This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, December 30, 2016:
One of Saul Alinsky’s rules, perhaps the most vicious, is this:
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 Haves. The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means.
In other words, anything goes if the end merits it.
This is what has driven the Service Employees International Union – the SEIU – for years. Whatever means used to achieve a given end are acceptable. This is what Kenneth Gladney learned the hard way in 2009 when he was peaceably protesting ObamaCare. At a St. Louis town hall meeting, four SEIU thugs surrounded him and taught him the lesson:
They surrounded me. After the first two guys got me on the ground, they surrounded me and started kicking me in the head and in the back, and the knees and stuff like that.
And after it was done, I got up, kind of dazed, looking for my glasses.
And the one guy actually was coming at me again, and that’s when the police came and … started arresting [them].
The SIEU has adopted Alinsky’s rule in other ways. The union, the second largest with some 1.9 million members and an annual budget of $300 million extracted from them as dues, officially calls its fund-raising strategy “Muscle for Money.” Sammy Benoit uncovered it in 2009:
It’s officially called the “Muscle for Money” program within the Service Employees International Union where it was started, and unofficially by the same name among activists of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN)….
Muscle for Money includes multiple techniques for creating highly aggressive, organized efforts both to pressure business and [company] officials to support the activists’ agenda or to discredit and intimidate opponents of their agenda.
Anita Moncrief, a former ACORN employee, expanded on those “techniques”:
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.
Protestors would also go to company functions like banquets where they would be as disruptive as possible.
When SEIU targeted Sodexo, a food services and catering company, it learned that its tactics of intimidation didn’t work. Sodexo sued the SEIU in March 2011 under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), charging the union with “engaging in illegal tactics in its efforts to unionize [our] workers.” During discovery Sodexo provided the court with a copy of SEIU’s internal document, “Contract Campaign Manual” on “Pressuring the Employer.” Going way beyond picketing and strikes, the manual employed Alinsky-like tactics to intimidate the board members of companies resisting unionization.
The manual describes how “outside pressure can involve jeopardizing relationships between the employer and [its] lenders, investors, stockholders, customers, clients, patients, tenants, politicians, or others on whom the employer depends for funds.” The manual encourages “threaten[ing] the employer with costly action by government agencies or the courts.”
The purpose is to “damage an employer’s public image and ties with community leaders and organizations” and recommends going after the company’s officials personally:
It may be a violation of blackmail and extortion laws to threaten management officials with release of “dirt” about them if they don’t settle a contract.
But there are no laws against union members who are angry at their employer deciding to uncover and publicize factual information about individual managers.
The operations manual even defines “dirt”: charges such as “racism, exploitation of immigrants, or proposals that would take money out of the community for the benefits of distant stockholders.” Tactics recommended include “leafleting outside meetings where [those managers] are speaking, their homes, or events sponsored by [them] to make sure their friends, neighbors, and associates are aware of the controversy.”
For years SEIU has used its members’ dues to gain government influence. And for years it has worked. In 2008 it spent $28 million directly supporting Barack Obama’s campaign for president and a total approaching $70 million when including funds spent on television ads, paying workers $11 an hour to go door-to-door to get out the vote, and other campaign efforts.
Since 1990 the SEIU has invested nearly $250 million in those campaigns, with 99 percent of the money supporting Democrats. And it has paid off. The union helped Obama appoint pro-union Kathleen Sibelius to head up the Department of Health and Human Services, and pro-union Hilda Solis as Secretary of the Department of Labor. In addition, SEIU’s secretary-treasurer Anna Burger was appointed to Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.
Now comes the encouraging news that SEIU is cutting its $300 million annual budget by $100 million, according to an internal staff memo obtained by Bloomberg. Wrote the outfit’s head, Mary Kay Henry:
Because the far right will control all three branches of the federal government, we will face serious threats to the ability of working people to join together in unions.
These threats required us to make tough decisions that allow us to resist these attacks and to fight forward despite dramatically reduced resources….
[Accordingly we] must plan for a 30% reduction [in our operating budget by January 1, 2018].
Staff reductions begin on January 1, 2017.
Since SEIU is clearly part of the swamp that Trump has promised to drain, it’s comforting that Trump has already forced this gaggle of thugs and thieves to cut its budget, with his inauguration still three weeks away.
Sources:
Bloomberg: Fear of Trump Triggers Deep Spending Cuts by Nation’s Second-Largest Union
Washington Times: VERNUCCIO: Labor’s new strategy: Intimidation for dummies
Sammy Benoit: Obama, ACORN, and the SEIU? They Go Way Back (Muscle for Money strategy detailed here)
Sign up to to receive Bob's explosive articles in your inbox every week, and as a thank you we'll send a copy of his most popular eBook - completely free of charge!
How can you help stop the Democrat's latest gun grab? How is the Federal Reserve deceiving America today? What is the latest Obama administration scandal coverup? Sign up for the Light from the Right email newsletter and help stop the progressives' takeover of America!
Latest Comments