May Day Terror Begins

My article from the May 1 edition of Front Page Magazine:

May Day Terror Begins

By Matthew Vadum

The Left’s May Day terrorism campaign got underway a day early Monday as at least seven Wells Fargo bank branches in Manhattan reportedly began receiving suspicious envelopes containing white powder in the mail.


“This is a reminder that you are not in control,” an accompanying message read. “Just in case you needed some incentive to stop working we have a little surprise for you. Think fast you have seconds.”


This effort to intimidate participants in the American marketplace for political advantage was not unexpected. As FrontPage Magazine reported Friday, former community organizer Brandon Darby, a leading expert on leftist tactics, said May Day protesters would commit “a lot of violent acts.”


Police sources told ABC News that San Francisco-based Wells Fargo may have been targeted for the white powder mailings because roughly six key Occupy Wall Street members have connections to Oakland, San Francisco, and Berkeley.


Although the news report didn’t mention it, in what is surely a bizarre, freaky coincidence unworthy of the attention of the mainstream media, former Obama green jobs czar Van Jones, a self-described communist whose Rebuild the Dream group is participating in the nationwide protests, hails from Oakland, long a hotbed of left-wing radicalism. Jones, who used to belong to a Maoist group, now says that he supports only nonviolent methods of protest against Americans’ cherished economic freedoms.


Incidentally, this isn’t the first time Wells Fargo has been targeted by left-wing activists. Both before and during the bursting of the nation’s housing bubble, the bank was targeted by the radical street thugs of ACORN, as I reported in my recent book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. ACORN affiliates took in almost $11 million from 1999 through 2008 from the family charity of left-wing plutocrats Herb and Marion Sandler, founders of subprime lender World Savings Bank. A decade ago as ACORN launched a class action lawsuit and conducted demonstrations against Wells Fargo, the bank just happened to be the Sandlers’ biggest competition in California.


Meanwhile, the radical, anti-American Occupy Wall Street movement, consisting of a dazzling array of Democratic politicians, labor unions, open-borders immigration groups, and a constellation of neo-communist and anarchist collectives, is calling for a general strike against capitalism today. Occupiers want Americans to shun their usual business in order to show the richest so-called one percent of the population what life would be like without the other “99 percent” of society.


The movement website occupywallst.org describes May 1, also known as International Workers’ Day, as “A Day Without the 99%.” Occupiers have urged Americans to refuse to work, attend school, perform housework, or go shopping and instead “Take the Streets on Tuesday!” The May Day activities are part of what left-wingers are calling the “99% Spring.” These actions are designed to disrupt the U.S. economy and capitalize on Americans’ growing political and economic jitters.


In another wacky example of randomness, all of this bears a remarkable similarity to the chaos planned by pioneering SEIU agitator Stephen Lerner. Long before Occupy Wall Street was a twinkle in Katrina vanden Heuvel’s eye, Lerner came up with a subversive plan that he said would “disrupt and create uncertainty for capital, for how corporations operate.” The frequent Obama White House visitor said, “There are actually extraordinary things that we could do right now that would start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement.” Among those things was Lerner’s call for revolutionary attacks on the nation’s banks.


While President Obama hasn’t explicitly endorsed the call for a general strike, on Monday he again used the poisonous us-versus-them rhetoric of class warfare to titillate his trade unionist supporters. “Republicans in Congress would rather put fewer of you to work rebuilding America than ask millionaires and billionaires to live without massive new tax cuts,” he told a meeting of the Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO.


Obama has repeatedly heaped praised on his allies in the Occupy movement. He recently told Rolling Stone:

I think that Occupy Wall Street was just one vivid expression of a broader anxiety that has been around in the United States for at least a decade or more. People have a sense the game is rigged, so just a few people can do well, and everybody else is left to scramble to get by.

Obama’s comments came after an unidentified African-American man recently called for blood at a rally in Washington, D.C. outside the Department of Justice.
“I feel a certain type of way about marches and rallies and I question the effectiveness of it,” said the Occupy supporter as he stood near a large photo of former Black Panther Party member Mumia Abu Jamal. The imprisoned neo-communist folk hero brutally murdered Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in 1981 to make some kind of political statement.


“I do a lot of political work in Washington, D.C. and as you all know this type of work is dangerous work to be doing,” the man continued. “I would just ask – If I ever got locked-up, incarcerated – please don’t march for me. Please don’t do no rallies for me. I want y’all to start killing motherfuckers,” the man said to laughter from the crowd. “You see, it’s funny, but that’s the only thing our government will listen to.”


That must be what the in-your-face Obama reelection campaign meant when it adopted the Progressive Era dog-whistle-of-a-word “Forward” as its new slogan yesterday.


As Victor Morton notes in the Washington Times, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “[t]he slogan ‘Forward!’ reflected the conviction of European Marxists and radicals that their movements reflected the march of history, which would move forward past capitalism and into socialism and communism.”


Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who, like Obama, nationalized entire industries, was the editor of a socialist newspaper called Avanti! which in Italian happens to mean “Forward!”


It must just be another incredible coincidence.