ACORN 8 Balls! - Meet the Acorn Advisory Board!

Meet Your Acorn All stars!


. John Podesta, President and CEO, Center for American Progress
• Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Board Member, RFK Foundation, former MD Lt. Governor
• Andrew Stern, International President, Service Employees International Union
• Henry Cisneros, Executive Chairman, Cityview
• John Banks, Vice President of Government Relations Con Ed
• Eric Eve, Senior VP of Global Consumer Group, Community Relations, Citigroup
• Harvey Hirschfeld, President, Lawcash
• Dave Beckwith, Executive Director, Needmor Fund

John Podesta is the Bubba Clinton Vet who was tasked with the waterfall of pardons by Bubba and keeping a lid on the UFOs - I imagine we will learn more about the Spacemen in Rosewell than the synergy between SEIU/ACORN and the DNC.

Kathleen Kennedy -Townsend, The Old Lion's Niece and a Kennedy - touch football, sailing, PT Boat accidents, water hazards, annulments and the poor and down-trodden.

Andy Stern . . not enough space here . . .the man who is killing organized labor and the American Middle Class. Andy will try and muzzle Bertha Lewis before she shoots her mouth off on Fox Sunday.

Henry Cisneros was Bubba's running-with-britches-down mate in the early Clinton White House Housing and Urban Development who paid off one of his skirts, lied to G, did a guilty plea and pardoned by Bubba and John Podesta.

John Banks - Up and Coming New York Government Relations fizer with MTA and Con Ed. Traffic and lights.

Eric Eve another Clintonista who found a home with CITI Group who made out handsomely on bad loans and Federal Bailouts!

Harvey Hirschfeld is Pay-to-Play Player in the Easy Loan Get Fed Money Finance World now with Litigation Lawyers CashLaw!

Dave Beckwith is an AllStar Community Organizer Like Jesus Was! Like Jesus, Dave plays to win Dig it!" Unless the organization wins concrete, measurable benefits for those who participate, it will not last long. The groups that content themselves with holding endless meetings and plod along involving everyone in discussions that never lead to action or to victory are doomed to shrink into nothing. People want to see results. That's why they get involved. There is a theory (isn't there always?) that says that folks join up if two things are true. First, they must see a potential for either benefit or harm to themselves if the group succeeds or fails. Second, they must see that their personal involvement has an impact on the whole effort. This makes sense to me. Winning is critical, but if the group's going to win whether I get involved or not - if my personal involvement is not critical - then I can stay home and watch TV."

Better stick to MSNBC Dave, because everywhere else ACORN and your work with them ain't looking too good.

Why Skilled and Industrial Trades Languish at 12-19% UnEmployment - Read Joel Kotkin's Real Teachable Moment

My family is comprised of very skilled trades workers ( men and women) who voted for Barack Obama. I am the only Hickey to back McCain. I did so because I did not and do not believe that Barack Obama was up to the job as President and that he had some very dicey people pouring poisonous ideas into his very willing ears.

I am a school teacher. I read and my relations work with their hands, heads and hearts. They are stationary engineers, electricians, carpenters, plumbers and pipefitters. Even the Hickey's( Brennans, Walshs, Winters, & etc.)with law degrees hold union cards.

When I work with tools bad things happen - to me and others. Hence, there is an ideological Mason/Dixon line drawn between me and my kin folk born of an inability and avoidance of genuine work on my part.

Hickeys are union people. I am as well - real unions. Politically, the skilled trades unions have historically made pacts with the devil in order to advance the prospects for workers to live with dignity and in safety.

In last forty years, politics betrayed the workers more than any Pinkerton agent or capitalist goon. Political Action Cadres (PACs) masquerading as Labor have co-opted Labor with sheer numbers.

Skilled Trades and Industrial Trades became enthralled by and to tax-payer salaried unions most notably Services Employee International Union (SEIU) which dictates policy to the National Democratic Committee ( Howard Dean) and the White House ( President Obama).

Our economic turmoil is not some glitch, but a planned operation - witness the recent remarks on Health Care by the daffy dimwitted Rep. Jan Schakowsky -

SCHAKOWSKY: “I know many of you here today are single payer advocates and so am I … and those of us who are pushing for a public health insurance don’t disagree with this goal. This is not a principled fight. This is a fight about strategy for getting there and I believe we will.” ( Emphasis my own -You got that right, Jan.)

Single payer ( The Government) Health Reform is the stated end game.

Likewise, One Big Union is the end game for SEIU. Skilled Trades will lose all autonomy and influence, as the jobs continue to disappear. Joel Kotkin a Social Demographer who trained under Michael Harrington and learned the dangers of creeping socialism has long been a critic of the economics of modern Progressives.

His article in Politico is a must read for all Labor People. Click my post title for the full article. Here is a bit of it.

This is Kotkin's genuine teachable moment. Real Labor might learn something.

As a recent New America Foundation report makes clear, precious little has gone to the productive side of the economy that determines the country’s competitiveness and creates many high-paying blue-collar jobs. Infrastructure, a critical component of any productivity-enhancing strategy, has accounted for barely 10 percent of the package.


The results have not been pretty for the productive sectors of the economy. Construction workers now have higher than 19 percent unemployment; jobs in this sector have fallen during the past year in 333 out of 352 metropolitan areas, with more than 200 plunging by double digits. Meanwhile, the hard-pressed manufacturing sector suffers more than 12 percent unemployment.


Why this disinclination to fund the tangible parts of the economy? One reason may be that those working in construction and manufacturing — both blue-collar workers and white-collar professionals — do not wield the same influence in this law review administration as college professors, Service Employees International Union-organized workers or unionized teachers.


One also senses that some militant environmentalists in the administration may be less than enthusiastic about anything associated with the entire carbon-creating part of the economy. Certainly, new factories, natural gas facilities, roads, ports and waterways don’t fit the professed passion of the president’s own science adviser, John Holdren, for the gradual “de-development” of the U.S. and other advanced economies.

Pages12 » Back to top Back to top

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25636.html#ixzz0MqRrJpSt

SEIU helps Obama and really Wants the Wealth Spread Around

"We're ready to take the offense for organized labor. It's time we have a President who didn't choke saying the word 'union.' We need to strengthen our unions by letting them do what they do best --- organize our workers. If a majority of workers want a union, they should get a union. It's that simple. We need to stand up to the business lobby that's been getting their friends in Congress and in the White House to block card check. That's why I was one of the leaders fighting to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. That's why I'm fighting for it in the Senate. And that's why we'll make it the law of the land when I'm President."
Barack Obama, Dubuque, IA, November 13, 2007

I am conflicted. American Labor created the American Middle Class through the sacrifices made by Union Men and Women and Colle ctive Bargaining. American Labor is now identified as the sole property of SEIU's Andy Stern. The Media did that.
The Media helped create Andy Stern. Andy Stern is a Marxist who leads the largest union of no skill and low skill workers who bu sheer force of their numbers intimidate politicians. Labor helpe no skill and low skill workers on to a path that gave them the skills to fight their way into the Middle Class.

The Middle Class is the home of American labor - skilled tradesmen. That home is being assaulted by SEIU. SEIU needs Barack Obama in the White House.

Click my post title -SEIU and ACORN are all over Indiana!

Services Employee Internation Union (SEIU) ignores Collective Bargaining practices, which American Labor developed to give build the American Middle Class. SEIU mobilizes no-skill and low skill workers by the thousands to intimidate, agitate and effect legislation that Redistribute Wealth. SEIU is now identified in the American Media as Labor.

Here is SEIU in its own words:

SEIU History
» In 1921, members of seven small janitor unions dared to dream they could build their strength by forming a single organization, the Building Service Employees International Union. The BSEIU, a union of mostly immigrant workers chartered by the then-AFL, changed its name to Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in 1968. Chicago-based Local 1, SEIU's first local union, is still organizing janitors and security officers today.


» In the years during and following the Great Depression, the union was the first in the country to help other service workers like hospital caregivers and public employees unite together in a union, paving the way for the modern SEIU's three core industries: property and public services, and health care. In 1968, the union was renamed the Service Employees International Union to reflect its membership and key sectors.


» SEIU's membership has grown from 625,000 in 1980 to more than 1.8 million today. At a time when the majority of organized labor was shrinking, SEIU was aggressively uniting workers' strength - largely in the fast-growing service industries. In 2000, SEIU had united 1.4 million members, to became the largest and fastest growing union in North America.


» SEIU represents more immigrants than any other union, and its membership is among the most diverse in the labor movement. Since President Andy Stern took office 1996, over 900,000 workers have united with SEIU, many of them women and people of color. Also that year, SEIU officers also committed to diversify the union's leadership to reflect the membership, and today, more than 50 percent of SEIU members are in local unions led by a woman or person of color.


» Following the 2004 presidential elections, SEIU launched a widely publicized dialogue to help rebuild the labor movement following several decades of decline. Despite massive economic changes in our world today, the strategies, structure, and priorities of the AFL-CIO, and many unions, haven't changed much since the federation was founded 50 years ago - prompting SEIU and four major unions to disaffiliate from the AFL-CIO in the summer of 2005 and build something stronger to help unite the 90 percent of workers who have no union. ( emphasis my own)

» At a historic founding convention in St. Louis on September 27, 2005, SEIU, along with 6 other unions representing 5.5 million workers--the Teamsters, UNITE HERE, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Laborers, the Carpenters and the United Farm Workers--formed the Change to Win Federation to develop joint strategic organizing campaigns to help ensure that workers, not just executives and stockholders, benefit from today's global economy. With a key focus to unite non-union workers by industry, the new federation aims to empower working people in this country so that they can build the strength to make their voices heard in their jobs, their communities, and in Washington. The delegates elected SEIU's Anna Burger as CTW federation chair - making her the first woman in U.S. history to ever head a labor federation.

Here is What SEIU is all about:
"We're going to build the strongest grassroots political voice in North America," Stern told more than 3,000 SEIU delegates in his June 2004 convention address.



But Stern's ideological aim has nothing to do with empowering workers. On the contrary, he has pursued a policy of consolidating small SEIU-affiliated unions into larger unions, and of giving the national union total control over its locals, which are now to be prohibited from even having their own logo and symbols. All power and image is to be subsumed under the purple and gold logo of national SEIU and its supreme boss, Andrew Stern. Stern's current organizing approach, in fact, is to bypass workers altogether.



SEIU and its political, media and leftwing activist allies conspire to attack a company directly with what they call "Corporate Campaigns" or the "death of a thousand cuts." This cabal of attackers harasses and disrupts company activities, sends vicious emails and letters to stockholders, intimidates customers, stalks and frightens employees, files baseless lawsuits, plants false stories with media allies to smear the company's reputation, and uses hundreds of other tactics to injure the targeted company in every way they can imagine.



The aim of this concerted swarming attack is to bully and pressure a targeted company into signing an agreement making SEIU the representative of its employees. When this happens, employees who might have voted "No" to SEIU representation in an election will get no vote at all. The union yoke is simply locked around each worker's neck - and paycheck. SEIU prefers this because, in a large percentage of past cases, workers who were given a choice voted against joining this thug union.



"He ticked off a number of reasons why union elections have their drawbacks," Chicago Tribune reporter Stephen Franklin wrote in a story headlined "Democracy Dream Still Eludes Union" after interviewing SEIU President Stern a few years ago. "They politicize the union's staff, they are costly, they are distracting from the union's business…. 'It is hard to make the argument that unions with direct elections better represent their members,' said Stern, whose membership takes in a large number of low-wage hospital workers, janitors and factory help."



"Some SEIU staff say straight up, 'This isn't a workers' organization. If it was left to the workers there wouldn't be an organization,'" wrote labor reporter JoAnn Wypijewski in October 2003 in the magazine CounterPunch. She is former Managing Editor of The Nation.



In its arrogance, organized labor now demands that workers should not be permitted any say in how their dues may be spent on politics. And the current SEIU approach is to deny workers any vote whatsoever on whether or not they must join this union, and no control over the local conglomerated SEIU union to which they must be members. Stern and the national union control everything. This is what Stern, blind to its irony, describes as "Union Democracy."



SEIU perfectly embodies the values of the New Labor Movement in America. To understand what it is, consider this 1997 analysis by Los Angeles Democrat, longtime fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, activist and author Joel Kotkin: "The public-sector unions have pushed the entire labor movement to the left. The Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, has embraced organizations with a New Left origin, such as ACORN and Cleveland's Nine to Five, and has even set up its own gay and lesbian caucus. 'Most of the radicals who went into labor ended up in the public employee unions,' observes one labor official."



"The rise of these unions led to the elevation of SEIU's boss, John Sweeney, to head of the labor federation," wrote Kotkin. "No George Meaney-style bread-and-butter unionist, Sweeney is an advocate of European-style democratic socialism. He has opened the AFL-CIO to participation by delegates openly linked to the Communist Party, which enthusiastically backed his ascent. The U.S. Communist Party says it is now 'in complete accord' with the AFL-CIO's program. 'The radical shift in both leadership and policy is a very positive, even historic change,' wrote CPUSA National Chairman Gus Hall in 1996 after the AFL-CIO convention. That alone is enough to send shivers down the spines of many labor activists, particularly those old enough to remember the earlier struggles against the totalitarian left. 'All those people we thought we got rid of 40 years ago are back in there,' complains one Detroit area labor lawyer close to the United Auto Workers. 'It's like the 1930s all over again.'"



Some SEIU activists boast that they are the "new CIO," referring to the radical, class-warfare Congress of Industrial Organizations before Walter Reuther purged it of its most toxic Communist leaders as a condition of merging with the more moderate, boost-worker-wages-oriented American Federation of Labor to create the AFL-CIO in 1955. Today's SEIU "leaders tend to be radical, even socialist," wrote Ryan Lizza, Associate Editor of The New Republic in 2003.



Such leftwing ideology was on display at the June 2004 SEIU convention, whose agendas moved far beyond workplace-and-wages issues by passing a resolution calling for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. SEIU and AFSCME contributed $2.6 million of their members' dues to Democrat Howard Dean's quixotic, losing anti-war run for the Iowa presidential caucuses, precisely because he was more passionately radical than the more reliable organized labor sock puppet, Rep. Dick Gephardt. (Many observers have likened Dean in that regard to SEIU President Stern.)



This New Labor movement is no longer focused just on workaday concerns. Many of its leaders are now 1960s radicals like Stern. SEIU's allies in waging mass attacks on targeted companies are not only politicians, the media and trial lawyers, but also leftwing environmental, health and community activist groups. John Sweeney marched arm-in-arm with such activists in protest against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle while radicals around him smashed store windows.



But although the SEIU objects to importing goods from international companies, it supports importing workers via easy immigration and amnesty for illegal aliens. One reason is that SEIU finds it easy to organize low-income, low-education workers who do not talk back to or question their SEIU union bosses. Another potential reason, as the Communist Party USA has proposed, is that Marxist-style revolution requires a disaffected proletariat, but American workers are generally too satisfied to function as this revolutionary class. The CPUSA answer: import poor immigrants, who, with proper union brainwashing, can become the soon-to-be-discontented proletariat that the U.S. has not produced in its own native population.



As Ben Johnson reported in FrontPageMagazine.com on March 2, 2004, SEIU's Andy Stern is on the Executive Committee of the Democratic Party auxiliary America Coming Together (ACT), along with the head of the Sierra Club and other radicals, ACT being funded by international money-manipulator George Soros.

John McCain: Obamanomics by SEIU's Andy Stern

SEIU is a leftist troika that poses as a labor union. SEIU is run by a Leftist Social Worker whose 1960's radicalism found a profitable and powerful home in a labor union that expands membership numbers, intimidates gutless politicians, and operates the most massive redistribution of wealth scam in America. 1-2-3- that's how you dance to a troika -1. Expand 2.Intimidate 3. Redistribute Wealth!

Taking over the weak and corrupt janitors union in Chicago in the 1970's, Andy Stern and fellow University of Pennsylvannia School Social Work colleague Anna Burger help radicalize and consolidate locals of building janitors, bringing thousands of unskilled to low skilled health care industry workers, security guard locals, menial office task workers and others into a political intimidation political action force.

Using a very complicit and lazy news media, Andy Stern deftly crafted a cult of personality unparalleled since Mao. The Purple Gang of hundreds of thousands of low-skill to no skill workers intimidated their way into public service employees and nearly match AFCME in tax-payer salaried workers. If you are somewhat taken aback by my analysis of the threat that I see from SEIU, please do take a look at Andy Stern's frequent trips to Red China and read Newsweeks's glwoing accounts of Stern's agenda to help one of the most oppresive regimes on the planet 'control their workers.' Take a look at Andy Stern's similar control that he exercises over local SEIU 'thought criminals.' Andy gets great PR from the press and the other mediums, but occasionally the real story gets out.

Like this one:

Sal Rosselli had been hardened by nearly three decades of front-line unionism. Time and again he staged insurgent organizing drives and do-or-die strikes, staring down major corporations. Now he blinked away tears as he huddled with supporters in his Oakland headquarters, a sooty-windowed, bunker-like building strewn with leaflets and picket signs, a place suddenly under siege.

Rosselli was describing his latest battle, his toughest ever: a face-off against a comrade in struggle, Andrew Stern, whom many view as the most powerful labor leader in America.

The two are locked in a nasty, often personal fight over how to make the nation's fastest-growing union -- 1.9 million members -- even bigger. Stern, its president, has sought more common ground with employers as a means to unionize entire industries. Rosselli believes building membership first requires getting the best deal for workers already under labor's tent.

"If you stick your head up, if you question what he's doing, you'll get whacked," said Rosselli, 58, head of the second-largest California chapter of Stern's union.

Wiping his eyes, he insisted that Stern, through a trusteeship, is determined to oust him from his elected post as part of a long push to centralize authority.

Stern and his allies in the Service Employees International Union dismiss the allegations and downplay the significance of the rift.

"It's not open warfare, it's a debate," said Pennsylvania union official Thomas De Bruin.

"It's David and Goliath," Rosselli said.

http://theunionnews.blogspot.com/2008/06/seiu-andy-stern-is-issue.html

SEIU was solidly behind John Edwards. Edwards tanked. SEIU is solidly behind Obama.

Anna Burger sits on Obama's Economic Advisory Board. A radical Marxist is telling Obam how to shape America's economic path.

Obama like Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick from whom Obama crafts many of his rhetorical hits in the media, depends upon Andy and SEIU.

Andy Stern is making sure that Race is the pivot point of Obama's Campaign.

Leaders of the AFL-CIO met this week in Chicago to decide how to deploy some 250,000 volunteers and more than $250 million for its grass-roots campaign on behalf of Obama and 500 Democratic candidates vying for other posts.

The fast-growing Service Employees International Union, which has successfully organized lower-wage workers, has $85 million to spend. The AFL-CIO said it has set aside its rivalry with the SEIU and other unions that left to form their own labor federation in 2005.

CONFRONT RACISM

Unions pride themselves on their racial diversity and plan to confront members about any biases they have.

"You go straight at our people and talk about the difference between McCain and Obama and the fact that race could be an issue -- you go straight at it," said Gerald McEntee, head of the AFL-CIO's political committee.

"Once people get in the booth, if they won't vote for a black man ...," he said with a shrug. Continued...

If you do not vote for Obama, You are a racist. Stalinist and simple. That's Andy Stern and all who do his bidding.

American Labor was built upon the principles of the right to work, the right to organize, the right to engage in collective bargaining and the right to strike for wages and benefits. American Labor made the American Standard of Living and the Middle Class. Unions taughtthe unskilled skills - moved the poor into the middle class. SEIU uses the poor and the unskilled to eliminate the American Middle Class.

The more unskilled and impoverished Americans, the more powerful Andy Stern's SEIU becomes.

Andy Stern's SEIU is for redistribution of wealth, global identification over American values, salaries mandated by legislation and the elimination of the American Middle Class.

Obama swims in Andy Stern's Tank.

John McCain is on the other side of Andy Stern.