ACORN and the $700 Billion bailout

[96Qowner]

Remember that Obama was a "community organizer"? What a wonderful thing that is, eh? The kind-hearted Barack Obama helps poor Blacks on Chicago's South side get their rights.

At least a few news reports have briefly mentioned Obama’s role in training Acorn’s leaders, but none that I know of have said what Foulkes reports next: that Obama’s long service with Acorn led many members to serve as the volunteer shock troops of Obama’s early political campaigns — his initial 1996 State Senate campaign, and his failed bid for Congress in 2000 (Foulkes confuses the dates of these two campaigns.) With Obama having personally helped train a new cadre of Chicago Acorn leaders, by the time of Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate campaign, Obama and Acorn were “old friends,” says Foulkes.

So along with the reservoir of political support that came to Obama through his close ties with Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, and other Chicago black churches, Chicago Acorn appears to have played a major role in Obama’s political advance. Sure enough, a bit of digging into Obama’s years in the Illinois State Senate indicates strong concern with Acorn’s signature issues, as well as meetings with Acorn and the introduction by Obama of Acorn-friendly legislation on the living wage and banking practices. You begin to wonder whether, in his Springfield days, Obama might have best been characterized as “the Senator from Acorn.”

From page 3

http://article.nationalreview....E0ODI=

Great article with tons of links for those who might be curious about ACORN. On page 4 there's this:

Important as these questions of funding and partisanship are, the larger point is that Obama’s ties to Acorn — arguably the most politically radical large-scale activist group in the country — are wide, deep, and longstanding. If Acorn is adept at creating a non-partisan, inside-game veneer for what is in fact an intensely radical, leftist, and politically partisan reality, so is Obama himself. This is hardly a coincidence: Obama helped train Acorn’s leaders in how to play this game. For the most part, Obama seems to have favored the political-insider strategy, yet it’s clear that he knew how to play the in-your-face “direct action” game as well. And surely during his many years of close association with Acorn, Obama had to know what the group was all about.

The shame of it is that when the L. A. Times returned to Obama’s stomping grounds, it found the park he’d helped renovate reclaimed by drug dealers and thugs. The community organizer strategy may generate feel-good moments and best-selling books, but I suspect a Wal-Mart as the seed-bed of a larger shopping complex would have done far more to save the neighborhood where Obama worked to organize in the “progressive” fashion. Unfortunately, Obama’s Acorn cronies have blocked that solution.

On Thursday, Sep 25th, the day McCain announced the suspension of his campaign and his return to Washington to attend to the bailout bill, Sen. Lindsey Graham, McCain's good friend and associate had this to say:

"Twenty percent of the money that should go to retire debt that will be created to solve this problem winds up in a housing organization called ACORN that is an absolute ill-run enterprise, and I can’t believe we would take money away from debt retirement to put it in a housing program that doesn’t work.”

http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?entry=9387

For those that would like a preview of the controversy to come, here are a couple sites listing several articles on ACORN and the bailout:

http://beltwayblips.com/story/...ilout/

http://wordpress.com/tag/acorn-bailout/

Yup, Obama got his start in politics working for ACORN.

ACORN is another community-organizing network with Alinskyian roots. Before going off to law school in the early 90s, Obama directed ACORN’s partner organization, Project Vote. Meeting with ACORN leaders in November, he reminded them of this, saying, “I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”ACORN, an acronym for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, considers itself the nation’s largest community organization. Its Political Action Committee, ACORN Votes, announced its endorsement of Senator Obama’s run for the US presidency in February 2008.

http://www.speroforum.com/site...15363

Uh huh, this is surely admirable. This is surely the kind of guy we want running the country. What a great guy that Obama is.

[audtatious]

Which has pretty much been what I've stated all along

[96Qowner]

Which has pretty much been what I've stated all along

Yep! I remembered you posting it, and when I heard that ACORN was prominently featured in the bailout bill, I flipped! Oh ... my ... gawd!

[Sentientbydesign]

I just recently received an email mentioning William Ayers, terrorism, and ACORN.

Can anybody shed some true light on the situation? I'm not looking for partisan opinions. I'm just hoping that some truth can be brought to the surface.

Just so everybody knows, both "lead" candidates scare me...I was in a Panda Express earlier and just the people around me with their depressed, shallow expressions scared me... Seems like too many people with amazing power and very little intelligence to steer it.

[96Qowner]

Ayres is old news and a bit of a cheap shot, IMO. He was an important part of the old Weather Underground, responsible for violent protest and bombings way back in the 70s. He helped introduce Obama into politics.

Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...ation)

But ACORN played a far larger role in introducing the wunderkind Obama. VERY ugly stuff - still active. Read the articles and links I provided and you'll learn everything there is to know about them.

[96Qowner]

So, now we're learning that Ayers wasn't just a cheap shot. First, Obama works for ACORN, then Ayers hires him to Chair the CAC, which funneled $160 million to organizations which were supposed to improve education, but which used the funds to further their own small-c communist objectives (quote from Ayers).

Here's more on ACORN, who Obama began working for in 1992, three years before Ayers hired him to Chair the CAC. Keep in mind that ACORN has received payments of nearly a million dollars from the Barack Obama Campaign in 2008. Apparently the payments were funneled through Citizens Services Inc., and may have been falsely reported to the FEC.

Voter Fraud• Since 1998, ACORN and Project Vote employees were implicated in voter registration fraud allegations in more than a dozen states.• In 2003, ACORN employees in Missouri turned in a batch of thousands of registration forms —of which only about 40 percent were valid, with another 1,000 believed to be attempts to register voters illegally.• Following Colorado’s 2004 election, two ex-ACORN employees were convicted of perjury for submitting false voter registration forms; one ex-ACORN employee admitted to registering her friends 40 times.• In 2004, police pulled over a former ACORN employee who had more than 300 voter registration cards in the trunk of his car, many of which had not been turned in within the legal time limit.• In 2005, Virginia authorities found that of a sample of Project Vote-gathered registrations, 83% were rejected for using false or questionable information.• In 2007, King County, Washington officials announced the indictment of seven workers ACORN had hired to register voters, calling the episode the “worst case of voter registration fraud in the history of the state.” At least three of those individuals have pleaded guilty and ACORN was forced to pay a $25,000 settlement.• In 2008, federal authorities announced that eight former ACORN voter registration employees pleaded guilty to federal election fraud for submitting false registration cards during the 2006 election.• In June 2008, ninety completed voter-registration applications were stolen from ACORN’s offices in Las Cruces, New Mexico. ACORN’s record in New Mexico includes registering a 13-year-old to vote in 2004, and the submission of 3,000 potentially fraudulent signatures by four of its employees in 2005. A sheriff said plainly that, “It’s safe to say the forgery was widespread.”• In March 2008, Philadelphia officials sought an investigation into ACORN’s voter registration program because they “were fed up with false applications gumming up the works” and “specifically accused” ACORN of turning in bad paperwork.• In June 2008, a Project Vote spokesman acknowledged that 35 percent of the cards turned into Louisiana officials were duplicates. One woman, for instance, had five cards turned in for her, though she didn’t complete them.• On July 6, 2008, authorities in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania announced the investigation of more than 100 voter registration cards submitted by ACORN, including instances where voters say they never filled out a document.• On July 7, 2008 the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that a Clark County, Nevada official “sees rampant fraud in the 2,000 to 3,000 registrations ACORN turns in every week.”

http://www.consumersrightsleag...l.pdf

Is Barry about to steal the election through voter fraud, perpetrated by his long-time buddies, ACORN?

[audtatious]

The deal is......Obama supporters would care less if he had Charles Manson on his staff.

[96Qowner]

Another great article on Obama and ACORN, if you have the time to read it - I recommend you do. It even has relevance to the collapse of Freddie and Fannie and its harm to our economy:

Obama has spent a large portion of his professional life working for ACORN or its subsidiaries, representing ACORN as a lawyer on some of its most critical issues, and training ACORN leaders. Stanley Kurtz's excellent National Review article, "Inside Obama's Acorn." also describes Obama's ACORN connection in detail. But I can't improve on Obama's own words:

"I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career (emphasis added). Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work." - Barack Obama, Speech to ACORN, November 2007 (Courtesy Newsmax.)

In another excellent article on Obama's ACORN connections, Newsmax asks a nagging question:

It would be telling to know if Obama, during his years at Columbia, had occasion to meet Cloward and study the Cloward-Piven Strategy.

I ask you, is it possible ACORN would train Obama to take leadership positions within ACORN without telling him what he was training for? Is it possible ACORN would put Obama in leadership positions without clueing him into what his purpose was?? Is it possible that this most radical of organizations would put someone in charge of training its trainers, without him knowing what it was he was training them for?

As a community activist for ACORN; as a leadership trainer for ACORN; as a lead organizer for ACORN's Project Vote; as an attorney representing ACORN's successful efforts to impose Motor Voter regulations in Illinois; as ACORN's representative in lobbying for the expansion of high risk housing loans through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that led to the current crisis; as a recipient of their assistance in his political campaigns -- both with money and campaign workers; it is doubtful that he was unaware of ACORN's true goals. It is doubtful he was unaware of the Cloward-Piven Strategy.

Fast-forward to 2005 when an obsequious, servile and scraping Daniel Mudd, CEO of Fannie Mae spoke at the Congressional Black Caucus swearing in ceremony for newly-elected Illinois Senator, Barack Obama. Mudd called, the Congressional Black Caucus "our family" and "the conscience of Fannie Mae."

In 2005, Republicans sought to rein in Fannie and Freddie. Senator John McCain was at the forefront of that effort. But it failed due to an intense lobbying effort put forward by Fannie and Freddie.

http://www.americanthinker.com....html

[96Qowner]

The "Cloward-Piven Strategy":

The Strategy was first elucidated in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation magazine by a pair of radical socialist Columbia University professors, Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. David Horowitz summarizes it as:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Cloward and Piven were inspired by radical organizer [and Hillary Clinton mentor] Saul Alinsky:

"Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist one. (Courtesy Discover the Networks.org)

Newsmax rounds out the picture:

Their strategy to create political, financial, and social chaos that would result in revolution blended Alinsky concepts with their more aggressive efforts at bringing about a change in U.S. government. To achieve their revolutionary change, Cloward and Piven sought to use a cadre of aggressive organizers assisted by friendly news media to force a re-distribution of the nation's wealth.

In their Nation article, Cloward and Piven were specific about the kind of "crisis" they were trying to create:

By crisis, we mean a publicly visible disruption in some institutional sphere. Crisis can occur spontaneously (e.g., riots) or as the intended result of tactics of demonstration and protest which either generate institutional disruption or bring unrecognized disruption to public attention.

No matter where the strategy is implemented, it shares the following features:

1. The offensive organizes previously unorganized groups eligible for government benefits but not currently receiving all they can. 2. The offensive seeks to identify new beneficiaries and/or create new benefits. 3. The overarching aim is always to impose new stresses on target systems, with the ultimate goal of forcing their collapse.

Capitalizing on the racial unrest of the 1960s, Cloward and Piven saw the welfare system as their first target. They enlisted radical black activist George Wiley, who created the National Welfare Reform Organization (NWRO) to implement the strategy. Wiley hired militant foot soldiers to storm welfare offices around the country, violently demanding their "rights." According to a City Journal article by Sol Stern, welfare rolls increased from 4.3 million to 10.8 million by the mid-1970s as a result, and in New York City, where the strategy had been particularly successful, "one person was on the welfare rolls... for every two working in the city's private economy."

According to another City Journal article titled "Compassion Gone Mad":

The movement's impact on New York City was jolting: welfare caseloads, already climbing 12 percent a year in the early sixties, rose by 50 percent during Lindsay's first two years; spending doubled... The city had 150,000 welfare cases in 1960; a decade later it had 1.5 million.

The vast expansion of welfare in New York City that came of the NWRO's Cloward-Piven tactics sent the city into bankruptcy in 1975. Rudy Giuliani cited Cloward and Piven by name as being responsible for "an effort at economic sabotage." He also credited Cloward-Piven with changing the cultural attitude toward welfare from that of a temporary expedient to a lifetime entitlement, an attitude which in-and-of-itself has caused perhaps the greatest damage of all.

Cloward and Piven looked at this strategy as a gold mine of opportunity. Within the newly organized groups, each offensive would find an ample pool of foot soldier recruits willing to advance its radical agenda at little or no pay, and expand its base of reliable voters, legal or otherwise. The radicals' threatening tactics also would accrue an intimidating reputation, providing a wealth of opportunities for extorting monetary and other concessions from the target organizations. In the meantime, successful offensives would create an ever increasing drag on society. As they gleefully observed:

Moreover, this kind of mass influence is cumulative because benefits are continuous. Once eligibility for basic food and rent grants is established, the drain on local resources persists indefinitely.

The next time you drive through one of the many blighted neighborhoods in our cities, or read of the astronomical crime, drug addiction, and out-of-wedlock birth rates, or consider the failed schools, strapped police and fire resources of every major city, remember Cloward and Piven's thrill that "...the drain on local resources persists indefinitely."

(From the source listed above)

[96Qowner]

The deal is......Obama supporters would care less if he had Charles Manson on his staff.

Yeah, they already admit they don't think a President needs to have experience.