Rescuing ACORN

Activist Group’s Fraud and Dishonest Practices Further Cemented by Cover-Up Scheme

7/9/08, WASHINGTON – Tim Miller, Communications Director of the Employment Policies Institute, issued the following statement after The New York Times published an explosive exposé this morning detailing how the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) covered up nearly $1 million in embezzled funds by its founder’s brother:

“It comes as no surprise that ACORN founder and chief organizer Wade Rathke hid his brother’s embezzlement of nearly $1 million dollars from the ‘charitable’ organization’s employees, board of directors, and donors. This is just one more page in ACORN’s corrupt history, which already includes election fraud investigations in at least a dozen states, hypocritical and oppressive employment practices, and a political agenda driven by a handful of anti-corporate activists.

“This shameful embezzlement scheme and the eight year cover-up ought to make supporters and donors wary of associating themselves with ACORN. It’s bad enough that the boss’ brother stole almost a million dollars, but for Wade Rathke to sweep the crime under the rug and keep his brother on ACORN’s payroll is a disgrace.”

More information about ACORN’s long history of corruption can be found in the Employment Policies Institute’s recent report “Rotten ACORN: America’s Bad Seed” — available online at www.RottenACORN.com

Wade Rathke, Organizer

Wade Rathke, the founder and Chief Organizer of ACORN and SEIU Local 100, AFL-CIO, has been a professional organizer for thirty-five years. He has worked for and founded a series of organizations dedicated to winning social justice, workers rights, and a democracy where “the people shall rule”.

Leader and founder of the radical cult ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) - a nationwide activist network engaged in "community organizing" and in voter mobilization drives for George Soros' Shadow Party Former draft-resistance activist for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

Former activist in the National Welfare Reform Organization (NWRO) and protegé of its founder George A. Wiley

Co-founder of the Tides Foundation, along with Drummond Pike. Currently serves as Board Chairman of the Tides Center and member of the Tides Foundation Board of Directors

Founded Local 100 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in New Orleans and heads it to this day.

Rathke is president and co-founder of SEIU's Southern Conference and a member of SEIU's national executive board. He also helped launch the United Labor Union (ULU), which organizes low-skill service workers.

Rathke chairs the AFL-CIO's Organizers Forum and formerly served as Secretary-Treasurer of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO.

According to his blog (www.waderathke.com), Wade Rathke comes from a family of prosperous orange ranchers in Orange County, California.

Rathke formed a new organization in 1970 called Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). He enlisted civil rights workers and trained them in a program (at Syracuse University) patterned after Saul Alinsky's activist tactics.

Wade Rathke is one of the most powerful - yet least known - of America's hard-Left activists.

One reason that major media may shrink from shining too bright a light on Rathke's achievements is that he has a disconcerting penchant for blunt talk - disconcerting at least to those who would hide the left's appetite for violence and lawlessness that Rathke epitomizes.

Florida recount crisis of 2000

Wade Rathke, typically, assessed the event with greater realism. "[W]e allowed conservatives to steal pages from our playbook and do actions on us in Dade County," he lamented in his magazine Social Policy. "We need an edge, some harder steel on the rim."

Discover The Networks

Something is really starting to smell here. I am beginning to sense that the timing of this “crisis” was no accident.

Of course! This is so outrageous that it borders on the unbelievable. How to buy massive numbers of votes at a grassroots level, right before an election...

Imagine for one moment that ACORN was a right wing criminal activist group, and this slush fund was stuck into this supposedly urgent bailout plan............the leftwing media would be SCREAMING this information from the rooftops......instead<<<<< crickets >>>>>>

Dead voters and illegal immigrant voters are good....Harry Reed and Nancy Pelosi.

Scary thing is this smacks of deep strategery. This ACORN nonsense is put in, it coagulates opposition around that one point. Dems agree to remove it leaving the content of the bill intact. If the whole thing collapses, Dems can claim that Repubs are racist etc. in opposing ACORN.

HOT AIR.com - blog: "VIDEO: OBAMA SHAMELESSLY CONTRADICTS HIMSELF ABOUT TROOPS DYING IN VAIN" (September 27, 2008)

VIDEO: "Video surfaces of Barack Obama admitting he doesn't understand the Stock Market" (Added September 21, 2008)

More Videos - Link

GOVERNOR.mo.gov: Jefferson City - "GOV. BLUNT STATEMENT ON OBAMA CAMPAIGN'S ABUSIVE USE OF MISSOURI LAW ENFORCEMENT" (September 27, 2008)

NATIONAL REVIEW Online - The Campaign Spot - Barack Obama: "MISSOURI PROSECUTORS, SHERIFFS 'TARGET ANYONE WHO LIES' ABOUT BARACK OBAMA" (September 26, 2008)

Link

[Post no. 140] - ARCHIVES - Topic: BIDEN & OBAMA (aka B & O) (September 26, 2008 -- Click Here.)

it was revealed that his brother Dale Rathke stole $948,607.50 from ACORN and its affiliates, in 1999 and 2000. The embezzlement was kept quiet for eight years, until a covert arrangement with the billionaire funders of this “poor people’s” organization, to keep law enforcement away, became known.

Among the players in this clique are the Soros-run billionaires’ club, “Democracy Alliance”; the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), whose pro-globalist president Andy Stern does Soros’s bidding in politics; and the Tides Foundation, that conduits Soros and other “charity” money into political causes.

The New York Times reported August 16, “When the embezzlement of almost $1 million by the brother of the founder of ... ACORN, surfaced last month, the organization announced that an anonymous supporter had agreed to make it whole. That supporter was Drummond Pike, the founder and chief executive of the Tides Foundation, which channels money to what it describes as progressive nonprofits, including some ACORN charitable affiliates.

Mr. Pike is a friend of Wade Rathke, the founder of ACORN and its leader until the scandal broke, and he [Pike] agreed to buy the promissory note that required the Rathke family to repay ACORN the money that Mr. Rathke’s brother, Dale, had stolen. Mr. [Wade] Rathke is a member of the board of the Tides Foundation and other Tides-related organizations.”

To review this incest: Wade Rathke, who founded ACORN, was a director of Tides Foundation. As Andy Stern’s ally, Rathke is still Chief Organizer of Local 100 of the SEIU.

Drummond Pike is founder of the Tides Foundation, which funds ACORN with Soros money; Pike brought ACORN founder Rathke onto the Tides board. Pike is the Treasurer of the Democracy Alliance, the Soros political funding group that passes the money along to ACORN and other groups. In the attempt by Pike’s longtime political partner Rathke to cover up the ACORN embezzlement, Pike personally put up about $700,000 from undisclosed sources to buy out the note the Rathkes had arranged to cover the matter.

Other leaders of the Soros clique operating ACORN:

** Democacy Alliance Vice Chairman Anna Burger is also secretary-treasurer of the SEIU, and chairs the grouping of SEIU and other unions that broke up the pro-Democratic Party AFL-CIO back in 2005.

** Democracy Alliance co-founder and director Anne Bartley, niece of Laurance Rockefeller and political strategist for the Rockefeller family donations, is the wife of Larry McNeil, head of leadership training for Andy Stern, Wade Rathke and the other SEIU honchos.

ACORN is a “non-partisan” organization, which operates several tax-exempt sub-entities designed to take money from foundations and coordinate with its top-down political aims, while using thousands of political operatives in election-related drives throughout the country.

On February 21, 2008, one day before ACORN’s political action committee formally endorsed Barack Obama’s campaign against Hillary Clinton, and two weeks before the crucial March 4 Ohio primary election, the following help-wanted ad appeared, and was circulated on the Internet:

“Ohio ACORN GOTV effort for Obama is hiring canvassers now. “GOTV for Obama! Ohio ACORN is doing a Get Out The Vote project with the OBAMA Campaign. Ohio ACORN is hiring canvassers to go door to door encouraging voters to vote for Barak Obama. “ACORN is hiring in Cleveland (216)431-3905, Columbus (614)425-9491, Cincinnati (513)221-1737, for Dayton (call Cincinnati), and for Toledo call Cleveland. Or email polnatoh@ACORN.org and your inquiry will be routed to the appropriate person in each of these cities. Intake and training will be held daily at local ACORN offices. Canvass begins on Wednesday Feb. 27th and will work through election day. Please, only persons wishing to work all or most of these days (Saturday and Sunday included) should inquire.

“Please do not contact the Obama campaign directly regarding this post as they are not the organization doing the hiring and it will only distract their staff and volunteers from the other important work they are doing on behalf of Senator Obama.”

Acorn has routinely violated its non profit status by supporting specific political candidates.

The SEIU local 100 has supported “labor peace’ organizing agreements (no strike clauses in contracts)

http://tinyurl.com/4qa3r3

2004— Four ACORN employees in Ohio were indicted by a federal grand jury for submitting false voter registration forms.

January, 2005— two Colorado ACORN workers were convicted of submitting false voter registrations.

November 1, 2006— four ACORN employees were indicted in Kansas City, Mo., for voter registration fraud, part of a national investigation.

2006— ACORN was investigated for submitting false voter registrations in St. Louis, with 1,492 fraudulent registrations identified.

2007— five Washington state ACORN workers were sentenced to jail; ACORN agreed to pay King County $25,000 for investigative costs.

This is LONG but worth the read (there is more at the link below). Talk about a weave of political corruption done in the name of ‘charity’.

NONE of these people care about the ‘working poor’. They care about THEMSELVES and MORE POWER & MONEY.

******

Now comes the Tides Foundation and its recent offshoot, the Tides Center, creating a new model for grantmaking — one that strains the boundaries of U.S. tax law in the pursuit of its leftist, activist goals.

Set up in 1976 by California activist Drummond Pike, Tides does two things better than any other foundation or charity in the U.S. today: it routinely obscures the sources of its tax-exempt millions, and makes it difficult (if not impossible) to discern how the funds are actually being used.

In practice, “Tides” behaves less like a philanthropy than a money-laundering enterprise (apologies to Procter & Gamble), taking money from other foundations and spending it as the donor requires. Called donor-advised giving, this pass-through funding vehicle provides public-relations insulation for the money’s original donors. By using Tides to funnel its capital, a large public charity can indirectly fund a project with which it would prefer not to be directly identified in public. Drummond Pike has reinforced this view, telling The Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Anonymity is very important to most of the people we work with.”

Where the Money Comes From

The Tides Foundation is quickly becoming the 800-pound gorilla of radical activist funding, and this couldn’t happen without a nine-figure balance sheet. Just about every big name in the world of public grantmaking lists Tides as a major recipient. Anyone who has heard the closing moments of a National Public Radio news broadcast is familiar with these names. In 1999 alone, Tides took in an astounding $42.9 million. It gave out $31.1 million in grants that year, and applied the rest to a balance sheet whose bottom line is over $120 million. Since 1996, one foundation alone (the Pew Charitable Trusts) has poured over $40 million into Tides. And at least 17 others have made grants to Tides in excess of $100,000.

The Tides Center: A Legal Spin-Off

The Tides Center board of directors has been especially busy of late. In 2001 the first Tides “franchise” office (not counting Tides’ presence in Washington and New York) was opened in Pittsburgh. This new outpost, called the Tides Center of Western Pennsylvania, was erected largely at the urging of Pittsburgh native Teresa Heinz (the widow of Senator John Heinz, the ketchup heir). Heinz pulls more strings in the foundation world than almost any other old-money socialite; she’s presently married to U.S. Senator John Kerry (D-MA). The Tides Foundation has collaborated on funding projects with the Heinz Endowments (Teresa Heinz’s personal domain) for over 10 years.

Fenton Communications, itself a touchstone for radical political campaigns, made use of the Tides Center to set up its Environmental Media Services (EMS) in 1994 (it has also since emerged from under Tides’ protection and formally set up shop in Fenton’s offices). The fact that Tides originally ran EMS’ day-to-day operations provided PR spinmeister David Fenton with “plausible deniability” — a ready-made alibi against charges that this supposedly “nonpartisan” media outfit was just a shill for his paying clients. Now, of course, we all know that it is just that.

Similar stories can be told about SeaWeb, the Environmental Working Group, the National Environmental Trust (formerly known as the Environmental Information Center) and the Center for a Sustainable Economy, each of which received millions while under the Tides umbrella. Besides having been “incubated” in this fashion, the other principal commonality among these organizations is a client relationship with Fenton Communications.

The depth and financial implications of the Tides/Fenton connection is truly impressive, if not surprising. After all, long-time Fenton partner and recently-departed Environmental Media Services chief Arlie Schardt has sat on the board of the Tides Center/Tides Foundation complex since the very beginning. At present, the Fenton Communications client list includes at least 36 Tides grantees, as well as 10 big-money foundations that use Tides as a pass-through funding vehicle just about every year. In some cases, the Tides Foundation has been used to funnel money from one Fenton client to another.

Tides also maintains an interesting relationship with the multi-billion-dollar Pew Charitable Trusts. Since 1993 Pew has used the Tides Foundation and/or Tides Center to “manage” three high-profile journalism initiatives: the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism, the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, and the Pew Center for the People and the Press. These Pew “Centers” are set up as for-profit media companies, which means that Pew (as a “private foundation”) is legally prohibited from funding them directly. Tides has no such hurdle, so it has gladly raked in over $95 million from Pew since 1990 — taking the standard 8 percent as pure profit.

In practice, the social reformers at the helm of the Pew Charitable Trusts use these media entities to run public opinion polling; to indoctrinate young reporters in “reporting techniques” that are consistent with Pew’s social goals; and to “promote” (read: subsidize) actual reporting and story preparation that meets Pew’s definition of “civic journalism.” Civic journalism, by the way, is defined as reporting that “mobilizes Americans” behind issues that Pew considers important.

Thumbing Their Noses At America

Among the most unbelievable “projects” of the Tides Center is something called the Institute for Global Communications (www.igc.org). IGC is a clearinghouse for Leftist propagandists of all stripes, including living-wage advocates, anti-war protesters, slave-reparations hucksters, and a wide variety of extreme environmentalists. In February 2002 Orange County Register columnist Steven Greenhut called it “a network of the loony left” that “has to be seen to be believed… One alert posted in an IGC member conference calls for financial support for the Earth Liberation Front… Another message warns readers against cooperating with the FBI.”

The Chronicle of Philanthropy has documented this sort of America-bashing before. In a November 15, 2001 story, the Chronicle reported that the Tides Center had given the Independent Media Center (IMC) $376,000 — ironically, from its “9/11 fund.” IMC is a notorious bastion of far left, radical viewpoints, and also serves as an organizing outpost for all sorts of large-scale protest activity. In particular, the IMC served as a “virtual” staging ground prior to the April 20, 2002 anti-war protests in Washington, DC. Visitors to the IMC web site can read the rantings of “black bloc” anarchists, violent animal-rights criminals, and an assortment of anti-American advocates, all brought to you by the Tides Center and its tax exemption.

Skirting the Tax Law

The Tides Foundation and Tides Center continue to build their activist war chest by exacting an 8 to 9 percent “handling fee” on funds that pass through on their way to other activists. Some monies are awarded as “grants” in the traditional fashion (according to “donor-advised” agreements). It’s impossible to know for sure whose money is being spent for which of these grants. Other funds go toward management services to existing activist organizations in return for a percentage of their gross revenues. In still other examples, the Tides Center offers financial and administrative support for start-up advocacy groups.

In this last case, the Tides Center offers a sort of blanket tax-exempt designation for its grantees and projects. The entire foundation (pun intended) on which the Tides Center is built depends on the notion that the law allows one tax-exempt group to “lend” its exemption to another organization.

The legality of this proposition has never been challenged in court, but Tides’ practice of allowing smaller groups to share “piggyback” tax-exempt status could make its own 501(c)(3) status vulnerable.

* When Ben & Jerry’s announced that profits from its popular “Rainforest Crunch” ice cream flavor were earmarked for save-the-earth charities, the mass media swooned. What they didn’t tell you was that 20% of the cut went directly to the Tides Foundation.

* Back in 1985, Drummond Pike and two colleagues started the Working Assets Funding Service, a for-profit company whose family of credit-card, mutual fund, and long-distance telephone services have grown into a $130 million business. Working Assets lures consumers (over 400,000 so far) with promises of “socially responsible” commerce. A two-percent cut of the profits go to activist causes — funneled, of course, through the Tides Foundation.

http://tinyurl.com/5fylm

Please read post numbers 28 & 29. They are LONG but you will find out just how corrupt and polictically connected they are (connections to the PEW outfit too).

I have mailed several of these IBD articles to EVERYONE on my email list, and I mean everyone, even folks I barely know! I have urged them to send these articles to everyone on THEIR email lists.

Folks are angrier than I have seen them—EVER! I think this even surpasses the immigration mess, but then, it sorta ties in to the immigration thing. People are STILL trying to get something they don't deserve!

IMHO, folks are also getting fatigued with the PC accusation that they are “racists” if they dare complain about unfair practices. The accusation has been used so often, and for such idiotic reasons, that it no longer has the sting it used to have. (The allegation was made during the immigration debacle, with little effect on American outrage.)

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is a non-profit (but not federally tax-exempt) organization at the center of a vast web of groups run by long-time anti-corporate activist Wade Rathke and a handful of his closest allies. In total, the Employment Policies Institute has documented more than 75 organizations run by the Rathke/ACORN empire—almost all run out of one office at 1024 Elysian Fields in New Orleans.

Its budget is fed by extracting immense resources from unions, government grants, foundations, its members, and “settlements” with targeted businesses.

The Institute’s program, on the other hand, was intended, first, to provide ACORN with a nonprofit, tax-exempt arm, important for securing foundation grants. Second, it would serve as a means of organizer recruitment through both the training sessions and the intern program. Third, it represented ACORN’s attempt to hegemonize the field of community organizing by offering training in “principles and techniques of community organizing, drawing particularly from the ACORN model of neighborhood-based organizing.”

The Rathke Family Business

ACORN portrays itself as a democratic organization whose decisions are made by its thousands of member families. But history indicates that only one family really controls ACORN: the Rathkes. For all of the members it claims to represent, and for all of the organizations it maintains, ACORN is the family business founded by Wade Rathke and run with help from his wife, his brother, and at least one child.

Beth Butler is both Wade Rathke’s wife and Head Organizer of Louisiana ACORN, where the national organization resides. Rathke has also placed his daughter, whom he called “Organizer 5” in one Internet diary entry, into the crucial campaign to attack Wal-Mart.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported that former Arkansas ACORN chair Dorothy Perkins stated that the group was “run like a Jim Jones cult” where all the money ended up under Wade Rathke’s control and was “never seen” by the low-income individuals the organization claims to represent.

Follow The Money (If You Can)The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is registered as a non-profit corporation in Arkansas, which does not require public financial disclosure. According to labor activist and scholar Peter Dreier, ACORN’s annual operating budget is around $30 million.11The New York Timessubsequently reported that the figure is closer to $37.5 million, excluding the non-profit research and housing organizations the group runs.12Even this estimate likely does not include the vast resources of the ACORN-run unions or reflect election-year resources given to its ostensibly non-partisan get-out-the-vote efforts.

ACORN And Elections

The popular perception of ACORN as a community organization attempting to use the political realm to further the interests of its members, and of all low-income individuals, is sharply at odds with the historical record.

In reality, ACORN uses politics as a means of building its own power, often prioritizing organizational strength over achieving the stated goal of a given candidate or ballot initiative campaign.

Long-Term Quest For Political Power

ACORN’s no-holds-barred take on politics originates from its philosophy, which is centered on power. An internal ACORN manual instructed organizers to sign up as many residents as possible because “this is a mass organization directed at political power where might makes right.”

ACORN’S Jen Kern“We would like it to become a fact of political life,” Kern says, “where every year the other side has to contend with a minimum-wage law in some state.”“ This is what moves people to the polls now. This is our gay marriage.”

Claims that political work by ACORN and its affiliate Project Vote are non-partisan strain credibility. When ACORN operated its minimum wage campaign in Florida, lifelong Democrat Joe Johnson resigned his position as campaign boss because, he told reporters, “there were efforts to try to inform people that this was nonpartisan, when, in fact, it was not.”

The New York Times reported the month prior to the 2004 election that Project Vote would spend an estimated $16 million to increase voter turnout, compared to its 2000 total of $1 million.81According to a post-election review by Wade Rathke, ACORN and its subsidiary non-profit Project Vote raised nearly $20 million for the election.

Government Grant Fraud

For decades, ACORN has accepted government grants. But like all other resources it obtains, the group uses the public’s money to build the infrastructure of the highly political group. And like the other areas in which ACORN is involved, it has misused that public money.

Pattern and Practice: Denial

The frequency with which ACORN employees are caught turning in fraudulent or erroneous documents indicates the group cares less about obeying laws than pushing its political agenda. When it is periodically forced to answer allegations of fraud, ACORN downplays the harm of its crimes or shifts blame to supposedly rogue employees, whom the organization then fires.

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported that former Arkansas ACORN chair Dorothy Perkins “contended Acorn was building up a land portfolio that would translate to money and power for the national organization.” Perkins alleged that money raised by the community group was “never seen” by the low-income individuals it claims to serve, “and that all the money ended up” under Wade Rathke’s control (which she said was “run like a Jim Jones cult”)

http://tinyurl.com/4rppss

I suspect that, too.

**Democrats want to use profits from the bailout as a slush fund for liberal activist groups, even those involved in vote fraud to help elect Barack Obama. **

NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Imagine this crap? My forefathers are rolling in their graves.

Take ACORN out or don't approve it!

U. S. Senate

U. S. House of Representatives

Scary thing is this smacks of deep strategery. This ACORN nonsense is put in, it coagulates opposition around that one point. Dems agree to remove it leaving the content of the bill intact. If the whole thing collapses, Dems can claim that Repubs are racist etc. in opposing ACORN.

You're absolutely right. I was thinking the same thing earlier today.

That's why before an election, the Republicans should show some balls and act like real free market conservatives.

Then Republicans can claim ACORN wasn't the only thing they had reservations about and can deflect the issue while earning confidence with the base.

DEAR GOD, I agree!

ACORN, if they get funded through this f#cking bailout, are going to be the equivalent of the brown shirts of the Nazis, and like South Africa’s communist ANC party thugs. They will turn into hit squads. Barry will just tell them to get in your face.

Acorn workers are like prostitutes.

1. They work the streets
2. Their bosses get the benefits.

If Obama once worked for ACORN, than the McCain campaign needs to make an issue of it.

Without a doubt. No ifs ands or buts.

Get it out there, Senator McCain.