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.
Barbara F. Hollingworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor.
