The anti-American activists of the Occupy Wall Street movement announced they plan to violently disrupt the G8/NATO summit in Chicago on May 19.

Adbusters, the Noam Chomsky-friendly magazine that spearheaded the Occupy movement, claims the movement will conduct a massive occupation of Chicago “in the tradition of the Chicago 8.”

Of course the radicals of the Chicago 8 organized riots at the Democratic Party’s national convention in that city in 1968. Hundreds of police officers were injured.

Adbusters vows that this time the rioters won’t give an inch to the police. A massive occupation of Chicago involving “50,000 people from all over the world” will begin on May 1:

And this time around we’re not going to put up with the kind of police repression that happened during the Democratic National Convention protests in Chicago, 1968 … nor will we abide by any phony restrictions the City of Chicago may want to impose on our first amendment rights. We’ll go there with our heads held high and assemble for a month-long people’s summit … we’ll march and chant and sing and shout and exercise our right to tell our elected representatives what we want … the constitution will be our guide. [ellipses in original]

When the nations of the G8 and NATO begin meeting May 19, the movement plans to press its demands. Occupiers want an economy-killing “Robin Hood Tax” to be imposed on financial transactions, an international agreement to curb carbon emissions, and “a nuclear-free Middle East” (translation: the unilateral nuclear disarmament of Israel), according to Adbusters.

And woe to the powers that be if they don’t give in to the radicals’ demands.

And if they don’t listen … if they ignore us and put our demands on the back burner like they’ve done so many times before … then, with Gandhian ferocity, we’ll flashmob the streets, shut down stock exchanges, campuses, corporate headquarters and cities across the globe … we’ll make the price of doing business as usual too much to bear. [ellipses in original]

The Occupy Wall Street movement grew out of an event last Sept. 17 in lower Manhattan called the US Day of Rage that was organized by Adbusters. Organizers vowed that the mass protest would be nonviolent in nature. This raised the question of why they named their event after the original “Days of Rage” that took place in Chicago in 1969. That tumultuous year, members of what was later to become known as the Weather Underground provoked four days of riots and demonstrations against The System.

George Soros is delighted that chaos is coming to his adopted homeland.

“In the crisis period, the impossible becomes possible,” the anti-American financier told Newsweek in a recent interview, restating the Alinskyite adage that a good crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros says. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

Like some of the more dimwitted commentators on economics, Soros loves to spew the usual socialist drivel about so-called market fundamentalism running amok as if he were living during the Cleveland administration. “The collapse of the Soviet system was a pretty extraordinary event, and we are currently experiencing something similar in the developed world, without fully realizing what’s happening.”

To people like Soros, the mortgage bubble was caused by the Snidely Whiplashes of the financial world, not by venal real-life politicians like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and the monstrous financial blunderers known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Free markets are to blame even though they have never been tried.

As the U.S. economy continues to deteriorate, anger will grow and rioting in the streets is sure to follow. “It’s already started,” he says. “Yes, yes, yes,” Soros adds “almost gleefully,” Newsweek writer John Arlidge editorializes.

For years Soros has longed for an opportunity to transform America into a socialist state. “The system we have now has actually broken down, only we haven’t quite recognized it and so you need to create a new one and this is the time to do it,” he said in 2009 as he created the Institute for New Economic Thinking with a $50 million endowment.

This Communist sympathizer co-founded the ultra-secretive Democracy Alliance, a billionaires’ club that funds leftist political infrastructure. He has said that European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now” and favors American decline. Soros praises Red China effusively, saying the totalitarian nation has “a better-functioning government than the United States.”

In American politics, only the Left mobilizes the mob against its opponents. That’s why history textbooks don’t contain references to marauding bands of Reagan supporters roughing up Mondale backers.

But leftist groups and groups aligned with the Democratic Party have long viewed Republicans as fair game.

The Obama-backed “Occupy” movement has been working nonstop in New Hampshire bullying, intimidating, harassing, and provoking the Republican Party’s presidential candidates. It is the kind of unseemly, Latin American-style political activism that threatens to become a permanent feature of American politics if President Obama wins a second term.

It’s also the classic Saul Alinsky “inside/outside” strategy. Ensconced in the White House Obama appears to remain above the fray while his loyal minions on the outside of officialdom do their best to irritate and embarrass his Republican adversaries.

All of the Republican candidates in New Hampshire have been targeted by the Obama-approved goon squads who work with hippies and labor activists. They have portrayed their number one target, Mitt Romney, as a job-killing capitalist, Newt Gingrich as a monster, and Rick Santorum as a “bigot.”

The activists attend the candidates’ campaign events, shouting and carrying on in an attempt to prevent Republicans from speaking. They’re not interested in honest discussion or debate: their only goal is to silence the opposition. The Occupiers’ tactics are the kind one might expect to see from the Italian squadristi or the German Sturmabteilung, both of which used physical coercion and intimidation to halt the democratic process.

Much of the thuggery is coordinated by Occupy New Hampshire, whose website is an agglomeration of Marxist pabulum. The group announced that it planned to attack Republican candidates in order to focus public attention on the “growing economic inequality and the disproportionate economic and political power of corporate America and the wealthiest 1%.”

Convicted terrorist collaborator Lori Berenson is fortunate that in the United States citizenship is not a license that expires upon bad behavior.

Berenson is back in America for the holidays, nearly two decades after the trust fund baby left to advance communism in Latin America.

A Peruvian court convicted her in 1996 of aiding a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group that even now aspires to overthrow Peru’s government by force, but the 42-year-old New Yorker is free on parole. She was granted permission to visit the U.S. and has promised to return to Peru next month and remain there until her sentence is completed.

Berenson was paroled in 2010 after serving 15 years of a 20 year prison term for collaborating with the Movimiento Revolucionario Tupac Amaru (Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) or MRTA. Along with Shining Path, a brutal Maoist guerrilla group, MRTA has long waged war against Peru’s democratically elected government.

Her long and winding quest for so-called social justice began in the late 1980s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the academic home of America-hating anarchist Noam Chomsky. An anthropology student, Berenson said her time at MIT radicalized her. It was “the place where I finally learned the connection between politics and human suffering.”

During an academic exchange program in El Salvador, Berenson met with the late Congressman Joe Moakley (D-Mass.) and future Congressman Jim McGovern (D-Mass.). They discussed human rights and conditions in El Salvador, which made Berenson reflect “that the world was much bigger and the suffering was much worse than I had thought.”

In 1989, she dropped out of MIT and started working for the Communist-influenced Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) in New York City and Washington, D.C. Two years later she moved to Central America and began working for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), then a Marxist guerrilla group in El Salvador.

Berenson found her way to Peru. Back in 1993, soon after she rented a house in a Lima suburb, it became an outpost for the group. MRTA’s second in command, Miguel Rincon, used one floor of the house as a command post, arsenal, and shooting range. Authorities say Berenson made several visits to the Peruvian Congress, casing it in preparation for a planned attack and identifying lawmakers for future kidnappings.

When Berenson’s home was raided in late 1995, an all-night siege followed. Fourteen guerrillas and a police officer lost their lives.

Don’t miss FrontPage’s other Union Gangsters profiles featuring Craig Becker, Richard Trumka, Stephen Lerner, Andy Stern, Jimmy Hoffa Jr., John Sweeney, Leo Gerard, Wade Rathke, Heather Booth and Daniel De Leon.

Sometimes union thugs wear pinstriped business suits.

Investment banker Ron Bloom is one of those thugs.

He decided in the 1970s to devote his life to helping labor unions stick it to America’s corporations. As an organizer, negotiator, and researcher for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Booth observed that many union negotiators didn’t have the skills they needed to bargain effectively with management.

“Unions were being backed into corners by companies and couldn’t understand on a sophisticated level, the company’s arguments … Labor needed to be armed with the equivalent skills.”

A longtime leftist, Bloom acquired the skills he needed to run circles around management. He went to Harvard Business School and built up his resume.

Bloom, who was President Obama’s car czar and then manufacturing czar, excels at wheeling and dealing. Last year Time magazine fawned over Bloom, naming him as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” Bloom’s “role in brokering the rescue of General Motors and Chrysler while preserving more than 100,000 jobs demanded a synergist who could work both sides of the equation with authority and respect.”

Although it is true that Bloom was one of the principal architects of the auto industry bailout, Time failed to mention that he made certain that the deal enriched the United Auto Workers at the expense of bondholders. Bondholders accept low rates of return on their investment in the expectation that if the company goes belly-up they will be among the first creditors paid back, but Bloom and his colleagues in the Obama administration upended that ancient rule of repayment priority in the name of so-called “social justice.” They made sure that President Obama’s allies in the labor movement got far more than their fair share.

In his career as an investment banker, Bloom has used his considerable skills as a negotiator to engineer deals that benefit trade unions.

For example, when Brazilian steel company Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (CSN) tried to merge with Wheeling-Pittsburgh Corp. in 2006, steelworkers feared the deal would decimate their ranks. Bloom, who joined the United Steel Workers (USW) union as a special assistant to the president in the 1990s, put together a hostile takeover bid by Chicago-based steel distributor Esmark to fend off CSN.

Big Labor scored a significant victory Wednesday when the National Labor Relations Board gave preliminary approval to a rule that severely limits the ability of employers to fight unionization drives.

On a vote of 2-to-1, the NLRB, a socialist anachronism left over from the New Deal, agreed to move forward with the “microwave” rule, which would allow workers to create unions more quickly and provide employers less time to fight such moves in courts or otherwise. The rule zaps the rights of employers by slashing the period between when workers file to create a union and when they vote from 30 days to as few as 10 days.

It is worth noting that while states are rushing to endorse right-to-work laws that uphold employees’ rights, the NLRB is going in the opposite direction by favoring union bosses.

Unlike in statist Europe, unions in individualistic America have always had a hard time organizing. And so they should. That’s the American way.

But Obama’s toadies at the NLRB are hell-bent on making America more like bureaucratic, dysfunctional Europe where labor disruptions and union violence are everyday occurrences.

Left-wingers on the NLRB are helping the lawless Obama administration circumvent Congress because they know the microwave rule, which is arguably a backdoor form of “card check,” would never be approved by lawmakers.

“What the NLRB is doing is not the action of one rogue agency or a few envelope-pushing employees, so much as it is a deliberate strategy to use the federal government’s regulatory powers to achieve what Obama and his political supporters want without having to bother with going to Congress first,” writes columnist Peter Roff.

Labor bosses view the potential rule change as an opportunity to force more American workers into the union fold.

Few politicians combine ignorance, obstinate self-righteousness, racial demagoguery, and extremism quite as perfectly as the congresswoman from South Central now poised to become a major force shaping federal banking policy.

Rep. Maxine Waters, a longtime cheerleader for Fidel Castro, was only too happy to use the 1992 Los Angeles riots as a political advertisement. She viewed the 53 deaths, thousands of injuries, and $1 billion in property damage as a shining example of participatory democracy. The word riot never escaped her lips. She called the unrest a “rebellion” and “a spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice and a lot of alienation and frustration.”

Waters then blamed the violence on Republican tax cuts. “The Reagan-Bush administrations have taken away programs that have been very helpful, very empowering,” she told CBS News. “In addition to that, the recession and the tax policies that are allowed for the exportation of jobs to Third World countries for cheap labor—all have caused us to come to the point where we are today—desperation, hopelessness. I lay the blame squarely at the foot of Bush and Reagan.”

With a straight face Waters has accused the CIA of encouraging drug use in the inner cities in order to hurt black Americans.

“She is one of the most self-serving, hate-filled, race-obsessed politicians in America,” says columnist Michelle Malkin. “The Democratic Party doesn’t just embrace her. It kneels at her feet.”

Waters is next in line to take over on the minority side of the powerful House Financial Services Committee.

Barney Frank, the thoroughly corrupt leftist lawmaker, is leaving Congress, freeing up the top Democratic post on the committee.

Frank’s surprise announcement that he won’t seek another term clears the way for another thoroughly corrupt leftist lawmaker, the scandal-plagued Waters of California, to become ranking Democrat on the panel.

It remains to be seen whether the change in the Democratic lineup on the committee that oversees the banking industry will make any difference at all in the day-to-day operations of the panel. In the event Democrats retake the House in the 2012 elections, a possibility that currently seems unlikely, as committee chairman Waters would offer much of the same as Frank offered.

The difference is largely in style. Frank is an intelligent, occasionally witty spokesman for socialism but he is also haughty and arrogant. When I interviewed him in his Capitol Hill office in 2005, the entire time he remained seated at his desk holding his morning newspaper while talking to me. A few times he lowered it slightly so he could scold and lecture me for daring to asking questions he deemed dumb.

Waters is simply an angry thug who could never be accused of thoughtfulness. Waters is Wanda Sykes without a sense of humor.

Both Frank and Waters were content in the decade-long run-up to the mortgage market collapse to pretend nothing was wrong even as signs that a huge bubble was about to burst became impossible to ignore.

Don’t miss FrontPage’s other Union Gangsters profiles featuring Craig Becker, Richard Trumka, Stephen Lerner, Andy Stern, Jimmy Hoffa Jr., John Sweeney, Leo Gerard, Wade Rathke and Daniel De Leon.

When today’s labor leaders want to hone their gangster skills they call 1960s radical Heather Booth, a mentor to generations of the activist Left.

A disciple of Saul Alinsky, the socialist-feminist Booth co-founded the Chicago-based Midwest Academy, a training institute for community organizers. “Alinsky is to community organizing as Freud is to psychoanalysis,” she says. The Midwest Academy is funded in part by radical left-wing philanthropies such as George Soros’s Open Society Institute, Tides Foundation, and the Woods Fund of Chicago. (Barack Obama and Bill Ayers served together on the Woods Fund board.)

The Midwest Academy claims since 1973 to have “trained more than 30,000 activists in progressive organizations, unions, and faith-based groups” to help advance “the struggle for social, economic, and racial justice.” The school “teaches an organizing philosophy, methods and skills that enable ordinary people to actively participate in the democratic process.”

Early in her organizing career, Booth was more honest when discussing her beliefs. “Truly reaching socialism or feminism will likely take a revolution that is in fact violent, a rupture with the old ways in which the current ruling class and elites are wiped out,” she said in the 1970s.

Booth has been honored for her contributions to the American socialist movement. In 1987 the Chicago branch of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) bestowed the Eugene Debs Award on Booth. The honor is named after the five-time presidential candidate and labor organizer who founded the Socialist Party of America. Other radical labor leaders and community organizers to receive the award are AFSCME Council 31 political director John D. Cameron (2011), SEIU executive vice president Eliseo Medina (2004), and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka (1994).

But Booth long ago embraced using Alinskyite stealth and subterfuge to achieve a socialist transformation of America. She knew that political activists who openly self-identify as socialists are usually doomed to fail. So she decided to associate her views with values such as fair play and “democracy.”

Instead of confronting authorities directly, radicals should embrace incrementalism, she reasoned. They ought to push for issues that matter in people’s daily lives such as health care and urban redevelopment.

The Midwest Academy, which is only one of the training facilities she created, helps organizers con the masses into accepting socialism. The school’s website is littered with a smorgasbord of Alinskyite boilerplate. For example:

Oppressive social structures are maintained in part because authorities masquerade as benevolent, define inequalities as too complex for resolution, and hide real conflicts of interest in a fairy tale of paternal benevolence. An organizer, therefore, seeks out confrontations and conflict; for the organizer understands that only in conflict situations do issues become clear with real interests no longer camouflaged; only in conflict situations does the rhetoric of the powerful lie exposed and the mobilization of a movement become possible.

Prominent Midwest Academy alumni include former SEIU chief Andy Stern and Miles S. Rapport, president of the influential left-wing pressure group Demos. Lesser known radicals such as Carlos Jimenez, an organizer with the labor-backed Jobs with Justice, and Becky Wasserman, a lobbyist at the anti-Israel group J Street, are also alumni.

Booth is now one of the better connected labor thugs in Washington, D.C. Her husband is Paul Booth, formerly national secretary of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Mr. Booth is executive assistant to Gerald McEntee, president of the powerful public sector employees’ union AFSCME.

In 2007 she was director of the AFL-CIO’s campaign for universal healthcare.

She was also was training director for the Democratic National Committee during the Clinton administration. She was founding director of the NAACP National Voter Fund in 2000, and claims to have increased black voter turnout by almost 2 million votes. She has done consulting work for the Center for Community Change, MoveOn, Campaign for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, Campaign for America’s Future, and the National Organization for Women.

In 1992 Booth was director of field operations for Carol Moseley-Braun’s (D-IL) successful run for the U.S. Senate. That was the same campaign that made Barack Obama, who led a get-out-the-vote effort benefiting Moseley-Braun, a rising star in the organizing community.

Booth also founded the innocuous-sounding Americans for Financial Reform, a labor-backed pressure group that advocates an economy-killing “financial speculation tax.”

“A big battle still needs to be waged to curb the incentive for speculation and to get our money back to fund jobs and health care, climate and more,” she said last year. “This fight against Wall Street is part of an even larger fight over who matters in the society, over our values and our priorities, over whether or not we have corporate control in banking, whether BP can destroy the coast, whether the insurance companies can deny our health care, whether companies can dominate our politics saying that money is speech,” Booth said.

On Dec. 13, the Midwest Academy awards in Washington, D.C. will honor one of the chief architects of the mortgage collapse, retiring Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) and radical Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN), a Muslim who co-chairs the far-left Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Booth is likely to provide the entertainment that night.

She can be embarrassingly schmaltzy when surrounded by fellow believers. During a panel discussion at a leftist confab in October, Booth led her fellow Marxists in a stirring recitation of the old labor movement song “Solidarity Forever.”

Perhaps at next month’s awards ceremony she’ll let her guard down and recite the lyrics of “The Internationale” instead.

The nihilistic Occupy Wall Street movement is poised to blunder into what may be its greatest tactical mistake to date.

The thugs of the Occupy movement, which serves as a natural magnet for criminals, malingerers, and drifters, are planning to disrupt shopping on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and the biggest retail sales day of the year. Black Friday falls on the same day as Buy Nothing Day, which has long been promoted by the anti-capitalist magazine Adbusters.

“The idea is simple, hit the corporations that corrupt and control American politics where it hurts, their profits,” Occupy Black Friday said on its Facebook page. The economically illiterate spinoff group calls Black Friday the “one day where the mega-corporations blatantly dictate our actions,” as if Target and Best Buy drag consumers out of their homes at gunpoint and force them to buy products they don’t want. (Oh wait; that’s Obamacare.)

Protesters across America plan to annoy and harass consumers in a piece of political theater aimed at driving home the point that capitalism and markets are bad.

Activists in Boise, Idaho, plan to send “consumer zombies” to major retailers to silently protest what they deem to be frivolous spending. In Des Moines, Iowa, the plan is to have flash mobs lecture consumers on consumerism. In Eugene, Ore., activists intend to sing reworded Christmas carols reminding Americans how dumb they are for wanting to purchase products to improve their lives.

In Seattle, Wash., and nearby cities Occupy supporters are scheduled to do Big Labor’s bidding by demonstrating at Wal-Mart. The company has long been targeted by unions and groups like ACORN because it has been so successful in resisting unionization.

In a propaganda communiqué, Occupy Seattle declared, “With its long history of mistreating workers and suppliers, its recent announcement of significant cutbacks on employee health care, and its obscene profits, Wal-Mart is a prime example of how the 99% are suffering at the hands of the 1%.”

Of course, logic is perpetually in short supply on the Left. Preventing Americans from buying deep-discounted products for Christmas or mocking them for wanting to give gifts to the ones they love will not endear the movement to the people it seeks to reach.

The sudden eviction of Occupy Wall Street squatters from lower Manhattan hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm of organized labor for their increasingly violent anarchist and neo-communist brethren.

The occupiers now say they plan to shut down Wall Street on Nov. 17 and occupy the New York subway. One Occupy Wall Street supporter was captured on video saying radicals plan to “burn New York City to the ground.” The movement that has spread across America is what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke, a former SEIU boss, calls an “anti-banking jihad.”

After New York police unexpectedly swooped down on the occupants of Zuccotti Park early in the morning of Nov. 15, organized labor leaders formally reaffirmed their support for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“You can draw a direct line from the Wisconsin protests in the winter to Occupy Wall Street to the overwhelming rejection of an anti-union ballot question in Ohio,” said Teamsters president James P. Hoffa. “Occupy Wall Street is bringing new energy to a fight that labor has been engaged in from the beginning: The fight for an economy that works for everybody, not just the 1 percent.”

The Teamsters union “wholly supports and endorses Occupy Wall Street and opposes any effort to unreasonably restrict, contain or stop this lawful protest,” the union’s general executive board said in an official resolution.

Art handlers who belong to the Teamsters joined with occupiers to protest Sotheby’s in New York a few weeks ago. “The Sotheby’s economy is destroying the lives of too many Americans,” said art handler and Teamsters Local 814 member Sim Jones. The auction house, which the Left now considers to be a playground of the decadent so-called 1 percent, had locked out some of the workers as part of a labor dispute.

Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has been in the vanguard of the Left’s economic terrorism campaign. SEIU board member Stephen Lerner has been leading an effort to physically intimidate corporate executives in their homes.

Not surprisingly, SEIU is still a gung-ho supporter of the occupiers. After Zuccotti Park was cleared, president Mary Kay Henry regurgitated the Left’s talking points. Henry praised what she called the “brave students, unemployed Americans, families and others” participating in the various occupations that have spread to scores of large U.S. cities.

On Nov. 17 SEIU members plan to march “arm in arm with unemployed workers, community members, allied groups and Occupy protesters in support of a great American idea: our nation and our economy should work for everyone, not just the richest 1%.”

New protests will help promote Big Labor’s agenda. SEIU plans to join “a National Day of Action for the 99% protesting the failure of politicians in Congress to pass a jobs bill that would have put people back to work fixing thousands of bridges, roads and schools.”

Just about all major labor organizations in the country now support Occupy Wall Street.

Don’t miss FrontPage’s other Union Gangsters profiles featuring Craig Becker, Richard Trumka, Stephen Lerner, Andy Stern, Jimmy Hoffa Jr., John Sweeney and Daniel De Leon.

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.

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.

He takes pride in the fact that the New York Times called him the “No. 1 scourge of free traders.” No wonder: A few days after Gerard visited President George W. Bush’s cabinet in 2001 the Bush administration slapped tariffs on imported steel. To help advance the protectionist agenda, President Obama named Gerard to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations.

Like Karl Marx, Gerard has an interest in economics. He had planned to become an economics professor before taking a job in the labor movement. But interest doesn’t imply aptitude, and like Marx, he apparently has little understanding of economics.

In an economically illiterate screed Gerard proclaimed that America, with its $15 trillion in national debt and untold trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities, doesn’t “have a deficit crisis; we have a jobs crisis.”

The House of Representatives’ top investigator has asked a federal prosecutor to look into fraudulent fundraising practices that ACORN’s New York front group allegedly used to raise money for Occupy Wall Street.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) wants to know if New York Communities for Change (NYCC) “engaged in fraud through its participation in the Occupy Wall Street protests.” (Front Page Magazine reported a month ago that NYCC was raising money for Occupy Wall Street.)

In a letter Monday Issa asked Brooklyn-based U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch to initiate an investigation into claims that NYCC may have “solicited donations from union members under false pretenses and misappropriated those funds to support the protesters.”

NYCC staffers reportedly collected money door-to-door for the group’s campaign to test schools for dangerous toxins and then commingled those funds with cash raised for a teachers union and to support Occupy Wall Street. One NYCC source was quoted saying money raised to help schools “isn’t going to the campaign … it’s just going to the protests, and that’s just so terrible.”

To cover up the funding funny business, NYCC executive director Jon Kest has reportedly threatened and fired employees, destroyed documentary evidence, ordered staffers not to speak to the media, and ordered the installation of surveillance cameras and recording devices at NYCC headquarters in Brooklyn.

NYCC is also reportedly destroying items that reference ACORN in an effort to cover up NYCC’s intimate working relationship with the ACORN network. Kest is a longtime ACORN operative. So is his brother Steve who was executive director for the national ACORN organization.

Staten Island congressman Michael G. Grimm (R-N.Y.) supports Issa’s call for a probe.

Even more convincing evidence linking the ACORN network to Occupy Wall Street has emerged. The protests, which have spread to dozens of other large U.S. cities, are part of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke calls an “anti-banking jihad.”

After I reported a month ago that ACORN front group New York Communities for Change (NYCC) was raising money for Occupy Wall Street, NYCC is in turmoil.

FoxNews.com is reporting that NYCC executive director Jon Kest, a longtime ACORN activist and brother of former ACORN executive director Steve Kest, is in panic mode. “They’re doing serious damage control right now,” said a source inside NYCC.

Instead of responding to allegations, NYCC is spending its time demonizing Fox News. According to NYCC board member Jean Sassine the group is blameless:

New York Communities for Change participates in protests, direct action, social activism and campaigns that promote social and economic justice. We see FOX as the enemy to those efforts. For the record, this is consistent with Fox attacks on Van Jones, Shirley Sherrod, George Soros, Citizen Action, Planned Parenthood and all those who stand for social justice. Once again, FOX entertainment poses as FOX News. Once again, FOX makes a series of false, unsubstantiated claims and accusations which have no basis in fact. Once again, through a series of sources FOX structures a story which is nothing but a series of lies.

Lying in order to misdirect its adversaries has long been ACORN’s public relations strategy. All throughout the pimp and prostitute video saga in 2009 ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis told blatant falsehoods about the unethical behavior of ACORN employees. The leaders of ACORN and its successor groups know they can lie and cover up because the mainstream media will never call them to account.

Meanwhile, Kest has threatened and fired employees, destroyed documents, ordered staffers not to speak to the media, and is installing surveillance cameras and recording devices at its headquarters in Brooklyn.

NYCC’s draconian crackdown on its own workers has a precedent: ACORN had a lousy employee relations track record too. It habitually stiffed workers, told workers to commit voter registration fraud, busted attempts to unionize the group, asked to be exempted from paying the minimum wage, and sent women to canvass alone at night in bad neighborhoods, as I documented in my new book, Subversion Inc.

NYCC officials “reminded us that we can get fired, sued, arrested for talking to the press,” said an NYCC insider.

At an emergency meeting NYCC organizing director Jonathan Westin played semantic games. According to a source:

It was pretty funny. Jonathan told staff they don’t pay for protesters, but the people in the meeting who work there objected and said, “Wait, you pay us to go to the protests every day?” Then Jonathan said “No, but that’s your job,” and staffers were like, “Yeah, our job is to protest,” and Westin said, “No your job is to fight for economic and social justice. We just send you to protest.” Staff said, “Yes, you pay us to carry signs.” Then Jonathan says, “That’s your job.” It went on like that back and forth for a while.

As I previously reported, the Working Families Party, another ACORN front group, is participating in the protests by raising money and paying for rent-a-mobs in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park.

The fingerprints of the preeminent funder of the activist Left today, George Soros, are all over the anti-American “Occupy Wall Street” movement.

The seventh-wealthiest person in America (net worth: $22 billion), Soros has publicly embraced Occupy Wall Street and financially supports a left-wing group that is funneling money to the movement.

As I note in my new book Subversion Inc., this Communist sympathizer co-founded the ultra-secretive Democracy Alliance, a billionaires’ club that wants to radically transform America. He has said that European-style socialism “is exactly what we need now” and favors American decline. Soros, a currency manipulator with an insider trading conviction, praises Red China effusively, saying the totalitarian nation has “a better functioning government than the United States.”

The nonprofit organization that has taken Soros’s money is the Alliance for Global Justice. It is managing donations benefiting the anarchists, socialists, communists, empty-headed Naomi Klein followers, and hippies now occupying Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. As of Nov. 2, the Alliance reported $206,000 in donations earmarked for Occupy Wall Street. The Wall Street Journal estimates Occupy Wall Street has taken in a grand total of $500,000 so far but that doesn’t appear to take into account non-monetary donations such as food, power generators, clothing, shoes, camping gear, and sleeping bags.

Alliance for Global Justice is a “fiscal sponsor” which means that it serves as a financial clearinghouse for causes that haven’t incorporated themselves as nonprofit organizations. Donors write a check to the Alliance and are then able to deduct the donations from their income tax. Fiscal sponsors take a percentage of donations as administrative fees and then pass on the rest to the cause favored by the donor.

Alliance for Global Justice has accepted grants from Soros’s charity, the Open Society Institute ($100,000 since 2004) and from the radical Tides Foundation ($60,000 since 2004) which allows high-profile donors to give secretly to radical causes.

A hotbed of anti-American activity, the Alliance takes money from the most extreme left-wing philanthropies operating in America today. The Alliance has accepted grants from the (pro-Fidel Castro) Arca Foundation ($185,000 since 2001), General Service Foundation ($165,000 since 2001), and Foundation for Deep Ecology ($30,000 since 2000), a group of environmental fundamentalists who regard human beings as the number one threat to planet earth.

Don’t miss FrontPage’s other Union Gangsters profiles featuring Craig Becker, Richard Trumka, Stephen Lerner, Andy Stern and Daniel De Leon.

Few union gangsters have the exquisitely barbaric pedigree of International Brotherhood of Teamsters president James P. Hoffa.

And few labor unions can match the Teamsters, the million-plus member union of truckers and blue-collar workers, for its legendary connections to organized crime, corruption, and violence. For decades the word Teamster was essentially a synonym for gangster.

Hoffa is the son of James R. Hoffa, the relentlessly corrupt, larger-than-life Teamsters president who worked closely with figures from the crime underworld. In July 1975 the elder Hoffa disappeared mysteriously outside a suburban Detroit restaurant at which he was planning to meet with two mobsters. His body has never been found.

Historian Thaddeus Russell likened the elder Hoffa to General George S. Patton. “He exalted bravery and despised frailty, and presented himself as the toughest, strongest, and most ruthless fighter in the union,” Russell wrote. Hoffa also once proudly proclaimed his potential to be “the meanest bastard that God ever created.”

Like his foul-mouthed, publicity-loving father, the younger Hoffa doesn’t mince words.

Like most union leaders, Hoffa blames “Wall Street’s greed, stupidity and fraud” for the nation’s economic problems, ignoring the role that Big Government meddling in the economy played in inflating the mortgage market bubble. He supports Occupy Wall Street and acknowledges that Teamsters “all over the country are participating in Occupy Wall Street events.”

When introducing President Obama at a Labor Day rally this year, Hoffa launched an attack, bellowing, “We got to keep an eye on the battle that we face: The war on workers. And you see it everywhere, it is the Tea Party.”

Well-practiced in the art of Saul Alinsky-style vilification, Hoffa told the crowd, “Let’s take these son [sic] of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong.” Not surprisingly, President Obama, who encourages his supporters to find opponents and “argue with them and get in their face,” never distanced himself from Hoffa’s demonization of a large chunk of the U.S. population.

After the event, Hoffa invoked the Mother of All Leftist Cliches, telling ABC News that conservatives “want to roll the clock back to about 1900.”

When Wisconsin voters gave their Republican governor Scott Walker a clear mandate to cut state spending, Hoffa lashed out. In February he called Walker’s extremely modest proposal that state workers shoulder a small percentage of the costs for their health care plans and pensions “union-busting” and “a vindictive attack” that was part of a “one-sided class war.”

Jimmy Hoffa Jr., a lawyer by training, has had a radical streak for a long time.

Don’t miss FrontPage’s other Union Gangsters profiles featuring Craig Becker, Richard Trumka, Stephen Lerner and Daniel De Leon.

Andy Stern is one of the most outspoken, cocksure neo-communists of the American labor movement.

“We like to say: We use the power of persuasion first,” Stern said, channeling Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky. “If it doesn’t work, we try the persuasion of power.”

Stern quotes Karl Marx in television appearances. In 2007 the wannabe Bolshevik told Bill Moyers that his Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was expanding to Australia, Switzerland, England, South America, and Africa.

We’ve been working with unions around the world. And what we’re working towards is building a global organization. Because “workers of the world unite,” it’s not just a slogan anymore. It’s the way we’re going to have to do our work.

Stern loves government slush funds that advantage the Left. He enthusiastically supports President Obama’s so-called jobs bill that would provide $15 billion for ACORN and its 20-odd new front groups, other radical left-wing groups, and state and local governments.

He also seems blissfully, willfully ignorant of the many misguided government policies and programs that helped to cause the current financial crisis. To him everything is the fault of investors.

“People burnt this economy to the ground with irresponsible speculative behavior,” Stern said in January 2010 at a labor forum sponsored by the left-wing Center for American Progress Action Fund. “And I would just say for the record that if American justice is really equal for everyone there are a lot of people that deserve to be called into account for what’s taken place up to now.”

As punishment, he supports enacting a stock market-killing tax on financial transactions that backers say could net $1.7 trillion over 10 years. The tax is being aggressively promoted by fellow neo-communist Heather Booth, the founder of the Alinskyite training school called the Midwest Academy. (Booth recently led Marxists in a stirring recitation of “Solidarity Forever” at a conference in Washington, D.C.)

Stern is also well-practiced in the dark art of Alinskyite vilification. At the 2010 forum he excoriated lawmakers for not passing the then-stalled Obamacare bill. Stern called senators who refused to approve the legislation “terrorists.”

“We should send the national security people over and explain to them why we don’t negotiate with terrorists,” he said. “There are a lot of terrorists in the Senate who think we’re supposed to negotiate with them when they have their particular needs that they want met.”

Under Stern’s leadership, SEIU became the fastest-growing union in America. His brutal, in-your-face tactics apparently helped to add a million dues-paying members to the rolls, bringing its total membership to 2.2 million.

Stern’s radicalism and love of thuggery permeates virtually every aspect of SEIU, which he led as president from 1996 to 2010 before leaving under an ethical cloud two years before his term of office was to expire.

With Stern at the helm, SEIU harassed and harangued companies into signing agreements to make the union the representative of their employees. Companies that dared to resist were subjected to “corporate campaigns” that included picket lines, boycotts, and actions calculated to generate negative publicity for employers.

The racketeers of SEIU use an intimidation manual to guide their vicious attacks against targeted companies. As labor watchdog F. Vincent Vernuccio reported,

The new union tactic is to use pressure on corporate boardrooms as a means of organizing entire companies nationwide rather than recruiting workers on a site-by-site basis; in short, to organize employers rather than employees. To create this pressure, unions attempt to push businesses to the edge of bankruptcy, with little regard for the welfare of employer and employee. They attempt to strong-arm businesses into agreeing to take away the secret ballot for employees in union-organizing elections via card check. They also try to force employers to restrict their own speech on union issues so that workers will not get both sides of the story on unionization. Among the SEIU’s demands is that employers agree to bargain only with it, to the exclusion of all other unions, regardless of what workers want.

Being endorsed by scary, hateful, self-marginalizing extremists isn’t necessarily the kiss of death in American politics.

After presidential candidate Ronald Reagan was endorsed by a Louisiana chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in 1980 –an endorsement he quite correctly and forcefully rejected— he prospered and went on to evict Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter from the White House.

But it’s different when the endorsee shares the core tenets of the fringe-dwelling endorsers.

It really shouldn’t be altogether surprising that Occupy Wall Street is now endorsed by both the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the American Nazi Party.

After all, the rhetoric at Occupy Wall Street events is only superficially distinguishable from the communiqués that the Communists and the Nazis recently released to express solidarity with OWSers across the nation.

Every day news reports show bigoted OWS speakers ranting against Jews, the rich, bankers, corporate chieftains, and the Tea Party, and calling for bloody revolution.

In a similar vein, the neo-Nazis said they welcome the “‘Occupy Wall Street’ fervor that has been sweeping the land like a breath of cleansing air!”

This issue is TAYLOR [sic] MADE for National Socialists, as well as WN [white nationalists] who are serious about DOING SOMETHING – MORE – than shouting “racial slurs” and acting like “poster boys of hate” loons. After all – JUST WHO – are the WALL STREET BANKERS? The vast majority are JEWS – and the others are SPIRITUAL JEW materialists, who would sell their own mother’s gold teeth for a PROFIT. And MORE and MORE people are AWARE of this truth, are not only NOT afraid to TALK ABOUT IT – they’re shouting it on WALL STREET! [caps in original]

The Communists view the OWS movement as class struggle, American-style. As the CPUSA pontificates about the movement,

No doubt the “Arab Spring” demonstrations and those that exploded in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere have inspired it. But underlying it all is the economic crisis, the massive unemployment and growing realization that nothing is getting better, and in fact we may be slipping into a “double dip” crisis. The crushing student debt and the feeling of being locked out of society with no future compound this. The movement is the newest wrinkle in the all-people’s upsurge against the banks and corporations and reflects a new level of class-consciousness.

As Jonah Goldberg reminded us in his opus, Liberal Fascism, the differences between fascism and communism are mostly superficial.

Both ideological camps demonize capitalism and seek to replace it with an iron-fisted command economy that makes the state the center of everything.

This pathological hatred of economic freedom animates not only American Nazis and Communists, but also the radicals of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Salvador Dali would have been comfortable painting a mural of the surreal Occupy Wall Street movement.

Supported by billionaire Marxists, mega-rich Hollywood airheads, radical libertarians, indebted students, sexual exhibitionists, malingerers, and professional protesters, the neo-communist “Occupy Wall Street” movement is fast becoming the face of the modern Democratic Party.

This is a wonderful thing, says conservative columnist George F. Will. Will said he wants the Occupy Wall Street protests to prosper:

I think they do represent the intellectual spirit of the American left, but also I remember the 1960s. We had four years of demonstrations like this [that] led up to 1968, when the Nixon/Wallace vote was 57 percent – the country reacting against demonstrators, and Republicans went on to win five of the next six presidential elections.

Organized by Obama allies such as the sleazy, SEIU-funded ACORN front group known as the Working Families Party, the Occupy Wall Street mob’s demands are strikingly similar to the Democratic Party platform, differing largely only in degree. They include creating a single-payer health-care system and a “guaranteed living wage,” abolishing credit agencies, free college education, banning the use of fossil fuels, open borders, and $1 trillion in useless new infrastructure spending.

Prominent national Democrats and the mainstream media are now working overtime to convince Americans that a revolution is in the air and that they should embrace it. In order to make the movement more palatable to middle America, they are pushing the line that Occupy Wall Street is a left-wing version of the Tea Party movement.

Democratic office holders have been sprinting so hard to align themselves with the unwashed masses squatting in lower Manhattan that it’s a miracle they haven’t suffered sports injuries.

President Obama threw his lot in with the demonstrators and used the occasion to smear Republicans. The movement “expresses the frustrations the American people feel, that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, huge collateral damage all throughout the country,” Obama said in a reference to Wall Street, which has long been a Democratic fundraising powerhouse.

“Yet you’re still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to fight efforts to crack down on the abusive practices that got us into this in the first place,” the president pontificated, ignoring the role that Democrat-dominated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Democrat-created Community Reinvestment Act, and Democrat-aligned ACORN, played in sabotaging the economy.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said she supports “the message to the establishment, whether it’s Wall Street or the political establishment and the rest, that change has to happen.”

Evidence suggests that ACORN, the Left’s premiere astro-turfing organization, has been paying people to participate in the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Astro-turfing campaigns can generate big money, and ACORN’s lucrative protest-for-profit program is nothing new. As I note in my book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, ACORN has acquired great expertise in manufacturing so-called grassroots protests.

Left-wing loan sharks Herb and Marion Sandler, the founders of World Savings Bank, gave ACORN affiliates close to $11 million to manufacture mobs to protest their competition in subprime mortgage lending. The United Federation of Teachers paid ACORN $500,000 to create a spontaneous uprising against charter schools in Manhattan.

The sleazy, SEIU-funded Working Families Party, a front group for ACORN, placed a want ad on the Craig’s List website dated Sept. 26. The ad indicates that WFP was recruiting activists to carry out “direct action,” leftist argot for a variety of activities aimed at forcing sociopolitical change. The line between direct action and violent terrorism can become blurry. Extreme forms of direct action can lead to bodily injury and sometimes death. The labor movement is no stranger to assault and killings. Left-wing activists David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin participated in an attack on an armored car that left two police officers and a security guard dead. Two anarchists tried to disrupt the 2008 GOP convention with Molotov cocktails. The eco-terrorist Sea Shepherd Conservation Society admits both to attacking whaling ships with acid and sinking them.

WFP’s ad is titled, “FIGHT TO HOLD WALLSTREET ACCOUNTABLE NOW! MAKE A DIFFERENCE GET PAID!” It states:

The WFP is seeking immediate hires.

You must be an energetic communicator, with a passion for social and economic justice.

Only outgoing, articulate dedicated, determined candidates will be considered for the positions.

For those candidates that qualify WFP offers substantial paid-training provided by senior leadership, on varied issues such as: advocacy, public speaking, mobilizing, fundraising, networking and organizing. We invest in passionate people with excellent communication skills and a full benefits package is offered to those candidates that qualify. In addition, there is opportunity for advancement and travel to our satellite chapters and out of state affiliates.

This is not a policy job! Through direct action you will be shaping NY state politics for the next 20 years.” [emphasis added]

As previously reported, WFP has been involved in organizing the Occupy Wall Street protests since the beginning.

As radical journalist Laura Flanders reported, WFP organizer Nelini Stamp has “been here since day one and she is part of the organizing team and the outreach team that has managed to bridge the distance between that first day and this day and between the grassroots folks here and the labor movement.” Stamp said the protests are aimed at “trying to change the capitalist system” and bringing “revolutionary changes to the states.”

WFP organizer Matthew Cain also acknowledged the party’s involvement Oct. 5 and helpfully provided a photograph of party staffers bearing a blue and white WFP banner during a march in lower Manhattan. Across from Foley Square,

several WFP field staff were standing on the steps. For some of the staffers, it was their first time at the square, but for many others they had already spent nights sleeping in the park. Even those who have been there for two weeks or more have not seen their spirits diminished – they’re every bit as committed as they were when they first showed up.

Of course WFP executive director Dan Cantor, a longtime ACORN operative, is pleased with Occupy Wall Street so far. Cantor told supporters in an email that “the spirit of Wisconsin and Tahrir Square is alive and well in New York City.”

The Working Families Party, an infamous ACORN front group notorious for corruption, was instrumental in organizing the Occupy Wall Street protests, according to radical journalist Laura Flanders of Free Speech TV.

The protests, which have spread to several other large U.S. cities, are part of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke calls an “anti-banking jihad.”

Working Families Party (WFP) organizer Nelini Stamp has “been here since day one and she is part of the organizing team and the outreach team that has managed to bridge the distance between that first day and this day and between the grassroots folks here and the labor movement,” Flanders said at the protest in lower Manhattan.

We are “actually trying to change the capitalist system we have today because it’s not working for any of us,” Stamp told Flanders in an interview. Demonstrators are asking “how do we really reform and bring revolutionary changes to the states?”

The WFP is part and parcel of ACORN. In 1998 the party was officially recognized in New York State. WFP’s headquarters is at the same address as ACORN on Nevins Street in Brooklyn. WFP’s executive director is longtime ACORN operative Dan Cantor.

One of the SEIU-funded party’s co-founders is ACORN’s former national chief organizer, Bertha Lewis. Democratic National Committee executive director Patrick Gaspard also contributed to the creation of the party and sat on its board. Gaspard was a political director in the Obama White House and is a former SEIU executive. Gaspard was also an organizer for the radical New Party in the early 1990s. That party’s membership consisted largely of individuals from the Democratic Socialists of America, SEIU, and ACORN. The party endorsed Barack Obama when he ran for the Illinois State Senate.

WFP takes credit for raising taxes both in the city and state of New York and for pressuring the state’s congressional delegation to oppose Social Security reforms. The party has sister WFP-branded parties in Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Oregon, South Carolina, and Vermont.

Working with its radical friends at SEIU, WFP advocates more government spending, higher taxes, universal government-run health care, campaign finance restrictions, free universal higher education, oppressive rent control, same-sex marriage, amnesty for illegal aliens, “greening” the economy by creating heavily subsidized union jobs in the energy sector, and mandatory paid sick leave for all workers.

In 2009 Connecticut WFP sent busloads of thugs to confront American International Group Inc. (AIG) executives at their homes. The protests were calculated to intimidate executives who had been receiving death threats after the company reportedly paid out bonuses using taxpayer bail-out funds.

ACORN allies are also involved in protests aimed at destabilizing the nation’s financial system.