Saul Alinsky

CRC  Senior Editor Matthew Vadum had an article in FrontPage Magazine about labor outrage at Michigan becoming a “right to work” state.

Here it is:

Unions Prepare for ‘Civil War’

By Matthew Vadum (FrontPage Magazine,  Dec. 13, 2012)

Top Teamsters goon James R. Hoffa is threatening to bring “civil war” to Michigan in order to roll back the state’s new right to work law.

After Gov. Rick Snyder (R) signed legislation aimed at breaking the labor movement’s death grip on Michigan’s near-comatose economy, Hoffa took to CNN Tuesday to declare, “This is just the first round of a battle that’s going to divide this state.” He added, “We’re going to have a civil war in this state.”

Read all »

Home Defenders League is a new ACORN front group formed around the time of the collapse of the lead entity in the ACORN network, ACORN Inc., in November 2010.

Many new groups have been founded by ACORN operatives. The typical new ACORN group will have the same employees as the old ACORN group. Often the new ACORN group will use the same office address that was used by the ACORN affiliate or state chapter it replaced. The new Saul Alinsky-inspired groups all have the same radical left-wing political objectives.

Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) is also a new ACORN offshoot created by longtime California ACORN leader Amy Schur. ACCE created Home Defenders League as a project. As of July 1, 2012, it was unclear if Home Defenders League has been formally incorporated or is a business name adopted by ACCE.

The Internet domain name, www.homedefendersleague.org, as this document shows, was registered by longtime California ACORN operative David Lagstein, now an ACCE employee.

New ACORN Front Group: Home Defenders League

What do self-described “communist” Van Jones, his good friend Arianna Huffington, radical philanthropist George Soros, the Threshold Foundation, and the Tides Foundation all have in common?

They all are connected in some way to convicted “Speedway Bomber” Brett C. Kimberlin, a man described by Michelle Malkin as “a radical, violent, lying, dangerous felon.”

Kimberlin, as blogger Liberty Chick previously reported,

spent nearly 17 years in prison after being convicted of launching a week-long bombing spree that terrorized the residents of Speedway, Indiana in the late 1970’s. One of the blasts horribly maimed a man so badly that it directly led to that man’s suicide a few years later, which was proven when the widow of that bombing victim successfully sued and won a civil judgment against Kimberlin for $1.6 million.

Kimberlin is a political trailblazer of sorts. He is a tactical innovator whose tried and true methods would have impressed the father of modern community organizing, Saul Alinsky. The late conservative Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart recognized Kimberlin’s unique talents last fall, tweeting that the convicted terrorist and his confederates needed “exposure.”

Kimberlin is focusing on bullying conservatives into silence, which is the same thing that so much of progressivedom is concentrating on nowadays. But unlike Van Jones and the various Marxist agitators who have inflicted damage on conservative talk radio and innocuous groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) through innuendo and smears, Kimberlin gets in his enemies’ faces. While in prison he taught himself the law. Nowadays he sues conservatives who write about him and obtains restraining orders against them – the First Amendment be damned.

Amazingly, a leading Kimberlin detractor, conservative blogger Aaron Walker, was jailed by a Maryland judge yesterday after criticizing Kimberlin.

JTMP and another nonprofit Kimberlin founded, Velvet Revolution, receive money from left-wing funders. Of course it’s their privilege to do what they want with their money even if it means funding nonprofits operated by “a radical, violent, lying, dangerous felon.” Similarly, since 1984 it has been Capital Research Center’s mission to report on and analyze what charities do with their money.

The Threshold Foundation has been in the news in recent days because the San Francisco-based philanthropy gave $20,000 in 2008 to the Justice Through Music Project, a seven year old Bethesda, Maryland-based 501c3 nonprofit entity. JTMP was founded by Mr. Kimberlin a few short years after his release from prison. (See its latest IRS Form 990 [tax return] here.) Threshold has also given $60,000 to the related nonprofit, Velvet Revolution, since 2007. (For more information on Threshold, see Bonner Cohen’s July 2006 Foundation Watch article.)

Read all »

Writer James Simpson has a wonderful new opus at the Accuracy In Media website.

Radical leftists are gearing up to try to steal the 2012 elections, he explains. In recent years Simpson, a frequent American Thinker contributor, has written extensively about the Cloward-Piven Strategy of orchestrated crisis and of the devious tactics of Alinskyite community organizers.

The new piece begins:

This report reveals the Left’s vote fraud strategy for the 2012 elections. Like a KGB operation, it is thorough, multi-faceted and redundant. It has overt and covert, illegal and legal elements, the latter of which are designed, at least in part, to facilitate illegal activities later. It is a deliberate, premeditated, comprehensive plan to win the 2012 presidential election at all costs, and is in keeping with the organizational methods, associations and ethics of the Community-Organizer-in-Chief, Barack Obama.

The Left seeks fundamental structural change to our entire form of government. In keeping with their amoral, means-justifies-ends philosophy, they will register any voters, dead or alive, legal or illegal, who will then vote as many times as possible, in order to establish a “permanent progressive majority.” As two New York Democrats recently caught in a vote fraud scandal told police, “voter fraud is an accepted way of winning elections…”

Low income individuals are the perfect dupes for this strategy. An expanding welfare state makes them increasingly dependent on government benefits, a development that guarantees their vote for liberal-left candidates. At the same time, people with marginal attachment to society may be less inclined to report illegal activity at the polls—or actually participate. The “victim” narrative promoted in popular culture and press may even encourage such behavior. Meanwhile, a growing tax burden and public debt suck private enterprise dry—pushing ever more people onto the dole.

Politicians of both parties are not above engaging in vote fraud. But this kind of corruption is relegated to individual campaigns or areas where corrupt political establishments have been able to develop unchallenged. It is not a systematic component of overall national strategy, as it is with the Left.

This strategy has been under development for decades. They have constructed an entire industry devoted to this task and pursue a multifaceted strategy to accomplish it: [...]

If at first you don’t succeed in murdering America’s constitutional legacy of limited government, try, try again. This sums up the approach of Marxist academic and activist Frances Fox Piven. The strategy of orchestrated crisis she pioneered with her late husband Richard Cloward helped generate chaos in American society throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The so-called Cloward-Piven Strategy inflicted a lot of damage on the nation but it didn’t quite succeed in bringing America to its knees, as its authors intended. So now Piven is calling for a new strategic attack on the American system of government.

But first some background is needed here. Cloward and Piven wrote a 1966 Nation article, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” in which they called for “a massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls” in an effort to overwhelm the system. [Italics in original.] The idea was that the crisis generated would serve as the catalyst for a radical transformation of American society. The strategy helped to bankrupt New York City in 1975. Years later, the Big Apple’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, denounced the academic activists by name.

In the Nation article, Cloward and Piven made it clear that they were irritated that plenty of Americans legally eligible to receive forcibly redistributed wealth hadn’t bothered to ask for handouts. “The discrepancy is not an accident stemming from bureaucratic inefficiency; rather, it is an integral feature of the welfare system which, if challenged, would precipitate a profound financial and political crisis.”

As Ron Radosh writes at Pajamas Media, with the U.S. economy and state and city budgets everywhere under tremendous strain, Piven

has issued a new call to repeat and build upon the ruinous strategies that she and her late husband advanced decades ago. And as in 1966, her vehicle is The Nation, the flagship magazine of the Left which today has a huge circulation and much greater influence than it had in the 1960s.

In the Jan. 10/17, 2011 edition of the Nation (hidden behind a capitalist paywall), Piven is outraged that Wall Street bankers aren’t being dragged from their homes and led to the guillotine given high unemployment and an anemic economy.

So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs? After all, the injustice is apparent. Working people are losing their homes and their pensions while robber baron CEOs report renewed profits and windfall bonuses. Shouldn’t the unemployed be on the march? Why aren’t they demanding enhanced safety net protections and big initiatives to generate jobs?

To not see that the American people are already angry, mad as hell at the Obama administration’s profligate spending, Piven must have slept through the Tea Party movement and the congressional town hall meetings of 2009, but I digress.

Piven argues that in order for socialism to prevail in America, the unemployed will have to be radicalized through agitation. They have “to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant.” In other words, they have to feel entitled to your money.

As Piven sees it, the unemployed have to be made to understand that individuals are never responsible for their own actions and that the capitalist system is by its nature oppressive. The jobless “have to stop blaming themselves for their hard times and turn their anger on the bosses, the bureaucrats or the politicians who are in fact responsible,” she writes.

Piven’s next words ought to send a chill down the spine of every good American.

Local protests have to accumulate and spread—and become more disruptive— to create serious pressures on national politicians. An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees. [emphasis added]

Piven only likes one thing about America and she shares that enthusiasm with her late comrade-in-arms Saul Alinsky. As Alinsky wrote in Rules for Radicals:

Let us in the name of radical pragmatism not forget that in our system with all its repressions we can still speak out and denounce the administration, attack its policies, work to build an opposition political base.

Apart from that one redeeming quality America possesses, the nation is beyond saving, according to Piven. She wants to burn the country down to the ground.

Thanksgiving is approaching and that means that the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) will be trying once again to con well-intentioned parishioners out of their hard earned money.

The radical ACORN-like CCHD, whose lineage can be traced back to Saul Alinsky, collects money ostensibly for the poor. The problem is that most if not all of the money never actually makes it to the poor. It finds it way to radical left-wing groups that promote values and ideas that Americans overwhelmingly reject. 

As I wrote in the Washington Times last year,

Growing up, I always thought Jesus’ admonition in the Book of Matthew, “The poor you will always have with you,” wasn’t meant to be taken literally as a directive to ignore the poor, but that’s exactly what a prominent Roman Catholic charity believes.

As this Sunday’s “second collection” approaches, most Catholics planning to donate to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development probably think their money will be used to help the poor by funding soup kitchens and homeless shelters. Well, the joke’s on them. CCHD has never provided direct relief to the poor. That’s not its purpose.

It is an extreme left-wing political organization created to feed and foster radical groups like ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Most Catholics are blissfully unaware of its true mission, though it says right on its Web site that it aims to support “organized groups of white and minority poor to develop economic strength and political power.”

Since I wrote that op-ed last year, CCHD hasn’t changed. It’s still a racket and a haven for extremists who reject the America we know and love.

To help fight CCHD, parishioners of the Catholic Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, are circulating a petition to urge Bishop Paul S. Loverde to withdraw support for the 2010 National Catholic Campaign for Human Development.

I trash Saul Alinsky protégé Nicholas von Hoffman’s memoir, Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky in the American Spectator.

The ACORN crime syndicate is not going away anytime soon, but it’s going to look different.

ACORN will probably run out of money and fold by year’s end but a dozen ACORN state chapters reincorporated to seem like new, independent organizations will spring up in the next week to carry on ACORN’s business, a leaked email from ACORN’s online director suggests.

“The truth is that it is hard for us to forsee [sic] any scenario where ACORN continues beyond the end of 2010 and some of us think it might not last that long,” writes Nathan Henderson-James, director of ACORN’s online campaigns, in an apparently authentic Feb. 22 email.

“Last one to leave turn out the lights and wipe the server,” he writes at the end of the message (which you may read in full here.)

In the email Henderson-James explains the subterfuge ACORN will use to lead Americans to believe ACORN is breaking apart.

“It is definitely true that over the next week or so we should see a dozen or more organizations launched on the state level by staff who used to work for ACORN and leaders who developed their skills as ACORN members. These are not just simple name changes, but reimaginings of how best to organize low and moderate income constitiuencies [sic] without any of the legal problems and funding issues dogging ACORN, not to mention the brand damage.”

It is a “tactically smart…reaction to the global situation that helps the work of building power for poor people to continue,” writes Henderson-James, an ACORN employee since 1997.

The Saul Alinsky-inspired public relations hocus-pocus described by Henderson-James is consistent with earlier reports that ACORN is trying to pass off various state chapters as “new” groups. ACORN’s ruse is designed to keep tax dollars and foundation grants flowing into its coffers. With the fallout from the hidden camera videos last fall, congressional funding of ACORN’s election fraud and racketeering business is no longer guaranteed, so ACORN developed a plan that would allow the operation to keep going, albeit on a smaller scale.

ACORN veteran Marcel Reid told me in an interview yesterday that she wasn’t buying into ACORN leadership’s spin. Reid is a whistleblower who was expelled from ACORN’s national board in 2008 for asking too many uncomfortable questions about a million-dollar embezzlement perpetrated in 2000 by the brother of ACORN’s founder and covered up by management for eight years.

“The folding of ACORN isn’t happening because it’s simply going to restructure,” she said. “In the meantime they’ll give all of these new community organizations in the states an opportunity to flourish without ACORN’s legal baggage.”

At least three of these dummy nonprofit corporations that Henderson-James describes have surfaced so far this year. They are Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, New York Communities for Change, and New England United for Justice. All three groups operate out of ACORN offices. The president of New England United for Justice, Maude Hurd, just happens to be the 20-year national president of ACORN. (Massachusetts articles of incorporation available here)

The Henderson-James email to ACORN supporters also encourages recipients to help rewrite the history of the embattled group.

“[T]here will be a fight over the narrative of ACORN’s demise,” he writes. The other side wants “a narrative about the corruption of popular organizations and how they are simply vehicles for the personal enrichment and power fantasies of their top staff members while pushing public policies that destroy middle America.”

This argument must be fought, Henderson-James argues, because it “gives people pushing a pro-corporate agenda a way to tar progressives and even non-progressive Democrats running for office with the ACORN brush.”

Then comes the whining from ACORN’s cyber-warfare chief.

Henderson-James acknowledges that ACORN made mistakes, but claims it was primarily a victim of dirty tricks perpetrated by the political right. “[W]e were all up against a 24-hour propoganda [sic] channel,” he writes, in an apparent reference to the Fox News Channel, one of the few media outlets to closely follow the ACORN saga.

Progressives didn’t fight back hard enough “in a moment of extreme duress, orchestrated by propogand [sic] videos,” he complains.

The movement “stood by as ACORN got gutted, while we also handed the forces of pro-corporate politics a handy club to kick the shit out of anything that vaugely [sic] sounds progressive. And that comes with a license to go after the next group or groups that embody the progressive agenda. This went beyond ACORN. We were just a convienent [sic] target to make into a bogeyman. This was about everything progressives stood for. And when it came time to stand up, most of us didn’t.”

Marcel Reid, who also heads a reform group called ACORN 8, told me ACORN’s setbacks are the fault of the left, not the right. Progressives should have come forward to help fix ACORN, but they didn’t.

“We stood up in the organization to straighten out its problems before they got to this point,” she said. “When they could have stood up to save it they sat down.”

“It’s the left’s fault because when it was time for them to police themselves they would not do it. The left didn’t stand up to purge itself when it could have. They can’t blame the right when they didn’t clean up their own house.”

In the email Henderson-James also complains that federal lawmakers and the mainstream media didn’t do enough to help ACORN, bemoaning “the breathtaking swiftness with which the Congress condemned us on the basis of what have been clearly shown by real journalists to be nothing but the purest propaganda [sic].”

Left-wingers, he writes, now have to promote a narrative “that says the attacks on ACORN were part of a concerted attempt to demobilize key progressive constituencies because they banded together to take power and threaten the status quo and that the legacy of ACORN deserves that regular people stand up for themselves and organize to take power, to pass public policies that create an America we all want to live in. One in which organizing is about average people making their lives and their communities and their workplaces better.”

This left-wing spin “will be contested for a bit and you can be sure that it will be marked by serious right-wing triumphalism,” he predicts. “Our side needs to make sure our narrative wins, using the kind of pushback that’s taken place recently around [undercover video maker James] O’Keefe.”

“That’s been beautiful,” Henderson-James coos.

(originally posted at BigGovernment)

I have an op-ed in today’s Washington Times.

It begins:

Growing up, I always thought Jesus’ admonition in the Book of Matthew, “The poor you will always have with you,” wasn’t meant to be taken literally as a directive to ignore the poor, but that’s exactly what a prominent Roman Catholic charity believes.

As this Sunday’s “second collection” approaches, most Catholics planning to donate to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development probably think their money will be used to help the poor by funding soup kitchens and homeless shelters. Well, the joke’s on them. CCHD has never provided direct relief to the poor. That’s not its purpose.

It is an extreme left-wing political organization created to feed and foster radical groups like ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Most Catholics are blissfully unaware of its true mission, though it says right on its Web site that it aims to support “organized groups of white and minority poor to develop economic strength and political power.” [...]

Both ACORN and CCHD were inspired by radical agitator Saul Alinsky, the Marxist Machiavelli who dedicated his activism opus, “Rules for Radicals,” to Lucifer, whom he called “the first radical.” The late Mr. Alinsky developed the concept of “community organizing” in order to mobilize poor neighborhoods to make demands, long and loud, on public officials and the private sector.

CCHD gives generously to the Industrial Areas Foundation, which Mr. Alinsky himself founded, and to similar leftist groups including the Gamaliel Foundation, People Improving Communities Through Organizing (PICO), and Direct Action and Research Training Institute (DART). [...]

Ralph McCloud, director of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD)

* * * * *

Earlier today Ralph McCloud, director of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), offered an eloquent but unconvincing defense of the radical charity he works for. He provided the commentary at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Fall General Assembly in Baltimore. Listen to the platitude-heavy discussion about the charity that finally cut off ACORN last year here.

An amusing exchange from the USCCB streaming video from the event today that sounded strangely like a PBS telethon:

PRIEST: You know that old axiom: Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime. As I read more and more about CCHD it’s about teaching fishing and it seems like that’s part of where these monies go, that our own generosity helps others to sustain themselves and also to contribute to the life of society as well, right?

MCCLOUD: Sure. I would take it even a step further in that it’s kind of like teaching an individual to fish but in addition teaching an entire community to fish where they can be supportive of one another.

That’s not quite the way I see CCHD. The charity only reluctantly cut off ACORN last year and continues to fund the equally radical community organizing group Industrial Areas Foundation that was founded by Saul Alinsky himself. It also funds PICO, DART, and the Gamaliel Foundation.

CCHD funds groups that teach a man to steal another man’s fish so that he will survive at the expense of the other man for life.

That’s “social justice.” That’s what CCHD believes in.