Union Gangsters: Ron Bloom

From today's Front Page Magazine:

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.

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.

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.

Frank’s Departure Unleashes Radical Waters

I had an article in yesterday's Front Page Magazine:

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.

Obama uses taxpayer cash to back ACORN: Name changes used to dodge the law

I had an op-ed in yesterday's Washington Times.

It begins:

The Obama administration has showered its allies at ACORN Housing with $729,849 so far this year despite powerful, newly unveiled evidence of corruption and massive accounting irregularities at the longtime affiliate of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now).

Watchdog group Cause of Action recently pressured NeighborWorks America, a taxpayer-funded federal nonprofit that funneled more than $26.5 million in federal foreclosure-avoidance money to ACORN Housing, to disclose an internal audit furnished to then-Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd, Connecticut Democrat, late last year.

The audit, provided to Cause of Action last month, found that although ACORN Housing and voter-fraud-prone ACORN are legally separate entities, there were numerous financial transactions and “evidence [of] extensive relationships between both organizations that may undermine claims of an ‘arm’s length relationship’ between them.” ACORN Housing, the audit states, worked closely with ACORN and even subcontracted some of the counseling work to “four ACORN local state chapters.”

It’s still the same old ACORN, the same old venal organization. But none of this seemed to bother the Obama administration when it started cutting new checks to its old community organizing friends earlier this year.

ACORN Housing was incapable of administering the federal funds properly, the audit suggests. “We have determined that [ACORN Housing] lacks the accounting capacity to manage the size and complexity of the [foreclosure-avoidance] program funds,” said the audit, dated Dec. 17, 2010. ACORN Housing had poorly trained staff, extraordinarily sloppy accounting procedures, and violated conflict-of-interest guidelines laid down by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the audit said.

ACORN Housing is the largest affiliate of ACORN, the notorious group brought down by undercover videos showing its employees facilitating child prostitution in 2009. ACORN Housing changed its name a year ago to Affordable Housing Centers of America (AHCOA) to escape the stigma of being associated with ACORN, the famously corrupt former employer and legal client of President Obama. ACORN’s state chapters have restructured themselves and now go by names such as New York Communities for Change and Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, both of which have been heavily involved in organizing and financing the Occupy Wall Street movement. [...]

Union Gangsters: Heather Booth

From yesterday's Front Page Magazine:

Union Gangsters: Heather Booth

By Matthew Vadum

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

Occupiers to Terrorize Bargain Shoppers

From Friday's Front Page Magazine:

Occupiers to Terrorize Bargain Shoppers 

By Matthew Vadum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then there is the question of whether there will be leftist-initiated violence on Black Friday. It’s anyone guess. As John Nolte has documented Occupy supporters have defecated on police cars, committed rape, assault, arson, and hundreds of other crimes and acts of violence.

Error in Daily Caller article

(Note: The Daily Caller corrected the article the same day. -MV)

A new profile of ACORN founder Wade Rathke in the Daily Caller inaccurately describes a key passage in my book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers (published by WND Books).

Here's the offending paragraph from the Daily Caller:

His book opens with the provocative question, “How many dead Republicans does it take to satisfy the bloodlust of ACORN founder Wade Rathke?” referring to his contention that ACORN leaders planned “to kill delegates and police” at the 2008 Republican national Convention in Minnesota, before a turncoat helped law-enforcement dismantle the plot.

In fact I did not write in my book that ACORN leaders planned to kill delegates and police at the 2008 Republican national convention. The book makes it clear that anarchists Bradley Neil Crowder and David Guy McKay plotted to bomb the Republican convention. Crowder and McKay went to prison for their crimes. I have never claimed that Crowder and McKay were in any way associated with ACORN. (Actually, I wrote about Crowder and McKay in a Daily Caller article published January 13, 2010.)

Rathke had nothing to do with the bomb plot. He did, however, express disgust that a fellow community organizer had foiled the plot by alerting the FBI.

Here is the relevant passage from the book:

How many dead Republicans does it take to satisfy the bloodlust of ACORN founder Wade Rathke?

 We’ll never know, because the FBI thwarted the attack planned by his allies on the 2008 Republican national convention. It’s impossible to determine how many American lives were saved that September day in St. Paul, Minnesota, because Rathke’s progressive comrades-in arms were caught before they could incinerate innocent Americans who disagreed with them politically.

 This attempt by radical left-wing anarchists to kill delegates and police and to shut down the nation’s democratic process didn’t enrage Rathke, chief architect of President Barack Obama’s favorite community organizing group. On the contrary, five months later Rathke wrote a blog post without a single word of criticism for the perpetrators.

 The planned murder and mayhem didn’t interest him at all. What really drove ACORN’s patriarch nuts was that a fellow radical leftist, a member of his own political camp, had dared to work with the government to fight left-wing thuggery. On his Chief Organizer blog, Rathke denounced FBI informant Brandon Darby, formerly a fellow America-hating radical community organizer, for helping to disrupt the attack: “It seemed so, how should I say it, ’60s?”

“One thing to disagree, but it’s a whole different thing to rat on folks, or, even worse, as some now allege, to try and mousetrap people,” Rathke wrote. “Why in the age of Bush did we need to go back to the 60’s and the Darth Vader times again?” Rathke continued, nostalgically gazing into his navel. “I’m not sure exactly what may have happened. Darby is suddenly not talking, but this is all both sketchy and creepy, and I want there to be different rules of engagement in the Age of Obama.” (The entire blog post is available in Appendix C.)

Human life, pain and suffering, the possibility of civil disorder, the sanctity of the American electoral process—all were less important to Rathke than protecting terrorists who shared his vision for America. Rathke must also have been incensed that the attack came so soon after the Democrats’ national convention, which had highlighted community organizers and what they do to the communities they target. And it must have made his blood boil that the terrorist attack failed at a Republican convention whose star attractions subjected his chosen profession to pitiless ridicule.

I trust the Daily Caller will promptly correct the error.

Vadum on Fox Business at 10 p.m. Eastern tonight

I'll be on Fox Business tonight ("Follow the Money" with host Eric Bolling) at 10 o'clock Eastern time.

The topic?  Agenda 21, a kooky idea that liberals and environmentalists are enamored of.  To boil it down, it's about so-called smart growth, i.e. pressuring people to live in cities in order to supposedly help the environment, fight global warming, yada yada yada.

* * * * *

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.