Say Anything Blog

Here’s an interesting bit of reporting from the San Francisco Examiner.

Corporate and political officials who defy workplace and community organizers risk being made objects of scorn by bright red-clad protestors in public and private, courtesy of an activist union and its close allies in the nation’s most controversial liberal non-profit advocacy group.
It’s officially called the “Muscle for Money” program within the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) where it was started, and unofficially by the same name among activists of Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN).
ACORN is under investigation in at least 14 states over voter registration fraud allegations stemming from the 2008 presidential campaign. The group endorsed President Barack Obama, despite federal laws barring partisan political activities by tax-exempt groups.

Muscle for Money includes multiple techniques for creating highly aggressive, organized efforts both to pressure businesses and officials to support the activists’ agenda or to discredit and intimidate opponents of their agenda, according to present and former ACORN members.
SEIU has funded Muscle for Money activities in the past and continues to finance corporate shakedown efforts across the country as part of this program.  SEIU locals 100 and 880 have been identified as allied organizations on ACORN’s web site.
That information has since been removed from the ACORN web site, but U.S. Department of Labor LM-2 financial disclosure forms show over $600,000 in transactions between these same locals and ACORN operations in recent years.

[...]

Some of the more prominent Muscle for Money targets to date have included the Carlyle Group, Sherwin-Williams, H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, Liberty Tax and Money Mart, according to Anita Moncrief, a former ACORN employee and now an ACORN 8 member.
“The idea is to go to private homes where wives and children are present and stand outside so the family members of a company official could be harassed and subjected to intimidation,” said MonCrief. “Protestors would also go to company functions like banquets where they would be as disruptive as possible.”

Isn’t that nice. If you do something to piss off the SEIU, ACORN thugs will show up at your house to intimidate your wife and children.

The program’s biggest score came against H&R Block, MonCrief said. The company was targeted beginning in January 2004 when ACORN promised demonstrations by its members in front of H&R Block offices protesting “overpriced tax refund loans” in at least 30 cities.
Eventually, H&R Block agreed to pay for the establishment of tax centers for the benefit of ACORN officials and members in exchange for stopping the protests, MonCrief said. H&R Block did not respond to an Examiner request for comment.

So all it takes to make the thuggery stop is a sweet deal for ACORN or SEIU big shots.

Reid, who now chairs ACORN 8, said she became disillusioned with the program when the shakedown campaign targeted Sherwin Williams four years ago. She said an estimated 400 ACORN members dressed in red shirts stormed into a Sherwin Williams meeting held at the Renaissance Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio.
“The people in that room were absolutely terrified and I didn’t realize it was going to be like this,” Reid said. “These tactics were really heavy, many of us became disillusioned. The idea is to isolate the target so they don’t have time to build up sentiment with neighbors and co-workers. We would intrude into a person’s social life.”

There’s more

ACORN’s muscling for money is nothing new
ACORN has used threats and intimidation to advance its agenda since its founding in 1970 by Wade Rathke, who adapted the tactics he learned as a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society - a group former New Leftist David Horowitz describes as “the first terrorist political cult.”

In 1969, Rathke started a Massachusetts chapter of the militant Welfare Rights Organization founded by George Wiley. As Horowitz explains in his book, “The Shadow Party,” Wiley used the Cloward-Piven strategy (named for left-wing Columbia University sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven) to purposely overwhelm New York’s welfare system and thereby encourage either increased benefits or social upheaval.

Rathke was later arrested for incitement to riot in Springfield, Mass. when the welfare recipients he led in a demonstration turned into a violent rock- and bottle -throwing mob.

ACORN’s so-called “muscle for money” strategy extorts “donations” from targeted government and corporate officials by offering them Mafia-like protection from protests by the group’s own paid thugs, many of them convicted felons. ACORN has also blocked bank mergers until the targeted financial institutions agreed to change their lending policies to ACORN’s satisfaction.

Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH successfully utilized a similar approach by threatening boycotts and discrimination lawsuits to shake down major Fortune 500 companies. ACORN activists took Jackson’s successful strategy a step further by physically blocking the entrances to banks that refused to make sub-prime loans.

ACORN succeeded in ???? in blocking a House Banking subcommittee investigating proposed changes to the Community Reinvestment Act - legislation that would ultimately trigger the collapse of the housing market in 2008.

Hundreds of ACORN members swarmed into the Washington Hilton in 1995, grabbing the microphone and forcing then- House Speaker Newt Gingrich to cancel his planned speech. Two years later, they pushed over a metal detector and prevented Chicago aldermen from leaving a closed session of the City Council.

And a bus full of profanity-chanting ACORN members targeted the private home of then Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley, who complained that the protesters badly frightened his wife and children, during their “living wage” campaign.

In her book on ACORN entitled “Organizing Urban America,” Rutgers political scientist Heidi Swarts called the group “oppositional outlaws” and “militants unafraid to confront the powers that be… a solitary vanguard of principled leftists…the only truly radical community organization.”

If “militants” and “outlaws” is how a sympathetic academic describes ACORN members, there can be little doubt that the group scrupulously follows the intimidation tactics outlined by Saul Alinsky in his 1971 book “Rules for Radicals” to force business and political leaders to do its bidding.

In “The Shadow Party,” Horowitz writes that sociologists at the University of Chicago, where Alinsky got a master’s degree in criminality, “defended and romanticized gangsters as victims of social injustice. Alinsky went further, pursuing actual alliances with mobsters…[even] “marrying the daughter of a prominent Chicago bootlegger.”

In a 2003 article, National Housing Institute board members and ACORN apologists John Atlas and Peter Dreier said ACORN “is not shy about using the in-your-face tactics” because “public officials who decry ACORN’s tactics wind up agreeing with its agenda - or at least negotiating with its leaders to forge compromises.”

In other words, intimidation gets results.

ACORN’s radical goals to transform the U.S. into a Marxist utopia have not changed in the four decades since Alinsky wrote: “The means-and-ends moralists, constantly obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the Have-Nots against the Haves, should search themselves as to their real political position. In fact, they are passive—but real—allies of the HavesÉ The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.”

Translation: Anything goes for those hoping to topple the political and economic system of a nation that has created more wealth and eliminated more poverty than any other in the history of mankind. Which makes their “muscle for money” intimidation tactics not only justified in ACORN’s eyes, but a necessary and even moral means to achieve their desired political ends.

And…

Liberty Tax CEO recalls ACORN’s “Mongolian Horde”
Red-clad protestors besieged Liberty Tax headquarters in 2005 when the company refused to comply with demands by the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN), according to the company founder and chief executive officer.

Demonstrations against the Virginia Beach-based firm were part of a Muscle for Money campaign funded by the Services Employees International Union (SEIU) against mortgage loans ACORN viewed as being too costly for low-income people.

After Jackson Hewitt and H&R Block negotiated agreements with ACORN, the group’s attention shifted to Liberty Tax, said the company’s founder and CEO, John Hewitt. Harrassment in the ACORN campaign began with threatening letters and culminated with protests aimed against corporate offices throughout the country.

Hewitt recalled meeting Wade Rathke, ACORN’s founder and then its chief organizer. “He was like a hippie right out of the 1960s,” Hewitt said.

Liberty Tax agreed to make changes to give customers a better understanding of the mortgages they were receiving, but refused to go any further, Hewitt said.

“All of sudden, four bus loads of homeless people pull up in front of our headquarters here in Virginia Beach,” he said. “They came pouring into the building like a Mongolian horde. There was screaming and fighting. One employee was bitten and another was scratched. They both had to go to the emergency room.”

All of the protestors were arrested and Liberty Tax filed a complaint but it was later dropped because the legal expenses pursuing it would have required would easily have exceeded hundreds of thousands of dollars, Hewitt said.

Despite it all, Liberty Tax ultimately signed a long-term agreement to pay just under $50,000 a year to an ACORN affiliate, Hewitt said.