The reality behind the often reported story of an ACORN member who is part of the San Francisco Occupy movement is far more complex than the mainstream press has told the public. Donna Vieira, a frequent spokesman for the 99% who tells the heartrending tale of having her home foreclosed on, is actually referring to a second home in another state that she and her husband paid nearly $750,000 for. It’s an example of how the press has been negligent in doing even basic checks to get to the reality behind the media myths of the Occupy movement and how a disparate group of people with their own agendas have glommed onto the Movement.

While researching the recent Occupy/Union/ACORN shut down of Wells Fargo and Bank of America in San Francisco’s financial district, I noticed that two different newspaper articles quoted the same woman: Donna Vieira.

The San Francisco Examiner identified her as a member of the renamed ACORN group ACCE:

But Donna Vieira, 42, a member of the statewide Association of Californians for Community Empowerment, welcomed some of the more provocative tactics, barring violence.

“I was sitting on the floor chained up with two teachers,” said Vieira, who spent Friday morning occupying Wells Fargo’s headquarters. “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty.”

And Reuters reported:

Donna Vieira, 42, a real estate appraiser, said she was protesting because the bank had “unfairly” foreclosed on her home in Reno, Nevada, last year.

“Nobody is going after the big banks. And loss and pain and suffering doesn’t matter to the regulators,” Vieira said.

My first thought was probably about the same as many people reading those articles – here’s a middle-aged woman taking desperate measures against big banks that got bailouts while her home was foreclosed on. I noticed that the home was in Reno, Nevada and wondered for a moment if she might’ve been reduced to homelessness on the streets of San Francisco, hundreds of miles away; a victim of the cold injustice of capitalism.

But my second thought occurred about five seconds later. What I’ve learned in the past few years is that you can’t take stories like this at face value. It didn’t take more than about 30 seconds of research using publicly available, free Internet search tools to discover just how many “facts” have been neglected in the story about this activist/spokesman for the 99%.

According to this story entitled “Faces of Foreclosure: Family Won’t Give Up,” the home was foreclosed on in Reno was not the Vieira family’s place of residence. It was, in fact, a second home of the family, who actually live in San Leandro, a medium-size residential community just across the bay from San Francisco.

The reason that Wells Fargo foreclosed? Apparently it wasn’t hardship on the part of the Vieiras family. They simply stopped making payments to Wells Fargo because they felt that an appraisal conducted by an independent firm was “fraudulent.”

The case is still stuck in Nevada’s court system. In the meantime, Wells Fargo foreclosed on the family’s Reno home for nonpayment.

“Knowing the mortgage was fraudulent, we just couldn’t keep on paying,” Nuno (Donna’s husband) said, adding that they stopped making mortgage payments in September of 2009.

The family still resides at their house in San Leandro, which they bought in 1997, but the foreclosure on the Reno property has made it harder to refinance and get a better mortgage interest rate on their current home.

“Despite the foreclosure, both of us still maintain near perfect credit scores,” Vieira said, “but due to something that is completely not our fault, we can’t take advantage of the low mortgage rates now and switch to a 30-year fixed. It just creates so much uncertainty in our life.”

While boasting about the couple’s “near perfect credit score,” the article also reveals the fact that the family sends their son to private school, despite the good public schools in the area.

“We can’t send Leo [to the public school], because I don’t have the time to help him with his homework or to track his progress in school,” she said.

Thankfully, Mrs. Vieira has put up a website at WellsFargoMortagoFraud.com that provides a number of legal papers that shed even more light on the story.

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New video footage proves once again that violence began during, not after, the main “general strike” protest conducted by Occupy Oakland on Nov. 2.

Masked activists, marching with the main parade, begin smashing windows as the Occupy chants (“Banks got bailed out, we got sold out”) are heard in the background.

A Whole Foods store is vandalized by some activists while other activists attempt to intervene and stop them, and are outnumbered. The same later happens at a Bank of America location, as an organizer shouts through a bullhorn: “People being thrown out on the street is violent. This pales in comparison–these windows will be fixed tomorrow, and they know it!”

Mayor Jean Quan and the mainstream media have described the protests as “mostly peaceful,” and have claimed that the violence began following the march. (more…)

Think Progress, a project of John Podesta’s Center for American Progress Action Fund, has been fiercely pushing a story about leaked emails that suggest the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was aware of espionage work being performed against American citizens by one of its private security firms.  The story first launched a few days ago as an exclusive on the progressive blog, when it reported that hacked emails obtained from the pro-WikiLeaks group “Anonymous” reveal that the US Chamber conspired to sabotage opposition progressive activist groups including ThinkProgress, Change to Win, SEIU, BradBlog and StopTheChamber, among others.  By this morning, the story was all over the lefty blogosphere, on sites such as AlterNet, Huffington Post, Raw Story, and in a press release from Kevin Zeese, our fan from IndictBreitbart.org.

But the reports are noticeably silent on one crucial component of the story.

The primary focus of the Chamber’s investigation was actually none other than the organization known as Velvet Revolution, and one of its co-founders, Brett Kimberlin.

Recognize that name?  That’s because we told you all about this convicted domestic terrorist, known as the Speedway Bomber, who in 1981 was finally convicted of a week-long bombing spree in Indianapolis, IN in which eight separate bombs caused extensive property damage, destroyed a police cruiser, and severely maimed a man, eventually leading to that man’s suicide.  In short, a community was terrorized for a week, and a potentially indirectly related murder remains unsolved today.  Indiana certainly remembers Brett Kimberlin.

As it turns out, despite the months of deafening silence on the left in response to questions about the ally they’ve so warmly embraced, some bigger characters apparently had taken notice.

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May 16, 2010, the day of the now infamous SEIU protest at the home of a Bank of America executive’s home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, also included a less publicized protest at the home of a J.P. Morgan bank executive.  The protests were all about denouncing the “evil banks.”

As reported by the Washington Post:

The controversy surrounds a May 16 protest organized by liberal group National People’s Action and the Service Employees International Union.

According to the NPA’s website,

National People’s Action (NPA) is a Network of community power organizations from across the country that work to advance a national economic and racial justice agenda. NPA has over 200 organizers working to unite everyday people in cities, towns, and rural communities throughout the United States. For 38 years NPA has been a leader in the fight to hold banks accountable to the communities in which they serve and profit.

In the 1970s, National People’s Action spearheaded the fight to pass the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and the Community Reinvestment Act, widely considered to be among the most transformative public policy to grow out of community organizing.

When you open the window to the organization’s Board of Directors, their names appear under the banner of the umbrella organization, Community Voices Heard, Inc. (CVH).  Then, under the tab, “Strategic Alliances,” NPA appears. (more…)

You’ve read the stories about how the D.C. cops escorted a bunch of SEIU protesters to a private home across the District line in Maryland.  You’ve heard the silence of the media lambs at the absolute outrage of hordes of purple-shirted thugs charging onto private property and berating a Bank of American lawyer from his very doorstep.

ASMAN: Imagine a Sunday afternoon in your home suddenly interrupted by the chants of 500 protestors, some with megaphones, marching onto the lawn of your neighbor’s house.

That’s exactly what happened to Fox News contributor Nina Easton. The mob was organized by SEIU directed at her neighbor bank executive Greg Baer. She joins us now from Washington. Nina, how would you describe the scene.

NINA EASTON, WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF, “FORTUNE” MAGAZINE: It’s a lovely Sunday afternoon, I had just put my toddler down for a nap, and suddenly 14 buses pull up, 14. Hundreds and hundreds of people pour out. I did a rough calculation there were at least 500 protesters who crossed my property and went on to Greg Baer’s property, the deputy general counsel of B of A.

ASMAN: He, by the way, ironically is a former Clinton administration official, right?

EASTON: He is, and his wife is a former Hillary Clinton official and is a very prominent person on national service issues.

These are not big bad Bush people, which is what the readers of the “Huffington Post” blog, the only press who covered it, they assumed it was a Bush administration official.

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Why is the Washington Post ignoring the SEIU protest at the homes of two bank executives, one being an employee of the Bank of America? Aside from a brief mention in a larger story on May 17 about SEIU protests, the paper of record in the nation’s capital has been strangely silent.

Even after the story broke here that the buses that carried an estimated 500 protesters to the Greenville Rd, Chevy Chase residence of a B of A executive were escorted by at least two units of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, the incuriosity of the WaPo continues.

This afternoon, all the details of this story were reconfirmed through the Montgomery County Police Department spokesperson, Corporal Daniel Friz.  Meanwhile, two high-level D.C. police officials have disputed their department’s police presence at the B of A executive’s home.

Operating in full CYA mode, the first statement cames from D.C. Chief of Police Cathy Lanier: (more…)

If you haven’t read by now all the headlines on this story, you’ll want to start at the beginning and read the first post, SEIU Storms Private Residence, Terrorizes Teenage Son of Bank of America Exec. Because as each day passes, new facts are popping up. The story seemed so outrageous at first. After all, the thought of over 500 screaming and chanting protesters surrounding a Bank of America lawyer’s private residence while the man’s teenage son, home alone, hid frightened inside a bathroom – it’s just so extreme, even by SEIU’s standards.

I knew something was up when the following day, Fortune magazine editor Nina Easton, a neighbor of the targeted residence, published an account of the incident and was almost immediately attacked by what seemed like practically a coordinated dogpile of writers from several specific sources.

In almost mirror fashion to the Town Hall events last August, when both the Huffington Post and Media Matters seemingly tried to cover up and dismiss the violent acts that SEIU committed against Kenneth Gladney, the same players were again out in full force. As our Larry O’Connor wrote, both outlets behaved less like journalists and more like arms of the SEIU press office, dismissing SEIU’s bad behavior and attacking an innocent party with fabricated conflicts of interest as a method of distraction and intimidation.

Bob Borosage, Erica Payne, and John Podesta

And now we learn this: Erica Payne, the guest who was invited to appear Friday on Megyn Kelley’s Fox News show and proceeded to blame the Tea Parties for the behavior of SEIU? She was co-founder of Democracy Alliance, the very organization that spawned and is a donor to Media Matters. SEIU Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger is also the Vice-Chair of its Board.

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Media Matters and the Huffington Post have tried to expose a supposed conflict of interest for journalist Nina Easton’s coverage of the shameful tactics used by SEIU this past weekend as they stormed the home of a Bank of America executive.  In doing so, they uncritically repeated a complete and total lie spewed out by SEIU’s propaganda machine.

In yesterday’s post exposing the propaganda efforts from MMFA and HuffPo, where they carried water for SEIU blogger-goon John Vandeventer, we seem to have downplayed how completely and totally deceitful and misleading their “reporting” really was.

If you recall, SEIU thugs invaded a quiet suburban neighborhood on Sunday afternoon and protested on the lawn and private property of Bank of America executive Greg Baer.  Fortune magazine journalist Easton happened to be Baer’s neighbor and the ruckus was so obnoxious that it woke her two-year-old child from a nap.

She reported on the event in Fortune and noted that SEIU is currently in an effort to organize the bank tellers at B of A.  She also revealed that SEIU owes B of A millions of dollars and today, our own Liberty Chick fleshes that story out even more… $90 million more! (more…)

The family of Greg Baer, Bank of America executive, is located in a jurisdiction protected by the Montgomery County Police Department (MCPD), which responded promptly to a disturbance call from his neighborhood last weekend.

According to Corporal Dan Friz, an MCPD spokesperson in Rockville, Maryland, the department received a disturbance call from one of Baer’s neighbors at 4:10 pm last Sunday. Four MCPD units arrived at Baer’s Greenville Rd. address at 4:15 pm.  At least two Metropolitan Police Department units from the nearby District of Columbia were already at the scene when they arrived.

Why? Because police cars attached to the Washington MPD’s Civil Disturbance Unit had escorted the SEIU protesters’ buses to Baer’s home. Such cross-jurisdictional escort activity is not uncommon for both departments according to Friz and Metro Police Department spokesperson Officer Eric Frost.  Still, the District police did not inform their colleagues of what was about to happen in one of their Maryland neighborhoods.

The Maryland officers reported there were approximately 500 protesters on and near the front lawn of Baer’s house.  Montgomery County was not given a “heads-up” concerning the planned protest.  Although a protest permit is technically required in Montgomery County, in practice no citation is issued if the protestors disperse when requested to do so by the owner of the private property they occupy. (more…)

Alinsky Rule #12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Nina Easton just became the left’s latest target. Why? So that SEIU can hide from the truth about its financial liabilities to Bank of America (more on that after the jump).

Easton, a Washington Editor for Fortune Magazine, wrote a column early morning Wednesday, addressing the outrageous protest organized by SEIU and National People’s Action, where 700 protesters stormed the front lawn of the private residence of Greg Baer, deputy general counsel for corporate law at Bank of America.

As I wrote in my post yesterday, “SEIU Storms Private Residence, Terrorizes Teenage Son of Bank of America Exec,” Easton is actually a neighbor of Baer. When she was startled by the loud, screaming, bullhorn-rattling protesters, she called Baer’s teenage son to check on him. Home alone, the frightened teenager had locked himself in the bathroom. After witnessing the entire incident as it unfolded on her neighbor’s private property, Easton criticized the SEIU and left wing groups in her article for crossing the line this time.

Alinsky’s Rule # 12 states,

“Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)”

In almost coordinated lock-step fashion, the 12th Rule was promptly and firmly applied. As Larry O’Connor posted on Big Journalism yesterday, a series of several posts soon followed the publication of Nina Easton’s article: (more…)

It looks like “reporter” Arthur Delaney has a new moonlighting gig as Assistant Communications Director for SEIU and he’s so tired he accidentally posted a PR piece for the beleaguered union at his day job at the Huffington Post.

As noted at Big Government today, a gang of SEIU intimidators stormed the front lawn of Bank of America Deputy General Counsel Greg Baer this past weekend in an attempt to bully him into changing B of A’s policies toward foreclosures, or so they claimed.

In Fortune Magazine, columnist Nina Easton reported on the protest and made note of the fact that SEIU is actively trying to organize the bank tellers at B of A — and by the way, SEIU owes the bank four million dollars.  But never mind all that, SEIU just cares about “the little guy.”

But, the main thrust of Easton’s article in Fortune is the fact that she happens to be Greg Baer’s neighbor.  The issue of hundreds of protesters bused in from various states to block traffic and scream through a bull horn on a peaceful suburban street on a Sunday afternoon transcends politics.  This is about common decency and co-existing in a civil society — qualities that elude the modern fascist left. (more…)