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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, by Matthew Vadum (WND Books):

Community organizing guru Saul Alinsky’s lust for violence was not lost on ACORN founder Wade Rathke (pictured above).

Rathke is usually quite careful about what he says in public. He soft-pedals his radicalism with positive-sounding phrases such as “citizen wealth” and “participatory democracy,” but from time to time even a master manipulator can slip up. His essay “Tactical Tension” is a case in point. It dates back to mid-2001 when the Left was in a stupor.

Liberal and radical activists were angry and demoralized because their would-be savior, Democratic candidate Al Gore, had just barely lost the presidency to George W. Bush. Although there has never been any credible evidence that Republicans stole the election, it became an article of faith on the Left that the GOP had deprived the American people of their rightful president. Many on the Left had high hopes for Gore after Bill Clinton tacked toward the political center and now those hopes were dashed.

To this perceived affront to democracy, Wade Rathke offered his comrades a declaration of war. His militant rant is very revealing.

Rathke argues that the Left is losing and needs to get more aggressive.

“We need an edge, some harder steel on the rim,” he writes. “If some day we want to make more just laws, then today we may have to just learn to break more laws.” In a “wish list,” he includes “[t]actics that include civil disobedience and political defiance” and “[t]actics that include extra-legal activity.”

He praises the rioters in Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting as “progressive forces.” Their civil disturbances were “a colorful, exciting, smoky, hazy amalgamation of helmeted police, broken glass, and righteous rage.” He continues admiringly, “Dispersed affinity groups operating on ‘street’ consensus [were] making a range of tactical decisions and holding ground in a way that made the momentum of the actions impossible to immobilize in spite of rain, gas, and cops.”

Rathke then attempts a delicate rhetorical balancing act, denouncing violent tactics in general while at the same time advocating specific examples of it: “We do not embrace violence, quite the contrary, but we need to create chemistry containing the elements of more explosive combinations in order to create more force and power through the equations of action and reaction that we push to the target.”

Despite this perfunctory condemnation of violence that fosters an illusion of respectability, the rest of the essay is filled with explicit endorsements of violent and illegal tactics. He praises the violent Black Panther Party of the 1960s and longs for some computer hackers to come to the aid of the labor movement.

Crazy, computer viruses are started by young kids around the world or hackers bored out of their skulls that live right down the street. As union organizers we are still doing 8 point difficulty dumpster dives for alpha lists of employees, when theoretically some good geeks could tap in, load up, and download the whole thing and throw it over our transom window. What a waste of talent when such a huge contribution could be made to the labor movement.

“Simply put, why isn’t there more ‘monkey wrenching’ in our world? Where is our Earth First!” he writes. Monkey-wrenching is a form of eco-terrorism or ecotage (eco-sabotage) that consists of harming the economic interests of those who are perceived threats to the environment. It might be arson, destruction of crops or sport utility vehicle dealerships, bombing, or tree-spiking, in which an activist drives metal rods into trees in order to prevent them from being cut down for commercial use. Tree-spiking has led to the injury and death of lumberjacks.

It further enrages Rathke that some of ACORN’s targets have not only defended themselves but have dared to fight back. ACORN’s founding Caudillo-in-Chief, whose stock-in-trade is thuggery, denounces these acts of self-defense as “intimidation.” Some targets filed lawsuits against ACORN “designed to sap resources and chill membership organized campaigns,” he huffs.

The nerve of those people! Hmpf.

Follow me on Twitter and check out my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. Copyright © 2011 by Matthew Vadum. View the Subversion Inc. page at Facebook.

From Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, by Matthew Vadum (WND Books):

For ACORN, anything goes, from rude protests to crude intimidation and violence. The bigger, the louder, the more obnoxious, the more destructive, the better. ACORN founder Wade Rathke summed up ACORN’s approach to doing business in a single sentence: “One can almost taste the adrenaline when people take a crowbar to a door and pop it open to begin squatting.” ACORN leadership doesn’t care if people get hurt or property is damaged: as long as the action advances the cause, it’s fair game.

“ACORN protests have turned violent, at times as soon as the rallies began,” writes Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute. “Some protests disrupted Federal Reserve hearings and busted into closed city council meetings.” In Stern’s opinion ACORN embraces “undisguised authoritarian socialism” when it demands that large companies that desire to leave the community be coerced into getting “an exit visa from the community board signifying that the company has adequately compensated all its employees and the community at large for losses due to relocation.”

ACORN’s legacy of destruction and lawlessness traces directly back to the fiendishly brilliant Saul Alinsky. Born in 1909, the group’s spiritual sherpa into the abyss of planned anarchy was always fascinated by violence. His defenders present Alinsky as an advocate of civil disobedience who rejected violence as a political tool. This is rubbish. Alinsky adored violence.

By the time he died, Alinsky had created an astounding 44 community organizations that aspire to pulverize the American system. ACORN founder Rathke worked with Alinsky, who trained activists from the Massachusetts chapter of ACORN’s parent organization NWRO and other groups before he died in 1972. Alinsky “had done sessions with my staff at Massachusetts Welfare Rights in early 1970 and various other things,” Rathke blogged.

According to one of Alinsky’s senior organizers at the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), Nicholas von Hoffman, Alinsky played no direct role in the creation of ACORN. But von Hoffmann believes the master, had he lived to see it develop, would have approved of ACORN’s approach to agitation.

The group’s “cheekiness, truculence and imaginative tactical tropes have an Alinskyan touch,” according to von Hoffman, a journalist who wrote a particularly nasty biography of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s counsel Roy Cohn. Von Hoffman soft-pedals the damage that Alinsky-style organizing does to the body politic, claiming Alinsky was sounding “the trumpet blast for democracy.”

If democracy includes “conking” picket line crossers on the head—something he admits Alinsky favored— then he’s right. Alinsky shied away from praising violence in public because “[t]he subject was too touchy and to bring it up was to invite misquotation and distortion.”

But in private “he would say that violence has its uses.”

Follow me on Twitter and check out my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. Copyright © 2011 by Matthew Vadum. View the Subversion Inc. page at Facebook.

From Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, by Matthew Vadum (WND Books):

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is part political group, part crime syndicate, part terrorist organization. Much of the time it operates outside the legitimate political process, waging war against the framework of society. ACORN is in the business of subverting the American system, so what Americans saw on the undercover “pimp and pro” videos released in 2009 was just another day at the office at ACORN.

But the darkest side of ACORN has remained largely unexplored – until now.

ACORN, which until it filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy last year was America’s largest poor people’s group, was founded on political violence and intimidation.

ACORN grew out of another notorious group called the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). NWRO was founded in 1966—the same year Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven’s seminal article “The Weight of the Poor” was published in the far-left Nation magazine. The so-called Cloward-Piven Strategy called for activists to double America’s welfare rolls in order to destabilize the American system of government. Placing impossible demands on states and localities would force them to ask Congress for a guaranteed annual income scheme and thereby set in motion the transformation of America into a socialist state.

NWRO grew out of the organizing efforts of Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky and other veteran radical agitators. Cloward and Piven also helped bring NWRO into the world. They acknowledge they “were intimately involved in the affairs of NWRO: we participated in discussions of strategy, in fund-raising efforts, and in demonstrations.”

In the late 1960s Wade Rathke signed on as an organizer for NWRO’s chapter in Springfield, Mass. A few months after arriving in Springfield, Rathke had built up a local empire of activism. He constructed an influential welfare rights organization consisting of 20 neighborhood groups with a combined membership of more than 2,000. The Springfield chapter of NWRO secured millions of dollars from the local welfare agency and encouraged hundreds of non-members to seek welfare benefits.

NWRO was also doing its best to swamp welfare departments nationwide. Between December 1960 and February 1969 the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) welfare program had grown 107 percent but in the 15-month period from February 1969 through October 1970 the program grew a staggering 55 percent as an extra 1.5 million families joined the rolls.

Rathke was arrested after he led an invasion of the Springfield welfare office with 250 or more women and students armed with signs reading “More for the poor, less for the war.” The welfare director refused to give in to the crowd’s demands for winter clothing, benefits to which they were not entitled.

That provoked two days of unrest in which millions of dollars of property was destroyed. The Soviet government used Rathke’s riot as anti-American propaganda, publishing an article about it in Pravda. Rathke’s experiences “reinforced his belief that one important resource for poor people was their ability to disrupt.” He realized that despite the failure of the action to achieve its objective, his followers felt empowered by violence directed against the system.

This empowerment by rioting became a staple of ACORN’s playbook.

Over time Rathke came to agree with Alinsky that single-issue organizations were doomed to fail. He felt a multi-pronged approach was needed to radically transform the nation. Rathke moved to Little Rock, Ark., and got down to work trying to turn the Natural State upside-down. ACORN was born with the irretrievably corrupt Rathke in place as its chief organizer, a position he was to hold for just shy of four decades.

Follow me on Twitter and check out my new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. Copyright © 2011 by Matthew Vadum. View the Subversion Inc. page at Facebook.

President Obama has been helping his former employer ACORN — in India, of all places.

As I wrote at The Daily Caller, President Obama’s ambassador to India, Timothy J. Roemer, has lent his name and the prestige of the American government to ACORN India’s efforts to agitate among rag-pickers in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay). Roemer used to be a Democratic congressman from Indiana.

The former congressman turned ACORN-propagandist met with rag pickers in Dharavi, a Mumbai slum, to give a publicity boost to ACORN India’s local campaigns. The local U.S. consulate in also co-sponsored an event with the Indian branch of the organization for community organizers.

According to ACORN India’s website the group was formed in order to assist in defending the “socialist legacy” of Jawaharlal Nehru, a leftist who served as Indian prime minister of India from 1947 to 1964. That “legacy” is “now in danger from the onslaught of the march of global corporatism,” the website says.

Acting like a Latin American caudillo President Obama continues to thumb his nose at Congress, daring Republican members of the House of Representatives to begin impeachment proceedings against him.

Obama’s latest outrage comes in the form of a recess appointment of extremist Craig Becker, who used to represent ACORN and SEIU (Service Employees International Union), to the National Labor Relations Board. Becker was rejected by the Senate when his nomination came up for a vote last month.

Becker is considered radical in part because he believes that ”employers should have no role in the unionization process,” according to Brian Johnson, executive director of the Alliance for Worker Freedom. Becker believes that all Americans should be forced to join unions whether they want to or not. The only choice Americans should have, he is on record saying, is between Union A and Union B.

Although card check is somewhere between dead and on emergency life support in Congress organized labor is hoping Becker will be able to abolish democracy in the unionization process by administrative fiat.

Becker is the fellow who lied to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) at a confirmation hearing regarding the work he did for ACORN.

Becker also believes that employers should not be punished for hiring illegal aliens as employees. Here is an outtake from a radio interview in which he made his case:

In a blog post last April, ACORN founder Wade Rathke couldn’t help bragging about Becker’s NLRB nomination, calling it “a big win no matter how you shake and bake it.”

ACORN boss and embezzlement coverup co-conspirator Bertha Lewis spins a yarn about ACORN at Washington, D.C.'s National Press Club yesterday.

The current chief organizer of ACORN, who was up to her eyeballs in the $1 million embezzlement scandal at the embattled radical leftist group, lied and lied and lied some more in an appearance at the National Press Club yesterday.

The contemptible Bertha Lewis, who now prefers to call herself “CEO” of ACORN, gave a “grand performance” at the press club, Glenn Beck said on his TV show Tuesday. Beck’s right. Maybe she should get nominated for an Oscar.

A small sample of the untruths that issued from her mouth:

CLAIM: After news of the embezzlement broke, ACORN “immediately hired outside professionals, no organizers. We may be brilliant organizers, but we needed real financial professionals, real legal professionals, to come in.”

FACT: If ACORN actually hired such people, it has kept evidence of those hirings under wraps. I don’t believe her.

CLAIM: Lewis says ACORN “began the decoupling of over a hundred corporations and organizations under my watch. We took apart that network with transparency and stability.”

FACT: I am not aware of any evidence supporting Lewis’s claim. Prove it, ACORN. Talk is cheap.

CLAIM: “And for nearly 40 years, ACORN has had the privilege to stand with our 500,000 member families fighting for those who typically don’t have a voice.”

FACT: ACORN’s own website says it has “over 400,000 member families,” whatever that means. Yes, 500,000 is more than 400,000, but you can’t just round up from an indefinite figure like “over 400,000.”

Those are just a few of Lewis’ lies from yesterday.

Nor did Lewis say much about her own role in covering up the embezzlement perpetrated by founder Wade Rathke’s brother. After news of the theft broke, Lewis drove out honest ACORN national board members who dared to ask questions.

Lewis, who has high-level contacts within the Marxist governments of Venezuela and Bolivia, also brought out the good ole stand-by smear yesterday, i.e. that everyone who criticizes ACORN is racist. Fortunately, now that the undercover sting videos last month showed Americans the true face of ACORN, the smear, which used to send Republicans and other ACORN critics running, isn’t working too well.

Of course the New York Times highlighted the only part of Lewis’s talk that appealed to it, namely her assertion that ACORN is somehow a victim of a new kind of McCarthyism.  Said Lewis (according to a press club transcript):

The RNC, every single day, because we’ve been inflated as the bogeyman, raises almost $2 million dollars a day every day. And this form of modern day ACORN McCarthyism has got to stop. Last week, members of Congress were asked, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of ACORN?” Everybody should take pause at that. Everybody should say, “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. This is not how we have discourse. This is not how we have disagreement in this country, by demonizing someone without due process.” This whole voting to de-fund ACORN, it’s all sensational, but it’s unconstitutional. So all we’re saying is, you know, hold us to a standard of the law. Then hold the folks that made those films to the same standard of the law.

Wade Rathke

Claim: ACORN theft was five times previously thought

By: DAVID FREDDOSO

10/05/09 11:50 PM EDT

ACORN was embroiled in scandal last year when it was revealed that Dale Rathke, brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke, had embezzled nearly $1 million from an ACORN affiliate years earlier. According to news reports, a handful of ACORN officials covered up the embezzlement, keeping the information even from some of the group’s directors, in order to prevent an episode embarrassing to the group’s left-wing mission.

But Louisiana’s Attorney General is now alleging a theft of ACORN funds five times as great. A new subpoena, granted on Friday by Louisiana’s 19th Judicial District, asserts that ACORN insiders have known for nearly a year that $5 million was embezzled, based on their own internal investigation.

Steve Beatty of the Pelican Institute in New Orleans provides the documentation once again. In seeking the subpoena, Louisiana Attorney General Buddy Caldwell made this assertion:

Current high ranking members of ACORN have publicly acknowledged that embezzlement did in fact occur, but the exact amount of the embezzlement was unknown until it was recently acknowledged in a board of directors meeting on October 17, 2008 by Bertha Lewis and Liz Wolf that an internal review had determined that the amount embezzled was $5,000,000.00 (FIVE MILLION), and it is still unclear if some of the monies embezzled are from state, federal or private funds.

via Claim: ACORN theft was five times previously thought | Washington Examiner .