Finally a wise government investment.
The City of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, is fighting homelessness locally by giving homeless people one-way bus tickets to those who have relatives outside the area willing to take them in, according to CBS Miami.
The $25,000 program is being funded by the Florida Law Enforcement Trust Fund, which is made up of money confiscated from criminals.
Matthew Vadum (matthewvadum.com) email: matthewvadum (at) gmail.com
Friday, December 23, 2011
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
More Democrats convicted of voter fraud
Voter fraud, the crime the Left says doesn't exist, keeps rearing its ugly head.
Four Democrats associated with ACORN's political party, New York's Working Families Party, have entered guilty pleas in connection with an illegal scheme in Troy, N.Y.
As Eric Shawn of Fox News reports, signatures were forged on absentee ballots in the Working Families Party primary in 2009. The four men to have pleaded guilty are former Troy Democratic City Clerk William McInerney, Democratic Councilman John Brown, and Democratic Party operatives Anthony Renna and Anthony DeFiglio.
Voter fraud is both commonplace and standard operating procedure for the Left, as I write in my book Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Politico's Bungling Ben moving to BuzzFeed
ACORN-loving Ben Smith, the bungling reporter at Politico who claimed to be knowledgeable about New York politics but who knew little about former SEIU 1199 mastermind Patrick Gaspard until I told him about him, is heading off to BuzzFeed.
Smith did everything he could to ignore the ACORN scandals while at the Politico. Perhaps he'll do the same at BuzzFeed.
Smith did everything he could to ignore the ACORN scandals while at the Politico. Perhaps he'll do the same at BuzzFeed.
Thursday, December 8, 2011
ACORN Visits Obama White House
Leaders of the resurrected radical group ACORN are lobbying the Obama administration in what appears to be a concerted effort to game the electoral system to help Democrats, new evidence suggests.
As I write in today’s American Spectator, at least five Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now leaders have visited the White House this year alone. One of those ACORN officials, Estelle Rogers of Project Vote (shown in photo above), has been involved in vetting Department of Justice hires who may help to enforce the voter fraud-enabling National Voting Rights Act (NVRA), also known as the Motor-Voter law. The Department has come under fire for refusing to enforce Section 8, which requires states to remove the names of ineligible felons, the dead, and non-residents from voter rolls, while zealously enforcing Section 7, which requires states to register voters at welfare offices.
As I argue in my book published earlier this year, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, those on relief tend to support Democrats, so Section 7 amounts to a taxpayer subsidy for Democratic candidates. Project Vote founder Sanford Newman openly admits his group’s work helps the Left almost exclusively.”While our work is nonpartisan, it is realistic to assume that upward of 90 percent of the people we register on unemployment and othersocial service distribution lines will oppose politicians who have supported cuts in the programs on which they rely,” he said. ”They are likely to vote Democratic in most instances.”
Union Gangsters: Ron Bloom
From today's Front Page Magazine:
Sometimes union thugs wear pinstriped business suits.
Investment banker Ron Bloom is one of those thugs.
He decided in the 1970s to devote his life to helping labor unions stick it to America’s corporations. As an organizer, negotiator, and researcher for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Booth observed that many union negotiators didn’t have the skills they needed to bargain effectively with management.
“Unions were being backed into corners by companies and couldn’t understand on a sophisticated level, the company’s arguments … Labor needed to be armed with the equivalent skills.”
A longtime leftist, Bloom acquired the skills he needed to run circles around management. He went to Harvard Business School and built up his resume.
Bloom, who was President Obama’s car czar and then manufacturing czar, excels at wheeling and dealing. Last year Time magazine fawned over Bloom, naming him as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” Bloom’s “role in brokering the rescue of General Motors and Chrysler while preserving more than 100,000 jobs demanded a synergist who could work both sides of the equation with authority and respect.”
Although it is true that Bloom was one of the principal architects of the auto industry bailout, Time failed to mention that he made certain that the deal enriched the United Auto Workers at the expense of bondholders. Bondholders accept low rates of return on their investment in the expectation that if the company goes belly-up they will be among the first creditors paid back, but Bloom and his colleagues in the Obama administration upended that ancient rule of repayment priority in the name of so-called “social justice.” They made sure that President Obama’s allies in the labor movement got far more than their fair share.
In his career as an investment banker, Bloom has used his considerable skills as a negotiator to engineer deals that benefit trade unions.
For example, when Brazilian steel company Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (CSN) tried to merge with Wheeling-Pittsburgh Corp. in 2006, steelworkers feared the deal would decimate their ranks. Bloom, who joined the United Steel Workers (USW) union as a special assistant to the president in the 1990s, put together a hostile takeover bid by Chicago-based steel distributor Esmark to fend off CSN.
Union Gangsters: Ron Bloom
By Matthew Vadum
Sometimes union thugs wear pinstriped business suits.
Investment banker Ron Bloom is one of those thugs.
He decided in the 1970s to devote his life to helping labor unions stick it to America’s corporations. As an organizer, negotiator, and researcher for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Booth observed that many union negotiators didn’t have the skills they needed to bargain effectively with management.
“Unions were being backed into corners by companies and couldn’t understand on a sophisticated level, the company’s arguments … Labor needed to be armed with the equivalent skills.”
A longtime leftist, Bloom acquired the skills he needed to run circles around management. He went to Harvard Business School and built up his resume.
Bloom, who was President Obama’s car czar and then manufacturing czar, excels at wheeling and dealing. Last year Time magazine fawned over Bloom, naming him as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” Bloom’s “role in brokering the rescue of General Motors and Chrysler while preserving more than 100,000 jobs demanded a synergist who could work both sides of the equation with authority and respect.”
Although it is true that Bloom was one of the principal architects of the auto industry bailout, Time failed to mention that he made certain that the deal enriched the United Auto Workers at the expense of bondholders. Bondholders accept low rates of return on their investment in the expectation that if the company goes belly-up they will be among the first creditors paid back, but Bloom and his colleagues in the Obama administration upended that ancient rule of repayment priority in the name of so-called “social justice.” They made sure that President Obama’s allies in the labor movement got far more than their fair share.
In his career as an investment banker, Bloom has used his considerable skills as a negotiator to engineer deals that benefit trade unions.
For example, when Brazilian steel company Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (CSN) tried to merge with Wheeling-Pittsburgh Corp. in 2006, steelworkers feared the deal would decimate their ranks. Bloom, who joined the United Steel Workers (USW) union as a special assistant to the president in the 1990s, put together a hostile takeover bid by Chicago-based steel distributor Esmark to fend off CSN.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Richard Cordray's 'Heroes' Occupy Banks and Private Homes
John Berlau has an excellent article in today's American Spectator.
He writes that Richard Cordray, President Obama's nominee for director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is a longtime supporter of violent community organizers:
Cordray has long supported ESOP, formerly known as the East Side Organizing Project, an Ohio housing advocacy group that has distinguished itself by storming into banks and launching plastic "shark attacks" on the lawns of private homes. ESOP's leaders brag about what they call their "organized hits" on banks and other targets, which have included the home of the late Congressman and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp.
Moreover, Cordray
As Ohio treasurer and attorney general, Cordray lobbied for state and federal funding for ESOP and publicly praised funders of the group as "the real heroes." And in a highly unusual move for a nominee awaiting confirmation, Cordray returned to Ohio in October to be the keynote speaker at the group's gala dinner.
Well, duh! Of Course New York Agency for Community Affairs is a front group for ACORN.
President Obama's Department of Justice finally noticed that the New York Agency for Community Affairs is a front group for ACORN.
In a new report the dawdling gumshoes of DOJ explain that
All of the individuals who worked on behalf of NYACA were ACORN employees. Further, the former NYACA Executive Director stated that she served concurrently as the Executive Director for both NYACA and the New York branch of ACORN. NYACA entered into a contractual agreement with ACORN for contract employees and all NYACA grant funds were transferred to ACORN for contractual payroll and fringe benefit charges paid to ACORN employees.
This is not news. I've written about ACORN's corrupt practices, front groups, interlocking directors, and abusive accounting schemes for years.
New York Agency for Community Affairs is identified as an ACORN affiliate in my book, Subversion Inc. Years before that investigators for Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) did the same. (See page 79 of PDF of "Is ACORN Intentionally Structured As a Criminal Enterprise?" July 23, 2009).
The DOJ also notes, predictably, the New York Agency for Community Affairs misspent $138,129 in federal grant funds. NYACA “did not have any paid employees at the time it received the grant or at any time during the life of the grant-funded project.” NYACA transferred the money to Citizens Consulting Inc., the accounting arm of ACORN.
This is how ACORN has always worked. Taxpayer money goes in via Citizens Consulting Inc., never to be seen again.
* * * * *
Americans need to know that ACORN is restructuring in time to help re-elect President Obama in 2012. Obama used to work for ACORN and represented the group in court as its lawyer. These radical leftists who use the brutal, in-your-face, pressure tactics of Saul Alinsky want to destroy America as we know it and will use any means to do it.
Buy my book Subversion Inc. at Amazon and in Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million bookstores. Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.
Friday, December 2, 2011
Emboldening Big Labor
Here is my article from today's Front Page Magazine:
Emboldening Big Labor
By Matthew Vadum
Big Labor scored a significant victory Wednesday when the National Labor Relations Board gave preliminary approval to a rule that severely limits the ability of employers to fight unionization drives.
On a vote of 2-to-1, the NLRB, a socialist anachronism left over from the New Deal, agreed to move forward with the “microwave” rule, which would allow workers to create unions more quickly and provide employers less time to fight such moves in courts or otherwise. The rule zaps the rights of employers by slashing the period between when workers file to create a union and when they vote from 30 days to as few as 10 days.
It is worth noting that while states are rushing to endorse right-to-work laws that uphold employees’ rights, the NLRB is going in the opposite direction by favoring union bosses.
Unlike in statist Europe, unions in individualistic America have always had a hard time organizing. And so they should. That’s the American way.
But Obama’s toadies at the NLRB are hell-bent on making America more like bureaucratic, dysfunctional Europe where labor disruptions and union violence are everyday occurrences.
Left-wingers on the NLRB are helping the lawless Obama administration circumvent Congress because they know the microwave rule, which is arguably a backdoor form of “card check,” would never be approved by lawmakers.
“What the NLRB is doing is not the action of one rogue agency or a few envelope-pushing employees, so much as it is a deliberate strategy to use the federal government’s regulatory powers to achieve what Obama and his political supporters want without having to bother with going to Congress first,” writes columnist Peter Roff.
On a vote of 2-to-1, the NLRB, a socialist anachronism left over from the New Deal, agreed to move forward with the “microwave” rule, which would allow workers to create unions more quickly and provide employers less time to fight such moves in courts or otherwise. The rule zaps the rights of employers by slashing the period between when workers file to create a union and when they vote from 30 days to as few as 10 days.
It is worth noting that while states are rushing to endorse right-to-work laws that uphold employees’ rights, the NLRB is going in the opposite direction by favoring union bosses.
Unlike in statist Europe, unions in individualistic America have always had a hard time organizing. And so they should. That’s the American way.
But Obama’s toadies at the NLRB are hell-bent on making America more like bureaucratic, dysfunctional Europe where labor disruptions and union violence are everyday occurrences.
Left-wingers on the NLRB are helping the lawless Obama administration circumvent Congress because they know the microwave rule, which is arguably a backdoor form of “card check,” would never be approved by lawmakers.
“What the NLRB is doing is not the action of one rogue agency or a few envelope-pushing employees, so much as it is a deliberate strategy to use the federal government’s regulatory powers to achieve what Obama and his political supporters want without having to bother with going to Congress first,” writes columnist Peter Roff.
Frank’s Departure Unleashes Radical Waters
I had an article in yesterday's Front Page Magazine:
Few politicians combine ignorance, obstinate self-righteousness, racial demagoguery, and extremism quite as perfectly as the congresswoman from South Central now poised to become a major force shaping federal banking policy.
Rep. Maxine Waters, a longtime cheerleader for Fidel Castro, was only too happy to use the 1992 Los Angeles riots as a political advertisement. She viewed the 53 deaths, thousands of injuries, and $1 billion in property damage as a shining example of participatory democracy. The word riot never escaped her lips. She called the unrest a “rebellion” and “a spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice and a lot of alienation and frustration.”
Waters then blamed the violence on Republican tax cuts. “The Reagan-Bush administrations have taken away programs that have been very helpful, very empowering,” she told CBS News. “In addition to that, the recession and the tax policies that are allowed for the exportation of jobs to Third World countries for cheap labor—all have caused us to come to the point where we are today—desperation, hopelessness. I lay the blame squarely at the foot of Bush and Reagan.”
With a straight face Waters has accused the CIA of encouraging drug use in the inner cities in order to hurt black Americans.
“She is one of the most self-serving, hate-filled, race-obsessed politicians in America,” says columnist Michelle Malkin. “The Democratic Party doesn’t just embrace her. It kneels at her feet.”
Waters is next in line to take over on the minority side of the powerful House Financial Services Committee.
Barney Frank, the thoroughly corrupt leftist lawmaker, is leaving Congress, freeing up the top Democratic post on the committee.
Frank’s surprise announcement that he won’t seek another term clears the way for another thoroughly corrupt leftist lawmaker, the scandal-plagued Waters of California, to become ranking Democrat on the panel.
It remains to be seen whether the change in the Democratic lineup on the committee that oversees the banking industry will make any difference at all in the day-to-day operations of the panel. In the event Democrats retake the House in the 2012 elections, a possibility that currently seems unlikely, as committee chairman Waters would offer much of the same as Frank offered.
The difference is largely in style. Frank is an intelligent, occasionally witty spokesman for socialism but he is also haughty and arrogant. When I interviewed him in his Capitol Hill office in 2005, the entire time he remained seated at his desk holding his morning newspaper while talking to me. A few times he lowered it slightly so he could scold and lecture me for daring to asking questions he deemed dumb.
Waters is simply an angry thug who could never be accused of thoughtfulness. Waters is Wanda Sykes without a sense of humor.
Frank’s Departure Unleashes Radical Waters
By Matthew Vadum
Few politicians combine ignorance, obstinate self-righteousness, racial demagoguery, and extremism quite as perfectly as the congresswoman from South Central now poised to become a major force shaping federal banking policy.
Rep. Maxine Waters, a longtime cheerleader for Fidel Castro, was only too happy to use the 1992 Los Angeles riots as a political advertisement. She viewed the 53 deaths, thousands of injuries, and $1 billion in property damage as a shining example of participatory democracy. The word riot never escaped her lips. She called the unrest a “rebellion” and “a spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice and a lot of alienation and frustration.”
Waters then blamed the violence on Republican tax cuts. “The Reagan-Bush administrations have taken away programs that have been very helpful, very empowering,” she told CBS News. “In addition to that, the recession and the tax policies that are allowed for the exportation of jobs to Third World countries for cheap labor—all have caused us to come to the point where we are today—desperation, hopelessness. I lay the blame squarely at the foot of Bush and Reagan.”
With a straight face Waters has accused the CIA of encouraging drug use in the inner cities in order to hurt black Americans.
“She is one of the most self-serving, hate-filled, race-obsessed politicians in America,” says columnist Michelle Malkin. “The Democratic Party doesn’t just embrace her. It kneels at her feet.”
Waters is next in line to take over on the minority side of the powerful House Financial Services Committee.
Barney Frank, the thoroughly corrupt leftist lawmaker, is leaving Congress, freeing up the top Democratic post on the committee.
Frank’s surprise announcement that he won’t seek another term clears the way for another thoroughly corrupt leftist lawmaker, the scandal-plagued Waters of California, to become ranking Democrat on the panel.
It remains to be seen whether the change in the Democratic lineup on the committee that oversees the banking industry will make any difference at all in the day-to-day operations of the panel. In the event Democrats retake the House in the 2012 elections, a possibility that currently seems unlikely, as committee chairman Waters would offer much of the same as Frank offered.
The difference is largely in style. Frank is an intelligent, occasionally witty spokesman for socialism but he is also haughty and arrogant. When I interviewed him in his Capitol Hill office in 2005, the entire time he remained seated at his desk holding his morning newspaper while talking to me. A few times he lowered it slightly so he could scold and lecture me for daring to asking questions he deemed dumb.
Waters is simply an angry thug who could never be accused of thoughtfulness. Waters is Wanda Sykes without a sense of humor.
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