The annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be held in Washington, D.C. at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel for three days, beginning today. It will feature a number of conservative speakers, from politicians (including three of the four presidential candidates) to columnists and conservative celebrities. Yet it may also “feature” something else as well: according to the Heritage Foundation’s Lachlan Markay, the “Occupy DC” offshoot of the OWS movement is planning to disrupt the meetings. How far will they go? “Speakers will be physically assaulted, not just verbally confronted,” a source told Heritage in an email.

Apparently the information was garnered by someone who attended a meeting of the Occupy DC group prior to their eviction from McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C. last Saturday. In the midst of intermittent violence and heated exchanges, Park Police dispersed the crowd, confiscating a number of tents in the process. Occupiers were then prohibited from camping out there any longer. On Thursday, two days prior to their disbanding, the Occupiers were engaged in a strategy session regarding the use of tactics to disrupt, or even shut down, CPAC entirely.

What tactics? According to the source, who requested anonymity, protesters suggested pulling fire alarms in the hotel where the conference will take place, screaming “fire” during conference activities, “glitter-bombing” participants, cutting electrical power, and barricading entrances to the hotel. The source also identified members of the New Black Panther Party, who “said they would be disappointed if they didn’t get arrested and planned to ‘make it count,’” and another protester who warned that “Mitt [Romney] has Secret Service now, but [Newt] Gingrich and [Andrew] Breitbart don’t,” implying that the group might go after people they consider easier to confront–or perhaps assault.

Reportedly, most of their antics will take place on Saturday, the last day of the conference — because they don’t want to get in the way of unions who plan to protest on Thursday and Friday. “What do Wisconsin Governor SCOTT WALKER, presidential candidates MITT ROMNEY, NEWT GINGRICH, RICK SANTORUM and House Budget Committee Chair PAUL RYAN have in common?” asks the Washington, DC Metro Council of the AFL-CIO on its website. “They all represent the greed of the wealthy 1% and they’ll all be at the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference. WE’VE HEARD ENOUGH FROM THE 1%! Join the rally featuring tents, an inflatable fat cat, puppets, ‘candidate Walmart,’  and more to LET THE VOICES OF THE 99% BE HEARD!”

The unions have scheduled two official protests at noon and 5 p.m. Friday. The 5 p.m. demonstration will coincide with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s speech. “It’s all in good fun, but with a very serious message in terms of representing the 99 percent,” said AFL-CIO organizer Chris Garlock. He also said he expects the protest to be “non-confrontational.”

Garlock has a short memory. In November, the very same Occupy D.C. protesters stormed a dinner held by Americans for Prosperity at Washington Convention Center. During that “non-confrontational” episode, Dolores Broderson, age 78, who had ridden 11 hours on a bus from Detroit to attend, was pushed down the stairs. She ended up in a hospital emergency room with a bloody nose and bruises on her hand and leg. There was also a “pre-planned assault on the Convention Center” as described by an eyewitness who claimed the mob was “hell-bent on shoving their way through the front doors.”

Joining the AFL-CIO will be a group called Change to Win (CTW), an SEIU-led federation that broke away from the AFL-CIO in 2005. CTW staffer Trina Tocca has posted a notice of the protest on her Facebook page. Thus, two union groups will be joining Occupy D.C. in their efforts to disrupt the conference.

That the unions would align themselves with Occupy D.C. is disturbing. According to the Occupy D.C. website, the CPAC event is characterized as “another gathering of bigots, media mouthpieces, corrupt politicians, and their 1 percent elite puppet masters.” Its purpose is to “parade and attempt to perpetuate the radical right wing’s imperialist ideologies with keynote speakers, movies and banquets dedicated to pursuing its racist, sexist, patriarchal and exploitative agenda.”

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.

What do you get when you mix Democratic fat-cat donations, Big Labor favors, pharmaceutical lobbying and Beltway business as usual? Answer: another toxic half-billion-dollar Barack Obama-approved crony deal. Move over, Solyndra. Here comes Siga-Gate.

This latest Chicago-style payoff on your dime involves a dubious smallpox drug backed by a liberal billionaire investor, along with a former union boss who was one of the White House’s most frequent visitors. They’re the “1 percent” with 100 percent immunity from the selectively outraged Occupier mobs that purport to oppose partisan government bailouts and handouts to privileged corporations.

Ronald Perelman is the New York City-based leveraged buyout wheeler-dealer who controls Siga Technologies. He has donated nearly $130,000 mostly to Democrats over the past two election cycles alone, and he forked over $50,000 to pay for the president’s lavish inaugural parties. A Siga affiliate pitched in nearly half a million more in contributions — 65 percent of which went to Democrats — and the firms have spent millions on lobbying.

Perelman’s pharma company makes an experimental antiviral pill used by smallpox patients who received diagnoses too late to be treated with the existing smallpox vaccine. Smallpox experts cast doubt on the need for the drug given ample vaccine stockpiles, the remoteness of a mass attack and questions about its efficacy. But over the objections of federal contract negotiators, competitors and scientists, the Obama administration approved a lucrative $433 million no-bid deal for Siga in May. No other manufacturers were able to compete for the “sole source” procurement, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The special arrangement was made after a competitor objected to the administration’s violating small-business rules during a first call for bids. That’s right: It’s yet another rigged giveaway from a Hope-and-Change champion who vowed on the 2008 campaign trail to “end the abuse of no-bid contracts once and for all.”

Intensifying the culture-of-corruption stench: the critical role of Andy Stern. He’s the profligate, corruption-coddling former head of the powerful Service Employees International Union — the 2.2 million-member public-employee union powerhouse that he left in April 2010 with a mountain of debt and eroding rank-and-file pensions.

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

Like so many of his fellow union leaders, John Sweeney is more than willing to adopt thuggish tactics to get his way.

Sweeney grew up in a labor family with a father who was a New York City bus driver and a mother who worked as a maid. In 1957, he got his first union job with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union [ILGWU]. Three years he joined the New York City Local 32B of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), working his way up to president of the organization in 1980. During his stint as SEIU president, which lasted until 1995, Sweeney implemented the kind of aggressive tactics that have since been adopted by other unions. Such tactics included planned stoppages of traffic in major cities, and the beginning of “corporate campaigning,” which consists of coordinated intimidation strategies designed to destroy a company’s reputation if it does not accede to union demands.

After leaving the SEIU, Sweeney served as president of the powerful American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) from 1995 to 2009. Serving with him was Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka and Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson. The trio called itself the “New Voice,” and the first indication of where that voice intended to take the union occurred during the 1995 campaign when Sweeney refused to repudiate civil disobedience as an organizing tactic. At his inaugural address, Sweeney remained true to that prospect. “We will use old-fashioned mass demonstrations, as well as sophisticated corporate campaigns to make workers’ rights the civil rights issue of the 1990s,” he promised.

In 1996, the union introduced its “Union Summer Program” which was an effort to tap into radical leftist college students who were organized under the banner of United Students Against Sweatshops. The program was designed to teach students how to “develop skills for union organizing drives and other campaigns for workers rights and social justice.” Materials included in the program included a pledge called the “Working Class Commitment,” a testament to class warfare: “I will remember to be proud that we do the world’s work, that we produce the world’s wealth, that we belong to the only class with a future, and that our class will end all oppression.” Thus began Sweeney’s attempt, as noted in his 1996 book, America Needs A Raise, to build a “social movement” not just a labor union. It was a social movement in which Sweeney began making favorable comparisons to Euro-style socialism.

That socialist impulse took an even harder turn to the left in the late ’90s when power trio member Richard Trumka was called to testify in a money-laundering case involving the Teamsters Union. When the AFL and CIO merged in 1955, one of the conditions was that outright communists in the CIO would be purged. In 1957, the AFL-CIO instituted a rule requiring the removal of any union official invoking his Fifth Amendment rights in court. During this case Trumka did exactly that and Sweeney responded–he removed the ban on communists joining the union rather than get rid of Trumka.

The move was hardly surprising. Sweeney himself is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a communist front group in the United States.

Sweeney retired as AFL-CIO president in 2009. He ws succeeded by Trumka. On February 15, 2011 Sweeney was one of 15 people awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor by Barack Obama. One is left to wonder whether the fact that the AFL-CIO under Sweeney’s leadership donated more than $200 million to Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign was a contributing factor.

Yet the defining piece of Sweeney’s legacy came to light as a result of a court case filed against the SEIU by catering company Sodexo Inc. on March 17, 2011 in the Eastern District of Virginia. Introduced into evidence was a work entitled “Contract Campaign Manual” written by the labor leader himself. The first two sentences of “Part 3″ give one an idea of how Mr. Sweeney intended to “persuade” companies to hire union workers. “It is not enough to be right,” Sweeney writes. “You need might as well.”

The exercise of such “might” was apparently egregious enough that Sodexo filed the suit under the auspices of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). The 1970 statute was written with the aim of eliminating “the infiltration of organized crime and racketeering into legitimate organizations operating in interstate commerce.”

The litigation was a response to SEIU’s “Clean Up Sodexo” campaign, a thinly-veiled attempt to intimidate the company into collecting union dues without having fair elections. This strategy outlined in the manual represented a departure from labor’s traditional method of organizing workers on a location-by-location basis. The new strategy was simple: put enormous pressure on corporate boardrooms via a series of strong-arm tactics, and the employers would eventually submit to having all of their workers organized in one shot.

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.

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.

Self-described America-hating ”communist” and Arianna Huffington courtier Van Jones effectively gave a full-throated endorsement of the SEIU-led economic terrorism campaign that aims to bring America’s financial system to its knees. In an obnoxious self-righteous op-ed in the Huffington Post Jones, a longtime intimate of the ideologically flexible Huffington, hails anarchy and lawlessness. Jones wants deadbeat homeowners to fight to stay in their homes — using force against law enforcement personnel if necessary.

Jones, a Maoist who is now a fellow at the left-wing propaganda factory known as the Center for American Progress, compares a woman who refused to leave a home she couldn’t afford to Rosa Parks, incredibly enough. The woman is Catherine Lennon and she fell behind in mortgage payments after her husband died. It’s a sad state of affairs but it happens. There’s nothing unique or unusual or even interesting about it.  You don’t pay your mortgage or your rent for any reason, you get evicted. It happens every day and there is nothing unfair about it.

But the media’s favorite Red tries to pull at the heart strings of the reader: 

Day after day, the media and government ignore an ongoing national tragedy: a tsunami of foreclosures is still sweeping millions of Americans out of their homes. As many as three million American families this year will hear a terrifying knock on the door: a law enforcement officer will tell them to get out, because a bank won’t work out a fair deal and allow them to stay.

But one remarkable grandmother this month refused to go quietly.

And her brave example — including her willingness to stand up, along with her neighbors, to a SWAT team — finally got elected officials to intervene.

He then goes on to acknowledge Mrs. Lennon is just another deadbeat. Jones says she should never have been dispossessed because

her husband died in January of 2008, leaving her with no will and her home ownership in legal limbo. She acknowledges missing some payments. But then, because her name was not on the house’s official mortgage paperwork, she says her bank refused her checks and returned them to her. She says she has the ability to make her payments.

Pieces of the back-story have to be missing here. Three years after her husband died without a will she still doesn’t have her name on the property? She’s even more pathetic than the character Jennifer Connelly played in “House of Sand and Fog.” How difficult would it have been for Mrs. Lennon to go through probate court and get title to her house? Will or no, wouldn’t she be entitled to become owner of the property? It’s really hard to believe the bank is at fault here.

But Jones keeps pumping Mrs. Lennon up as if she’s part of the vanguard of the proletariat leading a new revolution in America.

This popular post was originally published March 23, 2011.

“A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.” ~ Mao

We are currently in the midst of a battle for the heart and soul of America. This war is being waged at our schools, the workplace and in our communities. States struggling to moderate impossible debt and balance budgets are examining ways to free themselves from the fiscal and political shackles imposed by labor unions whose exorbitant pensions and benefits comprise the bulk of their debt. With the economy tanking and the fight over public union benefits and collective bargaining spreading across the United States, a totalitarian minority recognizes this as their make-or-break moment – their time to seize control of the social and economic environment by force rather than individual choice.

Hiding behind the labels of progressive, labor and social justice, this totalitarian minority is intrinsically linked with Communist, Socialist and Marxist ideologies. Their goal is to dismantle the foundations of our government and force the revolutionary transformation of America into their worldview. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose membership parallels the Congressional Progressive Caucus roster, describe their objective,

“To achieve a more just society, many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed through greater economic and social democracy.”  [Sound familiar?]

To accomplish their goal Socialists infiltrated leftist organizarions to the highest levels of leadership. The U.S. labor movement has a strong history of Socialist leadership but in recent decades members of the DSA gained control of the largest U.S. labor unions, AFCSME, SEIU and the AFL-CIO, creating a resurgence of militant communist/socialist views among their ranks. AFL-CIO Chief Richard Trumka recently admitted his main goal is using unions to fundamentally change America into his progressive vision.

The enemy is within and poised to destroy America. While speaking this past weekend in a closed session at the 2011 Left Forum, an annual gathering of Marxists and hard-left radicals that included Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, and Frances Fox Piven, former SEIU banking and finance director Stephen Lerner detailed the Left’s secret plan to “destabilize” the country. The full length video below reveals the depths to which the left are willing to go to seize control over the American economy. [H/T to The Blaze and Business Insider.]

“There are actually extraordinary things we could do right now to start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement….

“For example, 10% of homeowners are underwater, right? Their home, they are paying more for it then its worth. 10% of those people are in strategic default, meaning they are refusing to pay but they are staying in their home. That’s totally spontaneous. They figured out [that] it takes a year to kick me out of my home because foreclosure is backed up.

“If you could double that number you would you could put banks at the edge of insolvency again.

“Students have a trillion dollar debt.

“We have an entire economy that is built on debt and banks so the question would be what would happen if we organized homeowners in mass to do a mortgage strike if we get half a million people to agree it would literally cause a new finical crisis for the banks not for us we would be doing quite well we wouldn’t be paying anything…

“We have to think much more creatively. The key thing… What does the other side fear the most – they fear disruption. They fear uncertainty. Every article about Europe says when they rioted in Greece the markets went down. “The folks that control this country care about one thing – how the stock market goes, what the bond market does, how the bonuses goes. We have a very simple strategy:

• How do we bring down the stock market
• How do we bring down their bonuses
• How do we interfere with there ability to be rich…

“We are going to look at a week of civil disobedience – direct action all over [New York] city. Then roll into the JP Morgan shareholder meeting which they moved out of New York because I guess they were afraid because of Columbus.

“There is going to be a ten state mobilization to try and shut down that meeting and then looking at bank shareholder meetings around the country and try and create some moments like Madison except where we are on offense instead of defense.

“Where we have brave and heroic battles challenging the power of the giant corporations. We hope to inspire a much bigger movement about redistributing wealth and power in the country and that labor can’t do itself, that community groups can’t do themselves, but maybe we can work something new and different that can be brave enough and daring and nimble enough to do that kind of thing.”

Did you hear that? The radical Left is plotting to create socioeconomic chaos to build political momentum to push their revolutionary transformation. As U.S debt nears the tipping point of insolvency, they intend to strike at the heart of American capitalism by nationally expanding the agitation that triggered Wisconsin’s M&I Bank to shut down to avert a run on the bank after union firemen withdrew $192,000 in protest of the bank not succumbing to union demands to publicly oppose Gov. Scott Walker’s budget relief bill.

In other words, to force their will on the American people the Left is conspiring to commit extortion and economic terrorism by destroying the cash flow of banks nationwide in order to collapse of the financial system. If similar comments were said at a closed door Tea Party meeting, the speaker would be investigated as a threat to Homeland Security. Where are Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano? I hear crickets.

Next: It is not the gaining of power that is important, it is the KEEPING of power

We are currently in the midst of a battle for the heart and soul of America. This war is being waged at our schools, the workplace and in our communities. States struggling to moderate impossible debt and balance budgets are examining ways to free themselves from the fiscal and political shackles imposed by labor unions whose exorbitant pensions and benefits comprise the bulk of their debt. With the economy tanking and the fight over public union benefits and collective bargaining spreading across the United States, a totalitarian minority recognizes this as their make-or-break moment – their time to seize control of the social and economic environment by force rather than individual choice.

Hiding behind the labels of progressive, labor and social justice, this totalitarian minority is intrinsically linked with Communist, Socialist and Marxist ideologies. Their goal is to dismantle the foundations of our government and force the revolutionary transformation of America into their worldview. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose membership parallels the Congressional Progressive Caucus roster, describe their objective,

“To achieve a more just society, many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed through greater economic and social democracy.”  [Sound familiar?]

To accomplish their goal Socialists infiltrated leftist organizarions to the highest levels of leadership. The U.S. labor movement has a strong history of Socialist leadership but in recent decades members of the DSA gained control of the largest U.S. labor unions, AFCSME, SEIU and the AFL-CIO, creating a resurgence of militant communist/socialist views among their ranks. AFL-CIO Chief Richard Trumka recently admitted his main goal is using unions to fundamentally change America into his progressive vision.

The enemy is within and poised to destroy America. While speaking this past weekend in a closed session at the 2011 Left Forum, an annual gathering of Marxists and hard-left radicals that included Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, and Frances Fox Piven, former SEIU banking and finance director Stephen Lerner detailed the Left’s secret plan to “destabilize” the country. The full length video below reveals the depths to which the left are willing to go to seize control over the American economy. [H/T to The Blaze and Business Insider.]

“There are actually extraordinary things we could do right now to start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement….

“For example, 10% of homeowners are underwater, right? Their home, they are paying more for it then its worth. 10% of those people are in strategic default, meaning they are refusing to pay but they are staying in their home. That’s totally spontaneous. They figured out [that] it takes a year to kick me out of my home because foreclosure is backed up.

“If you could double that number you would you could put banks at the edge of insolvency again.

“Students have a trillion dollar debt.

“We have an entire economy that is built on debt and banks so the question would be what would happen if we organized homeowners in mass to do a mortgage strike if we get half a million people to agree it would literally cause a new finical crisis for the banks not for us we would be doing quite well we wouldn’t be paying anything…

“We have to think much more creatively. The key thing… What does the other side fear the most – they fear disruption. They fear uncertainty. Every article about Europe says when they rioted in Greece the markets went down. “The folks that control this country care about one thing – how the stock market goes, what the bond market does, how the bonuses goes. We have a very simple strategy:

• How do we bring down the stock market
• How do we bring down their bonuses
• How do we interfere with there ability to be rich…

“We are going to look at a week of civil disobedience – direct action all over [New York] city. Then roll into the JP Morgan shareholder meeting which they moved out of New York because I guess they were afraid because of Columbus.

“There is going to be a ten state mobilization to try and shut down that meeting and then looking at bank shareholder meetings around the country and try and create some moments like Madison except where we are on offense instead of defense.

“Where we have brave and heroic battles challenging the power of the giant corporations. We hope to inspire a much bigger movement about redistributing wealth and power in the country and that labor can’t do itself, that community groups can’t do themselves, but maybe we can work something new and different that can be brave enough and daring and nimble enough to do that kind of thing.”

Did you hear that? The radical Left is plotting to create socioeconomic chaos to build political momentum to push their revolutionary transformation. As U.S debt nears the tipping point of insolvency, they intend to strike at the heart of American capitalism by nationally expanding the agitation that triggered Wisconsin’s M&I Bank to shut down to avert a run on the bank after union firemen withdrew $192,000 in protest of the bank not succumbing to union demands to publicly oppose Gov. Scott Walker’s budget relief bill.

In other words, to force their will on the American people the Left is conspiring to commit extortion and economic terrorism by destroying the cash flow of banks nationwide in order to collapse of the financial system. If similar comments were said at a closed door Tea Party meeting, the speaker would be investigated as a threat to Homeland Security. Where are Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano? I hear crickets.

Next: It is not the gaining of power that is important, it is the KEEPING of power

Exploiting the battle between the governor and public employees in Wisconsin, frequent White House visitor, AFL-CIO Chief Richard Trumka has been trying to resuscitate a critically ill labor movement by setting up the entire conservative movement as the “enemy.” Trumka argues that the $14+ trillion dollar deficit is no big deal and that the GOP is trying to take money away from the middle class, only give it to those rich Wall Street CEOs.

As Trumka’s participation in the public workers’ union protests grew, so did the number of incidents of union violence and thuggery associated with the them.  This is not to say that the Grand Poobah of the union movement had anything to do with the violence, but it does seem to follow him around.  His inflammatory rhetoric led to bloodshed and death during his reign as president of the United Mine Workers Union.

The AFL-CIO demagogue’s behavior was not unusual; the history of the labor movement is littered with extremists who have used violence to get their their way.   At this moment, it is fair to say that union violence/thuggery has gone full circle. At the beginning of the movement the violence was outer directed; toward the government, management, or the police who were using violence themselves to destroy the labor movement. As the movement matured the violence became  directed inward, targeted towards keeping the rank and file “in line,” going after replacement workers,  or sabotaging the particular company under siege.  Just like the fictional Johnny Friendly bullied Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) in “On The Waterfront” (see the image above) real life union bosses ruled with an iron fist. Most recently however, union thuggery/violence  has become a political weapon;  attacking  members of the public who may disagree with the progressive-socialist politics championed by union management.

Here are the top six examples of violence committed by Big Labor. Starting with…

6. The Haymarket Square Incident, May 1886

Led by  the Knights of Labor (one of the first national unions), workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. in Chicago began a strike in the hope of gaining an 8-hour work day. Two days later, on May 3, police were used to protect strikebreakers and a scuffle broke out; one person was killed and several others injured. On Tuesday May 4, a mass meeting of workers was called to protest the police actions the previous day. A crowd of 20,000 had been expected but it was a cold rainy day,  so only about 2,500 showed up to hear speeches by Albert Parsons, Samuel Fielden and August Spies.

Responding to pressure from businessmen, 600 police reserves were called into duty that night at the West Chicago, Harrison and Central stations near the site of the protests. An extra 100 officers were added to the Des Plains station, less than half a block from Haymarket Square.

The rally began at 8:30 pm and the crowd was calm (and wet from the rain). Chicago Mayor Harrison rode by on his horse a short time later and was satisfied that the protest was peaceful. He ordered the police inspector to send the reserve officers home. The police inspector refused. Two hours later, he ordered his men to disperse the crowd. The speakers were approached by Police Captain William Ward, who commanded the meeting to end in the “name of the people of Illinois.”  Just then, a pipe bomb was thrown from a vestibule at Randolph and Des Plaines Streets. The bomb exploded in the middle of a column of police. One officer was killed instantly and six others were mortally wounded. The remaining officers quickly recovered and began shooting wildly into the fleeing crowd of laborers. The shooting continued for more than five minutes.

Looking for the person(s) who threw the bomb, officers began a reign of terror among working class citizens in Chicago. Hundreds of suspects were arrested, beaten and interrogated at all hours of the night. “Confessions” were beaten out of those thought to be “anarchists” or sympathizers of the labor unions. Despite the brutal response, the person responsible for the bombing was never caught. Nevertheless, in the end, eight anarchists were put on trial and seven were convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. Four were hanged in November 1887, one committed suicide and three were later pardoned by Illinois governor, John Peter Altgeld.

The Haymarket Massacre was an event that changed the direction of the American Labor movement. It delayed acceptance of the Knights of Labor’s key issue, the eight-hour work day, because people left the K.O.L. and moved toward the more moderate American Federation of Labor. For many years the police at Haymarket Square were regarded as martyrs and the workers as violent anarchists, a view that has moderated a bit as history has discovered and revealed new information. Still, the initial deadly violence came from the unions. And there was more – much more – to come.

Next: A former governor is assassinated…

Exploiting the battle between the governor and public employees in Wisconsin, frequent White House visitor, AFL-CIO Chief Richard Trumka has been trying to resuscitate a critically ill labor movement by setting up the entire conservative movement as the “enemy.” Trumka argues that the $14+ trillion dollar deficit is no big deal and that the GOP is trying to take money away from the middle class, only give it to those rich Wall Street CEOs.

As Trumka’s participation in the public workers’ union protests grew, so did the number of incidents of union violence and thuggery associated with the them.  This is not to say that the Grand Poobah of the union movement had anything to do with the violence, but it does seem to follow him around.  His inflammatory rhetoric led to bloodshed and death during his reign as president of the United Mine Workers Union.

The AFL-CIO demagogue’s behavior was not unusual; the history of the labor movement is littered with extremists who have used violence to get their their way.   At this moment, it is fair to say that union violence/thuggery has gone full circle. At the beginning of the movement the violence was outer directed; toward the government, management, or the police who were using violence themselves to destroy the labor movement. As the movement matured the violence became  directed inward, targeted towards keeping the rank and file “in line,” going after replacement workers,  or sabotaging the particular company under siege.  Just like the fictional Johnny Friendly bullied Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) in “On The Waterfront” (see the image above) real life union bosses ruled with an iron fist. Most recently however, union thuggery/violence  has become a political weapon;  attacking  members of the public who may disagree with the progressive-socialist politics championed by union management.

Here are the top six examples of violence committed by Big Labor. Starting with…

6. The Haymarket Square Incident, May 1886

Led by  the Knights of Labor (one of the first national unions), workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. in Chicago began a strike in the hope of gaining an 8-hour work day. Two days later, on May 3, police were used to protect strikebreakers and a scuffle broke out; one person was killed and several others injured. On Tuesday May 4, a mass meeting of workers was called to protest the police actions the previous day. A crowd of 20,000 had been expected but it was a cold rainy day,  so only about 2,500 showed up to hear speeches by Albert Parsons, Samuel Fielden and August Spies.

Responding to pressure from businessmen, 600 police reserves were called into duty that night at the West Chicago, Harrison and Central stations near the site of the protests. An extra 100 officers were added to the Des Plains station, less than half a block from Haymarket Square.

The rally began at 8:30 pm and the crowd was calm (and wet from the rain). Chicago Mayor Harrison rode by on his horse a short time later and was satisfied that the protest was peaceful. He ordered the police inspector to send the reserve officers home. The police inspector refused. Two hours later, he ordered his men to disperse the crowd. The speakers were approached by Police Captain William Ward, who commanded the meeting to end in the “name of the people of Illinois.”  Just then, a pipe bomb was thrown from a vestibule at Randolph and Des Plaines Streets. The bomb exploded in the middle of a column of police. One officer was killed instantly and six others were mortally wounded. The remaining officers quickly recovered and began shooting wildly into the fleeing crowd of laborers. The shooting continued for more than five minutes.

Looking for the person(s) who threw the bomb, officers began a reign of terror among working class citizens in Chicago. Hundreds of suspects were arrested, beaten and interrogated at all hours of the night. “Confessions” were beaten out of those thought to be “anarchists” or sympathizers of the labor unions. Despite the brutal response, the person responsible for the bombing was never caught. Nevertheless, in the end, eight anarchists were put on trial and seven were convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. Four were hanged in November 1887, one committed suicide and three were later pardoned by Illinois governor, John Peter Altgeld.

The Haymarket Massacre was an event that changed the direction of the American Labor movement. It delayed acceptance of the Knights of Labor’s key issue, the eight-hour work day, because people left the K.O.L. and moved toward the more moderate American Federation of Labor. For many years the police at Haymarket Square were regarded as martyrs and the workers as violent anarchists, a view that has moderated a bit as history has discovered and revealed new information. Still, the initial deadly violence came from the unions. And there was more – much more – to come.

Next: A former governor is assassinated…

Christopher Hayes, Washington editor for the far-left Nation magazine, offers a ringing endorsement of the thug tactics used by the Service Employees International Union and National People’s Action against Bank of America executive Gregory Baer.

You’ll recall that on his TV show Glenn Beck did a segment on the hundreds of angry, loud, purple-shirted SEIU members and National People’s Action activists who showed up at Baer’s house in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. They caused a ruckus, scared his family, frightened his neighbors, and used his home as a staging ground in their efforts to embarrass Bank of America and give so-called Wall Street reform legislation a boost.

After perfunctorily stating he was “dispositionally inclined to cringe at actions like this,” Hayes said he “got over that real quick when Trenda Kennedy of Springfield, Illinois, took the bullhorn on Baer’s steps.” He quoted Kennedy saying, “In America, every seven seconds one of our homes goes into foreclosure … My home is one of those!”

So somebody’s misfortune justifies urban terrorist tactics against a bank executive? Apparently that’s what Hayes believes. He might as well grab Al Sharpton’s bullhorn and start mindlessly chanting, “No justice! No peace!”

Hayes then praises the “Showdown in America,” an anti-capitalism campaign run by NPA, People Improving Communities through Organizing (PICO), and SEIU.” In his best MarxistSpeak, Hayes regurgitates the party line about America’s current economic problems: “The campaign aims to dismantle the entire Wall Street-Washington corporatist axis, which gave us the financial crisis, the bailouts and 7 million foreclosures since 2008, a million of which have ended in repossession.”

“It’s about damn time,” Hayes concludes, voicing his approval for the campaign.

Scaring the pants off suburbanites is absolutely necessary in order to generate the upheaval required to bring capitalism to its knees, argues Hayes.

Note that in his profoundly dishonest op-ed Hayes doesn’t assign any blame to government policy for America’s economic problems. There’s no discussion of the Community Reinvestment Act, home mortgage interest deduction, or the Fed’s crazy cheap money interest-rate policy.

To left-wingers like Hayes, the government can do no wrong.

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 previously at BigGovernment, 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.

NPA’s executive director is George Goehl who says he supports efforts to create “a more fair and just economy.” NPA takes credit for enacting the disastrous Community Reinvestment Act in the 1970s.

Marxist front group Americans for Financial Reform is also participating in the action. It is headed by executive director Heather Booth, an old hand at leftist astro-turfing operations. Booth is an Alinskyite who founded the Midwest Academy, a training institute for radical community organizers. “Alinsky is to community organizing as Freud is to psychoanalysis,” she has been quoted saying.

Booth has also been described as a “guiding force” for ACORN and was an avowed supporter of Bill Ayers’s Weather Underground terrorist group.

Other leftist groups participating are the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the AFL-CIO.

SEIU produced a tongue-in-cheek video in advance of the May 17 event. It’s called ”How to Stay Safe on K Street”:

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This article is reprinted from City Journal.

The camera focuses on an official of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), California’s largest public-employee union, sitting in a legislative chamber and speaking into a microphone. “We helped to get you into office, and we got a good memory,” she says matter-of-factly to the elected officials outside the shot. “Come November, if you don’t back our program, we’ll get you out of office.’

The video has become a sensation among California taxpayer groups for its vivid depiction of the audacious power that public-sector unions wield in their state. The unions’ political triumphs have molded a California in which government workers thrive at the expense of a struggling private sector. The state’s public school teachers are the highest-paid in the nation. Its prison guards can easily earn six-figure salaries. State workers routinely retire at 55 with pensions higher than their base pay for most of their working life. Meanwhile, what was once the most prosperous state now suffers from an unemployment rate far steeper than the nation’s and a flood of firms and jobs escaping high taxes and stifling regulations. This toxic combination—high public-sector employee costs and sagging economic fortunes—has produced recurring budget crises in Sacramento and in virtually every municipality in the state.

How public employees became members of the elite class in a declining California offers a cautionary tale to the rest of the country, where the same process is happening in slower motion. The story starts half a century ago, when California public workers won bargaining rights and quickly learned how to elect their own bosses—that is, sympathetic politicians who would grant them outsize pay and benefits in exchange for their support. Over time, the unions have turned the state’s politics completely in their favor. The result: unaffordable benefits for civil servants; fiscal chaos in Sacramento and in cities and towns across the state; and angry taxpayers finally confronting the unionized masters of California’s unsustainable government.

California’s government workers took longer than many of their counterparts to win the right to bargain collectively. New York City mayor Robert Wagner started a national movement back in the late 1950s when he granted negotiating rights to government unions, hoping to enlist them as allies against the city’s Tammany Hall machine. The movement intensified in the early sixties, after President John F. Kennedy conferred the right to bargain on federal workers. In California, a more politically conservative environment at the time, public employees remained without negotiating power through most of the sixties, though they could join labor associations. In 1968, however, the state legislature passed the Meyers-Milias-Brown Act, extending bargaining rights to local government workers. Teachers and other state employees won the same rights in the seventies.

These legislative victories happened at a time of surging prosperity. California’s aerospace industry, fueled by the Cold War, was booming; investments in water supply and infrastructure nourished the state’s agribusiness; cheaper air travel and a famously temperate climate burnished tourism. The twin lures of an expanding job market and rising incomes pushed the state’s population higher, from about 16 million in 1960 to 23 million in 1980 and nearly 30 million by 1990. This expanding population in turn led to rapid growth in government jobs—from a mere 874,000 in 1960 to 1.76 million by 1980 and nearly 2.1 million in 1990—and to exploding public-union membership. In the late 1970s, the California teachers’ union boasted about 170,000 members; that number jumped to about 225,000 in the early 1990s and stands at 340,000 today.

The swelling government payroll made many California taxpayers uneasy, eventually encouraging the 1978 passage of Proposition 13 (see page 30), the famous initiative that capped property-tax hikes and sought to slow the growth of local governments, which feed on property taxes. Government workers rightly saw Prop. 13 as a threat. “We’re not going to just lie back and take it,” a California labor leader told the Washington Post after the vote, adding that Prop. 13 had made the union “more militant.” The next several years proved him right. In 1980 alone, unionized employees of California local governments went on strike 40 times, even though doing so was illegal. And once the Supreme Court of California sanctioned state and local workers’ right to strike in 1985—something that their counterparts in most other states still lack—the unions quickly mastered confrontational techniques like the “rolling strike,” in which groups of workers walk off jobs at unannounced times, and the “blue flu,” in which public-safety workers call in sick en masse.

But in post–Proposition 13 California, strikes were far from the unions’ most fearsome weapons. Aware that Proposition 13 had shifted political action to the state capital, three major blocs—teachers’ unions, public-safety unions, and the Service Employees International Union, which now represents 350,000 assorted government workers—began amassing colossal power in Sacramento. Over the last 30 years, they have become elite political givers and the state’s most powerful lobbying factions, replacing traditional interest groups and changing the balance of power. Today, they vie for the title of mightiest political force in California.

Consider the California Teachers Association. Much of the CTA’s clout derives from the fact that, like all government unions, it can help elect the very politicians who negotiate and approve its members’ salaries and benefits. Soon after Proposition 13 became law, the union launched a coordinated statewide effort to support friendly candidates in school-board races, in which turnout is frequently low and special interests can have a disproportionate influence. In often bitter campaigns, union-backed candidates began sweeping out independent board members. By 1987, even conservative-leaning Orange County saw 83 percent of board seats up for grabs going to union-backed candidates. The resulting change in school-board composition made the boards close allies of the CTA.

But with union dues somewhere north of $1,000 per member and 340,000 members, the CTA can afford to be a player not just in local elections but in Sacramento, too (and in Washington, for that matter, where it’s the National Education Association’s most powerful affiliate). The CTA entered the big time in 1988, when it almost single-handedly led a statewide push to pass Proposition 98, an initiative—opposed by taxpayer groups and Governor George Deukmejian—that required 40 percent of the state’s budget to fund local education. To drum up sympathy, the CTA ran controversial ads featuring students; in one, a first-grader stares somberly into the camera and says, “Pay attention—today’s lesson is about the school funding initiative.” Victory brought local schools some $450 million a year in new funding, much of it discretionary. Unsurprisingly, the union-backed school boards often used the extra cash to fatten teachers’ salaries—one reason that California’s teachers are the country’s highest-paid, even though the state’s total spending per student is only slightly higher than the national average. “The problem is that there is no organized constituency for parents and students in California,” says Lanny Ebenstein, a former member of the Santa Barbara Board of Education and an economics professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “No one says to a board of education, ‘We want more of that money to go for classrooms, for equipment.’ ”

With its growing financial strength, the CTA gained the ability to shape public opinion. In 1996, for instance, the union—casting covetous eyes on surplus tax revenues from the state’s economic boom—spent $1 million on an ad campaign advocating smaller classes. Californians began seeing the state’s classrooms as overcrowded, according to polls. So Governor Pete Wilson earmarked some three-quarters of a billion dollars annually to cut class sizes in kindergarten through third grade. The move produced no discernible improvements in student performance, but it did require a hiring spree that inflated CTA rolls and produced a teacher shortage. (The union drew the line, however, when it faced the threat of increased accountability. Two years later, when Wilson offered funds to reduce class sizes even more but attached the money to new oversight mechanisms, the CTA spent $6 million to defeat the measure, living up to Wilson’s assessment of it as a “relentless political machine.”)

During this contentious period, the CTA and its local affiliates learned to play hardball, frequently shutting down classes with strikes. The state estimated that in 1989 alone, these strikes cost California students collectively some 7.2 million classroom days. Los Angeles teachers provoked outrage that year by reportedly urging their students to support them by skipping school. After journalist Debra Saunders noted in LA’s Daily News that the striking teachers were already well paid, the union published her home phone number in its newsletter and urged members to call her.

Four years later, the CTA reached new heights of thuggishness after a business-backed group began a petition to place a school-choice initiative on the state ballot. In a union-backed effort, teachers shadowed signature gatherers in shopping malls and aggressively dissuaded people from signing up. The tactic led to more than 40 confrontations and protests of harassment by signature gatherers. “They get in between the signer and the petition,” the head of the initiative said. “They scream at people. They threaten people.” CTA’s top official later justified the bullying: some ideas “are so evil that they should never even be presented to the voters,” he said.

The rise of the white-collar CTA provides a good example of a fundamental political shift that took place everywhere in the labor movement. In the aftermath of World War II, at the height of its influence, organized labor was dominated by private workers; as a result, union members were often culturally conservative and economically pro-growth. But as government workers have come to dominate the movement, it has moved left. By the mid-nineties, the CTA was supporting causes well beyond its purview as a collective bargaining agent for teachers. In 1994, for instance, it opposed an initiative that prohibited illegal immigrants from using state government programs and another that banned the state from recognizing gay marriages performed elsewhere. Some union members began to complain that their dues were helping to advance a political agenda that they disagreed with. “They take our money and spend it as they see fit,” says Larry Sand, founder of the California Teachers Empowerment Network, an organization of teachers and former teachers opposed to the CTA’s noneducational politicking.

Public-safety workers—from cops and sheriffs to prison guards and highway-patrol officers—are the second part of the public-union triumvirate ruling California. In a state that has embraced some of the toughest criminal laws in the country, police and prison guards’ unions own a precious currency: their political endorsements, which are highly sought after by candidates wanting to look tough on crime. But the qualification that the unions usually seek in candidates isn’t, in fact, toughness on crime; it’s willingness to back better pay and benefits for public-safety workers.

The pattern was set in 1972, when State Assemblyman E. Richard Barnes—an archconservative former Navy chaplain who had fought pension and fringe-benefit enhancements sought by government workers, including police officers and firefighters—ran for reelection. Barnes had one of the toughest records on crime of any state legislator. Yet cops and firefighters walked his district, telling voters that he was soft on criminals. He narrowly lost. As the Orange County Register observed years later, the election sent a message to all legislators that resonates even today: “Your career is at risk if you dare fiddle with police and fire” pay and benefits.

The state’s prison guards’ union has exploited a similar message. Back in 1980, when the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA) won the right to represent prison guards in contract negotiations, it was a small fraternal organization of about 1,600 members. But as California’s inmate population surged and the state went on a prison-building spree—constructing 22 new institutions over 25 years—union membership expanded to 17,000 in 1988, 25,000 by 1997, and 31,000 today. Union resources rose correspondingly, with a budget soaring to $25 million or so, supporting a staff 70 deep, including 20 lawyers.

Deploying those resources, the union started to go after politicians who didn’t support higher salaries and benefits for its members and an ever-expanding prison system. In 2004, for example, the CCPOA spent $200,000—a whopping amount for a state assembly race—to unseat Republican Phil Wyman of Tehachapi. His sin: advocating the privatization of some state prisons in order to save money. “The amount of money that unions are pouring into local races is staggering,” says Joe Armendariz, executive director of the Santa Barbara County Taxpayers Association. A recent mayoral and city council election in Santa Barbara, with a population of just 90,000, cost more than $1 million, he observes.

The symbiotic relationship between the CCPOA and former governor Gray Davis provides a remarkable example of the union’s power. In 1998, when Davis first ran for governor, the union threw him its endorsement. Along with those much-needed law-and-order credentials, it also gave Davis $1.5 million in campaign contributions and another $1 million in independent ads supporting him. Four years later, as Davis geared up for reelection, he awarded the CCPOA a stunning 34 percent pay hike over five years, increasing the average base salary of a California prison guard from about $50,000 a year to $65,000—and this at a time when the unemployment rate in the state had been rising for nearly a year and a half and government revenues had been falling. The deal cost the state budget an additional $2 billion over the life of the contract. A union official described it admiringly as “the best labor contract in the history of California.” Eight weeks after the offer, the union donated $1 million to Davis’s reelection campaign.

Even cops who run for office have felt the wrath of public-safety unions. Allan Mansoor served 16 years as a deputy sheriff in Orange County but angered police unions by publicly backing an initiative that would have required them to gain their members’ permission to spend dues on political activities. When the conservative Mansoor ran successfully for city council several years back in Costa Mesa, local cops and firefighters poured resources into helping his more liberal opponents. “I didn’t like seeing my dues go to candidates like Davis, so I supported efforts to curb that,” Mansoor says. “Union leaders didn’t like it, so they endorsed my opponents by claiming they were tougher on crime than I was.”

Even more troubling are the activities of the California Organization of Police and Sheriffs (COPS), a lobbying and advocacy group that has raised tens of millions of dollars from controversial soliciting campaigns. In one, COPS fund-raisers reportedly called residents of heavily immigrant neighborhoods and threatened to cut off their 911 services unless they donated. In another, a COPS fund-raiser reportedly offered to shave points off Californians’ driving records in exchange for donations. The group has dunned politicians, too. In 1998, it began publishing a voter guide in which candidates paid to be included. Pols considered the money well spent because of the importance of a COPS endorsement—or at least the appearance of one. “We all use them [COPS] for cover, especially in years when law enforcement is a big issue in elections,” one state senator, Santa Clara’s John Vasconcellos, admitted to the Orange County Register. “It stopped the right wing from calling me soft on crime.”

The results of union pressure are clear. In most states, cops and other safety officers can typically retire at 50 with a pension of about half their final working salary; in California, they often receive 90 percent of their pay if they retire at the same age. The state’s munificent disability system lets public-safety workers retire with rich pay for a range of ailments that have nothing to do with their jobs, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. California’s prison guards are the nation’s highest-paid, a big reason that spending on the state’s prison system has blasted from less than 4.3 percent of the budget in 1986 to more than 11 percent today.

California’s third big public-union player is the state wing of the SEIU, the nation’s fastest-growing union, whose chief, Andy Stern, earned notoriety by visiting the White House 22 times during the first six months of the Obama administration. Founded in 1921 as a janitors’ union, the SEIU slowly transformed itself into a labor group representing government and health-care workers—especially health-care workers paid by government medical programs like Medicaid. In 1984, the California State Employees Association, which represented many state workers, decided to affiliate with the SEIU. Today, the SEIU represents 700,000 California workers—more than a third of its nationwide membership. Of those, 350,000 are government employees: noninstructional workers in schools across the state; all non-public-safety workers in California’s burgeoning prisons; 2,000 doctors, mostly residents and interns, at state-run hospitals; and many others at the local, county, and state levels.

The SEIU’s rise in California illustrates again how modern labor’s biggest victories take place in back rooms, not on picket lines. In the late 1980s, the SEIU began eyeing a big jackpot: tens of thousands of home health-care workers being paid by California’s county-run Medicaid programs. The SEIU initiated a long legal effort to have those workers, who were independent contractors, declared government employees. When the courts finally agreed, the union went about organizing them—an easy task because governments rarely contest organizing campaigns, not wanting to seem anti-worker. The SEIU’s biggest victory was winning representation for 74,000 home health-care workers in Los Angeles County, the largest single organizing drive since the United Auto Workers unionized General Motors in 1937. Taxpayers paid a steep price: home health-care costs became the fastest-growing part of the Los Angeles County budget after the SEIU bargained for higher wages and benefits for these new recruits. The SEIU also organized home health-care workers in several other counties, reaching a whopping statewide total of 130,000 new members.

The SEIU’s California numbers have given it extraordinary resources to pour into political campaigns. The union’s major locals contributed a hefty $20 million in 2005 to defeat a series of initiatives to cap government growth and rein in union power. The SEIU has also spent millions over the years on initiatives to increase taxes, sometimes failing but on other occasions succeeding, as with a 2004 measure to impose a millionaires’ tax to finance more mental-health spending. With an overflowing war chest and hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers, the SEIU has been instrumental in getting local governments to pass living-wage laws in several California cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco. And the union has also used its muscle in campaigns largely out of the public eye, as in 2003, when it pressured the board of CalPERS, the giant California public-employee pension fund, to stop investing in companies that outsourced government jobs to private contractors.

Armed with knowledge about California’s three public-union heavyweights, one can start to understand how the state found itself in its nightmarish fiscal situation. The beginning of the end was the 1998 gubernatorial election, in which the unions bet their future—and millions of dollars in members’ dues—on Gray Davis. The candidate traveled to the SEIU’s headquarters to remind it of his support during earlier battles against GOP governors (“Nobody in this race has done anywhere near as much as I have for SEIU”); the union responded by pumping $600,000 into his campaign. Declaring himself the “education candidate” who would expand funding of public education, Davis received $1.2 million from the CTA. Added to this was Davis’s success in winning away from Republicans key public-safety endorsements—and millions in contributions—from the likes of the CCPOA.

Davis’s subsequent victory over Republican Dan Lungren afforded public-worker unions a unique opportunity to cash in the IOUs that they had accumulated, because Davis’s Democratic Party also controlled the state legislature. What followed was a series of breathtaking deals that left California state and municipal governments careening from one budget crisis to another for the next decade.

Perhaps the most costly was far-reaching 1999 legislation that wildly increased pension benefits for state employees. It included an unprecedented retroactive cost-of-living adjustment for the already retired and a phaseout of a cheaper pension plan that Governor Wilson had instituted in 1991. The deal also granted public-safety workers the right to retire at 50 with 90 percent of their salaries. To justify the incredible enhancements, Davis and the legislature turned to CalPERS, whose board was stocked with members who were either union reps or appointed by state officials who themselves were elected with union help. The CalPERS board, which had lobbied for the pension bill, issued a preposterous opinion that the state could provide the new benefits mostly out of the pension systems’ existing surplus and future stock-market gains. Most California municipalities soon followed the state enhancements for their own pension deals.

When the stock market slid in 2000, state and local governments got slammed with enormous bills for pension benefits. The state’s annual share, estimated by CalPERS back in 1999 to be only a few hundred million dollars, reached $3 billion by 2010. Counties and municipalities were no better off. Orange County’s retirement system saw its payouts to retirees jump to $410 million a year by 2009, from $140 million a decade ago. Many legislators who had voted for the pension legislation (including all but seven Republicans) later claimed that they’d had no idea that its fiscal impact would be so devastating. They had swallowed the rosy CalPERS projections even though they knew very well that the board was, as one county budget chief put it, “the fox in the henhouse.”

The second budget-busting deal of the Davis era was the work of the teachers’ union. In 2000, the CTA began lobbying to have a chunk of the state’s budget surplus devoted to education. In a massive rally in Sacramento, thousands of teachers gathered on the steps of the capitol, some chanting for TV cameras, “We want money! We want money!” Behind the scenes, Davis kept up running negotiations with the union over just how big the pot should be. “While you were on your way to Sacramento, I was driving there the evening of May 7, and the governor and I talked three times on my cell phone,” CTA president Wayne Johnson later boasted to members. “The first call was just general conversation. The second call, he had an offer of $1.2 billion. . . . On the third call, he upped the ante to $1.5 billion.” Finally, in meetings, both sides agreed on $1.84 billion. As Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters later observed, that deal didn’t merely help blow the state’s surplus; it also locked in higher baseline spending for education. The result: “When revenues returned to normal, the state faced a deficit that eventually not only cost Davis his governorship in 2003 but has plagued his successor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

Having wielded so much power effortlessly, the unions miscalculated the antitax, anti-Davis sentiment that erupted when, shortly after his autumn 2002 reelection, Davis announced that the state faced a massive deficit. The budget surprise spurred an enormous effort to recall Davis, which the unions worked to defeat, with the SEIU spending $2 million. At the same time, union leaders used their influence in the Democratic Party to try to save Davis, telling other Democrats that they would receive no union support if they abandoned the governor. “If you betray us, we won’t forget it,” the head of the 800,000-member Los Angeles County Federation of Labor proclaimed to Democrats. Only when it became apparent from polls that the recall would succeed did the unions shift their support to Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante, who finished a distant second to Schwarzenegger. Taxpayer groups were euphoric.

But as they and Schwarzenegger soon discovered, most of California’s government machinery remained union-controlled—especially the Democratic state legislature, which blocked long-term reform. Frustrated, Schwarzenegger backed a series of 2005 initiatives sponsored by taxpayer groups to curb the unions and restrain government growth, including one that made it harder for public-employee unions to use members’ dues for political purposes. The controversial proposals sparked the most expensive statewide election in American history. Advocacy groups and businesses spent a staggering $300 million (some of it, however, coming from drug companies trying to head off an unrelated initiative). The spending spree included $57 million from the CTA, which mortgaged its Sacramento headquarters for the cause. All of the initiatives went down to defeat.

California taxpayers nevertheless received a brief respite, thanks to the mid-decade housing boom that drove the economy and tax collections higher and momentarily eased the state’s budget crisis. Predictably, state politicians forgot California’s Davis-era deficit woes and gobbled up the surpluses, increasing spending by 32 percent, or $34 billion, in four years. Then the housing market crashed in 2007, prompting a cascade of budget crises in Sacramento and around the state. Only too late have Californians recognized the true magnitude of their fiscal problems, including a $21 billion deficit by mid-2009 that forced the state to issue IOUs when it temporarily ran out of cash. In the municipal bond market, fears are rising that the Golden State could actually default on its debt.

Municipalities around the state are also buckling under massive labor costs. One city, Vallejo, has already filed for bankruptcy to get out from under onerous employee salaries and pension obligations. (To stop other cities from going this route, unions are promoting a new law to make it harder for municipalities to declare bankruptcy.) Other local California governments, big and small, are nearing disaster. The city of Orange, with a budget of just $88 million in 2009, spent $13 million of it on pensions and expects that figure to rise to $23 million in just three years. Contra Costa’s pension costs rose from $70 million in 2000 to $200 million by the end of the decade, producing a budget crisis. Los Angeles, where payroll constitutes nearly half the city’s $7 billion budget, faces budget shortfalls of hundreds of millions of dollars next year, projected to grow to $1 billion annually in several years. In October 2007, even as it was clear that the area’s housing economy was crashing, city officials had handed out 23 percent raises over a five-year period to workers. (See the sidebars on pages 22 and 26.)

In the past, California could always rely on a rebounding economy to save it from its budgetary excesses. But these days, few view the state as the land of opportunity. Throughout the national recession that began in December 2008 and carried through 2009, California’s unemployment rate consistently ran several points higher than the national rate. Major California companies like Google and Intel have chosen to expand elsewhere, not in their home state. Put off by the high taxes and cumbersome regulatory regime that the public-sector cartel has led the way in foisting on the state, executives now view California as a noxious business environment. In a 2008 survey by a consulting group, Development Counsellors International, business executives rated California the state where they were least likely to locate new operations.

More and more California taxpayers are realizing how stacked the system is against them, and the first stirrings of revolt are breaking out. Voters defeated a series of ballot initiatives last May that would have allowed politicians to solve the state budget crisis temporarily through a series of questionable gimmicks, including one to let the state borrow against future lottery receipts and another to let it plug budget holes with money diverted from a mental-health services fund. In a clear message from voters, the only proposition to gain approval last May banned pay raises for legislators during periods of budget deficit.

With anger rising, taxpayer advocates now plan to revive older initiatives to cut the power of public-sector unions. Mark Bucher, head of the Citizens Power Campaign, is pushing for an initiative that’s similar to propositions that failed in 1998 and in 2005—but their prospects may be brighter today, he argues, because the woes of municipalities like Vallejo have made citizens more aware of union power and more supportive of reform. “The mood has clearly shifted in California,” Bucher says. “You can see that in the rise of local Tea Party antitax groups around the state. People are fed up.”

Another initiative that could mend California’s broken politics is a 2008 vote that took the power to delineate electoral districts away from the state legislature—which had used it to make it difficult to defeat incumbents—and gave it to a nonpartisan commission. If this commission succeeds in making legislative races more competitive and incumbents more responsive to voter sentiment, the legislature would almost certainly become less beholden to narrow union interests, and a whole series of reforms would be possible: a new, cheaper pension plan for state employees; fewer restrictions on charter schools, which often educate kids more effectively and less expensively than public schools do; and regulatory reforms that would reduce the estimated $493 billion cost that regulations impose on California businesses each year.

It will take an enormous effort to roll back decades of political and economic gains by government unions. But the status quo is unsustainable. And at long last, Californians are beginning to understand the connection between that status quo and the corruption at the heart of their politics.

Steven Malanga is the senior editor of City Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is the author of The New New Left. Research for his article was supported by the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation.

Under the best of circumstances it’s not easy to swallow the “guidance” from the leadership at the SEIU.  This is not the best of  circumstances.

Now the thugs, goons and sledgehammer swingers who provide the muscle for Service Employees International Union head Andy Stern have proven themselves even more tone deaf  than usual.

I was thinking earlier today about reports that your friendly neighborhood socialist SEIU prez earns a cool $300,000+ in annual compensation, the union EVP pocketing a quick $242,286, and  secretary-treasurer Anna Burger’s paltry salary of $252,724.  Not chump change by any stretch.  ’Repping  “the working men & women” of America is a pretty lucrative gig!

Nary a peep nor tweep about those numbers of course, but no strangers to irony those union folk.  They instead tweeted:

Tell the NY Realty Advisory Board to support fair pay & benefits for NYC’s apt. building service workers: http://seiu.me/32bjrab #unions

Turns out that the contract for 30,000 New Yorkers who work in the city’s apartment buildings is about to expire.  And the NYC building owners association has proposed horrid contract changes.  Horrid I say!  Draconian stuff like:

• making them pay $100 a month for health insurance
• reducing the number of paid sick days down to 5
• reducing overtime

I don’t know how the building workers union could survive such horribly egregious reductions.  I mean for gosh sakes, it’s not like the rest of America is struggling.  Insert tongue in cheek here.

On the other hand, since the SEIU is all about supporting fair pay, the building owners may well consider themselves lucky.  Just ask Andy Stern about his idea of  fair pay.

Everything you need to know about President Obama’s commitment to fiscal responsibility and cost containment can be summed up in two words: Andy Stern. The profligate, corruption-coddling head of the powerful Service Employees International Union was named to the White House debt commission last week. If Obama thinks Stern holds the cure for our government spending woes, you can be certain his latest health care prescription will be fiscal hemlock.

Obama extolled Stern and his other federal debt panel appointees as “distinguished individuals” who’ll bring a “sense of integrity” to the job. Tell that to rank-and-file SEIU members across the country who have watched their hard-earned dues go down the tubes under Stern’s thugocracy. While fat-cat union bosses toss hundreds of millions of dues into Democratic coffers, low-wage SEIU members’ pension funds are eroding and the organization’s debt is piling up. And federal prosecutors are reviewing requests that the union be investigated for potential illegal lobbying activities at the White House.

More damning: As head of the 2.2 million-member labor union, Stern directly installed a cadre of labor management stooges embroiled in financial scandals across the country.

SEIU crony Tyrone Freeman, like Obama, began his career as an urban community organizer. In 1994, Stern plucked Freeman from Georgia and set his loyalist up as head of Local 6434, the sprawling home-care workers’ chapter in southern California that represents an estimated 160,000 workers who make about $9 an hour caring for the elderly and disabled. Stern then named him a national vice president. It was part of Stern’s grander plan to consolidate power by merging locals into statewide chapters.

An extensive investigation by the Los Angeles Times exposed how Stern’s protege siphoned off hundreds of thousands of dollars in dues money for his personal enrichment and pleasure. Moreover, the paper alleged, Stern helped cover up the scandal. Freeman lived large — piping $600,000 in union contracts to his wife’s video production and entertainment ventures. The local also paid his mother-in-law $8,000 a month to babysit his daughter and other union employees’ children; footed a $13,000 bill for membership at a Beverly Hills cigar club; and forked over $8,000 in union dues to cover expenses for Freeman’s Hawaiian wedding.

Stern’s handpicked flunky also created a nonprofit training shop called the “Homecare Workers Training Center” — ostensibly to provide educational opportunities for nurses.

In practice, the nonprofit served as a conduit to subsidize a childcare business operated by Freeman’s mother-in-law. Freeman’s local also paid another $106,000 to Hollywood talent agency William Morris for “advice and counsel.”

SEIU’s top officials were warned of Freeman’s plundering six years before the paper blew the whistle. After dragging its feet and being forced to act to quell public embarrassment over the Times investigations, SEIU finally threw Freeman under the bus. He rebounded with a new career as a Los Angeles sports agent.

Rickman Jackson, another Stern administration protege and former chief of staff to Freeman, headed Michigan’s largest SEIU chapter before being “reassigned” for three years to a staff organizing job after the revelation of financial shenanigans tied back to Local 6434. While collecting a six-figure annual salary in Michigan, Jackson was drawing a second salary in California and accepted $33,500 in housing payments on a residence listed as the business address of Freeman’s bogus nonprofit housing corporation.

Another Stern administration protege, Annelle Grajeda, rose to power after Stern installed her as president of the 80,000-member Local 721 in Los Angeles. She ascended to positions on the union’s state council and international executive board. Like Freeman and Jackson, Grajeda had been voted onto Stern’s official administration at the SEIU convention in 2008.

Whistleblowers detailed how Grajeda’s ex-boyfriend, SEIU official Alejandro Stephens, collected multiple salaries and consultant fees from the union while also pocketing a salary as a Los Angeles County health services employee. Grajeda arranged for her ex-lover to get an eight-month leave of absence from the job. He was fired after he refused to return to work.

Grajeda quit her California posts after catching public flak and found a new job — as special assistant to SEIU secretary-treasurer (and Obama stimulus panel appointee) Anna Burger in Washington, D.C. Grajeda now oversees efforts to “partner with the Obama administration” to secure more public funds for SEIU projects involving infrastructure and core public services, including care for the elderly, health care, education and social services.

More recently, San Diego SEIU Local 221 came under fire last month for squandering dues on a cozy $107,000 severance package and consultancy deal for Stern’s former appointee Sharon Frances-Moore.

Freeman, Jackson, Grajeda and Moore were all groomed by Stern and personally appointed by him to the posts they exploited. Like Obama, Stern has managed to pass the buck while pretending it stopped at his desk. These fiscal responsibility fraudsters now back a massive expansion of government’s role in health care that they promise will rein in costs and root out fraud. Insert laugh track here.

So, Michelle Obama seems to be as delusional as her husband. Yesterday, she said that childhood obesity (a Crisis!) is a threat to national security. No, really. She actually said that:

(CNSNews.com) – At a ceremony at the White House on Tuesday, First Lady Michelle Obama announced the launch of the ‘Let’s Move’ campaign to end childhood obesity in the United States, an epidemic she said is costly and a threat to national security.

“A recent study put the health care cost of obesity-related diseases at $147 billion a year,” Mrs. Obama said. “This epidemic also impacts the nation’s security, as obesity is now one of the most common disqualifiers for military service.”

Fat kids are a threat to national security? I don’t think she’s really being fair; her husband is not fat. I suppose now instead of man-made disasters, terrorism will be called donut-made disasters? I just gave my kid fried chicken nuggets for lunch. Shall I now refer to her as NSR (national security risk)? Shall I make her new punishment “You go to bed with evil, security risky dessert!!”

Besides the stupidity of the “national security” premise, the entire initiative is ridiculous and a waste of OUR money. She goes on to say that we dum-dum parents can’t figure out what food is healthy or not, without the aid of Big Nanny Government. Hey, Michelle? Your husband is Big Nanny Government and he still doesn’t realize that smoking is bad for you (which, by the way, is the one thing that I like about him.)

“So many parents desperately want to do the right thing, but they feel like the deck is stacked against them,” Obama said. “They know their kids’ health is their responsibility but they feel like it’s out of their control.”

“They are bombarded by contradictory information at every turn, and they don’t know who to believe,” she said

Um, not really. It’s kind of simple. I don’t know one person who believes that fatty food will make them lose weight and I live in the South where, according to all the Smarter Than Us people, we barely know how to read. Even we understand that calories = fat and that exercise will burn calories. But, you see, we have free will as human beings, even if you consider us sub-human.

Perhaps if your husband does something about JOBS, people will have more money to stock up on better food. If they so choose. And maybe if our schools allow kids to have recess and play dodge ball and, you know, be kids, they would get a bit more exercise. The rest of it is up to parents. Contrary to your belief, parents are responsible for their own children. Stop perpetuating the entitlement mentality; that is what is making our jobs harder, as parents. We don’t need your help, we need you to get out of the way.

And so we come to the real reason behind this initiative:

Obama called for overhauling many federal laws and guidelines, including adding $10 billion over the next decade to “update” the Childhood Nutrition Act, which feeds 31 million children at school and would add funding to feed more children.

Aha! More money funneled into a government program. As Michelle Malkin reports:

What’s in it for Big Labor? SEIU Executive Vice President Mitch Ackerman explains: “A more robust expansion of school lunch, breakfast, summer feeding, child care and WIC [the federal Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program] is critical to reducing hunger, ending childhood obesity, and providing fair wages and healthcare for front line food service workers (emphasis added).” There are 400,000 workers who prepare and serve lunch to American schoolchildren. SEIU represents tens of thousands of those workers and is trying to unionize many more. “More robust expansion” of the federal school lunch law means a mandate for higher wages, increased benefits, and government-guaranteed health insurance coverage (the more luxurious the better now that SEIU has negotiated its Cadillac Tax exemption from the Democrats’ health care takeover bill).

For the Children? Nope, of course not. It never is about the children, really, for Liberals. It’s for the unions and SEIU. It’s ironic that SEIU is involved; how can they help the Obesity Crisis ™ when they are so gluttonous that they eat human fingers?

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Follow Lori  on Twitter and read more of her work at Snark and Boobs, iOwntheWorld and Right Wing News.

Behind every seemingly good deed in the Obama White House, there’s a deep-pocketed, left-wing special interest. Take first lady Michelle Obama’s crusade against childhood obesity. Who really benefits from the ostensible push for improved nutrition in the schools? Think purple — as in the purple-shirted army of the Service Employees International Union. Big Labor bigwigs don’t care about slimming your kids’ waistlines. They care about beefing up their membership rolls and fattening their coffers.

Mrs. Obama earned a State of the Union address shout-out from her hubby for taking on the weighty public policy issue of students’ physical fitness. The East Wing is now in full campaign mode — leaning on the nation’s mayors, traveling with the surgeon general and meeting with Congress and cabinet members to reauthorize the Lyndon Johnson-era Child Nutrition Act, which provides government-subsidized meals to more than 30 million children. It’s part of the Obama administration’s self-proclaimed “cradle-to-career” agenda for America’s youth.

For decades, school administrators have criticized this Great Society relic for outgrowing its initial conception. The program was originally created to use up post-World War II food surpluses. In the late 1970s, New York principal Lewis Lyman skewered it as a federal “boondoggle” in a seminal essay for the education journal Phi Delta Kappan. But Democrats demagogued the GOP’s responsible attempts at financial reform during the Clinton years as “starving the children.” While spending on youth nutrition and wellness have ballooned, so have the kids. Nearly one-third of U.S. children are now overweight or obese. The feds spend $15 billion a year on nutrition in schools; the White House wants at least a $1 billion increase this coming fiscal year.

The well-intended program to feed poor kids has morphed into an untouchable universal entitlement with a powerful school-lunch lobbying coalition of Department of Agriculture bureaucrats, food-service industry executives and union bosses. Enter the SEIU. Headed by the White House’s most frequent visitor, Andy Stern, the powerful labor organization representing government and private service employees has an insatiable appetite for power and growth. Working alongside the first lady, the SEIU unveiled a major ad campaign this week demanding reauthorizing and funding increases in the Child Nutrition Act.

What’s in it for Big Labor? SEIU Executive Vice President Mitch Ackerman explains: “A more robust expansion of school lunch, breakfast, summer feeding, child care and WIC (the federal Women, Infants and Children nutrition program) is critical to reducing hunger, ending childhood obesity and providing fair wages and healthcare for front line food service workers (emphasis added).”

There are 400,000 workers who prepare and serve lunch to American schoolchildren.

SEIU represents tens of thousands of those workers and is trying to unionize many more. “More robust expansion” of the federal school-lunch law means a mandate for higher wages, increased benefits and government-guaranteed health insurance coverage (the more luxurious the better now that SEIU has negotiated its Cadillac Tax exemption from the Democrats’ health care takeover bill).

The SEIU’s front group, “Campaign for Quality Services,” is clamoring for “the right to sick days and training” for school food-services workers. Never ones to let a crisis go unexploited, SEIU sent its members to lobby in front of Chicago public schools last year and scare parents into supporting their labor agenda. They accused the school system of “putting our kids at risk” during flu season by resisting the SEIU’s sick day coverage demands. “Without sick days, I can’t take a day off, so I have to bring germs to school,” an SEIU janitor lamented.

Along the same lines, they are casting food-services workers as indispensable saviors. The union has rallied behind P.R. efforts casting them as superheroes “serving justice, and serving lunch.” Opposing the union means opposing children’s health. SEIU propaganda features New Jersey school cafeteria workers like Leslie Williams of Orange, N.J., lamenting: “I love my work, but it’s getting harder to prepare nutritious meals on the low budget we’re working with. … It breaks my heart to see a child who’s hungry. As I see it, part of my job is to make sure the kids are well-fed.”

Actually, that’s the primary job of parents. Mom? Dad? Remember them? But the more responsibility we demand of parents, the less power and influence SEIU bosses are able to grab. Unionized school dietician and nutrition jobs are booming. And in addition to school breakfast and lunch, the SEIU is now pushing subsidized dinner plans and summer food service to create a “stronger nutrition safety net.” Translation: Perpetual employment for big government and its public employee union au pairs.

Cede the children, feed the state.

With the SOTU already well-covered here at NewsReal, we will take a narrower focus. George Will’s column in today’s Washington Post must have been written before the President’s speech, but it delivers a stinging rebuke to one of Obama’s talking points, as well as the leftist media’s phony outrage over the recent Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court decision.

From the SOTU, Obama had this to say:

“Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign corporations—to spend without limit in our elections. Well, I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.”

In addition to the obvious rejoinder–if Obama was so concerned about foreign influences on the elections, maybe he should have been a little more diligent checking where his own donations came from–the President is incorrect on the substance of the decision. Will sets us straight:

” Bringing law into conformity with this 1976 precedent, the court has struck down only federal and state laws that forbid independent expenditures (those not made directly to, or coordinated with, candidates’ campaigns) by corporations and labor unions. Under the censorship regime the court has overturned, corporations were even forbidden to send political communications to all of their employees.”

This decision still doesn’t allow Wal-Mart or SEIU to write checks directly to candidates, but it does allow them to spend their own money to say what they really feel about who should be elected and the direction in which they want the country taken. We’re hard-pressed to think of something more American than simple honesty.

Will also points out the media’s theatrical hysterics over Citizens United is a fine example of prize-winning hypocrisy:

“The New York Times calls the court’s decision, which enables political advocacy by (other) corporations, a “blow to democracy.” The Times, a corporate entity, can engage in political advocacy because Congress has granted “media corporations” an exemption from limits.”

Let’s be clear:the idea that the government itself should be picking and choosing which corporations–or entities in general–are allowed to participate in the political arena, and what they are allowed to say, is folly and censorship at its finest. The very concept seems, to us, anti-American-ideal.

Will’s thoughts are similar to ours–the whole idea of campaign finance reform centers around the idea that Ameicans are too stupid to make their own decisions, and that the government must protect them from their own easily-led nature. We don’t buy that for an instant. People are not wards of the state, and shouldn’t be treated as such. People should be free to make their own decisions based on all available information–they should even be free to make decisions that we think are the wrong ones. That’s what’s great about America: we’re all allowed to raise our voices, and we’re all allowed to make our own decisions. Not on the whim of the government, but as we choose to believe.

Related posts:

1. Victory for the First Amendment
2. Supreme Court May Strike Down Campaign Finance Regulation Tomorrow
3. HuffPo: Alito Was Rude (But Right)

SEIU members aren’t Nazis but they sure seem to enjoy beating up their opponents.

The left has long favored terror and violence as a means of affecting change in society.

“We need to make ample use of terror,” said the infamous Felix Dzerzhinsky, V.I. Lenin’s internal security chief.

Marxist and terrorist sympathizer Naomi Klein called for riots at the GOP convention in New York City in 2004. To Klein, violence aimed at Republicans is noble.

So when leftists in polite society condemn left-wing terrorism, it’s usually halfhearted because they believe that if the goals are noble, anything goes. Terrorists, despite their violent tactics, are simply misunderstood, they feel.

On the left there is a presumption of good intentions by fellow-traveling terrorists. As left-wing talk radio host Thom Hartmann told me: “My left-wing crazies are better than your right-wing crazies.”

Hartmann explained

Your right-wing crazies are incited to violence based on fear and hate of people because of whom they are, because they’re gay, because they’re Catholic, because they’re Jewish, because they’re black, because they’re Hispanic. And our left-wing crazies are incited to violence because they’re trying to create a better world. They’re trying to save the environment in the case of the eco-terrorists. They’re trying to end the Vietnam War in the case of the Weather Underground. They’re trying to bring about civil rights in the case of the Symbionese Liberation Army and some of the other black terrorist groups that were operating in the 1970s. [emphasis added]

Maybe this is why examples of left-wing thuggery have gone ignored by the left.

Two recent examples of left-wing domestic terrorism caught on videotape come to mind: the violent attack by SEIU goons on Kenneth Gladney and the New Black Panther Party incident in Philadelphia.

Kenneth Gladney was beaten up by purple shirt-wearing thugs outside a Missouri healthcare townhall meeting last year for the crime of daring to sell “Don’t Tread On Me” flags. The attack “met all the classic definitions of a hate crime. Time was, the beating of a black man outside a protest rally, and the arrest and prosecution of the perpetrators, would be headline news,” editorialized Investor’s Business Daily.

An eyewitness to the attack said the perpetrators were “union thugs” whose shirts read “Organizing for America” on the back and “SEIU” on the front.

Then there was the vote suppression and voter intimidation committed by members of the New Black Panther Party. Eric Holder’s Justice Department dropped the civil rights lawsuit against the individuals involved even though there was overwhelming evidence.

Members of the radical group dressed in paramilitary uniforms and one waved a nightstick outside a Philadelphia polling station. “Poll watchers also reported that they were hurling racial epithets at elderly voters, some of whom were quite afraid,” according to reports.

Related posts:

1. Media Matters: Black Man Beat Himself up or Something
2. Don't tread on Ken: charges finally laid in Gladney beating by union thugs
3. Would Edmund Burke Leap to the Conclusion of "Southern Populist Terrorism"?