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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Professional radical shill Peter Dreier, an Occidental College professor, has been very busy writing propaganda for his paying customer ACORN in recent days. Dreier is the driving force behind the “Cry Wolf” project, a push to encourage academics to help spread more lies about the corrupt group.

Now, taking a cue from America’s BP-Asskicking-Commander-In-Chief, Dreier affectionately oozes that the dissolving ACORN assaulted posteriors like nobody else. There was “[n]o group [that] was better at kicking ass,” Dreier writes.

What Dreier should have written was that there is no group better than ACORN – at kicking its own ass!

In a review of his friend John Atlas’s new institutional hagiography of ACORN, Seeds of Change, Dreier writes that ACORN brass “expected Obama’s victory in 2008 to give the organization even greater influence.”

But the New York Times and eeevil right-wingers spoiled the party.

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Many conservatives and libertarians think of labor unions as merely the grassroots muscle behind the progressive movement. Showing up as a swarm of purple shirts, with the forearms of a lumberjack and a penchant for terrorizing teenagers, labor unions have always been considered the rough and rugged group that intimidate their opponents through the “persuasion of power.”

But if you haven’t thought of the labor movement as a cerebral bunch, think again. Meet Peter Dreier, Donald Cohen, Nelson Lichtenstein, and their syndicate of progressive university professors – the “intellectual infrastructure” of the progressive labor movement.

It is no secret that progressives have created a self-cloning machine by hijacking our educational system. Their indoctrination efforts are well documented. But we rarely think of research institutions as propaganda factories. A Request for Proposal (RFP) — see document above — recently obtained by Big Journalism gives us a rare look at how progressives and labor unions attempt to manipulate the national media narrative.

And their process? you may ask. Use the credibility and resources of the American higher education system to create researchprop – biased collegial research papers that serve as propaganda to support political policies.

Entitled Cry Wolf, the RFP proclaims a desire to look “for faculty and graduate students… interested in writing short (2,000 word) policy briefs” that “construct a counter narrative that demonstrates the falsity or exaggeration” of conservative claims. Writers of briefs selected by the project coordinators will receive 100,000 pennies for their thoughts. (more…)

For quite some time, Noam Chomsky has joined other radical luminaries on the “Editorial Advisory Group” of the ACORN-linked Social Policy magazine.  Published by ACORN founder Wade Rathke, the magazine airs the views of Chomsky, Frances Fox Piven, Gloria Steinem, and Peter Dreier, among others.

This is the same publication that ran an analytical piece on Barack Obama’s 2004 primary campaign for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, written by a Chicago ACORN leader.

The article contained such gems as: “By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.”  The point is not to bring up President Obama’s apparently forgotten memories, but instead to point out Chomsky is not some nut that is isolated – he runs with the big dogs.

Chomsky recently painted a disturbing picture of America in the Russian news outlet Pravda, when he compared the opposition to President Obama and the Congress’ policies to what happened in Germany just prior to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.

“It’s very similar to Weimar Germany, the parallels are striking.

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Professor Peter Dreier, an ACORN apologist who portrays himself as an independent analyst, is really anything but.

As Andrew Breitbart articulated on BigGovernment November 25th, regarding a “study” Dreier produced critical of media coverage of ACORN:

At the end of the piece Professor Dreier offers the following biography: Peter Dreier, E.P Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Program at Occidental College.

Why did Professor Dreier choose to leave out the critical information regarding his advisory relationship to ACORN? Isn’t sitting on an advisory committee of ACORN the definition of a conflict of interest in writing a fair and balanced piece on the organization? In fact, Dreier has been shilling for ACORN at least since 2003.

So when Dreier proclaimed ACORN “Not Guilty” in one of his recent columns on TalkingPointsMemo, I must admit I threw up a bit in my mouth.  Some of Dreier’s most pathetic conclusions:

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Regular readers of Big Government should remember the woman pictured below as the delightfully forthcoming ACORN protestor from the fateful day Andrew Breitbart staged his one-man tea party in the midst of scores of “community organizers” who mistakenly protested in front of LA’s KTTV Fox 11 TV station thinking they were intimidating Fox News.  Do you remember the delightful little nuggets of information we caught on taped on our handy-dandy recorder?

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“We never declared because we have to be non-partisan – our national organization.  But, it was sort of like under the grapevine we knew we were going to put in Obama.”

When asked if she worked for ACORN, our ever loquacious friend said “No, I am just a member, I am ACORN… No, I don’t work.  I’m an organizer.”  This suggests that she was just one of those “Rent-a-protestor” who ACORN famously pays less than minimum age for (often, ironically to protest in favor of a living wage).  We captioned her picture at Big Government with the amusing phrase:  “Have You Seen This Organizer?”

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Media criticism of our ongoing and still unfolding ACORN story has been as bad as it has been funny and sad. The racket that is the mainstream media is coming to an end and exposed reporters and journalists, no longer feigning neutrality, have chosen to drive off the cliff, a la Thelma and Louise, in a customized ACORN convertible.

Professor and ACORN Adviser Peter Dreier

On Monday Christopher R. Martin and Peter Dreier wrote a commentary entitled “Have the Media ‘Falsely Framed’ ACORN?” for Editor & Publisher, “the authoritative journal covering all aspects of the North American newspaper industry, including business, newsroom, advertising, circulation, marketing, technology, online and syndicates.“  E&P was once the bible of the newspaper and publishing business, but in recent years has moved hard left, hiding its ideological tilt under a patina of “scholarship.”

Martin and Dreier’s piece — while not framed as such — is an ideological defense of ACORN and an attack on those who have truthfully investigated and exposed the obviously troubled community organizing group. It’s basically, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men trying to put ACORN together again. But instead of attempting to rebuild the king, Martin and Dreier are trying to rebuild the media and the left elite, who use the poor and the downtrodden as their foot soldiers in order to maintain power in government, academia, the media and Hollywood.  For them, ACORN provides the perfect photo-op.

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As ACORN’s faux independent review gets under way, ACORN’s advisory committee, made of up key liberal allies, is watching it closely, as seen in a fresh media advisory issued by David Redlener of The Advance Group and obtained by ACORNcracked.com.  That’s because ACORN is a critical component to the Left’s agenda for America.

Remember during the bank bailouts the justification was because they were “too big to fail.”  Well, to the liberal Left, ACORN is too big to fail.  It has its hands in too many things and runs an effective ground operation through registering voters, turning them out on Election Day, as well as managing ballot initiative campaigns as a tool to boost Democratic turn-out.

Consider Professor Peter Dreier’s analysis of ACORN’s use of ballot initiatives, from a 2005 article he wrote:

ACORN’s strategy to inject this issue into state ballot measures is another important step. In early 2004, ACORN initiated a statewide ballot initiative in Florida to raise the state minimum wage, registered thousands of residents, mostly in low-income, minority neighborhoods in cities, to increase turnout on election day, and won a decisive victory the following November. On its own, this is an impressive accomplishment. Since its victory in Florida, ACORN and its labor allies have begun talking about grassroots minimum-wage initiatives in other states in 2006, particularly where Democrats have a chance to expand, or hold on to, key offices. Campaigns are already underway in Ohio, Michigan, and Arizona, and ACORN is exploring possibilities in six other states and several cities. The strategy is designed to increase voter turnout and to provide candidates with a clear economic-justice issue.

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