The Founders as Nazis: that’s what the leftists who plan to occupy Wall Street tomorrow think of the American experiment

ACORN founder Wade Rathke wrote of an “anti-banking jihad” and SEIU operative Stephen Lerner promised to “bring down the stock market”

Radical Rage: Marxist Mob Plans to Occupy Wall Street

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Posted By Matthew Vadum
September 16, 2011

The artwork associated with a political movement says a lot about that movement.
The US Day of Rage’s Twitter feed features a photo of a defaced ten-dollar bill. Someone has added black hair and a Hitler moustache to Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, whom Congress honored in 1999 as “the man who more than any other designed the Government of the United States.”

The Founders as Nazis: that’s what the leftists who plan to occupy Wall Street tomorrow think of the American experiment. It’s not as if the media-savvy organizers of the US Day of Rage don’t understand the significance of the Founders. The event’s website constantly invokes the name of Publius, the pseudonym that Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay shared as they wrote The Federalist Papers.

Organizers of the event swear up and down that the mass protest will be nonviolent in nature. This raises the question of why they named their event after the original “Days of Rage” that took place in Chicago in 1969. That tumultuous year, members of what was later to become known as the Weather Underground provoked four days of riots and demonstrations against The System.

The September 17 protest comes months after ACORN founder Wade Rathke wrote of an “anti-banking jihad” and SEIU operative Stephen Lerner promised to “bring down the stock market” through a campaign of disruption. Sociologist Abby Scher said she was bullish on the potential of Lerner’s plan to cause massive upheaval. “As Frances Fox Piven and [Richard] Cloward taught us … poor peoples’ movements are successful when they create conditions of ungovernability. And then you win victories.”

It’s not entirely clear what will transpire in Lower Manhattan, but don’t believe US Day of Rage organizers when they say their event will not turn violent. They claim they are “fighting a war for the soul of our nation, its people.”

At the event Saturday, organizers vow to conduct a “horizontal mesh protest” by occupying public spaces on Wall Street itself and throughout the “entire island of Manhattan.”
Echoing radical lawyer William Kunstler’s infamous observation that the police can be “an army of occupation,” the US Day of Rage website makes it clear that members of the New York Police Department are the enemy. “Citizens have been prevented from exercising their right to peaceable assembly in New York City because the force established to serve and protect civil society, the NYPD, has become a counter-intel paramilitary force.”

At the Manhattan-wide protest, which will be accompanied by companion protests in Portland, OR, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin, Texas, legal observers from the pro-communist National Lawyers Guild will be available.

The guild helpfully advises would-be demonstrators not to cooperate with members of the NYPD’s intelligence division or with any police officers. Participants should arrive “with legal contact information written on your wrist or ankle; there is no guarantee that information written on paper will be accessible in the event of arrest.”

According to Adbusters, the Noam Chomsky-friendly magazine that regards capitalism as a disease and consumer advertising as mental pollution, 20,000 radicals, union members, and others are expected to occupy Wall Street. “Hacktivists,” who use computers and computer networks as a means of protest to promote political ends, are also expected to participate tomorrow.

Adbusters Media Foundation of Vancouver, Canada, the nonprofit behind the “anti-consumerist” magazine, has received funding from organizations associated with radical philanthropist George Soros’s Democracy Alliance, a donor collaborative that wants to push America even farther left. The foundation has received $176,500 since 2001 from the Glaser Progress Foundation, which was created by Alliance member Rob Glaser. Glaser heads the online multimedia company RealNetworks.

The Adbusters Media Foundation has also taken in $309,773 from the Tides Foundation since 2001. Tides was created by Drummond Pike, a close friend of ACORN founder Wade Rathke. When it was revealed in 2008 that Rathke’s brother Dale had embezzled nearly a million dollars from ACORN, Pike tried to squelch the scandal by writing a six-figure check to cover the perpetrator’s remaining restitution payments.

Tomorrow’s exercise in Marxist mobocracy is just one of many scheduled nationwide in coming months. George Goehl, executive director of Chicago-based National People’s Action, laid out the Left’s street protest strategy last year. He said “the banking crisis” is “the next big thing” and “the way to build a big economic justice movement in this country.”

The crisis presents “a once in a lifetime opportunity as progressives to engage millions of Americans in a big conversation around serious economic restructuring,” he said, “not around eking out some victories around the margins, not about making life a little less worse for people, but about big time transformative change.”

These radicals should be taken at their word.

The September 17 demonstration is one of many planned in coming months by the activist Left. The October 2011 Coalition is planning to occupy Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., starting on October 6 “if any U.S. troops, contractors, or mercenaries remain in Afghanistan.” Protesters will “resist the corporate machine” by taking over the area “to demand that America’s resources be invested in human needs and environmental protection instead of war and exploitation.”
The group said its intention is to make the plaza one block away from the White House “our Tahrir Square, Cairo.” The protest is modeled after the demonstrations that brought down the Egyptian government in February. The coalition’s leader, former ACORN spokesman David Swanson, said supporters will “shut down offices, buildings, streets, hallways, to nonviolently, strictly nonviolently resist what our government is doing.” Of course, it is unclear how the mighty U.S. government could be shut down without the use of violence.

Let’s hope we don’t find out.