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.

Union Gangsters: Andy Stern

From today's Front Page Magazine:

Union Gangsters: Andy Stern

By Matthew Vadum

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.

The Face of the Democratic Party

From Front Page Magazine today:

The Face of the Democratic Party

By Matthew Vadum

Salvador Dali would have been comfortable painting a mural of the surreal Occupy Wall Street movement.

Supported by billionaire Marxists, mega-rich Hollywood airheads, radical libertarians, indebted students, sexual exhibitionists, malingerers, and professional protesters, the neo-communist “Occupy Wall Street” movement is fast becoming the face of the modern Democratic Party.

This is a wonderful thing, says conservative columnist George F. Will. Will said he wants the Occupy Wall Street protests to prosper:

I think they do represent the intellectual spirit of the American left, but also I remember the 1960s. We had four years of demonstrations like this [that] led up to 1968, when the Nixon/Wallace vote was 57 percent – the country reacting against demonstrators, and Republicans went on to win five of the next six presidential elections.

Organized by Obama allies such as the sleazy, SEIU-funded ACORN front group known as the Working Families Party, the Occupy Wall Street mob’s demands are strikingly similar to the Democratic Party platform, differing largely only in degree. They include creating a single-payer health-care system and a “guaranteed living wage,” abolishing credit agencies, free college education, banning the use of fossil fuels, open borders, and $1 trillion in useless new infrastructure spending.

Prominent national Democrats and the mainstream media are now working overtime to convince Americans that a revolution is in the air and that they should embrace it. In order to make the movement more palatable to middle America, they are pushing the line that Occupy Wall Street is a left-wing version of the Tea Party movement.

Democratic office holders have been sprinting so hard to align themselves with the unwashed masses squatting in lower Manhattan that it’s a miracle they haven’t suffered sports injuries.

Marxist Mobocracy

My new op-ed in the Washington Times:

Marxist mobocracy

Let them protest and rage - it lays the groundwork for GOP domination

By Matthew Vadum

Abraham Lincoln rightly denounced the "mobocratic spirit." James Madison considered it the sacred duty of government to protect property rights from the violent whims of the mob: "That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest."

Lincoln and Madison would not have looked kindly upon the pro-redistributionist political street theater under way in urine- and garbage-saturated urban parks across the nation.

In an insult to the intelligence of the American people, the leaders of "Occupy Wall Street" piously claim that their movement is in the best traditions of nonviolent protest.

These class warriors are lying. The whole idea of these mass protests is to provoke the police and cause mass arrests, which the organizers can then use for propaganda purposes.

This exercise in Marxist mobocracy began on Sept. 17 in Lower Manhattan as the "U.S. Day of Rage." This is a more honest moniker because it makes clear that the demonstrators are the polar opposite of the Tea Party movement, which seeks to protect America's economic freedoms from the statist onslaught of the Obama administration. The leftist mob wants a radical transformation of American society in which government is expanded exponentially.

Occupy Wall Street is led by New York's Working Families party, a front group for ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), AFL-CIO and street-thug battalions from the various neo-communist organizations such as National People's Action and Democratic Socialists of America. Paid rent-a-mobs from the Working Families Party, which isn't even recognized in the District of Columbia, even paid a visit to the Washington Marriott at Metro Center in the nation's capital on Wednesday.

Although violence has been sporadic at the various "occupations" so far, mass violence is inevitable. This is what radicals want. What else could possibly be the end result of thousands of angry activists camping out for weeks without food and sanitation?

As the Pajamas Media website reported, a recent speaker at a parallel demonstration in Los Angeles gave away the game and unexpectedly injected clarity into the debate.

The man, apparently from India, rejected nonviolence and praised the bloody guillotines that worked overtime during the French Reign of Terror. "Gandhi today is a tumor that the ruling class is using constantly to mislead us," said the aspiring Robespierre. "The bourgeoisie won't go without violent means. Revolution! Yes, revolution that is led by the working class. Long live revolution! Long live socialism!" the speaker said to applause from the mob.

"Rules for Radicals" author and leftist icon Saul Alinsky agreed that nonviolence is of limited usefulness when trying to usher in a new era of socialism. As I note in my new book, "Subversion Inc.," he argued in his organizing opus that there is no reason to make "a special religion of nonviolence." In colonial India, he said, Gandhi's approach was simply "the best tactic for its time and place."

The mob actions Alinsky advocated and carried out have always been the antithesis of the American way of doing things. Americans reject lynch mobs and other forms of mob rule.

Conservative columnist George F. Will acknowledged as much on ABC's "This Week With Christiane Amanpour."

Mr. Will said he wants the Occupy Wall Street protests to continue and get even more publicity: "I think they do represent the intellectual spirit of the American left, but also I remember the 1960s. We had four years of demonstrations like this [that] led up to 1968, when the Nixon/Wallace vote was 57 percent - the country reacting against demonstrators, and Republicans went on to win five of the next six presidential elections."

Maybe there is hope for America, after all.

Thank you, Occupy Wall Street.

Matthew Vadum is a senior editor at the Capital Research Center and author of "Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers" (WND Books, 2011).

* * * * *

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.

SEIU's Stephen Lerner Leaks Plan to Terrorize Corporate Executives

Radical labor organizer Stephen Lerner of SEIU intends to terrorize the families of bank executives in their homes. Lerner, a prime architect of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, said this to Marxists at the left-wing Take the American Dream Back conference in Washington, D.C., on October 3, 2011.

Here's the video:



Like any good Alinskyite organizer Lerner poses as a mere liberal instead of as an anti-American radical. If Lerner gets his way, more labor and leftist-inspired violence and mayhem are on their way.

* * * * *

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.

Union Gangsters: Stephen Lerner

From today's Front Page Magazine:

Union Gangsters: Stephen Lerner

By Matthew Vadum

Editor's note: The following is the third installment of FrontPage's new series, "Union Gangsters." In this profile, award-winning investigative reporter Matthew Vadum unmasks economic terrorist Stephen Lerner. To read about union consigliere Craig Becker, click here. To read about Big Labor kingpin Richard Trumka, click here.]

One of the boldest labor thugs in America today is Stephen Lerner, a crafty economic terrorist who manages to sound like a folksy self-improvement seminar leader while he explicitly calls for the overthrow of capitalism.

“People are ready to move,” said Lerner, an organizer with the radical Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

“We have solutions. We just have to build it bigger and larger,” he said during a panel discussion Oct. 3 at the Take Back the American Dream conference in Washington, D.C.

“If we are really serious about movement building then we think one part is we have to act heroically, that we have to inspire people by our actions and we have to be willing to take incredible personal and collective risks, that that’s the time and there’s moments where history shifts and we’re going to decide if it shifts. That’s where I think we are and it’s a wonderful place to be because for the last couple of years it’s been shifting the other way.”

An SEIU board member, Lerner is one of the architects of a subversive plan that aims to destroy the nation’s financial system through intimidation, mass protests, and the mob violence that accompanies it. As part of it, Lerner targeted JPMorgan Chase for attack earlier this year because the bank would be “a really good company to hate.”

Lerner told a receptive union audience that it is necessary to demonize people like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in order to generate hatred and envy that will help to foment revolution. “We’ve got to be clear on the human beings who are bad,” he told the SEIU 775 convention in Seattle on Sept. 22. Wealthy corporate leaders must be made into social outcasts, despised even by their children, he said. “How do we make it so politicians don’t even want their money because their money’s toxic, it’s dirty, it’s evil.”

“It’s one thing if we say JPMorgan Chase crashed the economy. It’s another thing if we say Jamie Dimon makes $20 million a year, who is involved in the opera and all these philanthropies, and thinks he’s a nice guy, and he’s destroying our lives.”

Romney Hecklers in Iowa Part of Radical Street Thug Group

Those obnoxious hecklers who tried to shout down Mitt Romney at the Iowa State Fair last week weren't just random Iowans trying to participate in the democratic process, as I write at Front Page Magazine.

They were members of a Marxist, ACORN-like group called Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (Iowa CCI). Iowa CCI is an affiliate of a street thug outfit called National People's Action (NPA).

NPA may not be corrupt like ACORN but they're still bad people. NPA is participating in a nationwide economic terrorism campaign with the new ACORN front groups and SEIU aimed at destabilizing the nation's financial system.

You might remember the joint actions conducted by NPA and SEIU. The two organizations have been using angry mobs to invade banks and terrorize bank executives, such as Bank of America's Greg Baer, in their homes.

* * * * *

America needs 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.

Does Obama support SEIU/ACORN-led economic terror campaign against JPMorgan Chase?

Does President Obama approve of the SEIU/ACORN-led economic terrorism campaign that is now directed at JPMorgan Chase?

It seems like a reasonable question to ask. SEIU is President Obama’s favorite union and ACORN is his favorite community organizing outfit.

The campaign, engineered by SEIU board member Stephen Lerner, is designed, in Lerner’s words, “to disrupt and create uncertainty for capital, for how corporations operate ... 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.”

According to White House visitor logs, “Stephen Lerner” paid four visits to the Obama White House. On two of those visits he apparently met with then-White House political director Patrick Gaspard, a former executive vice president at the militant SEIU Local 1199. Gaspard, a longtime ACORN operative and Alinskyite, is now executive director of the DNC where he oversees the odious Organizing for America project.

I wonder what they talked about. Hmmmm.

Obama has named SEIU officials to senior posts in his administration, including former SEIU lawyer Craig Becker whom Obama sleazily recess-appointed to the National Labor Relations Board. Becker is a kind of fascist, or more precisely, a syndicalist. He thinks no one should have the right not to join a union: people should only get to choose which union to join. (Incidentally, Becker lied to a congressional committee when he denied having ties to ACORN.)

Earlier this year Lerner said that after consulting his allies he decided that JPMorgan Chase would be “a really good company to hate.” If leftists really believe capitalism is in a “transformative stage,” they “need to confront this in a serious way and develop a real ability to put a boot in the wheel.”

Not coincidentally, Obama has had a falling out with JPMorgan Chase. Although some once described the bank’s chairman Jamie Dimon as “Obama’s favorite banker,” their bromance is on the rocks now that Obama habitually demonizes bankers as “fat cats.”

The SEIU/ACORN war against JPMorgan Chase has recently kicked into high gear.

ACORN’s newly renamed chapters in New York (New York Communities for Change), California (Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment), Missouri (Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment), and Washington state (Organization United for Reform) make no secret about their participation in the subversive scheme.

Economic Terrorism's Big Comeback

"Economic Terrorism's Big Comeback" is the name of my latest piece at Front Page Magazine.

Here's the top of it:

Radical activist groups associated with President Barack Obama have launched a campaign of economic terrorism and sabotage – possibly with his blessing. Mortgage and student loan strikes, crippling bank boycotts, intimidation, and who knows what else are all on the agenda.
The idea of leftists using terrorism to achieve political objectives isn’t new. Leon Trotsky supported the use of terrorism to advance so-called social justice. Decades before an ice-axe found its way into his skull, Trotsky argued in Dictatorship vs. Democracy that Communists who reject “terrorism in principle” weren’t bona fide Communists. Years before that, he justified “proletarian terrorism” because the capitalist state itself, with its “entire state apparatus with its laws, police, and army is nothing but an apparatus for capitalist terror.” In the upside-down world of Marxists, radical activists’ frightening, violent, in-your-face tactics are thought of as merely fighting fire with fire.
Since at least the 1960s, the American Left has embraced terrorism. Striking fear into the hearts of big corporations has proven to be politically useful and lucrative, as the shakedown artists of ACORN and Jesse Jackson’s Wall Street Project can attest.
While most of its practitioners conceal the true nature of what they do, others revel in their depravity. For example, Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America head Bruce Marks has proudly described himself as both a “banking terrorist” and an “urban terrorist.”