An interesting item appeared in Business Insider on 22 March. The headline reads: "CAUGHT ON TAPE: Former SEIU Official Reveals Secret Plan to Destroy JP Morgan, Crash the Stock Market, And Redistribute Wealth in America." From the article you can access an audio recording of a revolutionary organizer and rabble-rouser discussing various plans in a closed meeting at Pace University. The Business Insider explained they had not verified that the voice in the audio was that of Stephen Lerner, a former labor union official. However, it is clear that the voices on the audio are real, and they are revolutionary, and they wish to demolish the economic basis for prosperity in the United States.
For a long time revolutionaries have existed on our college campuses, supported by taxpayer money, perverting the minds of impressionable young people with poisonous ideas. None of this is news for those of us who have attended Left wing meetings on campus, or found ourselves outnumbered by anti-capitalist malcontents in university seminars or colloquiums. Some of us have long been aware of the ongoing existence of communist agitators and revolutionaries in our midst, who are unsatisfied with holding down professorships, who dream of overturning capitalism, of getting revenge on the rich, and of blood running in the streets.
Cancerous cells of our body politic have long been multiplying, unchecked. We feed them, clothe them, and stupidly send our children to be brainwashed by them. They have tunneled into government, community organizations, labor unions, corporations and the media. A little synopsis of the Pace University meeting should help you understand the way these people talk and think. Their objective is to overthrow the U.S. Constitution in order to effect a redistribution of the wealth in America, which would undoubtedly entail the killing of thousands if not millions of Americans. As seen during the Bolshevik Revolution, when you take people's property away you generally have to murder a significant percentage of them. This is supposedly done in the name of "justice," where the robbers depict themselves as Robin Hood.
Here is the Pace University transcript in a nutshell, from the lips of the agitator himself: "We need to figure out ... through direct action, [in a] much more concrete way, how ... to disrupt and create uncertainty for capital, for how corporations operate." He then discussed ways of driving the country's banks into insolvency. He suggested a "mortgage strike" where people refuse to make mortgage payments. "If we get half a million people to agree, it would literally cause a new financial crisis." Then the agitator (supposedly Lerner) listed four things that could "really upset Wall Street." These were, (1) using the Left's power in city and state government to strong-arm a renegotiation of their debt on the grounds that they are paying too much interest; and also, rewrite everyone's mortgages so everybody can stay in their homes; (2) a student debt strike, which would amount to a trillion dollar loss to financial institutions; (3) use the public employee unions to force item (1) on state and local governments; (4) to allege that the country's financial sector "stole $17 trillion," and accuse the banks of impoverishing the country. This would be something of a declaration of war in order to justify violence and intimidation against financiers.
In the audio we hear the revolutionary organizer saying, "Labor can't lead this right now...." The chief impetus, he said, must come from "community groups and other activists." If capitalism is on the verge of revolution, he noted, "we have to think about how we are building something that really has the capacity to disrupt how the system operates." Unions won't do it, because they will be held responsible by courts. What is needed, of course, is an angry mob. What do the financiers fear most? The revolutionary says: "They fear disruption, they fear uncertainty."
There is a plan, said the organizer. The plan is to target JP Morgan Chase, which was chosen because of its name, as a symbol of capitalism. Let us smash Wall Street, he suggests. Let us mobilize a large mob and hit the streets. We will use "civil disobedience and direct action" in the first week of May, in New York City. He even proposed to break into the JP Morgan shareholder meeting, which was supposedly moved out of New York. He said that attacks on shareholder meetings around the country might be a promising tactic. "I don't want to give any details because I don't know how many police agents are in the room," He said to a cackle of laughter.
The revolutionary agitation will take the following line: (1) That America is not broke because there is plenty of money; (2) they have the money, and we need to get it back; (3)"they are using [New York Mayor] Bloomberg and other people in government as the vehicle to try and destroy us." Logically, therefore, it is only natural for the revolutionary mob to destroy the financial center of the country, and loot the system. With economic breakdown will come chaos, and with chaos, larger and larger mobs. With the simple theme of "eat the rich," the agitators and communists will prevail. (Well, at least in their dreams).
As Lerner put it, the imagery they want is of "brave and heroic battles challenging the power of the giant corporations." The key, as one of Lerner's associates mentioned, was the fostering of "un-governability," which is a concept put forward by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward in an article in The Nation titled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty." Of course, it is utopian nonsense to imagine we can end poverty. Money doesn't grow on trees, and it is not in the nature of things that everyone can be rich or middle class. Poverty is unavoidable for some, a choice for others, a consequence of bad decisions, of drug and alcohol addiction, of laziness, and of mental health issues. Society does not have such absolute control over the individual that a solution to these and other problems is possible. And if anyone did have such absolute control, it would be called tyranny, entailing universal degradation by a political system of enslavement. But that is, after all, what the revolutionary leaders are actually aiming at. (Please don't let them fool you.)
If we care to address the coming Left propaganda head-on, it is worth saying that America is broke, and the welfare state has a lot to do with that; especially where responsibility is taken away from the individual and given to the state. It might be added, as well, that the more money government redistributes the less it will be worth. In the end, that money (which is our currency) is already in the process of becoming worthless (bit by bit). And last, but not least, any attempt to take money from the rich will not raise the general standard of living. It is well known to students of political economy that such a process is guaranteed to lower the general living standard; though socialists don't seem to understand how this works, and they probably don't care to learn the truth.
A final note, taken from THE BLAZE, leaves us with the following: the agitator speaking in the Pace University audio (supposedly Stephen Lerner), has allegedly visited the White House four times over the past two years. Two of those meetings appear to be with White House officials. In other words, a communist revolutionary aiming at the overthrow of capitalism through sabotage and civil unrest, is on friendly terms with some of the president's people (if not the president himself). I fear we have reached the point at which our own government has become the avante-garde of a new Dark Age; an unstoppable, thick-headed band of "useful idiots" who plan to give up the country's nuclear weapons, collapse the dollar, and kill themselves along with the rest of us.
