With the Occupy movement becoming increasingly confrontational nationwide, there are indications that the anti-capitalist movement is turning violent deliberately.  The adroit agitators intermixed among the idealistic but misguided young people, the street radicals bent above all on attacking the U.S. economic system, see violent revolution as a key route to the transformation of our country into their version of the socialist utopia.

A look at the organizers of the most recent pre-planned Day of Action spotlights a large, radical group, a latter-day Red Army of seasoned activists who have been discreetly guiding Occupy since the movement’s onset and whose history is colored with previous mayhem while their plans for the immediate future raise serious questions. Just yesterday, the Occupy movement posted online plans for “alternative forms of protest,” including flash mobs that can be deployed nationwide.

Just over a week ago, Occupy Wall Street held a three-day “Direct Action Preparation and Training” course in downtown Manhattan to gear up for the latest round of riots, including last Thursday’s three-course meal of in-your-face tactics aiming to block subways and bridges as well as shut down the stock market.

Revealingly, official resources provided on the Occupy site as part of the planning for last week’s chaos shows several manuals from the Ruckus Society, whose mission is to provide “environmental, human rights, and social justice organizers with the tools, training, and support needed to achieve their goals”; this includes training radical activists in direct action techniques.

The same Ruckus Society that helped to spark the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, which devolved into violent unrest, was listed as a “friend and partner” for last week’s Day of Action.

The Ruckus training manuals provided at the Occupy site leave little to the imagination. Titles include: “Blockading for Beginners,” “Anonymous Riot Guide,” “Define White Supremacy,” “Uncle Sam the Pusher Man” and, of course, the (still!) Communist Party-connected National Lawyers Guild’s “Legal Observer Manual.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Convicted fraudster Robert Creamer, husband of Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), has announced that he is opening a nationwide political consulting firm, Democracy Partners.

Democracy Partners already “has offices in eight cities including Washington, D.C., Chicago, Minneapolis, Las Vegas, Miami, San Francisco, San Diego, and Portland, Maine”–and, presumably, a budget running into many millions of dollars.

Schakowsky & Creamer at the White House, November 2009

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(continued from Part 2)

It should come as no surprise that on the campaign trail, President Obama refused to be interviewed about Saul Alinsky, the community organizing guru who wrote Rules for Radicals, a how-to guide for destroying American capitalism and democracy.

Presumably Obama, who taught courses on Alinsky’s brutal, sometimes violent organizing techniques, declined to speak to reporters about the late guru. He must have realized that such an interview would throw an unwanted spotlight on Alinsky’s radicalism, and by extension, his own. Such counterproductive publicity would also have undermined the candidate’s efforts to reinvent himself as a moderate. Alinsky’s adherents now dominate the modern Democratic Party establishment. Apart from President Obama himself, they include Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, Federal Communications Commission diversity chief Mark Lloyd, Obama’s ex-green jobs czar Van Jones, former DNC trainer Heather Booth, Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to name just a few. “Who the hell isn’t [an Alinskyite] in this administration?” asks conservative author David Horowitz.

And President Obama hasn’t been the only longtime ACORN operative working in the White House. There’s also the low-profile Patrick Gaspard who, until recently, was White House political affairs director, one of the titles Karl Rove held in President Bush’s White House.

In a move that ought to disturb anyone who cares about the integrity of the democratic process, earlier this year Gaspard took over the reins of the Democratic National Committee as its executive director—just in time to begin initial preparations for President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

Gaspard hails from the same world of radical left-wing community organizing that made Barack Obama who he is today. Gaspard is an expert in the harsh, street-smart organizing tactics taught by Alinsky. He’s the hatchet man Obama sent to New York over a year ago to strong-arm then-Gov. David Paterson into dropping his reelection campaign. As executive director running the DNC’s day-to-day operations, Gaspard will oversee Organizing for America, a project of the DNC supposedly modeled on Alinskyite organizing principles.

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We hit the streets of Chicago to gauge people’s reaction to the recent street mob action style protests organized by long time Obama allies – National People’s Action (NPA), SEIU and Heather Tobis Booth.

Almost everyone we spoke with believes going to private home of a bank employee is deplorable.

Almost everyone we spoke with thinks politicians shouldn’t take money from or support groups that use mob tactics like this.

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The left-wing militants of SEIU and the National People’s Action group plan to shut down K Street, the heart of the lobbying industry in the nation’s capital, at a massive in-your-face rally and march planned for Monday.

The goal of the “action” –in organizing parlance— is a show of force calculated to intimidate bank lobbyists and show support for sweeping anti-bank legislation pending in Congress.

The action, called The Showdown on K Street, is listed at the website of Jobs With Justice. JwJ works closely with ACORN, other community organizing groups, and the labor movement.

“This is the first time that they’re going to hit K Street all out,” said a source in the progressive movement. “They want to intimidate bank lobbyists, who aren’t used to this kind of confrontation.”

“It’s an anti-Wall Street march. In many ways it mirrors what happened on Wall Street about a month ago.”

The source was referring to another in-your-face anti-bank march on April 30 in New York City’s financial district led by National People’s Action (NPA). Also known as National People’s Campaign, the Chicago-based organization filed its first tax return in 2008.

As Andrew Marcus reported, the federal government cut off funding for NPA’s sister organization, the National Training and Information Center (NTIC) in 2003. Investigators found NTIC had misused millions of taxpayer dollars by spending them on training community organizers to lobby the government instead of on community development projects. NTIC also committed fraud by carrying out a cover-up.

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As you know, we’ve been writing for some time about The Center for Community Self-Help and its financing affiliates Self-Help Credit Union, Self-Help Federal Credit Union, and Self-Help Ventures Fund.  As of late, the organization has been under increased scrutiny for its questionable lobbying activities, its former leader and soon to be CFPA Czar Eric Stein, and  its $15 million donation from disgraced hedge fund billionaire John Paulson.

According to the Self Help website, the organizations “provide financing, technical support, consumer financial services, and advocacy for those left out of the economic mainstream.”  Within that complex web of entities under the Self-Help umbrella exists about forty or so real estate development projects.  I thought it might be a productive exercise to start looking into some of Self-Help’s individual properties.

So, I started with Barr Building, LLC, a Self-Help investment registered under its affiliate Self Help Ventures Fund.  The property is located at 910 17th Street NW, Washington, DC.

And wouldn’t you know, it happens to be home to one of our most frequent subjects:

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

This seemed especially curious, because it was only recently I’d discovered that SEIU, together with the AARP, is also the proud funder and agitator for one of the Center for Responsible Lending’s other advocacy projects – its state-specific lobbying websites targeted at regulating short-term loans in an effort to insulate its own predatory practices from any private industry competition.  For example, take a look at this site, from Arizonans for Responsible Lending.  It’s chock filled with all of the usual SEIU corporate campaign elements:  the menacing title and domain name, the array of photos depicting abused consumers who simply could not have known any better, the manufactured headlines, and of course – the staple of their strategy – the studies and the research (all funded and conducted by their own organization allies).

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Tis the season to be thankful, and this year one thing stands out as something to be particularly grateful for…the Internet.

Thanks to the Internet, and the Army of Davids it has empowered, the mainstream media no longer possess a strangle hold on information. They no longer get to decide what we know about the people and organizations that effect our daily lives.

In direct terms, this means that when SEIU thugs beat up a black conservative at a health care town hall meeting, the whole world gets to see it via the internet.

And when those thugs are outed as Health Care for America (HCAN) coordinated responders to criticism of Obamacare, the whole world can take it upon themselves to learn about HCAN, using Google and other fabulous tools of the internet.

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In politics the media seems to have a tier system for how they report on scandals. Republicans who fall from grace are vilified. They are the butts of countless inappropriate jokes and cartoons and expected never to be heard from again. Recent right scandals (examples, Governor Mark Sanford and Mark Foley) dominated the news, but, besides Fox News, the media barely covered Obama adviser Van Jones or delved deeply into the dealings of Louisiana Congressman William Jefferson.

Unfortunately for America, the media has been filtering news for years and this practice has allowed some of the main figures in the Teamstergate scandal to assume top spots in the Democrat party. Part 1 of this series reviewed the history of the scandal and its strong ties to ACORN and President Obama.  In order to help readers fully appreciate the connections, I discuss below some of the major players in the Teamstergate saga who were named in indictments and a Congressional report on in a scheme that reached all the way into the White House.

The Congressional report, on Teamstergate, reached a number of damning conclusions that implicated organizations like Project Vote  and Citizen Action. It also raised a number of questions about campaign finance and “soft money” donations. Something that ACORN seemed concerned with as detailed in a spring blog post here. Were these questions raised by ACORN political director Zach Polett a result of the following statement in the Congressional report:

The issue of soft money abuses is inevitably tied to the question of how access to political figures is obtained through large contributions of soft money. It is also tied to the question of how tax-exempt organizations have been used to hide the identities of soft money donors. A system that permits large contributions to be made for partisan purposes, without public disclosure, invites subversion of the intent of our election law limitations.

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In what obviously was part of a concerted effort, former President Bill Clinton appeared recently on Sunday’s Meet the Press to discuss – wait for it – the “real” forces behind President Obama’s falling poll numbers and increasing opposition:

Former President Bill Clinton says the right-wing conspiracy that attacked him during his presidency now is after President Obama.

Democrats–no strangers to major scandal–do not hesitate to divert attention away from the corruption and “pay to play” tactics being exposed or simmering just under the surface. Clinton deliberately inserted himself into a critically important national debate and thereby unwisely opened the tomb of similar scandals, potentially more explosive than his unwise dalliances with Monica Lewinsky.

For most of the 1990’s, the White House, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Citizen Action and ACORN’s Project Vote were embroiled in what would become known as “Teamstergate.”

That scandal involved disgraced former union crusader and Teamster national president Ron Carey. According to New York Times Archives:

Three of Mr. Carey’s campaign aides have pleaded guilty to a web of illegal fund-raising schemes, including having the union donate $735,000 to three liberal grass-roots groups for a get-out-the-vote effort during the 1996 Congressional elections. In return, those groups and their supporters were to channel money to Mr. Carey’s re-election campaign…

Insisting that he delegated decisions on political gifts, Mr. Carey repeatedly denied knowing about the large donations to the three liberal groups: Citizen Action, Project Vote and the National Council of Senior Citizens.

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