My article from the Dec. 5, 2013 issue of American Thinker:
The hippy-fueled magazine Mother Jones that helped torpedo Mitt Romney’s campaign wants your tax dollars to fund its crusade for the radical transformation of American society.
Specifically, the extremist, George Soros-funded rag that published the story of Romney’s ill-received “47 percent” comments is counseling its interns to apply for taxpayer-funded food stamps so they can survive their voluntary servitude in ultra-expensive San Francisco. The locus of latte liberalism where the muckraking publication is headquartered has the highest rents in the nation.
In a feature story about how rotten left-of-center magazines are to their interns, left-winger Charles Davis reports at Vice:
One former MJ intern who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity told me they “slept on an air mattress for six months while I worked there because I couldn’t afford a real one.” Another former intern said, “During our first meeting with HR at Mother Jones, we were advised to sign up for food stamps.”
Of course they were.
This idea of using government money to fund political assaults on the American system and foment civil unrest has a long pedigree, as I wrote in my book, Subversion Inc.
More than four decades ago, when community organizer Wade Rathke landed a job at ACORN’s parent nonprofit group, he discovered that the National Welfare Rights Organization had no intention of paying him for his work. NWRO was one of many rabble-rousing leftist groups across the nation feeding at the public trough, receiving funding through the federal government’s Office of Economic Opportunity. The generously funded OEO was created to underwrite destructive left-wing “community” activism in the mid-1960s as part of the “War on Poverty.”
Rathke, who was hired by NWRO to create what would become the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), learned he would have to bum money off friends working in the federally funded anti-poverty effort.
This brutal exploitation of workers was typical of NWRO and, later, of Rathke’s ACORN, which went so far as to go to court to seek exemption from California’s minimum wage laws. (ACORN lost.) NWRO head George Wiley “would pay the telephone bill rather than the staff — even though the employees complained that they couldn’t pay their rent,” according to Wiley’s biographers, Nick and Mary Lynn Kotz.
Wiley expected his employees to “live off the land,” like an invading army. They were encouraged to pool resources, get free meals and accommodation, or get onto another organization’s payroll while still working at NWRO.
Not surprisingly, in recent months Mother Jones has published several odes to food stamps. One, “The Hidden Benefits of Food Stamps,” makes the preposterous claim that food stamps improve the health of Americans and the U.S. economy. The article cites the discredited Keynesian “multiplier” effect, arguing that every $5 in food stamps generates $9 in economic activity. By this reasoning, America should be able to spend itself into prosperity if governments add a few more trillion dollars to their welfare programs.
Mother Jones is only doing what its Saul Alinsky-inspired idols in the Progressive movement have been doing for nearly a half century.
As Davis reports, many employees of the magazine belong to a union. Editors Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery each bring in more than $167,000 annually.
Mary Harris “Mother” Jones (died 1930) would probably not have looked kindly on the exploitation of young interns by the publication that bears her name. The fiery, pistol-packing labor leader, whose grim visage is enshrined alongside that of Alinsky-trained organizer Cesar Chavez in the U.S. Department of Labor’s “Labor Hall of Fame,” campaigned against child labor, a fact Mother Jones even acknowledges on its own website.
Jones herself was a kind of proto-Alinsky who delighted in demonizing her adversaries and no doubt would have loudly approved of the idea of expending U.S. taxpayers’ money to campaign for ever-expanding government. The very notion of using food stamps to subsidize attempts to smash the eeevil capitalist system would have sent tingles of joy up the spines of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.
And if the proceeds from the crime-ridden welfare program, whose recipients routinely commit fraud by selling their food stamps for cash, end up covering poorly paid interns’ booze binges and lap dances, well, that’s just a bonus.
Matthew Vadum (website) is a conservative investigative journalist in Washington, D.C., as well as author of the ACORN/Obama exposé Subversion Inc.