Just how nutty is ACORN?
Very, say longtime watchers of the extreme leftwing group that sprouted out of a radical 60s anti-government movement.
For decades ACORN has presented itself as a grassroots network dedicated to improving the lives of the poor.
But there’s more to ACORN than its do-gooder veneer.
Just ask the banks, corporations and politicians who’ve been the target of ACORN’s shameless shenanigans over the past 40 years.
Here’s how the tiny seed of 1960s radicalism blossomed into a well-funded, national organization with political connections reaching all the way to the White House:
THE BEGINNING
*ACORN is rooted in extreme far-left activism that wants to shut down the US government by overwhelming it with demands for welfare benefits and other forms of assistance.
“They don’t like the American system of government, and would love for it to be overthrown,” said ACORN expert Matthew Vadum, a senior editor at the conservative Capital Research Center in D.C.
“The whole goal is to transform America into a socialist country, or some form of socialist democracy. This group is dangerous.”
*Founder Wade Rathke was a student at Williams College in 1969 and a member of the leftist Students for a New Democracy group when he dropped out to protest the Vietnam War full-time.
*Rathke began working for fiery activist George Wiley, a black radical who started the National Welfare Reform Organization in 1969. NWRO was created to help poor people sign up for more welfare benefits, with the goal of clogging and eventually grinding down US government systems.
*In 1970 Rathke was charged with inciting violence by Massachussetts police after a welfare rally he was leading turned into a riot. He was then sent to Arkansas to open up a new chapter of NWRO. But he began to hear rumors that Wiley was going to oust him from the organization. So he decided to start his own group — the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN.
*In 1972 ACORN launched its first political initiative and backed two of its members who were running for the Little Rock School Board. Its efforts proved so successful that the group expanded beyond Arkansas and opened offices in Texas and South Dakota. Before long, it became a national group and started pushing its progressive political agenda.
*In 1999 Wade Rathke’s brother Dale, also a major figure at ACORN, was caught embezzling nearly $1 million from the organization. His plundering was swept under the rug after the Rathke family promised to repay the debt. Both Wade and Dale Rathke remained on the payroll and the group didn’t inform any of its board members about the theft, or contact authorities.
*In June 2008 two whistleblowers demanded a full accounting of Dale Rathke’s embezzlement, and its subsequent cover-up. When news of it broke, Dale and Wade were forced to leave the organization, which employs hundreds worldwide. Wade remains in control of ACORN International and other subsidiaries of the main group. The two dissident board members were ejected from ACORN and labeled traitors.
HOUSING AND LIVING WAGE CAMPAIGNS
*In1986 the organization created the ACORN Housing Corporation to help poor people get into homes. The members started a campaign of targeting banks and businesses for sit-ins and large protests, alleging discriminatory lending practices. Critics of ACORN say the protests were little more than shakedowns to get grant money from the banks and force them to loan more freely to low-income families.
*1993: A vice-chair at the United Missouri Bancshares told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that ACORN tried to “blackmail” his company into lending $25 million to poor neighborhoods, and demanded payment for every mortgage their loan office helped set up.
“ACORN would invade a bank’s office, yelling and screaming, and it was pretty difficult for a bank not to say, ‘OK, we’ll give you a grant, just leave us alone,'” said Hans Von Spakovsky, an analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation.
“A lot of businesses felt they had to pay up just so ACORN would leave them alone. And ACORN hasn’t come under scrutiny for it, which is unfortunate.”
*In 1995 ACORN filed a lawsuit to try and claim an exemption from paying its workers minimum wage. The group had launched several successful campaigns to raise the minimum wage across the country and advocated heavily for fair pay and union wages from for-profit corporations. But it shouldn’t have to pay its workers a living wage because it would mean hiring fewer staffers, and make employees less in tune with the needs of the poor, ACORN lawyers said.
*In 1999 angry ACORN demonstrators showed up at the campaign headquarters of Democratic Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who at that time was running for mayor of Baltimore. The group chanted “What’s the difference between slum landlords and the Aryan brotherhood?” It was a reference to campaign money they mistakenly thought O’Malley had taken from a notorious slumlord, and their belief that a white supremacist group had backed the Democrat.
*O’Malley dismissed ACORN as “professional protestors” when they targeted him again three years later. The rabble-rousers dumped garbage on the steps of Baltimore’s City Hall and then rallied on his front lawn at home. “They unloaded a busload of people shouting pretty ugly things and scared the daylights out of my wife and kids. I thought it was a pretty cruddy thing to do,” O’Malley told the Baltimore Sun in 2002.
*In 2004, ACORN abruptly flipped its position on banks — criticizing financial institutions for being too quick to grant mortgages to poor and middle-income earners who couldn’t pay back their loans. It filed a class-action lawsuit in California against Wells-Fargo Financials. In the suit, ACORN said the bank engaged in unfair and deceptive lending practices, including “bait and switch” sales tactics. The same day it filed the lawsuit, ACORN brought 2,000 of its members to downtown LA to march against Wells Fargo’s “predatory lending” and “abusive loan practices.” ACORN’s housing director Maude Hurd said then that the group was determined that the bank would not “continue to swindle and steal from our communities.”
VOTER REGISTRATION FRAUD
*In 1998 an ACORN employee was arrested for falsifying voter registration forms in Arkansas. The next year, authorities in Philadelphia confiscated hundreds of registration forms because one ACORN employee wrote them all. This was the first of many voter registration frauds that ACORN would be accused of in subsequent years.
*Since 2004, members of the activist group in as many as nine states have been charged with crimes related to voter registration fraud. To date about 50 people have been arrested, and approximately 30 have resulted in guilty pleas for ACORN-related voter fraud.
*At election offices around the country, ACORN workers are famous for waiting until registration deadline to dump thousands of new documents on overworked clerks — making it harder for them to fully vet the registration forms.
“They have a long history of voter registration fraud, I don’t think we are even close to knowing the extent of it,” said John Samples, of the Cato Institute.
“A lot of it has been discovered by cursory checks or by accident. There’s a lot more out there to be discovered.”
In 2007, Washington authorities filed felony charges against seven people who committed voter registration fraud while working for ACORN — the worst case of voter fraud in Washington’s history. The organization had to pay officials $25,000 for investigative costs.
* During the 2008 presidential campaign “Mickey Mouse” and “Donald Duck” were just some of the crazy names put on bogus voter registration forms submitted by ACORN. The group claimed to have registered 1.3 million voters, but more than 400,000 of those forms were later deemed fraudulent or incomplete by election authorities. An ACORN manager said the group hired “lazy crackheads” who needed money to collect signatures in Nevada. Convicted felons living in transitional housing in Las Vegas were recruited by ACORN organizers and were promised bonuses — which is illegal in Nevada — if they got 20 or more new voter sign ups a day. The organization was slapped with two dozen felonies by the Nevada attorney general.
*”Every time you turn over an ACORN rock, something ugly crawls out,” said Scott St. Clair, of the nonpartisan Evergreen Freedom Foundation based in Washington.
POLITICAL TIES
*ACORN claims to be non-partisan, but since the 1970s has backed mostly Democratic candidates in local, state and national elections. It has close connections with union groups around the country, most notably the Service Employees International Union, a powerful labor organization that has extensive ties to Capitol Hill.
“The Democratic Party has used them as foot soldiers, even if they claim not to be directly related to ACORN,” said Von Spakovsky.
“ACORN transfers money between its subsidiaries — and nobody knows for sure how many there are. A lot of these subsidiaries get paid by Democratic campaigns as consultants,” he said.
*In 1992 President Obama headed the Project Vote campaign — an organization affiliated with an ACORN subsidiary — to register 150,000 voters in Chicago. ACORN backed Carol Moseley Braun, the country’s first female African-American Senator.
*Barack Obama was one of the lawyers who represented ACORN in 1994 when it sued Citibank on behalf of “all persons who are African-American” and applied for a loan between 1992 and 1995. The group argued that Citibank wasn’t giving mortgages in a “race-neutral way.”
*A year later Obama again represented ACORN with a team of lawyers when the group sued Illinois, claiming the state was violating federal voting access law.
*In 2008, during the presidential primary, Obama worked with ACORN subsidiary Citizen Services Inc — a consulting firm affiliated with ACORN — to help with voter turnout. He paid the group $800,000.
THE FUTURE?
ACORN’s altruistic façade came tumbling down — possibly for good — this month after a series of videos showed staffers giving an undercover pimp and hooker tips on defrauding the government, laundering money, cheating on taxes and obtaining a mortgage to open up a home-based brothel.
The damning display put ACORN on the defensive again and even rocked its once solid base of support among Democratic lawmakers.
Both the House and Senate have passed bipartisan bills calling for an immediate halt to federal funding to ACORN, which a Republican tally puts at $53 million since 1994.
Governor David Paterson on Friday placed a hold on all state contracts with the agency’s local chapter, and the US Census Bureau kicked ACORN off its upcoming 2010 population count.
Yet ACORN needs more than just a slap on the wrist for encouraging people to commit mortgage and tax fraud, according to Von Spakovsky, a former Department of Justice investigator. The activist organization has yet to be held accountable for most of its actions — past and present, he said.
“Nobody knows for sure how many subsidiaries ACORN has, but many investigations have shown they’re mostly shell groups, used to transfer money around,” said Von Spakovsky.
“We’ll only know the true extent of their wrongdoing when the Department of Justice does a forensic audit, and we find out where those millions in federal funds have gone,” he said.