Anti-American radicals, not mere liberals, screamed at Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney at the Iowa State Fair, but you wouldn’t know that from most news reports.
The mainstream media fell down on the job by misreporting the name of the group whose obnoxious members (see CBS News video) badgered and heckled Romney on Thursday, shrieking and interrupting him as he attempted to share his views on reforming entitlement programs like Social Security.
Even though oceans of news articles on the Internet say a “liberal” group, the “Iowa Center for Community Involvement,” gave the former Massachusetts governor a hard time at a candidate forum, that group doesn’t appear to exist.
The error seems to stem from a mistake in an AP story by Philip Elliott. (In the old days, getting the name of a person or organization wrong was often a firing offense for reporters. Alas.)
In fact the group’s name is Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (Iowa CCI), according to Kathie Obradovich of the Des Moines Register. The group “is known for confrontational politics,” she notes.
That is an understatement.
That the ACORN-like Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement has been praised by Bill Moyers and labeled the “Most Valuable Grassroots Advocacy Group” of 2009 by John Nichols of The Nation magazine, tells you just about everything you need to know about the group. Nichols wrote approvingly of the group’s “in-your-face activism” and its frequent denunciations of banks.
Like ACORN, Iowa CCI blackmails lenders using the financial affirmative action law known as the Community Reinvestment Act. The organization brags about being the first group to use the law to “negotiate family farm loan agreements with banks.”
Iowa CCI is part of a larger Saul Alinsky-inspired organizing network called National People’s Action (NPA).
Although friendly reporters use the euphemisms liberal and progressive to describe NPA, Marxist is a more appropriate adjective. That’s because NPA makes no bones about its desire to overthrow what remains of America’s free enterprise system.
As I report in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, NPA executive director George Goehl says radicals shouldn’t let the financial crisis go to waste.
“The banking crisis is the next big thing,” Goehl said in June 2010 at the left-wing Campaign for America’s Future confab in Washington, D.C.
“The banking crisis is the way to build a big economic justice movement in this country,” Goehl said.
People are questioning capitalism. People are asking, Will this economy ever work for me or will it work for my kids? This is a once in a lifetime opportunity as progressives to engage millions of Americans in a big conversation around serious economic restructuring, 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.
If you build a platform for revolution, the angry masses will do the rest, Goehl said.
“If we create a space for people to come out they want to come out,” he said. “People are ready to move to the streets, some because they’re angry, some because they want justice right now, and some because they’re tired of hearing about the Tea Party coming out.”
NPA is working with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, and ACORN’s new front groups across America in an economic terrorism campaign aimed at the financial services sector.
You might remember the joint actions conducted by NPA and SEIU. The two organizations have been using angry mobs to invade banks and terrorize bank executives, such as Bank of America’s Greg Baer, in their homes.
It’s never enough with these people.
Unfortunately, this is just the beginning.
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