Unearthed! Obama's twisted ACORN roots

While ACORN remains riddled in scandal, lawmakers have voted to cut off federal funding to the group, the U.S. Census Bureau has severed ties to the organization – and the White House has blasted its behavior as "unnacceptable."

The following is a timeline outlining some of the purported connections between the president and ACORN through the years:

ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, first noticed Obama when he was organizing on the far south side of the city with the Developing Communities Project. A March 2, 2008, Los Angeles Times article by Letta Tayler and Keith Herbert, titled "Obama Forged Path As Chicago Community Organizer," explored Obama's pre-law school days as a community organizer in Chicago and his efforts to build a partnership with Chicago's "Friends of the Parks."

"Obama's task was to help far South Side residents press for improvement," the Times article explained.

National Review Online noted, "Part of Obama's work, it would appear, was to organize demonstrations, much in the mold of radical groups like ACORN."

The Times article reveals that Madeleine Talbot, who at the time was a leader at Chicago ACORN, was thoroughly impressed with Obama because "he got people to vote with their feet."

"At the time, Talbot worked at the social action group ACORN and initially considered Obama a competitor," the article stated. "But she became so impressed with his work that she invited him to help train her staff."

Talbott personally led Chicago ACORN's campaign to intimidate banks into making high-risk loans to low-credit customers, Stanley Kurtz reported.

ACORN’s Nutty Regime for Cities

(Editor’s Note: Sol Stern’s political trajectory has taken him from the University of California’s student movement in the 1960s to editorship of the New Left magazine Ramparts to writing books and articles on a wide range of political matters from a conservative point of view. The following excerpts from a three-times lengthier article present his critique of ACORN, one of the country’s pre-eminent organizing groups..)

f you thought the New Left was dead in America, think again. Walk through just about any of the nation’s inner cities, and you’re likely to find an office of ACORN, bustling with young people working 12-hour days to “organize the poor” and bring about “social change.” The largest radical group in the country, ACORN has 120,000 dues-paying members, chapters in 700 poor neighborhoods in 50 cities, and 30 years’ experience… Not only big, it is effective, with some remarkable successes in getting municipalities and state legislatures to enact its radical policy goals into law.

Community organizing among the urban poor has been an honorable American tradition since Jane Addams’s famous Hull House dramatically uplifted the late-nineteenth-century Chicago slums, but ACORN and Addams are on different planets philosophically. Hull House and its many successors emphasized self-empowerment: the poor, they thought, could take control of their lives and communities through education, hard work, and personal responsibility. Not ACORN…

ACORN’s bedrock assumption remains the ultra-Left’s familiar anti-capitalist redistributionism. “We are the majority, forged from all the minorities,” reads the group’s “People’s Platform,” whose prose Orwell would have derided as pure commissar-speak. “We will continue our fight…until we have shared the wealth, until we have won our freedom…We have nothing to show for the work of our hand, the tax of our labor”-claptrap that not only falsifies the relative comfort of the poor in America…But never mind-ACORN claims that it “stands virtually alone in its dedication to organizing the poor and powerless.” It organizes them to push for ever more government control of the economy, as if it had learned no lessons about the free-market magic that made American cities unexampled engines of job creation for more than a century, proliferating opportunity and catapulting millions out of misery…

ACORN has perfected an in-your-face strategy that works effectively at capturing public attention and winning adherents in cities. ACORN’s revival of its Baltimore chapter is a textbook example of this style. Several years ago, a top ACORN organizer, Mitch Klein, injected a new aggressiveness into the Baltimore chapter. Underlings piled garbage in front of City Hall to protest lack of services in poor neighborhoods, wielded huge inflated rubber sharks to disrupt a bankers’ dinner, and-most controversially-staged a profanity-laced protest in front of Mayor Martin O’Malley’s home…

…[T]here’s an aspect] in which ACORN departs from the old New Left’s playbook. Instead of trying to overturn “the system”… ACORN burrows deep within the system, taking over its power and using its institutions for its own purposes, like a political Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Not only has ACORN worked to influence existing city councils and state legislatures; it has also thrown itself into municipal and state elections, claiming to have registered 500,000 new voters in low-income communities around the country. With the labor-union allies it has cultivated, it has even helped create new parties that have scored real successes [such as New York’s New Party]…

…ACORN organizer Heather Appell, an energetic and appealing recent Vassar graduate, is currently talking to poor parents about taking advantage of the new No Child Left Behind education law that allows children who attend failing public schools to transfer to more successful public schools. “Parents are really stirring on this issue,” Appell enthuses. “Many of these people come here so they can get ahead and provide a decent future for their children and families-so being forced to go to bad schools becomes a huge concern.” Appell sounds like a real education reformer-even a conservative reformer. No doubt it’s talk like this that prompted Bush administration secretary of education Rod Paige to honor ACORN publicly with membership on something called the Urban School Reform Dream Team.

But a closer look at ACORN’s educational policies reveals a militant opposition to the authentic educational reform the urban poor need so desperately. Consider ACORN’s successful effort in 2001 to derail Mayor Giuliani’s proposal to allow Edison Schools Inc.-a for-profit educational firm-to manage five of the lousiest of New York City’s lousy schools. Reasonable people can disagree about Edison’s overall record in turning around bad inner-city schools; based on what I’ve seen of the evidence, I think it has done pretty well. But what is beyond dispute is that Edison has never performed as poorly in a single one of its schools as has Gotham’s Board of Ed in the five schools the mayor proposed for privatization. In those schools, more than 80 percent of the students couldn’t read or do math at grade level. Nothing that Edison might have done could possibly have made them any worse-and might well have improved them.

Yet ACORN used every tactic in its comprehensive playbook to scuttle the Edison plan. It intimidated schools chancellor Harold Levy into letting it print leaflets at city expense, filled with false information about Edison’s record, including the charge that the firm expelled children for poor grades. ACORN obtained from school officials lists of the addresses and phone numbers of parents, whom it then barraged with calls and letters. When Edison reps tried to make their case at public forums in Harlem, ACORN activists shouted them down. For good measure, ACORN staged a noisy demonstration outside Edison’s headquarters, complete with the 12-foot-high inflated rat that is an ugly staple of all union demonstrations in New York against non-unionized companies.

Sadly, ACORN’s bullying tactics won the day, and the parents at all five schools voted against the plan. ACORN’s “victory” certainly didn’t benefit the kids, who were stuck right where they were. So who did profit? ACORN. Little appreciated was the crucial detail that ACORN itself is part of the failed bureaucratic system that any successful privatization program would unsettle. For more than a decade, ACORN has used foundation grants to start up its own New York public schools, something the Board of Ed sometimes allows community-based organizations to do. With warm-sounding names like the Bread and Roses High School, ACORN’s schools are political-indoctrination centers with mediocre academic records. Their curricula abound with “social justice” themes that wouldn’t be out of place at an ACORN community organizers’ training school. Bread and Roses, for example, holds an annual “Why Unions Matter” art project to “teach students how labor unions work and what they do to support social change, economic growth and democratic principles.” The schools have even bused kids to Washington to demonstrate against “tax cuts for the rich.”

…ACORN had another ulterior motive for opposing any privatization experiment. ACORN has political ties with teachers’ unions-and they fiercely oppose privatization and vouchers in education, because these reforms might threaten union members’ jobs….

http://socialpolicy.org/index.php?id=1121

What Makes Obama Run?

Lawyer, teacher, philanthropist, and author Barack Obama doesn’t need another career. But he’s entering politics to get back to his true passion–community organization.

By Hank De Zutter
December 8, 1995

… Another strong supporter of Obama’s work–as an organizer, as a lawyer, and now as a candidate–is Madeline Talbott, lead organizer of the feisty ACORN community organization, a group that’s a thorn in the side of most elected officials. “I can’t repeat what most ACORN members think and say about politicians. But Barack has proven himself among our members. He is committed to organizing, to building a democracy. Above all else, he is a good listener, and we accept and respect him as a kindred spirit, a fellow organizer.”

Obama continues his organizing work largely through classes for future leaders identified by ACORN and the Centers for New Horizons on the south side. Conducting a session in a New Horizons classroom, Obama, tall and thin, looks very much like an Ivy League graduate student. Dressed casually prep, his tie loosened and his top shirt button unfastened, he leads eight black women from the Grand Boulevard community through a discussion of “what folks should know” about who in Chicago has power and why they have it. It’s one of his favorite topics, and the class bubbles with suggestions about how “they” got to be high and mighty…

And never mind that Project Vote is simply a front for ACORN.

From Discover The Networks:

PROJECT VOTE (PV)

Project Vote is the voter-mobilization arm of ACORN. It is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization whose professed purpose is to carry out “non-partisan” voter registration drives; to counsel voters on their rights; and to litigate on behalf of voting rights — focusing on the rights of the poor and the “disenfranchised.” …

And even our one party media admit this is so.

First, in a September 26, 2004 article in the New York Times:

“I get about 30 new voters or changes of address in six hours,” said Ms. Green, who was hired by Project Vote, the nonpartisan arm of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn. “I used to get 16 in 45 minutes, but now everyone’s registered.”

And in this October 20, 2004 article, also from the New York Times:

Project Vote, the charitable arm of Acorn, will spend at least $16 million in crucial states this year; it spent $1 million in 2000.

As does Time Magazine, in this October 18, 2004 article:

“We don’t bring 300 kids from Ohio State University into the inner city of Columbus,” says David Leland, national director of Project Vote, a nonpartisan arm of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which claims it has registered more than 50,000 voters in the Columbus area.

As does this article — from today’s Palm Beach Post:

Project Vote, which is a political arm of ACORN, a nationwide group of community organizations, estimates their workers have signed up 145,000 Floridians this year.

And someone should alert the grant givers, such as the Beldon Fund (a pdf file):

Indeed, check out the office addresses of ACORN in Arkansas (where they began) and Washington DC:

Compare with the Project Votes offices:

Indeed, they don’t just share offices, but also their job advertising:

And ACORN has been the top “independent contractor” by far for Project Vote for the years we have public records, via Guidestar:

Which adds up to $9,612,115 in “payments” in just three years.

(By the way, “Citizens Services/Consulting” is Project Vote’s accountants. Coincidentally, they also keep the books for ACORN. Lest we forget, it was recently uncovered that the Obama campaign paid $832,598 to Citizens Services, Inc.)

And again, note that according to their Forms 990 ACORN and Project Vote (and Citizens Services) once again share the same address:

(Click all images to enlarge)

ACORN and Project Vote even use the same phone number.

But, no, they are clearly two completely different entities.

Just ask Obama.

http://sweetness-light.com/archive/obama-claims-he-never-worked-for-acorn

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Front group for the radical cult ACORN
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Spearheads the Voting Rights Movement
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Played a decisive role in pushing the 1993 Motor-Voter Bill through Congress

Project Vote’s major program areas include the following:

Voter Participation Program: “[Since its inception], Project Vote has helped more than 4 million Americans in low-income and minority neighborhoods register to vote, including 1.1 million in 2003-04. In the same period, Project Vote reached more than 2.3 million low-income and minority voters to educate them about the importance of voting. Our methodology is based on face-to-face contact between voters and trusted community messengers, generally a representative of a local community organization.”

Election Administration Program: “[This program] encompasses every aspect of election implementation, from voter registration application design to voting booth placement to vote counting and everything in between. Working in neighborhoods nationwide, Project Vote documents voting problems and works closely with elections officials, secretaries of state, and state legislators to enact proactive, pragmatic solutions. A central component of our work is the inclusion of low-income and minority voters through the involvement of our community partners.”

NVRA Implementation Project: “[This] partnership between Project Vote, ACORN and Demos aims to improve voter registration services at public assistance agencies. Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 requires states to offer voter registration to public assistance clients upon application, recertification or renewal, and change of addresses. The Project ... offers technical assistance.” The National Voting Rights Institute and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law have recently become co-administrators of this initiative.

The stated purpose of Project Vote is to work within the system, using conventional voter mobilization drives and litigation to secure the rights of minority and low-income voters under the U.S. Constitution. However, the organization’s actions indicate that its true agenda is to overwhelm, paralyze, and discredit the voting system through fraud, protests, propaganda and vexatious litigation. In this respect, Project Vote is following the so-called “crisis strategy” or Cloward-Piven Strategy pioneered during the Sixties by Columbia University political scientists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.

As a follow-up to their effort to collapse the welfare system in the 1960s, in 1983 Cloward and Piven founded the Human Service Employee Registration, Voting and Education campaign Fund (Human SERVE Fund). Its objective, they said, was to increase voter turnout among the poor. But unlike Project Vote, Human SERVE did not rely on conventional door-to-door canvassing, or even on the more effective method of registering people in food stamp and unemployment lines which Project Vote had pioneered. Rather, Human SERVE lobbied government officials directly to enact laws and regulations directing public employees to offer to register citizens applying for services at government agencies. This effort realized its grandest ambition on May 20, 1993, when President Clinton signed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 — commonly called the “Motor-Voter Act.” It ordered every state to provide resources enabling people to register to vote at state agencies, at the same time they applied for drivers’ licenses, welfare, Medicaid and disability benefits. In June 2000, Cloward and Piven dissolved Human SERVE, leaving to ACORN and Project Vote the task of making the Motor Voter “crisis strategy” work at the polls. It did, in fact, fuel an explosion of fraudulent voters.

In 1996, Project Vote became involved in Teamstergate — a criminal conspiracy to embezzle funds from the Teamster treasury, launder them through outside organizations, and then siphon them back into the re-election war chest of Teamsters President Ron Carey in 1996. According to trial testimony, the operation was approved by high-level White House and Democratic Party officials.

A persistent pattern of lawlessness has followed ACORN/Project Vote activists over the years. For example, one Project Vote contractor — a single mother of three — forged 400 voter registration cards in 1998.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6966

Obama Hid $832,598 Payment To ACORN

From the (Obama-endorsing) Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Obama to amend report on $800,000 in spending

By David M. Brown
Friday, August 22, 2008

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign paid more than $800,000 to an offshoot of the liberal Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now for services the Democrat’s campaign says it mistakenly misrepresented in federal reports.

An Obama spokesman said Federal Election Commission reports would be amended to show Citizens Services Inc. — a subsidiary of ACORN — worked in “get-out-the-vote” projects, instead of activities such as polling, advance work and staging major events as stated in FEC finance reports filed during the primary.

FEC spokeswoman Mary Brandenberger said it is not unusual for campaigns to amend reports, even regarding large sums of money.

But, said Blair Latoff, spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee: “Barack Obama’s failure to accurately report his campaign’s financial records is an incredibly suspicious situation that appears to be an attempt to hide his campaign’s interaction with a left-wing organization previously convicted of voter fraud. For a candidate who claims to be practicing ‘new’ politics, his FEC reports look an awful lot like the ‘old-style’ Chicago politics of yesterday.” …

Melanie Sloan, executive director of the liberal-leaningCitizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said the campaign’s error on FEC documents doesn’t seem extraordinary, especially considering the huge amounts of money being spent.

“It’s rare that people don’t file any amended reports. If he has a pattern of lots and lots of amended reports, that would be more noteworthy than an occasional one,” Sloan said.

Jim Terry, spokesman for a group that tracks ACORN, said Citizens Services Inc.’s involvement in the Obama campaign raises bigger questions.

“All of this just seems like an awful lot of money and time spent on political campaigning for an organization that purports to exist to help low-income consumers,” said Terry, chief public advocate for Consumers Rights League, a Washington, D.C., advocacy outfit with a libertarian outlook.

“ACORN has a long and sordid history of employing convoluted Enron-style accounting to illegally use taxpayer funds for their own political gain,” Terry claimed. “Now it looks like ACORN is using the same type of convoluted accounting scheme for Obama’s political gain.”

http://sweetness-light.com/archive/obama-hid-800k-payment-to-acorn

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