Category Archives: ACORN

Actor Jimmy Smits, Obama’s Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, and co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America union and Democratic Socialists of America member Dolores Huerta have recorded Public Service Announcements (PSAs) for the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) directed at workers “documented or not.”

In the video, the three DOL spokespersons announce the Department’s selective enforcement of U.S. laws as they explain that DOL intends to use its resources for both “documented” and “not” documented workers.  But, the real plan is to force all workers to pay union fees as a condition of employment.

U.S. Labor Sec. Hilda Solis’ 30-second script:

I’m U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, and it is a serious problem when workers in this country are not being paid every cent they earned.

Remember every worker in America has the right to be paid fairly whether documented or not.

So call us it is free and confidential at 1-866-487-9243

We can help.

Here is how this works.   Undocumented workers call the DOL hot line and say that they are being unfairly paid by Employer X.  Armed with this information, DOL investigators call Employer X and say they have evidence that Employer X has hired so-called undocumented workers and that it may have wage violations. The DOL investigators suggest that some type of remediation needs to occur, and then DOL will likely offer a list of options, any combination of which may be used:  multiple substantial fines, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigation, Wage & Hour investigation, IRS audit, and possibly imposition of a union contract to help prevent future calls from DOL.

The last option may be used as an escape clause to prevent investigations and/or fines.   (During the 1990’s when the Clinton Administration ran DOL, an employer was promised that the Wage & Hour investigation, NLRB charges, and other issues would go away if he signed a contract with SEIU.  Eventually, this led to a dismissal of one high ranking Clinton appointee after an inspector general investigation and a congressional investigation.)

This is another step in the Obama Administration’s continuing shakedown of employers in an attempt to entice them into agreeing to force their employees into unions.

With the legal costs associated with multiple federal agency investigations and the risks of heavy fines, Employer X could be forced out of business.  Under these conditions, Employer X might begin to believe that sacrificing his workers’ rights and forcing them into a union is an option worth taking.

Why should we suspect the Obama Administration’s involvement in this type of shakedown?  Besides the fact that the Wage & Hour Division was used by the Clinton Administration in an attempt to force unions upon employers in the past, there is more recent evidence that indicates that this is occurring now:

• In a November 2008 e-mail, ACORN outlined a special project, or shakedown operation,  comprised of SEIU, UFCW, AFSCME, Teamsters, and the Building Trades unions along with “Legal Aid, NELP, Greater Boston Legal Services” and “dirty money hungry lawyers to suck every dollar out of the employers.”  ACORN’s Ross Fitzgeraldreferred to it as Wage and Hour Centers.  (note: DOL’s Wage and Hour Division put together the Smits, Solis, and Huerta PSAs above.)*
• Quoting the ACORN e-mail: “We see it as a useful tool for [ACORN] offices to have, and bring to different Unions and pitch partnerships that use the Wage and hour center in a way that fits the unions organizing targets. We see this as the only way to get to the informal sector in an EFCA scenario.”   Later the memo refers to this plan as the ACORN — Worker Justice Center concept.
• According to the ACORN memo, SEIU, a substantial Obama political supporter, was eager to get this program off the ground: “Houston, Dallas – SEIU Local 1 has asked if we can specifically target janitorial contractors for litigation in the Dallas and Houston markets. This will be a contract that can hopefully lead to a recognition affiliation and shared dues arrangement.”  Click here to read the e-mails.
• In New York, ACORN was not needed to organize the harassment and shakedown of employers and employees because NY taxpayers funded the operation under the direction of Patricia Smith and Lorelei Boylan through a program called NY Wage Watch that provided a similar service to the one outlined in the ACORN email. Rather than tracking down “money hungry lawyers,” Smith used the power of the state of New York to shakedown employers – much more efficient in terms of costs and time than the ACORN plan.
• Now, Boylan (Wage & Hour Administrator) and Smith (Solicitor of Labor) are in the U.S. DOL and have created a nationwide federal program  like  NY Wage Watch that is running full steam ahead.  DOL likely has targeted employees unencumbered by forced unionism in every significantly sized city in America.
• Wage & Hour whistleblowers have let it leak that they have been ordered to give tips from union officials priority.

These DOL videos provide another peek inside DOL under the Obama Administration.  Sec. Solis and her forced unionism allies intend to use the power of the federal government to force documented and undocumented workers to expand the ranks of SEIU and other unions at the cost of individual worker freedom and choice.  Congress should defund these forced unionism programs; stop Sec. Solis from using the Wage & Hour Division to intimidate workers; and specifically exclude payments to or contracts with unions as a condition of settlement or negotiation with an employer.

* ACORN=Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now; SEIU=Service Employees International Union;  UFCW=United Food & Commercial Workers Union;  AFSCME=American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; Teamsters=International Brotherhood of Teamsters union; Building Trades=AFL-CIO Building Trades Organizations;  NELP=National Employment Law Project

Professional radical shill Peter Dreier, an Occidental College professor, has been very busy writing propaganda for his paying customer ACORN in recent days. Dreier is the driving force behind the “Cry Wolf” project, a push to encourage academics to help spread more lies about the corrupt group.

Now, taking a cue from America’s BP-Asskicking-Commander-In-Chief, Dreier affectionately oozes that the dissolving ACORN assaulted posteriors like nobody else. There was “[n]o group [that] was better at kicking ass,” Dreier writes.

What Dreier should have written was that there is no group better than ACORN – at kicking its own ass!

In a review of his friend John Atlas’s new institutional hagiography of ACORN, Seeds of Change, Dreier writes that ACORN brass “expected Obama’s victory in 2008 to give the organization even greater influence.”

But the New York Times and eeevil right-wingers spoiled the party.

Dreier and Atlas advance the positively ludicrous argument that the New York Times –which for the most part refused to cover ACORN’s troubles – somehow had something to do with ACORN’s fall. Really, they argue that, presumably with a straight face.

But the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy^TM really did ACORN in. Really.

Soon after Obama was inaugurated, “ACORN became the target of a right-wing assault that it was unprepared for and, ultimately, unable to survive,” Dreier writes.

Without a scintilla of credible evidence Dreier argues that ACORN’s demise was “engineered in part by Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s top political advisor, who saw in ACORN’s successful large-scale voter registration efforts a real threat to GOP candidates.”

As someone who has followed ACORN very closely in recent years, I can say with complete confidence that Dreier and Atlas don’t know what they’re talking about.

Rove might very well have wanted ACORN to die, but in fact the organization saved him the trouble by committing suicide.

No sinister right-wing conspiracy forced Wade Rathke’s brother Dale to embezzle a million dollars.

No sinister right-wing conspiracy forced Rathke to cover up the theft for eight years until it was discovered in mid-2008.

No sinister right-wing conspiracy forced ACORN employees across the nation to offer assistance to two camera-wielding undercover activists who claimed they needed help in setting up a brothel for underage illegal alien prostitutes.

No sinister right-wing conspiracy forced the Democrat-controlled Congress last September to vote to cut off all federal funding to the group.

No sinister right-wing conspiracy forced President Obama, whose close ties to ACORN are exhaustively documented, to sign the funding ban into law.

By the way, Dreier’s sleight-of-hand is part of a plan hatched by ACORN to try to cover up the sordid group’s decades of wrongdoing by downplaying aspects of it’s history and erasing other aspects altogether. ACORN cares about its image deeply because it is planning to reemerge after the next election, a fact Atlas acknowledges in his book.

ACORN online campaign director Nathan Henderson-James wrote in February that the revisionist project was underway.

“[T]here will be a fight over the narrative of ACORN’s demise,” he wrote to members of Townhouse, an invitation-only forum run by Matt Stoller, senior policy adviser to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.). The other side wants “a narrative about the corruption of popular organizations and how they are simply vehicles for the personal enrichment and power fantasies of their top staff members while pushing public policies that destroy middle America.”

Don’t forget to send your invoice to Nathan, Professor Dreier.

Despite its recent setbacks, the renamed ACORN network remains well positioned to receive support from left-leaning foundations, corporations, unions and the federal government, according to a whistleblower group comprised of former board members. Moreover, the existing financial apparatus that made it possible to transfer public money away from their stated purpose and into partisan political efforts remains intact.

The American Institute of Social Justice (AISJ), one of four national affiliates, deserves greater scrutiny and attention in this area. Over $53 million was transferred between ACORN and AISJ from 2000-2004, according to a report from the House Oversight Committee.

ACORN was also on the receiving end of a $4,952,288 grant from AISJ, according to the Institute’s 990 tax form for 2006. This is instructive because AISJ itself received almost $4 million from ACORN Housing Corp. (AHC) between 2000 and 2006, tax documents show.

“The money flowing to AISJ from ACORN Housing should be a huge red flag for investigators because almost all the federal money that the ACORN network receives goes into its housing affiliate,” Matthew Vadum, a senior editor with the Capital Research Center (CRC) observes. “So it’s entirely possible that when money was being transferred to the national ACORN organization from AISJ, taxpayer money designated for nonpartisan purposes might have been used for blatantly partisan purposes. These transfers are extremely suspicious. This is the type of financial activity that we see with organized crime and it should be investigated.”

On April 1, ACORN’s leadership announced it was dissolving its national network, but in reality the national affiliates and their many state level counterparts are simply remarketing and rebranding themselves, former insiders have warned.

ACORN Housing Corp., for example, the national affiliate at the epicenter of last year’s videotape scandal, has renamed itself Affordable Housing Centers of America. Several state entities have also followed suit reorganizing under generic sounding names that avoid the ACORN label.

ACORN 8, the whistleblower group named for the eight board members blocked from investigating an embezzlement scandal, cautions against media reports that suggest the national organization known in full as the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) has been permanently set back.

“Always note the date, April 1.” Marcel Reid, the ACORN 8 chairwoman, said in an interview. “ACORN is not dissolving, it may be morphing, but it is still is in business and it is still in a position to receive funding, although it may be done under different names.”

In fact, it may become easier over the long for donors to reactive their support for “community organizers” who are no longer burdened by the tarnished ACORN name, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) has observed.

“ACORN’s cover has been blown and its true identity has been revealed but it remains a viable entity beneath different names with the same patrons and same funding sources,” she explained in an interview. “I don’t see a tremendous change in the structure that called itself ACORN.”

Bachmann lead the charge against continued public funding for ACORN throughout 2009 but she does not anticipate that the current congress will move permanently cut off support. Only four Democrats joined with Bachmann to vote against an amendment attached to a mortgage bill last year that would prevent organizations with a criminal history from receiving taxpayer support.

Ron Sykes, a former treasurer with the Washington D.C. branch, and an ACORN 8 activist, has identified the Citizens Consulting Inc. (CCI) affiliate as a major conduit for the comingling and misappropriation of funds. Tax documents do show links between CCI and other affiliates.

“ACORN did not want its local people to have any control over the finances,” he has previously explained. “There were many accounts by CCI had control over all of it.”

Reid, the ACORN 8 chair, recalls how the funding schemes worked to the disadvantage of rank and file members who sought support for community initiatives.

“You could make a tax-deductible donation to ACORN if you were a foundation,” she explained. “You made it through AISJ, then the money was funneled through CSI (Citizens Consulting Inc.) and then the money was kicked back to ACORN – that’s the loop.”

The future of Citizens Consulting remains uncertain and it’s not clear that the affiliate remains in operation. Consequently, AISJ appears to be the main vehicle through which financial contributions can be diverted away from their stated purpose. The national affiliate has attracted little press attention and deserves greater attention and scrutiny as ACORN activists gear up for the 2010 elections.

Despite its recent setbacks, the renamed ACORN network remains well positioned to receive support from left-leaning foundations, corporations, unions and the federal government, according to a whistleblower group comprised of former board members. Moreover, the existing financial apparatus that made it possible to transfer public money away from their stated purpose and into partisan political efforts remains intact.

The American Institute of Social Justice (AISJ), one of four national affiliates, deserves greater scrutiny and attention in this area. Over $53 million was transferred between ACORN and AISJ from 2000-2004, according to a report from the House Oversight Committee.

ACORN was also on the receiving end of a $4,952,288 grant from AISJ, according to the Institute’s 990 tax form for 2006. This is instructive because AISJ itself received almost $4 million from ACORN Housing Corp. (AHC) between 2000 and 2006, tax documents show.

“The money flowing to AISJ from ACORN Housing should be a huge red flag for investigators because almost all the federal money that the ACORN network receives goes into its housing affiliate,” Matthew Vadum, a senior editor with the Capital Research Center (CRC) observes. “So it’s entirely possible that when money was being transferred to the national ACORN organization from AISJ, taxpayer money designated for nonpartisan purposes might have been used for blatantly partisan purposes. These transfers are extremely suspicious. This is the type of financial activity that we see with organized crime and it should be investigated.”

On April 1, ACORN’s leadership announced it was dissolving its national network, but in reality the national affiliates and their many state level counterparts are simply remarketing and rebranding themselves, former insiders have warned.

ACORN Housing Corp., for example, the national affiliate at the epicenter of last year’s videotape scandal, has renamed itself Affordable Housing Centers of America. Several state entities have also followed suit reorganizing under generic sounding names that avoid the ACORN label.

ACORN 8, the whistleblower group named for the eight board members blocked from investigating an embezzlement scandal, cautions against media reports that suggest the national organization known in full as the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) has been permanently set back.

“Always note the date, April 1.” Marcel Reid, the ACORN 8 chairwoman, said in an interview. “ACORN is not dissolving, it may be morphing, but it is still is in business and it is still in a position to receive funding, although it may be done under different names.”

In fact, it may become easier over the long for donors to reactive their support for “community organizers” who are no longer burdened by the tarnished ACORN name, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) has observed.

“ACORN’s cover has been blown and its true identity has been revealed but it remains a viable entity beneath different names with the same patrons and same funding sources,” she explained in an interview. “I don’t see a tremendous change in the structure that called itself ACORN.”

Bachmann lead the charge against continued public funding for ACORN throughout 2009 but she does not anticipate that the current congress will move permanently cut off support. Only four Democrats joined with Bachmann to vote against an amendment attached to a mortgage bill last year that would prevent organizations with a criminal history from receiving taxpayer support.

Ron Sykes, a former treasurer with the Washington D.C. branch, and an ACORN 8 activist, has identified the Citizens Consulting Inc. (CCI) affiliate as a major conduit for the comingling and misappropriation of funds. Tax documents do show links between CCI and other affiliates.

“ACORN did not want its local people to have any control over the finances,” he has previously explained. “There were many accounts by CCI had control over all of it.”

Reid, the ACORN 8 chair, recalls how the funding schemes worked to the disadvantage of rank and file members who sought support for community initiatives.

“You could make a tax-deductible donation to ACORN if you were a foundation,” she explained. “You made it through AISJ, then the money was funneled through CSI (Citizens Consulting Inc.) and then the money was kicked back to ACORN – that’s the loop.”

The future of Citizens Consulting remains uncertain and it’s not clear that the affiliate remains in operation. Consequently, AISJ appears to be the main vehicle through which financial contributions can be diverted away from their stated purpose. The national affiliate has attracted little press attention and deserves greater attention and scrutiny as ACORN activists gear up for the 2010 elections.

The ACORN apologists over at Media Matters were hard at work last week as they took time to once again whitewash or ignore the truth in order to protect ACORN. Even though Media Matters claims that my article titled “Radical Judicial Nominee Jack McConnell’s Disturbing ACORN Connections” is “nothing new” and the connections I drew in the article “between ACORN and progressives” are “even weaker than previous conservative attacks,” Media Matters apparently felt a need to try to refute it. Why write about “nothing new”?

Unfortunately for Media Matters, its arguments only work as long as its readers are content with ignoring key facts about ACORN and its role in politics, elections and government itself.

As stated in my previous article posted at many websites, including BigGovernment.com, there are several disturbing connections involving Jack McConnell, the lead paint litigation, and ACORN. Keeping in mind that this is the same “news organization” that still insists that ACORN’s alter ego Project Vote was totally separate from ACORN when Barack Obama worked for them, I will let ACORN’s own words explain its involvement in the Sherwin-Williams California case. The excerpt below is from page 59 of an ACORN report available here (click to enlarge).

Why would Media Matters ignore ACORN’s own words?

For the same reason it tries to dismiss my article as a conservative attempt to use ACORN as the “boogeyman.” By omitting the fact that I worked for ACORN and testified against ACORN/Project Vote in 2008, Media Matters hopes to downplay the significance of my knowledge of ACORN’s inner workings and its relationships with others.

In fact, while in the DC office of ACORN/Project Vote I worked on projects that allowed me to discover that among the donors to Project Vote was the private law firm involved in the California lead paint case.

Court documents show that the petitioners, California counties and cities, had not only hired Jack McConnell’s firm, Motley Rice, but also “Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy” (and others) to represent them against the paint companies (interestingly, the Santa Clara County counsel who initiated the lead paint case was appointed by the Obama administration to the Justice Department last year).

Not only did Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy give over $10,000 to ACORN’s Project Vote,  they were ACORN’s own attorneys. The connection between Motley Rice, ACORN and Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy is crystal clear in a reference here from page 31 of a 2006 report by ACORN.

“Amy Schur, directing this effort, was vigilant, and having dogged them all year, has constructed a legal strategy with ALERT and the Cachet firm [sic Cotchett] that has now brought the cities of San Diego and Los Angeles into the lawsuit.”

ACORN founder Wade Rathke mentions donor/attorney Naill McCarthy by name and also explains the lead paint litigation strategy in his book Citizen Wealth.

Wade goes on to explain how organizations like ACORN use litigation to gain power.

To recap for the Media Matters readers who may be used to having their news filtered:

1. ACORN staged a NATIONWIDE campaign against paint company Sherwin Williams.
2. ACORN turned down settlements to clean up the damage because it wanted money.
3. ACORN and its attorneys were in the final stages of given ACORN a seat in the negotiation process in the California case.
4. Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy represented ACORN in similar cases against Household Finance and Wells Fargo.

Don’t be fooled by the misspelling in the ACORN report, Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy is the same law firm that successfully represented ACORN in the Wells Fargo case.

“Wells Fargo Financial, Inc., the consumer finance subsidiary of Wells Fargo & Company, and the law firms of Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy (Burlingame, Calif.) and Miner, Barnhill & Galland, P.C. (Madison, Wisc.) said they have agreed to settle a class action lawsuit…..

In the proposed settlement, Wells Fargo Financial commits to continue for three years several improvements it had already put into practice, which have further strengthened its nonprime real estate-secured lending practices, and to implement other practices to benefit its customers. It also agrees to enact a default relief program, earmarking $2.4 million to provide relief to qualifying class members whose loans have become delinquent by more than 60 days. Qualifying class members who submit claims may also be entitled to cash payments, which will be determined using a formula to disburse up to $4.4 million.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a party to the lawsuit, had alleged that Wells Fargo Financial failed to adequately disclose points and prepayment penalties and had inaccurately reported loan balances on some of its California customers to credit reporting agencies.”

ACORN involvement in the lead paint issue was tremendous. Besides releasing reports and, staging protests (both national and international), ACORN even dedicated a separate website to the cause.

ACORN demonstrations included:

A reasonable person would say that given ACORN’s relationship with former Rhode Island Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse and current United States Senator (an enthusiastic supporter of Jack McConnell’s nomination), and its work with Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy on settlements, does raise the question as whether Motley Rice’s agreement with DuPont paint deserves more scrutiny.

“It’s odd and I think unlawful that the Attorney General, in a sense, appropriated the DuPont settlement moneys for his own purposes. It’s curious part of the money went to his alma mater, another part w[ent] to pay off a pledge made by Motley Rice to a Boston hospital, then the rest of the money went to the Children’s Health Forum, which is not based in Rhode Island at all.”

The fact that ACORN Advisory Committee member and long time ACORN ally Henry Cisneros is on the board of the Children’s Health Forum could be considered a coincidence to the folks over at Media Matters, but what if I were to tell you that the Mayor of Los Angeles Antonio Villaraigosa was on the advisory committee of the Children’s Health Forum?

In 2009 Cisneros was honored for his commitment to ACORN while Villaraigosa engaged in crisis PR for the group. Side note:  Villaraigosa is also board members of the Institute for America’s Future, a group that goes out of its way to protect ACORN interests.

Either Jack McConnell’s law firm Motley Rice was totally oblivious to the FACT that Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy were in the FINAL stages of securing ACORN a seat next to them  at the negotiating table or McConnell lied during his confirmation hearing (see transcript below)

SEN. KYL: I understand. My five minutes is up. It’s kind of hard to have continuity in questioning when we have this kind of limitation. I understood the point you were originally trying to make, but if I can — and I have a couple more minutes’ worth of questions just as a follow up to this.

My point really was not only, is it right to seek this as a movement, but whether you actually encourage these lawsuits in other states — you or your law firm — did you?

MR. MCCONNELL: No, Senator, we did not.

SEN. KYL: Are you aware of any role by the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now — that’s ACORN — in how those cases might have come to be filed?

MR. MCCONNELL: No, neither I nor my firm have had any relationship with ACORN.

President Clinton said that his answer depended upon what the meaning of the word is is. McConnell might say that it depends upon what a relationship is. Apparently McConnell did not want to acknowledge any kind of relationship to ACORN by the time his confirmation hearing was held. Still, McConnell, his firm and ACORN are all connected. McConnell’s key role in the lead paint litigation in Rhode Island, where ACORN had a significant presence, and his law firm’s subsequent participation in the California lead paint case on the side of ACORN and its California law firm contradict his unqualified assurance that neither he nor his firm “had any relationship with ACORN.”

To quote from ACORN Report shown in the screen shots above:

p. 38: “Luck would have it that the major CA lawsuit against the paint industry is being handled by the same law firm handling our Wells Fargo case [Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy]–and they want to work together on the lead case. Over the last month we have been able to convince several major CA cities and school districts to join the lawsuit. In a potentially important precedent for our role in these types of cases, we are in the final stages of negotiating a seat for ALERT (ACORN Law for Education, Representation & Training) on the legal team for the case, which puts us at the table–and in the settlement negotiations.”

P. 59: December 2006–”ACORN gets 2 cities and 2 school districts in CA to join a lawsuit against paint companies”

ACORN demanded and received changes to a congressional report that –surprise, surprise– fails to find ACORN did anything wrong.

Longtime ACORN lawyer Arthur Z. Schwartz sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) which was examining federal grants to ACORN, under orders from Congress. Schwartz’s demands appear at pages 32 and 33 of the report which is called “Preliminary Observations on Funding, Oversight, and Investigations and Prosecutions of ACORN or Potentially Related Organizations.” The paper is available at GAO’s website.

ACORN’s election fraud assurance division, Project Vote, which used to employ President Obama, even threw in a few helpful suggestions in an effort to trick Americans into believing it no longer has anything to do with ACORN. Project Vote lawyer Brian Mellor’s letter appears at pages 35 and 36 of the report.

The preliminary -as in incomplete, insufficient, and downright superficial- report is less than enlightening. I got the distinct impression while reading it that its authors hadn’t actually been following ACORN’s troubled history. You can’t expect much from a federal investigation when the question posed, namely, whether some of the grants ACORN received, were misused. Instead of doing actually shoe-leather investigating, all GAO appears to have done is talked to other government agencies and compiled existing data.

Table 4 at p.19 of the report indicates that of the six major federal agencies GAO asked questions of only ONE (!) has provided responses so far. Talk about “preliminary”!

It is amazing that GAO’s lukewarm threshhold-level probe is considered an investigation at all.

The real issues that have yet to be explored are whether ACORN engaged in violations of RICO through money-laundering of taxpayer funds designated for nonpartisan activities, engaged in partisan activities, and violated ERISA (the federal pension statute) by shifting pension funds around in order to conceal a million dollar embezzlement perpetrated by the ACORN founder’s brother (Dale Rathke) — for starters! ACORN’s criminal activities stretch almost all the way back to the group’s founding in 1970 in Arkansas.

Only a proper racketeering investigation will shed light on ACORN’s decades of lawbreaking.

Meanwhile, ACORN hagiographer and radical left-wing community organizer John Atlas, author of Seeds of Change, crows that ACORN has been “vindicated” by a new preliminary threshhold-level report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

When he’s not agitating people in the inner cities to rise up against their government, Atlas is a full-time unicorn breeder.

The July issue of Playboy (available on news stands Friday) has an awesome feature story, “Rogues of K Street: Confessions of a Tea Party Consultant.” The piece is by Anonymous. We bring you our first installment below. The whole article can be found here.

Everything I know about being a good consultant comes from Fight Club. Discretion is everything. Rule number one is you don’t talk about consulting for the Tea Party. Rule number two is you don’t talk about consulting for the Tea Party. The story about the wild characters who are shaping this campaign cycle is worth telling, but please excuse my anonymity.

I hold as many meetings as possible over Tanqueray and tonics at the St. Regis hotel on K Street in Washington, D.C. The bar is dark and private, with comfortable couches. Even the gin tastes better there. On weekday afternoons the only people in the bar are foreigners and political consultants long past caring about who actually wins.

“You’re going to see something spectacular,” an old friend who has a knack for black-bag operations said as he proudly downed his vodka. “About a month from now you’ll see ACORN explode from within.” Right on schedule a video was released that showed undercover conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles getting advice from employees at the Baltimore office of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now on how to smuggle underage El Salvadoran girls into a fictitious brothel.

That’s when I realized this isn’t an average fringe movement. This one is credible, legit and-for the first time in a decade-scaring the crap out of the left. In my years as a campaign hack and then as a consultant, I’ve created more than my share of fake grassroots organizations. Some were downright evil but effective beyond expectations. Did you get an automated call from the sister of a 9/11 victim asking you to reelect President Bush in 2004? That was me. Did you get a piece of mail with the phrase ’supports abortion on demand as a means of birth control’? That may have been me too.

Conservatives had been trying to take down ACORN for three decades. Where they failed, BigGovernment.com and my friends succeeded. In one magnificent explosion, a loose group of troublemakers, libertarians and Republicans took its first scalp. Sonja Merchant-Jones, former co-chair of ACORNís Maryland chapter, told The New York Times in March, “That 20-minute video ruined 40 years of good work.”

The ACORN blood tasted good. Shortly after, a core group of about 30 of us convened for the first time. It was the kind of conference call during which no one, except the handful with nothing to lose, offered last names. But it didn’t matter. I’d been around long enough to know many of the people by voice. Most of our talk was devoted to rants about the K Street lobbyists who are ruining the GOP. There I sat, in the quiet corner of a coffee shop on K Street, listening to a conference call beating the shit out of the people who keep me in business.

The cynical among us think it’s a group of peasants with pitchforks controlled by an underground cabal of Glenn Beck, wealthy donors and the guys who killed JFK. But the worst thing I can say about the Tea Party I work for is that it can make lots of noise but can’t win without professional help. I love the irony of helping run this organization from the St. Regis Bar.

This cause is worthier and more real than anything I’ve done in the past. I’m all in. When I met the colorful characters behind the organization, I was really all in. None of them were prom king, none went to college east of the Appalachians (even the Jews), and a lot of them smoke a pack a day just because they’re not supposed to. Unlike most of the tired, airbrushed conservatives living in D.C., the homegrown activists I work with are the real deal. They may not read much, but they all know their Ayn Rand.

Read more tomorrow. The whole article can be found here.

A sitting congressman allegedly commits assault on a public sidewalk, is caught on video doing so (link is to the related Eyeblast.tv video and blog post), and "apologizes."

Note that the incident took place "last week," according to the linked BigGovernment.com post, which means that Etheridge didn't see the need for an apology until the video went viral.

So ... who does the intrepid Associated Press attempt to go to for comment? The Congressman? Apparently not, as you will see; the AP must see his "apology" as the end of the story. The person whom Etheridge arguably assaulted? Legal experts, who could weigh in on whether the congressman could be arrested and and charged? House or Democratic Party colleagues? No-no-no.

Get a load, in the final paragraph of what will probably end up being a brief initial report, of who the AP believes owes it a comment first and foremost:

Yeah, that's right. Andrew Breitbart.

You have to wonder, especially since they felt compelled to bring up the ACORN sting videos, if the folks at AP check under their beds at night for vast right wing conspirators before turning in.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

“ACORN HQ is wkg [working] for the Democratic Party,” so say the newly released FBI records.  The handwritten notes provide a laundry list of underhanded activities related to elections in St. Louis, Missouri, in 2007.

The documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by Judicial Watch, a conservative government watchdog group in Washington, DC, concern the arrests of eight workers from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, aka ACORN, for violations of election laws and voter fraud in Missouri.

ACORN is a collection of “community organizations” purportedly promoting various social issues relevant to low-income families, and large-scale voter registration drives have been a significant aspect of that outreach since the 1980s. During the 2006 mid-term elections there were numerous reports of voter fraud on the part of ACORN’s canvassers, which led to investigations in numerous states. The 2006 federal investigation of the allegations in Missouri led to several convictions, but after a similar investigation in Connecticut was halted by the Obama Justice Department in 2009, Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the documents produced by the earlier investigation.

The result was a collection of FBI documents which included copies of arrest warrants and court documents and over one hundred pages of handwritten notes from the FBI investigators regarding the ACORN employees’ attitudes and actions.

The investigators were told that ACORN had “told employees not to talk to the FBI“, and that “anyone who was against PV (Project Vote) or ACORN’s goals [were] ‘right wing.’” The investigators noted that Project Vote paid ACORN “whether the [voter registration] cards were fake or not” and one of the employees they interviewed “said ‘You treat the cards like $ (cash).’” Despite knowing that submitting fake voter registration cards was against the law, employees detailed several methods for creating fake cards. One explained that they would get “some names…right from the phone book and made up the rest.” Another “thought if she used a completely fake name it would be less like ID theft.”

The Connecticut and Missouri investigations are not stand-alone incidents, however. ACORN has a long history of encouraging falsification of voter registration cards. Between 2004 and 2006, they had been implicated in investigations in 12 states, and in 2007 were involved in the largest instance of voter fraud in Washington state’s history. In 2009, ACORN was investigated by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee which issued an 88 page report which declared that “[t]he weight of evidence against ACORN and its affiliates is astounding.”

Astounding, indeed.  These documents show the need for a national criminal investigation by the Obama Justice Department into ACORN. Is Attorney General Holder doing nothing because of Obama’s close connections to ACORN and Project Vote? The information in these new documents has national implications that cry out for further investigation,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

The media in the backdrop of Barack Obama’s now infamous “whose ass to kick” comment has argued that this President’s critics are angry at him for not showing more emotion.  That conservative bastion CNN features an article entitled ‘Why Obama doesn’t dare become the ‘angry black man’ that reads:

Who would have ever expected some white Americans to demand that an African-American man show more rage?

If you’ve followed the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, you’ve heard the complaints that Obama isn’t showing enough emotion.

But scholars say Obama’s critics ignore a lesson from American history: Many white Americans don’t like angry black men.

[…]

“Folks are waiting for a Samuel Jackson ‘Snakes on the Plane’ moment from this president as in: ‘We gotta’ get this $#@!!* oil back in the $#!!* rig!’ But that’s just not who Obama is,” says Saladin Ambar, a political science professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

A few observations here.  First, notice how it is only leftists like Bill Maher, Spike Lee and the elites in academia and the media coming out and making this a race issue.  Second, how unintelligible is this argument?  People are upset because the President is not getting upset, but they are wrong to be upset because they don’t like President’s that play into stereotypes?  What exactly does this have to do with an oil spill that is crippling the nation?  And who is perpetuating such a stereotype?  Third, which Americans are demanding that Barack Obama show rage?  People of all stripes and colors are looking for a President to stand up and show calm but confident and steadfast leadership, irrespective of the President’s race.  If Barack Obama happened to be purple it wouldn’t make a damn difference.

The race issue is simply devised as a smokescreen by which the left seeks to distract us.  Since the President has done a poor job leading the nation in the wake of the ongoing BP spill, the media pulls the race card to shift the focus away from Obama and towards his critics who after all are all clansmen.  Yet notice again that throughout this Presidency, the only people talking about race are the leftists themselves.

There is another aspect however to the President’s aloofness with regard to the oil spill, aloofness leaving aside the candid putting the “boot on the throat of BP” line, which I might add if Bush’s administration had taken would have likely led to mass impeachment for conspiracy to reinstate the Third Reich.

The BP situation reflects that the President is only serious, empathetic, emotional and unscripted when it comes to issues that he is truly passionate about with folks he is really passionate about, such as ACORN, Henry Louis Gates and illegal immigrants in Arizona.

Hence, we see the returning of the bust of Winston Churchill to Great Britain, the sticking of the finger in Benjamin Netanyahu’s chest, the demonizing of capitalists, the concluding that Daniel Pearl’s beheading “capture[d] the world’s imagination,” and the attending of countless concerts and basketball games while the nation burns.

For a President who makes a thrill go up some peoples’ legs, who is considered so polished and intelligent, what are we to make of such behavior?

Some have argued that Obama is simply not that competent nor politically astute.  Given his trajectory from the Ivy League through the Windy City to the White House, I find this to be impossible.

I read President Obama differently.  Sure the man is narcissistic and unable to handle criticism; what are we to expect from a man having led such a charmed political existence?  But the actions he takes and the words he chooses that make the right so apoplectic are highly calculated and symbolic.

Barack Obama’s message is quite clear: he is spiteful with regard to traditional Americans with traditional American values, spiteful with regard to America’s traditional allies and spiteful with regard to America’s traditional place as the beacon of liberty.  Barack Obama prefers an America that is nuclear-neutered, bankrupt, statist and paralyzed with dhimmitude to an America that is exceptional.

This President intentionally makes a mockery of the Presidency — the leadership of the free world — because he believes the notion of the free world, as we have traditionally understood it, to be a mockery.  He wishes it seems to reduce us from the free world to the Third World.  The fundamental principles of Western Civilization are completely anathema to those of President Barack Obama.  Hence Dorothy Rabinowitz’s characterization of him as an alien President.

A serious President in Obama’s shoes would stand up and lead, inspiring confidence in his administration but far more importantly in the American people themselves because after all it is not the President or the Congress that makes the country great, but its people.  The government is supposed to be the servant that protects us from the tyranny of others, not the master that tyrannizes us itself.

A serious President in light of the oil spill might show continued, genuine heartfelt compassion for the Americans that are bleeding, noting that though the government is limited in its capability to carry out such efforts, it will dedicate its full resources and efforts to work with BP, Governor Bobby Jindal and others in any and all capacity possible.  A serious President might give an impassioned speech condemning the terrorists on the flotilla, defending Israel’s right to sovereignty and reiterating our unwavering support for her.  A serious President might honor our fallen troops on Memorial Day and D-Day.

But who cares for such things when you’ve got social justice to fight for.

SEIU’s New Lavender Lady Labor Boss

Politico’s Ben Smith was first to publish that Service Employee International Union (SEIU) Secretary-Treasurer Anna Burger would not be the Purple Union’s  new union boss, he created a shock heard round the world; well at least, at SEIU’s Dupont Circle Headquarters. The breaking news was that Executive Vice President (EVP) Mary Kay Henry (MKH) would become the abruptly resigned Andy Stern’s replacement. Some claimed that this indicated an SEIU shake-up; actually it is merely an SEIU insiders’ game of musical chairs that will result in little change.

Don’t let the cheery atmosphere surrounding her anointment ease concerns about her nor the SEIU and its agenda; because for her, ObamaCare and its potential for 21.1 million forced unionism conscripts are just the beginning steps for SEIU’s steady march towards domination of U.S. labor markets.

Mary Kay Henry’s intentions to further radicalize the labor movement and the American economy are clearer than Stern’s vision.  With the hundreds of millions of union dues and fees flowing into SEIU’s treasury, she has the financial fuel needed to fund her ambitious desires.

SEIU’s Growth by Forced Unionism Fiats

Under Stern direction, SEIU had focused on the takeover of the healthcare industry through forced unionism obtained primarily through government fiats or from intimidated and cowed employers signing away worker freedoms to keep “labor peace.”  SEIU’s purple machine is unlikely to change their top-down intimidation operation with  Henry running the show.

Mary Kay Henry the Queen of ‘SEIU Grassroots’

Despite the New York Times headline: “Grass-Roots Choice Leads Race for Top Union Post;” SEIU is not a grassroots friendly organization. Its growth cannot be attributed to grassroots.

Mary Kay Henry has been credited with most of SEIU’s membership growth for more than a decade; however, that growth did not come from the grassroots; it was top down.

From 1996-2007, SEIU claimed 900,000 “new members” and Mary Kay Henry’s healthcare division provided almost all its growth.. Perhaps, this earned her the recent press accolades referring to her as a “grassroots” organizer, etc…

But, looking at the underlying sources of SEIU “membership” growth provides an excellent picture of how SEIU organizes – and more proof that SEIU and MKH are in reality antithetical to the customary meaning of grassroots:

• Nearly 200,000 of SEIU’s 900,000 new members came through a 1998 merger with an existing union’s membership, an old New York hospital union Local 1199
• Another 200,000 SEIU counted as new recruits are not members, but were actually federally forced agency fee payers to SEIU
• SEIU included 35,000 “members” who were actually retirees
• Almost 500,000 of these “new members” are home care, home childcare and similar quasi-public workers previously treated as independent contractors.[ii]

FYI, This homecare worker forced-unionism scheme was the brain child of ACORN Founder Wade Rathke and others who worked closely with SEIU lawyer, now National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) board member, Craig Becker.

SEIU’s primary method of membership growth is being challenged by several homecare worker victims and their attorneys from The National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation.  Hundreds of thousands of non-state employees who were forced into labor unions by gubernatorial and legislative fiats may soon regain their freedom if Foundation attorneys prevail.

Continued Centralized Power and Control

In 2006, Mary Kay Henry laid her plan on the table:

More central power is needed, said Henry. “We believe the American labor movement needs to move beyond voluntarism [joining voluntarily?] … SEIU aims to increase the union rate of health care workers from its current 20 percent to 50 percent.[iii]

SEIU’s game plan is simple and reminiscent of the 1950s: create the allusion that it has the power to subjugate employers by region and couple it with SEIU’s willingness to ignore election rules to intimidate and control almost every elected and appointed Democrat in the United States.  If the plan works, SEIU organizations gain control of workers in an entire region of the country.

After creating mega-locals, SEIU begins to sign-up smaller workplaces and move these units into the appropriate mega-local conflating contracts into its master contract for the region.

In the end, SEIU’s mega-local contract spans across numerous states and worksites making it virtually impossible for individual workers to mount a successful decertification or deauthorization NLRB election.

Political $$$ Translates into Forced Unionism and SEIU Growth

SEIU political campaign expenditures on behalf of politicians and its willingness to use political intimidation are largely responsible for those 500,000 new SEIU forced dues paying clients in the home health care field.

After creating subservient elected officials from the state houses to the White House, SEIU follows up with to-do lists like the illegitimate forcing of a half-a-million homecare workers to pay fees to SEIU with the stroke of a pen in some cases.

Former Illinois State Senator and now-President Barack Obama is one such politician that is obligated to SEIU.  In his book, The Audacity, Obama proudly boasts of his SEIU obligation. Read Obama’s own words:

“The Leaders of several of the largest service workers unions the Illinois Federation of Teachers, SEIU, AFSCME, UNITE-HERE chose to endorse me [for U.S. Senate] over Hines … so I owe those unions. When their leaders call, I do my best to call them back right away. I don’t consider this corrupting in anyway.  I don’t mind feeling obligated toward a bunch of home healthcare workers’ [union bosses].”

Mary Kay Henry Andrew Stern

As SEIU President, Mary Kay Henry will no doubt enjoy the same political access afforded the old boss Andy Stern.  Mary Kay Henry has been playing the political game of forced unionism for decades, and she will continue to use SEIU’s political incentives and disincentives. Stern referred to this as the “power of persuasion” and the “persuasion of power.”

Don’t let the new shade of lavender and laces fool you; Henry is as tough as any other Big Labor boss.  She has played major roles in expanding forced unionization and she will continue, unless politicians, taxpayers, and the very workers that Henry claims to represent continue to pushback against SEIU’s extreme agenda against individual workers and their rights.

[iii] Feuerherd, Joe. “Split poses dilemma for labor’s allies.” National Catholic Reporter. 12 Aug. 2005: 11. eLibrary. Web. 04 May. 2010.

If elections were like football games, this would be your two minute warning.  All of the passion, energy and renewed interest in politics that propelled the tea party movement of 2009 opens the door to a new level of involvement. As patriot groups around the country prepare for the November 2010 elections, a quiet force has been building behind the scenes.

Investigative reporter Carol Greenberg’s work inside Obama’s Organizing for America has already helped expose the OFA’s connection to ACORN and its network of top Democrat party insiders. Greenberg’s latest article explains the OFA plan to deploy rapid response teams to Ohio ahead of the elections.

Any liberal discussion of Ohio includes the sentiment that “Ohio is ground zero for the left.” Long a playground for groups like ACORN, they conducted voter experiments, filed lawsuits against the state and their voter fraud shenanigans led to a civil RICO suit brought by the Buckeye Institute. ACORN’s settlement of the case required that it surrender its business license in the state.

Unfortunately for conservatives, the awareness of ACORN’s network of organizations and mob like behavior come at a time when he same political workeasily be done by Obama’s permanent campaign. A campaign that was absorbed into the Democratic National Committee after it ceased being Obama for America.

Obama’s ACORN cronies designed a system that could be substantial from any number of leftist organizations, including the DNC:

“Apparently, ACORN and Project Vote were ’smack dab’ in the middle of another one of Obama’s voter registration drives. According to ACORN reports, ACORN was Catalist’s first client. Let me be clear, the ACORN VBASE, is the archetype of the Obama campaign. ACORN’s technology combined with union money elected a president.”

Draft slides of a 2006 Project Vote PowerPoint show that Project Vote’s method could produce the desired results to sway an election.

Critics of Project Vote and ACORN underestimate their effectiveness in contacting voters to move them on an issue or to the polls.

Other slides detail their plans to turn this Voter Mobilization Network over to the leftist friends (including the DNC).

The left may scoff at whether this connection exists, but Karyn Gillette, then development director of Project Vote, also gave me a copy of the 2004 DNC donor list to work from. Karyn Gillette came to Project Vote from Ohio where she was employed by Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner.

“According to a court filing in Ohio alleging ACORN violated state Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law, ‘Project Vote, regularly advises Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner (hereinafter “Secretary Brunner”) on election strategy, and recently issuing a news release claiming credit for Secretary Brunner’s directive restricting challenges to suspected unlawful voter registrations.’

“Maurice Thompson, the attorney handling the Ohio RICO action, told me late yesterday, ‘Evidence of collusion amongst ACORN, Project Vote, the Obama Campaign and Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner comes as no surprise to us — these supposedly separate entities appear to have been co-mingling funds, trading political tips, and helping each other gain power for years now.’”

Here is a screen shot of the email Gillette sent to ACORN.org email addresses containing the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Though a number of news outlets like the New York Times had copies of the DNC donor list,  it was never made public, until now.

Click here to view the DNC major donor list ACORN used to fundraise for its voter registration drives.

The OFA’s organizing machine can track millions of calls and mobilize countless volunteers and it would behoove the right to take notice. Twitter and Facebook may spread the message and connect folks but there is a serious need for some good old fashion grassroots door knocking. If conservatives are going to win in November there must be a combination of new and old organizing. In 2004 Ohio surprised the nation by going red for Bush. As many others have noted, there was initially a

…lack of outreach among African American communities. Karl Rove proved in 2004 with black voters in Ohio that persons should not assume that African Americans will consistently vote progressive.”

Organizing for America has stopped the game clock with the unveiling of Vote 2010. November is the goal and they have the ball. Kickoff events are scheduled around the country for June 5th. Inviting emails with subjects like “What are you doing Saturday?” are making the rounds.

Conservatives, what are you doing this Saturday? If you want to win in November, it should be attending one of those kickoff parties or other OFA events. OFA, it’s the new ACORN. Learn who they are and how they operate. Click here to find an event near you or to sign up for their updates. If the OFA can continue to organize to pass Obama’s agenda and maintain the Congressional majorities, and all of the momentum of the past year and a half will be lost.

“If you make a mess, you have to help clean it up”, John “Jack” McConnell said in his opening statement in a case that would have lasting and costly effects. From the looks of things McConnell and his friends may need a mop because there is a trail of corruption originating from Rhode Island that has spread to DC and polluted the country. McConnell’s nomination for the Rhode Island’s federal court reeks of backroom deals and paybacks.

“President Barack Obama nominated Jack McConnell in March for a spot on the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island. He was recommended by the state’s two senators, Democrats Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse.”

The Heritage Foundation explains McConnell’s background:

“Another of McConnell ’s claims to fame is the lead paint litigation in Rhode Island and Wisconsin. In Rhode Island, McConnell’s law firm shopped a lawsuit against the former makers of lead paint to Whitehouse, when the latter was that state’s Attorney General. Whitehouse’s successor ratified a decision that Whitehouse made and contracted out the state’s power to sue in the public interest to McConnell’s law firm. In the lawsuit, which McConnell considers one of his most significant, the state sought an order directing the companies to abate lead pigment in all buildings in Rhode Island that were accessible to children on the ground that the buildings were a ‘public nuisance.’

The Rhode Island Supreme Court recognized that lead poisoning was a serious public health problem, but declined to play the role of the legislature and create a new cause of action to address it, as McConnell ’s lawsuit wanted it to do.”

Have angry mob, will travel

Naturally, when there is an opportunity to exploit the situation, attack business, and make some money, ACORN is not far behind.

As so called leaders in the ’social justice’ movement, ACORN was active in lead paint initiative early on. Whether it was state and local grants or lucrative partnerships, ACORN was ready to sign on. In the case of Rhode Island, ACORN formed an alliance with an organization called the Childhood Lead Action Project (CLAP). CLAP was instrumental in pushing the litigation in Ohio and joined with ACORN to file an amicus brief on behalf of McConnell’s case.

A one time partnership on a case of mutual interest can be overlooked but ACORN and the Childhood Lead Action Project teamed up on a number of projects including

Rhode Island Diesel Pollution Initiative

The National Low Income Housing Coalition

The Fund for Community Progress

The Childhood Lead Action Project presented Jack McConnell with the Above and Beyond the Call of Duty Award and McConnell’s firm Motley & Rice LLC. donated funds to CLAP.

Steal from the rich and give to the liberal rich.

With ACORN organizing protests across the country against McConnell’s target Sherwin-Williams, the “advocacy group” was able to maintain leverage over negotiations and even described their motives to a gathering of staff in December of 2006:

“As an outgrowth of the neighborhood lead-based campaigns in recent years, the profile of our lead work leaped forward targeting giant paint manufacturer Sherwin-Williams. Legal settlements in Rhode Island most notably gave us encouragement that some level of victory was possible in finally winning remediation for the impacts of lead paint.

The initial gamut of the company and others was to attempt to force us to tread water with the trade association, but meetings won through early actions produced nothing. Amy Schur, directing this effort, was vigilant, and having dogged them all year, has constructed a legal strategy with ALERT and the Cachet firm that has now brought the cities of San Diego and Los Angeles into the lawsuit.”

Read more on page 31 of the ACORN 2006 YEYB Report.

ACORN insiders go on to describe how the organization is more concerned about using the lawsuits to force a monetary settlement for the organization than for removing lead paint (emphasis mine):

“We knew going into this campaign that we faced a particular challenge in the current environment. They can settle with ACORN, but still haven’t gotten rid of their biggest problem – the city and state lawsuits.

Over the last 6 months our primary strategy has been to demonstrate to Sherwin-Williams that ACORN has the capacity to compound their legal problems, primarily by getting more cities and states to sue. While right now there is a chance that the company’s legal problems will grow significantly, ACORN’s work could almost ensure that this would be the case. So, deal with ACORN to take out that factor, and they might hope to beat back the worst of what could come.

Sherwin-Williams hasn’t wanted to deal, so we now either give up or make good on our threat. The problem is, while we can get more state lawsuits moving, and these very well may lead to the homes in our neighborhoods being made lead safe, securing the final victory is in the hands of the AG’s and how do we benefit organizationally?

Luck would have it that the major CA lawsuit against the paint industry is being handled by the same law firm handling our Wells Fargo case – and they want to work together on the lead case. Over the last month we have been able to convince several major CA cities and school districts to join the lawsuit. In a potentially important precedent for our role in these types of cases, we are in the final stages of negotiating a seat for ALERT (ACORN Law for Education, Representation & Training) on the legal team for the case, which puts us at the table – and in the settlement negotiations.”

ACORN’s above statement raises questions as to whether McConnell was candid to Senator John Cornyn, R-Texas when Cornyn “a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked John McConnell Jr. if it was appropriate for a lawyer to solicit a school board as a client in a lead paint lawsuit even if the district is not sure its schools contain lead paint.”

Written Questions from Sen. John Cornyn and Written Answers from Nominee John McConnell Jr.

16. Attached as Exhibit A is an August 2, 2000 memorandum from a Texas plaintiffs’ law firm to Texas school board members lobbying the school board to join a lead based paint remediation lawsuit that was headed by Ness Motley, predecessor to Motley Rice LLC and your firm at the time.

a. Do you believe that it is appropriate for a lawyer to solicit a school board as a client in a lead-based paint remediation lawsuit if the district is not aware whether district school buildings have lead-based paint and is not aware of any past remediation costs?

Response: No.

b. Do you believe that it is appropriate for a lawyer, in soliciting a school board as a client in a lead-based paint remediation lawsuit, to assure the district that if it recovers funds for lead-based paint remediation, those funds do not have to be spent on lead-based paint remediation, but may be placed in the general maintenance and operations fund and used for any appropriate purpose?

Response: No.

c. Did you or any attorneys with your firm help prepare the attached memorandum or the resolution attached thereto? If so, please identify who helped in the preparation.

Response: I have never seen the memo that is Attachment A and know nothing about the circumstances of the preparation or distribution of this document. I made diligent inquiry of members of my firm and they advised that they also did not have any involvement with this memo.

Amazingly the ACORN idea of targeting school districts for potential clients in lead paint litigation was used by Motley Rice, though no one can recall doing so. More interestingly, according to court documents, Motley Rice was also involved in the California lead paint case ACORN was working on.

How much is that AG in the window?

While its no secret that McConnell is a top donor to the Democrats, it should be noted that McConnell’s firm Motley Rice has given tens of thousands to Senator Whitehouse.

However, the question is whether McConnell worked with ACORN on the lead paint lawsuit. In addition to the connection through CLAP, ACORN and McConnell’s share one powerful friend. United States Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) recommended McConnell for the Rhode Island federal court vacancy and he and McConnell have a long friendship

In 1999 Sheldon Whitehouse was attorney general of Rhode Island when he first:

“ initiated a lawsuit against the lead paint industry that ended in a mistrial; the state later won a second lawsuit against former lead paint manufacturers Sherwin Williams Co., Millennium Holdings and NL Industries that found them responsible for creating a public nuisance.[4] However, this decision was unanimously overturned by the Rhode Island Supreme Court on July 1, 2008. The Court found that it is the responsibility of the property owners to abate and mitigate lead hazards (as specified by Rhode Island statute).”

ACORN and its coalition partners had tried a number of strategies before relying on the “all politics is local” mantra and employing the skills of politicians like Whitehouse who obviously had aspirations for higher office. ACORN’s strategy was clear and state attorney generals were a key component of the plan. ACORN stated it would:

Work to find a second large law firm willing to develop a partnership along the lines of the one being negotiated in CA and get several more state AG’s (or cities) to work with us on a lawsuit strategy.

On page 258 of the same report ACORN finished its tale of corporate shakedowns by declaring “we plan on nothing less than a Rhode-Island style win!”

Whitehouse and McConnell worked closely on the Rhode Island lead paint case while the attorney general continued to curry favor with ACORN. In March of 2007 Senator Whitehouse proudly attended an ACORN rally in Washington DC where an ACORN leader stated:

“We need things for the needy and not the greedy,’ said New York ACORN President Pat Boone at the rally. ‘Congress must act now to appropriate $450 billion and fully fund these vital domestic programs, rejecting outrageous and unnecessary tax breaks for wealthy individuals.”

Whitehouse was also instrumental in using the Alberto Gonzalez scandal to politically align the stars for ACORN affiliate Project Vote. A mere two months before Project Vote released – to much fanfare and finger pointing at the right – its report Caging Democracy: A 50-Year History of Partisan Challenges to Minority Voters, Whitehouse paved the way with a provocative letter to the Department of Justice.

Reliable ACORN Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) “asked the Justice Department to investigate the alleged ‘caging’ of predominantly African American voters in Jacksonville, Florida by the RNC in 2004.” Rhode Island and Massachusetts are liberal testing grounds for what Project Vote called its “experiments.” Groups like ACORN pushed fusion voting, living wages and lead paint campaigns through areas filled with ACORN friendly politicians.

In 2008 Senator Whitehouse again delivered for ACORN by introducing a bill aimed at fulfilling Project Vote’s action items on voter caging:

Voter Participation – ACORN is committed to helping all citizens exercise their rights to participate in the electoral process by registering people to vote. This election year, ACORN is committed to ensuring that citizens be able to register and cast their votes without fear of harassment and intimidation from dirty political tricks such as voter caging. Prohibiting voter caging, which a New York Times editorial this week called “a little known but pernicious technique,” is the goal of bills introduced in the Senate by Sheldon Whitehouse (S. 2305) and in the House by John Conyers (H.R. 2305). ACORN members will be lobbying their representatives to sign on in support of the bills.

The recommendation of McConnell by Whitehouse, a notorious member of the ACORN 7, “Chicago style politics.” As James R. Copeland explained:

“But you’d have to be paying close attention to know about two of the president’s craziest choices for the federal district courts, Wisconsin’s Louis Butler and Rhode Island’s Jack McConnell.

President Obama nominated Butler last year, but the Senate returned Butler’s nomination without action after it passed through the Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote; the president resubmitted the nomination on January 20 of this year.

…In 2005, Butler authored a split opinion for the court in Thomas v. Mallet, which permitted lawsuits against the manufacturers of paint that may have contained lead, even absent proof that any individual manufacturer’s paint had been used by the person or persons filing the lawsuit.

This expanded Wisconsin law to embrace the theory of “market-share liability,” a doctrine accepted in California regarding litigation against manufacturers of the anti-morning-sickness drug diethylstilbestrol but overwhelmingly rejected in other jurisdictions and contexts thereafter.”

Recently Obama’s Environmental Protection agency passed new restrictions modeled after the Rhode Island and Wisconsin cases:

A new federal rule aimed at reducing exposure to toxic lead-paint chips and dust requires renovators to be trained and certified in EPA-approved methods of containing and cleaning up work areas.

…The EPA estimates that its new rule will add $8 to $167 to the cost of the average interior remodeling job, but contractors say the expense to homeowners will be much greater. “The EPA has grossly underestimated the costs to comply on any job. I can see my labor costs go up by thousands of dollars.”

It appears as though ACORN and the “environmental justice” movement secured a major victory despite losing the court cases because the main goal was not a local victory. ACORN and other organizations wanted to impose national restrictions totaling billions and by using small states like Rhode Island ACORN was able to secure a temporary victory whose momentum could be used to enact national changes.

From little ACORN attorneys powerful politicians grow

If federal judgeships are for sale, “‘the massive campaign contributions…approaching $700,000 over the past two decades’—by McConnell and his wife to [Senator Jack] Reed, [Senator Sheldon] Whitehouse, and an array of other Democrats” might entitle him to one. But judgeships should not be for sale and it is apparent that McConnell would be a “liberal judicial activist” and rule based on his personal empathy and political views instead of follow the law.

McConnell’s involvement in lead paint cases in Ohio, Wisconsin and California without any overt mention of ACORN’s work raises several red flags. What is McConnell hiding and has he been truly honest about his connections to ACORN. Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time an ACORN lawyer with powerful friends was able to get a job he wasn’t qualified for.

USA Today reports that the United States Census Bureau is overhauling its hiring and security procedures following James O’Keefe’s video exposing supervisors encouraging enumerators to falsify time sheets.

From the article:

The Census Bureau has made some changes to its hiring and security procedures after reports that a convicted sex offender was hired to go door-to-door in New Jersey and an undercover video surfaced showing Census supervisors paying workers for hours they did not work.

“No hire will be allowed into the field without passing a fingerprint process,” Census Director Robert Groves said at a briefing Wednesday. “Any name check that discovers a mismatch between name, date of birth, sex, or Social Security number … will stop processing of applicant.”…

Conservative activist James O’Keefe, best known for an undercover video showing ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) counselors appearing to encourage him to hide a prostitution venture to get housing money, released another video this week. This one shows O’Keefe at two New Jersey Census offices where he was hired and took a two-day training course. O’Keefe quit after working 16 hours but was paid for 19.5 hours. The video also shows supervisors giving 70-minute paid lunch breaks — 40 minutes longer than allotted.

“At the time of training, we expect each day to be an 8-hour day,” Groves said…

Read the full article here.

Earlier today, Andrew Breitbart, James O’Keefe and Shaughn Adeleye were guests on the Glenn Beck Radio Program.

In the first segment, Breitbart discuss various stories from Big Government and Big Journalism including the SEIU protests at the home of B of A executive Gregory Baer and Huffington Post & Media Matters unusual involvement in the coverage of that story.

In the second segment, James O’Keefe and Shaughn Adeleye join Beck for a discussion of the latest video investigation surrounding the Census Bureau.

From ABC News:

The conservative filmmaker arrested this year for an undercover attempt to tape staffers at a U.S. senator’s office said his next target — the Census Bureau — is another example of government waste.

James O’Keefe, fresh off sentencing for his role in the attempted sting on Sen. Mary Landrieu’s Louisiana office in January, signed up to work for the Census in hopes of exposing what he alleges is the bureau’s waste of taxpayer money.

O’Keefe said in an exclusive interview today with “Good Morning America” that he has no plans to stop his undercover operations.

“You’re on notice…if you are doing things behind closed doors, we will find you and we will film you,” O’Keefe said.

O’Keefe and friend Shaugn Adeleye signed up in May to work for the Census Bureau in New Jersey and Louisiana, respectively.

They each attended paid training courses: O’Keefe earned $18.25 an hour and Adeleye made $13.25 an hour.

The two quit after a few days and, O’Keefe said, his time with the Census Bureau proved his theory that the government entity was wasting money.

“Over the course of two days I was paid for as many of 3 ½ to 4 hours of work I didn’t do,” O’Keefe said.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

When O’Keefe confronted his supervisor about getting paid for hours he didn’t work, she told him not to worry about it.

“We all left early,” O’Keefe could be heard telling his supervisor on the tape.

“You got paid for two hours more then,” his supervisor replied.

“Yeah, so that’s all I’m concerned about,” O’Keefe told her.

“I would say don’t be concerned…you did your best to, you know, to bring it to our attention. I don’t, I don’t think anyone’s going to be questioning it, except for you,” she told O’Keefe. “So I would just let it go.” When O’Keefe’s colleague, Adeleye, approached his supervisor in Louisiana showing that he was paid for hours he did not work, his supervisor said “I’d throw it away. But I mean, you want to keep it for your records, fine.”

Continue reading here.

Former Democratic operative turned journalist George Stephanopoulos lectured James O'Keefe on Tuesday, deriding, "And some of your critics say that you're more of a political activist than a journalist..." [Audio available here.]

The Good Morning America host, and former aide to Bill Clinton, quizzed the conservative investigative journalist and dismissed, "So, you're a conservative activist, not a journalist."

Stephanopoulos, who also worked for Michael Dukakis' 1988 presidential campaign, repeatedly chided O'Keefe over an aborted undercover investigation into Senator Mary Landrieu.

(O'Keefe eventually plead guilty to entering federal property under false pretenses and was sentenced to community service.)

The morning show host grilled, "You would do it again? You would commit a crime again?...But you committed a crime."

It's a little odd for a representative of ABC to be deriding the work of undercover journalists. After all, in 1994, it was a show on the very same network that used fake credentials given to by union groups to attack the supermarket Food Lion for using unsanitary meat.

The Media Research Center's Brent Bozell wrote on January 28, 1997:

What do you call it when an undercover reporter working for a national television network, investigating the sanitation of a grocery store with a hidden camera, films a dirty meat slicer and then mutters obscenities when an employee ruins the fun and cleans it up? Or when, posing as a worker in the store's meat department, puts what she knows to be spoiled chicken on sale and then instructs a cameraman to film it? Or when her network airs footage of an employee talking about cooking out-of-date chicken, but edits out the part where she says her manager instructed her to throw the chicken away?

...

The ten minute national television story purported to show serious sanitation problems at Food Lion; Food Lion responded with a lawsuit and in the discovery phase was able to acquire the 45 hours of footage ABC had compiled undercover, footage which showed the producers actually staging events in order to show Food Lion in the worst possible light. The food chain chose not to sue for libel - proving malice is next to impossible - instead opting to charge the network with fraud and trespassing. A jury agreed with the complaint, and slapped the multi-million dollar fine on ABC.

Stephanopoulos even hammered O'Keefe with a Salon hit piece that the online magazine had to issue corrections on: "But, one other point your critics make is they say you're animated by resentment over race. They point out that you've attended at least one conference where white nationalist literature and speaker were promoted."

Finally, the network journalist repeatedly touted Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown as an expert on O'Keefe's investigation of ACORN. He recited, "But, critics like California Attorney General Jerry Brown have called him a partisan showman, who uncovered no illegal activity and revised reality for political gain."

Later, Stephanopoulos repeated, "On ACORN, you exposed people doing things they shouldn't do. Although, Jerry Brown shows you didn't show legality by ACORN."

A partial transcript of the June 1 segment, which aired at 7:30, follows:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: But, now, we turn to our exclusive interview with the man who has been called a guerrilla videographer and who has called himself a conservative activist out to, quote, "create chaos for glory." James O'Keefe gained national attention last year with his video expose of the community organizing group ACORN. But, in January, he got arrested and was sentenced last week for trying to pull off another hidden camera operation. He's going to join us in a moment. But, first, a look back at his brief but already controversial career. James O'Keefe became a media sensation after he and a friend posed as a pimp and prostitute and secretly recorded ACORN workers giving them advice on how to cheat on their taxes.

JAMES O'KEEFE: Sex is kind of like dancing, right?

ACORN WORKER: Yeah.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Those videos turned into a massive political backlash, forcing ACORN to shut down. O'Keefe's work was hailed by conservatives.

O'KEEFE [giving speech]: This is no joke. We are called to do this and we're going to devote our lives to doing it.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But critics like California Attorney General Jerry Brown have called him a partisan showman, who uncovered no illegal activity and revised reality for political gain. This winter, at the height of the health care debate, O'Keefe went back under cover. But this time, he made news before he ever filmed anything. On January 25th, O'Keefe and three friends were arrested at the New Orleans offices of senator Mary Landrieu. Two were dressed as telephone repairmen. O'Keefe was carrying a camera, disguised to look like a cell phone. Their plan: To videotape staffers they believed were refusing to field calls from opponents of health care reform. Last week, all four pled guilty to entering federal property under false pretenses, a misdemeanor. And were sentenced to community service and probation.

O'KEEFE: What I do is I stand up to power. My mission is to just expose truth. And Americans can play judge and jury.

STEPHANOPOULOS: O'Keefe says he has found his next target, the Census Bureau. In May, he and his friend Sean Adeleye signed up to work for the Census in New Jersey and Louisiana. They each attended paid training courses. O'Keefe earned $18.25 an hour. Adeleye made $13.25. During that training, they said they were paid for some hours they didn't work. And they quit after a few days. And joining us now, James O'Keefe, and Andrew Breitbart, the publisher of BigGovernment.com. James, let me being with you. And I do want get to the new project. But, first, let's set the record straight. You did commit a crime, correct?

O'KEEFE: Yes. A misdemeanor.

STEPHANOPOULOS: A misdemeanor. Entering federal property under false pretenses. But you sounded pretty defiant on the steps of the court. Do you think you did anything wrong?

O'KEEFE: I would do it again. I might do it differently. But, corruption exists inside federal buildings.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You would do it again? You would commit a crime again?

O'KEEFE: No, I might do it differently. But, I don't regret what I did. Corruption exists in federal building.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But, you committed a crime.

O'KEEFE: Senators are corrupt. Politicians are corrupt. These people have to be investigated.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But, you would commit a crime again?

O'KEEFE: No, like I said, I might do it a bit differently.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, you would try to stay within the letter of the law next time?

O'KEEFE: Of course. Yes. Yes.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, you do regret that?

O'KEEFE: Oh, yeah. But like I said, these people need to be investigated. And they're not immune from investigative journalism. Do you know what I mean?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, the judge said you were a journalist. But he said you crossed the line. And some of your critics say that you're more of a political activist than a journalist, including your political colleagues and allies. Morton Blackwell, respected conservative said that he let you go from your work at the Leadership Institute because you wanted to do a sting operation. He said our group doesn't do that kind of work. "And Blackwell told O'Keefe to choose between his job and the activism. He said he was committed to the activism." And, by your own admission, on your own website, BigGovernment.com you say, "Chaos for Glory: My Time With ACORN." You say it's time to emulate the work of ACORN. These are your words. "It's time for us to be studying and applying their tactics, many of which are ideologically neutral. It's time for conservative activists to create chaos for glory." So, you're a conservative activist, not a journalist.

O'KEEFE: No. I consider myself an investigative journalist. This is- These are tactics journalists have been doing for decades. Going undercover, confronting subjects, posing as characters. This is something- we're rebranding it. We're revitalizing it. We're resurrecting a genre that's existed. But, this is not a left or right thing. This is just about exposing corruption.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, except you write you're a conservative activist trying to create chaos for glory. That sounds like it's got an ideological agenda.

O'KEEFE: Chaos for glory. It's like- It's like destroying corruption. It's another way of sort of tackling, taking on power. Because, that's what this is. It's about speaking truth to power. Standing up. And shining a light behind closed doors.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I want to get to the Census. But, one other point your critics make is they say you're animated by resentment over race. They point out that you've attended at least one conference where white nationalist literature and speaker were promoted. And they point to a time in college at Rutgers when you were kicked out of a dorm for using racist slurs.

O'KEEFE: That's outrageous. I mean, that's been completely disproven on the internet. I'm not even going to address that.

ANDREW BREITBART: That was debunked. That was a Max Blumenthal hit piece at Salon where they had to issue retractions. And so-

STEPHANOPOULOS: This is his diary. This is James O'Keefe's diary.

BREITBART: This is the type of journalism we do is to counter the false narratives and the slurs that happen from political operatives, like Max Blumenthal, like Joan Walsh at Salon who use journalism as a platform, to slur James O'Keefe. It's not true.

O'KEEFE: When you take on corruption-

STEPHANOPOULOS: But, this is your diary that points it out.

O'KEEFE: When you stand up- When you stand up to institutions, people are going to come after you. They're going to use character assassinations. Well, we're going to rise above that. This is not about me. I'm creating a movement of investigative journalists across the country. And they're not going to stop us with character assassination and innuendo.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But, you don't deny that this was your own diary that pointed this out?

O'KEEFE: They're not going to be able to stop that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You don't deny that?

O'KEEFE: No. What I'm saying is when you stand up to powerful individuals, they're going to try to destroy you and smear you. But, this is not about me. This is about the truth. They can't stop us with that type of stuff.

STEPHANOPOULOS: As you know, and you did. I have to give you credit for this. On ACORN, you exposed people doing things they shouldn't do. Although, Jerry Brown shows you didn't show legality by ACORN.

BREITBART: Is it legal to set up a prostitution ring in every single office? If that isn't illegal, then, maybe, perhaps we should create some- they get federal money. They get federal money. Al Franken voted against ACORN. The Census was de-linked by the White House, by way of the Treasury Department as part of the executive office. What he exposed caused a lot of damage. And there are- they have political enemies that want to send a message to citizen journalists around the world, not to join the James O'Keefe bandwagon.

STEPHANOPOULOS: I was one of the few, if not the only journalist, who actually asked President Obama about the ACORN case.

BREITBART: Why- journalists not interested in that story? That's why we do what we do. The media is hesitant to cover certain narratives that don't fit with the political orientation.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, As I said- as I said I did cover it. I did ask the question. So, I hold no brief for ACORN.

The Census Bureau dumped ACORN as a “national partner” in the 2010 head count last fall after James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles’s undercover videos spotlighting ACORN’s rampant corruption debuted here on Big Government.

In a letter dated Sept. 11 that terminated the Census Bureau’s relationship with ACORN, Census director Robert M. Groves wrote

Over the last several months, through ongoing communication with our regional offices, it is clear that ACORN’s affiliation with the 2010 Census promotion has caused sufficient concern in the general public, has indeed become a distraction from our mission, and may even become a discouragement to public cooperation, negatively impacting 2010 Census efforts.

While not decisive factors in this decision, recent events concerning several local offices of ACORN have added to the worsening negative perceptions of ACORN and its affiliation with our partnership efforts.

The Census had to act because it’s important to keep dishonest and incompetent workers far away from the nation’s once-a-decade Census.

The data gathered are used to help determine who gets what and how much in the nation’s federalist system of governance. Population figures arrived at through the Census decide which states gain and lose seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, the redistricting of state legislatures, county and city councils, and electoral districts.

False or inflated population figures can water down or negate entirely the value of an individual’s vote just as effectively as stuffing ballot boxes.

That’s why Americans were outraged last year when they learned the Obama administration bent over backwards to give ACORN a major role as a “national partner” in the 2010 Census.

In March, after the Obama administration tried unsuccessfully to consolidate control over Census operations in the White House, officials downplayed the significance of ACORN’s participation in the Census:

Any charge or claim that a Census Bureau partner could influence or have direct input into census operations is baseless and inaccurate … the Census Bureau has strict quality assurance procedures in every operation to prevent the introduction of errors and/or fraudulent information into the national count.

The official statement was, however, largely beside the point.

After Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the administration the Census Bureau disclosed that ACORN’s involvement gave it ample opportunities to influence how the count would be conducted.

ACORN’s status as a “national partner” in the Census entitled it to “[i]dentify job candidates and distribute recruiting materials,” and “[p]rovide space to train new employees.”

Just what the Census needs: radical left-wing community organizers as employees, recruiters, and trainers.

The “national partner” status also would have helped ACORN to pose as a respectable group by allowing it to “[u]se census drop-in articles, messages and logos in newsletters, mailings, etc.” (See page 113 of the Census Bureau’s May 15, 2009 Freedom of Information Act response to Judicial Watch.)

“Given its history of illegal activity and fraud, ACORN should be nowhere near the 2010 Census,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said last year.

Follow me on Twitter.

On April 27, 2010, I got a job with the United States Census Bureau in New Jersey. With a hidden camera, I caught four Census supervisors encouraging enumerators to falsify information on their time sheets. Over the course of two days of training, I was paid for four hours of work I never did. I was told to take a 70 minute lunch break, was given an hour of travel time to drive 10 minutes, and was told to leave work at 3:30pm. I resigned prior to doing any data collection but confronted Census supervisors who assured me, “no one is going to be auditing that that level,” and “nobody is going to be questioning it except for you.” Another Census supervisor only said he’d adjust my pay after I gave him a letter recanting my hours.

As to whether this is an “isolated incident” or if there are more Census videos showing more waste, fraud, and corruption, we’ll let you take a wild guess.

America, real journalism has been dead for a long time now. With $1500 Hannah Giles and I were able to break a story that the New York Times couldn’t have broken no matter how many times they mortgaged their building.  The government took our camera, so I bought another.  The government put us in jail and deleted our tapes, but we got out and we’ll just make more.  My travel was restricted to the state of New Jersey, so that’s where I got back to work. The media establishment is busy doing character assassinations on my friends and me but time and truth is on our side. Congress answered to our ACORN videos, now it will be up to the Department of Justice to explain why it edited out of a press release their admission we had no intent to tamper with Senator Landrieu’s phones. More importantly, it will be up to the Census Bureau to explain why their supervisors are systematically falsifying time sheets.

Exposing corruption requires standing up to power, because power hates sunlight. We should have known they would try and ruin the reputations of those who try and expose them. But in response, we are going to build an army of citizen investigators. There’s hundreds more where I came from.  You have awakened a sleeping giant. And you can’t ruin us all. In fact, in the coming months you will see this army expanding into every state, every statehouse, every city council, every school board, and everywhere people are conspiring to keep themselves in power, practice favoritism, or line their pockets with tax dollars.

This isn’t a political movement. This is a movement to clean up society through transparency and accountability. Corruption, dishonesty, waste, and secrecy are anathema to all Americans. I happen to love liberty but I will happily expose Democrats and Republicans, public and private sector… anyone who deserves it.

These days, Americans know that people in backrooms are taking advantage of their power. And they’re fed up with it. We are sunlight. All we’re going to do is continue to expose the truth, and then it’s up to democracy to decide the verdict. Have faith in Americans armed with the facts.

Every dishonest politician, bureaucrat, and business in America is now on notice. You are being watched.  Next time you try and take advantage of honest Americans, remember the person sitting in front of you just may have a camera or a microphone. America is watching. And if you’re cheating, stealing, or scamming, we will find you, we will film you, and we will make you an unwilling celebrity.

Veritas!

428-2 –

From the Associated Press:

Conservative activist-videographer James O’Keefe said video he shot of conversations with staffers of U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu was deleted when his cell phone was returned after he and three others pleaded guilty to charges in a caper he orchestrated at the Democrat’s New Orleans office.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office said Saturday that U.S. Magistrate Daniel Knowles III ordered the footage removed. O’Keefe made the claim Friday in a posting on his Twitter social networking site.

O’Keefe, 25, and the others pleaded guilty on Wednesday to misdemeanor charges of entering federal property under false pretenses. They were sentenced by Knowles.

They were sentenced to probation, community service and fines. O’Keefe received the heaviest sentence, three years probation, 100 hours of community service and a $1,500 fine.

The FBI has said O’Keefe used his cell phone to try to capture video of two others who posed as telephone repairmen and asked to see the phones at Landrieu’s office. O’Keefe has said the group was trying to investigate complaints that constituents calling Landrieu’s office couldn’t get through to criticize the Democrat’s support of a health care reform bill.

O’Keefe, who apologized after his sentencing for raising security concerns at the federal building that houses Landrieu’s office, said he would continue his undercover work.

Continue reading here.

The following is a document that James O’Keefe sent to me last night and has authorized me to publish. It is O’Keefe’s version of events in New Orleans. I believe this is the first time anywhere that he has publicly given his full statement of what occurred.

The document was drafted by lawyers based on O’Keefe’s statements, and was intended to be offered as the factual basis for his plea. O’Keefe confirmed for me that this document is an accurate account of what happened.

What Really Happened in New Orleans

Factual Basis

On January 25, 2010, Messrs. James O’Keefe, Stan Dai, Joe Basel, and Michael Flanagan (collectively “Defendants”) entered the Hale Boggs Federal Building located at 500 Poydras Street, New Orleans, Louisiana (“Hale Boggs Building”), with no intent to commit a felony, but rather an intent to engage in political speech with respect to pending national healthcare legislation (the “Healthcare Bill”). During the several days before their entry to the Hale Boggs building, Defendants discussed opportunities to engage in independent journalism and political advocacy. One of the ideas raised during those discussions was a method to test the truthfulness of Senator Landrieu’s statements as to the reason for the inability of Tea Party members and other Louisiana constituents to contact her staff on the telephone to discuss her vote on the Healthcare Bill. The Defendants were advised that this was a recent story in the news in New Orleans.

Prior to the Defendants’ arrival in New Orleans there had been picketing of the Senator’s office by Tea Party Members and others. The controversy about Senator Landrieu’s phones was described in a prior news article as follows:

“We were stunned to learn that so many phone calls to Senator Landrieu have been unanswered and met with continuous busy signals,” Perkins said. “We asked them to call their Senators. They could get through to Senator Vitter, but not Senator Landrieu.”

“Our lines have been jammed for weeks, and I apologize,” Landrieu said in interview after giving a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday.

As a result, the Defendants devised what was, in retrospect, a poorly thought out plan to test the veracity of Senator Landrieu’s statements. The plan settled upon was for two of the Defendants to dress as telephone repairmen and, wearing an audio and video camera hidden in one of the hard hats they wore as part of their disguise, enter Senator Landrieu’s office and interview her staff while a third Defendant recorded the interviews using a second audio and video camera.

The group devised a plan involving disguises because they believed that if they simply entered Senator Landrieu’s office and identified themselves as journalists they would not likely receive truthful answers. They thought it likely that Senator Landrieu’s staff would be more candid with a repairman than a reporter. Looking back, the Defendants now recognize clearly that this plan was imprudent, and produced unintended security concerns and consequences that none of the Defendants anticipated. The Defendants agree that they should have anticipated these consequences and regret that they decided to proceed in that fashion.

Upon entering the Hale Boggs Building, the Defendants presented their real drivers license identifications to security officials and were not questioned as to the purpose of their visit to the Hale Boggs Building or where in the Hale Boggs Building they were going. Before passing through security, the Defendants placed all of their equipment (including all recording and video devices) through the security x-ray machines, as requested by the Hale Boggs Building security employees.

After passing through the Hale Boggs Building security checkpoint, the Defendants proceeded to the 10th floor, where Senator Landrieu’s office is located. Senator Landrieu’s office was and is open to the public and the Defendants entered through its open door. They spoke with members of Senator Landrieu’s staff, then separately left the Senator’s office and exited the Hale Boggs Building.

A short time later, the Defendants were “detained” by Federal Marshals. They believed they would be released when the US Marshals realized that they were journalists and immediately explained to the commanding US Marshal that they were journalists investigating whether Senator Landrieu wasn’t answering her calls.

Despite truthfully explaining, in detail, to the FBI and Federal Marshals that their purpose was solely to ask questions (and record the questions and answers) of Senator Landrieu’s staff regarding recently published statements by constituents that calls to Senator Landrieu’s staff concerning her vote in favor of the pending Healthcare Bill were not being returned and about the Senator’s public statement that her office phones had been “jammed,” Defendants were charged in a criminal complaint with a felony:

by false and fraudulent pretense enter and attempt to enter real property belonging to the United States of America with the intent to commit a felony: to wit, willful and malicious[s] interference with a working and use of a telephone system operated and controlled by the United States; in violation of Title 18 United States Code Section(s) 1036(a)(1), 1362, and 2.

At approximately 8 pm, the Defendants were taken from the Federal Building to the St. Bernard Parish Jail. The Defendants remained in jail overnight and were then transported the next afternoon in red jumpsuits and hand and leg irons back to the Hale Boggs Building where they were “arraigned” before Magistrate Judge Louis Moore, Jr., who released them on personal bonds of $10,000.

O’Keefe clarified to me that he and his companions entered only the public reception area of Sen. Landrieu’s office.

O’Keefe’s attorney Michael Madigan is scheduled to appear on Fox News Sunday tomorrow morning to discuss the prosecution.

More to come later today, including a post about the First Amendment implications of the judge ordering the destruction of the footage of O’Keefe’s foray into Landrieu’s offices, and a post about New York Magazine’s retraction of the errors I highlighted here the other day.

Attorney-client communications are among the most sacred in the American system of jurisprudence, so when James O’Keefe’s lawyers noticed at least two instances of privileged communication between them and their client appearing in the media, they wrote to Assistant U.S. Attorney Jan Mann in New Orleans: “O’Keefe materials improperly provided to media.”

The information that I have confirmed was disclosed to the media appears to be intentionally calculated to foment negative public opinion against Mr. O’Keefe, presumably in an unethical effort to prejudice any criminal proceedings… a clear violation of Chapters 1-7.500 and 1-7.600 (E) of the United States Attorneys’ Manual as well as a prosecutor’s ethical obligations…

When O’Keefe and three others were arrested in January, his computer and cell phone were seized, under the completely false premise that they were surveillance devices, and it appears that the documents came from them. If true, as O’Keefe’s lawyers note, this would constitute an outrageous violation of law-enforcement ethics as well as “severe prosecutorial misconduct.”

The letter follows:

March 4 letter to Jan Mann-1

UPDATE: O’Keefe promises more undercover investigations.  Full update after the jump.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) – Four conservative activists accused of trying to tamper with the phones in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office have pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of entering federal property under false pretenses.  The most prominent activist, James O’Keefe, was sentenced to three years probation, 100 hours of community service and fined a $1,500 fine. The 25-year-old is known for wearing a pimp costume in a video that embarrassed ACORN.

Magistrate Daniel Knowles III sentenced the three others to two years probation, 75 hours of community service and fined them $1,500.

The FBI has said O’Keefe used his cell phone to try to capture video of two men who posed as telephone repairmen and asked to see the phones. O’Keefe spokesman Denis Calabrese disputed an earlier allegation that a fourth suspect waited in a car with a listening device, which was not mentioned in court records.

*******

UPDATE:

NEW ORLEANS (AP) – Conservative activist James O’Keefe has told a judge he regretted his attempt to surreptitiously film Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office, but said after the hearing he planned more undercover investigations…

The 25-year-old is also known for wearing a pimp costume in a video that embarrassed ACORN. He said he will release the results of another investigation very soon.

Developing at the Bigs…

Two role-playing investigators with bogus documents and a hidden camera walked into Head Start centers across the country to expose fraud and corruption. They got more than they had bargained for, discovering a pattern of rule-bending fraud so shocking it prompted a briefing for President Obama.

Is this the latest James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles sting operation?

Nope. It was the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which used tactics remarkably similar to O’Keefe and Giles, sans the pimp and prostitute costumes.

GAO’s undercover investigation revealed a common practice among Head Start employees: the deliberate disregard — or even outright falsification — of income documentation to pad enrollment. “Now you see it, now you don’t,” said a Head Start employee in New Jersey who “disappeared” $23,000 worth of income for one applicant so that his fictitious child could be enrolled. GAO found Head Start programs were more than willing to help its investigators falsify applications at eight of the 15 centers it visited.

The duo that destroyed ACORN last year caught flak from liberals for their undercover tactics. Media critic Eric Alterman of the Center for American Progress called their investigation “dishonest.” He wrote that O’Keefe and Giles “ignore[d] the rules of honest information gathering and reporting.”

In reality, O’Keefe and Giles’ investigative prowess turned the ACORN story into a national episode of corruption at a government-funded organization. Turns out GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, is using essentially the same tactics to expose malfeasance.

One major difference: the level of media attention for ACORN’s scandal compared to Head Start’s corruption. Was it simply the lack of a pimp or prostitute? Or was it a deliberate attempt on the part of the Obama administration and congressional Democrats to sweep the story under the rug?

Last week’s congressional hearing was convened by Rep. George Miller (D-CA) on what was dubbed “Super Tuesday” for the host of contested primary elections dominating the news. Just two Republicans showed up because others hadn’t arrived in Washington yet. The top Republican on the education committee couldn’t make it back in time because he was filing for re-election in Minnesota.

While the scandal drew coverage from the New York Times and Washington Post, those stories were buried on pages 18 and 17, respectively.

Arguably, the Head Start scandal deserved front-page headlines on newspapers across America last week. Outrage over ACORN centered on the group’s taxpayer funding. The total amount of federal funds that flowed to ACORN was about $53 million dating to 1994.

Head Start, a Great Society program created in 1965 for low-income children, received $9 billion — yes, billion — in appropriations and stimulus funding last year alone. Over the lifetime of the program, it has cost taxpayers more than $150 billion.

There are more than 3,300 Head Start programs operating in America, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. A government-funded impact study criticized the effectiveness of the program earlier this year. Given the cost of the program and the group of people it primarily serves, Head Start deserves some much-needed scrutiny.

Miller’s hearing was designed to do that. Or was it?

Even though the salacious details of the undercover investigation were unearthed in testimony before Congress, the hearing will actually delay GAO’s final report until July. More importantly, by holding a hearing on a busy news day, Miller intentionally or not avoided any coverage from broadcast media, which were tied up covering the primary elections.

Republicans politely suggested there was something fishy about the timing, especially in light of an ongoing investigation by the Health and Human Services inspector general. “It is vital for Congress to expose and root out this type of waste, fraud, and abuse,” said Rep. Judy Biggert (R-IL), “but I do not believe that any of us wishes to jeopardize an ongoing and potentially criminal investigation.”

Head Start certainly escaped harsh press coverage. Will it now avoid more scrutiny from Congress?

Miller, through his spokeswoman, dismissed questions about the timing of his hearing: “Chairman Miller’s obligation is to transparency and accountability, as well as ensuring the integrity of the Head Start program.”

But that didn’t stop his Democratic colleagues from indicating there were bigger fish to fry. “Can you tell me how much money is stolen in Medicare and Medicaid fraud?” asked Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) to the witness from the Department of Health and Human Services. When she didn’t know the answer, Scott replied, “More than the total Head Start budget.”

That’s no reason to ignore a clear-cut case of fraud and abuse. Head Start shouldn’t get off so easy.

Bluey directs the Center for Media and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

It’s only a trespassing charge, but there is something really gratifying about seeing the corrupt, race-baiting Bertha Lewis being led away in handcuffs. This happened just yesterday, at an immigration rally in NYC. Skip ahead to the 7:30 mark to see the arrest (Lewis is dressed in all white, at the far left of the still image below):

Their attempt to feign patriotism by singing the national anthem is despicable, as the immigration “reform” movement is only the latest front in the ongoing war socialists are waging against our nation.

But don’t take my word for it, Bertha Lewis outlined the whole strategy just a couple of months ago:

This is a fight we absolutely must win.

Durring a protest against the Arizona immigration law and for open borders, ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis was arrested. Apparently she believes in purposely breaking the law in order to advocate for those that purposely break U.S. immigration laws.

Make sure you visit this post on the Eyeblast Blog for more details on what happened

Colorado’s 9News has the latest on ACORN:

Dan Bishop figured that when scandal-plagued ACORN went out of business it would stop deducting donations from his bank account. He was wrong.

“They supposedly shut down several months ago,” Bishop said. “I just assumed they would stop taking money.”

9Wants to Know has learned donations are still being collected for ACORN Colorado, the local branch of the liberal advocacy group.

Bishop says he signed up for automatic monthly payments several years ago, payments that continued being withdrawn after ACORN’s collapse.

ACORN closed state offices across the country after public backlash and a loss of government funding following the posting of a video on a conservative website that appeared to show ACORN employees advising a couple, posing as a pimp and a prostitute, on how to disguise their work for tax purposes.

The organization had previously been criticized over allegations of voter fraud.

The Colorado office is closed, its phone is disconnected and it filed paperwork with the Secretary of State on April 15 saying it was going out of business.

The statement of withdrawal says ACORN “will no longer transact business or conduct activities in this state and it relinquishes its authority to transact business or conduct activities in this state.”

Phone calls and e-mails to the national offices in Washington, D.C. were not returned.

Continue reading here.

Even if Congress does move decisively to cut off funding from the self-described network of community organizers who previously called themselves ACORN, the renamed entities are likely to remain potent and well-funded into the foreseeable future, former insiders say.

In fact, donors may find it easier to channel funds in the direction of liberal activists who describe themselves as community organizers now that the sullied name has been dropped, they suggest.

Shortly after ACORN’s leadership announced that it was dissolving on April 1, national and state affiliates repackaged themselves under generic sounding descriptions. ACORN Housing, for example, became known as the Affordable Housing Centers of America.

“Anyone who celebrates the demise of ACORN has celebrated prematurely because they are not going away,” Anita MonCrief, a former Project Vote/ACORN employee, said in an interview. “The network is repositioning itself so it can receive new donations.”

ACORN, which stands for the Association of Community Activists for Reform Now, has received over $53 million in federal funds since 1994, federal records show. Although the U.S. Supreme Court turned away a legal challenge to last year’s congressional ban on public funding, there does not appear to be any concerted effort on the part of lawmakers to have it reimposed.

Moreover, it is worth noting that only four Democrats joined with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) to oppose an amendment that would allow organizations with a criminal history to receive funding. The amendment was submitted as part of a mortgage bill several months before the videotape scandals broke.

“There’s a real boldness on the part of Democrats who want to keep funding ACORN,” Rep. Bachmann said. “They are incredulous about the possibility of losing their majority and they know which side their bread gets buttered on and ACORN is their friend.”

Even so, only a small-percentage of ACORN’s overall financial support comes from the government, MonCrief, explains. “The rest of the money comes from left-leaning foundations and there is no indication these funding sources will dry up,” she said. “There are also individual donors and you also have to include organized labor.”

MonCrief indentified Wellspring Advisors, Vanguard Charitable Endowment, the Rockefeller Fund and the Tides Foundation as the major conduits for facilitating anonymous donations.

“If someone wanted to contribute directly to ACORN without having their name attached to it they could give a  check to Wellspring Advisors, they can give to Vanguard Charitable Endowment, they can give to Tides Foundation,” she said. “There are so many ways ACORN can obtain money through these anonymous donors  and some are connected to the Rockefeller  Fund.  So long as there is an agenda they are going to make sure that money is funneled to them anyway they can.”

Wellspring Advisors is the critical component in this equation, she emphasized.

“Donors were able to give anonymously to Wellspring so the money would not be traced back to where it was coming from and Wellspring would then cut a check from Vanguard,” MonCrief continued. “That’s one way it happened.”

Sandy Newman, who founded Project Vote, operated as a conduit between Wellspring and the ACORN affiliate, MonCrief points out on her blog.

“ It’s interesting that Wellspring is one of Project Vote’s major donors and Sandy Newman steers other money in Project Vote’s direction,” she wrote. “Newman founded Project Vote along with Zach Polett, who was also head of ACORN Political Operations. ACORN voter registration drives are intentionally partisan undertakings with the intent to replace elected officials with ACORN friendly candidates. This is once again the “wink, wink” approach to doing business. It all seems so legal on the surface.”

Other former insiders such as Ronald Sykes, who served as treasurer for the Washington D.C. ACORN affiliate, have raised questions about Citizens Consulting Inc (CCI), which was the major accounting arm for the national group and its allied organizations. A report from the House Oversight Committee concluded that CCI was largely responsible for misappropriating and comingling funds.

“Money was funneled through Wellspring, from there it went into various bank accounts controlled by CCI,” MonCrief said. “CCI had dozens and dozens of accounts. Some were Project Vote and some were ACORN.”

MonCrief, who testified against ACORN in 2008 as part of a voter registration fraud case in Pennsylvania, said the Project Vote affiliate was closely interlinked with the national organization’s operations.

“It is laughable to say Project Vote was in any way separate because it functioned as one cohesive arm with ACORN,” MonCrief explained. “Project Vote could not exist without this support because it doesn’t have the field capacity to run voter registration programs.”

ACORN remains the subject of voter registration fraud investigations in at least 14 states and MonCrief  anticipates that the same network will find a way to remain active in the 2010 midterm elections and beyond. The political operatives that continue to stand behind the renamed affiliates are very shrewd in the sense that they will target areas where elections are close and where they have sympathetic local election officials, MonCrief warned.

Despite the publicity that followed various criminal investigations, there is much about ACORN that remains hidden from public view, Matthew Vadum, a senior analyst and editor with the Capital Research Center (CRC) suggests.

“We really don’t know how much ACORN has received from its aggressive corporate shakedown efforts,” Vadum observed. “The renamed network could remain well-funded thanks to liberal foundations and high dollar donors such as Herb and Marion Sandler.”

An intrepid researcher and investigator, Vadum has kept careful tabs on the rebranded ACORN entities. Most recently, he reported on the lobbying efforts of the rebranded D.C. affiliate.

As public attention dissipates and the ACORN name fades, foundations that pulled back in the wake of negative press attention last year may find they have more flexibility and dexterity to re-establish their support. This would be a significant development as ACORN drew in millions of dollars from foundations in the span of just a few years.

The lead ACORN organization registered in Arkansas and New Orleans has received $3 million from the Marguerite Casey Foundation, $821,000 from the Robin Hood Foundation, $595,000 from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and $65,000 from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, according to CRC.

Other foundations have contributed to ACORN’s affiliates.

Project Vote has received $4,047,500 from the Rockefeller Family Fund, $1,460,801 from the Tides Foundation, and $2,643,100 from the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program, financial records show. ACORN’s American Institute for Social Justice (AISJ) has received almost $30 million in foundation grants, since 2000, according to CRC.

Other generous benefactors to AISJ include the Marguerite Casey Foundation, which donated $5,125,000 and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which donated $4,130,000, CRC research shows.

In previous reports for CRC, Vadum has also called attention to the Woods Fund of Chicago, where President Barack Obama and former Weather Underground leader William Ayers sat as board members. The Woods Fund has donated about $190,000 to the ACORN network, according to financial records.

The corporate shakedown efforts, which have also been lucrative for ACORN, were largely funded by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), according to the testimony MonCrief delivered in Pa.

One of the most aggressive and successful joint SEIU-ACORN nationwide campaigns known as “Muscle for Money” targets corporations and top officers who resist union demands, MonCrief has explained.

Even in the teeth of ongoing scandals, ACORN and its affiliates received over $1 million from organized labor in 2009 including over $220,000 from the Change to Win coalition, U.S. Department of Labor financial disclosure forms show.

The 2009 LM-2 disclosure forms show that SEIU Local 32 donated $25,400 to the national ACORN organization, Local Union 1 donated $32,791 to the ACORN Community labor Training Center and the national SEIU donated $37,878 to the ACORN Labor Partnership.

All told, organized labor has contributed over $10 million to ACORN, since 2005 with SEIU contributing about $8.7 million of this sum, according to Labor Department records.

In 2009 gubernatorial races, ACORN was active in attempting to swing the New Jersey election in cooperation with SEIU, according to other press reports. However, the network was less visible in Virginia where Republican Bob McDonnell won by a large margin.

As it turns out, Gov. Chris Christie’s margin of victory over the Democratic incumbent in N.J. was large enough to avoid a recount.  But there is a lesson here for Republican operatives in that community organizers who were supposedly setback by on-going scandals still found expression where they could most be effective; in close-competitive races where it is possible to maximize the influence of organized labor.

The financial reform bill is finally in its home stretch in the Senate, but Americans have yet to fully engage on the issue.  In fact, in recent weeks as I’ve worked with various grassroots leaders across the country to discuss the bill, its impacts on our economy and on us as American citizens, I must admit, it’s probably the first time I’ve ever found myself frustrated at the progress of activism.

It’s a complex issue, and let’s face it, not exactly an exciting one either.  But that’s precisely what the left is counting on.  So, whenever I find myself feeling frustrated that others might not share my same level of fervor on the issue, I remind myself of its complexity and lackluster appeal.  And then, I proceed directly to the source – the bill itself.

I hone in on a few key points in three categories that resonate with most activists I know:  Big Labor, Big Government, and Big Brother.  Put those together in the context of Big Banks, and they spell out big disaster.

As the left goes on demonizing Wall Street and big bankers on one hand, Democratic lawmakers on the other hand are busy making sweetheart backroom deals with them up on Capitol Hill, promoting their legislation to the public as “consumer protection.”  But really, such measures are nothing more than payback to the likes of three-way mortgage entitlement partnership stronghold of the Bank of America, Center for Responsible Lending and Fannie Mae.

Meanwhile Democrats and Obama allies like Organizing for America are also using the issue as a shameless fund-raising opportunity.

The banks actually SUPPORT this bill – so don’t let that “Main Street Not Wall Street” message fool you, no matter which side of this issue you’re on.

Once many people learn about some of what’s in the bill, their reaction of immediate remorse followed by outrage is completely understandable.  Remorse – for some -  for not having engaged their grassroots groups earlier. Outrage over just how much this bill would push the country head first toward socialism.  That’s right, I said the “s” word.  Let’s stop pretending and just call it for what it is, shall we?  Even old school Democrats I talk to feel the same outrage and see the “s” word coming as the result of this bill.  Facing down the inevitable is the only way we’re going to be able to tackle what the radical left has snuck into this thing.  All the while, they have been counting on the apathy of average citizens on BOTH sides, and on the burnout of Tea Party and other patriot group activists.

The reality is this: If we sit back and allow this bill to pass the Senate in its current form, then we deserve the destruction of our privacy, our liberties and of our free market system that will follow.  WE will be the only ones to blame.  Because as bad as we all thought the Health Care bill was for our freedoms, the Financial Reform bill makes Health Care pale in comparison.  No level of remorse could suffice if we failed to engage every last patriot, every last Paul Revere and Sam Adams , during these final days of the legislation.

I’ve found that one way to help other activists digest this bill has been to put all of the actual financial details aside and focus solely on some of the parts of the bill that demonstrate the erosion of our personal liberties and the free market system as we know it.

Big Labor: Dismantling the Free Market System

Under the American Financial Stability Act of 2010 (S 3217), several provisions tucked away in the bill will give labor bosses unprecedented powers that, especially if abused, could threaten the very structure of our free market system.

• Financial institutions and other covered businesses could be required by law to give labor unions “Proxy Access”, enabling union bosses to potentially abuse the system to force unrelated agenda items, like unionizing the firm’s employees, before the shareholders
• New regulations will control how board of director elections are conducted – at private corporations!
  • The SEC would be granted the power to force the names of outside nominees onto the corporate ballot (as reported by Politico)
  • Directors running in an uncontested election would now be required to win a majority of votes cast, rather than only by the current plurality(as reported by Politico)
• Similar rules will also determine whether an individual may serve as both the CEO and Chairman of the Board -  at a private corporation!
• Government and labor unions will have “say on pay” for the annual salaries and bonus compensation of executives and other employees.  Essentially, like Obama himself, they can determine at what point “someone has made enough money”

I don’t think anyone’s against shareholders having their proper say and representation in the corporate management process.  But that’s not really what’s behind these pieces of the legislation.  We’ve seen how today’s labor bosses are abusing their powers and using the shareholder resolution as a hostage weapon to bully corporations into unionization and special union concessions. Just read my prior post, “SEIU’s Secret Weapon: If Obama’s Plan Fails, Brandish the Shareholder Resolution” for a taste of that tactic.

It’s been known for some time that labor bosses are now organizing on a  global scale, and as such, have taken to the Participative Management style common in European workplaces.  In the U.S., private corporations might typically achieve a similar democratic process of employee participatory management when the company enters into a direct employee ownership plan.  The difference here however is that we’re talking about companies that do not belong to the labor unions – these are companies in which the union might have a pension fund investment, or perhaps some of its workers unionized on premise.  These are private companies that the unions attempt to overtake through such smaller connections to earn a place on the board, and then change it from the inside out until a Participative Management environment is achieved.  If  that achievement were to occur, US corporations would quickly fold and restructure under a more socialist model.  Eventually, the free market system would erode away as labor unions take over the boards of once privately owned corporations.

For weeks now, Ive been searching for the resources to help me describe this threat in simple terms, and just as fate would have it, my friend Peter List over at LaborUnionReport and RedState pens the perfect post describing this with clarity and precision, in his post titled “Changing America Forever: Behind the AFL-CIO’s Push for Financial Reform.”

Big Government: Power, Control and Everlasting Entitlements

• A new agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, or CFPA, would serve as massive bureaucracy that would control everything from defining the types of loans consumers may be permitted to purchase, to expanding redlining provisions and subsequent mortgage entitlement programs.  (And let’s not forget that the head of this agency would be Eric Stein, who ran the Center for Responsible Lending, and before that worked at Fannie Mae)

• The CFPA’s authority goes far beyond banks or financial institutions. This new bureaucracy would have the power to regulate hundreds of thousands of businesses.  Examples of small businesses that would be subject to CFPA oversight (as outlined by the US Chamber of Commerce):
  • A nonprofit organization that provides financial literacy education
  • A software company that creates products to help consumers manage their money
  • An advertising company that provides services relating to financial products
  • Utilities companies, retailers and even doctors that extend credit to their customers.

• The Consumer Financial Protection Agency, or CFPA, created in the bill would be housed within the Federal Reserve, an already secretive and unchecked force of power in our financial system that insists on going unaudited
• A government agency will have unlimited executive bailout authority, including the power to pick and choose which companies are saved and which are left to fail.  This creates serious potential for abuse, as private corporations could literally live or die based upon political decisions
• This bill contains the same language used by groups like the Center for Responsible Lending in the redlining laws and changes to the Community Reinvestment Act in 1995 for special research centers and programs “that promote awareness and understanding of the access of individuals and communities to financial services, and to identify business and community development needs and opportunities”

And we all know what happened as the result of those redlining laws and subsequent CRA changes in 1995.

Big Banks:  Empowered by Big Government, Become Big Brother

Finally, in order to justify all these entitlement programs, all this forced unionization, all this takeover of private companies’ boards of directors, the government needs research.  Not to worry, the bill creates vehicles for that, like the “Office of Financial Research” and a national database for the collection of your personal bank account and loan information, and various deposit account data.

Fannie Mae and Bank of America will be so thrilled when this passes the Senate (as will ACORN and SEIU).  Thanks, of course, to years of lobbying by organizations like the Center for Responsible Lending.  After all, they pioneered the use of banking research to mandate mortgage entitlements.  Just imagine all the new entitlements that will be created once they can analyze all of that *new* banking information and data on what we’re purchasing.  Someone will find some injustice somewhere in there.  You can count on that.

If you haven’t been as interested in all the complex language about things like financial derivatives and credit default swaps in this bill, then all of this above should be plenty for you to be concerned about.

Some call it a homophobic slur; others, an obscure sexual fetish.  For the President of the United States, however, the term “tea bagger” is just another tool to marginalize opponents of his radical agenda.  As John Kartch of Americans for Tax Reform reported today, President Obama is quoted in a new book using this derogatory term to describe concerned citizens that make up the mainstream, nonpartisan tea party movement:

President Barack Obama, known for his lectures to others on civility, saw fit to use the obscene and derogatory term “tea-baggers” in a book interview with author Jonathan Alter.

Below is an excerpt from Alter’s new book The Promise: President Obama, Year One, to be released May 18:

“Obama said that the unanimous House vote against the Recovery Act ‘set the tenor for the whole year’: ‘That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.’  For Obama this was the greatest surprise of 2009.”

This has long been the modus operandi of the far left, from the likes of actress Janeane Garofalo to the commentators on MSNBC and CNN.  Yet for the President of the United States to invoke this term is simply stunning, particularly in light of the recently delivered commencement speech in which he heavily critiqued the tenor of political discourse in our age.

His disrespect of the tea party movement is also quite odd given his roots in community organizing.  Apparently that line of work is only respectable if it involves advancing far left causes or aiding folks in conspiring to evade taxes while smuggling underage girls into the country for a sex ring.  As regular readers know, these were the mission and downfall, respectively, of ACORN, an organization with which Mr. Obama worked closely early on in his career.

The tea party movement consists of a wide range of Americans who, according to recent polls, have a more mainstream vision for the country than the President himself.  Shame on you, Mr. President, for denigrating concerned citizens you were elected to serve.  Shame on you.

On April 30th, Progressives marched on Wall Street to vilify Wall Street banks and bankers. Who organized that march? It was a group called National People’s Action (NPA), and their anti-capitalist campaign is ominously titled Showdown In America.

You might be thinking “Crap. Not another Alinsky community organizing group and its damn acronym!” – but this is one to which you need to pay very close attention. This group is at the very center of the real estate bubble-bust brought on by the dreaded CRA, and they are organizing an army of unions to march on Wall Street and blame the entirety of the economic disaster on the evil rich.

The first thing that you need to know about NPA is that their now-deceased leader, Gail Cioncotta, is credited in community organizing circles for authoring the Community Reinvestment Act. Her group is also credited with honing the tactic of storming into banks and occupying their lobbies.

Another thing you need to know is that in 2003, NPA’s sister organization, the National Training and Information Center (NTIC), was busted by the Justice Department for misappropriating millions of federal grant dollars from community development projects,  using the funds instead to train community organizers to lobby the government. On top of that, the Justice Department found that they committed fraud as they tried to cover up their actions.

The overall purpose of the audited grant was to provide training, technical assistance, and funding to community-based organizations, and more than half of NTIC’s grant funds were awarded to these sub-grantees. Although the sub-grantees were supposed to have been selected competitively based upon their ability to run a successful community program, evidence in the grantee’s files and statements by NTIC staff revealed that the majority of sub-grantees were instead selected based upon their connection to influential lawmakers. Moreover, while a major element of the grant was to provide training to these sub-grantees and significant funds were spent for training conferences, considerable portions of these sessions were dedicated to conducting congressional lobbying visits and training sub-grantees in how to conduct successful lobbying activities. Most importantly, we believe that NTIC intentionally misled OJP and attempted to conceal its true activities. As a result of these systemic improprieties, we question the entire amount awarded, or $3,162,580.

…..

We began our audit in October 2003 and contacted the OIG Investigations Division in February 2004. Due to the initiation of the criminal investigation, we postponed reporting our results until the conclusion of the criminal investigation. The Executive Director of NTIC pleaded guilty and served his sentence related to the criminal case. As of March 2008, a civil action under the False Claims Act was pending against NTIC.

As a result of their crimes, NPA and NTIC lost their federal funding. This marginalized their organization’s influence in community organizing circles and further radicalized their remaining members. Without the federal dollars streaming in, there was no need to hide the real agenda – which is to destroy corporate America.

Pay very close attention starting at 2:20 in the video below

Notice the stars in their logo at the beginning of the video below

With the downfall of ACORN as a “respectable” brand, NPA and NTIC are stepping in to fill the void. They are “cleaning up” their look, having removed the red stars from their current logo.

Last year, together with Andy Stern and SEIU, NPA led an angry march against “greedy” bankers in Chicago.*

Now, SEIU and NPA are working together with other unions to organize a series of marches and demonstrations aimed at Wall Street and capitalism. From the description of their next march:

National People’s Action (NPA), and our allies at SEIU, the AFL-CIO, and Jobs With Justice are calling for a Showdown on K Street.  The big banks destroyed our economy and have hijacked our democracy.  Corporate lobbyists representing the big banks paved the way to deregulate Wall Street and are now standing in the way of reforms that would protect people and strengthen our economy.

This all begs the question:  did Andy Stern leave SEIU because it would look very unseemly for one of the most frequent visitors to the Obama White House to be leading unionized-angry-street-mobs against corporate America? Did Andy Stern leave SEIU to protect the Obama Administration from charges of coordinating protests in the streets of our nation?

That would be a fundamental transformation of our country -  if the Executive Branch coordinated directly with unions to shake down corporations and vilify fellow Americans. A dark transformation indeed.

To quote the great Glenn Reynolds: “We are in the very best of hands.”

*For more information on NPA’s Chicago Showdown, please contact Senator Dick Durbin and/or FDIC Chair, Sheila Bair. They both addressed the group at an NPA breakfast held the morning of the protest.

For quite some time, Noam Chomsky has joined other radical luminaries on the “Editorial Advisory Group” of the ACORN-linked Social Policy magazine.  Published by ACORN founder Wade Rathke, the magazine airs the views of Chomsky, Frances Fox Piven, Gloria Steinem, and Peter Dreier, among others.

This is the same publication that ran an analytical piece on Barack Obama’s 2004 primary campaign for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, written by a Chicago ACORN leader.

The article contained such gems as: “By the time he ran for U.S. Senate, we were old friends.”  The point is not to bring up President Obama’s apparently forgotten memories, but instead to point out Chomsky is not some nut that is isolated – he runs with the big dogs.

Chomsky recently painted a disturbing picture of America in the Russian news outlet Pravda, when he compared the opposition to President Obama and the Congress’ policies to what happened in Germany just prior to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.

“It’s very similar to Weimar Germany, the parallels are striking.

…

“The United States is very lucky that no honest and charismatic figure has appeared, and if this were to happen this country would be in real trouble for the frustration, disillusionment and the justified anger combined with the absence of a coherent response,” he concludes.

Chomsky, apparently, is referring to the Tea Party movement and other expressions of frustration with the direction of our country.

In Germany, he recalls, an enemy was created to explain the crisis which was the Jew.  “Here they are the illegal immigrants and blacks. We will say that white men are a persecuted minority. We will say that we must uphold and defend the honor of the nation.  Military force will be exalted. There will be blows. This could be converted into an undeniable force. And if it takes place, it will be more dangerous than Nazi Germany. The United States is a world power … I do not believe that this is far from happening,” he says.

Chomsky makes outrageous claims that are indefensible.  Frances Fox Piven recently criticized Glenn Beck, saying he made scapegoats out of people with “dark skin, foreigners and intellectuals.”

It’s only a matter of time before Chomsky’s opinions show up in the pages of Social Policy.

What Chomsky fails to point out, of course, is that Hitler and the Nazis sought a perfect socialist society through government policy, that is, supreme government control.  It was not borne out of the belief of individual freedom and curtailed government spending, as are generally the principles of the Tea Party movement.

But Chomsky and his ilk can’t afford to let a few facts get in the way of some good old fashioned fear mongering.  If there’s any scapegoating going on, it’s being done by Chomsky, Dreier, Piven and others who are claiming peaceful old people showing up to protest Medicare cuts are leading some sort of seditious movement.

The left-wing architects of the subprime mortgage collapse have yet to be called to account.

Much has already been written about the possibly criminal conduct of Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who relentlessly gamed the political system to clear the way for their friends at government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make billions at the expense of taxpayers, but very little has been written about the role that their liberal friends and allies in the private and nonprofit sectors played in bringing the U.S. economy to its knees.

Funded by huckster John Paulson and predatory lending kingpins Herb & Marion Sandler (who also gave generously to ACORN through the years), the inappropriately named Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) laid the foundation for the current financial crisis.

The media seems barely to have noticed that CRL’s puppet, Eric Stein, is now leading the Obama administration’s push to Sovietize the American banking system. Stein, who is now the U.S. Treasury’s deputy secretary for consumer protection, was previously a vice president at CRL.

This means that Stein, who helped create the subprime crisis by pushing people to borrow money they couldn’t afford to repay, is now in charge of cleaning up the mess he created.

Posted below with the permission of my employer, Capital Research Center, the following article by journalist Sean Higgins appears in the March 2010 issue of our monthly newsletter, Organization Trends. -MV

* * * * *

Summary: The Center for Responsible Lending presents itself as a tireless advocate of poor and downtrodden borrowers facing a credit industry of greedy banks, payday lenders and other financial predators. Yet a review of CRL’s advocacy paints a different picture of the organization. It is intimately tied to some of the worst actors in the lending business and its advocacy has too often hurt, not helped, the very people it claims to defend.

The California financiers Herbert and Marion Sandler must have had a rude shock when they saw themselves depicted in an October 2008 comedy routine on “Saturday Night Live,” the popular late night television show also known as “SNL.”

Presented as a mock C-SPAN broadcast, the sketch brutally parodied the politicians who orchestrated the bailout legislation that fall.

President George W. Bush, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, all took their licks, as did homeowners delinquent on their mortgages. In the comedy skit an actress playing Pelosi introduces actors playing Herb and Marion Sandler, the co-founders of the Golden West financial empire. Played by the comedian Darrell Hammond, “Herbert” explains the couple’s plight: “My wife and I had a company which aggressively marketed subprime mortgages, and then bundled them into securities to sell to banks such as Wachovia. Today our portfolio is worth almost nothing, though at one point it was worth close to $19 billion.”

Pelosi says that’s horrible and asks if the Sandlers were able to sell their portfolio for anything.

“Yes, for $24 billion,” Herbert replies.

“So … you’re not so to speak actual victims?” Pelosi asks.

“Oh no, that would be Wachovia bank,” Herbert chuckles.

“Actually we’ve done quite well. We’re very happy,” chimes in Casey Wilson, who plays Marion.

“We were sort of wondering why you asked us to come today,” Herbert says. As he speaks a C-SPAN caption bearing the toxic mortgage king and queen’s names appears on the screen, with the words: “People who should be shot.”

The audience roared with laughter. As Herbert and Marion begin walking away, they thank Pelosi and Barney Frank (played by Fred Armisen) for “helping block congressional oversight of our corrupt activities.” Marion and Pelosi exchange pecks on the cheek.

The SNL sketch was notable for its sharp parody of everyone involved in the financial meltdown. But the surprise was the poke at the Sandlers, little-known by the general public but major players in the elite world of liberal philanthropy. The Sandlers’ leftist activist grantmaking often exceeds that of George Soros himself, but they have worked hard to create an image of themselves as persons deeply concerned about how to make mortgage financing available to low-income persons. The couple helped create the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), a leading liberal advocacy group that attacks the lending practices of banks and payday lenders. Over the years the Sandlers have contributed at least $20 million to CRL. The Sandlers did not appreciate the publicity.

They had journalism pundit Paul Steiger call NBC to complain that the sketch was unfair.

Steiger is editor-in-chief of ProPublica, a journalism nonprofit that produces left-leaning investigative reports (pro-ACORN, anti-Palin) that it promotes to major media outlets. Herb Sandler just happens to be the chairman of ProPublica, and it’s been reported that the Sandlers have committed $10 million to fund its activities. (ProPublica was profiled by Cheryl K. Chumley in the May 2009  Foundation Watch.)

Shortly afterwards SNL producer Lorne Michaels apologized and had the “should be shot” caption edited out of the program’s video clip, which has since been expunged from the NBC website. NBC folded, but the irony is that the SNL sketch got it right. The Sandlers actions did contribute in significant ways to the housing meltdown.

But don’t expect nonprofit groups that are recipients of the Sandlers’ philanthropy to make an issue of it.

Groups like the Center for Responsible Lending claim to be dedicated to fighting the very predatory actions that the Sandlers practiced and that SNL skit parodied. That’s hardly surprising. CRL wants to be seen as a liberal nonprofi t that does good deeds. But as we shall see, its agenda is one-sided, its outrage is selective, its advocacy is often counterproductive, and its ties to the financial world make many of its actions suspect.

The Sandlers and their Philanthropy
Unlike other major philanthropists Herb and Marion Sandler have attracted little attention even though they are big givers to liberal politicians, activist groups and liberal nonprofits. In 2004 they donated $13 million to liberal groups and political committees like MoveOn.org and Citizens for a Strong Senate. Those contributions made them the third largest donors to liberal political groups during the election cycle, just after Soros ($27 million) and Progressive insurance magnate Peter B. Lewis ($23 million). The Sandlers also contributed about $1 million to Democratic political campaigns across the country.

Through their Sandler Foundation, the couple donated more than $23 million to Human Rights Watch, a group adamantly opposed to effective war on terror policies. The Sandler Foundation (2007 assets: $1.1 billion, grants: $94.5 million) also has been generous to the ACLU ($4.6 million in 2007), to ProPublica ($3.75 million in 2007), and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities ($1.8 million in 2007). The Sandlers also helped found the Center for American Progress, the liberal think tank – “on steroids,” according to head John Podesta— that doubles as a rapid response organization for the Democratic Party. The foundation gave it $7.2 million in 2007 and about $10 million in total since 2005.

As late as 2004, the Sandler Foundation had little more than $20 million in assets. But after the couple sold Golden West to Wachovia in 2006, they poured $530 million into it in 2006 and $811 million in 2007, according to data from Guidestar.org, the nonprofit database.

The Sandlers’ pride and joy – and the reason why the SNL sketch stung so badly – is the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL). Their giving has helped transform what was a tiny North Carolina-founded nonprofit into a major player in financial services and banking policy-making. Indeed, CRL is to those issues what the ACLU is to civil rights or AARP is to seniors’ entitlements: It is the dominant left-wing advocacy/lobbying group—the one political and media elites in Washington, D.C. listen to regarding low income lending policies.

The Sandlers have personally donated more than $20 million to the organization – including $5.2 million from the Sandler Foundation in 2007. Their efforts are key to CRL’s reputation as the left’s authority on responsible lending.

CRL has aggressively attacked “redlining,” the now-outlawed financial practice of outlining (at one time with red ink on a map) the poor minority neighborhoods where banks would not make home loans. It also has lobbied states and the federal government to ban lending practices that it deems “predatory.”

But CRL’s activities have done as much harm as good. Ironically, CRL’s eagerness to castigate banks for alleged redlining has caused banks to overcompensate by making more of the subprime loans that have caused so much misery in poor neighborhoods. The group has turned a blind eye towards the lending practices of people like its benefactors, the Sandlers, persons whom Time magazine dubbed two of the “Twenty-five people to blame for the financial crisis.”

Profits Before Philanthropy In 1963 Herbert and Marion Sandler, now 78 and 79 respectively, purchased what is invariably called a “mom and pop” enterprise called Golden West Savings and Loan Association, located in Oakland, California.

They renamed it the World Savings Bank as it grew to be one of the nation’s largest savings and loans. What distinguished World Savings were the Sandlers’ social views. They built their business on making home loans to the minority poor who were considered poor credit risks by other lenders. The Sandlers disagreed and claimed loans could be profitable if they were properly scrutinized and carefully managed.

Their business model acquired a reputation for thoroughness that was only burnished when World Savings came through the S&L crisis of the late 1980s virtually unscathed.

Behind the scenes, however, World Savings Bank aggressively pushed an exotic form of mortgage called an option adjustable rate mortgage, or option ARM. World Savings gave it a cute name: “Pick-A-Pay.” There was nothing cutesy, though, about the way it worked. The customer was given several alternatives for making a monthly mortgage payment. Ostensibly this gave homeowners more fl exibility in handling their payments should they encounter money problems. In practice, however, Option ARMs lured borrowers into going deeper into debt. Some of the options offered payment amounts so low they didn’t cover the interest on the principal, and by allowing consumers to choose them, the mortgage holder encouraged borrowers to make regular monthly payments that actually put them deeper in debt, owing more and more to the bank with each passing month.

Inevitably many borrowers did just that, and World Savings Bank’s portfolio soon swelled with “toxic” loans. “This product is the most destructive financial weapon ever deployed against the American middle class,” housing lawyer William Purdy told the New York Times.

By the time it was sold to Wachovia in May 2006 for $25.5 billion World Savings Bank carried an amazing $122 billion in adjustable rate mortgages on its books. Shortly after World Savings Bank was sold to Wachovia, the loans became a drain on the bank. In the first quarter of 2007 Wachovia reported losses of $2.3 billion. By the second quarter of 2008 it reported losses of $8.9 billion. Wachovia effectively ceased to exist by October 2008 when it was acquired by Wells Fargo in a forced government sale.

How Self-Help Helped Create the Housing Crisis
As the Sandlers’ wealth increased so did their interest in philanthropy. As liberals, they wanted to fund political activists and nonprofit advocacy groups. And as bankers they sought out a nonprofit group focused on expanding mortgage lending to low income people. That combination attracted them to Martin Eakes.

Martin Eakes is the “main intellectual engine driving Democratic responses to the housing crisis,” wrote the Washington insider journal Politico in a January 2008 profile.

Politico reported that Eakes, now 55, held meetings with powerful figures like Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank.

How did Eakes come to be in such company?

As chief executive officer of the Center for Responsible Lending, Eakes is by all accounts a tireless advocate of financial regulatory reform and foe of the mortgage industry. The Center is an outgrowth of an earlier nonprofit community lender called Self-Help, founded by Eakes and his wife, Bonnie Wright, in Durham, North Carolina in 1980. With degrees from Yale and Princeton and a summer of experience as a Ford Foundation intern, Eakes set up Self-Help to provide loans to poor people with bad credit.

He told Politico that Self-Help was “one of the earliest subprime lenders in the nation.” (Eakes and his nonprofits were profiled by David Hogberg in the October 2005 Organization Trends.) Over time Eakes began to spin off various parts of Self-Help, creating the Self-Help Ventures Fund and the Self-Help Credit Union in 1984. The Self-Help Community Development Corporation followed along
with the Center for Community Self-Help.

All were—and are—closely affiliated. They have overlapping staff and missions, according to disclosures in their IRS form 990 tax returns. The family of groups is usually referred to as “Self-Help.”

According to Self-Help’s website, the organizations exist to, “provide financing, technical support and advocacy for those left out of the economic mainstream” Female, rural, and minority homeowners are specifically mentioned. Self-Help operates a “secondary market program that enables private lenders to make more loans in low-wealth communities.”

A note on terminology: At one time there was no such thing as a “secondary market.” The primary mortgage market consisted of banks making loans to borrowers, which enabled people to buy homes. But increasingly the banks began to sell securities in a secondary market backed by their mortgages. Buyers of these mortgage-backed securities were buying the promise that they would receive proceeds from the mortgage payments. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were key producers of these instruments. They bought mortgages and repackaged them as mortgage-backed securities.

The federal government had to bail out Fannie and Freddie because so many of the mortgages underlying the securities were “toxic.” In other words, the mortgage backed securities were not the sure thing they appeared to be because so many of the people who had to pay the mortgages could not afford them after all. Many borrowers allowed their homes to go into foreclosure because the amount of their mortgage was more than the value of their house. The house was “underwater.”

Self-Help has promoted home loan secondary markets in every way possible. It claims to have facilitated the extension of more than $3.6 billion in financing for home mortgages and loans. Self-Help became very popular with left-wing funders and received large grants from the Surdna, Annie E. Casey, and MacArthur foundations to promote its mortgage programs. The Ford Foundation provided a staggering $50 million to subsidize minority and low-income mortgages. A Ford press release explained how Self-Help would use its giant grant:

Fannie Mae has made a commitment to purchase and/or securitize the total $2 billion in loans Self-Help will acquire. The combined effort will in turn help lenders such as BankAmerica Mortgage, Chase Manhattan, and NationsBank which have expanded outreach and developed special products to increase their services to low-wealth borrowers as part of their efforts under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), by enabling them to make additional loans.

Self-Help taps taxpayers directly by doing business with Fannie Mae, a government sponsored enterprise (GSE) that was nationalized during the housing crisis. According to Self-Help’s website, the group offers a “flow” program that provides lenders “the assurance and convenience of a guaranteed buyer for qualified loans to low-and-moderate income homebuyers, along with the ability to sell loans directly to Fannie Mae through Self-Help.” Self-Help’s portfolio program “purchases selected loans from lenders after a careful analysis of loan characteristics and performance.”

The federal government underwrites Self- Help in other ways. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has loaned about $4 million to the Self-Help Ventures Fund. Those loans have a 1% interest rate and the loan does not have to be repaid in full until 2021 at the earliest. The Small Business Administration (SBA) has lent the Ventures Fund another $2.5 million at interest rates varying from 2.63% to 4.5%. Self-Help also gets government grants. In 2005 the U.S. Department of Education gave it an $8 million grant to guarantee loans for charter schools. According to a 2003 report, Self-Help made 31 loans totaling $33 million to 17 schools.

Despite all this back-up support, the Self-Help Credit Union’s business appears to have suffered during the housing downturn. Financial reports by the National Credit Union Agency put the assets of the Self-Help Credit Union at nearly $184 million in June 2005. By the June 2009 report, the assets were only $72.7 million.

Martin Eakes’s relentless activities at the state level caught the Sandler’s attention. “I said, ‘Isn’t it incredible what he is doing?’” Herbert Sandler told the New York Times. “I said to Martin (Eakes), ‘What would it take to do what you do on a national level?’”

Together, the Sandlers and Eakes created the Center for Responsible Lending in 2002.

Since then, the Sandlers have been major funders of the Center, pouring more than $20 million into it.

With the Sandlers’ financial support, Eakes has made the Center for Responsible Lending a powerhouse in the inside-the-beltway politics of f nancial policymaking. CRL combines think tank policy research with advocacy group lobbying. Its reports and research have generally been uncritically accepted by the mainstream media despite the organization’s well known bias on housing issues.

The Housing Bubble and the Financial Meltdown
CRL’s mission is to stamp out what it calls “predatory lending,” a term of art used to characterize loans made to borrowers who are misinformed or misled about the cost of their loan and its schedule for repayment.

Critics typically allege that the lender either knows or should know that the borrower is incapable of fulfilling the loan conditions, but ignores the high risk of default in order to make the deal.

“Community organizing” groups frequently attack what they consider predatory lending, claiming that it has spiked during the last decade. The irony is that by working to expand subprime loans to the poor, long a political goal of the left, CRL has increased the likelihood of predatory lending.

At one time the lending industry was very cautious about making loans. Banks only extended credit to low risk borrowers who were considered certain to repay their loans.

Consequently a loan was a difficult, time consuming process in which borrowers had to prove their creditworthiness. The joke was that to get a bank loan you had to prove that you didn’t need it.

Low-income people had a hard time getting credit because it was thought there was a greater risk that they would be unable to repay their loans. And when those with low incomes lived in minority neighborhoods it was easy for left-wing critics to call the lenders racists for discriminating against minority borrowers. Fighting the practice of “redlining” became a social justice cause on the left.

This changed in 1995 when the Clinton administration expanded the scope of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). The 1995 CRA revision toughened government oversight over bank lending. Now banks receiving insurance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) were required to make loans in the communities they served.

Banks lost some of their discretion to refuse to make loans because FDIC gave them ratings based on their compliance with the CRA. A bank or other financial institution that received a poor CRA rating became a magnet for bad publicity and civil rights lawsuits.

Activists would cite the rating as proof that the bank was guilty of racist practices.

This gave the banks a strong incentive to make more loans to residents in “underserved” communities—even to borrowers who were credit risks likely to fall into bankruptcy or foreclosure. But for many years this danger was obscured by the housing bubble as some prices increased higher and faster than at any previous time, giving borrowers a false sense of increased wealth.

Martin Eakes and the Center for Responsible Lending have pushed hard for expanding bank lending to low-income minority communities, and they are in denial about the obvious connection between the housing crisis and the role of the Community Reinvestment Act in expanding high-risk lending.

CRL’s website says calling attention to the linkage is “scapegoating.” Instead, it argues that the problem is inadequate government regulation: “Had regulators leveled the playing field through common sense underwriting requirements and more vigorously enforced CRA requirements instead of allowing a race to the bottom, this crisis would have been averted.” (Emphasis added.)

Activists like Eakes are unwilling to admit any doubts. They wanted the government to loosen credit. But when prices soar and foreclosures skyrocket they blame only the lenders, not the borrowers or the policy advocates like themselves for the fiscal meltdown and the collapse of the housing bubble.

Eakes has his own “scapegoat” and it’s “predatory lending.”

As he explained to PBS in 2000, low income borrowers are simply not a risk:

“[W]e went for 10 years, we have had our first loss of a home loan of $10,000 in a total of $120 million of lending directly and indirectly we have made, to mostly minority, single moms. We had our first $10,000 this past year. So, whatever people believe, the truth is, if someone has a chance to get a toehold and own a home, they will be far better borrowers than most of the rest of us. That is just a fact.”

Trial Lawyers to the Rescue
In interviews, the Ivy League-educated Eakes dwells on his humble North Carolina roots. Articles report that his annual salary is $60,000 (plus $26,000 in “other compensation” according to CRL tax forms). In 1996 Eakes received a $260,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” And he has a nice office: In 2004 CRL purchased an 11-story building in Washington D.C.’s Farragut Square for $23 million. That makes CRL part of Washington’s infamous “K Street” corridor of lobbying firms located blocks from the White House.

Besides the Sandlers’ $20 million ($13.9 million of it since 2005), CRL has received grants from the usual suspects: the Pew Charitable Trusts ($1 million in 2007), MacArthur Foundation ($500,000 in 2002), Ford Foundation ($200,000 in 2003), Rockefeller Fund ($150,000 in 2002), Philadelphia Foundation ($268,847 since 2000), and George Soros’s Open Society Institute ($100,000 since 2003).

However, eyebrows were raised over a recent major donation.

In 2007, hedge fund manager John Paulson [no relation to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson] had his company contribute $15 million to CRL. The donation was to create an “Institute for Foreclosure Legal Assistance” to be managed by the National Association of Consumer Advocates (NACA), an association of 1,000 class-action attorneys. The Institute’s website says the purpose of the group is to make grants of about $250,000 to nonprofit legal aid groups and law school clinics for “homeowner protection.”

The Paulson gift was made at the same time that Paulson and Co. hedge fund was pushing for a form of bankruptcy reform legislation that would let federal judges rewrite the home mortgages of people in bankruptcy—a process called “cramdown” in the mortgage business. Paulson and Co. senior vice president Michael Waldorf said the firm’s generous contribution was in the public interest (a “positive contribution in addressing a serious economic problem.”)

By contrast, Business Week surmised that “Paulson … stands to rake in a windfall if the measure passes.” How? Paulson made a massive bet against the subprime market. “Economy’s Loss Was One Man’s Gain” was how a New York Times review of a book on Paulson’s feat put it.

As he explained in an interview for Portfolio.com, Paulson saw the turmoil in the housing market early on because the securities traded in the subprime market were far riskier than their ratings indicated: “We thought that many banks and brokerages were massively overleveraged, with very risky assets, and that a small decline in the assets would wipe out the equity and impair the debt.”

Financial institutions had every reason to worry that the cramdown legislation would further roil the already troubled secondary market trading subprime mortgage securities.

Who would invest if judges were given the authority to rewrite the terms of mortgages? The secondary market would dry up.

According to BusinessWeek, Paulson’s plan was to create a broad coalition of consumer and legal aid groups to push for the legislation.

He also took short positions on securities he thought would tumble when the housing market did. One of the banks he focused on was Wachovia.

The bet on the fall of the mortgage securities paid off and generated a record $15 billion for Paulson and Co. in 2007.

John Paulson’s personal payday return was $3.7 billion. The total would have been even higher had the cramdown legislation become law. CRL, whose $15 million grant was small change for Paulson, denied that there was any quid pro quo. Reacting to the BusinessWeek story, the organization said none of the money Paulson contributed would be used to lobby for the cramdown legislation. The insinuation, it said, was “outrageous.”

CRL’s Crusade Against Payday Lending
CRL and its supporters assume predatory lenders are always at fault, eager to have borrowers fall behind on their payments in order to collect ever-higher payments. That’s what’s behind the current Democratic bill to create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which would expand the federal government’s powers to monitor lenders, extend lenders’ legal liabilities, and create the basis for a new wave of class-action lawsuits.

It’s also what’s behind legislation introduced by Sen. Dick Durbin, (D-IL) to crack down on the payday lending industry.

Payday lending, sometimes also known as cash advances, is a state-regulated industry in which retail lenders make small short term loans (e.g. a few hundred dollars for two weeks). Low-income people who find themselves in a sudden cash crunch often rely on such lenders—for instance, for auto repairs so that a borrower has transportation to get to work. Payday lending is a substantial industry throughout the U.S., providing quick, convenient and customer-friendly services. CRL, however, calls the practice “nothing more than legal loansharking” that forces borrowers into a “debt trap.”

“The problem for the borrowers—and the payoff for the lenders—is that the terms of these loans are cleverly designed to be very difficult to meet. The borrower must keep coming back and renewing their loan because they aren’t allowed to pay it down and can’t afford to pay it off. They pay the lender another chunk of interest each time, about $50 for a $300 loan.”

Eakes created CRL to fight payday lending. In 1999, his Coalition for Responsible Lending, composed of credit unions and nonprofits like the NAACP, succeeded in stopping North Carolina lenders from making loans containing what the Coalition considered excessive balloon payments, fees and refinancing charges. Eakes got Georgia to pass similar legislation in 2004, and CRL is now pushing Durbin’s federal legislation.

CRL says banning payday loans would protect Americans, especially African-Americans, from abusive loans. A March 2005 CRL study, “Race Matters,” asserts that “abusive loans made by payday lenders are not just an issue of fair and responsible lending, but are a civil rights issue as well.”

However, no less an authority than the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has argued against banning borrowers from securing loans from payday lenders. Its November 2007 report on what happened in Georgia and North Carolina warned that there would be unintended consequences if payday lending was outlawed:

Georgians and North Carolinians do not seem better off since their states outlawed payday credit: they have bounced more checks, complained more about lenders, and debt collectors, and have filed for Chapter 7 (“no asset”) bankruptcy at a higher rate. The increase in bounced checks represents a potentially huge transfer from depositors to banks and credit unions. Banning payday loans did not save Georgian households $154 million per year, as the CRL projected, it cost them millions per year in returned check fees.

The report also noted that borrowers in Hawaii had “fewer and less chronic” financial problems after the state doubled the legal limit of a payday loan to $600.

A 2009 report by Gregory Elliehausen of the George Washington School of Business seconded the Federal Reserve study, noting that payday loans, while often costly, are “better than the alternatives.” Payday loans “increase communities’ resiliency to financial difficulties, relax credit restraints without increasing delinquency and reduce the incidence of financial problems.”

Elliehausen added that the loans were also popular with consumers: “Nearly all payday loan customers evaluated their own experience with their recent payday loan positively and believed that payday loan companies provide a useful service to consumers.”

Conclusion Such findings have not stopped CRL’s crusade against payday loans. It claimed in January 2009 that “payday lending alone costs American families $4.2 billion in predatory fees,” arguing that “[f]or every payday lending staff position, 179 Americans are caught in the cycle of high cost payday debt.”

The collapse of the housing market and the crisis affecting American financial institutions should have caused the Center for Responsible Lending and its Self-Help affiliates to reexamine their premises about the best ways to help low-income people. And the mainstream media should have more closely examined how the philanthropy of financiers like John Paulson and Herb and Marion Sandler promoted their business interests.

Neither reevaluation has occurred.

How ironic that the toughest media scrutiny lending advocates have faced came from a late night comedy skit on television.

Sean Higgins is a Washington, D.C.-based reporter.

(This article appeared in the March 2010 issue of Capital Research Center’s monthly newsletter, Organization Trends.)

A federal court of appeals overturned Clinton-appointee Judge Nina Gershon’s ruling that claimed the government had the right and responsibility to fund ACORN.

Thank God, in light of the latest antics from ACORN Chief Organizer Berth Lewis.  While applauding the Young Democratic Socialists, she said, “Any group that says, ‘I’m young, I’m Democratic, and I’m a socialist,’ is all right with me.”

I’m glad the real socialists, with the ear of our government, are finally standing up to be counted.

The Tea Parties, which Lewis called a “bowel movement,” are bringing America into a phase that will surpass Jim Crow, McCarthism and the Japanese internment camps of World War II.

This woman, who has overseen an organization and employees accused and/or convicted of voter registration fraud in well over a dozen states, has no shame.

Lewis’ actions, both past and present, show why her organization isn’t worthy of our hard-earned tax dollars.

“We’re on life support,” Lewis told reporters after her court appearance.  And the plug can’t be pulled fast enough.

From the Associated Press:

The Supreme Court has turned down ACORN’s request for help in its lawsuit claiming Congress was wrong to shut off the activist group’s federal funding.

The high court on Friday refused to throw out a decision by the federal appellate court in New York City. That court had decided to freeze a judge’s determination that Congress acted unconstitutionally in yanking the group’s funding.

ACORN, which bills itself as an advocate for low-income and minority home buyers and residents, has drastically cut its operations since losing its funding.

Lawmakers acted after a widely circulated video showed three employees apparently advising a couple posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend to lie about her profession and launder her earnings.

Check for updates here.

The Pentagon rescinded the invitation of evangelist Franklin Graham to speak at its May 6 National Day of Prayer event because of complaints about his previous comments about Islam.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation expressed its concern over Graham's involvement with the event in an April 19 letter sent to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. MRFF's complaint about Graham, the son of Rev. Billy Graham, focused on remarks he made after 9/11 in which he called Islam "wicked" and "evil" and his lack of apology for those words.

Col. Tom Collins, an Army spokesman, told ABC News on April 22, "This Army honors all faiths and tries to inculcate our soldiers and work force with an appreciation of all faiths and his past comments just were not appropriate for this venue."

In a press release, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins called the Army's decision "further evidence that the leadership of our nation's military has been impaired by the politically correct culture being advanced by this Administration. Under this Administration's watch we are seeing the First Amendment, designed to protect the religious exercise of Americans, retooled into a sword to sever America's ties with orthodox Christianity."

Graham's comments could certainly be considered inflammatory, but it should be noted that the Obama Administration hasn't always backed away from controversial religious leaders.

An April 17 front page Washington Post article by Krissah Williams on Rev. Al Sharpton detailed how he has been an "ally" to Barack Obama since the 2008 election:

Sharpton has been among the president's chief defenders against criticism from television host Tavis Smiley that "black folks are catching hell" and that the president should do more to specifically help blacks.

"We need to try to solve our problems and not expect the president to advocate for us," Sharpton said on his radio show. "It is interesting to me that some people don't understand that to try to make the president do certain things will only benefit the right wing, who wants to get the president and us."

Williams also noted several times in the article the link between Obama cabinet officials and Sharpton, with officials speaking at his National Action Network conference and regularly appearing on his radio program.

But Sharpton is not without his own controversies, to say the very least. Earlier this spring he told Fox News "The American public overwhelmingly voted for socialism when they elected President Obama."

Last fall Sharpton played a role in blocking Rush Limbaugh's ownership bid of the NFL's St. Louis Rams, going so far as to send a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. The letter read in part, "Rush Limbaugh has been divisive and anti-NFL on several occasions, with comments about NFL players, including Michael Vick and Donovan McNabb, and his recent statement that the NFL was beginning to look like a fight between the Crips and the Bloods without the weapons was disturbing."   

Furthermore, Sharpton, the race huckster, owes his current status to his involvement in a string of contemptible incidents in New York. In the 1987 Tawana Brawley case, he slandered an innocent man in the course of defending an infamous "race crime" hoax. He was sued and lost a judgment for $345,000, without ever retracting or apologizing for his accusation. His race demagoguery resulted in violence and deaths on more than one occasion.

Safe to say, Franklin Graham's remarks about Islam, however objectionable, didn't incite murder.

The Pentagon rescinded the invitation of evangelist Franklin Graham to speak at its May 6 National Day of Prayer event because of complaints about his previous comments about Islam.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation expressed its concern over Graham's involvement with the event in an April 19 letter sent to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. MRFF's complaint about Graham, the son of Rev. Billy Graham, focused on remarks he made after 9/11 in which he called Islam "wicked" and "evil" and his lack of apology for those words.

Col. Tom Collins, an Army spokesman, told ABC News on April 22, "This Army honors all faiths and tries to inculcate our soldiers and work force with an appreciation of all faiths and his past comments just were not appropriate for this venue."

In a press release, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins called the Army's decision "further evidence that the leadership of our nation's military has been impaired by the politically correct culture being advanced by this Administration. Under this Administration's watch we are seeing the First Amendment, designed to protect the religious exercise of Americans, retooled into a sword to sever America's ties with orthodox Christianity."

Graham's comments could certainly be considered inflammatory, but it should be noted that the Obama Administration hasn't always backed away from controversial religious leaders.

An April 17 front page Washington Post article by Krissah Williams on Rev. Al Sharpton detailed how he has been an "ally" to Barack Obama since the 2008 election:

Sharpton has been among the president's chief defenders against criticism from television host Tavis Smiley that "black folks are catching hell" and that the president should do more to specifically help blacks.

"We need to try to solve our problems and not expect the president to advocate for us," Sharpton said on his radio show. "It is interesting to me that some people don't understand that to try to make the president do certain things will only benefit the right wing, who wants to get the president and us."

Williams also noted several times in the article the link between Obama cabinet officials and Sharpton, with officials speaking at his National Action Network conference and regularly appearing on his radio program.

But Sharpton is not without his own controversies, to say the very least. Earlier this spring he told Fox News "The American public overwhelmingly voted for socialism when they elected President Obama."

Last fall Sharpton played a role in blocking Rush Limbaugh's ownership bid of the NFL's St. Louis Rams, going so far as to send a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. The letter read in part, "Rush Limbaugh has been divisive and anti-NFL on several occasions, with comments about NFL players, including Michael Vick and Donovan McNabb, and his recent statement that the NFL was beginning to look like a fight between the Crips and the Bloods without the weapons was disturbing."   

Furthermore, Sharpton, the race huckster, owes his current status to his involvement in a string of contemptible incidents in New York. In the 1987 Tawana Brawley case, he slandered an innocent man in the course of defending an infamous "race crime" hoax. He was sued and lost a judgment for $345,000, without ever retracting or apologizing for his accusation. His race demagoguery resulted in violence and deaths on more than one occasion.

Safe to say, Franklin Graham's remarks about Islam, however objectionable, didn't incite murder.

The New York Times reported today that long-suffering Brooklyn homeowner Daniel Goldstein has finally been forced out by the state’s eminent domain abuse in the Atlantic Yards case. And the paper turned to ACORN chief Bertha Lewis for some gloating commentary:

Bertha Lewis, a housing advocate who supported the project, bid Mr. Goldstein “good riddance.”

“Low- and moderate-income people had to wait years for housing while he obstructed the Atlantic Yards project,” she said.

Of course, Lewis is much more than just a “housing advocate who supported the project,” she was the CEO of ACORN, a group that signed a contract with Atlantic Yards developer Bruce Ratner “to publicly support the [Atlantic Yards] Project by, among other things, appearing with the Developer before the Public Parties, community organizations and the media as part of a coordinated effort to realize and advance the Project.” In return, Ratner pledged to include a certain amount of “affordable housing” in the project, units that ACORN stood to make a fortune from marketing and managing. As the New York Post reported, “Anita MonCrief, a former ACORN official-turned-whistleblower, estimates the anticipated deal could bring the group $5 million to $10 million annually over multiple years.”

And the money didn’t stop there.

In 2008 Ratner bailed ACORN out to the tune of $1.5 million dollars after the news broke that Dale Rathke, brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke, had embezzled nearly $1 million from the group back in 2000 and the national leadership had covered the crime up for eight years. The financial fallout from that scandal threatened to ruin ACORN until Ratner stepped in with a $1 million load and a $500,000 grant. This desperately-needed cash kept ACORN alive and allowed it to keep providing cover for Ratner’s corporate welfare and eminent domain abuse.

So if it wasn’t for Bruce Ratner’s taxpayer-subsidized bribes and handouts, we would’ve bid good riddance to ACORN long ago. Apparently the New York Times didn’t think any of that context was important to the story.

As you know, we’ve been writing for some time about The Center for Community Self-Help and its financing affiliates Self-Help Credit Union, Self-Help Federal Credit Union, and Self-Help Ventures Fund.  As of late, the organization has been under increased scrutiny for its questionable lobbying activities, its former leader and soon to be CFPA Czar Eric Stein, and  its $15 million donation from disgraced hedge fund billionaire John Paulson.

According to the Self Help website, the organizations “provide financing, technical support, consumer financial services, and advocacy for those left out of the economic mainstream.”  Within that complex web of entities under the Self-Help umbrella exists about forty or so real estate development projects.  I thought it might be a productive exercise to start looking into some of Self-Help’s individual properties.

So, I started with Barr Building, LLC, a Self-Help investment registered under its affiliate Self Help Ventures Fund.  The property is located at 910 17th Street NW, Washington, DC.

And wouldn’t you know, it happens to be home to one of our most frequent subjects:

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

This seemed especially curious, because it was only recently I’d discovered that SEIU, together with the AARP, is also the proud funder and agitator for one of the Center for Responsible Lending’s other advocacy projects – its state-specific lobbying websites targeted at regulating short-term loans in an effort to insulate its own predatory practices from any private industry competition.  For example, take a look at this site, from Arizonans for Responsible Lending.  It’s chock filled with all of the usual SEIU corporate campaign elements:  the menacing title and domain name, the array of photos depicting abused consumers who simply could not have known any better, the manufactured headlines, and of course – the staple of their strategy – the studies and the research (all funded and conducted by their own organization allies).

And of course, the site is immersed in SEIU and ACORN through its flagship partners, such as “Americans for Financial Reform“, which is run by Heather Booth and Lisa Donner – longtime radicals of ACORN, SEIU, Center for Working Families and other leftist organizations.

How convenient.  And there’s one of these sites for most of their ballot measure lobbying states.  Even more convenient.

I suppose I’ll spend some time looking into the entire list of properties.  Who knows what one will find?  Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire.  Especially when SEIU enters the picture in the middle of someone else’s scandal.

If the video clip of Bertha Lewis I posted yesterday exposed her disturbing views on the tea party and conservatives in general, as well as her support for genuine socialism, the clip I am going to post here reveals the means by which she and others on the left plan on achieving their radical goals. For all the phony accusations against the Tea Party movement for racism and fomenting violence, if there is anything which will lead to racial violence and civic unrest in this country it’s the agenda on display here – watch:

Transcript:

First of all, let me just say that any group that says “I’m young, I’m democratic, and I’m a socialist” is alright with me. [applause]

The reason that you have to build your organization, and make it as big and as powerful as you can, is because you need to get into real battles. And here’s what I think you need to do. And you need make sure that you get into this battle. The next big battle that’s coming…whether healthcare lives or dies…[break]

Immigration is the next big battle. Immigration, immigration, immigration. And the reason this is so important is, you know, here’s the secret [whispers]:

We’re getting ready to me a majority, minority country. Shhhh. [applause] We’ll be like South Africa. More black people than white people. [laughter] Don’t tell anybody.

You get yourselves together, get strong, get big, and get in this battle. Get in this battle! Because again it’s all about money. How this country works. Who we have in this country. And the fact that a fear of a black planet that’s being played out in the United States today. The future of our country is people of color. And how that’s going to change our psyche and our economics, this is why folks are grabbing so hard to change the economic paradigm, because we gettin’ ready to have a majority country of people of color. And the fear of a black planet is real. [break]

My challenge to black folks, and to people of color and civil rights folks, are as this: the face of immigration needs to be a lot blacker than it is. Because once they can frame the immigration debate as about Latinos, crossing some mythical border, when in fact we have second and third generation black folks in this country who come from immigrant families. But they’re not standing up and marching with their Latino brothers and sisters, and saying “I am an immigrant too”…[break]

So Young Democratic Socialists, join this immigration war. Black people, young black people that have been put in the vast vat of “African Americans”, JOIN. Don’t march along side, don’t march in back, be right out front!

Because that will be the battle for our democracy. That will be the battle for the kind of government that we have. That will be an economic battle of epic proportions. Immigration, self-sufficiency, and the people united. Thanks you. [appplause]

Of course Lewis is likely correct about the demographic trend, regardless of what happens with immigration reform, but her language of incitement and class warfare is completely reprehensible. Not to mention irresponsible in the light of the current political and and economic unrest in this country. Consider as well that this conference was held at a public high school, and her audience consisted primarily of college students and other young people.

As a country, we have a proud history of accepting immigrants from all over the world, and we are better off for it. But we do not have a “mythical border”. It is the responsibility of our government to maintain our territorial integrity, and as citizens – through our democratic institutions – we should proudly seek to defend the laws and traditions which have made this nation great. There is nothing inconsistent between this and a rational immigration policy, as evidenced by multiple generations of immigrants who have peacefully and successfully assimilated into our way of life. (While enjoying unparalleled freedom to continue to honor their cultural and religious traditions, however they desire.)

But we should have no tolerance for those who ignore our laws, and seek to undermine the values we hold most dear through subversive means. This is the socialist agenda for America, and this is the “progressive” agenda for America – and it must be defeated.

There is something very important to consider about the recent Bertha Lewis rant posted earlier on Big Government, in which she referred to the Tea Party movement as a “Bowel movement”. Something that has thus far been largely overlooked.

While it is important to consider the implications of Bertha using this kind of language to describe average Americans, the actual story is not just what she said, it’s who she said it to.

Bertha was addressing the Young Democratic Socialists. This is not just some fringe, esoteric, Socialist youth group.

The Young Democratic Socialists is the on-campus section of the Democratic Socialists of America.

The Democratic Socialists of America founded the incredibly powerful Congressional Progressive Caucus with self described Socialist-Democrat, Bernie Sanders.

The Democratic Socialists of America, along with ACORN/SEIU and Citizen Action (now USAction) co-founded the New Party, and the Working Families Party, both of which Barack Obama pledged his loyalty to. Citizen Action was the organization Bob Creamer (Jan Schakowsky’s husband) was found guilty of embezzling from. Together, they all launched HCAN, the movement that spearheaded Obamacare.

The Democratic Socialists of America and Citizen Action were both founded by former members of the SDS/Weather Underground.

The Young Democratic Socialists represents the modern youth arm of America’s Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Frantic and breathless about a non-existent ‘neo-McCarthism era,’ Bertha was warning them specifically because they are the next generation of the current Socialist-Progressive government.

Educate yourselves regarding the Democratic Socialists of America, and Citizen Action (USAction), and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and their respective youth sections.

These are the people who launched Barack Obama. These are the people who have changed America. Understanding them and their published missions will help you understand the Socialist vision they have for charted for America.

Barack Obama is not who the Conservative movement needs to defeat in an ideological battle for hearts and minds. These people are.

At the end of 2007, hedge fund billionaire John Paulson invested $15 million in the leftist non-profit, Center for Responsible Lending, their largest single donation ever. Around the same time, Paulson and his employees contributed over $100,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, headed, at the time, by Sen. Chuck Schumer. Roughly six months later, CRL and Sen. Schumer both launched a highly public attack on the California-based mortgage lender, Indymac. The lender failed, wiping out the investment of thousands of people. Roughly six months after that, John Paulson, in partnership with George Soros, bought up the remnants of Indymac for pennies on the dollar.

It is a drama that no longer surprises us, unfortunately. Wealthy investors use their access to elected officials and their checkbook to advocacy groups for private profit. But this story has a twist; a top executive of CRL when this deal went down, Eric Stein, is now working at the Treasury Department,  heading up the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Mr. Stein will be the chief federal official designing regulations to protect consumers. Right.

This is that story.

Financial crises create opportunities. Prudent and discerning entrepreneurs who save their capital for a rainy day are able to acquire assets at firesale prices and put these assets to higher and better uses. Market forces cleanse wasteful malinvestments, innovative business models make existing ones obsolete and the economy roars forward all the stronger for it.

But while market entrepreneurs generally prosper during times of great dislocation, ultimately to the benefit of all participants in the economy, today political entrepreneurs have hijacked the economic system. The politically connected elites have used this downturn to carry out a massive wealth transfer from the people to the public and private sectors, fleecing the middle class for their own enrichment.  In their hypocrisy, the long ago small businesses that grew large because of free markets have helped chain these markets through lobbying for regulations and subsidies to shield themselves from competition and their own errors.

This has occurred most egregiously in the financial sector, where there has been a veritable free-for-all in legalized political plunder.  Those who understand the illusory nature of our monetary and symbiotically related political and financial systems have clamored to profit as much as possible before the house of cards falls, with the sanction of our supposed representatives.

The biggest asset bubble contributing to this Depression, occurring in housing, was largely attributable to artificially low interest rates, government agencies and concomitant policies that pushed profligate lending, and the lobbying and more brutish efforts put forth by the groups that proliferated around and prescribed to the pollyanish at best and perverse at worst “home-ownership for every American” persuasion.

Here at Big Government we have been working to pull the veil back and expose these organizations, most notably in the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL). As readers may recall, most recently we examined the Center’s alleged lobbying violations.  This organization is highly significant in that for its efforts, the CRL has won a front row seat in helping design the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA), as one of its major architects is former CRL senior executive Eric Stein who is serving as the Treasury Deputy Secretary for Consumer Protection and will likely be tabbed as the CFPA Czar.

Like with all of the economic and social justice-peddling shell organizations, in the case of the CRL the acorn does not fall far from the ACORN. Hidden beneath an innocuous title is an organization in the CRL whose activities serve ends directly opposite of those they purport to promote. Under the guise of fostering fairness in lending, the CRL has been used as an attack dog to force banks to lend to poor credit risks.  Due to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), redlining lawsuits and the intimidation of groups like the CRL, many banks were threatened into creating mortgage products such as Alt-A and NINJA loans, discarding all rational lending standards and helping create a market ripe for speculators and sure to ultimately be delinquent homeowners.

That the CRL has been largely funded by the Sandler family of option-ARM (and SNL) fame in itself stinks. The Sandlers, Co-CEOs of Golden West Bank were major underwriters of these mortgages generally structured to have low “teaser” rates in early years, followed by massive increases in rates when the mortgages reset, rates that many borrowers could never afford.  The explosion in this imprudent lending helped pump housing prices to epic levels, and the Sandlers wisely dumped these mortgages on Wachovia as the bubble reached its apogee. This is a Soros-like strategy of playing the market, which is likely no coincidence as we will soon see.

John Paulson, recently back in the news due to the SEC’s civil suit against Goldman Sachs was the most famous winner of the subprime mortgage debacle, as he used derivatives to bet against mortgage-backed securities that in some cases he had worked with banks to create in order to profit when the housing market crashed. He has received much acclaim for being an astute investor who took a contrarian view and put his money to work accordingly even in the face of rising housing prices, placing bets that ended up paying off handsomely. Paulson & Co. earned an unprecedented $15 billion from the trades, and Paulson himself was said to pocket approximately $4 billion in 2007.

While overnight, Paulson became a celebrity in the financial community, with the media following his every move, interestingly one tidbit seems to have largely evaded them. As John Paulson noted in a statement to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in November of 2008,

As we saw the difficulty homeowners were having in making mortgage payments, in July 2007, prior to the initiation of any government support programs, Paulson & Co. made a $15 million charitable contribution to the Center for Responsible Lending to form the Institute for Foreclosure Legal Assistance (IFLA). The institute supports local groups across the country providing legal representation to families facing foreclosure.

Incidentally, the IFLA is being managed by the National Association of Consumer Advocates (NACA), another ACORN-like organization that helped inflate the housing bubble with its dubious practices.

That Paulson would make such a donation is ironic, in that his contribution came from money that Paulson & Co. had earned from the collapse of the very housing bubble that the CRL had helped to blow.  While most in the media remained mum on this curious gift, to its credit, Business Week provided a disturbing but logical reason for it, insinuating that Paulson was to financially benefit from a bankruptcy reform bill that the CRL was advocating.

According to a trade publication called the Credit Union Times, in early 2008 Republican Representative Patrick McHenry sent a letter to Democratic Representative Barney Frank requesting a hearing on the use of non-profits to manipulate markets, citing Paulson’s donation as being reflective of this problem.  Specifically he asserted, “In October, he [Paulson] gave $15 million to the Center For Responsible Lending, which has been leading the charge in lobbying for a law that would let bankruptcy judges restructure mortgage loans. By forcing servicers to accept lowered monthly payments, market values would likely fall even further, and Mr. Paulson would most definitely benefit financially.”  This issue though quite suspect is not nearly as significant as the one we are approaching.

Paulson was not the only major benefactor of the CRL.  As Activist Cash notes, George Soros’ Open Society Institute has donated at least $100,000 to the CRL. Soros of course seems to be behind almost all of these leftist groups as has been well-documented in numerous articles and in David Horowitz’s 2007 book, The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party.  When it comes to Soros’ character and aspirations, it bears noting that Soros willingly confiscated property with the Nazis who slaughtered his own Jewish people during the Holocaust, and was quoted in a damning 2004 Newsmax article as saying that he wanted to “puncture the bubble of American supremacy.”  He has also had a penchant for making bundles of money off of collapses resulting from the socialist policies that he so ardently supports. Needless to say that in my view, George Soros is a dangerous and diabolical character.

During the throes of the credit crisis with banks failing across the country due to their collapsing loan portfolios, friends of the CRL John Paulson and George Soros along with a handful of other money managers formed an investment vehicle called IMB Management Holdings to acquire these beaten down assets. The first bank that they purchased? IndyMac.

As you may remember, IndyMac was the struggling bank that New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer curiously was said to have caused a run on in July of 2008, and I say curiously given that a. IndyMac was a commercial bank in California, about as far as could be from Schumer’s constituents, and b. normally it does not fall under the job description of members of Congress (even ones with a fetish for the camera as great as that of Schumer) to leak statements that may materially affect financial institutions. Schumer’s statements on the problems of IndyMac were eerily similar to those divulged in a report released by the Center for Responsible Lending entitled “IndyMac: What Went Wrong? How an “Alt-A” Leader Fueled its Growth with Unsound Abusive Mortgage Lending.”  The very business that the CRL had helped push banks like IndyMac into was now being criticized by the CRL as abusive.

The timing of Schumer’s actions and those of CRL are worth noting. Sen. Schumer released his “concerns” about Indymac on a Thursday. On the following Monday, CRL released their “report” on Indymac.  Understand, the CRL report was the first time in the organization’s history that they released a full research report on an individual company. Built on interviews with former employees, the report would have taken some time to compile. It may have been a weird coincidence, but a PR firm could not have designed a better schedule.

Whether or not Schumer and the CRL orchestrated the bank run, within 11 days of Schumer’s revelations, depositors withdrew more than $1.3 billion from IndyMac.  A bank that at its peak in March of 2008 had held $32 billion in assets was sold to Paulson and Soros’ holding company for $13.9 billion in a deal that closed in March of 2009.  Created out of IndyMac’s remains was OneWest Bank.

Senator Schumer and The Center for Responsible Lending appear to have been on the same page for some time.  In February of 2008, the CRL cited Senator Schumer in a white paper critical of Countrywide’s lending practices.  In March 2009, Schumer co-sponsored a bill to create a “Financial Product Safety Commission,” supported by “over 55 national and state organizations, including Consumer Federation of America, Center for Responsible Lending, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, NAACP, La Raza, AFL-CIO, SEIU, National Consumer Law Center, Consumers Union, Public Citizen, and US PIRG.”  Additionally, in June of 2009, Senator Schumer was honored by ACORN, one of the CRL’s closest allies. When these points are considered in context of Schumer’s ideological bent and constituency, I believe it is safe to say that at the very least Schumer is sympathetic to the CRL’s agenda.

Senator Schumer has also had substantial financial ties to George Soros and John Paulson.

Most recently, in June of 2009 Soros donated $2000 to Schumer.  In 2005, Soros hosted a fundraiser for Democratic Senatorial candidates headlined by Schumer.  In general, given the millions of dollars that Soros has contributed to Democrats and Democratic causes over the years, it is likely that other benefits both direct and indirect have accrued to the New York Senator courtesy of Mr. Soros.

Meanwhile, John Paulson’s hedge fund Paulson & Co. has been a very generous donor to Democrats.  In 2007, Paulson made a $25,000 donation to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) chaired by none other than Senator Charles Schumer (outdoing even Soros who only contributed a measly $21,750 to the DSCC that year), and also contributed $2300 each to Senate Finance Committee Chairman and Democrat Max Baucus, and Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services Chairman and Democrat Dick Durbin.  All told, during the 2007-2008 fundraising cycle, Paulson & Co. contributed $105,000 to the DSCC, $20,700 to Baucus and $19,400 to Durbin.  More recently, Paulson is reported to have held a $1000-per-head fundraiser for Democratic Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd.

Now to be fair, it is common practice for Wall Street firms to donate to politicians that legislate on issues dear to them, but in the case of these two gentlemen, donations have been decidedly partisan and closely connected to Schumer.

To review, George Soros and John Paulson are major supporters of the CRL, the ACORN-like group that helped contribute to the financial crisis and whose former principal Eric Stein is now building and set to run the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Chuck Schumer likely shares the CRL’s agenda and appears to have helped precipitate a run on IndyMac at the same time as the release of the CRL’s critical report on the same bank, a bank that Soros and Paulson were later able to purchase in a sweetheart deal with the FDIC (though the FDIC has reacted in unprecedented fashion in vehemently denying this claim). Soros and Paulson have been major contributors to Senate Democrats including Schumer and his allies.

To add another wrinkle to the story, in July 2008, shortly after regulators seized IndyMac, Self Help, the financial parent of the CRL that spawned in response to the CRA chartered a credit union in California with $5 million.  The purpose of the union was to serve “low-wealth California families,” likely the same families that IndyMac had targeted before its collapse.  According to the Credit Union Times, Self Help has swelled since its inception and now controls $150 million in assets.

Can this all be a coincidence?  Given George Soros’ proclivity for shady dealings in his profiting from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in his downright frightening instigation of “velvet revolutions” abroad, it is hard to imagine him partaking in a venture in which the odds are not decidedly in his favor.  Soros’ investing style is to guarantee success by supporting policies that undermine countries and their industries, and profit handsomely off of their failures and at times subsequent bailouts, be it in the case of the British pound or Citigroup.  What is peculiar is how wedded Soros has become to John Paulson, a man whose past I have not found to be checkered with progressivism, but I suppose their profits trump partisanship.

The above shameful narrative is in my view illustrative of the rule rather than the exception in contemporary America.  Simply put, the house always wins.  The house is the government-financial complex.  The best political entrepreneurs enjoy the spoils of this corrupted system at the expense of market entrepreneurs and the American people.  This system can only last so long before it collapses, and knowing this, the most adept players are cashing in under the pretense of crises that will pale in comparison to the ones we will ultimately face if we do not reverse our path as a people.

The MSM’s reticence to investigate the CRL represents another failure on their part to do their job.  More important however are the the implications herein regarding the CRL’s potential complicity with Senators and hedge fund managers which appears to be not only outrageous, but hazardous especially in light of the CRL’s role in forthcoming financial regulation.  Yet this particular story represents a mere symptom, albeit writ incredibly large, of a socialistic and thus immoral system that is fast accelerating our demise.

From the Associated Press:

A federal appeals court on Wednesday handed the government a victory by temporarily blocking a judge’s finding that Congress was wrong to halt federal funding to the activist group ACORN.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan also agreed to expedite the government’s appeal of U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon’s rulings that the funding cutoff was unconstitutional. Oral arguments were likely to occur before July.

The appeals court’s one-paragraph decision to freeze Gershon’s two rulings that found Congress acted unconstitutionally will remain in place until the 2nd Circuit rules on the merits of the government’s appeal. It acted a day after hearing arguments.

The government had argued that it was necessary to block the Brooklyn judge’s ruling to ensure that federal agencies weren’t required to commit funds that haven’t been appropriated by Congress. It said Congress did the same as several states and localities when it tried to protect federal funds by stopping certain federal agencies from pledging money to ACORN and its affiliates because of evidence of systemic mismanagement by the group.

Attorney Jules Lobel, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, represented ACORN and said he was considering taking the unusual step of appealing the temporary order to the U.S. Supreme Court. He said government lawyers needed to show the appeals court that it would suffer irreparable harm to block Gershon’s rulings.

“They never even attempted to show that,” he said.

Lobel, who argued against the stay before a three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit on Tuesday, said the decision was another blow to ACORN, which has suffered through a national scandal and been driven to near ruin after three employees were caught on video apparently advising a couple posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend to lie about her profession and launder her earnings.

“It further drives the nail into ACORN,” he said. “It just delays crawling out of the hole. Justice delayed here is justice denied.”

Continue reading here.

From the Associated Press:

A federal appeals court on Wednesday handed the government a victory by temporarily blocking a judge’s finding that Congress was wrong to halt federal funding to the activist group ACORN.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan also agreed to expedite the government’s appeal of U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon’s rulings that the funding cutoff was unconstitutional. Oral arguments were likely to occur before July.

The appeals court’s one-paragraph decision to freeze Gershon’s two rulings that found Congress acted unconstitutionally will remain in place until the 2nd Circuit rules on the merits of the government’s appeal. It acted a day after hearing arguments.

The government had argued that it was necessary to block the Brooklyn judge’s ruling to ensure that federal agencies weren’t required to commit funds that haven’t been appropriated by Congress. It said Congress did the same as several states and localities when it tried to protect federal funds by stopping certain federal agencies from pledging money to ACORN and its affiliates because of evidence of systemic mismanagement by the group.

Attorney Jules Lobel, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, represented ACORN and said he was considering taking the unusual step of appealing the temporary order to the U.S. Supreme Court. He said government lawyers needed to show the appeals court that it would suffer irreparable harm to block Gershon’s rulings.

“They never even attempted to show that,” he said.

Lobel, who argued against the stay before a three-judge panel of the 2nd Circuit on Tuesday, said the decision was another blow to ACORN, which has suffered through a national scandal and been driven to near ruin after three employees were caught on video apparently advising a couple posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend to lie about her profession and launder her earnings.

“It further drives the nail into ACORN,” he said. “It just delays crawling out of the hole. Justice delayed here is justice denied.”

Continue reading here.

Apparently CEO Bertha Lewis said of ACORN yesterday “we’re on life support”. Well, I think ACORN’s remaining benefactors might be a little closer to pulling the plug once and for all after watching this bizarre rant from Ms. Lewis from just a few weeks ago. She is speaking at the Winter Conference of the Young Democratic Socialists on March 25, 2010 – watch:

As I’ve said elsewhere, I think it is unbecoming of conservatives to engage in hyperbole and personal attacks. We should allow this to remain the primary tool of our opponents. Lewis is clearly a bit unhinged here, but the underlying debate is an important one for the future of America. Frankly, I wish more “progressives” would express their views so openly. The debate between socialist values of collectivism and government control, and traditional American values of individual liberty and free enterprise is one we should relish.

The White House recently rescinded the ban on federal funding for ACORN after a court order, as reported by Matthew Vadum here yesterday. While the Justice Department is vigorously appealing in an attempt to re-instate this ban, it is a little late for the President, key Democrats, and certain members of the progressive media to distance themselves from Lewis and ACORN now. As much as they might like to.

To Ms. Lewis and others that share her  concerns: there is no group of Americans who value freedom of expression, personal liberty, and equality under the law more than us. So any talk of communist witch hunts, Jim Crow laws, or internment (!?) is utterly ridiculous. But there was one thing she was right about: we are coming for you. At the ballot box in November.

During a speech to the winter conference of the Young Democratic Socialists the site Verum Serum found that ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis praised socialism and attacked conservatives. She even goes so far as to say that today's political atmosphere is worse than McCarthyism, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and Jim Crow segregation:

The November 2010 elections are shaping up to be  memorable for residents of California as top Republicans target key districts. Minority leader John Boehner hopes to unseat Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House while Chuck Devore actively campaigns for Senator Barbara Boxer’s seat.

America’s eagerness to vote out corrupt politicians has opened the field for candidates who understand the issues and  promise to resist the lure of the DC power structure.

In California’s 37th Congressional District race that candidate is Conservative leader Star Parker.

Parker “is the founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal & Education, a 501(c)3 non-profit think tank that provides a national voice of reason on issues of race and poverty in the media, inner city neighborhoods, and public policy.”

The 37th congressional district includes most of Long Beach and Compton, as well as Carson, Signal Hill, and parts of other municipalities and is represented by the ethically challenged Congresswoman Laura Richardson.

Richardson, who owes her seat to ACORN friend Maxine Waters, made headlines for the foreclosure of her home and pending ethics investigations. One blogger notes:

Richardson, in the meantime, has worked a pretty good deal. She has been elected to a safe (lifetime tenure) African American seat in a Los Angeles area Congressional district, where she reaps campaign contributions from many special interests, including area defense contractors and unions. She walks away from this home and lets the lender, Washington Mutual, take the loss.

To pay for her campaign expenses and personal loan debt to HER OWN campaign she collects additional campaign contributions AFTER Washington Mutual forecloses on her equity strapped Sacramento property and takes the loss.

Her credit score takes a hit but she is an elected Member of Congress with a steady and sizable income. Richardson pays herself back from campaign contributions she accumulates over the course of her election year campaign.

Richardson’s personal troubles culminated with last October’s announcement that ethics investigations would move forward for Richardson and her political benefactor Maxine Waters.

RedCountry noted that other California Democrats began to smell blood in the water:

“According to the Los Angeles County Registrar’s office, Democrats Lee Davis, Peter Mathews and Terrance Ponchak have requested ‘Signature In-Lieu’, which allows candidates during the candidate filing period to collect signatures as a method to reducing the candidate’s filing fee.

Who would ever think that troubles for the Democrats could not get any worse in this 2010 election season?

The irony is for Democrats like Rep. Richardson who can’t stop the noise within their own tent leaves the door open for a possible Republican pickup in this Long Beach area congressional seat.

Anger is brewing throughout the country including here in Los Angeles County and we might see an unprecedented voter revolt come this November!“

Star Parker’s decision to run guarantees national attention on this so called “safe seat” which could lead to the type of national support that turned the Scott Brown race. Conversations with Parker over the weekend revealed a reluctant politician, someone who believed in public service and had spent most of her life dedicated to building a stronger America. Parker surveyed the political landscape and responded to America’s need for new leaders by deciding to run, like Allen West and Chuck Devore. In her syndicated column, Parker explores her reasons for running:

“As I wrote a little over a year ago: ‘I thought we were on the road to moving socialism out of poor black communities and replacing it with wealth producing American capitalism. But, incredibly, we are going in the opposite direction. Instead of poor America on socialism becoming more like rich America on capitalism, rich America on capitalism is becoming like poor America on socialism.’

…The government health care takeover which has just been forced on an unhappy America could not have happened without the cooperation of our large pharmaceutical firms and insurance companies. They should be ashamed of themselves…

I’m challenging a Black Caucus incumbent in a district that political pundits rate ’safe’ for Democrats.

But this year no Democrat representing low income Americans should feel safe peddling the same plantation policies that already have produced our broken schools, broken families, and broken spirits. Now they’re bringing these bankrupt ideas to the whole country.”

Richardson’s ethics issues, support for heath care and her statements regarding “Comrade” Fidel Castro should be fresh in voters minds come November but according to Open Secrets, Richardson still is heavily union backed. The graphic below illustrates that unions have historically poured money into her campaign, big spenders like SEIU may be expected to step up the donations in order to retain the seat.

Tellingly, Parker does not appear to be concerned with appeasing big labor and explained her fundraising strategy. Parker stated that she needs:

“500 people to each get 50 friends to give $50 dollars.”

Her website Star Parker For Congress is currently accepting those donations and Parker’s campaign is creating quite a stir on the right.

With November around the corner Democrats are gearing up to fight for their political lives as viable and courageous candidates attempt to reign in an out of control government.

The organized crime syndicate known as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which has been making much ado about its feigned withdrawal from the national political stage, continues doing business as usual.

Proof comes in the form of an email, which went out to ACORN supporters on April 16 and which came two weeks after ACORN’s faked dissolution on April Fool’s Day as a national organization.

ACORN_email_April162010

Writes ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis:

ACORN is not dead!

ACORN is alive because you are alive and still fighting for justice. Over the past 40 years, ACORN members have been through a lot in the fight to empower working families and families of color — and it has been the commitment of people like you, regular folks doing extraordinary things, that has made it possible.

In the email the perennially truth-averse Lewis, whose lies throughout the undercover video saga are well documented, continues to play the victim card arguing that ACORN, dozens of whose employees have been convicted of election-related crimes, was set up by shadowy corporate forces.

Nathan Henderson-James, director of ACORN’s online campaigns, already admitted ACORN isn’t really going away.

ACORN will probably run out of money and fold by year’s end but a dozen ACORN state chapters reincorporated to seem like new, independent organizations will spring up to carry on ACORN’s business, his leaked email suggested. At least a dozen of the group’s state chapters have already broken away under new names.

“The truth is that it is hard for us to forsee [sic] any scenario where ACORN continues beyond the end of 2010 and some of us think it might not last that long,” Henderson-James.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has already restored full funding to ACORN, which used to employ President Obama.

The fiscal floodgates are opening for ACORN, the president’s former employer and legal client, despite a congressional ban on funding the activist group that has long been a practitioner of election fraud.

In a March 16 memo Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Peter Orszag quietly ordered federal agencies to resume funding the group whose employees were caught on hidden camera videos last year condoning a variety of crimes including child prostitution and tax evasion.

The memo came a week after renegade federal judge Nina Gershon of the Eastern District of New York made permanent her temporary injunction prohibiting Congress from cutting off funding for ACORN.

The memo also came despite the fact that the Department of Justice is appealing Gershon’s ruling and seek a stay pending appeal.

It’s unclear why the Obama administration isn’t doing the responsible thing and waiting for the case to work its way through the judicial system.

The Service Employees International Union has been waging a long-running campaign against food service provider Sodexo, with the ultimate goal of unionizing the company.  SEIU’s modus operandi is if a company doesn’t bend to the union’s will, the smear machine gets cranked up and the company is attacked.  In this case, it’s the food service provider for the college football and basketball stadiums.  Liberty Chick provides more coverage here.

As pawns in SEIU’s unionizing game, 20 Ohio State University students were arrested for blocking a major campus street, according to the union-sympathizing campus newspaper, The Lantern.

After meeting with the university president, the union pawns claimed he “was rude and hardly let us talk.”

On High Street, the students sat in the crosswalk, facing the potential of being struck by traffic.  But, likely in their minds it was justified – whatever it takes to accomplish SEIU’s goal!

The Lantern story reads:

The mission statement for Service Employees International Union is to “improve the lives of workers and their families to create a more just and humane society.” And coordinated chants of “si se puede!” and “yes we can!” echoed the protestors’ collective commitment to those ends.

Collective commitment?  How about lemming-like mentality to enable the SEIU in securing more dues-payers?  President Obama, call your office: SEIU has stolen your slogan!

The OSU protest is of particular interest to the movement. “Ohio State is the largest university in the country,” Sanchez said. “It has the power to influence others.”

This is standard fare for SEIU and its likes, such as ACORN – go after the biggest and make them the example.  Consider a story Wade Rathke, founder of ACORN (and former SEIU Local 1100 head), told in an article entitled, “Leveraging Labor’s Revival: A Proposal to Organize Wal-Mart:”

At the first negotiating session in March 2004 between H&R Block and ACORN in New Orleans, when the parties were trying to settle a series of disputes concerning predatory products being promoted among lower income families, the chief spokesman for H&R Block asked a question that was both straightforward and to the point, “Are we here today because we are the biggest or because we are the worst?” The answer then was easy—because they were the biggest.

In that example, as likely the case at OSU, culpability and “wrongs” we’re ultimately the issue – the size of the institution was.

We’ll have to see if SEIU is successful in organizing the huge corporation.  The union’s attacks must certainly be having their desired effect.  What also remains to be seen is if critically-thinking students, at esteemed institutions of higher learning such as Ohio State University, will allow themselves to be used as pawns in SEIU’s unionizing game.

The activity surrounding the controversial Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) in the financial reform legislation is really picking up these days.  But many Americans would never know it.  It seems Democrats may have learned something from the experience of the health care bill after all.  In their efforts to avert a repeat disaster of losing control of the message, they appear to be taking every step necessary to ensure that the public engages as little as possible in this debate.

But I assure you, this is a debate that the American public should engage in, pronto.

Because behind the scenes, certain lobbyists are quietly but aggressively scurrying about, pushing hard for the passage of the CFPA in a power grab by the Executive Branch that would dwarf the Health Care Reform bill and the Patriot Act.  And with the passage of the proposed CFPA, one man in particular with a history tied to some of the deepest tentacles in the financial crisis – and to the Community Reinvestment Act changes of 1995 – would gain the power to selectively manipulate the entire landscape of the financial, small business and housing markets.

Last week, we reintroduced you to an early trigger in the financial crisis, with good reason. In “Death by Senator: As Financial Reform Looms, We Revisit IndyMac,” we revisited the role that Senator Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) very public letter played in the fall of one financial institution.  As I ended that piece, I teased that there was more to the story that would soon follow.

So, let’s pick up from June 30, 2008.

Merely days after the now infamous Schumer letter triggered a run on the bank that would total over $1.3 billion, this lengthy and scathing report was released to the public:

The report, written by the left-wing Center for Responsible Lending (CRL), condemned IndyMac’s lending practices.  The conclusions in it were drawn entirely from statements by laid-off IndyMac employees and consumer advocacy trial attorneys with active lawsuits against the lender, which drew a great deal of criticism and sparked cries of bias within the industry.  Nonetheless, the general public connected with that report and it drove the last nail into IndyMac’s coffin, further poising CRL as the champion for – and direct beneficiary of – federal financial regulation.

In addition to the timely coincidence of the CRL report having released almost in concert with Schumer’s letter, the fact that it came from CRL is even more curious.

This is an organization that is no stranger to Capitol Hill. Democrats have invited CRL to testify before Congress on a multitude of occasions.

And frequently among those guests invited from CRL to testify has been… Eric Stein.

A staunch proponent for social justice in affordable housing and payday lending, Stein had long been the President/SEO of CRL’s parent network, the Center for Community Self-Help.  For over 30 years, Self-Help has billed itself as a non-profit organization that serves the interests of minorities and the disadvantaged by financing loans and investing in real estate development in “low-wealth communities.”  In parallel, Stein had also served as Senior Vice President of CRL, which serves as the research and policy arm to Self-Help.

Stein’s biography also illustrates other positions that may have been beneficial relationships for CRL, including his employment with Fannie Mae, and an employment stint with Congressman David Price (D-NC).  Incidentally, Congressman Price has received nearly $5 million in federal grants for Self Help Ventures Fund, one of Self-Help’s many affiliates, located in the same district.

Stein was also a member of the Community Development Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.

So, where is Eric Stein today?  Working in the United States Treasury Department, and gearing up to head the CFPA.

In early 2009, President Obama appointed Stein to the newly created position of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Consumer Protection, where Stein has been key in writing the consumer protection language in the proposed financial reform legislation. He is also in charge of designing the dually proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency.  Should the bill become law, Stein is expected to head the new agency, which will have immense powers that extend far beyond mortgages and financial investments.

That’s a lot of power to be held by one unelected official.  Especially for one so closely tied to an organization that stands to benefit immensely from this new agency and the legislation behind it.

So, what do we know about this organization with which Stein has spent so many years of his career?

We first introduced the Center for Responsible Lending to you a few weeks ago, but let’s take a closer look at the organization and its parent, Center for Community Self Help.

The Center for Community Self-Help:  Born From the CRA

After the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was passed in 1977, most of its implementation began rolling out around 1979.  And in 1980, the Center for Community Self Help was founded with its focus on serving the very market that was now the beneficiary of the new redlining laws. Soon after, Self-Help joined with Fannie Mae to establish a program for borrowers who were underserved by banks in the primary market.  With this new secondary market underway, it was Self-Help that collected all of the information from Fannie Mae’s borrowers, tracked their loans, and produced analysis that was then used to put pressure on the larger banks to issue more loans to underserved communities.  As Deborah Momsen-Hudson, Vice President & Director of Secondary Marketing, put it, “We’re an R&D lab for the financial industry.”

In direct response to the research produced by Self-Help and Fannie Mae, the CRA laws were subsequently expanded in 1995 to establish quotas for issuing mortgages to residents of underserved communities and to levy fines against lenders that did not meet those quotas.  The new laws also required institutions to offer ATMs and local branch services in areas that were previously considered low usage, high risk areas for crime.

But as always, there were unintended consequences.

Peter Wallison has written an excellent analysis of how the unintended consequences of the 1995 changes to the Community Reinvestment Act laws greatly contributed to the financial crisis:

Together, the tighter CRA requirements and the affordable-housing regulations imposed on the GSEs substantially reduced the standards that had to be met to qualify for a mortgage. The number of CRA loans was not large, but they required banks to devise ways of lending to people who would not previously have qualified for a mortgage. Once Fannie and Freddie began accepting loans with low down payments and other liberalized terms, the same unsound standards were extended to borrowers who could have qualified under the traditional underwriting standards. In addition, federal regulations encouraged bank lending for housing in preference to other lending, and tax policy favored borrowing against (and thus reducing) the equity in a house.

These policies were effective in the sense that they achieved some of the intended results. Between 1995 —when lending quotas based on the CRA became effective—and 2005 , the proportion of American households that owned their own home rose from 64 percent, where it had been for about twenty-five years, to 69 percent (Vlasenko 2008 ). A measure of the unintended results of federal policy, however, is that home prices doubled between 1995 and 2007 ; and that the housing bubble was composed—to an unprecedented degree—of subprime and other nonprime and risky loans. Banking-capital regulations and the deductibility of interest on home-equity loans made a crisis inevitable once this housing bubble collapsed.

Coincidentally, these were – and remain – the very markets that Self-Help serves and the very services that Self-Help offers.  The regulations that Self-Help lobbied to bring about delivered for them fruitful gains, as the pool of secondary mortgage customers exploded, and the demand for short-term lending and easy access to cash and ATM services skyrocketed.  Hence, the Self-Help network expanded from mortgage lending to Credit Unions, short term lending, real estate development, and the financing of community facilities, such as schools, non-profits, and day-care centers.

And it’s a model upon which our government has based an entire entitlement program.  In 1994, President Clinton modeled the Treasury Department’s Community Development Financial Institution Fund after Self-Help’s lending plans.

The Center for Responsible Lending:  Crisis Creator?

After the successful results gained by Self-Help’s research in the 1990’s, the parent network expanded to include a designated research and policy arm, The Center for Responsible Lending.  Founded in 2002, CRL is “an affiliated nonprofit research and policy organization dedicated to curbing predatory lending.”

Much like the Center for American Progress is the think-tank that provides all the research to support the left-wing agenda, CRL serves that same role for the left specifically for matters concerning the financial and real estate industry.  Their research papers pool data from other liberal sources and are often aided by the canvassing and mobilizing efforts of establishment left-wing groups like ACORN and organized labor.  Just as in the Health Care “crisis”, their reports often seem to be cleverly timed to coincide with certain events to force a particular policy issue or create a financial or housing equality “crisis”, and at times may even be aided along by Washington insiders.

Case in point:  IndyMac.

The Self-Help Money Machine

Under Eric Stein’s leadership, Self-Help and CRL have certainly expanded quite a bit, reaching their tentacles into a multitude of different areas.  Spreading out from beneath this primary partnership of the two flagship organizations, there is a structure of at least 10 major affiliates, and another 37 sub-affiliates, consisting of an entire network of credit unions, mortgage and short-term lending, venture funds, real estate development companies, and investment companies.  Couple that with a slew of paid lobbyists (some of whom have worked for Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky), and maybe you’ll wonder too why a non-profit like Self-Help would require such sophistication.

The primary source of funding behind Self-Help and CRL since its inception has been non other than the notable subprime/Alt-A loans king and queen, Herb and Marion Sandler.

You may recognize the Sandlers from their various philanthropy projects like the Center for American Progress, and various media outlets, as well as their investments in groups with other notable investors like George Soros.  Or maybe from the SNL skit they ordered off the Internet.

But the Sandlers’ most relative and probably best-known investment was California headquartered GoldenWest Financial/World Savings bank.  The couple are said to have made off with $2.3 billion in cash after they sold off World Savings bank to Wachovia in 2006.  Shortly thereafter, Wachovia collapsed from the weight of the toxic loans that had been bundled up into World Savings’ portfolio, far from the sunlight of peering eyes.

In fact, the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are both investigating claims that Golden West/World Savings lied about the quality of its loans to its investors and broke the law by fraudulently luring customers into loans they could never afford.

Self-Help and its CRL affiliate may seem like one of those charitable do-good organizations that is improving communities all across America and lifting Americans out of poverty thanks to the generous funding of benefactors like the Sandlers.  But the reality is, the faces of the corporate elite may often be masked behind well-intended (and sometimes not so well-intended) do-gooders.

We must always do our due diligence and at least ask the question:  Is it possible that there are ulterior motives at play here?  Is the Self-Help network a sincere collective of honest do-gooders?  Or do they have a vested interest in seeing a repeat of the financial reform of the Clinton years, only this time on steroids?  Look at their competitors and think about which organization the new CFPA would favor.

Needless to say, we should be asking the same of Mr. Stein, the current Treasury executive who ran this organization for so many years, who worked for Fannie Mae, who worked for a Congressman who coincidentally secured millions in funding for Self-Help, who has appeared frequently before Congress to push for financial regulation, and who is now just one heartbeat away from controlling the engine of our entire nation’s economic system.

All this, and still, we haven’t even scratched the surface on this story yet.  Continue to stay tuned…

Some people may not abhor Planned Parenthood for its past and present racism and abortion profiteering.  Others may shrug at its systemic, criminal avoidance of statutory rape laws, and tawdry “sexual education” guides aimed at teenagers.  But perhaps even some of the group’s most ardent defenders will recoil from the latest addition to the odious outfit’s ongoing carnival of moral degradation.

The following CNS News report speaks for itself (emphasis added):

In a guide for young people published by the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the organization says it opposes laws that make it a crime for people not to tell sexual partners they have HIV. The IPPF’s “Healthy, Happy and Hot” guide also tells young people who have the virus that they have a right to “fun, happy and sexually fulfilling lives.”

“…Some countries have laws that say people living with HIV must tell their sexual partner(s) about their status before having sex, even if they use condoms or only engage in sexual activity with a low risk of giving HIV to someone else,” the guide states. “These laws violate the rights of people living with HIV by forcing them to disclose or face the possibility of criminal charges.”

Under the heading “Sexual Pleasure and Well-Being,” the guide declares that it is a human right and not a criminal issue as to whether a person decides if or when to disclose their HIV status, even if they engage in sexual activities.

“You know best when it is safe for you to disclose your status,” the guide states. “There are many reasons that people do not share their HIV status. They may not want people to know they are living with HIV because of the stigma and discrimination within their community.”

The guide continues: “They may worry that people will find out something else they have kept secret, like that they are using injecting drugs or, having sex outside of marriage or having sex with people of the same gender. People in long-term relationships who find out they are living with HIV sometime fear that their partner will react violently or end the relationship.”

“Young people living with HIV have the right to sexual pleasure,” the guide states under the heading “Sexual Pleasure; Have Fun Explore and Be Yourself.”

“Sex can feel great and can be really fun!” the guide says.

Planned Parenthood receives hundreds of millions of US tax dollars annually.  In light of this grotesque new information, how can any American continue to countenance public subsidies to a group that actively promotes a paramount “right” to personal sexual pleasure–at the expense of others’ right not to be unwittingly infected with a lethal, incurable virus?  This is a morally bankrupt, perverse, and socially unacceptable position.

Now more than ever, it is time to defund Planned Parenthood.  If individual citizens choose to make private donations to sustain its existence, nobody can stop them–but public money is an entirely different matter.  Republicans should immediately introduce a bill or binding resolution calling for the cessation of all taxpayer funding to Planned Parenthood.  They should publicly cite this shocking and depraved HIV-related document as the catalyst for the legislation, and defy any member of Congress to vote against the measure.

This action would serve both a moral and political purpose:  First, it could very well end up stripping an execrable organization of much of its budget and help prevent innocent people from being unilaterally sentenced to death by a reckless, selfish sexual partner.  In other words, it’s the right thing to do.  It also happens to put Democrats in a bind.  As members of a party beholden to the abortion lobby, Democrats generally balk at any proposal that could be characterized as “pro-life.”  As an Illinois State Senator, President Obama infamously (and repeatedly) opposed the Born Alive Infant Protection Act because he feared it might threaten Leftism’s holy grail, Roe v. Wade.

But facing an already irate electorate in November, some Democrats may feel compelled to deny their opponents another potent line of attack.  (”Why does Congressman X refuse to defund fund an organization that…”) With public support for Obamacare deteriorating by the day, many frantic Democrats are pushing the panic button.  As November approaches, political self-preservation may momentarily override Democrats’ usually unwavering commitment to taxpayer funded abortion on demand.  Pro-lifers in Congress ought to force their colleagues to take sides, then ensure that voters are made aware of which representatives cast their lot with the statutory rape-enabling defenders of intentional HIV transmission.

Planned Parenthood–due to its own actions and policies–richly reserves to join ACORN on the garbage heap of decaying, politically-toxic entities.  Let’s make it happen.

It was common knowledge that SEIU and ACORN were of the same tree prior to the James O’Keefe/Hannah Giles coast-to-coast video sting.  At ACORNcracked.com, I chronicled nearly two dozen SEIU contributions to ACORN in just a few years.

In 2009, SEIU gave to a variety of ACORN affiliates both before and after the sting videos began to be released.  Consider these:

The last one, Citizens Services Inc, is particularly interesting, given that CSI was the entity Obama for America also hired for campaign work, as Michelle Malkin pointed out.

SEIU 1199, the largest local affiliate of the national union (and former employer of White House Political Director Patrick Gaspard), gave a whopping $550,000 to the Working Families Party in 2009.  WFP was co-founded by ACORN.

The national SEIU also made expenditures to the National Public Pension Coalition, an outfit that “supports state-based activities in defense of public employee defined benefit pension systems,” according to a job posting for the executive director position.

The American Federation of Teachers listed other members of the coalition, “in addition to the AFT, are the AFL-CIO; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; Change to Win; the National Education Association; and the Service Employees International Union.”

The Center for American Progress Action Fund was the recipient of a $236,036 contribution from the SEIU.  The Economic Policy Institute, the “think tank” or “issue advocacy group,” according to the financial filing, receives huge financial support from organized labor and surprise-surprise, produces economic data favorable to…….organized labor!

The Chicago-based Gamaliel Foundation – the organization that gave a young Barack Obama his start in community organizing – received $100,000 in the middle of 2009.  The organization’s views are in line with ACORN, they’re just a little more diplomatic in how they go about it.

The SEIU’s contributions to Healthcare for America Now surpassed the one-million mark with an additional $550,000 in financial support.  SEIU’s and HCAN’s efforts proved successful when ObamaCare finally passed the Congress.

The free Huffington Post received $15,000 in “subscription services” from SEIU.

This is America. SEIU can spend its money however it wishes.  Previously, we compared the Marxist Andy Stern’s compensation to that of his secretary.  The reality is, the union could increase the wage disparity ten-fold and I could care less.

What I have a problem with is Andy Stern using the “power of persuasion” to change our economic system when he won’t enact those principles voluntarily at his own union. Until you live up to your own principles, Andy, I will fight you at every turn.

Media Matters has operated as a vile organization attacking all things non-progressive: Republicans, Tea Partiers, conservatives, non-progressive media.  So it should come as no surprise that Media Matters’ ire rises most when its funders are attacked.

Most notably, Media Matters will trash all things non-progressive and in turn, its funders will cite Media Matters.  Case in point?  AFL-CIO’s Rich Trumka recently gave a speech in which he said, “We are working to counter the Glenn Beck effect and turn anger into action for real change.”

AFL-CIO then linked to a Media Matters article about Fox News.  Additionally, Media Matters promoted its funder’s speech before a Harvard University audience.

Another?  Media Matters has consistently defended SEIU.

An Investor’s Business Daily editorial advanced the false claim that Andy Stern, president of Service Employees International Union (SEIU), “is the most frequent visitor to the White House.” Moreover, IBD attacked Stern for saying, “[W]orkers of the world unite (is) not just a slogan anymore; it’s a way we are going to have to do our work,” and claimed, “In SEIU’s worldview, there is no room for dissent. Karl Marx, call your office”; however, IBD ignored that Stern has also said it’s “good news” that “communism’s dead.”

Consider this small group of funders:

• Service Employees International Union – 10/09 and 11/09 – $50,000
• National Education Association – 8/19/09 – $100,000
• AFL-CIO – 10/23/08 – $25,000

Perhaps the best way to get on Media Matters’ good side is to throw them a little coin.  I wonder if they have a Muscle for Money program like ACORN did?

So if you’re looking to avoid Media Matters’ crosshairs, send a check to:

David Brock, executive director

Media Matters for America

455 Massachasetts Ave. NW
Suite 600
Washington, DC 20001

Tell him Kyle sent you.

Earlier last year, ACORN founder Wade Rathke glowingly blogged that Patrick Gaspard, political director of the White House, was a former ACORN organizer.  When that claim started receiving a bit of attention, Rathke offered a retraction, saying his memory was playing tricks on him. Right, Wade, right…

What is indisputable about Patrick Gaspard is that at one time, he was the Executive Vice President of SEIU Local 1199, the New York City-based chapter that is the largest of all SEIU locals.  At some point in late 2007 or early 2008, Gaspard allegedly left SEIU to join the Obama campaign.

Obama won the primary, and ultimately the general election, and Gaspard was named the Director of Political Affairs in the White House – a heady and important job.

So it should give transparency and clean government advocates a bit of concern to see in calendar year 2009, Gaspard received a whopping $37,191 from SEIU 1199.  Assuming he officially became a federal employee on January 20^th (Inauguration Day), it amounted to nearly $2,000 a day in compensation.

Gaspard left the SEIU to join the Obama campaign – which presumably was more than a full-time job – then became an upper-level staffer during the transition.  But apparently all the while, he was still on the SEIU dime.

And as he was making arrangements to occupy an office in the West Wing, he was still on the SEIU payroll.  It causes one to wonder: who is Gaspard serving?

From the April 2010 issue of Townhall magazine: Brandon Darby learned something from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. Once a hard-core radical who sided with progressive revolutionaries, Darby prevented a left-wing terrorist attack on the 2008 GOP convention. Now, this America-loving patriot is the target of the domestic extremists he once called “friends.”

Did you know that a courageous former radical helped to avert a planned left-wing terrorist attack at the 2008 Republican National Convention that might have killed who knows how many Americans?

Neither did I until recently.

That’s because if you disrupt a terrorist attack on Americans by Islamic fundamentalists as Northwest Flight 253 passenger Jasper Schuringa did on Christmas Day, you’re a hero; however, if you take the initiative to undermine a terrorist attack on Americans by supposedly well intentioned left-wing fundamentalists, you might as well be a terrorist yourself.

Brandon Darby, who in recent years also refused leftists’ invitations to get involved in Venezuelan communist subversion here in America and in anti-Israeli terrorism in Palestine, learned this unpalatable truth the hard way.

The Left-Wing Plot to Kill Republicans

After years of in-your-face protests, confrontational tactics and working with America-haters, Darby eventually experienced a political epiphany. He rejected the radical Left and its culture of political violence. He came to realize that America, for all its faults, wasn’t such a bad place after all.

“I felt I had a duty to atone after badmouthing my country for so many years,” Darby told me in an interview. “I love my country.”

But Darby didn’t always love his country.

Darby previously considered himself a revolutionary. His charisma and militant anti-Americanism made the intense Texan a larger-than-life figure among leftist activists in the South.

He openly called for the overthrow of the U.S. government, which he considered too corrupt and oppressive to be reformed. He expressed his hatred of police as guardians of the status quo. He consorted with eco-terrorist tree-spikers, radical feminists and black nationalists.

He was approached to rob an armored car and asked to commit arson to fight gentrification. He mouthed politically correct slogans and platitudes about the Bush administration. Government didn’t care about people, and in his eyes, the much-maligned response to Hurricane Katrina proved it.

But around the same time, the former radical community organizer was turning away from radicalism, and at tremendous personal risk, he undermined a leftwing terrorist plot to attack the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. If he hadn’t taken action, Americans exercising their free speech rights and police officers might have been killed.

Without informing his fellow anarchists, Darby offered his assistance to the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and, at the FBI’s request, infiltrated a leftwing group known as the Austin Affinity Group. The outfit had joined with a larger coalition of progressive organizations that facetiously called itself the “RNC Welcoming Committee.” The committee hoped to lay siege to the GOP convention that nominated the presidential ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin.

The FBI sent Darby to meet with anarchists who were developing their plan at a bookstore in Austin.

“It was a group of people whose explicit purpose was to organize a group of ‘black bloc’ anarchists to shut the Republican convention down by any means necessary,” he explained. “They showed videos of people throwing Molotov cocktails, and they were giving people ideas.”

The two 20-something plotters on whom Darby informed, David Guy McKay and Bradley Neil Crowder, had made homemade riot shields and were ready to use them in St. Paul to help demonstrators block streets near the Xcel Energy Center in order to prevent GOP delegates from participating in the convention. The shields were discovered and confiscated.

But McKay and Crowder were undeterred by this setback. Together they manufactured instruments of death calculated to inflict maximum pain and bodily harm on people whose political views they disagreed with.

During a search of a residence, police found gas masks, slingshots, helmets, knee pads and eight Molotov cocktails consisting of bottles filled with gasoline with attached wicks made from tampons.

“They mixed gasoline with oil so it would stick to clothing and skin and burn longer,” Darby told me.

Thanks to Darby’s cooperation with the FBI, the two anarchist would-be bomb throwers are now languishing in prison. McKay entered a “guilty” plea and was sentenced in May 2009 to 48 months in prison plus three years of supervised release for possession of an unregistered “firearm,” illegal manufacture of a firearm and possession of a firearm with no serial number. A week before, Crowder cut a deal with prosecutors and was sentenced to 24 months in prison for possession of an unregistered firearm.

McKay received the stiffer sentence in part because he fabricated a tall tale about Darby’s involvement in the plot.

During sentencing, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis went out of his way to make a specific legal finding that McKay obstructed justice by falsely accusing Darby of inducing him to manufacture the incendiary devices.

Davis told McKay he crossed the line between peaceful dissent and violent protest. “You were leading the charge. You and Crowder were coming up here [to Minnesota] to do anarchy against the system.”

But now the story takes a strange turn.

After Darby, who until the end of 2008 had been a confidential FBI informant, revealed that he had worked with authorities to pre-empt the violent conspiracy, he became the subject of a campaign of vilification by the Left.

Google Darby’s name and the words “snitch” and “rat” appear. Cyber-squatters appropriated his name and created a hateful Web site to defame him.

The floodgates of abuse burst open after Darby acknowledged in an open letter posted at an alternative news Web site that not only had he worked with the FBI, but he also “strongly” stood behind his decision to do so.

The irretrievably liberal New York Times ignored his heroism. A Jan. 5, 2009, article focused not on Darby’s lifesaving intervention but on the feelings of “betrayal” his former allies in left-wing anarchist circles were experiencing.

The paper showed how shocked and appalled Scott Crow, who with Darby co-founded the Common Ground Relief agency in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, was after learning about Darby’s cooperation with the FBI.

“I put it all on the line to defend him when accusations first came out,” Crow said. “Brandon Darby is somebody I had entrusted with my life in New Orleans, and now I feel endangered by him.” Why someone who presumably hadn’t committed a crime would feel “endangered” by knowing an FBI informant is unclear.

ACORN founder Wade Rathke (shown at left in above photo), who worked as a professional agitator for the violent Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s, would have preferred that Republican delegates be incinerated.

He denounced Darby for working with the authorities to disrupt the domestic terrorists. “It seemed so, how should I say it, ’60s?”

It’s “one thing to disagree, but it’s a whole different thing to rat on folks,” Rathke wrote on his blog.

This response to ideological apostasy is not altogether surprising. Leftists who abandon their faith are demonized by their former co-religionists. Relentless attacks on Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore and former radical David Horowitz continue to the present day, decades after they moved rightward.

Right-Wing Violence Bad, Left-Wing Violence Good?

Compare the treatment of Darby at the hands of the Left to the respectful— often groveling—treatment afforded ObamaCare architect Robert Creamer.

A HuffingtonPost.com contributor and husband of shrill socialist Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., Creamer served prison time for kiting checks and failing to pay withholding taxes for his leftist nonprofit, Illinois Public Action Fund. Just like his liberal friends in Congress and the Obama administration, he refused to roll back spending and instead created a modified Ponzi scheme in order to continue drawing his full $100,000 salary.

This crusader for social justice and political consultant to Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and impeached Democratic Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich even whined at his 2006 sentencing that he received a five-month period of incarceration, well below the 30 to 37 months called for in federal sentencing guidelines. The media failed to call him on it.

Convicted cop-killing activists Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal are legends on the Left. Black Panther Abu-Jamal in particular enjoys a cult following among radicals even though no serious person—including Abu-Jamal himself, who failed to claim to be innocent at his trial—contests that in 1981 he shot and killed Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in cold blood.

Creamer, Peltier and Abu-Jamal are all heroes to the Left no matter what they did, and to some precisely because of what they did.

This is because on the Left there is a presumption of good intentions even by fellow-traveling terrorists. As left-wing talk radio host Thom Hartmann told me last year: “My left-wing crazies are better than your right-wing crazies.”

Hartmann explained:

“Your right-wing crazies are incited to violence based on fear and hate of people because of whom they are, because they’re gay, because they’re Catholic, because they’re Jewish, because they’re black, because they’re Hispanic. And our left-wing crazies are incited to violence because they’re trying to create a better world. They’re trying to save the environment in the case of the eco-terrorists. They’re trying to end the Vietnam War in the case of the Weather Underground. They’re trying to bring about civil rights in the case of the Symbionese Liberation Army and some of the other black terrorist groups that were operating in the 1970s” (emphasis added).

To the Left, violent acts aimed at desirable ends are worthy of praise, especially if aimed at the other side.

Internationally known Marxist author Naomi Klein has praised the riots that took place during the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle and openly called for violence at the 2004 Republican convention, urging protesters to bring the Iraq War to the streets of New York City. The Canadian writer wasn’t ostracized by the Left after her outrageous statement; if anything, her public stature has only grown since 2004.

If right-wing terrorists plotted to attack a Democratic National Convention, whoever foiled the conspiracy would be immortalized in film, literature and song as a savior of democracy.

“If you flip the equation around and it had been a group of conservatives threatening to use force to prevent those on the Left from meeting, everyone would expect the government to infiltrate them and they would also expect the FBI to stop them and charge them with crimes,” Darby said.

“But when it’s leftists that organize to prevent Republicans from being able to meet, then all of a sudden it’s considered government oppression. There’s something wrong with that, and no one points that out, and it’s really offensive and damaging to our system.”

Social justice-oriented terrorism isn’t ugly and anti-American, according to the nation’s entertainment-media complex; it’s downright praiseworthy and hip. So it should come as no surprise that Crowder and McKay are in the process of being rehabilitated by the Left.

Early on, the duo became a cause célèbre for the Left, dubbed the Texas 2. Now documentary filmmakers are currently making a movie about them called—you guessed it—“Better This World.” The documentary, which is reportedly in the post-production phase, received an HBO Documentary Films Fellowship.

No doubt there will be more praise heaped on them as they ascend to the Left’s pantheon of social justice champions, joining Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and the Unabomber.

The Journal Away From Radicalism

But no one is singing the praises of Darby, a genuine American hero.

Born in Pasadena, Texas, in 1976, Darby’s efforts in post-Katrina New Orleans were highlighted favorably in the media, most notably in a Jonathan Demme documentary that was shown on the “Tavis Smiley Show” on PBS.

When Darby learned people were suffering in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, he moved there, defying police orders not to enter the stricken city. With $50, he co-founded Common Ground in the home of Malik Rahim, a veteran community organizer and former Black Panther who did prison time for armed robbery.

“When we started, everyone in the city was armed, everyone was scared, and there was a complete lack of law enforcement,” said Darby. “The few roving bands of law enforcement that were present didn’t like us very much because of the fact that we were involved with people like Malik Rahim, who to this day continues to advocate for those who have attacked law enforcement personnel.”

“We were young, we were caught up in the fervor of helping others and fighting injustice, and at that time, we couldn’t see why people like law enforcement didn’t like Malik,” Darby said.

Common Ground was no mere relief agency. It was a group of far-Left revolutionaries who viewed their work as an extension of their politics.

In a promotional video, Rahim thunders to volunteers: “You are showing this government that the people, that the people in this country do care for peace and justice and that we will stand for peace and justice and that we will do what it takes to restore peace and justice back to America.”

When Common Ground was threatened, the radical Left mobilized to defend it. Police were “freaked out because there were all these Black Panthers who’d had shootouts with the police years ago, and they’re in this house and they refused to leave, so it turned into this really stressful ordeal,” Darby explained.

Despite many obstacles, Common Ground quickly became a successful nonprofit group that helped alleviate the suffering of poor people in the devastated city, especially in the hard-hit 9th Ward.

Supported by donations that flowed in from across the country, in its first three years 22,000 volunteers worked for Common Ground. A magnet for outraged radicals ranging from garden variety collectivists to militant vegans to pagan lesbians, the group gutted flood damaged houses without bothering to obtain permits and provided free health care and meals.

The group was profiled by ABC’s “Nightline,” and the media treated Darby as a savior. With its contributions to the city, the group began to wield political influence, Darby said. Even its initial detractors begrudgingly admitted Common Ground’s positive impact on the Crescent City.

Over time, a lot of the things Darby experienced with Common Ground led him to question his political beliefs, and these experiences offer a window into what happens when the radical Left takes over an area.

In bed with real-estate developers, New Orleans wanted to use eminent domain to condemn many vacant flood damaged houses. According to Darby, many anarchists refused to join his fight to protect the property rights of homeowners, because they didn’t believe in private property.

“I just started putting the call out, and all these libertarians, Republicans and Democrats, started showing up. And what we would do was any time there were bulldozers we would just get in front of them and wouldn’t let them work,” he said.

“We had our lawyers file lawsuits, and so next thing you know, they backed away from it. And they started to work with us to identify where the residents were, and we’d ask the residents if they wanted their place demolished or not.”

Darby defied the politically correct “consensus” method of group decision making and riled feathers by daring to tell aimless volunteers what to do. After vegan volunteers took over the Common Ground kitchen and tried to inflict their dietary preferences on the poor, it occurred to Darby that the leftist-anarchist approach with its aversion to hierarchy would never work in the real world.

“Like most people driven by a strong dogma, the majority of the people who took over were from Berkeley, and they came in under the guise of helping,” he said.

“They tried to use the experience to ‘correct’ the culture and lifestyle of the working-class poor. They tried to use the black residents of New Orleans as lab rats and guinea pigs, and I didn’t like that at all—and the residents didn’t like it either.”

For example, some of the activists tried to organize the residents into “collectives,” and another group of gay activists took over part of a church that had donated its space to help relief efforts. “We were helping to rebuild the church, but then some radicals took over and started using over half the space and designated it as a ‘queer safe place,’” Darby said.

This infuriated the church leadership who were already uncomfortable with being associated with so many radical activists.

“It’s not about you coming here and creating your utopia,” Darby explained.

“It’s about helping these residents and making them feel comfortable. The radicals wanted to make residents sit through political orientations in order to get fed. I objected and that got me called a dictator.”

Common Ground leaders continued to insist on indoctrinating young volunteers and on continuing with in-your-face protest tactics, which lost their usefulness after the group became well established and had connections with people in the city, Darby said.

“The people making decisions for the city about how aid was distributed and about where FEMA work crews and search-and-rescue crews operated, developed relationships with us,” he explained. “They were completely open to hear our perspective and wanted us to participate in what decisions were made, but unfortunately many of the other community organizers were stuck in a fight-the-power dogma, which ultimately hindered their ability to serve those in need. There was no official of local government there that we couldn’t call on their cell phone and set up a dinner meeting with or enjoy a cup of coffee with.”

After initially having rocky relations with the New Orleans Police and other local authority figures, Darby came to realize that, in the hurricane-ravaged city, relief volunteers and the authorities were on the same side—both sides wanted to help people.

Darby’s “eureka” moment came as he began to accept the idea that not everyone in government was a villain.

He credits Maj. John Bryson of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) with helping him to stop viewing everyone in government as the enemy.

Bryson (pictured above), who, in the wake of Katrina, was the NOPD’s 5th District commander, an area that encompassed the especially hard-hit Lower 9th Ward, observed Darby’s transformation over time.

When Bryson first met Darby, he was “so up in my face it was unbelievable,” Bryson told me. “Radical” was too weak a word to describe Darby, Bryson said.

When the two first met, Darby promised that his fellow activists would be videotaping police and that they wouldn’t hesitate to report anything they didn’t like to the media. Bryson helped to improve the relationship by giving Darby his cell phone number and told him to contact him directly if police officers misbehaved.

Bryson offered to help Darby but cautioned him that “if we find that you are not here to help our citizens, then we’re going to have a problem,” Bryson explained, “and that was our agreement.”

Over time, the two, who had been filled with mutual distrust and hostility, began to get along, even to like each other as friends.

Bryson watched Common Ground—which, in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, he said, had more people on the ground than the federal government—begin to flourish. The group opened shelters for women, families and children, offering services to locals that governments at the time were unable to provide.

As relations with the police improved dramatically, Darby confessed to Bryson that he had never had this kind of positive relationship with any kind of law enforcement personnel. The feeling was mutual.

Bryson praised Darby for cooperating with the FBI:

“Everybody [on the Left] hates Brandon because he did the right thing for the right reasons. Anytime anyone in this country, in this state, in this city, or even in this world is going to do some horrible things to innocent people, if a good man does not stand up, or a good woman for that matter, then we’re in trouble. And Brandon stood up and did the right thing. He stole my heart as he said, ‘I thought about you and how well you worked with us, and I couldn’t see innocent people getting hurt.’”

Plots Abroad

Although Darby’s positive experiences with New Orleans police had forced him to begin questioning his anarchist beliefs, a trip to Marxist Venezuela helped to kill off his remaining radical impulses.

The trip came as the U.S. government was taking a beating in the media for its post-Katrina relief efforts. At the time, Venezuela’s communist strongman, Hugo Chavez, began trying to embarrass the Bush administration by offering aid to the Katrina-hit Gulf Coast.

Chavez had already been running what political scientists call a “public diplomacy” campaign in the U.S. to help bolster American support for his regime. The propaganda effort consisted of funneling discounted home heating oil to former U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy’s, D-Mass., nonprofit group, Citizens Energy Corp. The nonprofit then distributed the oil to poor people, and Kennedy (pictured above behind lectern) went on TV to berate the Bush administration, which he said “cut fuel assistance.” Kennedy boosted his benefactor, boasting in a commercial that “CITGO, owned by the Venezuelan people,” had helped poor Americans while their own government stood idly by.

Darby traveled to Caracas in 2006 as part of a Common Ground delegation to the Chavez government to seek funding to keep Common Ground afloat.

“I had this idea of having ‘Chavez trailers’ for displaced residents to live in. This would embarrass FEMA into supplying trailers,” he said.

Darby said he didn’t realize when he came up with the concept that using money from abroad to influence the U.S. government might be illegal, but Chavez government officials he met with insisted it would violate U.S. law.

“They told me I would get in trouble, and they wanted to work out a way to make the project happen,” he said.

In the month he was there, Venezuelan officials introduced him to executives of PDVSA, the government-owned oil company that owns CITGO, which operates a chain of gas stations in the U.S. They pressured Darby to journey to neighboring Colombia to meet with a group aligned with the narco-terror organization FARC and to visit another revolutionary group in Maracaibo, Venezuela.

According to Darby, Chavez wanted to create a terrorist network in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. This is the same Chavez who blamed the recent earthquake in Haiti on the United States and who called President George W. Bush “the Devil” during a United Nations speech, so some might find his efforts at subversive activities in the United States hard to take seriously. However, it’s important to remember that Chavez has close ties to Iran and Cuba and allows terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah to operate offices in Caracas.

(Long before he learned of the RNC plot, Darby reached out to the FBI to undermine terrorism. A longtime Texas friend, the late Riad Hamad [pictured above], had tried to hijack Darby’s plan to provide medical assistance in war-torn parts of the world. Darby wanted to create a group called Critical Response that would have sent medics into war zones to help civilians caught in the crossfire in places such as Lebanon and Darfur. Hamad, founder of the much-investigated Palestinian Children’s Welfare Fund, told him he wanted to send medics to Israel and put explosives on motorcycles and boobytrap ambulances in order to kill Jews. Hamad also hatched an elaborate plan to funnel money to Hamas and Hezbollah. Around the same time, Darby viewed a very graphic Israeli first responders’ training video. “At the time I was conflicted about what to do, but seeing the dead bodies of Israeli children in that tape made the so-called Palestinian activists’ chant ‘no justice, no peace,’ take on a whole new meaning. I decided the only ethical thing to do was to tell law enforcement what I knew.”)

To Darby’s astonishment, during his stay in Caracas, senior officials in the Chavez government and in PDVSA told him they wanted him to create a revolutionary army of guerrillas in the swamps of Louisiana.

“At the very last meeting they ramped up the pressure,” Darby said. They taunted him, saying, “What? You’re not a revolutionary?”

Despite intense pressure from his Venezuelan hosts, he refused. This was the last straw for him.

“I realized I didn’t like Venezuela, the authoritarianism of it, and I started to realize how brilliant and miraculous the American system of checks and balances was,” Darby said. “There was still something brilliant about the fact that this nation had institutionalized a system of checks and balances that has been working since this nation was founded. I realized just how hard a task that is.”

Common Ground, divided by radical factions with harebrained ideas constantly warring with each other, was a living example of left-wing radicalism in action.

“When I would leave Common Ground for a few days I would be worried that a power vacuum could develop and factions could displace me while I was away, and that’s just the way things are in places like Venezuela,” he said. “It is actually absurd to want the United States government to go away, and that’s when it really hit me that my ideas were wrong.”

Darby said he’s still proud of his Common Ground experience on the whole. “I’m proud of helping people, but I’m ashamed of what I used to believe,” Darby admitted.

“Thankfully, I had the honor of serving my country by working undercover with the FBI and participating in efforts to protect the safety and civil rights of others.”

(This article appears in the current issue of Townhall magazine and is posted here with the magazine’s permission.)

After 14 months of committing 100% to health care reform, the day after the signing of the Health Care bill was to mark the Democratic Party’s new primary concern: destroy the uprising, annihilate by all means necessary, the Tea Party movement.

The first sign that a plan was in place was the ham-fisted, high-camp posturing of the most controversial members of the Democratic caucus walking through the peaceful but animated “Tea Party” demonstrators on Capitol Hill. There is no reason for these elected officials to walk above ground through the media circus amid their ideological foes. The natural route is the tunnels between the House office buildings and the Capitol. By crafting a highly symbolic walk of the Congressional Black Caucus through the majority white crowd, the Democratic Party was looking to provoke a negative reaction. They didn’t get it. So they made it up.

The proof that the N-word wasn’t said once, let alone 15 times, as Rep. Andre Carson claimed, is that soon thereafter — even though the press dutifully reported it as truth — Nancy Pelosi followed the alleged hate fest, which allegedly included someone spitting, by walking through the crowd with a gavel in hand and a shit-eating grin on her face. Had the incidents reported by the Congressional Black Caucus actually occurred the Capitol Police would have been negligent to allow the least popular person to that crowd – the Speaker – to put herself in harm’s way.

That crowd was a sea of new-media equipment. Not only were tens of thousands people armed with handicams, BlackBerrys and iPods, so also was the mainstream media there, covering every inch of the event. Why did not one mainstream media outlet raise the specter that perhaps a video would exist to prove the events occurred? I am still dealing with the same press telling me we didn’t prove that ACORN was aiding and abetting criminal activity because we “did not provide enough audio and video evidence.” (Insert laugh track.) Is there not a blatant double standard at play here? Nancy Pelosi tipped her hand that race was a central part of her strategy. She invoked the Civil Rights Act and compared it with the universally reviled health care bill. Her caucus is doubling down on the civil-rights rhetoric. There are no coincidences.

Linking the health-care bill, which has nothing to do with black and white, to the divisive civil-rights period, while simultaneously accusing its opponents of being racist, is an evil strategy — literally. Charles Manson would approve.

The Democratic Party is trying to signal to the black community and to progressive media types that the way to push back against the Tea Party and Republicans is to use the reliable race card by provoking a racial incident. The ensuing rhetoric about the bill and about the nature of the Tea Party is based upon repeated talking points. Propaganda. Everyone is on message that Republicans and Tea Partiers are racist — a divisive and dangerous argument, so lacking in any shred of evidence save for the fact that the majority in the Tea Party, as in America itself, is white. This is Duke lacrosse politics at its worst.

Those in the movement who are Hispanic or black are given the Clarence Thomas treatment: mocked, ridiculed and marginalized. The Democratic party cannot afford for minority groups to break from the pack, so they show that apostasy is met with high-grade ridicule. Those willing to withstand vile and hateful un-American taunts are some of America’s greatest patriots.

The press went straight to petrified Republican leaders like John Boehner and Michael Steele over the falsified “N-word” allegations, who dutifully offered apologies that they were not qualified to give. It was a set-up.

I smelled a rat so I offered at first $10k five days after the highly publicized alleged incidents happened. How could we be five full news cycles into this major controversy and not have any evidence? In fact, the existing footage showed the Congressional Black Caucus walking and never once moving their heads toward any “racist outbursts.” Is it conceivable that all of them stoically walked by the N-word as it was hurled 15 times — as they were holding up cameras to convey they were suspicious of the crowd to begin with?

We are now two weeks since the bill was signed and the $10k reward jumped to $20k in a day after it was mentioned on both Hannity and O’Reilly. At the Searchlight Tea Party event last weekend I upped the ante to $100k. So where’s the evidence? Ken Vogel of Politico covered this story and said calls to Rep. John Lewis — one of the originator’s of the N-word storyline – were never returned.

Nancy Pelosi did a great disservice to a great civil rights icon by thrusting him out there to perform this mischievous task. His reputation is now on the line as a result of her desperation to take down the Tea Party movement.

We’ve called their bluff. And they have tried to back off. They realize that this race warfare can backfire, just as it did with the railroaded Duke lacrosse players, as it did with professor Madonna Constantine and her faked noose incident at Columbia and the Sergeant Crowley boner by Barack Obama who stupidly said the white police officer had behaved “stupidly” in handcuffing Skip Gates.

The first Alinsky president is now using surrogates to split this nation into two hostile parties so he can puppeteer the have-nots against the perceived haves. The non-response to my $100k challenge is a tacit acknowledgement that the Congressional Black Caucus and Barack Obama don’t have the stomach for doubling down.

The other part of the strategy that is built into the N-Word Capitol Hill Walk is the strategy to incite. The media is doing their job for them by speaking of an unhinged white Tea Party mob. Absent any evidence other than creatively selected hand-crafted signs from the fringe of the audience that are presented to represent the whole, the media is simply repeating assumptions that Democrats and media elites have against fly-over types. What we have here is hardcore media elitism mixed with politically correct class warfare.

The Searchlight Nevada Tea Party is the Rosetta Stone of the Democratic Party strategy. Tea Party protesters were not going to Sen. Harry Reid’s office building to threaten individuals, Democratic-style: “No Justice, No Peace!” They went to the middle of nowhere, a place akin to the moon landing site, to talk up the constitution, the founding documents and to express their dismay with the current political class. The real astroturf, the bought-and-paid-for, union-thug support network that does the heavy lifting and the bone breaking, traveled to Searchlight to incite a fight. Video captured by my film crew caught Harry-Reid-placard-holding, t-shirt-wearing appartchiks, not just misdirecting traffic down the wrong highway but also, when confronted over that hostile act, throwing a dozen eggs at the passing Tea Party Express bus.

The usual suspects of Democratic Party apologists, like John Podesta’s Media Matters, were quick to diminish the events. Eric Boehlert dubbed my report “the Phantom Egg,” calling into question my veracity. But on tape a day later we were able to prove that the Harry Reid supporters were not just the ones who’d misdirected traffic, they were also the ones who threw the eggs, just as they were also the ones who called the police to report that I was the egg thrower and the instigator. Classic Alinsky. Accuse those of the acts that you are doing. It usually works. But in this day and age of new media and hyper-media, the tape, or lack thereof, usually tells the tale.

The race baiting of the Tea Party crowd on the Capitol front was caught by calling the Democrats out — and they didn’t deliver the goods. The attempt to incite a reaction from the Nevada Tea Party was even worse. They were the violent ones, who traveled out of their way to provoke an incident — and when they didn’t get it, they blamed the victim.

IT’S ON TAPE. And the person lying on camera to the police is the field director of the Nevada Democratic Party.

Over at Media Matters, Podesta’s den of deceit, the phantom egg has turned into Breitbart mockery over easter eggs. Change the subject, misdirection, their side caught with their pants around their ankles, don’t look there media, there’s nothing to see here.

Alinsky.

The Democrats need to kill the Tea Party movement. They need to marginalize and demonize those who would stand up to their hardball, toxic and anti-democratic tactics. Their strategy is to bait and incite the Tea Party and to use whatever they can get to silence the awakening giant. They have failed, epically, and the American people now see these tactics for what they are. At long last, new people every day are beginning to understand the kinds of people we are dealing with here.

Will the media keep falling into the trap? Their business model continues to fail each and every time they are suckered – unless, of course, they are doing it on purpose. The Republican Party failed in its attempt to make good with the Tea Party when its leaders apologized for it. When will the GOP stop playing Charlie Brown to the media’s Lucy? The Democratic party has been exposed as trying to create a Kristallnacht to save the Obama presidency along the fault line of race and the essence of the First Amendment. If the GOP does not have the intestinal fortitude to fight back, a growing number of disenchanted and disenfrachised Tea Party participants will have to do it themselves.

Who is calling the shots here? Is it the White House, by way of Chicago? Or is it Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid? The press refused to tell you the truth about this president. It refused to tell you of his proud adherence to the teachings of the original Chicago “community organizer” Saul Alinsky. We have now entered the first full-fledged Alinsky presidency. The only way to beat Alinsky is with Alinsky. The Democrats and President Obama will not give up this tack. Do you think the GOP will win the day in November and in 2012 if its strategy is to apologize for every manufactured “right wing fringe” outrage?

With President Obama over the last week calling attention to the Tea Parties and their “heated” rhetoric, he has officially connected himself to the civil war his minions have flailingly attempted to inflame. The only good thing to come of this is that we can now officially put to rest the laughable notion that Obama was going to be the first post-racial president.

While ACORN has earned much of the scorn of the press and public in recent months, its voter registration arm, Project Vote, is actually the entity that has been conducting the questionable voter registration drives.

Project Vote has been accused of voter registrations fraud in more than a dozen states.  Its parent group ACORN, along with a staff member, are scheduled to be tried for fraud in Nevada in a matter of days. Recently, ACORN was nailed under the RICO Act in Ohio and ordered to never come back to the state.  More importantly, the settlement also said ACORN couldn’t simply morph into another organization and cause the same type of trouble in Ohio.

In short, Project Vote is at the root of ACORN’s voter registration fraud problems.

So as ACORN is transforming, Project Vote is transforming, too.  According to a new article in The Nation, Frances Fox Piven of “Cloward-Piven Strategy” fame, recently joined the Project Vote board of directors.

On their face, Piven’s views seem harmless – registering low-income people to vote is how it’s framed publicly.  But it was Piven’s strategy that served as the impetus for the creation of the National Welfare Rights Organization, led by the radical George Wiley.  Wiley had a young protégé, named Wade Rathke, who was eventually dispatched to Arkansas to establish a beachhead in the South for the social justice movement.  He founded, of course, ACORN.

The strategy put forward by Piven and Richard Cloward,  to overwhelm the welfare system in the late 60s and early 70s, bankrupted New York City.

It was Piven who suggested that people losing their homes to foreclosure should simply refuse to leave. ACORN had been following this strategy to a T with its Home Defenders program.

And now Piven is going to have a direct influence over the policy and direction of Project Vote.

Perhaps Piven’s strategy of overwhelming the system will now be applied to registering people to vote.  As we saw in Indiana, Florida, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio and many other states, Project Vote created chaos for elections workers to sift through.  With Piven now guiding this ship, her success at overwhelming the welfare system will now be applied to voter registration.  What could possibly go wrong?

Did you hear that the scandal-plagued Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is schedule to dissolve today?

ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis and her allies in the mainstream media said so and everything.

April Fool’s! Ha ha ha.

Whew! ACORN almost had America going there.

The truth is ACORN’s not going anywhere. Right now the embattled organization that used to employ President Obama is engaged in a strategic retreat. ACORN is plundering the assets of state chapters and affiliated organizations and stockpiling cash for future use.

I know this because in recent days ACORN sources have told me repeatedly and in no uncertain terms that the much-publicized shut-down of ACORN today is a gigantic fraud. ACORN intends to avoid the spotlight for a year or two and then come back using a new name, they say.

The sources’ comments echo the leaked email from full-time ACORN cyber-agitator Nathan Henderson-James who confirmed the whole thing’s a big joke.

A dozen ACORN state chapters reincorporated to seem like new, independent organizations will soon spring up to carry on ACORN’s business, the email from ACORN’s online director suggested in late February.

There will be “a dozen or more organizations launched on the state level by staff who used to work for ACORN and leaders who developed their skills as ACORN members,” Henderson-James wrote.

The secret message was posted on Townhouse, an invitation-only discussion forum run by Matt Stoller, senior policy adviser to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.).

So far at least six state chapters have attempted to reinvent themselves. The latest is ACORN’s Texas chapter which has become the “Texas Organizing Project.”

The crown jewels of the ACORN network –ACORN Housing and Project Vote— also aren’t going away.

ACORN Housing, whose employees were caught on hidden-camera video last year by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles providing a walk-in legal clinic for prostitutes, pimps, and illegal immigrant smugglers, has filed legal papers changing its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America.

The notorious Project Vote, which registers Mickey Mouse, household pets, and the dead to vote every election cycle, is also still is business.

So, if you believe ACORN is dead and buried, the joke’s on you.

NEW ORLEANS – Joseph Basel, age 24, Stan Dai, age 24, Robert Flanagan, age 24, and James O’Keefe, age 25, were charged in a one-count bill of information with entering real property of the United States under false pretenses, a misdemeanor, announced the U. S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

According to the Bill of Information, between January 20, 2010, and January 25, 2010, Flanagan, Basel, O’Keefe, and Dai met on several occasions. During their meetings, they discussed, among other things, possible scenarios in which they would talk with members of the staff of Senator Mary Landrieu inside of her New Orleans, Louisiana office, in the Hale Boggs Federal Building, and record the interaction using audio and visual equipment. As a result of this planning, on January 25, 2010, Basel and Flanagan entered the Senator’s office dressed as telephone repairmen, said they were following up on reports of problems with the telephone system, engaged in conversation with the staff members, and pretended to test the phone system. O’Keefe, who had also entered the office, recorded the interaction between Basel, Flanagan, and the staff members.

If convicted, Flanagan, Basel, O’Keefe, and Dai each face a maximum term of six (6) months in prison and a fine of $5,000.

The United States Attorney’s Office reiterated that the Bill of Information is merely a charge and that the guilt of each defendant must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

The investigation of this matter was conducted by Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Deputy Marshals with the United States Marshal’s Service. The case is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Jordan Ginsberg.

When Barack Obama decided to launch his political career in the living room of unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, he tacitly endorsed using violence as a political tactic.

And when two staunch allies of the Democratic Party–the SEIU and ACORN–drove busloads of protesters to the private homes of AIG executives, just days later, President Obama told a meeting of bankers that “my administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

Implicitly, Obama was using the threat of violence to get the bankers to acquiesce.

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama didn’t shy away from confrontation. In fact, he encouraged it by telling supporters to “argue with” opponents and to “get in their face[s].”

The Obama Administration’s confrontational tone included some violent imagery last August, when one White House official encouraged Obama supporters to “punch back twice as hard” against opponents.

Later that day, at an anti-ObamaCare rally in St. Louis, a black man named Kenneth Gladney was handing out “Don’t Tread on Me” flags when he was approached by pro-ObamaCare SEIU union members. One of the men asked Gladney, “What kind of n*%%er are you to be giving out this kind of stuff?”

The union thugs then beat him so badly he required overnight hospitalization.

Obama’s supporters got the message. They were getting in people’s faces, and they were punching. And kicking. Repeatedly.

Yet despite the fact that the Kenneth Gladney beating occurred the same day that the Obama Administration recommended supporters “punch back twice as hard,” there was no hyperventilating in the media about political violence or the veiled threats that encouraged it.

Today, however, the Democratic politicians who rammed through ObamaCare over the wishes of the American public are worried about the ugly environment that the Obama Administration spent over a year stoking. And if Obama and the Democrats truly believe that words lead to violence, then they should accept responsibility for the beating of Kenneth Gladney.

I’m certainly not condoning political violence, and would condemn any that actually happens. But there has been no reported violence against any Congressman, Senator or government official, despite the media frenzy of stories describing a crazed American public ready to terrorize politicians.

All politicians receive threats; any moderately trafficked blogger receives threats. So while I would hate for there to be any actual violence, excuse me if I chuckle at the chatter of the chickens in the media and our political class. This media-driven national freakout is a diversion, designed to take your attention away from the illegitimate and unprecedented usurpation of power by the Democrats in Congress and President Obama. They’re banking on you forgetting by November.

If the media is going to report on this atmosphere without discussing the Obama Administration’s words or the SEIU beat-down of Kenneth Gladney, if they are going to spend time breathlessly reporting rumored threats that have not been carried out while ignoring violence that actually occurred but didn’t fit their narrative, then it is yet more proof of the media’s patent bias.

Time Magazine:

Andrew Breitbart sits in an Aeron chair at an iMac computer gazing out the sliding glass door of his Los Angeles home office. On the patio, a hula hoop and a portable basketball rim await his children’s return from school. Breitbart, 41, dressed on this late-winter day in his standard work uniform of a dirty oxford-cloth shirt and grungy khaki shorts, looks more like a surf bum than one of the most divisive figures in America’s political and culture wars. Then his BlackBerry rings.

The woman at the other end of the line, conservative fulminator Ann Coulter, is among Breitbart’s staunchest allies, and they soon are engaged in a spirited attack on liberals. “Their entire structure is writhing in diseased agony on the side of the road, and they don’t even realize it,” Breitbart says. But the left isn’t the only object of disdain. “I’m sick of this effete GOP nothing sandwich,” he adds, growing more animated. “As long as everyone is so pristine and socially registered, we’re going to lose.” Shortly before signing off, Breitbart says, “The second I realized I liked being hated more than I liked being liked — that’s when the game began.”

It’s a game he plays extraordinarily well. Breitbart has become the Web’s most combative conservative impresario — part new-media mogul, part Barnumesque scamp. Last fall, he launched Big Government, the flagship of his wickedly right-of-center sites, which also include Big Hollywood, Big Journalism — which described the House’s March 21 passage of the health care reform bill as a “socialist putsch” — and the news aggregators Breitbart.com and Breitbart.tv. On its first day of business, Big Government produced a scoop: undercover filmmakers James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles — the would-be Borats of the right — had shot videos that appeared to show workers at ACORN, a liberal organization that lobbies for affordable housing, offering tips on how to open a brothel. For Breitbart, the videos proved to be a gold mine, putting the left on the defensive and Big Government on the map. That the filmmakers were accused of entrapping their subjects and editing in footage of O’Keefe dressed as a pimp seemed almost beside the point.

The stunt gave Breitbart — who like many online scribes had spent much of his professional life toiling in anonymity — a public persona. In January, O’Keefe was arrested in New Orleans on charges of entering the offices of U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu under false pretenses while preparing another undercover video. That only boosted Breitbart’s profile. At the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville in February, Breitbart introduced the star speaker, Sarah Palin, and delivered a rousing jeremiad of his own. Assailing national reporters for portraying the movement as “racist and homophobic,” he used the dais at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel to speak his version of truth to mainstream media power: “It’s not your business model that sucks. It’s you that sucks.”

Read the full article here.

"Because of its pivotal role in bringing down ACORN," Peter Drier and John Atlas wrote in their March 24 editorial, "the Times owes the group an apology and the public a commitment to assign an experienced journalist to cover the complex world of community organizing, whose diverse practitioners mobilize poor and middle class people to win a voice in local, state, and national politics."

The New York Times, the two maintained, were complicit in ACORN's "framing."

The authors took particular issue with the following excerpt from Clark Hoyt's March 21 article: "It remains a fascinating story. To conservatives, Acorn is virtually a criminal organization that was guilty of extensive voter registration fraud in 2008. To its supporters, Acorn is a community service organization that has helped millions of disadvantaged Americans by organizing to confront powerful institutions like banks and developers."

"Hoyt seems to be saying: Take your pick. Or, according to journalistic convention: the truth lies somewhere in between," Drier and Atlas cried.

Apparently The New York Times is a covert ally of the Republican Party abetting a scheme to suppress minority voters: "The Times has never informed readers that the Republican Party's ongoing war against ACORN began in 2004 and accelerated during the 2008 presidential campaign. Karl Rove and conservative Republicans orchestrated an attack on Acorn for alleged ‘voter fraud,' as part of a campaign to suppress the voting of minorities and the poor."

The authors maintained the organization's innocence against allegations of voter-fraud and rampant corruption, accusing Times reporters of repeating the "misleading canard" of "planted" stories - giving "aid and comfort to its enemies."

This is the same New York Times notorious for planting ACORN-friendly liberal propaganda, that completely ignored and killed the extraordinarily significant ACORN scandal, and admitted to such.

Besides, everyone knows the Times "overwhelms readers with stories about the Tea Party, whose numbers pale in comparison to membership in grassroots community organizing in cities across the country." If the Times is a hot bed of Tea Party boosterism, the paper had done a brilliant job of hiding it.

Another major point of condemnation by Driers and Atlas? This one's new: "The Times has no reporter whose beat covers community organizing or, more generally, liberal and progressive activism." The horror.

Comparing ACORN's plight to those accused of spying by Joe McCarthy six decades ago (yes, imagine leftists bringing up McCarthyism), Driers and Atlas wrote, "Haven't today's journalists learned any lessons from that experience?"

Conservatives owe the The Huffington Post a debt of gratitude for cluing us in on an ally we didn't know we had ... the New York Times.

Image via StockphotoPro.

You’ve got to give Enforcement Czar and SEIU boss Andy Stern credit: he’s got a major set of cojones.

Fresh off his health care reform victory, he’s renewing his attack on Bank of America, one of the banks SEIU and ACORN targeted during the foreclosure crisis and bank bailouts.  Bank employees reportedly received a memo saying “that SEIU is ramping up a big attack on the banks again about derivatives,” according to sources.

What makes Stern’s attack particularly audacious is that, according to SEIU’s latest LM-2 financial report filed with the federal Department of Labor, the union currently has an outstanding loan of $94,578,779 from Bank of America.  It has repaid a paltry $1,740,250.

In true SEIU (and ACORN) fashion, we’re willing to bet the union will be use its public besmirching of Bank of America to attempt renegotiate the terms of its loan, or better yet, have a bit of the massive debt waived.

If only the average Joe could treat corporate America, or the IRS, in such a way and reap the financial dividends.  Alas, we’d end up in jail.  Yet somehow SEIU or ACORN get away with using such tactics.

If Bank of America wants to eliminate this major thorn in its side, it should publicize how much money it has loaned to the union, and ask the public why this organization would treat one of its major funders so badly.

The bank could also pose another interesting question to the public – if Bank of America is such an awful entity, why did the morally superior SEIU stoop so low to do business with it?

Or better yet, the bank could call the terms of the loan, demanding immediate repayment.  Andy Stern’s power trip and frequent visitor status to the White House would all come crashing down.

It would be refreshing to see Corporate America wake up for a change and defend itself against slimy characters like Stern, who are happy to use the bank’s money to further their goals, then turn around and stab the institution in the back long before repaying the loan.

The public deserves to see the entire picture. We wish Corporate America would find some pluck and give us the rest of the story.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) has announced that it is disbanding.

Though the hard-leftists that formed or were running it are likely to show up in some other venue and perhaps in a successor organization down the road (Update: or perhaps burrow themselves into the government, as NB commenter "Hunter 12" suggests), this is a moment to savor. Two twenty-somethings, acting entirely on their own, assisted later by a skilled mentor who knew the value of their work and how to maximize the mileage to be gained from it, brought down what had turned into a pretentious, intimidating, fraud-riddled wing of the Democratic Party's get out the vote effort. All that remains -- frankly more than should be allowed to remain -- is ACORN Housing Corporation. According to USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, whose related article is behind its subscription wall, is saying that ACORN Housing "has a separate budget and board."

In one last act of sympathy, most of the press is giving ACORN's leaders a chance to vent without rebuttal and in some cases supplying their own sour grapes. Here are some examples:

(The Associated Press, in an article written by Michael Tarm)

"It's really declining revenue in the face of a series of attacks from partisan operatives and right-wing activists that have taken away our ability to raise the resources we need," ACORN spokesman Kevin Whelan said.

... "ACORN has faced a series of well-orchestrated, relentless, well-funded right wing attacks that are unprecedented since the McCarthy era," ... (ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis) said. "The videos were a manufactured, sensational story that led to rush to judgment and an unconstitutional act by Congress."

ACORN's board decided to close remaining state affiliates and field offices by April 1 because of falling revenues, with some national operations will continue operating for at least several weeks before shutting for good, Whelan said Monday.

(The New York Times, in an article by Ian Urbina)

“For Acorn as a national organization, our vindication on the facts doesn’t necessarily pay the bills,” Bertha Lewis, the chief executive of Acorn, said in a statement.

(Ben Smith, in his own final sentence in a post at the Politico)

The collapse of the national group, though, reflects the impact of a conservative assault that never prompted any prosecutions.

(Reuters, in an unbylined item)

"ACORN has faced a series of well-orchestrated, relentless, well-funded right wing attacks," the group said in a statement announcing the moves.

A journey into the fever swamps brings forth Jason Leopold at Alternet (Remember? Unless it's an incredible coincidence that there's another unhinged guy by the same name, this is the Jason Leopold who just knew that Karl Rove's indictment in the Joe Wilson-Valerie Plame affair was a done deal), soooo predictably playing the race card:

The (O'Keefe-Giles) video was trumpeted by Fox News and other right-wing news outlets, starting a stampede in the mainstream press and in Congress, where a majority of panicked Democrats joined the herd in approving legislation to strip ACORN of federal funds. The stampede, which trampled ACORN and its mostly black and Hispanic organizing staff, soon pulled in President Barack Obama, who often has touted his work as a community organizer in his youth.

One exception to the failure to get reaction from sensible, non-leftist people is at CNN:

ACORN's announcement was welcomed by Matthew Vadum, senior editor of the Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank based in Washington. "I won't be shedding any tears," said Vadum, who said he has been studying the organization for years and written extensively on the organization. "ACORN is a thoroughly corrupt organization that abuses taxpayer dollars and breaks the law at every opportunity. To suggest that it was set up is laughable."

He added in a telephone interview, "For ACORN to claim that it's a victim of McCarthyism, as I've seen CEO Bertha Lewis do repeatedly, doesn't even pass the laugh test. It can't be taken seriously."

ACORN's McCarthyism whines don't pass the laugh test. Oh, but its demise does bring on a smile, along with a prayer of gratitude for the courage and brilliance of James O'Keefe, Hannah Giles, and Andrew Breitbart.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

Politico’s Ben Smith has the bombshell:

The national group ACORN is folding, an official there, Kevin Whelan, said in an emailed statement:

The ACORN Association Board met on Sunday March 21 and approved a set of steps to responsibly manage the process of bringing its operations to a close over the coming months. These include:

* Closing ACORN’s remaining state affiliates and field offices by April 1st; and
* Developing a plan to resolve all outstanding debts, obligations and other issues.

ACORN’s members have a great deal to be proud of–from promoting to homeownership to helping rebuild New Orleans, from raising wages to winning safer streets, from training community leaders to promoting voter participation—ACORN members have worked hard to create stronger to communities, a more inclusive democracy, and a more just nation.

ACORN was always a very decentralized group, with a great deal of its activity and power concentrated in local chapters from New York to Arkansas — the strongest of which will survive. The collapse of the national group, though, reflects the impact of a conservative assault that never prompted any prosecutions.

Original post here.

ACORN, the ultra-secret, keep-the-books-from-the-leadership community organizing group, called the New York Times to say it’s preparing to file for bankruptcy?  The corrupt outfit is choosing now to be transparent?

Or did it seek that opportunity to call an allied newspaper at precisely the moment conservatives were all in a lather about ObamaCare?

Regardless, ACORN leaders “not authorized to speak to the news media” claimed ACORN will soon be filing for bankruptcy.

The move could be an armadillo action so the group’s critics will move on to other things.  ACORN certainly is down.  It has reportedly lost significant private funding.  It’s been booted out of Ohio for good. From the Times article:

“That 20-minute video ruined 40 years of good work,” said Sonja Merchant-Jones, former co-chairwoman of Acorn’s Maryland chapter. “But if the organization had confronted its own internal problems, it might not have been taken down so easily.”

ACORN’s leaders past and present didn’t help. Wade Rathke and his team admitted to choosing restitution over retribution in his brother’s nearly million-dollar embezzlement.  But it wasn’t just the authorities that were kept in the dark for 8 years – the national board was, too.

Oh, and being accused of voter registration fraud in over a dozen states doesn’t help, either.  So while ACORN will attempt to blame its woes on James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, it ultimately has itself to blame for its apparent downfall.

One thing is clear: the brainchild of Wade Rathke – the web of hundreds of organizations all claiming a single address – does appear to be dead.  But the dream lives on in smaller breakaway organizations sprinkled throughout the country.  What remains to be seen is whether the new organizations will eventually unite to re-form the mighty ACORN, or if they will be small, relatively weak, like-minded allies that are limited to reminiscing about the glory days, when they elected senators and presidents.

Census 2010: overreaching and out of bounds. Intrusive. Harassing. I have now received two Census forms and thirteen or fourteen notices from the Census Bureau, and they are still coming.

For the past month I have been called, harassed and visited numerous times by a Pamela Childs of the Census Bureau, who was pursuing me for an interview. Knowing my rights under the law, even under the current Obama coup, I did not respond. I filled out my form — that which is required by law — but still received calls, visits, and notes. Daily.

At one point, I left a message saying I would not speak to her. Period. Mind you, I already filled out and sent in my form the day after I got it.

This nonsense began a month ago. A week passed after my last visit from Childs, and now I am being harassed again by another census drone, Constance Atman. They want to interview me poisonally. Thursday mail brought me two more letters from the Census — both from Atman’s supervisor, Lester A. Farthing, Regional Director. Farthing complained: “our Representative has been unable to reach you after numerous attempts.” And he wasn’t giving up: “Because of the importance of this survey, we would appreciate you telling us how you can be contacted.”

The country is going bankrupt, and they can’t throw money away fast enough on this power play.

It’s pretty clear that, as Dick Morris predicted last summer, Barack Obama intends to use the census to establish artificial Democrat majorities that will fix the upcoming elections and make sure that his socialist/internationalist policies take hold in America for decades to come. Remember how, in February 2009, Obama cynically tried to circumvent the Constitution by removing the Census from the jurisdiction of the Commerce Department and moving it to the White House — a brazen attempt to steal voting power for certain states and partisan groups within states. He also wanted to involve his scandal-ridden cronies of ACORN in the gathering of data for the Census. And he allocated one billion dollars in the porkulous package for the already automatically funded census taking.

And so census goons are now prying into my private life. Welcome to Oganda – America dominated by Obama Propaganda.

I suspect there is more in the offing. I am not a member of the Libertarian party, nor do I back their positions on drugs, foreign policy and the like, but I agree with the statement of their chairman, William Redpath, that “the federal government’s current census procedures are unconstitutional, unnecessary, and too expensive.” Redpath pointed out that “the census is constitutionally limited to collecting only one piece of information about each residence: the number of persons living in it.”

Redpath made a vital recommendation: “We urge Congress to change the census laws to comply with this constitutional limitation.” I certainly agree with that. And he added:

The U.S. Constitution empowers Congress to provide for a census in order to apportion Representatives correctly. The Constitution does not empower Congress to use a census for any other purpose. There is no need for Congress to collect additional information such as names, races, ages, sexes, or home ownership status. Unfortunately, the federal government wants to use the additional information to fine-tune its control over the lives and money of the American people.

Meanwhile, American citizens are not taking this lying down. One reader of my blog, AtlasShrugs.com, was selected (that is, compelled) to complete the insidiously intrusive “American Community Survey.” After not answering some of the question, this reader received a call from the Census Bureau, and explains: “Fact is that the Bureau didn’t like the fact that I would not reveal racial issues, health issues, health insurance, the plumbing in my home, details of employment, what transportation I use, marital history, taxes I pay, my phone service, education and many other prying questions found in this packet.”

Another reader sent me a copy of the Census form that he sent back. He answered all the questions that he is actually required by law to answer; over the rest, he wrote: “Go pound sand.”

That’s the free American spirit, the spirit of the Boston Tea Party, of those who protested against the Stamp Act.

American must protest the partisan appropriation and intrusive data-gathering of Census 2010. Obama is once again overstepping his Constitutional bounds. Free citizens must call him on it.

Census 2010: overreaching and out of bounds. Intrusive. Harassing. I have now received two Census forms and thirteen or fourteen notices from the Census Bureau, and they are still coming.

For the past month I have been called, harassed and visited numerous times by a Pamela Childs of the Census Bureau, who was pursuing me for an interview. Knowing my rights under the law, even under the current Obama coup, I did not respond. I filled out my form — that which is required by law — but still received calls, visits, and notes. Daily.

At one point, I left a message saying I would not speak to her. Period. Mind you, I already filled out and sent in my form the day after I got it.

This nonsense began a month ago. A week passed after my last visit from Childs, and now I am being harassed again by another census drone, Constance Atman. They want to interview me poisonally. Thursday mail brought me two more letters from the Census — both from Atman’s supervisor, Lester A. Farthing, Regional Director. Farthing complained: “our Representative has been unable to reach you after numerous attempts.” And he wasn’t giving up: “Because of the importance of this survey, we would appreciate you telling us how you can be contacted.”

The country is going bankrupt, and they can’t throw money away fast enough on this power play.

It’s pretty clear that, as Dick Morris predicted last summer, Barack Obama intends to use the census to establish artificial Democrat majorities that will fix the upcoming elections and make sure that his socialist/internationalist policies take hold in America for decades to come. Remember how, in February 2009, Obama cynically tried to circumvent the Constitution by removing the Census from the jurisdiction of the Commerce Department and moving it to the White House — a brazen attempt to steal voting power for certain states and partisan groups within states. He also wanted to involve his scandal-ridden cronies of ACORN in the gathering of data for the Census. And he allocated one billion dollars in the porkulous package for the already automatically funded census taking.

And so census goons are now prying into my private life. Welcome to Oganda – America dominated by Obama Propaganda.

I suspect there is more in the offing. I am not a member of the Libertarian party, nor do I back their positions on drugs, foreign policy and the like, but I agree with the statement of their chairman, William Redpath, that “the federal government’s current census procedures are unconstitutional, unnecessary, and too expensive.” Redpath pointed out that “the census is constitutionally limited to collecting only one piece of information about each residence: the number of persons living in it.”

Redpath made a vital recommendation: “We urge Congress to change the census laws to comply with this constitutional limitation.” I certainly agree with that. And he added:

The U.S. Constitution empowers Congress to provide for a census in order to apportion Representatives correctly. The Constitution does not empower Congress to use a census for any other purpose. There is no need for Congress to collect additional information such as names, races, ages, sexes, or home ownership status. Unfortunately, the federal government wants to use the additional information to fine-tune its control over the lives and money of the American people.

Meanwhile, American citizens are not taking this lying down. One reader of my blog, AtlasShrugs.com, was selected (that is, compelled) to complete the insidiously intrusive “American Community Survey.” After not answering some of the question, this reader received a call from the Census Bureau, and explains: “Fact is that the Bureau didn’t like the fact that I would not reveal racial issues, health issues, health insurance, the plumbing in my home, details of employment, what transportation I use, marital history, taxes I pay, my phone service, education and many other prying questions found in this packet.”

Another reader sent me a copy of the Census form that he sent back. He answered all the questions that he is actually required by law to answer; over the rest, he wrote: “Go pound sand.”

That’s the free American spirit, the spirit of the Boston Tea Party, of those who protested against the Stamp Act.

American must protest the partisan appropriation and intrusive data-gathering of Census 2010. Obama is once again overstepping his Constitutional bounds. Free citizens must call him on it.

Who knew that two brave twenty-somethings and a skilled mentor constituted America's entire right wing?

That's apparently how Ian Urbina at the New York Times sees it. In a subheadline employed in a front-page article in the paper's March 20 print edition (relevant portion shown at right) but not used in the online edition's version, the reporter told readers that the poor, put-upon Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is on the brink of bankruptcy because it was "ATTACKED BY" the streamrolling monolith known at "THE RIGHT" (cue the scare music and the blood-curdling scream).

Actually, it was filmmaker James O'Keefe, his investigative partner Hannah Giles, and Andrew Breitbart, the pair's take-no-prisoners mentor. Three people, hardly "the right wing," basically did it all. What followed -- the de-fundings, the abandonments by former political and corporate friends, and now apparently its imminent financial demise -- was largely inevitable fallout from a brilliantly conceived series of stings followed by a savvily managed exposure campaign that ultimately forced holdout establishment media publications, including the Times itself, to play catch-up after days of embarrassing unprofessional silence.

Obviously, that's not how Urbina sees it, occasionally with barely concealed bitterness (bolds are mine throughout this post):

The community organizing group Acorn, battered politically from the right and suffering from mismanagement along with a severe loss of government and other funds, is on the verge of filing for bankruptcy, officials of the group said Friday.

Acorn is holding a teleconference this weekend to discuss plans for a bankruptcy filing, two officials of the group said. They asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the news media.

Over the last six months, at least 15 of the group’s 30 state chapters have disbanded and have no plans of re-forming, Acorn officials said. The California and New York chapters, two of the largest, have severed their ties to the national group and have independently reconstituted themselves with new names. Several other state groups are also re-forming outside the Acorn umbrella, and will not be affected if the national organization files for bankruptcy.

This week, the Maryland chapter announced that it would not reopen its offices, which were shuttered in September in the wake of a widely publicized series of video recordings made by two conservative activists, posing as a prostitute and a pimp, who secretly filmed Acorn workers providing them tax advice. In the videos, Acorn workers told one of the activists, James E. O’Keefe III, how to hide prostitution activities from the authorities and avoid taxes, raising no objections to his proposed criminal activities.

After the activists’ videos came to light and swiftly became fodder for 24-hour cable news coverage, private donations from foundations to Acorn all but evaporated and the federal government quickly distanced itself from the group.

Yep, if it wasn't for Fox News, Urbina apparently reasons, we might have been able to get away with ignoring those dumb videos and ACORN would still be viable. Puh-leeze.

Urbina goes on to try to impress us with a few statistics about the organization's allegedly noble endeavors:

A network that once included more than 1,000 grass-roots groups, Acorn, which stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, was created in 1970 and has fought for liberal causes like raising the minimum wage, registering the poor to vote, stopping predatory lending and expanding affordable housing. The organization helped roughly 150,000 lower-income families prepare their tax returns and obtain $190 million in tax refunds between 2004 and 2009, Acorn officials said.

As I pointed out last September (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), that supposedly impressive tax stat, amounting to 25,000 returns per year, is really laughably unimpressive (a previous link to King County has been removed because its content has since been changed):

25,000 returns nationwide? That’s ... just over 200 per year in each of ACORN’s 110 cities, and likely includes a lot of repeat-year returns that are pretty easy to prepare.

By contrast, here’s just one example of a United Way taxpayer assistance outreach effort out of Washington state (bold is mine):

"In 2009, 530 volunteers dedicated 16,000 hours to United Way of King County’s Free Tax Prep Campaign. Volunteers prepared 13,631 tax returns, helped return $17.3 million in federal refunds back to the community, including $5.2 million in Earned Income Tax Credits, and saved customers an estimated $1 million in tax preparation fees."

The King County group, in just one metro area, did over half as many returns as ACORN did in the entire country, and provided their services for free.

... reporters should be ashamed that they have ignored the obvious indications that ACORN’s offices really accomplish very little of value on behalf of the poor people they allegedly serve.

It would appear that Mr. Urbina was unaware of how truly pathetic the ACORN performance was, because he was actually touting it. If he had recognized it, he might have asked this critical question: What in the world have these people been doing?

Mr. Urbina wrote up part of the answer in a later paragraph:

In Pittsburgh, Acorn officials said they were trying to continue work while they decided whether to stay with the national organization or form a new one. Maryellen Hayden, the volunteer director of Allegheny County’s Acorn, said the group was continuing to counsel people facing foreclosure and had recently sent two buses with dozens of members to Washington to rally for the Democratic health care bill.

The answer, of course, is that ACORN was really all about leftist activism. Tax return prep, housing assistance, and other services served as fig leafs to conceal the organization's real aims, which were (and will be, if or when successors get back on their feet) to radicalize communities, test the limits of election control systems, and, when called upon, intimidate vulnerable targets.

The country owes O'Keefe, Giles, and Breitbart a debt of bottomless gratitude for decimating this once insufferably arrogant and defiant bunch. Too bad Ian Urbina and the establishment media don't see it that way.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

A pretty stunning late-Friday news dump in the New York Times:

The community organizing group Acorn, battered politically from the right and suffering from mismanagement along with a severe loss of government and other funds, is on the verge of filing for bankruptcy, officials of the group said Friday.

Acorn is holding a teleconference this weekend to discuss plans for a bankruptcy filing, two officials of the group said. They asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak to the news media.

Over the last six months, at least 15 of the group’s 30 state chapters have disbanded and have no plans of re-forming, Acorn officials said. The California and New York chapters, two of the largest, have severed their ties to the national group and have independently reconstituted themselves with new names. Several other state groups are also re-forming outside the Acorn umbrella, and will not be affected if the national organization files for bankruptcy.

This week, the Maryland chapter announced that it would not reopen its offices, which were shuttered in September in the wake of a widely publicized series of video recordings made by two conservative activists, posing as a prostitute and a pimp, who secretly filmed Acorn workers providing them tax advice. In the videos, Acorn workers told one of the activists, James E. O’Keefe III, how to hide prostitution activities from the authorities and avoid taxes, raising no objections to his proposed criminal activities.

After the activists’ videos came to light and swiftly became fodder for 24-hour cable news coverage, private donations from foundations to Acorn all but evaporated and the federal government quickly distanced itself from the group.

The Census Bureau ended its partnership with the organization for this year’s census, the Internal Revenue Service dropped Acorn from its Voluntary Income Tax Assistance program, and Congress voted to cut off all grants to the group.

A network that once included more than 1,000 grass-roots groups, Acorn, which stands for Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, was created in 1970 and has fought for liberal causes like raising the minimum wage, registering the poor to vote, stopping predatory lending and expanding affordable housing.

But long before the activist videos delivered what may become the final blow, the organization was dogged for years by financial problems and accusations of fraud. In the summer of 2008, infighting erupted over embezzlement of Acorn funds by the brother of the organization’s founder. Some chapters were also found to have submitted voter application forms with incorrect information on them during the lead-up to the 2008 presidential election, leading to blistering charges from conservative organizations linking Acorn’s errors to the Obama campaign.

“That 20-minute video ruined 40 years of good work,” said Sonja Merchant-Jones, former co-chairwoman of Acorn’s Maryland chapter. “But if the organization had confronted its own internal problems, it might not have been taken down so easily.”

Read the whole article here.

While America is distracted by Democrats’ attempts to unconstitutionally ram government-run healthcare down the throats of the American people, the Obama administration began preparing to resume funding to President Obama’s favorite community organizing group.

The fiscal floodgates are opening for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the president’s former employer and legal client, despite a congressional ban on funding the activist group that has long been a practitioner of election fraud.

In a March 16 memo Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Peter Orszag quietly ordered federal agencies to resume funding the group whose employees were caught on hidden camera videos last year condoning a variety of crimes including child prostitution and tax evasion.

The memo came a week after renegade federal judge Nina Gershon of the Eastern District of New York made permanent her temporary injunction prohibiting Congress from cutting off funding for ACORN.

The memo also came despite the fact that the Department of Justice is planning to appeal Gershon’s ruling and seek a stay pending appeal.

It’s unclear why the Obama administration isn’t doing the responsible thing and waiting for the case to work its way through the judicial system.

Could the OMB be moving at lightning speed to restore funding for ACORN, which is under indictment in Nevada for election fraud, because ACORN is in dire financial straits? Perhaps it’s a reward for ACORN’s loyal support in the ObamaCare battle.

I am calling to all of you freedom-loving Americans to come once again to Washington D.C. to gather at upper Senate Park, across from the Capitol on Saturday, at 12 o’clock noon.

We must come by the thousands.

Speaker Pelosi will stop at nothing to fulfill her corrupt conquests. She will bring all of the corrupt ACORN liars to try to bully all the Democrats that may be having pangs of guilt knowing quite surely what their votes can and will do. If they’re bullied into saying “yes,” it will destroy America.

Join me and Rep. Michele Bachmann in Washington DC at 12 noon EST so we can give all the Democrats who know what the end result will be the courage to say: “No, do not pass this destructive bill.”

I’ll see you there.

Group is undone in national scandal sparked by videos showing illegal activity

From today’s Baltimore Sun:

A former leader of Maryland’s ACORN chapter said Monday the group will no longer operate in the state, doomed by an embarrassing national scandal six months ago from which the organization never recovered.

An undated sign hangs on the entrance to the ACORN offices at 16 W. 25th St. A former Maryland ACORN official said the office ceased operations late last year.  You may recognize this stoop from this golden oldie.

Sonja Merchant-Jones, former co-chairwoman of the state chapter of ACORN and a board member since 1999, said there are no plans in Maryland to rebrand under a different name, a move undertaken Monday by several ACORN affiliates across the country.

Maryland ACORN ceased operations late last year, Merchant-Jones said, and all the offices in the state have closed. The group has not held a board meeting in Maryland since November, she added.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now came under scrutiny in September, when videos recorded in Baltimore showed workers counseling two conservative activists pretending to be a pimp and prostitute. Two staff members of the Baltimore office were fired because of the video, which was broadcast on major networks throughout the country and showed the employees giving tax-evading tips to the man and a scantily dressed female partner.

The incident effectively shut down local and state offices, Merchant-Jones said, and the branches were forced to cease operations after dues-paying members fled.

Congress reacted to the video by stripping ACORN’s federal funding. Last week a federal judge upheld a ruling that a law blacklisting ACORN and groups allied with it was unconstitutional, but observers doubt ACORN will recoup any money.

Read the full article here.

The Associated Press seems to have two unwritten rules on how and when to write stories about leftist controversies and setbacks:

Rule Number 1 -- Do little or nothing with the story until you can figure out a way to make center-right critics or victors look like the bad guys.

Rule Number 2 -- If you're thinking about covering the story any other way, refer to Rule Number 1.

On Thursday, the 1851 Center for Constitutional Law in Columbus, Ohio, which describes itself as "an independent legal center dedicated to protecting the constitutional rights of Ohioans from government abuse," announced a significant legal victory for Buckeye State residents interested in clean elections:

The 1851 Center for Constitutional Law achieved victory in its state RICO action against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). ACORN has agreed to settle the case and will cease all Ohio activity as a result. In its settlement with the 1851 Center, ACORN agreed to surrender all of its Ohio business licenses by June 1, 2010. Further, the organization cannot support or enable any individual or organization that seeks to engage in the same type of activity.

That seems like a pretty clear-cut result, doesn't it? Not if you're the Associated Press's JoAnne Viviano, whose brief item on Saturday followed the rules above, fabricated a supposed loophole in the settlement, and gave an unnamed spokesman an open mic to despicably play the race card:

Isn't that nifty? The news isn't that ACORN agreed to leave and not come back in any current or alternative form. No-no-no. The real news to Ms. Viviano is that racist meanies like those at the 1851 Center would fight ACORN or any of its successors if the far-left activists and accused racketeers reneged on their agreement.

This isn't journalism; it's character assassination by anonymous attribution.

Though far from perfect, the coverage by the Columbus Dispatch's James Nash was more measured -- and accurate:

ACORN is out of Ohio's elections
In legal settlement, group agrees not to return to state

ACORN, the liberal group notorious for allegedly trying to inflate voter rolls through fraudulent practices, has seen its last election in Ohio.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now will permanently surrender its Ohio business license by June1 as part of a legal settlement with the conservative Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions, both sides said yesterday.

ACORN was active in Ohio in the 2006 and 2008 elections, working to register thousands of low-income people to vote and get them to the polls. The group's efforts were marred by irregularities, including one case in which ACORN workers allegedly induced a Cleveland man to register to vote 72 times, offering cigarettes as an incentive.

The Buckeye Institute's 1851 Center for Constitutional Law teamed with two Warren County residents to sue ACORN in Warren County Common Pleas Court just before the 2008 election. The residents alleged that their rights were abridged by thousands of fraudulent voter registrations, each representing "a potential illegal vote that has the capacity to dilute (legitimate) votes."

The case was moved to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.

Yesterday's settlement is mostly confidential, said Maurice A. Thompson, the conservative group's attorney.

"They will surrender their business license by June 1 and cease to operate in Ohio and cease to support or enable other groups to do what they do," Thompson said.

... After the 2008 election, in which some credited or blamed ACORN for the election of Barack Obama as president, ACORN has dialed back its political activity across the country.

ACORN continues to deny any wrongdoing in Ohio ...

The Occam's Razor explanation for ACORN's surrender would seem to be that the 1851 Center's RICO evidence was strong, and that national exposure of it would do serious damage.

The most obvious weakness in Nash's report is that he never explained why "ACORN has dialed back its political activity." We can thank James O'Keefe, Hannah Giles, and Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com for that.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

The wounded ACORN snake continues writhing.  This time, the group has been barred from the entire state of Ohio, a swing state where the organization was very active in the last presidential election.

So active, in fact, it received an “Unsung Hero” award from the Communist Party USA for its “critical but  generally unrecognized role of organized labor and grassroots voter registration efforts in winning Ohio for Barack Obama,” according to a document on ACORNcracked.com.

But now, ACORN has reached a settlement under the Ohio Corrupt Activities Act, similar to the federal RICO Act  –  the same law that’s used to prosecute mobsters and drug kingpins.  Under the settlement, ACORN,  along with Project Vote, agreed “to file a certificate permanently surrendering its business license in Ohio by June 1,” according to The Columbus Dispatch.

The next part of the settlement was critical: it bars ACORN from simply changing its name and moving back into the state. From the Dispatch:

The center’s lawyer, Maurice A. Thompson, said the settlement is mostly confidential but permanently bars ACORN from doing business in Ohio or reconstituting as another group and perpetuating its practices.

A 2008 press release from the 1851 Center for Constitutional Law said this:

Plaintiffs Jennifer Miller of Mason, Ohio and Kimberly Grant of Loveland, allege that ACORN’s actions deprived them of the right to participate in an honest and effective elections process. They allege fraudulent voter registrations submitted by ACORN dilute the votes of legally registered voters.

“The right to cast a vote that is not diluted by fraudulent votes is a fundamental individual right,” Buckeye Institute President David Hansen said.

“ACORN appears to be recklessly disregarding Ohio laws and adding thousands of fraudulent voters to the state’s roles in the process,” Maurice Thompson, Director of the Buckeye Institute’s 1851 Center for Constitutional Law said. “Such voter fraud erodes the value of legally cast votes,” he added.

The 1851 Center is no longer affiliated with the Buckeye Institute.  A copy of the original court filing can be found here.

Despite the ruling, ACORN’s lawyer, Alfonse Gerhardstein, said that it didn’t mean much because it was inactive already “for reasons unrelated to this litigation.”

As ACORN reconstitutes itself in other states, watchdogs are tracking its every move and sounding the alarm so such activities don’t occur again.

By Tom Fitton

Documents released today by Judicial Watch reference serious allegations of corruption and voter registration fraud by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform (ACORN), as well as the Obama administration’s decision to shut down a criminal investigation into these matters.

Two specific complaints were filed against ACORN for alleged voter fraud in October 2008 by Lucy Corelli and Joseph Borges, Republican Registrars of Voters in Stamford and Bridgeport, Connecticut, respectively. As part of its continuing investigation into alleged criminal activities of ACORN, Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents concerning this matter with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

According to Corelli, on August 1, 2008, her office received 1,200 ACORN voter registration cards from the Secretary of State’s office. Over 300 of these cards were rejected because of “duplicates, underage, illegible and invalid addresses,” which “put a tremendous strain on our office staff and caused endless work hours at taxpayers’ expense.” Corelli claimed the total cost of the extra work caused by ACORN corruption was $20,000. Likewise, Borges contended that: “The organization ACORN during the summer of 2008 conducted a registration drive which has produced over 100 rejections due to incomplete forms and individuals who are not citizens…” Among the examples cited by Borges was a seven-year old child who was registered to vote by ACORN through the use of a forged signature and a fake birth certificate claiming she was 27-years old. By burdening these election officials with fraudulent registrations, ACORN put those who legally registered at risk of not being put on voting rolls at all.

The FBI and Department of Justice opened an investigation. However, the Obama Justice Department, while noting that ACORN had engaged in “questionable hiring and training practices,” closed down the investigation in March 2009, claiming ACORN broke no laws.

By contrast, the documents also include records related to a federal investigation of ACORN corruption in St. Louis, Missouri, involving 1,492 allegedly fraudulent voter registration cards submitted by Project Vote, a liberal non-profit organization affiliated with ACORN on voter registration drives, during the 2006 election season. Assistant United States Attorney Hal Goldsmith initiated the investigation with “concurrence” from the Department of Justice and the participation of the FBI. According to a Justice Department memo, Goldsmith “advised he would prosecute any individual responsible for submitting fraudulent voter registration cards.” Goldsmith identified the statute for prosecution: Title 42, USC 1973 (gg), which provides for criminal penalties for fraudulent voter registrations. In April 2008, eight former ACORN employees from the St. Louis office pled guilty to voter registration fraud. Oddly, the FBI document that details the shut down of the Connecticut investigation seems to ignore this legal issue.

Other documents show that the Bush Justice Department failed to prosecute ACORN voter registration fraud of non-citizens in Phoenix, Arizona in 2007 because the allegations that led to the opening of the investigation were “unverifiable.” Notably, the FBI document detailing this questionable decision reveals that a “draft Intelligence Bulletin…concludes that ACORN’s employment practices perpetuate fraudulent voter registration.”

The ACORN documents include internal FBI memoranda, signed affidavits, subpoenas, fraudulent voter registration cards, and publications describing ACORN’s policies and practices. The documents also include details regarding numerous allegations of corruption extending beyond voter registration fraud, to include attempts by ACORN employees to coerce workers to participate in campaign activities on behalf of Democratic candidates.

These documents reflect seemingly systematic voter registration fraud by ACORN. It is unconscionable that the Justice Department has not conducted a fully comprehensive criminal investigation into – and prosecution of – this matter. Given President Obama’s close connections to ACORN, including his campaign’s hiring of the ACORN’s Project Vote organization, it seems questionable at best that Attorney General Holder has failed to seriously investigate these and other alleged ACORN criminal activities.

You can download the documents here and here.

Tom Fitton is president of Judicial Watch, a nonpartisan, nonprofit educational foundation that fights government corruption.

Ben Sheffner, at Copyrights and Campaigns Blog, has the breaking story:

A state court in Baltimore has dismissed ACORN’s lawsuit against James O’Keefe, Hannah Giles, and Breitbart.com LLC after the plaintiffs failed to serve the complaint on the defendants within Maryland’s 120-day limit.

28218713-ACORN-v-O-Keefe-Docket

It was with great fanfare that ACORN, along with two recently-fired employees of its Baltimore office, sued last September over thesurreptitious taping of the employees advising O’Keefe and Giles on running a prostitution business out of a house. ACORN’s general counsel, Arthur Schwartz, told the Washington Post at the time that the defendants, young filmmakers O’Keefe and Giles, plus Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart.com LLC, which disseminated the videos, had committed “clear violations of Maryland law” against audio recording without consent from all parties. But ACORN appears to have lost interest in the case since filing it, confirming my suspicion that it was little more than a press release on pleading paper.

Under Maryland Rule 2-507(b), “An action against any defendant who has not been served or over whom the court has not otherwise acquired jurisdiction is subject to dismissal as to that defendant at the expiration of 120 days from the issuance of original process directed to that defendant.” That’s exactly what the court did March 4, with no apparent notice from the media that covered the filing of the lawsuit. The court’s dismissal was without prejudice, meaning that the plaintiffs could theoretically re-file. But, as I argued shortly after it was filed, the lawsuit has substantive flaws that go well beyond the plaintiffs’ apparent lack of interest in pursuing it.

Newsmax first reported that Organizing for America, the community organizing outfit under the auspices of the Democratic National Committee, has launched a plan to inundate talk radio shows with callers.  The action will occur when a particular radio show is discussing ObamaCare.

This is an extension of OFA’s and Health Care for America Now’s campaign to flood last summer’s town hall meetings with union members and left-wing activists supporting Obama’s government takeover of health care.

The intent then, just as it is now, was to drown out average taxpayers showing up  to voice their concerns or vent their frustrations.  The intent is also to run out the clock on real debate and take a vote on health reform with as little resistance as possible.

HCAN and ACORN were busing non-constituents, some from as far as 200 miles away, to fill the seats and skew the crowd.  It was to give the false impression that constituents really wanted ObamaCare.

But the result was even worse.  HCAN and union members, particularly SEIU, were filling the seats which would have otherwise been occupied by the average person just getting out of work.

So, the campaign now is geared toward achieving the same result: flood different talk radio shows with left-wing activists and ObamaCare apologists.  The OFA’s website has a talk radio du jour with a call-in number and “discussion points” – talking points for the latest version of the Democrats’ plan.

Be aware and be prepared, Talk Radio: The president’s got your number and his foot soldiers are coming for you.

While most of the public is consumed by the health care-death-march spectacle, Senators Bob Corker and Chris Dodd are making serious progress on the Senate’s “financial services reform” legislation. The legislation was dead just a couple weeks ago, but Sen. Corker thought he could snag a seat at the grown-up table and stepped forward to ‘cut a deal.’

As is the new DC operating procedure for major legislation, there are almost no firm details on the current language. We know there will be a large new federal bureaucracy, somewhere within government, to provide “consumer protection” for financial products. We know there will be a $50 billion tax on banking customers to provide a permanent bailout fund, or as Sen. Corker would describe it, a “wind-down” fund. Unfortunately, we also know that the bill will do nothing to reform Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, who continue to drain billions from the U.S. Treasury.

We’re told the Corker-Dodd Bailout Bill is a necessary response to the financial melt-down triggered by the collapse of the housing bubble. But, if it doesn’t take even small steps to reform Fannie and Freddie, then, simply, it isn’t a serious proposal. Its like rebuilding the porch on a house, while ignoring it’s cracked foundation.

Washington politicians would rather ignore this, but the housing bubble was the result of very explicit government policy. Throughout the 90’s and early 2000’s, officials from both parties became addicted to forever pushing homeownership rates higher than the laws of economics would otherwise allow.

If you want to identify the roots of the homeownership-cult among elected officials, fire-up the way-back machine and check out a little report issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in the early 90’s. Under the leadership of Richard Syron, then-President of the Boston Fed (more on him later), the report was the result of discussion among the bank’s staff and the usual collection of academics and professional activists. It was to make recommendations to the nation’s bankers on addressing alleged discrimination in mortgage lending.

Boston Fed

Most of the report is innocuous pablum; a kind of cross between a Hallmark Card and corporate-ese. But, a few of the report’s recommendations are, in hindsight, more ominous. And while they were just ‘recommendations’, they were being made by one of the Fed banks, which carries a certain, shall we say, weight with bankers. From the intro:

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston wants to be helpful to lenders as they work to close the mortgage gap. For this publication, we have gathered recommendations on “best practice” from lending institutions and consumer groups. With their help, we have developed a comprehensive program for lenders who seek to ensure that all loan applicants are treated fairly and to expand their markets to reach a more diverse customer base.

As far as it goes, fine. But, consider this:

Obligation Ratios: Special consideration could be given to applicants with relatively high obligation ratios who have demonstrated an ability to cover high housing expenses in the past. Many lower–income households are accustomed to allocating a large percentage of their income toward rent. While it is important to ensure that the borrower is not assuming an unreasonable level of debt, it should be noted that the secondary market is willing to consider ratios above the standard 28/36.

Got that. Banks should use their normal risk-based underwriting standards, because low-income people can carry more debt than families with higher income. Oh, and wink-wink, the secondary market will consider higher risk ratios. In other words, go ahead and underwrite the mortgage and you can probably sell it off. More:

Credit History: Policies regarding applicants with no credit history or problem credit history should be reviewed. Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor. Certain cultures encourage people to “pay as you go” and avoid debt. Willingness to pay debt promptly can be determined through review of utility, rent, telephone, insurance, and medical bill payments. In reviewing past credit problems, lenders should be willing to consider extenuating circumstances. For lower–income applicants in particular, unforeseen expenses can have a disproportionate effect on an otherwise positive credit record. In these instances, paying off past bad debts or establishing a regular repayment schedule with creditors may demonstrate a willingness and ability to resolve debts.

Nothing can go wrong there. But, this is one of the more interesting items noted in the report:

Institutions that sell loans to the secondary market should be fully aware of the efforts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to modify their guidelines to address the needs of borrowers who are lower–income, live in urban areas, or do not have extensive credit histories.

Boy, would Fannie and Freddie ever modify their guidelines. While the Boston Fed Report was being written, Fannie and Freddie were implementing their first congressional mandate to increase their holdings of mortgages to low-income buyers. From the Village Voice:

[Andrew]Cuomo’s predecessor, Henry Cisneros, did that for the first time in December 1995, taking a cautious approach and moving the GSEs toward a requirement that 42 percent of their mortgages serve low- and moderate-income families. Cuomo raised that number to 50 percent and dramatically hiked GSE mandates to buy mortgages in underserved neighborhoods and for the “very-low-income.”

At some point, the supply of low-income buyers who meet conventional loan standards is going to run out. It would be impossible for Fannie and Freddie to meet their federal mandate if they only bought conventional mortgages. So, by the end of the decade, Fannie, at the urging of elected officials and activist groups, purchased its first sub-prime mortgage. From the New York Times, September 29, 1999:

In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.

By the time the bubble burst, Fannie and Freddie were imploding under the weight of hundreds of billions in sub-prime and other risky mortgages.

A few more excerpts from the Boston Fed Report:

Even the most determined lending institution will have difficulty cultivating business from minority customers if its underwriting standards contain arbitrary or unreasonable measures of creditworthiness.

And,

Unintentional discrimination may be observed when a lender’s under- writing policies contain arbitrary or outdated criteria that effectively disqualify many urban or lower–income minority applicants.

And,

management should be directed to review existing underwriting standards and practices to ensure that they are valid predictors of risk. Special care should be taken to ensure that standards are appropriate to the economic culture of urban, lower–income, and nontraditional consumers.

And, finally, a section that, seen in hindsight, gives me a headache:

The Board may also wish to encourage management to work with the public sector to develop products that assist lower–income borrowers by using public money to reduce interest rates, provide down payment assistance, or otherwise reduce the cost of the mortgage. The Board should also encourage management to work with special secondary mortgage market programs designed for lower–income homebuyers.

To be sure, there were a number of causes that inflated the housing bubble. The Fed’s policy of, essentially, free money in the early part of the decade sloshed money across the financial system and allowed credit to be widely available to anyone with a pulse. Ever more exotic financial products that few understood ingrained themselves into bank balance sheets as little ticking time-bombs.

But, the scope of the crisis would have been far less severe, if it hadn’t been accompanied by explicit government pressure on banks to loosen their lending criteria. Leftist activist groups like ACORN and the Center for Responsible Lending exerted complementary pressure through the media. With nearly-free money, entities like Fannie and Freddie eager buy up even the riskiest loans and near-universal predictions of forever increasing house prices, it is little wonder banks bowed to the outside pressure and loosened their standards. The rest is history.

Oh, about that Richard Syron, who headed up the first Fed report urging banks to loosen their lending standards. He became CEO of Freddie Mac at the end of 2003. He certainly put our money where his mouth was. In the final years of the bubble, 2005-2007, 40% of the loans Freddie took onto its books were junk loans.

Sometimes pablum leaves a mark.

From Daniel Bice, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Milwaukee police officers sat on their hands for months last year instead of investigating possible voter fraud cases from the 2008 general election.

It’s an incredible claim, but it’s coming from a credible source:

Assistant District Attorney Bruce Landgraf, the Milwaukee County prosecutor responsible for overseeing campaign and election issues.

“Honestly, the Milwaukee Police Department largely ignored your double voter (and other) referrals received in January 2009 for the first six months of 2009,” Landgraf wrote in an e-mail to a city elections official on Jan. 26.

Speaking with unguarded candor, the veteran prosecutor said in his note that MPD’s tardy response had a major impact. The cases involve voters who may have cast more than one ballot, felons who may have voted illegally and other cases of possible election fraud.

“Sadly, several probable cases of genuine voter fraud were harmed by that delay,” Landgraf wrote in an e-mail obtained through an open records request.

The assistant district attorney was even more pessimistic about the investigation of more than 500 individuals who registered to vote on election day but whose addresses could not be confirmed later by postcard.

“I do not expect them to ever get to the Address Cards,” he said of the Milwaukee cops.

On Friday, Landgraf declined to provide specifics, referring questions to his boss, District Attorney John Chisholm.

Interestingly, Chisholm wouldn’t elaborate on his assistant’s concerns.

“I’ll let the e-mail speak for itself,” he said while praising Landgraf’s experience and knowledge.

Read the whole thing here. Keep in mind, the allegations in this case involve not just voter registration fraud, but actual voting fraud. Actual fraudulent ballots cast in the 2008 elections.

It appears that the Bailout Bob Corker continues to ignore the pleas of his conservative allies and constituents and is close to reaching a deal on establishing a new consumer regulatory bureaucracy that in the words of Sen. Dodd, will be like one we have not seen before. Corker has told CNBC that the last stick point is not the principle of new regulation — he has capitulated on that point — but “administrative issues.”

The legislation includes Corker’s pet project, a “strong resolution mechanism for unwinding troubled companies.” News to Corker: For over 200 years, America had such a mechanism — it was called bankruptcy. But “unwinding” troubled companies is a code word for BAILOUT. The Federal Government, via the Federal Reserve, would be empowered to break-up, subsidized and bailout companies. As House conservatives warned during the House debate, enactment of the bill would establish bailouts as the official policy of the United States for decades to come. That’s why the House bill authorizes $4 trillion for the Federal Reserve.

Adding insult to injury, Reuters also reports that the Corker “reform” bill does not address the main culprit in the financial crisis — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It does not address the issues associated with Community Lending that encouraged banks to lend to people who could never pay back their loans. It does not address ACORNS. All it does it layer more Washington bureaucracy on top of existing Washington Bureaucracy. Nice work, Bob.

The bill was flatlined and now Corker has revived it. His media fawning work will cost taxpayers for decades to come. It appears that Corker is officially off the conservative reservation.

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Five Wisconsin residents have been charged with criminal counts of voter fraud in the November 2008 general election, state Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen announced Monday.

Two of those charged – Maria Miles, 36, of Milwaukee, and Kevin Clancy, 26, of Racine – worked for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the embattled community organizing group.

“The complaint alleges that Miles and Clancy submitted multiple voter registration applications for the same individuals, and also were part of a scheme in which they and other (special registration deputies) registered each other to vote multiple times in order to meet voter registration quotas imposed by ACORN,” the Van Hollen news release says.

Both were charged with one felony count.

ACORN could not be reached for comment Monday.

Also charged were a couple – Herbert Gunka, 60, and Suzanne Gunka, 54, both of Milwaukee – for supposedly double voting in November 2008, once absentee and once at the polls.

Michael Henderson, 40, was charged with two felony counts of being a felon who cast a ballot even though he was still on probation. The Milwaukee man was convicted in 2005 in Rock County with two felonies for bail jumping and one disorderly conduct misdemeanor.

He was sentenced to five years’ probation.

A felony for voter fraud carries a maximum penalty of up to 3 1/2 years behind bars and a $10,000 fine. All five individuals are scheduled to appear in court on April 20.

The charges were brought as part of the Milwaukee Election Fraud Task Force.

Van Hollen’s announcement comes the same day that the Journal Sentinel disclosed that a Milwaukee County prosecutor was accusing Milwaukee police of failing to investigate these cases for the first half of last year.

Read the whole article here.

A Christian pundit, Dawn Eden, thinks my daughter Hannah Giles and her partner James O’Keefe should not have used Saul Alinsky’s deceptive tactics against ACORN because Saul was “evil,” his methods sneaky, and he dedicated his book, Rules for Radicals, to Lucifer.

In addition, Eden took a swipe at Lila Rose, Planned Parenthood’s main pain in the butt, for being deceptive in her undercover vids which exposed Planned Parenthood’s illegal activity. Oh, and I almost forgot: Dawn also busted on Hannah for being un-Christlike for wearing a miniskirt and dressing like a hooker.  Sounds a little catty to me—and a wee bit like Dana Carvey’s Church Lady—but I digress.

First off, Ms. Eden, if you ever drum up the nerve to expose a scandalous multimillion dollar Obama-backed, taxpayer-funded organization for doing illegal crap and then undergo death threats (versus sitting on the sidelines and simply critiquing those who have the cojones to do so) you will find that the lawbreakers are rather reticent in telling journalists, who are intent on exposing and destroying their world, exactly how they’re breaking the law.  Yeah, I know.  It’s weird, eh?

You’d think that nefarious organizations would just spill their guts, throw up their hands, give up their hard drives, refrain from dumping tens of thousands of documents in a dumpster, and just cooperate to the fullest extent with the FBI and the DOJ, but alas, they don’t because they’re criminals, and criminals, generally speaking, aren’t known for truthfulness, contrition and full disclosure with cops.

Therefore, most of the time when journalists, Christian or not, want to get the 411 on a reprehensible group, they usually have to fly under the radar, you know, by being misleading, going stealth, acting like serpents, slithering in and getting the apple in front of the culprit and seeing if they’ll take the bait. Deception is a given in the truth seeker’s toolbox when it comes to dealing with slippery critters who won’t easily spill the beans. It’s called hunting.  Haven’t you ever watched a Jason Bourne movie, seen Barney Fife in action, or read Joshua or Judges?  Geez, Dawn.  Come to speed, why don’t cha?

For frail Dawn, the deceptive tactics Giles, O’Keefe and Rose employed in exposing crappy cabals like ACORN and Planned Parenthood present a pious conundrum because she sees deceit, in all forms, as evil; according to her read of the Bible, sweet Jesus would never give the thumbs-up to a believer to participate in that kind of devilish activity.

No, for Dawn, we must pray, be more “mature,” take the high road, wait a million years, come through the front door with a press pass around our neck, and tell the twisted that the USA and Jesus would really appreciate it if ACORN and Planned Parenthood would confess their sins, close down their operations, and become a Ben & Jerry’s.

Here’s my take on whether or not Jesus and the Bible are cool with deceit for righteous purposes.  First off, when I’m talking about Jesus, I’m talking about the one in the Bible who methodically made a whip and beat the religious hucksters out of the temple (that’s not very Christlike, eh Dawn?), purposely picked fights with sanctimonious toads and political pukes, and instructed his disciples to be “shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves” (Mt. 10:16).  Or, as my King Doug Contra Mundus Translation interprets the original Greek text, “be as clever as the Devil.”  Yep, good old Jesus said it’s okay to imitate the serpent in regard to cleverness; just be righteous in spirit and desired goals.

From what I know from my own serious Christian kid and O’Keefe (as well as Rose, via several interviews with her), their motivations were pure in that they wanted to sink these two sucky organizations—organizations, mind you, that are on tape aiding and abetting underage prostitution, home loans for multiple whorehouses, money laundering, tax fraud, millions of abortions, and not just any old abortions but abortions for underage girls (without their parents’ knowledge or consent) who have been the victims of statutory rape.

The reason I believe Jesus wouldn’t give a flip about these three heroes’ mad methods but would instead applaud their efforts is because the Scripture doesn’t condemn:

Rahab, a real whore, for her sleight of hand with the Canaanites
Gideon’s pretense with his small army
Abraham’s lie regarding his wife
King David’s feigned madness before King Achish.

Real life is war, sweetie pie, and I hate to burst your smug balloon, my dear Dawn, but sometimes playing dirty for noble reasons is the right thing to do.

With Eden’s edict banning deception, it follows that Christian cops couldn’t do their fabulous undercover work; Christian soldiers couldn’t wear deceptive camo or take on local dress in order to whack the Taliban; Christian CIA ops would have to wear dove and fish T-Shirts instead of their Simon Templar garb; and the amazing Christians who lied to the murderous Nazis would all be uniformly condemned for fibbing about the whereabouts of precious Jews they were hiding.

Lastly, Dawn, at the end of the day, I believe Hannah, James and Lila will get mad applause in heaven as they are here on earth for exposing ACORN and Planned Parenthood’s hellish practices.  I know, as a Christian, I prefer their ways of doing things to your way of not doing them.  Amen.

Not enough people know about the Tides Foundation, which is one of the original “philanthropic” donation launderers for donors who don’t want to be tied to fringe activist groups. Frankly, there’s too much to tell, but they’re the sugar daddy for ACORN (whose founder, Wade Rathke, is intricately linked within Tides official leadership).

[I'm including some grants of note below -- What will you find?]

Tides 990 2008

A look at their 2008 tax return, 160-plus pages, reads like a directory of the New Left. I’ve pulled out the donations to ACORN groups and Big Labor’s Working America Education Fund (not many people know unions take in ostensibly charitable donations) and one theme is clear: “general support” seems to be a popular phrase. Another theme: notice that states receiving money are critical to election-year success for Democrats. And finally, notice just how much money is being thrown around.

ACORN, Inc – 100,000 Latino voter registration and engagement canvass

ACORN International – 100,00 general support

ACORN Institute
49,500 – general support
25,293 – general support
10,000 – general support

Project Vote
275,000 – 2007-08 Election Administration Program
225,000 – election administration work in Arizona, Florida, and Pennsylvania
115,00 – general support
100,000 – 2008 Voter Participation Program
100,000 – Election Administration Program
100,000 – general support
100,000 – civic engagement work in New Mexico
75,000 – general support
65,000 – general support
53,086 – voter registration program
50,000 – Voter Participation Program
48,000 – nonpartisan Get Out The Vote work
35,000 – general support
30,000 – general support
25,000 – general support
10,000 – general support

Working America Education Fund
261,661 – general support
245,000 – general support
200,000 – civic engagement in Ohio
125,000 – organizing in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Colorado, and Maine
115,000 – general support
100,000 general support
65,006 – general support
30,000 – general support
30,000 – General support

It looks like Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes is on track to win another endorsement from ACORN!

This week, Hynes announced that “no criminality has been found” after his investigation of the videotapes made by investigative journalists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, which show ACORN employees counseling the pair on getting a mortgage for a house of prostitution.

(They got a choice of government loans: Phat Fannie Mae, Prince Freddie Mac or Barney Fresh Daddy Frank … aka “Sir Fix-A-Lot.”)

I’m just glad to know that Hynes conducted a thorough “investigation” first. Who did he have screen the videotapes, Gov. Paterson?

If his investigators had actually watched the videotapes, they would have found ACORN employees apparently advising a pimp and prostitute on how to defraud mortgage lenders, deposit prostitution money in a bank, hide money from the government and avoid detection while running a whorehouse with teenage girls from El Salvador.

I’m not a lawyer — oh, wait, yes, I am — but I count approximately a half-dozen state law crimes being discussed on those tapes, from money laundering to advancing prostitution.

In a “Eureka” moment, ACORN Employee-of-the-Month Volda Albert identifies for O’Keefe and Giles the problem they had been having getting a mortgage:

Albert: Um, is it legalized? Is prostitution legalized in New York state?

O’Keefe: It’s not. It’s not, unfortunately.

Albert: Well see, that’s your problem.

As ACORN employee Milagros Rivera said, “You can’t say what you do for a living because of the law.” But displaying ACORN’s can-do attitude, she explained: “Honest is not going to get you a house.”

ACORN employees helped concoct a scheme to hide from the lender the source of O’Keefe and Giles’ down payment money. Albert suggested that O’Keefe “pay a down payment — or (Giles) can transfer to somebody else, who is not in that business … a close friend, then (Giles) can transfer that, and then he can give you, like, a gift to purchase.”

Under New York law, hiding the true source of down payment money from a lender constitutes mortgage fraud. Also, using the proceeds of criminal conduct in any banking transaction is money laundering.

Does anybody need a flow chart at this point, or should I continue?

To help Giles hide her income from turning tricks, ACORN employee Albert advised Giles to open two banking accounts, depositing no more than $500 per week in each one. (This would not only enable her to conceal her illegal earnings, it would also qualify her for free checking.)

But Albert’s most inspired idea was that Giles get a “house with a backyard. You get a tin can … and bury (your money) down in there, and you put the money right in, and you put grass over it, and you don’t tell a single soul but yourself where it is.”

Back when I was in Louisiana, we advised people to put their illegal money in the freezer, but that didn’t work out so well. And I guess putting your money in a mattress isn’t advisable if you live in a whorehouse.

Anyway, Albert was particularly detailed on the tin-can-in-the-backyard investment plan: “Keep thinking: ‘I have a yard. I have a house.’ You gotta start coming out with, like, plants and you start doing — so it won’t be suspicious. You start buying plants for the backyard in pots and what have you, and you mark a spot.”

She later told Giles: “You are not paying Social Security, so you’ll have society, all right? You are not getting a pension, so you need to save that money for in later years.” ACORN: Helping Plan Your Financial Future.

If only shady lawyers advised clients to bury money in cans in their backyards, instead of putting it in tax shelters, we wouldn’t have all those attorneys clogging up prison cells!

The ACORN employees also stressed that Giles should do nothing to attract attention to her prostitution money. Albert said: “You can buy a decent car for yourself, no big fancy thing to attract people, all right?”

In Albert’s defense, this could have been common etiquette advice. No one likes a showy hooker.

Even after Giles explained her plan to house a “slew” of 13-, 14- and 15-year-old girls from El Salvador for her prostitution business, Rivera simply responded: “So you guys ready to schedule that (mortgage application) for the summer?”

Rivera clearly missed her calling — she should be pushing vacation time shares in Boca Raton beach condos.

Under New York law, a person is guilty of advancing prostitution if he: “knowingly … aids a person to commit or engage in prostitution (or) … engages in any other conduct designed to institute, aid or facilitate an act or enterprise of prostitution.”

It is a class D felony (up to seven years in prison) if the prostitute is under 19 years old — as the ACORN employees knew Giles was — and a class C felony (up to 15 years in prison) if the prostitute is under 16 years old — as Giles stated the El Salvadoran girls were. (And if she’s under 15 years old, Eliot Spitzer may be involved.)

If none of the advice given by ACORN on those videotapes constitutes conspiracy or aiding or abetting a crime, see this column next week for my opus: “10 Detailed Plans to Kill George Soros and Why This Might Be Right for You.”

Do Republicans Not Get It? Did they not pay attention to the thousands of tea parties this past year? Did they not see the hundreds of thousands of tea party protesters across the nation? Did they miss the million protesters who marched down the streets of Washington DC on September 12th?

(Photo via Instapundit and Mary Katharine Ham)

Are the Republicans really that blind? Do they Not Care? Even awful Speaker Pelosi is warming up to the Nazis tea party protesters.

After all of the posturing and preening and shouting and yelling and marching and tea party protesting, America is about to get the whole Democrat agenda shoved down our collective throat. Barack Obama announced today that Democrats are going to use reconciliation to jam Obamacare through Congress and essentially nationalize one-sixth of the US economy. And now, Republicans are about to offer them the rest of the American economy on a silver platter thanks to Senator Bob Corker. Congress is currently working to create a whole new consumer protection division within the Federal Reserve. This new division will give the Fed more power and focus on consumer protection. And, a Republican, Bob Corker, is for some reason leading the charge to create this whole new bureaucracy. The Wall Street Journal reported:

Several senior Republicans have joined negotiations with Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd (D., Conn.) over how to construct consumer-protection rules, potentially bringing more Republican votes to a broader revamp of finance rules—if Democrats can stomach more concessions.

“We’re very, very, very close to a deal,” Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.) said in an interview.

The development came after a closed door meeting Tuesday night between Mr. Corker and Sens. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), Richard Shelby (R., Ala.), Judd Gregg (R., N.H.), and Mike Crapo (R., Idaho).

The meeting was called after a Wall Street Journal story Tuesday said Messrs. Corker and Dodd were near an agreement on a compromise to create a new consumer protection division within the Federal Reserve…

…On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett met with consumer and public interest groups and said new consumer protection rules would be formidable.

At the meeting, Mr. Geithner said it was an “empty argument” that safety and soundness regulation couldn’t be separated from consumer protection, someone familiar with the meeting said. Treasury officials also said they would only support new rules if the agency had an independent leadership, budget and decision making powers, and the power to set rules and enforce them.

Grassroots conservatives are rightly up in arms over Senator Corker’s game of footsie with far left Democrat Chris Dodd on President Obama’s effort to impose a massive new regulatory scheme on America’s economy. Dodd, of course, is one of the architects of the current financial crisis. His decades long support of ACORN, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Community Reinvestment Act should have disqualified him from these negotiations in the first place. But, this is Washington, after all, and apparently Bailout Bob was willing to look the other way and turn the other cheek.

This was even after the House of Representatives passed a similar bill in December, but it received no Republican votes. Close to two dozen Democrats voted against it.

The House passed financial reform bill, crafted by none other than Barney Frank (D-MA) contained a permanent bailout fund for banks and Wall Street firms and created a new agency of government that would be allowed to regulate any and all business in America. It received no Republican votes and close to two dozen democrats opposed the legislation. But, it is alive today thanks to Bob Corker.

The ironically named Consumer Financial Protection Agency will pile a new bureaucracy on top of an existing bureaucracy. It will spend hundreds of millions of dollars imposing job killing regulations on small business. It will have the power to strip consumers of their freedoms and restrict credit opportunities for small business. And, there’s more. Also tucked in the bill is a clause that gives the Federal Reserve the authority to bailout businesses to the tune of an astonishing $4 trillion.

The bill seemed to be dead until Corker decided to grab favorable headlines from the New York Times. According to news reports, Corker’s solution to the problem is to move the new regulatory agency to the Federal Reserve as opposed to leaving it a stand alone agency. Corker is misleading his colleagues and the public by telling them that this will some how save money.

Let’s be clear, the bill contains bailouts for big banks and Wall Street firms and new red tape nightmares for main street businesses. What difference does the location of this new uber-regulatory bureaucracy make? The only thing this bill will save is jobs, paychecks, yachts and third vacation homes for Wall Street bankers and irresponsible CEOs.

The fact is we need to reduce the size and scope of government not allow a government takeover of the financial sector of the economy.

The word from the halls of the Capital is Corker is still trying to cut a deal. But, honestly, what can conservatives possibly get from such a deal? If you strip out the bailouts and the new Washington bureaucracies and regulations, there is nothing left. So, any deal will be a bad one. A quick look at Corker’s financial contributors leaves one wondering whether Corker supports Wall Street more than Main Street. He is giving those at the top a handout while giving the middle class the bill. And as far as the tea party movement. Corker will forfeit any political ground conservatives have gained back recently.

Call Bob Corker and tell him to Stop the Madness. (202) 224-3344

Last week, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a crime syndicate dedicated to tightening the Democratic Party’s grip on America, dissolved its national structure.  Too much of ACORN’s corruption had been exposed to public scrutiny for it to run its vote fraud and extortion rackets effectively.  So, ACORN activists will have to soldier on in state-level organizations, such as New York Communities for Change and New England United for Justice in Massachusetts.

ACORN does indeed operate like the Mafia, but it more closely resembles another organization that began as an affiliate of the Democratic Party, the Ku Klux Klan.  Aside from intimidating some bank executives, ACORN does not engage in violence, but like the KKK it has vote fraud as a top priority.

There have been two distinct organizations known as the Ku Klux Klan.  The modern-day KKK, with whom most people are familiar, was spawned in 1915 by the Hollywood epic Birth of a Nation, premiered at the White House by a Democrat president, Woodrow Wilson.  Cross-burning and other rituals were actually inspired by the movie.  The Klan came to dominate the Democratic Party so thoroughly that the 1924 Democratic National Convention was known as the “Klanbake.”

It is not so much this Klan 2.0 that ACORN parallels as the original version.  Established in 1866, Klan 1.0 was an affiliate of the Democratic Party during the Reconstruction era.  Named for “kuklos,” the Greek word for “circle,” the Ku Klux Klan waged war against the Republican Party in the former Confederate states.  Goofy titles for its commanders such as Wizard and Cyclops were intended to disguise the fact that the KKK was a paramilitary organization.  In some areas, leadership of the Ku Klux Klan and the Democratic Party were indistinguishable.

Democrats used the Klan to suppress their political opposition, with vote fraud and intimidation and violence.  Klansmen aimed at African-Americans, nearly all Republicans in those days, and at white Republicans who tried to help them.  Once threatened by the KKK, Republicans could in many cases save their lives only by publicly swearing allegiance to the Democratic Party.  According to a southern governor, “Few Republicans dare sleep in their houses at night.”

“The suppression of enough GOP votes could ensure a Democratic victory,” wrote one historian.  “There’s no question that Klansmen closely watched the polls” – easy to do before the secret ballot was introduced in the United States in the 1880s.  All too often, Republican ballots were not even counted.

Like ACORN, the Ku Klux Klan operated with impunity until Republican politicians and journalists sounded an alarm.  In 1869, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the KKK’s Grand Dragon, ordered the Klan disbanded.  Why?  The national organization was getting too much attention, so Klansmen would have to soldier on in state-level organizations, such as the Red Shirts in South Carolina and the Men of Justice in Alabama.   Nonetheless, most members of these spin-off groups considered themselves to be Klansmen.

A congressional investigation reported that “the operations of the Klan are executed in the night and are invariably directed against members of the Republican Party.”

In 1871, the Republican-controlled 41st Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, and a Republican president, Ulysses Grant, signed it.  Until overturned by the Supreme Court twelve years later, the law effectively banned the KKK.  Federal troops crushed Klan uprisings in South Carolina and Louisiana, while hundreds of Klansmen were convicted in federal court.  Law enforcement played a role in eliminating the Ku Klux Klan, but primarily the Klan disappeared because after Democrat regimes replaced the Reconstruction state governments there was no need for Democrats to suppress Republican opposition by covert means when government authorities could do so openly.

Back then, Klansmen had to contend with a Republican administration, but now, with a Democrat in the White House, ACORNistas know that the federal government is on their side.  With Eric Holder’s Justice Department condoning polling place thuggery [pictured] and other illicit activity against the GOP, there is less incentive for Democrats to suppress Republican opposition by covert means when government authorities are doing so openly.

The Democrat-controlled 111th Congress has made ACORN spin-off groups eligible for billions of taxpayer dollars.  Once an insurgency, community organizers are now part of the establishment.  To the victors go the spoils.

What would Saul Alinksy do?

In the wake of defeats for the Obama administration last month both with Scott Brown’s stunning Senate victory in the bluest of blue states and the Supreme Court Citizens United decision that will let thousands of groups speak more freely about candidates positions’ in the 2010 elections and beyond, that’s the question President Obama and his allies are probably asking. It’s also the question that proponents of limited, constitutional government and free enterprise must be asking in order to anticipate the organized Left’s next moves.

Alinksy was the father of left-wing community organizing. He wrote the book Rules for Radicals and other primers, which explained to would-be leftist organizers how to “search out controversy” and “fan the latent hostilities.” Seeing the world as a never-ending conflict between the “haves and have-nots,” Alinsky wrote In Rules for Radicals that “in war, the end justifies almost any means.”  One community organizer who took Alinsky’s words to heart was a young Barack Obama, who worked for an offshoot of Alinsky’s network of organizations in Chicago in the 1980s. Throughout his career, according to the Washington Post, Obama has “embraced many of Alinsky’s tactics.”

And one tactic in Alinsky’s arsenal dovetails almost perfectly with Obama’s new focus on so-called “financial reform” and his bashing of Wall Street to score political points. One of Alinsky’s most important rules for radicals was that “you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.” In this case, the “moral garment” is the supposed interest of shareholders.

Obama and Democrats are pushing legislation they claim would empower average investors against powerful corporate executives. They propose requiring a shareholder vote on everything from CEO pay to – in a move to limit the freedoms in the Citizens United decision — companies’ weighing in on political candidates.

But the crème de la crème in using the cover of shareholders to tilt the playing field to the Left’s advantage may be a scheme called “proxy access.” Provisions regarding proxy access are embedded in House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank’s “financial reform” bill that passed the House in December, as well as a “discussion draft” of a bill introduced by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.).

After Dodd’s failure to reach agreement on a compromise bill with Senate Banking Committee ranking Republican Richard Shelby, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) has stepped into the void and is now hashing out a bill with Dodd. It is vital that grass-roots conservatives and libertarians learn about proxy access and educate lawmakers of both parties about the threat this Alinksy-inspired policy poses both to a fragile economy and to the political playing field.

Proxy access would federalize and override decades of state law governing the structure of corporations and force publicly-traded companies to put shareholders’ nominees for a board of directors on a company’s proxy ballot along with the firm’s own nominees for those positions. Currently, in states such as Delaware, where many firms are incorporated, all shareholders can nominate their own candidates for the board of directors, but they have to finance these campaigns at their own expense. Under proxy access, companies and all their shareholders would effectively be forced to subsidize the director campaigns of certain shareholder nominees. The threshold for shareholders could be less than 1 percent, based proposals that have floated before the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Like net neutrality, another pet cause of the Left, proxy access sounds technical and somewhat boring on the surface. But also like net neutrality, and like the Fairness Doctrine, proxy access would fundamentally reshape an area of commerce to the Left’s advantage by granting a right of forced access to viewpoints that have been unable to prevail in the marketplace of ideas. And because proxy access would reach all types of businesses that are publicly traded, it could serve as a lever to force U.S. companies to bow to the Left’s wish list on every policy from “card check” that would end secret ballot for union elections to cap-and-trade rationing of electricity to a silencing of conservative voices by small group of ideological shareholders who would have veto power over the content of a media company.

Proxy access has its roots in a concept developed by Alinsky called the “proxy tactic” In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky devoted his second-to-last chapter – “The Genesis of Tactic Proxy” — to describing a new method to force corporations to bow to leftist demands.

In explaining the “proxy tactic,” Alinsky laid out a roadmap for progressive groups and individuals to pool shares of stock and “use [shareholder] proxies for political and social purposes.” Alinsky proclaimed proudly that “there was dynamite in the proxy scare” and described it as “the razor to cut through the golden curtain that protected the so-called private sector from facing its public responsibilities.” In a Playboy interview published in 1972 – a few months before he died – Alinsky would add that “the proxy tactic is also an invaluable means of gaining middle-class participation in radical causes.”

Fast forward almost 40 years to 2010. Since the 1980s, the Left had developed, in the words of George Washington University political scientist Jarol Manheim, a “network that is using shareholder resolutions and proxy voting to press American corporations to change their governance structures and social policies in ways aligned with the Progressive worldview.”

According to Manheim’s book Biz-War and the Out of Power Elite, “By one estimate in 1997 union pension funds controlled a total of $1.4 trillion [emphasis in original].” Also controlling billions of dollars of investment are left-wing foundations such as The Tides Foundation, which has funded radical environmentalism, efforts to ban guns, and the notorious Association for Community Reform Now or ACORN. Manheim writes that Tides, which had almost $150 million in net assets as of 2006, “has openly advocated policies that would advance the influence of Progressive shareholder activists.”

And hardly anything would advance that interest more than proxy access. The government employees union AFSCME has called proxy access rules “the holy grail of corporate governance.” But in reality, the shareholders these proposals would most help are leftist pressure groups – from union pension funds to George Soros-backed foundations with substantial shares of stock – at the expense of ordinary shareholders. Groups from unions to animal rights groups could run their own candidate for corporate directors and promote their special interest agendas at the company’s (and ultimately other shareholders) expense.

Even now—without “proxy access”—the public pension managers and union bosses haven’t been shy about asserting union and other social priorities that would reduce returns for their own pensioners as well as other shareholders. They’ve also used their control over worker funds in obvious efforts to aid the Democratic Party – and attempt to silence its opposition.

In 2004, when Sinclair Broadcasting was planning to air “Stolen Honor,” a documentary critical of presidential candidate John Kerry, New York’s Democrat Comptroller Alan Hevesi fired off a threatening letter to Sinclair saying that airing the program would hurt “shareholder value.” The claim was pretty dubious, as the controversy about the program would almost ensure high ratings. But Sinclair ended up airing only clips from the documentary in a news special. Ironically Hevesi, who posed as a guardian of state pension holders’ interests in Sinclair conflict, would later plead guilty to defrauding the state government and face – in the words of the New York Times — allegations that his “associates had sold access to the state’s $122 billion pension fund, using one of the world’s largest pools of assets to reward friends, pay back political favors and reap millions of dollars in cash rewards for themselves.”

Similarly, when President Bush was pushing private accounts for Social Security, the AFL-CIO threatened to pull its $400 billion fund away from any financial services company backing the accounts. “We have no intention of letting any of these companies get away with this while they manage our workers’ funds,” said top AFL-CIO lobbyist Gerald Shea, according to the Wall Street Journal. After this “pension fund blackmail,” as the Journal called it, several companies pulled out of coalitions supporting private accounts.

Other shareholder groups are pushing corporate policies that would endanger both health and American foreign policy. The radical animal-rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has sponsored shareholder resolutions to stop companies from conducting animal research for potential life-saving drugs. The left-leaning Human Rights Watch pushed Caterpillar to stop sales to Israel of bulldozers, because the dozers could be used to destroy Palestinian homes. (Not mentioned in the resolution was that many of these homes belonged to terrorists or were used to cover the entrances of arms-smuggling tunnels.) The proposal was defeated by Caterpillar’s shareholders 97 percent to 3 percent.

But under “proxy access” rules, a militant minority of less than one percent, depending on where the threshold is set, could run candidates for director on the official company proxy ballot. And these groups could be “swing votes” in close director elections. This would give corporate boards and management a huge incentive to cave to various demands of interest groups on the Left.

And many squishy CEOs would give in, cutting deals with “progressive” groups at the expense of ordinary shareholders. As I note in a new report for the Capital Research Center, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt has rarely been a target of campaigns to rein in pay of poorly performing executives, despite the fact that GE has lost almost two-thirds of its value since Immelt has been at the helm. Why? Likely because Immelt has supported liberal priorities like the energy-rationing cap and trade, and lets Leftists dominate the airwaves of GE-owned MSNBC despite abysmal ratings.

In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky admitted that his proxy tactic “will result in diminished dividends” and lower returns for middle-class investors. He even called it “corporate jujitsu.” But the negative effects on nest eggs were okay with him, because he didn’t think much of middle-class folks anyway, referring to them contemptuously as the “have-a-little-want-mores”

Radicals “are right,” Alinksy wrote, that “the values and way of life of the middle class” are “materialistic, decadent, bourgeois, degenerate, imperialistic, war-mongering, brutalized, and corrupt.” But he advised that radicals must disguise their true beliefs and appeal to the middle-class to take power for the Left. “We must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change, and the power and the people are in the big middle-class majority.”

Indeed the middle-class is where the power is. But members of this class are smarter, savvier, and more attuned to threats to the nation’s well-being than Alinsky, Obama, and other community organizers have ever given them credit for. If Democrats and/or compromising Republicans attempt to push through proxy access or any other form of Alinsky’s shareholder jujitsu, they may face an army of opposition from middle-class investors and entrepreneurs who know the principles of freedom that made this country great.