In a surreal news conference at the United Nations, anti-American radical and rogue financier George Soros (net worth: $22 billion) threw in his lot with the thousands of Communists, anarchists, eco-feminists, malingerers, and professional protesters who have been baiting and taunting police in lower Manhattan as part of a mass demonstration that began September 17.

The protests, which have spread to other large cities, are part of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke calls an “anti-banking jihad.” Not surprisingly, the remnants of the ACORN network are deeply involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement. New York ACORN’s new front group, New York Communities for Change (NYCC), led by veteran ACORN enforcer Jon Kest, is one of the major protest groups leading the effort to turn America into one big socialist armpit.

Kest explained why NYCC is involved by using what has become the standard Marxist boilerplate about the financial collapse. “When the big banks tanked our economy they took away millions of people’s shot at achieving the American Dream,” he blogged. “It’s about time all these people come together and hold Wall Street accountable for what they’ve done to our futures and the future of this country.” Of course Kest didn’t bother to mention the role that ACORN played in creating the mortgage bubble by strong-arming Fannie Mae, pushing the financial affirmative action scheme known as the Community Reinvestment Act, and blackmailing banks that didn’t want to lend money to people who wouldn’t be able to pay it back.

SEIU board member Stephen Lerner has vowed to do his part to drive a stake through the heart of capitalism and drag the populace into economic misery. Lerner says he wants to “bring down the stock market” through a campaign of disruption. 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.”

Soros said he sympathizes with the rabble. “Actually I can understand [the protesters’] sentiment, frankly,” said the preeminent funder of the American activist Left in remarks to reporters.

But anyone who has followed Soros’s life wouldn’t dare to describe him as a working class hero.

Remember that this corrupt investment banker fired his butler for complaining after his cook used Château Lafite in a stew. The butler won a wrongful dismissal lawsuit against Soros. Soros was also convicted of insider trading. A French court fined him millions of dollars.

Soros’s hedge fund invested almost $1 billion in shares of Petrobras, the Brazilian oil concern, coincidentally just before the Export-Import Bank of the United States announced it was lending $2 billion to the company.

Soros closed a hedge fund to outside investors rather than submit to the new Dodd-Frank financial regulations – regulations he helped to enact by giving money to groups that lobbied for them. Soros shed a few crocodile tears for small business owners whose credit lines got squeezed after the 2008 financial collapse. “An awful lot of them actually were put out of business,” he said.

Remember also that Soros deliberately collapses national economies for fun and profit, openly expresses admiration for Communist China, and has said European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now.” He wants the American economy to sink into the abyss. “I’m having a very good crisis,” Soros said in 2009.

Even though Soros is the archetype of the Wall Street insider, leftists can’t bring themselves to criticize him, preferring to demonize the invented billionaire bogeymen of the Right.

Plenty of other rich liberals have been holding court near Wall Street in recent days.

Hip hop and credit card mogul Russell Simmons (net worth: $340 million), alleged comedian Roseanne Barr (net worth: $80 million), actress Susan Sarandon (net worth: $50 million), and celluloid propagandist Michael Moore (net worth: $50 million) have all dropped by to cheer on the protesters in their quest to redistribute wealth while radically transforming the nation.

Simmons stood beside Frances Fox Piven as the Bolshevik academic unwittingly created an impromptu parody of the “we’re all individuals” crowd scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. “Wall Street is the center of the neo-liberal cancer that has spread across the world,” Piven said, pausing every few seconds to allow the mob to repeat her words.

After Piven finished, Simmons stood up and did the same routine like an automaton from a creepy cult. As the mob repeated his words, Simmons condemned the “class warfare being waged on the poor and the middle class” and claimed:

The fact is our problem, at least our number one problem, is the corporations and the other special interest groups that are more important to our politicians than the people. The lobbyists and the money gotta get the f*** out of Washington.

Another exercise in Marxist mobocracy is underway in the nation’s capital.

The October 2011 Coalition has taken over Freedom Plaza near the White House to “resist the corporate machine.” The various groups occupying the area are demanding “that America’s resources be invested in human needs and environmental protection instead of war and exploitation.” The group’s stated goal is to make the plaza one block away from the White House “our Tahrir Square, Cairo.”

Plenty more disruptive demonstrations are scheduled.

Next week will be busy, SEIU’s Lerner said during a panel discussion Monday at the Take Back the American Dream conference in Washington, D.C. sponsored by the left-wing Campaign for America’s Future.

About 10,000 demonstrators are expected to hit the streets of Chicago while protesters march on Wells Fargo in Minneapolis, he said.

Activists in New York are planning to campaign to extend that state’s tax on millionaires. “We may go visit some of them,” said Lerner, whose union goons have terrorized the families of many corporate executives in their homes.

Goehl’s National People’s Action group is planning a “Make Wall Street Pay” event on November 3. That’s two days before Guy Fawkes Day, the annual commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot in which English dissidents plotted to vaporize Parliament.

Fancy that.

(This is a modified version of an article that appeared at Front Page Magazine.)

Wrong.

There’s only one problem: the ACORN mentality – pinpointing and mobilizing particular groups in support of a radical-left agenda – is no longer restricted to government-funded private non-profits like ACORN.  The ACORN mentality now dominates the government itself.  Taxpayer dollars are being used by elected officials to encourage the deification of President Obama and his agenda.  And one of the chief organs of the government propaganda machine is the National Endowment for the Arts.

Let’s start from the beginning.  On August 25, artist Patrick Courrielche told the story of a conference call he attended on August 10.  That conference call was hosted by the NEA, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve.  The goal of the conference call: “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.”  The call would push “a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!” (more…)

As Patrick Courrelieche, an L.A.-based arts organizer who participated in the call, reported at Big Hollywood, the people running the call, including the NEA’s director of communications Yosi Sergant  and members of the White House Office of Public Engagement and United We Serve, told the assembled crew of “thought leaders” that “we’re going to come at you with some specific asks here” (that’s a direct quote from Buffy Wicks of the Office of Public Engagement). 

Chief among the requests from Sergant (who was either “reassigned” from the agency or “reportedly resigned” after denying the full extent of his role in organizing the call) was “to pick something whether it’s health care, education, the environment, you know… [and] apply artistic, you know, your artistic creative communities’ utilities and bring them to the table.” Beyond the specific policy issues above, the call organizers stressed the ideologically loaded concept of “service” as the animating principle of the Obama administration and wanted the artists to do whatever they could to promote that. As Wicks put it, “We really view [our efforts] as an onramp to a lifetime of service. We really want service to be incorporated into people’s daily lives.”

Given that the NEA prides itself on being the single largest funding source for the arts in the country, such arm-twisting by agency officials, however masked in fulsome compliments to creators’ genius, is disturbing on its face. It clearly sets a political agenda for the very people who are likely to be applying for, well, NEA and other government grants. Does anyone think that the organizers were fishing around for projects that might complicate the public option for health care?

Embedded in the discussion is at least one other disturbing point: a nearly lunatic delusion that artists are the vanguard of the proletariat. As Mike Skolnick, the political director for music impresario Russell Simmons, told the participants, the assembled crew “tell our country and our young people sort of what to do and what to be in to; and what’s cool and what’s not cool.” While that command-and-control notion is widely shared by liberals and conservatives alike, it is patently false. Artists and politicians hate to hear this, but the audience does have a mind of its own.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” was all the rage, the NEA under President George H.W. Bush was attacked by liberals for restricting the aesthetic independence of institutional and individual grant recipients. John Frohnmayer, Bush’s NEA director, eventually went on the record in favor of total freedom of expression, even for those receiving federal dollars. In his 1993 memoir, Leaving Town Alive: Confessions of an Arts Warrior, he said that government-funded art should be free of “restrictions” and that the government doesn’t really set an agenda anyway: “The government is not the sponsor of any idea that is produced by the artist. The ideas belong to the artist; the government is merely an enabler.”

Now more than ever, it seems, and it’s not a pretty sight. It’s ironic that official attempts to use artists have come to light only weeks before the 20th anniversary of the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the German Democratic Republic, a regime that spent an enormous amount of time, energy, and resources creating fake culture to bolster its political agenda. “Official” culture is always unseemly, especially when the connections between officials and the ostensible creators are hidden from the audience.