ACORN: Puppet Master of Occupy Wall Street

The Working Families Party, an infamous ACORN front group notorious for corruption, was instrumental in organizing the Occupy Wall Street protests, according to radical journalist Laura Flanders of Free Speech TV. The protests, which have spread to several other large U.S. cities, are part of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke calls an ''anti-banking jihad.''(snip)WFP’s headquarters is at the same address as ACORN on Nevins Street in Brooklyn. WFP’s executive director is longtime ACORN operative Dan Cantor. One of the SEIU-funded party’s co-founders is ACORN’s former national chief organizer, Bertha Lewis. Democratic National Committee executive director Patrick Gaspard also contributed

ACORN's Senator in 2008

Election '08: Barack Obama wasn't just the second-largest recipient of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac political contributions. He was also the senator from ACORN, the activist leader for risky "affirmative action" loans. Despite efforts to blame the rescue bill's failure on the GOP, it should be remembered that 95 Democrats — some 40% of the Democratic Caucus — withheld support. Obama himself also deserves blame — not only for the bill's failure, but also for the crisis it was designed to solve.

As the New York Times reports, "Aides to Mr. Obama said he had not directly reached out to try to sway any House Democrats who opposed the measure." Is the reason the fact that the slush fund for ACORN in the original bill, siphoning off 20% of any future profits for such activist groups, was trimmed from the tree?

Obama, who once represented ACORN in a lawsuit against the state of Illinois, was hired by the group to train its community organizers and staff in the methods and tactics of the late Saul Alinsky. ACORN would stage in-your-face protests in bank lobbies, drive-through lanes and even at bank managers' homes to get them to issue risky loans in the inner city or face charges of racism.

In the early 1990s, reports Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Policy Center, Obama was personally recruited by Chicago's ACORN to run training sessions in "direct action." That's the euphemism for the techniques used under the cover of the federal Community Reinvestment Act to intimidate financial institutions into giving what have been called "Ninja" loans — no income, no job, no assets — to people who couldn't afford them.

CRA was designed to increase minority homeownership. Whenever a bank wanted to grow or expand, ACORN would file complaints that it was not sufficiently sensitive to the needs of minorities in providing home loans. Agitators would then be unleashed.

Chicago's ACORN used Alinsky's tactics against institutions such as Bell Federal Savings and Loan and Avondale Federal Savings. In September 1992, the Chicago Tribune described the group's agenda as "affirmative action lending."

Obama also helped ACORN get funding. When he served on the board of the Woods Fund for Chicago with Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, the Woods Fund frequently gave ACORN grants to fund its activist agenda.

In 1995, Kurtz reports, Obama chaired the committee that increased funding of ACORN and other community organizers. The committee report boasted that the fund's "non-ideological" image "enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and governmental 'establishments' without undue risk of being accused of partisanship."

Here is the Axelrod/AstroTurf connection to the "Working Families Party".

DAVID AXELROD (Last sentence is pure projection...Occupy THIS!)

Longtime Democratic political consultant President Obama’s closest advisor

Born in 1955, David Axelrod grew up in Manhattan and, from an early age, engaged passionately in politics. At age ten, he canvassed for New York mayoral candidate John Lindsay and, at age 13, sold campaign buttons and bumper stickers promoting Robert Kennedy for President. Axelrod's mother was a writer for PM, a left-wing New York newspaper, which was alleged to have ties to the Communist Party.

In 1977, Axelrod completed his B.A. in political studies at the University of Chicago. That same year, he received an internship at the Chicago Tribune. In 1982 he was promoted to become the Tribune’s youngest chief political writer. Don Rose, founder of the pro-communist Hyde Park Voices and a 1960s member the Alliance to End Repression, which was a suspected Communist Party front, has claimed that he and another prominent Chicago communist, David Canter, mentored Axelrod and guided his early political development during this time. “I ... wrote a reference letter for him,” Rose stated, “that helped him win an internship at the Tribune, which was the next step in his journalism career.”

In 1984, dissatisfied with his career and the “corporatization of journalism” in general, Axelrod joined the Senate campaign of Illinois Representative Paul Simon. Originally hired as Communications Director, Axelrod was promoted to Co-Manager within the first two months. During the campaign, he worked alongside Rahm Emanuel, who would go on to become President Barack Obama’s chief of staff 25 years later.

Following Simon’s successful Senate bid, Axelrod in 1985 founded a political consultancy named Axelrod & Associates, which later became known as AKPD Message and Media. This firm specializes in "representing Democratic candidates and progressive causes." In 1987, Axelrod’s Chicago-based company got its first break when Axelrod was hired to run the re-election campaign of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first African-American mayor. Here, Axelrod worked with Don Rose and Marc Canter (David Canter's son), who had close associations with Mayor Washington and were involved in a coalition of communist and socialist groups supporting his mayoral campaigns in the 1980s.

Directing Washington’s successful re-election campaign propelled Axelrod’s political consultancy into the limelight. In the years that followed, Axelrod helped a number of African-American candidates win political office. Most prominent of these victorious Democratic campaigns were those of Carol Moseley-Braun, the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992, and Deval Patrick, the first African-American elected governor of Massachusetts in 2006.

In addition to scores of Democratic politicians and other organizations, Axelrod and his consultancy were hired by the Democratic National Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic Governors Association, the AFL-CIO, the AFSCME, the SEIU, and the Working Families Party. Axelrod also came to advise the top echelon of politicians in the Democratic Party. He worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate Campaign, helped Rahm Emanuel win a House of Representatives seat in 2002, and directed John Edwards' 2004 presidential campaign.

From the same Chicago address that his political consultancy occupied, Axelrod ran ASK Public Strategies, which discreetly produces advertising campaigns for corporate clients seeking to swing negative public opinion in their favor. Although Axelrod and his partners refuse to reveal the identity of any of their clients, public records confirm that ASK’s client list has included the Chicago Children’s Museum, Cablevision, AT&T, and the Chicago-based utility ComEd.

According to Business Week magazine, the secrecy surrounding ASK masks a significant crossover of Axelrod’s political connections and his corporate business. For instance, in 2007, Mayor Richard M. Daley, one of Axelrod’s friends and earliest clients, pushed for the development of a Children’s Museum but was blocked by local groups. Daley hired ASK to direct a campaign to win support for the museum project. Another of ASK’s longtime private clients, ComEd, and its parent company Exelon contributed $181,711 to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, a sum greater than what was contributed by any other company in Illinois.

Axelrod is considered by many to be the mastermind behind Barack Obama’s rapid rise to power. Axelrod and Obama initially became acquainted when Obama led a Project Vote voter-registration drive in Chicago in 1992. It was not until Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign in 2004 that the two joined forces. Ever since, Axelrod has been Obama’s closest advisor.

Axelrod has depicted his relationship with Obama more as a vocation than a job: “I thought that if I could help Barack Obama get to Washington, then I would have accomplished something great in my life.” “I do love Barack Obama,” Axelrod stated on another occasion. “I believe in him.” Obama himself has indicated that their close partnership is based upon a deep ideological affinity: “You know, he and I share a basic worldview … I trust his basic take on what the country should be and where we need to move towards — not just on specific policy but how politics should be able to draw on our best and not our worst.”

During the 2008 presidential campaigns, Axelrod was asked to comment on the relationship between Obama and the former Weather Undeground terrorist Bill Ayers. Said Axelrod: "Bill Ayers lives in his [Obama's] neighborhood. Their kids attend the same school. They're certainly friendly, they know each other, as anyone whose kids go to school together." At the time of Axelrod's statement, Ayers' three children were in their late twenties and early thirties, whereas Obama's two daughters, Sasha and Malia, were aged six and nine, respectively.

Some critics contend that Axelrod possesses similar radical associations as Obama. Besides his alleged early communist mentors, Axelrod sat on the finance board of Chicago’s St. Sabina Catholic Church, where Michael Pfleger -- a longtime supporter of Barack Obama, Jeremiah Wright, and Louis Farrakhan -- serves as pastor. St. Sabina’s official website listed Axelrod as a member of its “Raise the Roof” committee. Alongside Axelrod’s name was an open letter from Pfleger asking for $1 million in contributions.

Axelrod has used his White House position to attack conservatives. He publicly declared that Fox News is “not really a news station”; he characterized Israel's construction of settlements in the Arab section of Jerusalem as an “affront” and an “insult” to the Palestinian people and the peace process; and he derided the Tea Party movement. “I think any time that you have severe economic conditions, there is always an element of disaffection that can mutate into something that’s unhealthy,” he said in April 2009 regarding that movement.

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