(Chicago) Former ACORN Members Here Saw Scandal Coming

CHICAGO (CBS) ― The fireworks just keep coming in the ACORN case. Another official was fired Friday.

ACORN employees were secretly recorded giving advice on everything from how to smuggle in illegal immigrants to setting up brothels for teen prostitutes.

Conservatives paid for a sting that secretly videotaped employees of ACORN. The employees appeared willing to help two undercover actors, even though the two said they were setting up a brothel for teen-aged prostitutes.

Posing as a female madam and a male pimp, the actors recorded ACORN employees in Maryland, New York, California, D.C. and other places – but not in Chicago.

That's because there no longer is an ACORN Illinois. As CBS-2 News Political Editor Mike Flannery reports, activists here broke away two years ago, calling ACORN's national leadership "bad people."

The ACORN scandal has Barack Obama's conservative critics noting that he and ACORN Illinois were close allies on community development issues here.

They're demanding the group be investigated. What they don't seem to know is that ACORN Illinois no longer exists. It collapsed in 2007.

Denise Dixon was once president of ACORN Illinois, and Madeline Talbott was a top organizer. But two years ago, in a move that now looks prophetic, they and other Chicago activists quit ACORN.

"We just felt things were not right at the top. There were different people in charge then," Talbott said.

"After I left and others left, we had heard that steps were being taken to get rid of the bad apples in the barrel and to straighten it out," she added. "I still believe that's true. But it's very clear they didn't get all the bad apples yet."

Talbott and Dixon complained that ACORN's then-national leader, Wade Rathke, put his brother in charge of finances, was concealing key money moves and was, in short, a scandal waiting to explode.

"My people would be holding them while they called the police, because my people would probably be doing something to them that they shouldn't be doing," Dixon, now executive director of Action Now, said.

Illinois Sens. Dick Durbin and Roland Burris were among a handful of senators who voted "no" this week when both houses of Congress voted to cut off all federal funding for ACORN.

"The amendment voted on by the Senate ... went too far," Durbin said in a written statement. "It prohibited all federal housing funding from going to ACORN, an organization that has helped more than 100,000 families acquire homes."

"It's pretty sad that you've got a vote like that by both of our senators," said state Rep. Tom Cross, R-Oswego.

After ACORN Illinois collapsed two years ago, many of its former activists formed Action Now. They say they seek to stop foreclosures, improve public schools and reform health care.

Meanwhile, back in Chicago, Madeline Talbott
http://www.madelinetalbott.com/
http://www.facebook.com/people/Madeline-Talbott/642558180

and her friends
http://actionnow.org/
http://bostonreview.net/BR21.3/Talbott.html

are still busy ragging the banks to “modify” the kind of loans that they’ve been ragging the lenders to make since the 1990’s:
http://www.newstips.org/interior.php?section=Newstips&main_id=869
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/dangerous_pals_cvq7rDCHftKwJyLaecfPQK

One more proof, if any is needed, that with these people, “No ‘good deed’ will go unpunished.”

They remind me of that famous Gahan Wilson “lemonade stand” cartoon, where creepy looking kids are selling lemonade for 5c from their streetside stand and, around the corner, their confederates are selling the antidote for $5. Given the complicity of “big pharma” in the drive for Obamacare, that cartoon should be revived and applied in that even more relevant discussion. It is well described in this essay on political advertising:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-ducat/propaganda-101-how-to-dec_b_130119.html

A second strategy employed in advertising can be called the “get’m sick, get’m well” approach. A disturbing emotion, like fear or envy, is generated in the first half of the ad narrative, and is associated with the competing product or candidate. This is antidoted by the second half of the ad, in which a reassuring feeling, like safety or pride, is elicited, and linked to the commodity or politician being promoted. I’m reminded of an old Gahan Wilson cartoon. A group of wholesome-looking, all-American kids are selling lemonade at their makeshift street corner stand. The sign says, “Lemonade, Five Cents.” Around the corner we see customers gripping their bellies in agony and lurching toward another stand, where the kids with a more demonic countenance are sitting behind a sign that reads, “Lemonade Antidote, Fifty Dollars.” Get’m sick, get’m well.

“After ACORN Illinois collapsed two years ago, many of its former activists formed Action Now. They say they seek to stop foreclosures, improve public schools and reform health care.”

http://www.actionnow.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=55%3Astaff&catid=21%3Aabout-us&Itemid=30

Madeline Talbott

Lead Organizer

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/24/AR2007032401152.html

For Clinton and Obama , a Common Ideological Touchstone
Washington Post, The (DC) - Sunday, March 25, 2007
Author: Peter Slevin, Washington Post Staff Writer

EXCERPT

Obama stepped into the Alinsky tradition after deciding “mainly on impulse,” he has said, at age 21 to become a community organizer. His passion ran to romantic visions of the civil rights struggle.

“He wanted to make that kind of contribution and didn’t know how to do it,” said Gerald Kellman, who hired Obama . “There’s that side of him that’s strongly idealistic, very much a dreamer, and this kind of work attracts that kind of person. It isn’t just that we’re going to change things, but we’re going to change things from the grass roots.”

Obama spent three roller-coaster years trying to build a new source of power in the Altgeld Gardens housing project and the Roseland community, maneuvering among neighbors, church leaders and politicians who did not always welcome the encounters.

“It was poverty on top of poverty. There were so many people who had given up. They just didn’t care,” said Loretta Augustine-Herron, who signed up to work with Obama . “I don’t think he knew how bad it was until he came to our area. He had to have the tenacity and the patience to train us, and sometimes he had to be frustrated.”

The Alinsky method, which Obama taught long afterward, is centered on one-on-one conversations. The organizer’s task is to draw out people’s stories, listening for their goals and ambitions - “the stuff that makes them tick,” one of his teachers told him. There he would find the self-interest that would spark activism.

Fellow community organizer Madeline Talbott said Obama mastered the approach. She remembers a successful 1992 voter-registration drive that he ran for Project Vote.

“He says things like, `Do you think we should do this? What role would you like to play?’ “ said Talbott, chief organizer for Illinois ACORN. “Everybody else just puts out an e-mail and says, `Y’all come.’ Barack doesn’t do that.”

//
O’S DANGEROUS PALS
BARACK’S ‘ORGANIZER’ BUDS PUSHED FOR BAD MORTGAGES
By STANLEY KURTZ
September 29, 2008

EXCERPT

ONE key pioneer of ACORN’s subprime-loan shakedown racket was Madeline Talbott - an activist with extensive ties to Barack Obama. She was also in on the ground floor of the disastrous turn in Fannie Mae’s mortgage policies.

Long the director of Chicago ACORN, Talbott is a specialist in “direct action” - organizers’ term for their militant tactics of intimidation and disruption. Perhaps her most famous stunt was leading a group of ACORN protesters breaking into a meeting of the Chicago City Council to push for a “living wage” law, shouting in defiance as she was arrested for mob action and disorderly conduct. But her real legacy may be her drive to push banks into making risky mortgage loans.

(SNIP - MUCH MORE AT LINK)

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/oct/07/characters-count/

Tuesday, October 7, 2008
GAFFNEY: Obama’s sleazy friends

EXCERPT

Thanks to the intrepid Stanley Kurtz, we also have learned of Mr. Obama ‘s longstanding ties to another fixture of the radical left, one emblematic of its enmity toward an America seen as oppressive and racist: the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (better known as ACORN). Mr. Obama trained ACORN personnel, worked with its activists on the group’s (often problematic) voter-registration efforts and consulted with its most aggressive operatives. Pre-eminent among the latter has been one Madeline Talbott .

Mr. Obama also secured, through his position on the Woods Fund and Chicago Annenberg Challenge boards (he served on the former with Bill Ayers), funding for ACORN’s intimidation campaigns against banks that failed to make subprime style loans to otherwise ineligible would-be homeowners. As Mr. Kurtz put it in the New York Post (http://www.nypost.com/seven/09292008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/os_dangerous_pals_131216.htm?page=0), “It would be tough to find an ‘on the ground’ community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott . And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama .”

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