The left-wing militants of SEIU and the National People’s Action group plan to shut down K Street, the heart of the lobbying industry in the nation’s capital, at a massive in-your-face rally and march planned for Monday.
The goal of the “action” -in organizing parlance– is a show of force calculated to intimidate bank lobbyists and show support for sweeping anti-bank legislation pending in Congress.
The action, called The Showdown on K Street, is listed at the website of Jobs With Justice. JwJ works closely with ACORN, other community organizing groups, and the labor movement.
“This is the first time that they’re going to hit K Street all out,” said a source in the progressive movement. “They want to intimidate bank lobbyists, who aren’t used to this kind of confrontation.”
“It’s an anti-Wall Street march. In many ways it mirrors what happened on Wall Street about a month ago.”
The source was referring to another in-your-face anti-bank march on April 30 in New York City’s financial district led by National People’s Action (NPA). Also known as National People’s Campaign, the Chicago-based organization filed its first tax return in 2008.
As Andrew Marcus reported, the federal government cut off funding for NPA’s sister organization, the National Training and Information Center (NTIC) in 2003. Investigators found NTIC had misused millions of taxpayer dollars by spending them on training community organizers to lobby the government instead of on community development projects. NTIC also committed fraud by carrying out a cover-up.
NPA’s executive director is George Goehl who says he supports efforts to create “a more fair and just economy.” NPA takes credit for enacting the disastrous Community Reinvestment Act in the 1970s.
Marxist front group Americans for Financial Reform is also participating in the action. It is headed by executive director Heather Booth, an old hand at leftist astro-turfing operations. Booth is an Alinskyite who founded the Midwest Academy, a training institute for radical community organizers. “Alinsky is to community organizing as Freud is to psychoanalysis,” she has been quoted saying.
Booth has also been described as a “guiding force” for ACORN and was an avowed supporter of Bill Ayers’s Weather Underground terrorist group.
Other leftist groups participating are the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the AFL-CIO.
SEIU produced a tongue-in-cheek video in advance of the May 17 event. It’s called “How to Stay Safe on K Street”:
Follow me on Twitter.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.