrementalists, a label which tends to cover radical interests of unknown lengths.  He was called the spiritual father of Social Security and he specialized in union studies.  He was also one of America’s progressive eugenicists.

Barry Obama’s hero, Harold Washington was not America’s fist socialist, big city mayor.  That distinction goes to Emil Seidel, elected as Milwaukee’s Marxist boss in 1910, the same year that Victor Luitpold Berger was elected America’s first socialist representative in Congress.

Socialsts tried and convicted, 1919

It was Berger that gave union leader Eugene Debs a copy of Das Kapital and won him over to Marxism.  Debs became the Socalist Party’s candidate for president in 1912, with Mayor Seidel his VP candidate.  However, their Socialist Party of America chose not to run their own candidate for president in 1924, eagerly backing La Follette, instead, much as confessed socialists backed Obama, in 2008.

The Department of Justice was on to Berger and he was tried and in 1919, convicted of rather tenuous charges under the Espionage Act of that time.  Four others were also convicted for their own doings.  Yet, Berger continued to be a political celebrity in Wisconsin.

Those names are just the tip of the top of the iceberg. Extensive information on the Wisconsin front on the Marxist war against American freedoms is available in numerous books and at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, where they have a curious pride in their collection.  Compiled, it is enough to satisfy the appetite of one much more skeptical than our state’s own Sen. Joe McCarthy.

With numerous socialist operations headquartering in neighboring Chicago and with the influx of European immigrants, at or shortly after the turn of the Twentieth Century, the state became saturated with a small but stubborn and increasingly subversive minority of Marxists.

Concomitantly, the University of Wisconsin became a center for the weakly meandering but strongly stated thoughts of discontented, dead Germanic and Jewish intellectuals, hanging out at the atheistic ends of the enlightenment through industrial ages.  During the Vietnam War, the U. of W. at Madison was among the hottest of the SDS hot spots, suffering a murderous bombing along the way.  Many more Marxists than the infamous Joel Rogers intellectually infest Wisconsin and it’s university system to this day.  Pardon, make that through this day (tenure) and despite their thirst for abortion, many of them breed red diaper comrades.

Wisconsin is also on the vanguard of the subversion of America’s churches — yes churches.  It was Saul Alinsky’s revolutionary model to feed neo-Marxist community organizations, drawing from radicalized resources planted within churches and synagogues, along with trade unions (as well as the cash cow foundation and political party structures already blueprinted by his time).  And, long story short, we have the Gamaliel Foundation ¹ ² (which, in Chicago, employed Barack Obama) plus Alinsky’s own baby, the Industrial Areas Foundation, both flourishing here, like woodbine.  Their roots thrust especially into Wisconsin’s dominant Lutheran (especially ELCA) and Catholic churches, plus many others. (Links, their own sites: Gamaliel Foundation; Gamaliel in Wisconsin – WISDOM; Industrial Areas Foundation; IAF’s Common Ground in southeastern Wisconsin: ELCA’s “Organizing Networks” — neo-Marxist Roman Catholic entities are legion, pardon the Biblical expression.)

What a state, as Yakov Smirnoff would say.

And get this. Before our early apostle of Marxism, Victor Berger, became a politician he was a newspaper editor and… a school teacher. What Mark Twain would say is, “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

And now we have teachers and other government workers, some likely third and fourth generation Marxists, calling in, sick to demonstrate and getting doctor’s excuses on site.  Some teachers have even dragged high school students along, though according to interviews, many fail to understand why they have come.  One is confident these students are not quite taught the revolutionary aims of those clued-in union bosses, community organizers, and progressive politicians who follow the Alinsky and Cloward-Piven models.  It remains controversial, to try to overload America’s governments with so much debt they collapse and turn the swollen ranks of the government-dependent into a panicked and frustrated mob, nationwide and significantly more ginned up than is seen now, in Madison.

And how many of the majority in the Wisconsin legislature understand this is the goal?  It is hard to say, since charges of McCarthyism await any who would mention it.

To the debate, the union bosses have trucked in the throw weight of notables such as Richard Trumka, communist collaborator and head of the AFL-CIO; more rhyming with history.  Corporate shake-down artist, Jesse Jackson has been at it long enough to rhyme with his own.

But something unparalleled in American history, the Neo-Marxist Organizer in Chief, himself, Barack Obama pushes the protests, while building the ranks of the pampered proletariat through his personal and even sorta’ presidential operation, Organizing for America.  And, the putative president has warned the vetted Governor Walker against an “assault on the unions.”  Of course he has.

At, HeartlandRevolution.com, we see that numerous other state capitols have been targeted for little Cairos-in-the-heartland, including Columbus, Ohio and Eugene Debs’ own Indianapolis, IN.   So fitting that it all begins here, where the force is strong, but the prog pickings may be a bit thinner, elsewhere.

Here is my take, this winter, no snow and no bluff.  We are in a contest of global collectivism vs. our American sovereignty and liberty that will carry on in the rhymings of history, to make for a saga of the ages.  So on, Wisconsin, in it.

]]> http://biggovernment.com/awilliams/2011/02/22/why-wisconsin-warning-history/feed/ 106 http://biggovernment.com/mikeflynn/2011/02/20/confession-we-staged-the-entire-union-protest-in-wisconsin-all-of-it/ http://biggovernment.com/mikeflynn/2011/02/20/confession-we-staged-the-entire-union-protest-in-wisconsin-all-of-it/#comments Sun, 20 Feb 2011 21:44:47 +0000 Mike Flynn http://biggovernment.com/?p=231732 I guess it was only a matter of time, but I’m still a little surprised at how quickly the left connected the dots. Always on guard against elaborate right-wing conspiracies, the brain trust over at Crooks and Liars needed just a few hours to uncover the truth: that Breitbart organized the elaborate sting featuring actors posing as doctors to hand out fake ‘medical excuses’ for union protesters.

Even more impressive; they didn’t even get a copy of our internal memo on the operation. They just noted that Breitbart was in Madison and noted that conservative news outlets did the reporting of the ‘fake notes’ scandal. It was a brilliant piece of deduction.

So, it is probably only a matter of time before they learn the full truth. The doctor sting, in fact, was only an afterthought, dreamed up by our research lemur after a tequila binge with Retracto. It was profoundly simple too. The lemur pulled the whole thing off after only about 15 minutes on Gchat.

I’m coming clean: Breitbart staged the entire union protest in Madison. All of it. The Walker proposal, the union protest and the counter protest. Everything. Let me explain.

For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been trading coded messages with the Kochs, trying to find that final nail to put into the coffin of the middle class. (The exact code is a bit complicated, but it is based on the spacing of letters around certain phrases in Glenn Beck monologues. Think “cloward-piven” etc.) The orders from the Kochs finally came back, “take out public sector unions.”

We retired to the top floor of the gleaming Breitbart tower to plot strategy. I’m saving most of this for my book, but we ultimately settled on using the budget crisis to propose very small changes in public unions’ compensation and then, this was the tricky part, getting the unions to so overact that they would lose all public sympathy.

“But, this isn’t some third-world banana republic,” I cautioned. “Its America, even public unions will realize the need for shared sacrifice to get out of this budget mess.”

There was silence for a while. Then, Andrew had another eureka moment, “We don’t use real union members. We’ll hire fake ones.”

“But, that would take, like, thousands of people to pull off,” I again cautioned.

Andrew shot back, “Have you seen the unemployment numbers.”

Once we realized we could just hire fake protesters, the ideas started flowing. “Really big puppets”, I threw out. “Interpretive dances,” thundered Stage Right. “No, I got it,” shrieked Dana, “have so many teachers call in sick that schools have to close. Parents will hate that shit.”

Brilliant.

“Okay, but,” I said, “we still need someone to propose this. You know, a place with a legislature, where this proposal can actually be voted on. Which of the 49 states can we get to do this?”

Several minutes of silence broken again by Andrew, “Let’s just make up a state! I always thought there should be fifty. We’ll just convince people there’s a 50th state where this is happening. We can call it Wisconsin, in honor of our first Alpaca.”

Nolte chimed in, “Well, if its a fake state, we can even have Democrat legislators ‘fleeing the state’ so they don’t have to vote. I know real legislators wouldn’t do that…but if we are making it up its no-holds-bar. I know Hollywood, we can, like, so totally pull this off.”

“Okay,” I said, “but that is some serious brainwashing we’re gonna need. Its one thing to say a guy in chinos is wearing a pimp costume. You’re talking about convincing people there is a whole new state. I don’t think even the Kochs and all their CGI studios can pull that off.”

“Right,” Andrew said. He turned and bellowed into his phone, “Get me the Hungarian.”

Of course, there is more to the story…especially the funny bit about how Trumpka almost blew the whole thing. But, as I said, I’m saving that for my book.

1)What do you think of the tea parties?

It’s important to note that I wasn’t asking about political philosophy or personal preference, but rather as an organizing philosophy.

Rathke is impressed by their ability to organize. As an organizing phenomenon, the tea parties are effective and, as an organizer, Wade Rathke believes they took advantage of a vacuum, stepped in, and filled a void that the president never saw coming. Rathke once referred to the tea party movement as “tea baggers”. He did this only once. He never really took any pot shots at them besides this and so I don’t know that this was a deliberate dig.

Rathke did, however, also point out that often the tea parties fail basic organizing principles.

Far too often, screen shots, photos, and videos show angry people, people yelling, and faces that portray meanness. That’s not the image you want in organizing. As Rathke told me, “the more angry you are, the calmer you have to look”. In organizing, Rathke is always very aware of how a crowd will appear in newspapers, on television, and in photos. This is something he stresses at all times in organizing protests. Portraying anger, in his opinion, turns off more people than it attracts.

Conservatives can dismiss this criticism but they’ll do it at their peril. I processed this as Rathke, not the political opponent, but Rathke the schooled community organizer offering an opinion based on experience. There is a lot of anger portrayed at tea party rallies and that’s what often winds up on television. Image is everything and Rathke, the organizer, understands this.

2) What do you think of conservatives demonizing the SEIU protests of the American Banking Association while lionizing the tea parties?

This is something I have found peculiar myself. When I thought this question up, I thought it was a red meat question for Rathke. He didn’t necessarily react quite as ideologically as I thought.

Rathke simply said that protests are totally legitimate. He said that SEIU has been criticizing the banks for a while. The latest protest was no different than protests they’ve done before. Rathke didn’t take the bait to take a series of potshots at his political opponents to exploit the hypocrisy of folks that lionize one set of protests while demonizing another set of protests. Protests are something that Rathke has engaged in his entire career and he told me that he has no problem with anyone conducting a protest for any issue as that’s something he’s done his whole life.

3) What do you think of conservatives attacking Saul Alinsky all while using his tactics?

Rathke told me he often receives “strange emails” both from folks he knows and doesn’t know that brag about how they have used one Alinsky tactic or another on LIBERALS. This he finds to be delicious irony.

On the issue of Saul Alinsky, he told me that all organizers owe at least some inspiration to Saul Alinsky. Saul Alinsky was able to drive imagination for idealistic youth. He showed people like Wade Rathke that community organizing can be a profession, a calling, and a way of life. It wasn’t something his high school guidance counselor ever told him was possible. Far more than anything he did as an organizer, Saul Alinsky inspired with words, speeches, and several books.

4) How do you build rapport as a white guy in a place like the Dominican Republic, India, etc. Wade Rathke now runs Community Organizations International, a world organizing organization.

I was curious about this because I thought that he goes through a long and arduous process in acclimating himself to new cultures and customs. Instead, I got an education in Rathke’s experience, confidence, and skill as an organizer.

He told me that building rapport, for him, in India, the D.R, or any foreign land is no different than building rapport as a young organizer in the African American neighborhoods of Massachusetts. Wade Rathke is a six foot white guy and that won’t change, but when he goes into any neighborhood he offers the community a “set of skills to build their voice”. He seeks leaders. Most importantly, “it’s not about me, it’s about finding leaders in the community”.

5)What advice would you give current ACORN leadership?

Rathke wanted to stay away from giving advice to the current leadership. He didn’t want to be one of those folks that sat on the sidelines and told his former organization how to run things. In a broad sense, he told that me that ACORN needs to “deeply embed yourself in the community”. Show the community “why you’re valuable”. ACORN is most effective as the grassroots organization that is able to get on the street, build rapport with the community, and identify their problems. In short, go back to the basics of organizing.

6)Did he, in leading ACORN, follow the philosophy of Cloward/Piven and how does this philosophy differ from his Maximum effective participation strategy?

This was suggested to me be a fellow reporter. In fact, I wasn’t totally familiar with either and to be totally frank, Rathke went above my head.

Rathke told me that Cloward/Piven was a strategy for a time and place, the late 1960’s. It focused on welfare rights. It was focused and myopic. As the world has evolved, the strategy has become outdated. At the time, the federal government spent a lot more resources on urban renewal. There are no more race riots.

His own maximum effective participation strategy is much more expansive and in his opinion follows for the times.

In fact, Rathke was being very diplomatic in his description of Cloward/Piven. I spoke with several individuals involved in organizing following the interview. Cloward/Piven is in fact, at least according to them, a way of organizing welfare recipients to demand more and more entitlements until the capitalistic system breaks. What it really is, is a way of reaching the poor. It’s important that without poor there are no rich. Everything is relative. Poor are given all sorts of reasons for why they have a station in life. In this philosophy, the system is blamed for their station in life and you attack the system.

In the view of one, Rathke is more expansive in that he wants to apply a similar philosophy to the world.

On this note, Wade Rathke told me that he’s never met, never known, and has had no contact with Bill Ayers. There are all sorts of rumors, internet and otherwise, that put the two of them together in the 1960’s and the present. Rathke told me categorically that he doesn’t know William Ayers.

6) Did he feel any responsibility for the current travails of ACORN?

Rathke really didn’t feel any personal responsibility for the current problems at ACORN. To put it in Rathke’s words, “if this happened 30 days after I left that would be one thing, but this happened a year and a half later”. He told me he worries about ACORN often. He is saddened and disturbed by their disintegration but he doesn’t necessarily feel any personal responsibility for their current problems.

7) Are the attacks on ACORN legitimate or mostly ideologically based?

He said that without question ACORN has brought many of its problems on itself. He wasn’t going to pretend as though they’d done nothing wrong and that the attackers had no legitimate claims to make. That said there was a certain “neo McCarthyist” streak to the attacks. In his mind, there’s no question that ACORN was being singled out because, “ACORN is the single most effective community organization that works on behalf of the poor and middle class in the country”.

For this, I followed up with another question?

8)If it is ideological, how do you process the likes of former ACORN employee Greg Hall and the ACORN 8 making the same claims. Both Hall and ACORN 8 believe in ACORN’s mission. Surely, you can’t dismiss their criticism to ideology.

Rathke first dealt with Greg Hall. He said he doesn’t know who he is. (Hall is a former ACORN organizer) At any given time, ACORN will send out between six and twelve thousand W2’s in a given year. So, if one individual is unhappy, that’s not something he can speak to.

As for ACORN 8, he told me that within the ACORN board, two factions began to form. There was the “administrative party”. That was lead by Maude Hurd, current President of ACORN. Then, there was the “dissident faction”. That was lead by Marcel Reid and Karen Inman (for full disclosure, I’ve interviewed both), both currently in ACORN 8. The dissidents were caught in a philosophical battle with the administrative wing that started in 2007 and even 2006. They saw the direction of ACORN differently from the administrative wing. In his view, their disagreements are rooted in these philosophical battles.

It was at this point of the interview that I was most exhilarated. The answer was brilliant both in its genius and in its diabolical nature. I knew exactly what Rathke was attempting to do and I was still impressed even as he was doing it. In his own smooth silky manner, Rathke painted the ACORN 8 as ideologues. They aren’t conservative ideologues that see ACORN as bad. Rather they are philosophical ideologues that see the direction of ACORN as wrong and thus their disagreements are rooted in that philosophical split.

Of course, several members of ACORN 8 I spoke with afterwards found this to be, well, hog wash. One said, “what about the embezzlement“…alluding to the million dollar embezzlement by Wade’s brother Dale. Another said that if they are “ideologues”, it’s ideologues that want to see ACORN return to its original mission of helping the poor. If there was a philosophical split, it’s as both told me that they believed that ACORN was no longer helping the poor. It’s the corruption that they saw that was the philosophical split.

Epilogue:

Without speaking to Rathke, it’s really impossible to describe just how pleasant he is. That’s the best description for his demeanor and manner. This is extremely important. His pleasant nature is almost hypnotic. After speaking to him, there’s absolutely no doubt why he’s so effective. It’s damn near impossible to not like Wade Rathke after speaking to him for more than an hour. That makes him effective and also potentially very dangerous, depending on his intentions. It also makes him a lot more complicated than his political opponents would like to turn him into. He’s not anything like the political caricature that opponents make of him. One individual described him to me as “diabolical” and that’s why I thought of the word when he was answering my question, and if that’s really so, he’s also dangerous. He is under no circumstances to be underestimated. Whatever Wade Rathke is, one thing is for sure and that is that he is newsworthy.

Wade Rathke would like to turn his organizing philosophy into an organization that organizes throughout the world. At one time, his organization was an organization of one, Wade Rathke. He grew that organization into a political, organizing, media, and cultural force that has become a polarizing organization in large part because of its effectiveness. Make no mistake, he is capable of doing it. If he does it right, the conservative ideologues  of the world will criticize. If he does it wrong, it will unleash a web of corruption that will interlock the globe and span continents. That makes what Wade Rathke will do going a forward a story that everyone should follow.

Here’s part I of the interview.

Stay tuned for part III.

“I’m Recognized to be a Fairly Dangerous Fellow Out There in the Community” – Wade Rathke

Let’s be honest, if Wade Rathke saw me walk into his book signing last Tuesday, he wouldn’t have been at his most candid.  I wanted insight into the man who created this racket that is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or is it the American Institute for Social Justice, or Citizens Consulting Inc?  I’m still not too sure.  I know it operates under 361 different affiliates in at least 43 states and the District of Columbia.

In his newly released book Citizen Wealth, he paints himself as a modern day Robin Hood, stealing from the evil faceless corporations to give to the poor.  But as he recounts these campaigns it becomes clear the corporations have faces, their CEOs, who he doesn’t hesitate to harass at home to demand financial concessions.  Wade’s stilted story almost makes him sound noble as he provides innocuous reasons why he would like to collect and store copies of people’s personal financial records and birth certificates or as he tries to rationalize why people would be well served by becoming dues paying ACORN members.

These past few months I believed Wade’s the blissfully ignorant captain whose been stripped of his command but still seems intent to go down with the ship.  He hasn’t “run” the organization since the very public revelation that his brother embezzled close to $1 million from ACORN and Wade went about covering it up.  He was negotiated out of the coveted “chief organizer” role that he had held for decades.  The ACORN Board allowed him to retain control of ACORN International, but when public pressure started building, he even went ahead and changed its name to COI – Community Organizations International.

Even in exile he denies that ACORN is a criminal enterprise and claims that allegations that federal and tax-exempt funds have been used for political purposes are a “complete fabrication.”

I had to hear him speak.  I had to see for myself if he really bought what he was selling.  But let’s be real.  I’m a twenty-eight year old Republican lawyer… and I look like one.  I wear Brooks Brothers suits, bold ties, and nine times out of ten there’s a pair of elephant cufflinks on my wrists.  If he saw me coming I doubted he would be as open in his proselytizing for community organizing.

I had to tone it down a notch.  No, I didn’t borrow James O’Keefe’s vintage chinchilla shoulder throw.  I just threw on jeans and a t-shirt, jumped in my SUV, and headed off to see ACORN’s Founding Father.

I arrived early and grabbed my seat in the middle of the room.  I expected a crowd.  Instead I was greeted by six reporters and ten supporters.

Wade had barely gotten started when that folksy “aw shucks” Wade Rathke persona took over:

“It’s all a new ride on the rodeo to me” when discussing how he is no longer accountable to ACORN members.

“The Single largest success in the last 20 years of the organized labor movement is home healthcare workers.”

On the Cloward-Piven model he cited his book which laments the fact that Americans who are eligible for government programs are not taking advantage of them.  He seemed wistful in his dreams of “maximum eligible participation.”

Then he hit his stride…

“I think it’s ridiculous that an organization like ACORN has to be involved in voter registration”

“We were raising up to $20 million to register voters before I left”

Throughout his remarks he was a steadfast defender of ACORN.

Maybe he truly believes in ACORN or whatever affiliates it’s doing business as.  Maybe he’s just doing right by the organization he built that did right by him.  It did provide him a steady living for decades, his embezzling brother too.  But they’re not the only members of the ACORN family.  ACORN also employed Rathke’s wife Beth Butler, his daughter Dine, and his son Chaco.  Who’d have expected nepotism in New Orleans?

Wade noted that “I’m a huge fan of ACORN, I pay my dues now.”

After hearing him speak I must admit, I was wrong about Wade.  He’s not the captain going down with his ship.  He’s more like the Iraqi Information Minister “Baghdad Bob” – in denial, steadfastly claiming victory even as American tanks rolled past.