lmart (Guest)(302 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

this is what is wrong with the world ignorant people.... i really want to see you guys working the fields or cleaning business, you say mexicans taking jobs that you can be working well by all means go right ahead and work it...and mexican that have good jobs they work for it.. and i agree with Miriam mexican who talk crap about there own raice like Ms Melinda its whats wrong i'm mexican and proud of it as a citizen and a voter of the united states i'm dissapointed in what came out of you. you should be proud of were you came from HELLO were you think your grandparents are from Educate por favor... Osea tu eres la naca ni a los talones me llegas... por favor huvicate...

jovita villalpando(350 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

as an american i am againsnt legalization! we dont need 20 million illegals that are going to bring in 50 more million people to the usa! if an illegal has an american child that illegal qualifies for welfare, food stamps, free education for the kid thats not an american, medicaid, free school lunch, free childcare and many other benefits! first of all mexicans and others that come from other latin countries are uneducated and poor! they come here and are still poor but are going to be on food stamps and medicaid for the rest of their lives. we dont need this! mexican government has to be responsible for their masses and not send them here as drones for their country. stop giving illegal aliens jobs and stop automatic citizenship my government is aiding and abetting illegals and i am upset for that but something needs to change! no immigration reform, no dream act! ice do you your and mr president build that wall!

Guest(364 - days ago)Page: Patricia Watkins

god bless you

dheera.sujan@rnw.nl(383 - days ago)Page: Pam Chamberlain

I am a producer with Radio Netherlands The Dutch International Service which broadcasts around the world and has a particularly heavy presence in the US via NPR. I produce a human rights programme called The State We're In, in which we look at people's rights. At the moment, I am working on a programme about forced sterilizations.

I would liketo find someone who can talk about her own experience of forced sterilizations.

I would be most grateful for an email or phone number of someone I could talk to in further detail about this.

Regards


Dheera Sujan

Senior Producer,

Radio Netherlands Worldwide

PO Box 222

1200 JG Hilversum

The Netherlands

Ph: 31 35 6724284

email: dheera.sujan@rnw.nl

Miguel Angel Rodriguez(402 - days ago)Page: Your Opinion Matters

Obama and ACORN: You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide


Monday, October 6, 2008 7:26 PM


By: Lowell Ponte Article Font Size







Barack Obama is running as fast and as far away from his association with the radical group ACORN as he can, but he can’t hide from the facts of his close relationship with the organization. ACORN, or Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, describes itself as a “non-partisan” group devoted to helping the poor and to registering millions to vote. Critics accuse ACORN of involvement vote fraud, voter intimidation, shakedowns against businesses, and the promotion of socialist class hatred and class warfare. Apparently worried by the connection between Obama and the group, his campaign has put claims of his ties to ACORN as the lead item on its “Fight The Smears” Web site — a site the Obama campaign created to counter what they claim are partisan lies made up against their candidate. The release on the Obama site reads: “When Obama met with ACORN leaders in November, he reminded them of his history with ACORN and his beginnings in Illinois as a Project Vote organizer, a nonprofit focused on voter rights and education. Senator Obama said, ‘I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That's what I did for three and half years before I went to law school. That's the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize. “So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. 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.” Indeed, Obama was being far too modest. The 2008 Democratic presidential nominee had worked not just alongside ACORN, but also as a key operative for the organization. He was its lawyer in several pivotal ACORN cases. Obama funded a number of its activities, as well. When he sat on the board of the prestigious Woods Fund for Chicago alongside former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, he oversaw and approved many grants for ACORN. As the National Review’s Stanley Kurtz reported, one Woods committee report boasted that the fund’s “non-ideological” public image “enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government ‘establishments’ without undue risk of being accused of partisanship.” Obama was the Illinois director of ACORN’s controversial voter registration operation, and he trained the group’s leaders in the ways of radical, sometimes illegal, confrontational politics. He also paid ACORN affiliates during his recent Democratic primary contest. For example, leading up to the 2008 Ohio Democratic Primary, Obama’s campaign between Feb. 25 and March 17 paid Citizens Services, Inc., a subsidiary of ACORN, $832,598, apparently for get-out-the-vote activities. Obama’s mysterious, shrouded past as a “community organizer” is closely tied to ACORN, a group that supplies a large share of the Democratic Party political shock troops responsible for the party’s recapture of Congress in 2006. ACORN has at least 350,000 dues-paying member families, and more than 800 chapters spread among at least 104 U.S. cities as well as in Canada, Mexico, Argentina, and Peru. To outsiders, Obama’s “long service with ACORN led many of its members to serve as the voluntary shock troops of Obama’s early political campaigns — his initial 1996 State Senate campaign, and his failed bid for Congress in 2000,” wrote Kurtz. “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.’” ACORN’s Radical Roots ACORN’s four co-founders were 1960s New Leftists. One was George Wiley, whose National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) members practiced confrontation politics, e.g., swarming into welfare offices and bullying social workers. The second ACORN co-founder was NWRO organizer Gary Delgado. Wiley made no secret that he followed the radical tactics proposed in the far-left The Nation Magazine by socialist Columbia University scholars Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who argued that American capitalism could be bankrupted and destroyed by overloading our system with ever-rising costs and bureaucratic demands. (In 1996, President Bill Clinton invited Cloward and Piven to the White House as honored guests.) ACORN’s other founders and longtime bosses were former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist Wade Rathke, a close NWRO ally, and his brother Dale. “We are the majority, forged from all minorities,” proclaimed ACORN’s founding 1970 “People’s Platform” manifesto. “We are the masses of many, not the forces of few…. We will wait no longer for the crumbs at America’s door. We will not be meek, but mighty.” In ACORN, the Rathkes replaced Cloward-Piven tactics designed to overthrow capitalist America with the confrontational-but-compromising tactics of Chicago socialist Saul Alinsky. “Instead of trying to overturn ‘the system — to blow it up, as Wiley wanted to do, ACORN burrows deep within the system,” wrote Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern, adding, “taking over its power and using its institutions for its own purposes, like a political ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’” The Rathkes first established ACORN as the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now and struck a personal deal with that state’s liberal Republican then-Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller, who reportedly paid the newly-sprouted ACORN $5,000 in cash to register voters. “Of course, they thought we were going to register Republicans,” Delgado later boasted. “We did not register a single Republican voter in that election. However, we did use those resources early on to build the organization.” Obama, ACORN, and Vote Fraud Selectively adding millions of Democratic names to the voter rolls remains one of ACORN’s most lucrative activities, for which this organization has been given millions of dollars by organized labor, non-profit foundations, and Democratic-controlled government agencies. Because Obama had worked closely with one of its leaders, Madeline Talbott, ACORN, in 1995, specifically sought out this radical young lawyer to help craft its lawsuit to impose President Bill Clinton’s 1993 National Voter Registration Act, nicknamed “Motor Voter,” according to Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes. Obama’s ACORN lawsuit won, thereby slapping aside state officials who resisted Motor Voter because of what it soon proved to be: a 12-lane superhighway to massive vote fraud. The Motor Voter law required bureaucrats at welfare offices, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and other government offices to register as voters those who used their services. “Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship,” wrote Wall Street Journal reporter John Fund in his book “Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy.” “States also had to permit mail-in voter registrations, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election official.” Those who took advantage of government services such as welfare were disproportionately likely to vote for the Big Government party. Motor Voter also made it more difficult to purge voter rolls of fraudulent registrations. Motor Voter, wrote Fund, “fueled an explosion of phantom voters.” But in Barack Obama’s Democrat-ruled Chicago, phantom voters and voting graveyards are nothing new. Motor Voter was the Clinton administration’s attempt permanently to tilt voter rolls in favor of the Democratic Party. And Obama, working for ACORN, played a key role in imposing this law. Perhaps thanks to ACORN’s and Motor Voter’s influence, of the 19 foreign terrorists who attacked America on 9/11, at least six were registered to vote. In 1992, Obama took time off as a lawyer to direct Project Vote, ACORN’s voter mobilization entity, statewide in Illinois. Project Vote added an estimated 125,000 names to voter rolls, which helped propel Democrat Carol Moseley Braun into the same U.S. Senate seat Obama now holds. Nationwide, ACORN’s Project Vote claims to have helped register more than 4 million voters in low-income and minority neighborhoods. Project Vote’s tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status prohibits its involvement in partisan political activity, but one of its leaders told Foundation Watch that “lots of grass-roots members” are assisting the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. ACORN, wrote Foundation Watch investigators Elias Crim and Matthew Vadum last June, has a “record of highly-publicized voter fraud allegations” lodged against it “in Ohio (2004), Wisconsin (2004), Florida (2004), New Mexico (2004), Colorado (2005), Missouri (2006), and Washington State (2007).” They could have named other states as well. In 2006, in Missouri’s U.S. Senate race, Republican incumbent James Talent lost by about 50,000 votes to Democrat Claire McCaskill. “A sizeable portion of that margin,” wrote columnist Carl Horowitz, “was attributable to ACORN organizers submitting phony or at least suspicious voter-registration cards to election officials in the St. Louis and Kansas City metro areas. Several ACORN members in Kansas City were indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office just prior to Election Day, and eventually pleaded guilty. [Wade] Rathke, not one for subtlety, called City of St. Louis election officials ‘slop buckets’ when they questioned the veracity of ACORN-submitted forms.” And who was Missouri state auditor during 2006, responsible at a statewide level for overseeing the honesty of voter registration? “That,” wrote Horowitz, “would be Claire McCaskill.” And Sen. McCaskill is one of Obama’s most ardent supporters. In Florida, ACORN’s 2004 Miami-Dade field director, Mac Stuart, according to David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks.org investigation, “has testified that fraud is standard procedure for ACORN/Project Vote canvassers — behavior that is not only tolerated, but encouraged by supervisors.” Stuart reportedly told investigators: “[T]he voter registration project has been operating illegally since it started.” In 2005, Virginia authorities sampled Project Vote registrations and rejected 83 percent of them for containing false or questionable information... In Washington state, five ACORN employees were convicted in 2007 in what its Secretary of State Sam Reed called “the worst case of election fraud in our state’s history. It was an outrage.” In this state the current Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire was elected literally by a handful of votes, but 450 apparently fictitious names were found registered to vote as Democrats at a single address. At least 1,700 ACORN voter registrations — using the names of Harry Reid, Dennis Hastert, and movie and sports stars — were later revoked in just one county of the state. In Nevada, the state most likely to decide the 2008 presidential election, the Las Vegas Review-Journal last July 7 reported that a Clark County official “sees rampant fraud in the 2,000 to 3,000 registrations ACORN turns in every week.” ACORN, of course, blames a handful of overzealous activists or mercenaries for acts of voter registration fraud. ACORN denies that it condones or encourages any illegal behavior. Intimidation Politics Incidentally, Obama’s ACORN comrade Madeline Talbott, according to Kurtz, “was so impressed by Obama’s organizing skills that she invited him to help train her own staff.” In 1997, notes Kurtz, Talbott was “a key leader” of 200 ACORN protestors who on July 31 tried to storm a Chicago City Council session. These ACORN demonstrators, wrote Kurtz, reportedly “pushed over a metal detector and table used to screen visitors, backed police against the doors to the council chamber, and blocked late-arriving aldermen and city staff from entering the session….almost certainly a deliberate bit of what radicals call ‘direct action,’ orchestrated by ACORN’s Madeline Talbott,” who was “led away handcuffed, charged with mob action and disorderly conduct.” Obama has never been led away in handcuffs for radical behavior. But, notes Kurtz, Obama has used groups of ominously angry activists to intimidate and pressure local officials. A newspaper photo of Obama in his “community organizer” days shows him next to activist group the Developing Communities Project (DCP) posters that read: “It’s a power thing.” The ACORN organizer manual likewise declares, “This is a mass organization directed at political power where might makes right.” Obama supporters in 2008 have angrily demonstrated against, and shared information intended to disrupt, a radio talk show in Chicago that has had Kurtz as a guest. This could be a foretaste of how intimidation might be used to stifle criticism of a President Obama administration. Money-Hungry ACORN By the 1980s, ACORN was expanding its horizons from voter registration to housing. “In 1985, ACORN illegally seized 25 abandoned buildings owned by New York City and installed squatters as residents,” recounted a New York Post editorial. “A weak-kneed City Hall eventually gave the group title to the buildings — proving that crime can pay.” In 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed the Community Redevelopment Act (CRA), which, in retrospect, was the opening wedge for what now threatens to become a government takeover of all housing in America. Under Carter’s administration, the domestic Peace Corps government entity VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, gave a federal grant of $470,000 to ACORN to train volunteers to help low-income citizens. A later congressional investigation found that ACORN illegally used this money for labor organizing. According to ACORN co-founder Delgado, after two of “their own,” Sam Brown and Marjorie Tabankin, became directors of Carter’s ACTION agency and VISTA program, “over 3 million dollars was funneled directly to ACORN” and other left-wing organizations. After the Clinton administration gave a grant worth more than $1 million to ACORN Housing Corp, an investigation by the inspector general of AmeriCorps found that AHC used government funds to register low-income persons for paid ACORN memberships, in violation of federal law. Apparently this taxpayer money was given only to those poor people who agreed to pay $60 immediately back to ACORN. By the infiltration of ideological comrades into positions of power at government agencies, ACORN became the recipient of a flood of taxpayer-funded grants, including some worth millions of dollars. AHC alone between 1997 and 2006 received more than $11,230,000 in public funds. In 2005 alone, according to Department of Labor disclosure statements, labor leaders reportedly paid more than $2.4 million to ACORN in gifts, grants, and fees for organizing work. Mandatory family membership dues bring ACORN another $3 million or so per year. But foundations and churches, boasted Wade Rathke in 2004, account for less than half the revenue ACORN pockets from corporations that had been the targets of successful ACORN protest campaigns. ACORN and Today’s Credit Crisis President Carter’s CRA and related laws were repeatedly expanded to require lending institutions to avoid “redlining” policies that denied home loans to those in minority neighborhoods. Obama was one of many lawyers who profited from successfully suing on grounds that discrimination was the reason an African-American was denied a home loan. Banks and other lenders needed not only public good will but also the cooperation of government regulators to approve mergers and other business activities. Expanding laws such as CRA meant that if ACORN accused a bank of racial discrimination and unleashed protestors against it, however unjustly, that bank might suddenly face very unfriendly government regulators. Banks were thus set up to be easy victims for ACORN shakedowns, and paying protection money became necessary for bank survival. “The same corporations that pay ransom to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pay ransom to ACORN,” said Robert L. Woodson, President of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. “The 2000 tax return for the ACORN Housing Corporation,” reported the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), “disclosed grants from Bank of America, Fleet Services Corporation, Fannie Mae Foundation, Chase Manhattan Foundation, and Well Fargo Foundation totaling $4,752,198.” And AHC is just one of 100 arms of the ACORN octopus. “The banks know they are being held up,” one financial industry consultant told EPI researchers, “but they are not going to fight over this. They look at it as a cost of doing business.” Politicians and left-wing activist groups including ACORN were doing more than shaking down lending institutions for their own profit. They also demanded that lending standards be loosened for those in the underclass who tend to vote Democratic. With a large political gun aimed at their heads, banks commenced making hundreds of thousands of what they called “Ninja” — no income, no job, no assets — loans to minorities who previously would have been deemed uncreditworthy. Knowing that many of these loans they were coerced to make would go bad, many lending institutions bundled them into new types of investment packages and sold them to shed risk. The giant quasi-governmental lending institutions Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, both largely run by Democratic appointees, became sources of funding for groups such as ACORN that aided Democratic politicians — and promoters of high-risk subprime home loans. Democratic executives at these institutions, such as former Clinton administration member and Fannie Mae chair and chief executive officer, Franklin Raines, arranged to have their incomes increase with the amount of lending their institutions did. In six years of recklessly having Fanny Mae assume an astronomical burden of risk, Raines pushed his own income above $90 million. As former federal prosecutor James H. Walsh recounted in a Sept. 22 Newsmax.com article, Raines was an adviser to Obama until recent national financial problems made Raines too risky to embrace. [Editor's Note: Read “Obama, Voter Fraud & Mortgage Meltdown” — Go Here Now]. Obama, noted Walsh, had been “the Senate’s second-largest recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” Is ACORN troubled by what many are calling a credit meltdown and the likelihood that many minority homeowners may lose their homes? Probably not, because the ideological aim of ACORN’s radical founders was to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism. In the current financial situation, government will get bigger, free markets will become less free, and vast amounts of capital will shift from private companies to government. For those like Barack Obama who share ACORN’s ideology, the situation is perfect — heads, government wins; tails, capitalism loses. If people keep their homes, many will naively thank the Democratic politicians and left-wing activists who caused their problems in the first place. If poor people lose their homes, they will be that much easier for ACORN to brainwash with class hatred against evil capitalists. And lest we forget, the first think that congressional Democrats put into their proposed “bailout package” to solve the financial crisis was a permanent slush fund to be extracted from capitalist institutions that would start growing at more than $20 million. The beneficiaries of this now-deleted slush fund were to have been radical Democrat-allied organizations such as ACORN. Greedy Lefists The Rathkes commingled ACORN’s socialist redistribute-the-wealth ideology with their own hypocrisy and personal greed. From ACORN, they spun off approximately 100 other legal entities. They then created a shell game under which money acquired by one ACORN front group, e.g., Project Vote, would be moved to other ACORN-controlled groups, in some cases to acquire property. One former Arkansas ACORN chair, Dorothy Perkins, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, described the organization as “building up a land portfolio” that was supposed to “translate to money and power for the national organization.” But that money was “never seen” by the poor people ACORN claimed to serve, she said, and “all the money ended up” under Wade Rathke’s control. Rathke, she said, ran ACORN “like a Jim Jones cult.” Relatively little of the redistributed wealth of Rathke’s ACORN conglomerate trickled down to the poor, and comparatively little went to the organization’s thousands of full-time “community organizers.” Typical pay was $25,000 a year or less, for which ACORN employees were expected to work 54 hours or more per week, weekends included. In 2006, ACORN required many of its workers in Missouri to sign an agreement that they would be “working up to 80 hours over seven days of work.” ACORN went to court in California, arguing unsuccessfully that it should be exempt from minimum wage laws. But in recent years, ACORN has staged many demonstrations to demand a “living wage,” typically a minimum of $12 or more per hour, for minimum wage workers. According to Mac Stuart, ACORN collected more than $4 for each completed, and illegally copied, voter registration. Its workers who found people and submitted their registrations were paid only $2, with ACORN and the Rathkes pocketing the difference. But ACORN had many other sources for its annual $37.5 million budget, including millions in government and foundation grants. ACORN head Wade Rathke was also chief organizer of a New Orleans local of one of America’s most radical labor unions, the Service Employee’s International Union (SEIU), and ACORN was a close ally of organized labor. Unions sometimes paid ACORN to have its low-paid workers march with picket signs pretending to be striking union members. When ACORN workers, as well as those in his SEIU union local, tried to form their own unions to bargain for higher wages and shorter hours, Rathke successfully used a wide array of union-busting techniques to stop them — the same kinds of techniques he routinely condemned other businesses for using. But the Rathkes fell from power in 2008 shortly before The New York Times on July 9 reported that in 1999-2000 Dale Rathke, then ACORN’s chief financial officer, had diverted $948,607 from ACORN and affiliated charitable organization accounts. Other ACORN officials in 2001 reportedly obtained a restitution agreement from Wade Rathke to repay the missing funds in $30,000 per-year installments. ACORN, meanwhile, continued to pay Wade Rathke considerably more than $30,000 each year, in effect covering these repayments, while Dale Rathke’s apparent embezzlement of almost a million dollars — in contributions to help the poor — was kept secret from the public and from those funding ACORN. “How did ACORN handle the crime?” asked a July 13 New York Post editorial. “By disguising it on the books as a loan from one of its contractors….” and only letting Rathke go “when word of his fraud leaked to donors…. most of the people who covered up the embezzlement are still working for ACORN.” “We thought it best at the time to protect the organizations,” said ACORN President Maude Hurd. “We did what we thought was right.” Or what served the interests of the left. Welcome to ACORN, the organization that made Barack Obama what he is today, and that may make him president of the United States.

Miguel Angel Rodriguez(402 - days ago)Page: Closing the Gap

Obama and ACORN: You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide


Monday, October 6, 2008 7:26 PM


By: Lowell Ponte Article Font Size







Barack Obama is running as fast and as far away from his association with the radical group ACORN as he can, but he can’t hide from the facts of his close relationship with the organization. ACORN, or Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, describes itself as a “non-partisan” group devoted to helping the poor and to registering millions to vote. Critics accuse ACORN of involvement vote fraud, voter intimidation, shakedowns against businesses, and the promotion of socialist class hatred and class warfare. Apparently worried by the connection between Obama and the group, his campaign has put claims of his ties to ACORN as the lead item on its “Fight The Smears” Web site — a site the Obama campaign created to counter what they claim are partisan lies made up against their candidate. The release on the Obama site reads: “When Obama met with ACORN leaders in November, he reminded them of his history with ACORN and his beginnings in Illinois as a Project Vote organizer, a nonprofit focused on voter rights and education. Senator Obama said, ‘I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That's what I did for three and half years before I went to law school. That's the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize. “So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. 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.” Indeed, Obama was being far too modest. The 2008 Democratic presidential nominee had worked not just alongside ACORN, but also as a key operative for the organization. He was its lawyer in several pivotal ACORN cases. Obama funded a number of its activities, as well. When he sat on the board of the prestigious Woods Fund for Chicago alongside former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, he oversaw and approved many grants for ACORN. As the National Review’s Stanley Kurtz reported, one Woods committee report boasted that the fund’s “non-ideological” public image “enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government ‘establishments’ without undue risk of being accused of partisanship.” Obama was the Illinois director of ACORN’s controversial voter registration operation, and he trained the group’s leaders in the ways of radical, sometimes illegal, confrontational politics. He also paid ACORN affiliates during his recent Democratic primary contest. For example, leading up to the 2008 Ohio Democratic Primary, Obama’s campaign between Feb. 25 and March 17 paid Citizens Services, Inc., a subsidiary of ACORN, $832,598, apparently for get-out-the-vote activities. Obama’s mysterious, shrouded past as a “community organizer” is closely tied to ACORN, a group that supplies a large share of the Democratic Party political shock troops responsible for the party’s recapture of Congress in 2006. ACORN has at least 350,000 dues-paying member families, and more than 800 chapters spread among at least 104 U.S. cities as well as in Canada, Mexico, Argentina, and Peru. To outsiders, Obama’s “long service with ACORN led many of its members to serve as the voluntary shock troops of Obama’s early political campaigns — his initial 1996 State Senate campaign, and his failed bid for Congress in 2000,” wrote Kurtz. “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.’” ACORN’s Radical Roots ACORN’s four co-founders were 1960s New Leftists. One was George Wiley, whose National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) members practiced confrontation politics, e.g., swarming into welfare offices and bullying social workers. The second ACORN co-founder was NWRO organizer Gary Delgado. Wiley made no secret that he followed the radical tactics proposed in the far-left The Nation Magazine by socialist Columbia University scholars Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who argued that American capitalism could be bankrupted and destroyed by overloading our system with ever-rising costs and bureaucratic demands. (In 1996, President Bill Clinton invited Cloward and Piven to the White House as honored guests.) ACORN’s other founders and longtime bosses were former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist Wade Rathke, a close NWRO ally, and his brother Dale. “We are the majority, forged from all minorities,” proclaimed ACORN’s founding 1970 “People’s Platform” manifesto. “We are the masses of many, not the forces of few…. We will wait no longer for the crumbs at America’s door. We will not be meek, but mighty.” In ACORN, the Rathkes replaced Cloward-Piven tactics designed to overthrow capitalist America with the confrontational-but-compromising tactics of Chicago socialist Saul Alinsky. “Instead of trying to overturn ‘the system — to blow it up, as Wiley wanted to do, ACORN burrows deep within the system,” wrote Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern, adding, “taking over its power and using its institutions for its own purposes, like a political ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’” The Rathkes first established ACORN as the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now and struck a personal deal with that state’s liberal Republican then-Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller, who reportedly paid the newly-sprouted ACORN $5,000 in cash to register voters. “Of course, they thought we were going to register Republicans,” Delgado later boasted. “We did not register a single Republican voter in that election. However, we did use those resources early on to build the organization.” Obama, ACORN, and Vote Fraud Selectively adding millions of Democratic names to the voter rolls remains one of ACORN’s most lucrative activities, for which this organization has been given millions of dollars by organized labor, non-profit foundations, and Democratic-controlled government agencies. Because Obama had worked closely with one of its leaders, Madeline Talbott, ACORN, in 1995, specifically sought out this radical young lawyer to help craft its lawsuit to impose President Bill Clinton’s 1993 National Voter Registration Act, nicknamed “Motor Voter,” according to Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes. Obama’s ACORN lawsuit won, thereby slapping aside state officials who resisted Motor Voter because of what it soon proved to be: a 12-lane superhighway to massive vote fraud. The Motor Voter law required bureaucrats at welfare offices, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and other government offices to register as voters those who used their services. “Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship,” wrote Wall Street Journal reporter John Fund in his book “Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy.” “States also had to permit mail-in voter registrations, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election official.” Those who took advantage of government services such as welfare were disproportionately likely to vote for the Big Government party. Motor Voter also made it more difficult to purge voter rolls of fraudulent registrations. Motor Voter, wrote Fund, “fueled an explosion of phantom voters.” But in Barack Obama’s Democrat-ruled Chicago, phantom voters and voting graveyards are nothing new. Motor Voter was the Clinton administration’s attempt permanently to tilt voter rolls in favor of the Democratic Party. And Obama, working for ACORN, played a key role in imposing this law. Perhaps thanks to ACORN’s and Motor Voter’s influence, of the 19 foreign terrorists who attacked America on 9/11, at least six were registered to vote. In 1992, Obama took time off as a lawyer to direct Project Vote, ACORN’s voter mobilization entity, statewide in Illinois. Project Vote added an estimated 125,000 names to voter rolls, which helped propel Democrat Carol Moseley Braun into the same U.S. Senate seat Obama now holds. Nationwide, ACORN’s Project Vote claims to have helped register more than 4 million voters in low-income and minority neighborhoods. Project Vote’s tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status prohibits its involvement in partisan political activity, but one of its leaders told Foundation Watch that “lots of grass-roots members” are assisting the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. ACORN, wrote Foundation Watch investigators Elias Crim and Matthew Vadum last June, has a “record of highly-publicized voter fraud allegations” lodged against it “in Ohio (2004), Wisconsin (2004), Florida (2004), New Mexico (2004), Colorado (2005), Missouri (2006), and Washington State (2007).” They could have named other states as well. In 2006, in Missouri’s U.S. Senate race, Republican incumbent James Talent lost by about 50,000 votes to Democrat Claire McCaskill. “A sizeable portion of that margin,” wrote columnist Carl Horowitz, “was attributable to ACORN organizers submitting phony or at least suspicious voter-registration cards to election officials in the St. Louis and Kansas City metro areas. Several ACORN members in Kansas City were indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office just prior to Election Day, and eventually pleaded guilty. [Wade] Rathke, not one for subtlety, called City of St. Louis election officials ‘slop buckets’ when they questioned the veracity of ACORN-submitted forms.” And who was Missouri state auditor during 2006, responsible at a statewide level for overseeing the honesty of voter registration? “That,” wrote Horowitz, “would be Claire McCaskill.” And Sen. McCaskill is one of Obama’s most ardent supporters. In Florida, ACORN’s 2004 Miami-Dade field director, Mac Stuart, according to David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks.org investigation, “has testified that fraud is standard procedure for ACORN/Project Vote canvassers — behavior that is not only tolerated, but encouraged by supervisors.” Stuart reportedly told investigators: “[T]he voter registration project has been operating illegally since it started.” In 2005, Virginia authorities sampled Project Vote registrations and rejected 83 percent of them for containing false or questionable information... In Washington state, five ACORN employees were convicted in 2007 in what its Secretary of State Sam Reed called “the worst case of election fraud in our state’s history. It was an outrage.” In this state the current Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire was elected literally by a handful of votes, but 450 apparently fictitious names were found registered to vote as Democrats at a single address. At least 1,700 ACORN voter registrations — using the names of Harry Reid, Dennis Hastert, and movie and sports stars — were later revoked in just one county of the state. In Nevada, the state most likely to decide the 2008 presidential election, the Las Vegas Review-Journal last July 7 reported that a Clark County official “sees rampant fraud in the 2,000 to 3,000 registrations ACORN turns in every week.” ACORN, of course, blames a handful of overzealous activists or mercenaries for acts of voter registration fraud. ACORN denies that it condones or encourages any illegal behavior. Intimidation Politics Incidentally, Obama’s ACORN comrade Madeline Talbott, according to Kurtz, “was so impressed by Obama’s organizing skills that she invited him to help train her own staff.” In 1997, notes Kurtz, Talbott was “a key leader” of 200 ACORN protestors who on July 31 tried to storm a Chicago City Council session. These ACORN demonstrators, wrote Kurtz, reportedly “pushed over a metal detector and table used to screen visitors, backed police against the doors to the council chamber, and blocked late-arriving aldermen and city staff from entering the session….almost certainly a deliberate bit of what radicals call ‘direct action,’ orchestrated by ACORN’s Madeline Talbott,” who was “led away handcuffed, charged with mob action and disorderly conduct.” Obama has never been led away in handcuffs for radical behavior. But, notes Kurtz, Obama has used groups of ominously angry activists to intimidate and pressure local officials. A newspaper photo of Obama in his “community organizer” days shows him next to activist group the Developing Communities Project (DCP) posters that read: “It’s a power thing.” The ACORN organizer manual likewise declares, “This is a mass organization directed at political power where might makes right.” Obama supporters in 2008 have angrily demonstrated against, and shared information intended to disrupt, a radio talk show in Chicago that has had Kurtz as a guest. This could be a foretaste of how intimidation might be used to stifle criticism of a President Obama administration. Money-Hungry ACORN By the 1980s, ACORN was expanding its horizons from voter registration to housing. “In 1985, ACORN illegally seized 25 abandoned buildings owned by New York City and installed squatters as residents,” recounted a New York Post editorial. “A weak-kneed City Hall eventually gave the group title to the buildings — proving that crime can pay.” In 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed the Community Redevelopment Act (CRA), which, in retrospect, was the opening wedge for what now threatens to become a government takeover of all housing in America. Under Carter’s administration, the domestic Peace Corps government entity VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, gave a federal grant of $470,000 to ACORN to train volunteers to help low-income citizens. A later congressional investigation found that ACORN illegally used this money for labor organizing. According to ACORN co-founder Delgado, after two of “their own,” Sam Brown and Marjorie Tabankin, became directors of Carter’s ACTION agency and VISTA program, “over 3 million dollars was funneled directly to ACORN” and other left-wing organizations. After the Clinton administration gave a grant worth more than $1 million to ACORN Housing Corp, an investigation by the inspector general of AmeriCorps found that AHC used government funds to register low-income persons for paid ACORN memberships, in violation of federal law. Apparently this taxpayer money was given only to those poor people who agreed to pay $60 immediately back to ACORN. By the infiltration of ideological comrades into positions of power at government agencies, ACORN became the recipient of a flood of taxpayer-funded grants, including some worth millions of dollars. AHC alone between 1997 and 2006 received more than $11,230,000 in public funds. In 2005 alone, according to Department of Labor disclosure statements, labor leaders reportedly paid more than $2.4 million to ACORN in gifts, grants, and fees for organizing work. Mandatory family membership dues bring ACORN another $3 million or so per year. But foundations and churches, boasted Wade Rathke in 2004, account for less than half the revenue ACORN pockets from corporations that had been the targets of successful ACORN protest campaigns. ACORN and Today’s Credit Crisis President Carter’s CRA and related laws were repeatedly expanded to require lending institutions to avoid “redlining” policies that denied home loans to those in minority neighborhoods. Obama was one of many lawyers who profited from successfully suing on grounds that discrimination was the reason an African-American was denied a home loan. Banks and other lenders needed not only public good will but also the cooperation of government regulators to approve mergers and other business activities. Expanding laws such as CRA meant that if ACORN accused a bank of racial discrimination and unleashed protestors against it, however unjustly, that bank might suddenly face very unfriendly government regulators. Banks were thus set up to be easy victims for ACORN shakedowns, and paying protection money became necessary for bank survival. “The same corporations that pay ransom to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pay ransom to ACORN,” said Robert L. Woodson, President of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. “The 2000 tax return for the ACORN Housing Corporation,” reported the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), “disclosed grants from Bank of America, Fleet Services Corporation, Fannie Mae Foundation, Chase Manhattan Foundation, and Well Fargo Foundation totaling $4,752,198.” And AHC is just one of 100 arms of the ACORN octopus. “The banks know they are being held up,” one financial industry consultant told EPI researchers, “but they are not going to fight over this. They look at it as a cost of doing business.” Politicians and left-wing activist groups including ACORN were doing more than shaking down lending institutions for their own profit. They also demanded that lending standards be loosened for those in the underclass who tend to vote Democratic. With a large political gun aimed at their heads, banks commenced making hundreds of thousands of what they called “Ninja” — no income, no job, no assets — loans to minorities who previously would have been deemed uncreditworthy. Knowing that many of these loans they were coerced to make would go bad, many lending institutions bundled them into new types of investment packages and sold them to shed risk. The giant quasi-governmental lending institutions Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, both largely run by Democratic appointees, became sources of funding for groups such as ACORN that aided Democratic politicians — and promoters of high-risk subprime home loans. Democratic executives at these institutions, such as former Clinton administration member and Fannie Mae chair and chief executive officer, Franklin Raines, arranged to have their incomes increase with the amount of lending their institutions did. In six years of recklessly having Fanny Mae assume an astronomical burden of risk, Raines pushed his own income above $90 million. As former federal prosecutor James H. Walsh recounted in a Sept. 22 Newsmax.com article, Raines was an adviser to Obama until recent national financial problems made Raines too risky to embrace. [Editor's Note: Read “Obama, Voter Fraud & Mortgage Meltdown” — Go Here Now]. Obama, noted Walsh, had been “the Senate’s second-largest recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” Is ACORN troubled by what many are calling a credit meltdown and the likelihood that many minority homeowners may lose their homes? Probably not, because the ideological aim of ACORN’s radical founders was to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism. In the current financial situation, government will get bigger, free markets will become less free, and vast amounts of capital will shift from private companies to government. For those like Barack Obama who share ACORN’s ideology, the situation is perfect — heads, government wins; tails, capitalism loses. If people keep their homes, many will naively thank the Democratic politicians and left-wing activists who caused their problems in the first place. If poor people lose their homes, they will be that much easier for ACORN to brainwash with class hatred against evil capitalists. And lest we forget, the first think that congressional Democrats put into their proposed “bailout package” to solve the financial crisis was a permanent slush fund to be extracted from capitalist institutions that would start growing at more than $20 million. The beneficiaries of this now-deleted slush fund were to have been radical Democrat-allied organizations such as ACORN. Greedy Lefists The Rathkes commingled ACORN’s socialist redistribute-the-wealth ideology with their own hypocrisy and personal greed. From ACORN, they spun off approximately 100 other legal entities. They then created a shell game under which money acquired by one ACORN front group, e.g., Project Vote, would be moved to other ACORN-controlled groups, in some cases to acquire property. One former Arkansas ACORN chair, Dorothy Perkins, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, described the organization as “building up a land portfolio” that was supposed to “translate to money and power for the national organization.” But that money was “never seen” by the poor people ACORN claimed to serve, she said, and “all the money ended up” under Wade Rathke’s control. Rathke, she said, ran ACORN “like a Jim Jones cult.” Relatively little of the redistributed wealth of Rathke’s ACORN conglomerate trickled down to the poor, and comparatively little went to the organization’s thousands of full-time “community organizers.” Typical pay was $25,000 a year or less, for which ACORN employees were expected to work 54 hours or more per week, weekends included. In 2006, ACORN required many of its workers in Missouri to sign an agreement that they would be “working up to 80 hours over seven days of work.” ACORN went to court in California, arguing unsuccessfully that it should be exempt from minimum wage laws. But in recent years, ACORN has staged many demonstrations to demand a “living wage,” typically a minimum of $12 or more per hour, for minimum wage workers. According to Mac Stuart, ACORN collected more than $4 for each completed, and illegally copied, voter registration. Its workers who found people and submitted their registrations were paid only $2, with ACORN and the Rathkes pocketing the difference. But ACORN had many other sources for its annual $37.5 million budget, including millions in government and foundation grants. ACORN head Wade Rathke was also chief organizer of a New Orleans local of one of America’s most radical labor unions, the Service Employee’s International Union (SEIU), and ACORN was a close ally of organized labor. Unions sometimes paid ACORN to have its low-paid workers march with picket signs pretending to be striking union members. When ACORN workers, as well as those in his SEIU union local, tried to form their own unions to bargain for higher wages and shorter hours, Rathke successfully used a wide array of union-busting techniques to stop them — the same kinds of techniques he routinely condemned other businesses for using. But the Rathkes fell from power in 2008 shortly before The New York Times on July 9 reported that in 1999-2000 Dale Rathke, then ACORN’s chief financial officer, had diverted $948,607 from ACORN and affiliated charitable organization accounts. Other ACORN officials in 2001 reportedly obtained a restitution agreement from Wade Rathke to repay the missing funds in $30,000 per-year installments. ACORN, meanwhile, continued to pay Wade Rathke considerably more than $30,000 each year, in effect covering these repayments, while Dale Rathke’s apparent embezzlement of almost a million dollars — in contributions to help the poor — was kept secret from the public and from those funding ACORN. “How did ACORN handle the crime?” asked a July 13 New York Post editorial. “By disguising it on the books as a loan from one of its contractors….” and only letting Rathke go “when word of his fraud leaked to donors…. most of the people who covered up the embezzlement are still working for ACORN.” “We thought it best at the time to protect the organizations,” said ACORN President Maude Hurd. “We did what we thought was right.” Or what served the interests of the left. Welcome to ACORN, the organization that made Barack Obama what he is today, and that may make him president of the United States.

rodriguez.miguelangel59@yahoo.com(402 - days ago)Page: Criminal Justice

Obama and ACORN: You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide


Monday, October 6, 2008 7:26 PM


By: Lowell Ponte Article Font Size







Barack Obama is running as fast and as far away from his association with the radical group ACORN as he can, but he can’t hide from the facts of his close relationship with the organization. ACORN, or Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, describes itself as a “non-partisan” group devoted to helping the poor and to registering millions to vote. Critics accuse ACORN of involvement vote fraud, voter intimidation, shakedowns against businesses, and the promotion of socialist class hatred and class warfare. Apparently worried by the connection between Obama and the group, his campaign has put claims of his ties to ACORN as the lead item on its “Fight The Smears” Web site — a site the Obama campaign created to counter what they claim are partisan lies made up against their candidate. The release on the Obama site reads: “When Obama met with ACORN leaders in November, he reminded them of his history with ACORN and his beginnings in Illinois as a Project Vote organizer, a nonprofit focused on voter rights and education. Senator Obama said, ‘I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That's what I did for three and half years before I went to law school. That's the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize. “So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. 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.” Indeed, Obama was being far too modest. The 2008 Democratic presidential nominee had worked not just alongside ACORN, but also as a key operative for the organization. He was its lawyer in several pivotal ACORN cases. Obama funded a number of its activities, as well. When he sat on the board of the prestigious Woods Fund for Chicago alongside former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, he oversaw and approved many grants for ACORN. As the National Review’s Stanley Kurtz reported, one Woods committee report boasted that the fund’s “non-ideological” public image “enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government ‘establishments’ without undue risk of being accused of partisanship.” Obama was the Illinois director of ACORN’s controversial voter registration operation, and he trained the group’s leaders in the ways of radical, sometimes illegal, confrontational politics. He also paid ACORN affiliates during his recent Democratic primary contest. For example, leading up to the 2008 Ohio Democratic Primary, Obama’s campaign between Feb. 25 and March 17 paid Citizens Services, Inc., a subsidiary of ACORN, $832,598, apparently for get-out-the-vote activities. Obama’s mysterious, shrouded past as a “community organizer” is closely tied to ACORN, a group that supplies a large share of the Democratic Party political shock troops responsible for the party’s recapture of Congress in 2006. ACORN has at least 350,000 dues-paying member families, and more than 800 chapters spread among at least 104 U.S. cities as well as in Canada, Mexico, Argentina, and Peru. To outsiders, Obama’s “long service with ACORN led many of its members to serve as the voluntary shock troops of Obama’s early political campaigns — his initial 1996 State Senate campaign, and his failed bid for Congress in 2000,” wrote Kurtz. “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.’” ACORN’s Radical Roots ACORN’s four co-founders were 1960s New Leftists. One was George Wiley, whose National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) members practiced confrontation politics, e.g., swarming into welfare offices and bullying social workers. The second ACORN co-founder was NWRO organizer Gary Delgado. Wiley made no secret that he followed the radical tactics proposed in the far-left The Nation Magazine by socialist Columbia University scholars Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who argued that American capitalism could be bankrupted and destroyed by overloading our system with ever-rising costs and bureaucratic demands. (In 1996, President Bill Clinton invited Cloward and Piven to the White House as honored guests.) ACORN’s other founders and longtime bosses were former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist Wade Rathke, a close NWRO ally, and his brother Dale. “We are the majority, forged from all minorities,” proclaimed ACORN’s founding 1970 “People’s Platform” manifesto. “We are the masses of many, not the forces of few…. We will wait no longer for the crumbs at America’s door. We will not be meek, but mighty.” In ACORN, the Rathkes replaced Cloward-Piven tactics designed to overthrow capitalist America with the confrontational-but-compromising tactics of Chicago socialist Saul Alinsky. “Instead of trying to overturn ‘the system — to blow it up, as Wiley wanted to do, ACORN burrows deep within the system,” wrote Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern, adding, “taking over its power and using its institutions for its own purposes, like a political ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’” The Rathkes first established ACORN as the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now and struck a personal deal with that state’s liberal Republican then-Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller, who reportedly paid the newly-sprouted ACORN $5,000 in cash to register voters. “Of course, they thought we were going to register Republicans,” Delgado later boasted. “We did not register a single Republican voter in that election. However, we did use those resources early on to build the organization.” Obama, ACORN, and Vote Fraud Selectively adding millions of Democratic names to the voter rolls remains one of ACORN’s most lucrative activities, for which this organization has been given millions of dollars by organized labor, non-profit foundations, and Democratic-controlled government agencies. Because Obama had worked closely with one of its leaders, Madeline Talbott, ACORN, in 1995, specifically sought out this radical young lawyer to help craft its lawsuit to impose President Bill Clinton’s 1993 National Voter Registration Act, nicknamed “Motor Voter,” according to Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes. Obama’s ACORN lawsuit won, thereby slapping aside state officials who resisted Motor Voter because of what it soon proved to be: a 12-lane superhighway to massive vote fraud. The Motor Voter law required bureaucrats at welfare offices, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and other government offices to register as voters those who used their services. “Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship,” wrote Wall Street Journal reporter John Fund in his book “Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy.” “States also had to permit mail-in voter registrations, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election official.” Those who took advantage of government services such as welfare were disproportionately likely to vote for the Big Government party. Motor Voter also made it more difficult to purge voter rolls of fraudulent registrations. Motor Voter, wrote Fund, “fueled an explosion of phantom voters.” But in Barack Obama’s Democrat-ruled Chicago, phantom voters and voting graveyards are nothing new. Motor Voter was the Clinton administration’s attempt permanently to tilt voter rolls in favor of the Democratic Party. And Obama, working for ACORN, played a key role in imposing this law. Perhaps thanks to ACORN’s and Motor Voter’s influence, of the 19 foreign terrorists who attacked America on 9/11, at least six were registered to vote. In 1992, Obama took time off as a lawyer to direct Project Vote, ACORN’s voter mobilization entity, statewide in Illinois. Project Vote added an estimated 125,000 names to voter rolls, which helped propel Democrat Carol Moseley Braun into the same U.S. Senate seat Obama now holds. Nationwide, ACORN’s Project Vote claims to have helped register more than 4 million voters in low-income and minority neighborhoods. Project Vote’s tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status prohibits its involvement in partisan political activity, but one of its leaders told Foundation Watch that “lots of grass-roots members” are assisting the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. ACORN, wrote Foundation Watch investigators Elias Crim and Matthew Vadum last June, has a “record of highly-publicized voter fraud allegations” lodged against it “in Ohio (2004), Wisconsin (2004), Florida (2004), New Mexico (2004), Colorado (2005), Missouri (2006), and Washington State (2007).” They could have named other states as well. In 2006, in Missouri’s U.S. Senate race, Republican incumbent James Talent lost by about 50,000 votes to Democrat Claire McCaskill. “A sizeable portion of that margin,” wrote columnist Carl Horowitz, “was attributable to ACORN organizers submitting phony or at least suspicious voter-registration cards to election officials in the St. Louis and Kansas City metro areas. Several ACORN members in Kansas City were indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office just prior to Election Day, and eventually pleaded guilty. [Wade] Rathke, not one for subtlety, called City of St. Louis election officials ‘slop buckets’ when they questioned the veracity of ACORN-submitted forms.” And who was Missouri state auditor during 2006, responsible at a statewide level for overseeing the honesty of voter registration? “That,” wrote Horowitz, “would be Claire McCaskill.” And Sen. McCaskill is one of Obama’s most ardent supporters. In Florida, ACORN’s 2004 Miami-Dade field director, Mac Stuart, according to David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks.org investigation, “has testified that fraud is standard procedure for ACORN/Project Vote canvassers — behavior that is not only tolerated, but encouraged by supervisors.” Stuart reportedly told investigators: “[T]he voter registration project has been operating illegally since it started.” In 2005, Virginia authorities sampled Project Vote registrations and rejected 83 percent of them for containing false or questionable information... In Washington state, five ACORN employees were convicted in 2007 in what its Secretary of State Sam Reed called “the worst case of election fraud in our state’s history. It was an outrage.” In this state the current Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire was elected literally by a handful of votes, but 450 apparently fictitious names were found registered to vote as Democrats at a single address. At least 1,700 ACORN voter registrations — using the names of Harry Reid, Dennis Hastert, and movie and sports stars — were later revoked in just one county of the state. In Nevada, the state most likely to decide the 2008 presidential election, the Las Vegas Review-Journal last July 7 reported that a Clark County official “sees rampant fraud in the 2,000 to 3,000 registrations ACORN turns in every week.” ACORN, of course, blames a handful of overzealous activists or mercenaries for acts of voter registration fraud. ACORN denies that it condones or encourages any illegal behavior. Intimidation Politics Incidentally, Obama’s ACORN comrade Madeline Talbott, according to Kurtz, “was so impressed by Obama’s organizing skills that she invited him to help train her own staff.” In 1997, notes Kurtz, Talbott was “a key leader” of 200 ACORN protestors who on July 31 tried to storm a Chicago City Council session. These ACORN demonstrators, wrote Kurtz, reportedly “pushed over a metal detector and table used to screen visitors, backed police against the doors to the council chamber, and blocked late-arriving aldermen and city staff from entering the session….almost certainly a deliberate bit of what radicals call ‘direct action,’ orchestrated by ACORN’s Madeline Talbott,” who was “led away handcuffed, charged with mob action and disorderly conduct.” Obama has never been led away in handcuffs for radical behavior. But, notes Kurtz, Obama has used groups of ominously angry activists to intimidate and pressure local officials. A newspaper photo of Obama in his “community organizer” days shows him next to activist group the Developing Communities Project (DCP) posters that read: “It’s a power thing.” The ACORN organizer manual likewise declares, “This is a mass organization directed at political power where might makes right.” Obama supporters in 2008 have angrily demonstrated against, and shared information intended to disrupt, a radio talk show in Chicago that has had Kurtz as a guest. This could be a foretaste of how intimidation might be used to stifle criticism of a President Obama administration. Money-Hungry ACORN By the 1980s, ACORN was expanding its horizons from voter registration to housing. “In 1985, ACORN illegally seized 25 abandoned buildings owned by New York City and installed squatters as residents,” recounted a New York Post editorial. “A weak-kneed City Hall eventually gave the group title to the buildings — proving that crime can pay.” In 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed the Community Redevelopment Act (CRA), which, in retrospect, was the opening wedge for what now threatens to become a government takeover of all housing in America. Under Carter’s administration, the domestic Peace Corps government entity VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, gave a federal grant of $470,000 to ACORN to train volunteers to help low-income citizens. A later congressional investigation found that ACORN illegally used this money for labor organizing. According to ACORN co-founder Delgado, after two of “their own,” Sam Brown and Marjorie Tabankin, became directors of Carter’s ACTION agency and VISTA program, “over 3 million dollars was funneled directly to ACORN” and other left-wing organizations. After the Clinton administration gave a grant worth more than $1 million to ACORN Housing Corp, an investigation by the inspector general of AmeriCorps found that AHC used government funds to register low-income persons for paid ACORN memberships, in violation of federal law. Apparently this taxpayer money was given only to those poor people who agreed to pay $60 immediately back to ACORN. By the infiltration of ideological comrades into positions of power at government agencies, ACORN became the recipient of a flood of taxpayer-funded grants, including some worth millions of dollars. AHC alone between 1997 and 2006 received more than $11,230,000 in public funds. In 2005 alone, according to Department of Labor disclosure statements, labor leaders reportedly paid more than $2.4 million to ACORN in gifts, grants, and fees for organizing work. Mandatory family membership dues bring ACORN another $3 million or so per year. But foundations and churches, boasted Wade Rathke in 2004, account for less than half the revenue ACORN pockets from corporations that had been the targets of successful ACORN protest campaigns. ACORN and Today’s Credit Crisis President Carter’s CRA and related laws were repeatedly expanded to require lending institutions to avoid “redlining” policies that denied home loans to those in minority neighborhoods. Obama was one of many lawyers who profited from successfully suing on grounds that discrimination was the reason an African-American was denied a home loan. Banks and other lenders needed not only public good will but also the cooperation of government regulators to approve mergers and other business activities. Expanding laws such as CRA meant that if ACORN accused a bank of racial discrimination and unleashed protestors against it, however unjustly, that bank might suddenly face very unfriendly government regulators. Banks were thus set up to be easy victims for ACORN shakedowns, and paying protection money became necessary for bank survival. “The same corporations that pay ransom to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pay ransom to ACORN,” said Robert L. Woodson, President of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. “The 2000 tax return for the ACORN Housing Corporation,” reported the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), “disclosed grants from Bank of America, Fleet Services Corporation, Fannie Mae Foundation, Chase Manhattan Foundation, and Well Fargo Foundation totaling $4,752,198.” And AHC is just one of 100 arms of the ACORN octopus. “The banks know they are being held up,” one financial industry consultant told EPI researchers, “but they are not going to fight over this. They look at it as a cost of doing business.” Politicians and left-wing activist groups including ACORN were doing more than shaking down lending institutions for their own profit. They also demanded that lending standards be loosened for those in the underclass who tend to vote Democratic. With a large political gun aimed at their heads, banks commenced making hundreds of thousands of what they called “Ninja” — no income, no job, no assets — loans to minorities who previously would have been deemed uncreditworthy. Knowing that many of these loans they were coerced to make would go bad, many lending institutions bundled them into new types of investment packages and sold them to shed risk. The giant quasi-governmental lending institutions Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, both largely run by Democratic appointees, became sources of funding for groups such as ACORN that aided Democratic politicians — and promoters of high-risk subprime home loans. Democratic executives at these institutions, such as former Clinton administration member and Fannie Mae chair and chief executive officer, Franklin Raines, arranged to have their incomes increase with the amount of lending their institutions did. In six years of recklessly having Fanny Mae assume an astronomical burden of risk, Raines pushed his own income above $90 million. As former federal prosecutor James H. Walsh recounted in a Sept. 22 Newsmax.com article, Raines was an adviser to Obama until recent national financial problems made Raines too risky to embrace. [Editor's Note: Read “Obama, Voter Fraud & Mortgage Meltdown” — Go Here Now]. Obama, noted Walsh, had been “the Senate’s second-largest recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” Is ACORN troubled by what many are calling a credit meltdown and the likelihood that many minority homeowners may lose their homes? Probably not, because the ideological aim of ACORN’s radical founders was to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism. In the current financial situation, government will get bigger, free markets will become less free, and vast amounts of capital will shift from private companies to government. For those like Barack Obama who share ACORN’s ideology, the situation is perfect — heads, government wins; tails, capitalism loses. If people keep their homes, many will naively thank the Democratic politicians and left-wing activists who caused their problems in the first place. If poor people lose their homes, they will be that much easier for ACORN to brainwash with class hatred against evil capitalists. And lest we forget, the first think that congressional Democrats put into their proposed “bailout package” to solve the financial crisis was a permanent slush fund to be extracted from capitalist institutions that would start growing at more than $20 million. The beneficiaries of this now-deleted slush fund were to have been radical Democrat-allied organizations such as ACORN. Greedy Lefists The Rathkes commingled ACORN’s socialist redistribute-the-wealth ideology with their own hypocrisy and personal greed. From ACORN, they spun off approximately 100 other legal entities. They then created a shell game under which money acquired by one ACORN front group, e.g., Project Vote, would be moved to other ACORN-controlled groups, in some cases to acquire property. One former Arkansas ACORN chair, Dorothy Perkins, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, described the organization as “building up a land portfolio” that was supposed to “translate to money and power for the national organization.” But that money was “never seen” by the poor people ACORN claimed to serve, she said, and “all the money ended up” under Wade Rathke’s control. Rathke, she said, ran ACORN “like a Jim Jones cult.” Relatively little of the redistributed wealth of Rathke’s ACORN conglomerate trickled down to the poor, and comparatively little went to the organization’s thousands of full-time “community organizers.” Typical pay was $25,000 a year or less, for which ACORN employees were expected to work 54 hours or more per week, weekends included. In 2006, ACORN required many of its workers in Missouri to sign an agreement that they would be “working up to 80 hours over seven days of work.” ACORN went to court in California, arguing unsuccessfully that it should be exempt from minimum wage laws. But in recent years, ACORN has staged many demonstrations to demand a “living wage,” typically a minimum of $12 or more per hour, for minimum wage workers. According to Mac Stuart, ACORN collected more than $4 for each completed, and illegally copied, voter registration. Its workers who found people and submitted their registrations were paid only $2, with ACORN and the Rathkes pocketing the difference. But ACORN had many other sources for its annual $37.5 million budget, including millions in government and foundation grants. ACORN head Wade Rathke was also chief organizer of a New Orleans local of one of America’s most radical labor unions, the Service Employee’s International Union (SEIU), and ACORN was a close ally of organized labor. Unions sometimes paid ACORN to have its low-paid workers march with picket signs pretending to be striking union members. When ACORN workers, as well as those in his SEIU union local, tried to form their own unions to bargain for higher wages and shorter hours, Rathke successfully used a wide array of union-busting techniques to stop them — the same kinds of techniques he routinely condemned other businesses for using. But the Rathkes fell from power in 2008 shortly before The New York Times on July 9 reported that in 1999-2000 Dale Rathke, then ACORN’s chief financial officer, had diverted $948,607 from ACORN and affiliated charitable organization accounts. Other ACORN officials in 2001 reportedly obtained a restitution agreement from Wade Rathke to repay the missing funds in $30,000 per-year installments. ACORN, meanwhile, continued to pay Wade Rathke considerably more than $30,000 each year, in effect covering these repayments, while Dale Rathke’s apparent embezzlement of almost a million dollars — in contributions to help the poor — was kept secret from the public and from those funding ACORN. “How did ACORN handle the crime?” asked a July 13 New York Post editorial. “By disguising it on the books as a loan from one of its contractors….” and only letting Rathke go “when word of his fraud leaked to donors…. most of the people who covered up the embezzlement are still working for ACORN.” “We thought it best at the time to protect the organizations,” said ACORN President Maude Hurd. “We did what we thought was right.” Or what served the interests of the left. Welcome to ACORN, the organization that made Barack Obama what he is today, and that may make him president of the United States.

rodriguez.miguelangel59@yahoo.com(402 - days ago)Page: Affirmative Action

Obama and ACORN: You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide


Monday, October 6, 2008 7:26 PM


By: Lowell Ponte Article Font Size







Barack Obama is running as fast and as far away from his association with the radical group ACORN as he can, but he can’t hide from the facts of his close relationship with the organization. ACORN, or Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, describes itself as a “non-partisan” group devoted to helping the poor and to registering millions to vote. Critics accuse ACORN of involvement vote fraud, voter intimidation, shakedowns against businesses, and the promotion of socialist class hatred and class warfare. Apparently worried by the connection between Obama and the group, his campaign has put claims of his ties to ACORN as the lead item on its “Fight The Smears” Web site — a site the Obama campaign created to counter what they claim are partisan lies made up against their candidate. The release on the Obama site reads: “When Obama met with ACORN leaders in November, he reminded them of his history with ACORN and his beginnings in Illinois as a Project Vote organizer, a nonprofit focused on voter rights and education. Senator Obama said, ‘I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That's what I did for three and half years before I went to law school. That's the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize. “So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. 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.” Indeed, Obama was being far too modest. The 2008 Democratic presidential nominee had worked not just alongside ACORN, but also as a key operative for the organization. He was its lawyer in several pivotal ACORN cases. Obama funded a number of its activities, as well. When he sat on the board of the prestigious Woods Fund for Chicago alongside former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, he oversaw and approved many grants for ACORN. As the National Review’s Stanley Kurtz reported, one Woods committee report boasted that the fund’s “non-ideological” public image “enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government ‘establishments’ without undue risk of being accused of partisanship.” Obama was the Illinois director of ACORN’s controversial voter registration operation, and he trained the group’s leaders in the ways of radical, sometimes illegal, confrontational politics. He also paid ACORN affiliates during his recent Democratic primary contest. For example, leading up to the 2008 Ohio Democratic Primary, Obama’s campaign between Feb. 25 and March 17 paid Citizens Services, Inc., a subsidiary of ACORN, $832,598, apparently for get-out-the-vote activities. Obama’s mysterious, shrouded past as a “community organizer” is closely tied to ACORN, a group that supplies a large share of the Democratic Party political shock troops responsible for the party’s recapture of Congress in 2006. ACORN has at least 350,000 dues-paying member families, and more than 800 chapters spread among at least 104 U.S. cities as well as in Canada, Mexico, Argentina, and Peru. To outsiders, Obama’s “long service with ACORN led many of its members to serve as the voluntary shock troops of Obama’s early political campaigns — his initial 1996 State Senate campaign, and his failed bid for Congress in 2000,” wrote Kurtz. “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.’” ACORN’s Radical Roots ACORN’s four co-founders were 1960s New Leftists. One was George Wiley, whose National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) members practiced confrontation politics, e.g., swarming into welfare offices and bullying social workers. The second ACORN co-founder was NWRO organizer Gary Delgado. Wiley made no secret that he followed the radical tactics proposed in the far-left The Nation Magazine by socialist Columbia University scholars Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who argued that American capitalism could be bankrupted and destroyed by overloading our system with ever-rising costs and bureaucratic demands. (In 1996, President Bill Clinton invited Cloward and Piven to the White House as honored guests.) ACORN’s other founders and longtime bosses were former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist Wade Rathke, a close NWRO ally, and his brother Dale. “We are the majority, forged from all minorities,” proclaimed ACORN’s founding 1970 “People’s Platform” manifesto. “We are the masses of many, not the forces of few…. We will wait no longer for the crumbs at America’s door. We will not be meek, but mighty.” In ACORN, the Rathkes replaced Cloward-Piven tactics designed to overthrow capitalist America with the confrontational-but-compromising tactics of Chicago socialist Saul Alinsky. “Instead of trying to overturn ‘the system — to blow it up, as Wiley wanted to do, ACORN burrows deep within the system,” wrote Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern, adding, “taking over its power and using its institutions for its own purposes, like a political ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’” The Rathkes first established ACORN as the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now and struck a personal deal with that state’s liberal Republican then-Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller, who reportedly paid the newly-sprouted ACORN $5,000 in cash to register voters. “Of course, they thought we were going to register Republicans,” Delgado later boasted. “We did not register a single Republican voter in that election. However, we did use those resources early on to build the organization.” Obama, ACORN, and Vote Fraud Selectively adding millions of Democratic names to the voter rolls remains one of ACORN’s most lucrative activities, for which this organization has been given millions of dollars by organized labor, non-profit foundations, and Democratic-controlled government agencies. Because Obama had worked closely with one of its leaders, Madeline Talbott, ACORN, in 1995, specifically sought out this radical young lawyer to help craft its lawsuit to impose President Bill Clinton’s 1993 National Voter Registration Act, nicknamed “Motor Voter,” according to Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes. Obama’s ACORN lawsuit won, thereby slapping aside state officials who resisted Motor Voter because of what it soon proved to be: a 12-lane superhighway to massive vote fraud. The Motor Voter law required bureaucrats at welfare offices, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and other government offices to register as voters those who used their services. “Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship,” wrote Wall Street Journal reporter John Fund in his book “Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy.” “States also had to permit mail-in voter registrations, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election official.” Those who took advantage of government services such as welfare were disproportionately likely to vote for the Big Government party. Motor Voter also made it more difficult to purge voter rolls of fraudulent registrations. Motor Voter, wrote Fund, “fueled an explosion of phantom voters.” But in Barack Obama’s Democrat-ruled Chicago, phantom voters and voting graveyards are nothing new. Motor Voter was the Clinton administration’s attempt permanently to tilt voter rolls in favor of the Democratic Party. And Obama, working for ACORN, played a key role in imposing this law. Perhaps thanks to ACORN’s and Motor Voter’s influence, of the 19 foreign terrorists who attacked America on 9/11, at least six were registered to vote. In 1992, Obama took time off as a lawyer to direct Project Vote, ACORN’s voter mobilization entity, statewide in Illinois. Project Vote added an estimated 125,000 names to voter rolls, which helped propel Democrat Carol Moseley Braun into the same U.S. Senate seat Obama now holds. Nationwide, ACORN’s Project Vote claims to have helped register more than 4 million voters in low-income and minority neighborhoods. Project Vote’s tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status prohibits its involvement in partisan political activity, but one of its leaders told Foundation Watch that “lots of grass-roots members” are assisting the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. ACORN, wrote Foundation Watch investigators Elias Crim and Matthew Vadum last June, has a “record of highly-publicized voter fraud allegations” lodged against it “in Ohio (2004), Wisconsin (2004), Florida (2004), New Mexico (2004), Colorado (2005), Missouri (2006), and Washington State (2007).” They could have named other states as well. In 2006, in Missouri’s U.S. Senate race, Republican incumbent James Talent lost by about 50,000 votes to Democrat Claire McCaskill. “A sizeable portion of that margin,” wrote columnist Carl Horowitz, “was attributable to ACORN organizers submitting phony or at least suspicious voter-registration cards to election officials in the St. Louis and Kansas City metro areas. Several ACORN members in Kansas City were indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office just prior to Election Day, and eventually pleaded guilty. [Wade] Rathke, not one for subtlety, called City of St. Louis election officials ‘slop buckets’ when they questioned the veracity of ACORN-submitted forms.” And who was Missouri state auditor during 2006, responsible at a statewide level for overseeing the honesty of voter registration? “That,” wrote Horowitz, “would be Claire McCaskill.” And Sen. McCaskill is one of Obama’s most ardent supporters. In Florida, ACORN’s 2004 Miami-Dade field director, Mac Stuart, according to David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks.org investigation, “has testified that fraud is standard procedure for ACORN/Project Vote canvassers — behavior that is not only tolerated, but encouraged by supervisors.” Stuart reportedly told investigators: “[T]he voter registration project has been operating illegally since it started.” In 2005, Virginia authorities sampled Project Vote registrations and rejected 83 percent of them for containing false or questionable information... In Washington state, five ACORN employees were convicted in 2007 in what its Secretary of State Sam Reed called “the worst case of election fraud in our state’s history. It was an outrage.” In this state the current Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire was elected literally by a handful of votes, but 450 apparently fictitious names were found registered to vote as Democrats at a single address. At least 1,700 ACORN voter registrations — using the names of Harry Reid, Dennis Hastert, and movie and sports stars — were later revoked in just one county of the state. In Nevada, the state most likely to decide the 2008 presidential election, the Las Vegas Review-Journal last July 7 reported that a Clark County official “sees rampant fraud in the 2,000 to 3,000 registrations ACORN turns in every week.” ACORN, of course, blames a handful of overzealous activists or mercenaries for acts of voter registration fraud. ACORN denies that it condones or encourages any illegal behavior. Intimidation Politics Incidentally, Obama’s ACORN comrade Madeline Talbott, according to Kurtz, “was so impressed by Obama’s organizing skills that she invited him to help train her own staff.” In 1997, notes Kurtz, Talbott was “a key leader” of 200 ACORN protestors who on July 31 tried to storm a Chicago City Council session. These ACORN demonstrators, wrote Kurtz, reportedly “pushed over a metal detector and table used to screen visitors, backed police against the doors to the council chamber, and blocked late-arriving aldermen and city staff from entering the session….almost certainly a deliberate bit of what radicals call ‘direct action,’ orchestrated by ACORN’s Madeline Talbott,” who was “led away handcuffed, charged with mob action and disorderly conduct.” Obama has never been led away in handcuffs for radical behavior. But, notes Kurtz, Obama has used groups of ominously angry activists to intimidate and pressure local officials. A newspaper photo of Obama in his “community organizer” days shows him next to activist group the Developing Communities Project (DCP) posters that read: “It’s a power thing.” The ACORN organizer manual likewise declares, “This is a mass organization directed at political power where might makes right.” Obama supporters in 2008 have angrily demonstrated against, and shared information intended to disrupt, a radio talk show in Chicago that has had Kurtz as a guest. This could be a foretaste of how intimidation might be used to stifle criticism of a President Obama administration. Money-Hungry ACORN By the 1980s, ACORN was expanding its horizons from voter registration to housing. “In 1985, ACORN illegally seized 25 abandoned buildings owned by New York City and installed squatters as residents,” recounted a New York Post editorial. “A weak-kneed City Hall eventually gave the group title to the buildings — proving that crime can pay.” In 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed the Community Redevelopment Act (CRA), which, in retrospect, was the opening wedge for what now threatens to become a government takeover of all housing in America. Under Carter’s administration, the domestic Peace Corps government entity VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, gave a federal grant of $470,000 to ACORN to train volunteers to help low-income citizens. A later congressional investigation found that ACORN illegally used this money for labor organizing. According to ACORN co-founder Delgado, after two of “their own,” Sam Brown and Marjorie Tabankin, became directors of Carter’s ACTION agency and VISTA program, “over 3 million dollars was funneled directly to ACORN” and other left-wing organizations. After the Clinton administration gave a grant worth more than $1 million to ACORN Housing Corp, an investigation by the inspector general of AmeriCorps found that AHC used government funds to register low-income persons for paid ACORN memberships, in violation of federal law. Apparently this taxpayer money was given only to those poor people who agreed to pay $60 immediately back to ACORN. By the infiltration of ideological comrades into positions of power at government agencies, ACORN became the recipient of a flood of taxpayer-funded grants, including some worth millions of dollars. AHC alone between 1997 and 2006 received more than $11,230,000 in public funds. In 2005 alone, according to Department of Labor disclosure statements, labor leaders reportedly paid more than $2.4 million to ACORN in gifts, grants, and fees for organizing work. Mandatory family membership dues bring ACORN another $3 million or so per year. But foundations and churches, boasted Wade Rathke in 2004, account for less than half the revenue ACORN pockets from corporations that had been the targets of successful ACORN protest campaigns. ACORN and Today’s Credit Crisis President Carter’s CRA and related laws were repeatedly expanded to require lending institutions to avoid “redlining” policies that denied home loans to those in minority neighborhoods. Obama was one of many lawyers who profited from successfully suing on grounds that discrimination was the reason an African-American was denied a home loan. Banks and other lenders needed not only public good will but also the cooperation of government regulators to approve mergers and other business activities. Expanding laws such as CRA meant that if ACORN accused a bank of racial discrimination and unleashed protestors against it, however unjustly, that bank might suddenly face very unfriendly government regulators. Banks were thus set up to be easy victims for ACORN shakedowns, and paying protection money became necessary for bank survival. “The same corporations that pay ransom to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pay ransom to ACORN,” said Robert L. Woodson, President of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. “The 2000 tax return for the ACORN Housing Corporation,” reported the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), “disclosed grants from Bank of America, Fleet Services Corporation, Fannie Mae Foundation, Chase Manhattan Foundation, and Well Fargo Foundation totaling $4,752,198.” And AHC is just one of 100 arms of the ACORN octopus. “The banks know they are being held up,” one financial industry consultant told EPI researchers, “but they are not going to fight over this. They look at it as a cost of doing business.” Politicians and left-wing activist groups including ACORN were doing more than shaking down lending institutions for their own profit. They also demanded that lending standards be loosened for those in the underclass who tend to vote Democratic. With a large political gun aimed at their heads, banks commenced making hundreds of thousands of what they called “Ninja” — no income, no job, no assets — loans to minorities who previously would have been deemed uncreditworthy. Knowing that many of these loans they were coerced to make would go bad, many lending institutions bundled them into new types of investment packages and sold them to shed risk. The giant quasi-governmental lending institutions Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, both largely run by Democratic appointees, became sources of funding for groups such as ACORN that aided Democratic politicians — and promoters of high-risk subprime home loans. Democratic executives at these institutions, such as former Clinton administration member and Fannie Mae chair and chief executive officer, Franklin Raines, arranged to have their incomes increase with the amount of lending their institutions did. In six years of recklessly having Fanny Mae assume an astronomical burden of risk, Raines pushed his own income above $90 million. As former federal prosecutor James H. Walsh recounted in a Sept. 22 Newsmax.com article, Raines was an adviser to Obama until recent national financial problems made Raines too risky to embrace. [Editor's Note: Read “Obama, Voter Fraud & Mortgage Meltdown” — Go Here Now]. Obama, noted Walsh, had been “the Senate’s second-largest recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” Is ACORN troubled by what many are calling a credit meltdown and the likelihood that many minority homeowners may lose their homes? Probably not, because the ideological aim of ACORN’s radical founders was to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism. In the current financial situation, government will get bigger, free markets will become less free, and vast amounts of capital will shift from private companies to government. For those like Barack Obama who share ACORN’s ideology, the situation is perfect — heads, government wins; tails, capitalism loses. If people keep their homes, many will naively thank the Democratic politicians and left-wing activists who caused their problems in the first place. If poor people lose their homes, they will be that much easier for ACORN to brainwash with class hatred against evil capitalists. And lest we forget, the first think that congressional Democrats put into their proposed “bailout package” to solve the financial crisis was a permanent slush fund to be extracted from capitalist institutions that would start growing at more than $20 million. The beneficiaries of this now-deleted slush fund were to have been radical Democrat-allied organizations such as ACORN. Greedy Lefists The Rathkes commingled ACORN’s socialist redistribute-the-wealth ideology with their own hypocrisy and personal greed. From ACORN, they spun off approximately 100 other legal entities. They then created a shell game under which money acquired by one ACORN front group, e.g., Project Vote, would be moved to other ACORN-controlled groups, in some cases to acquire property. One former Arkansas ACORN chair, Dorothy Perkins, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, described the organization as “building up a land portfolio” that was supposed to “translate to money and power for the national organization.” But that money was “never seen” by the poor people ACORN claimed to serve, she said, and “all the money ended up” under Wade Rathke’s control. Rathke, she said, ran ACORN “like a Jim Jones cult.” Relatively little of the redistributed wealth of Rathke’s ACORN conglomerate trickled down to the poor, and comparatively little went to the organization’s thousands of full-time “community organizers.” Typical pay was $25,000 a year or less, for which ACORN employees were expected to work 54 hours or more per week, weekends included. In 2006, ACORN required many of its workers in Missouri to sign an agreement that they would be “working up to 80 hours over seven days of work.” ACORN went to court in California, arguing unsuccessfully that it should be exempt from minimum wage laws. But in recent years, ACORN has staged many demonstrations to demand a “living wage,” typically a minimum of $12 or more per hour, for minimum wage workers. According to Mac Stuart, ACORN collected more than $4 for each completed, and illegally copied, voter registration. Its workers who found people and submitted their registrations were paid only $2, with ACORN and the Rathkes pocketing the difference. But ACORN had many other sources for its annual $37.5 million budget, including millions in government and foundation grants. ACORN head Wade Rathke was also chief organizer of a New Orleans local of one of America’s most radical labor unions, the Service Employee’s International Union (SEIU), and ACORN was a close ally of organized labor. Unions sometimes paid ACORN to have its low-paid workers march with picket signs pretending to be striking union members. When ACORN workers, as well as those in his SEIU union local, tried to form their own unions to bargain for higher wages and shorter hours, Rathke successfully used a wide array of union-busting techniques to stop them — the same kinds of techniques he routinely condemned other businesses for using. But the Rathkes fell from power in 2008 shortly before The New York Times on July 9 reported that in 1999-2000 Dale Rathke, then ACORN’s chief financial officer, had diverted $948,607 from ACORN and affiliated charitable organization accounts. Other ACORN officials in 2001 reportedly obtained a restitution agreement from Wade Rathke to repay the missing funds in $30,000 per-year installments. ACORN, meanwhile, continued to pay Wade Rathke considerably more than $30,000 each year, in effect covering these repayments, while Dale Rathke’s apparent embezzlement of almost a million dollars — in contributions to help the poor — was kept secret from the public and from those funding ACORN. “How did ACORN handle the crime?” asked a July 13 New York Post editorial. “By disguising it on the books as a loan from one of its contractors….” and only letting Rathke go “when word of his fraud leaked to donors…. most of the people who covered up the embezzlement are still working for ACORN.” “We thought it best at the time to protect the organizations,” said ACORN President Maude Hurd. “We did what we thought was right.” Or what served the interests of the left. Welcome to ACORN, the organization that made Barack Obama what he is today, and that may make him president of the United States.

Miguel Angel Rodriguez(402 - days ago)Page: Race Debate

Obama and ACORN: You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide


Monday, October 6, 2008 7:26 PM


By: Lowell Ponte Article Font Size







Barack Obama is running as fast and as far away from his association with the radical group ACORN as he can, but he can’t hide from the facts of his close relationship with the organization. ACORN, or Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, describes itself as a “non-partisan” group devoted to helping the poor and to registering millions to vote. Critics accuse ACORN of involvement vote fraud, voter intimidation, shakedowns against businesses, and the promotion of socialist class hatred and class warfare. Apparently worried by the connection between Obama and the group, his campaign has put claims of his ties to ACORN as the lead item on its “Fight The Smears” Web site — a site the Obama campaign created to counter what they claim are partisan lies made up against their candidate. The release on the Obama site reads: “When Obama met with ACORN leaders in November, he reminded them of his history with ACORN and his beginnings in Illinois as a Project Vote organizer, a nonprofit focused on voter rights and education. Senator Obama said, ‘I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That's what I did for three and half years before I went to law school. That's the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize. “So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. 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.” Indeed, Obama was being far too modest. The 2008 Democratic presidential nominee had worked not just alongside ACORN, but also as a key operative for the organization. He was its lawyer in several pivotal ACORN cases. Obama funded a number of its activities, as well. When he sat on the board of the prestigious Woods Fund for Chicago alongside former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, he oversaw and approved many grants for ACORN. As the National Review’s Stanley Kurtz reported, one Woods committee report boasted that the fund’s “non-ideological” public image “enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government ‘establishments’ without undue risk of being accused of partisanship.” Obama was the Illinois director of ACORN’s controversial voter registration operation, and he trained the group’s leaders in the ways of radical, sometimes illegal, confrontational politics. He also paid ACORN affiliates during his recent Democratic primary contest. For example, leading up to the 2008 Ohio Democratic Primary, Obama’s campaign between Feb. 25 and March 17 paid Citizens Services, Inc., a subsidiary of ACORN, $832,598, apparently for get-out-the-vote activities. Obama’s mysterious, shrouded past as a “community organizer” is closely tied to ACORN, a group that supplies a large share of the Democratic Party political shock troops responsible for the party’s recapture of Congress in 2006. ACORN has at least 350,000 dues-paying member families, and more than 800 chapters spread among at least 104 U.S. cities as well as in Canada, Mexico, Argentina, and Peru. To outsiders, Obama’s “long service with ACORN led many of its members to serve as the voluntary shock troops of Obama’s early political campaigns — his initial 1996 State Senate campaign, and his failed bid for Congress in 2000,” wrote Kurtz. “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.’” ACORN’s Radical Roots ACORN’s four co-founders were 1960s New Leftists. One was George Wiley, whose National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) members practiced confrontation politics, e.g., swarming into welfare offices and bullying social workers. The second ACORN co-founder was NWRO organizer Gary Delgado. Wiley made no secret that he followed the radical tactics proposed in the far-left The Nation Magazine by socialist Columbia University scholars Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who argued that American capitalism could be bankrupted and destroyed by overloading our system with ever-rising costs and bureaucratic demands. (In 1996, President Bill Clinton invited Cloward and Piven to the White House as honored guests.) ACORN’s other founders and longtime bosses were former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist Wade Rathke, a close NWRO ally, and his brother Dale. “We are the majority, forged from all minorities,” proclaimed ACORN’s founding 1970 “People’s Platform” manifesto. “We are the masses of many, not the forces of few…. We will wait no longer for the crumbs at America’s door. We will not be meek, but mighty.” In ACORN, the Rathkes replaced Cloward-Piven tactics designed to overthrow capitalist America with the confrontational-but-compromising tactics of Chicago socialist Saul Alinsky. “Instead of trying to overturn ‘the system — to blow it up, as Wiley wanted to do, ACORN burrows deep within the system,” wrote Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern, adding, “taking over its power and using its institutions for its own purposes, like a political ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’” The Rathkes first established ACORN as the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now and struck a personal deal with that state’s liberal Republican then-Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller, who reportedly paid the newly-sprouted ACORN $5,000 in cash to register voters. “Of course, they thought we were going to register Republicans,” Delgado later boasted. “We did not register a single Republican voter in that election. However, we did use those resources early on to build the organization.” Obama, ACORN, and Vote Fraud Selectively adding millions of Democratic names to the voter rolls remains one of ACORN’s most lucrative activities, for which this organization has been given millions of dollars by organized labor, non-profit foundations, and Democratic-controlled government agencies. Because Obama had worked closely with one of its leaders, Madeline Talbott, ACORN, in 1995, specifically sought out this radical young lawyer to help craft its lawsuit to impose President Bill Clinton’s 1993 National Voter Registration Act, nicknamed “Motor Voter,” according to Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes. Obama’s ACORN lawsuit won, thereby slapping aside state officials who resisted Motor Voter because of what it soon proved to be: a 12-lane superhighway to massive vote fraud. The Motor Voter law required bureaucrats at welfare offices, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and other government offices to register as voters those who used their services. “Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship,” wrote Wall Street Journal reporter John Fund in his book “Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy.” “States also had to permit mail-in voter registrations, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election official.” Those who took advantage of government services such as welfare were disproportionately likely to vote for the Big Government party. Motor Voter also made it more difficult to purge voter rolls of fraudulent registrations. Motor Voter, wrote Fund, “fueled an explosion of phantom voters.” But in Barack Obama’s Democrat-ruled Chicago, phantom voters and voting graveyards are nothing new. Motor Voter was the Clinton administration’s attempt permanently to tilt voter rolls in favor of the Democratic Party. And Obama, working for ACORN, played a key role in imposing this law. Perhaps thanks to ACORN’s and Motor Voter’s influence, of the 19 foreign terrorists who attacked America on 9/11, at least six were registered to vote. In 1992, Obama took time off as a lawyer to direct Project Vote, ACORN’s voter mobilization entity, statewide in Illinois. Project Vote added an estimated 125,000 names to voter rolls, which helped propel Democrat Carol Moseley Braun into the same U.S. Senate seat Obama now holds. Nationwide, ACORN’s Project Vote claims to have helped register more than 4 million voters in low-income and minority neighborhoods. Project Vote’s tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status prohibits its involvement in partisan political activity, but one of its leaders told Foundation Watch that “lots of grass-roots members” are assisting the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. ACORN, wrote Foundation Watch investigators Elias Crim and Matthew Vadum last June, has a “record of highly-publicized voter fraud allegations” lodged against it “in Ohio (2004), Wisconsin (2004), Florida (2004), New Mexico (2004), Colorado (2005), Missouri (2006), and Washington State (2007).” They could have named other states as well. In 2006, in Missouri’s U.S. Senate race, Republican incumbent James Talent lost by about 50,000 votes to Democrat Claire McCaskill. “A sizeable portion of that margin,” wrote columnist Carl Horowitz, “was attributable to ACORN organizers submitting phony or at least suspicious voter-registration cards to election officials in the St. Louis and Kansas City metro areas. Several ACORN members in Kansas City were indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office just prior to Election Day, and eventually pleaded guilty. [Wade] Rathke, not one for subtlety, called City of St. Louis election officials ‘slop buckets’ when they questioned the veracity of ACORN-submitted forms.” And who was Missouri state auditor during 2006, responsible at a statewide level for overseeing the honesty of voter registration? “That,” wrote Horowitz, “would be Claire McCaskill.” And Sen. McCaskill is one of Obama’s most ardent supporters. In Florida, ACORN’s 2004 Miami-Dade field director, Mac Stuart, according to David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks.org investigation, “has testified that fraud is standard procedure for ACORN/Project Vote canvassers — behavior that is not only tolerated, but encouraged by supervisors.” Stuart reportedly told investigators: “[T]he voter registration project has been operating illegally since it started.” In 2005, Virginia authorities sampled Project Vote registrations and rejected 83 percent of them for containing false or questionable information... In Washington state, five ACORN employees were convicted in 2007 in what its Secretary of State Sam Reed called “the worst case of election fraud in our state’s history. It was an outrage.” In this state the current Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire was elected literally by a handful of votes, but 450 apparently fictitious names were found registered to vote as Democrats at a single address. At least 1,700 ACORN voter registrations — using the names of Harry Reid, Dennis Hastert, and movie and sports stars — were later revoked in just one county of the state. In Nevada, the state most likely to decide the 2008 presidential election, the Las Vegas Review-Journal last July 7 reported that a Clark County official “sees rampant fraud in the 2,000 to 3,000 registrations ACORN turns in every week.” ACORN, of course, blames a handful of overzealous activists or mercenaries for acts of voter registration fraud. ACORN denies that it condones or encourages any illegal behavior. Intimidation Politics Incidentally, Obama’s ACORN comrade Madeline Talbott, according to Kurtz, “was so impressed by Obama’s organizing skills that she invited him to help train her own staff.” In 1997, notes Kurtz, Talbott was “a key leader” of 200 ACORN protestors who on July 31 tried to storm a Chicago City Council session. These ACORN demonstrators, wrote Kurtz, reportedly “pushed over a metal detector and table used to screen visitors, backed police against the doors to the council chamber, and blocked late-arriving aldermen and city staff from entering the session….almost certainly a deliberate bit of what radicals call ‘direct action,’ orchestrated by ACORN’s Madeline Talbott,” who was “led away handcuffed, charged with mob action and disorderly conduct.” Obama has never been led away in handcuffs for radical behavior. But, notes Kurtz, Obama has used groups of ominously angry activists to intimidate and pressure local officials. A newspaper photo of Obama in his “community organizer” days shows him next to activist group the Developing Communities Project (DCP) posters that read: “It’s a power thing.” The ACORN organizer manual likewise declares, “This is a mass organization directed at political power where might makes right.” Obama supporters in 2008 have angrily demonstrated against, and shared information intended to disrupt, a radio talk show in Chicago that has had Kurtz as a guest. This could be a foretaste of how intimidation might be used to stifle criticism of a President Obama administration. Money-Hungry ACORN By the 1980s, ACORN was expanding its horizons from voter registration to housing. “In 1985, ACORN illegally seized 25 abandoned buildings owned by New York City and installed squatters as residents,” recounted a New York Post editorial. “A weak-kneed City Hall eventually gave the group title to the buildings — proving that crime can pay.” In 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed the Community Redevelopment Act (CRA), which, in retrospect, was the opening wedge for what now threatens to become a government takeover of all housing in America. Under Carter’s administration, the domestic Peace Corps government entity VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, gave a federal grant of $470,000 to ACORN to train volunteers to help low-income citizens. A later congressional investigation found that ACORN illegally used this money for labor organizing. According to ACORN co-founder Delgado, after two of “their own,” Sam Brown and Marjorie Tabankin, became directors of Carter’s ACTION agency and VISTA program, “over 3 million dollars was funneled directly to ACORN” and other left-wing organizations. After the Clinton administration gave a grant worth more than $1 million to ACORN Housing Corp, an investigation by the inspector general of AmeriCorps found that AHC used government funds to register low-income persons for paid ACORN memberships, in violation of federal law. Apparently this taxpayer money was given only to those poor people who agreed to pay $60 immediately back to ACORN. By the infiltration of ideological comrades into positions of power at government agencies, ACORN became the recipient of a flood of taxpayer-funded grants, including some worth millions of dollars. AHC alone between 1997 and 2006 received more than $11,230,000 in public funds. In 2005 alone, according to Department of Labor disclosure statements, labor leaders reportedly paid more than $2.4 million to ACORN in gifts, grants, and fees for organizing work. Mandatory family membership dues bring ACORN another $3 million or so per year. But foundations and churches, boasted Wade Rathke in 2004, account for less than half the revenue ACORN pockets from corporations that had been the targets of successful ACORN protest campaigns. ACORN and Today’s Credit Crisis President Carter’s CRA and related laws were repeatedly expanded to require lending institutions to avoid “redlining” policies that denied home loans to those in minority neighborhoods. Obama was one of many lawyers who profited from successfully suing on grounds that discrimination was the reason an African-American was denied a home loan. Banks and other lenders needed not only public good will but also the cooperation of government regulators to approve mergers and other business activities. Expanding laws such as CRA meant that if ACORN accused a bank of racial discrimination and unleashed protestors against it, however unjustly, that bank might suddenly face very unfriendly government regulators. Banks were thus set up to be easy victims for ACORN shakedowns, and paying protection money became necessary for bank survival. “The same corporations that pay ransom to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pay ransom to ACORN,” said Robert L. Woodson, President of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. “The 2000 tax return for the ACORN Housing Corporation,” reported the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), “disclosed grants from Bank of America, Fleet Services Corporation, Fannie Mae Foundation, Chase Manhattan Foundation, and Well Fargo Foundation totaling $4,752,198.” And AHC is just one of 100 arms of the ACORN octopus. “The banks know they are being held up,” one financial industry consultant told EPI researchers, “but they are not going to fight over this. They look at it as a cost of doing business.” Politicians and left-wing activist groups including ACORN were doing more than shaking down lending institutions for their own profit. They also demanded that lending standards be loosened for those in the underclass who tend to vote Democratic. With a large political gun aimed at their heads, banks commenced making hundreds of thousands of what they called “Ninja” — no income, no job, no assets — loans to minorities who previously would have been deemed uncreditworthy. Knowing that many of these loans they were coerced to make would go bad, many lending institutions bundled them into new types of investment packages and sold them to shed risk. The giant quasi-governmental lending institutions Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, both largely run by Democratic appointees, became sources of funding for groups such as ACORN that aided Democratic politicians — and promoters of high-risk subprime home loans. Democratic executives at these institutions, such as former Clinton administration member and Fannie Mae chair and chief executive officer, Franklin Raines, arranged to have their incomes increase with the amount of lending their institutions did. In six years of recklessly having Fanny Mae assume an astronomical burden of risk, Raines pushed his own income above $90 million. As former federal prosecutor James H. Walsh recounted in a Sept. 22 Newsmax.com article, Raines was an adviser to Obama until recent national financial problems made Raines too risky to embrace. [Editor's Note: Read “Obama, Voter Fraud & Mortgage Meltdown” — Go Here Now]. Obama, noted Walsh, had been “the Senate’s second-largest recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” Is ACORN troubled by what many are calling a credit meltdown and the likelihood that many minority homeowners may lose their homes? Probably not, because the ideological aim of ACORN’s radical founders was to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism. In the current financial situation, government will get bigger, free markets will become less free, and vast amounts of capital will shift from private companies to government. For those like Barack Obama who share ACORN’s ideology, the situation is perfect — heads, government wins; tails, capitalism loses. If people keep their homes, many will naively thank the Democratic politicians and left-wing activists who caused their problems in the first place. If poor people lose their homes, they will be that much easier for ACORN to brainwash with class hatred against evil capitalists. And lest we forget, the first think that congressional Democrats put into their proposed “bailout package” to solve the financial crisis was a permanent slush fund to be extracted from capitalist institutions that would start growing at more than $20 million. The beneficiaries of this now-deleted slush fund were to have been radical Democrat-allied organizations such as ACORN. Greedy Lefists The Rathkes commingled ACORN’s socialist redistribute-the-wealth ideology with their own hypocrisy and personal greed. From ACORN, they spun off approximately 100 other legal entities. They then created a shell game under which money acquired by one ACORN front group, e.g., Project Vote, would be moved to other ACORN-controlled groups, in some cases to acquire property. One former Arkansas ACORN chair, Dorothy Perkins, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, described the organization as “building up a land portfolio” that was supposed to “translate to money and power for the national organization.” But that money was “never seen” by the poor people ACORN claimed to serve, she said, and “all the money ended up” under Wade Rathke’s control. Rathke, she said, ran ACORN “like a Jim Jones cult.” Relatively little of the redistributed wealth of Rathke’s ACORN conglomerate trickled down to the poor, and comparatively little went to the organization’s thousands of full-time “community organizers.” Typical pay was $25,000 a year or less, for which ACORN employees were expected to work 54 hours or more per week, weekends included. In 2006, ACORN required many of its workers in Missouri to sign an agreement that they would be “working up to 80 hours over seven days of work.” ACORN went to court in California, arguing unsuccessfully that it should be exempt from minimum wage laws. But in recent years, ACORN has staged many demonstrations to demand a “living wage,” typically a minimum of $12 or more per hour, for minimum wage workers. According to Mac Stuart, ACORN collected more than $4 for each completed, and illegally copied, voter registration. Its workers who found people and submitted their registrations were paid only $2, with ACORN and the Rathkes pocketing the difference. But ACORN had many other sources for its annual $37.5 million budget, including millions in government and foundation grants. ACORN head Wade Rathke was also chief organizer of a New Orleans local of one of America’s most radical labor unions, the Service Employee’s International Union (SEIU), and ACORN was a close ally of organized labor. Unions sometimes paid ACORN to have its low-paid workers march with picket signs pretending to be striking union members. When ACORN workers, as well as those in his SEIU union local, tried to form their own unions to bargain for higher wages and shorter hours, Rathke successfully used a wide array of union-busting techniques to stop them — the same kinds of techniques he routinely condemned other businesses for using. But the Rathkes fell from power in 2008 shortly before The New York Times on July 9 reported that in 1999-2000 Dale Rathke, then ACORN’s chief financial officer, had diverted $948,607 from ACORN and affiliated charitable organization accounts. Other ACORN officials in 2001 reportedly obtained a restitution agreement from Wade Rathke to repay the missing funds in $30,000 per-year installments. ACORN, meanwhile, continued to pay Wade Rathke considerably more than $30,000 each year, in effect covering these repayments, while Dale Rathke’s apparent embezzlement of almost a million dollars — in contributions to help the poor — was kept secret from the public and from those funding ACORN. “How did ACORN handle the crime?” asked a July 13 New York Post editorial. “By disguising it on the books as a loan from one of its contractors….” and only letting Rathke go “when word of his fraud leaked to donors…. most of the people who covered up the embezzlement are still working for ACORN.” “We thought it best at the time to protect the organizations,” said ACORN President Maude Hurd. “We did what we thought was right.” Or what served the interests of the left. Welcome to ACORN, the organization that made Barack Obama what he is today, and that may make him president of the United States.

Miguel+Angel+Rodriguez.+republican1.johnmccain@yahoo.com(402 - days ago)Page: Gary Delgado

Obama and ACORN: You Can Run, But You Can’t Hide


Monday, October 6, 2008 7:26 PM


By: Lowell Ponte Article Font Size







Barack Obama is running as fast and as far away from his association with the radical group ACORN as he can, but he can’t hide from the facts of his close relationship with the organization. ACORN, or Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, describes itself as a “non-partisan” group devoted to helping the poor and to registering millions to vote. Critics accuse ACORN of involvement vote fraud, voter intimidation, shakedowns against businesses, and the promotion of socialist class hatred and class warfare. Apparently worried by the connection between Obama and the group, his campaign has put claims of his ties to ACORN as the lead item on its “Fight The Smears” Web site — a site the Obama campaign created to counter what they claim are partisan lies made up against their candidate. The release on the Obama site reads: “When Obama met with ACORN leaders in November, he reminded them of his history with ACORN and his beginnings in Illinois as a Project Vote organizer, a nonprofit focused on voter rights and education. Senator Obama said, ‘I come out of a grassroots organizing background. That's what I did for three and half years before I went to law school. That's the reason I moved to Chicago was to organize. “So this is something that I know personally, the work you do, the importance of it. 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.” Indeed, Obama was being far too modest. The 2008 Democratic presidential nominee had worked not just alongside ACORN, but also as a key operative for the organization. He was its lawyer in several pivotal ACORN cases. Obama funded a number of its activities, as well. When he sat on the board of the prestigious Woods Fund for Chicago alongside former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, he oversaw and approved many grants for ACORN. As the National Review’s Stanley Kurtz reported, one Woods committee report boasted that the fund’s “non-ideological” public image “enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and government ‘establishments’ without undue risk of being accused of partisanship.” Obama was the Illinois director of ACORN’s controversial voter registration operation, and he trained the group’s leaders in the ways of radical, sometimes illegal, confrontational politics. He also paid ACORN affiliates during his recent Democratic primary contest. For example, leading up to the 2008 Ohio Democratic Primary, Obama’s campaign between Feb. 25 and March 17 paid Citizens Services, Inc., a subsidiary of ACORN, $832,598, apparently for get-out-the-vote activities. Obama’s mysterious, shrouded past as a “community organizer” is closely tied to ACORN, a group that supplies a large share of the Democratic Party political shock troops responsible for the party’s recapture of Congress in 2006. ACORN has at least 350,000 dues-paying member families, and more than 800 chapters spread among at least 104 U.S. cities as well as in Canada, Mexico, Argentina, and Peru. To outsiders, Obama’s “long service with ACORN led many of its members to serve as the voluntary shock troops of Obama’s early political campaigns — his initial 1996 State Senate campaign, and his failed bid for Congress in 2000,” wrote Kurtz. “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.’” ACORN’s Radical Roots ACORN’s four co-founders were 1960s New Leftists. One was George Wiley, whose National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) members practiced confrontation politics, e.g., swarming into welfare offices and bullying social workers. The second ACORN co-founder was NWRO organizer Gary Delgado. Wiley made no secret that he followed the radical tactics proposed in the far-left The Nation Magazine by socialist Columbia University scholars Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who argued that American capitalism could be bankrupted and destroyed by overloading our system with ever-rising costs and bureaucratic demands. (In 1996, President Bill Clinton invited Cloward and Piven to the White House as honored guests.) ACORN’s other founders and longtime bosses were former Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) activist Wade Rathke, a close NWRO ally, and his brother Dale. “We are the majority, forged from all minorities,” proclaimed ACORN’s founding 1970 “People’s Platform” manifesto. “We are the masses of many, not the forces of few…. We will wait no longer for the crumbs at America’s door. We will not be meek, but mighty.” In ACORN, the Rathkes replaced Cloward-Piven tactics designed to overthrow capitalist America with the confrontational-but-compromising tactics of Chicago socialist Saul Alinsky. “Instead of trying to overturn ‘the system — to blow it up, as Wiley wanted to do, ACORN burrows deep within the system,” wrote Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern, adding, “taking over its power and using its institutions for its own purposes, like a political ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’” The Rathkes first established ACORN as the Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now and struck a personal deal with that state’s liberal Republican then-Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller, who reportedly paid the newly-sprouted ACORN $5,000 in cash to register voters. “Of course, they thought we were going to register Republicans,” Delgado later boasted. “We did not register a single Republican voter in that election. However, we did use those resources early on to build the organization.” Obama, ACORN, and Vote Fraud Selectively adding millions of Democratic names to the voter rolls remains one of ACORN’s most lucrative activities, for which this organization has been given millions of dollars by organized labor, non-profit foundations, and Democratic-controlled government agencies. Because Obama had worked closely with one of its leaders, Madeline Talbott, ACORN, in 1995, specifically sought out this radical young lawyer to help craft its lawsuit to impose President Bill Clinton’s 1993 National Voter Registration Act, nicknamed “Motor Voter,” according to Chicago ACORN leader Toni Foulkes. Obama’s ACORN lawsuit won, thereby slapping aside state officials who resisted Motor Voter because of what it soon proved to be: a 12-lane superhighway to massive vote fraud. The Motor Voter law required bureaucrats at welfare offices, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and other government offices to register as voters those who used their services. “Examiners were under orders not to ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship,” wrote Wall Street Journal reporter John Fund in his book “Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy.” “States also had to permit mail-in voter registrations, which allowed anyone to register without any personal contact with a registrar or election official.” Those who took advantage of government services such as welfare were disproportionately likely to vote for the Big Government party. Motor Voter also made it more difficult to purge voter rolls of fraudulent registrations. Motor Voter, wrote Fund, “fueled an explosion of phantom voters.” But in Barack Obama’s Democrat-ruled Chicago, phantom voters and voting graveyards are nothing new. Motor Voter was the Clinton administration’s attempt permanently to tilt voter rolls in favor of the Democratic Party. And Obama, working for ACORN, played a key role in imposing this law. Perhaps thanks to ACORN’s and Motor Voter’s influence, of the 19 foreign terrorists who attacked America on 9/11, at least six were registered to vote. In 1992, Obama took time off as a lawyer to direct Project Vote, ACORN’s voter mobilization entity, statewide in Illinois. Project Vote added an estimated 125,000 names to voter rolls, which helped propel Democrat Carol Moseley Braun into the same U.S. Senate seat Obama now holds. Nationwide, ACORN’s Project Vote claims to have helped register more than 4 million voters in low-income and minority neighborhoods. Project Vote’s tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status prohibits its involvement in partisan political activity, but one of its leaders told Foundation Watch that “lots of grass-roots members” are assisting the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. ACORN, wrote Foundation Watch investigators Elias Crim and Matthew Vadum last June, has a “record of highly-publicized voter fraud allegations” lodged against it “in Ohio (2004), Wisconsin (2004), Florida (2004), New Mexico (2004), Colorado (2005), Missouri (2006), and Washington State (2007).” They could have named other states as well. In 2006, in Missouri’s U.S. Senate race, Republican incumbent James Talent lost by about 50,000 votes to Democrat Claire McCaskill. “A sizeable portion of that margin,” wrote columnist Carl Horowitz, “was attributable to ACORN organizers submitting phony or at least suspicious voter-registration cards to election officials in the St. Louis and Kansas City metro areas. Several ACORN members in Kansas City were indicted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office just prior to Election Day, and eventually pleaded guilty. [Wade] Rathke, not one for subtlety, called City of St. Louis election officials ‘slop buckets’ when they questioned the veracity of ACORN-submitted forms.” And who was Missouri state auditor during 2006, responsible at a statewide level for overseeing the honesty of voter registration? “That,” wrote Horowitz, “would be Claire McCaskill.” And Sen. McCaskill is one of Obama’s most ardent supporters. In Florida, ACORN’s 2004 Miami-Dade field director, Mac Stuart, according to David Horowitz’s DiscoverTheNetworks.org investigation, “has testified that fraud is standard procedure for ACORN/Project Vote canvassers — behavior that is not only tolerated, but encouraged by supervisors.” Stuart reportedly told investigators: “[T]he voter registration project has been operating illegally since it started.” In 2005, Virginia authorities sampled Project Vote registrations and rejected 83 percent of them for containing false or questionable information... In Washington state, five ACORN employees were convicted in 2007 in what its Secretary of State Sam Reed called “the worst case of election fraud in our state’s history. It was an outrage.” In this state the current Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire was elected literally by a handful of votes, but 450 apparently fictitious names were found registered to vote as Democrats at a single address. At least 1,700 ACORN voter registrations — using the names of Harry Reid, Dennis Hastert, and movie and sports stars — were later revoked in just one county of the state. In Nevada, the state most likely to decide the 2008 presidential election, the Las Vegas Review-Journal last July 7 reported that a Clark County official “sees rampant fraud in the 2,000 to 3,000 registrations ACORN turns in every week.” ACORN, of course, blames a handful of overzealous activists or mercenaries for acts of voter registration fraud. ACORN denies that it condones or encourages any illegal behavior. Intimidation Politics Incidentally, Obama’s ACORN comrade Madeline Talbott, according to Kurtz, “was so impressed by Obama’s organizing skills that she invited him to help train her own staff.” In 1997, notes Kurtz, Talbott was “a key leader” of 200 ACORN protestors who on July 31 tried to storm a Chicago City Council session. These ACORN demonstrators, wrote Kurtz, reportedly “pushed over a metal detector and table used to screen visitors, backed police against the doors to the council chamber, and blocked late-arriving aldermen and city staff from entering the session….almost certainly a deliberate bit of what radicals call ‘direct action,’ orchestrated by ACORN’s Madeline Talbott,” who was “led away handcuffed, charged with mob action and disorderly conduct.” Obama has never been led away in handcuffs for radical behavior. But, notes Kurtz, Obama has used groups of ominously angry activists to intimidate and pressure local officials. A newspaper photo of Obama in his “community organizer” days shows him next to activist group the Developing Communities Project (DCP) posters that read: “It’s a power thing.” The ACORN organizer manual likewise declares, “This is a mass organization directed at political power where might makes right.” Obama supporters in 2008 have angrily demonstrated against, and shared information intended to disrupt, a radio talk show in Chicago that has had Kurtz as a guest. This could be a foretaste of how intimidation might be used to stifle criticism of a President Obama administration. Money-Hungry ACORN By the 1980s, ACORN was expanding its horizons from voter registration to housing. “In 1985, ACORN illegally seized 25 abandoned buildings owned by New York City and installed squatters as residents,” recounted a New York Post editorial. “A weak-kneed City Hall eventually gave the group title to the buildings — proving that crime can pay.” In 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed the Community Redevelopment Act (CRA), which, in retrospect, was the opening wedge for what now threatens to become a government takeover of all housing in America. Under Carter’s administration, the domestic Peace Corps government entity VISTA, Volunteers in Service to America, gave a federal grant of $470,000 to ACORN to train volunteers to help low-income citizens. A later congressional investigation found that ACORN illegally used this money for labor organizing. According to ACORN co-founder Delgado, after two of “their own,” Sam Brown and Marjorie Tabankin, became directors of Carter’s ACTION agency and VISTA program, “over 3 million dollars was funneled directly to ACORN” and other left-wing organizations. After the Clinton administration gave a grant worth more than $1 million to ACORN Housing Corp, an investigation by the inspector general of AmeriCorps found that AHC used government funds to register low-income persons for paid ACORN memberships, in violation of federal law. Apparently this taxpayer money was given only to those poor people who agreed to pay $60 immediately back to ACORN. By the infiltration of ideological comrades into positions of power at government agencies, ACORN became the recipient of a flood of taxpayer-funded grants, including some worth millions of dollars. AHC alone between 1997 and 2006 received more than $11,230,000 in public funds. In 2005 alone, according to Department of Labor disclosure statements, labor leaders reportedly paid more than $2.4 million to ACORN in gifts, grants, and fees for organizing work. Mandatory family membership dues bring ACORN another $3 million or so per year. But foundations and churches, boasted Wade Rathke in 2004, account for less than half the revenue ACORN pockets from corporations that had been the targets of successful ACORN protest campaigns. ACORN and Today’s Credit Crisis President Carter’s CRA and related laws were repeatedly expanded to require lending institutions to avoid “redlining” policies that denied home loans to those in minority neighborhoods. Obama was one of many lawyers who profited from successfully suing on grounds that discrimination was the reason an African-American was denied a home loan. Banks and other lenders needed not only public good will but also the cooperation of government regulators to approve mergers and other business activities. Expanding laws such as CRA meant that if ACORN accused a bank of racial discrimination and unleashed protestors against it, however unjustly, that bank might suddenly face very unfriendly government regulators. Banks were thus set up to be easy victims for ACORN shakedowns, and paying protection money became necessary for bank survival. “The same corporations that pay ransom to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pay ransom to ACORN,” said Robert L. Woodson, President of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise. “The 2000 tax return for the ACORN Housing Corporation,” reported the Employment Policies Institute (EPI), “disclosed grants from Bank of America, Fleet Services Corporation, Fannie Mae Foundation, Chase Manhattan Foundation, and Well Fargo Foundation totaling $4,752,198.” And AHC is just one of 100 arms of the ACORN octopus. “The banks know they are being held up,” one financial industry consultant told EPI researchers, “but they are not going to fight over this. They look at it as a cost of doing business.” Politicians and left-wing activist groups including ACORN were doing more than shaking down lending institutions for their own profit. They also demanded that lending standards be loosened for those in the underclass who tend to vote Democratic. With a large political gun aimed at their heads, banks commenced making hundreds of thousands of what they called “Ninja” — no income, no job, no assets — loans to minorities who previously would have been deemed uncreditworthy. Knowing that many of these loans they were coerced to make would go bad, many lending institutions bundled them into new types of investment packages and sold them to shed risk. The giant quasi-governmental lending institutions Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae, both largely run by Democratic appointees, became sources of funding for groups such as ACORN that aided Democratic politicians — and promoters of high-risk subprime home loans. Democratic executives at these institutions, such as former Clinton administration member and Fannie Mae chair and chief executive officer, Franklin Raines, arranged to have their incomes increase with the amount of lending their institutions did. In six years of recklessly having Fanny Mae assume an astronomical burden of risk, Raines pushed his own income above $90 million. As former federal prosecutor James H. Walsh recounted in a Sept. 22 Newsmax.com article, Raines was an adviser to Obama until recent national financial problems made Raines too risky to embrace. [Editor's Note: Read “Obama, Voter Fraud & Mortgage Meltdown” — Go Here Now]. Obama, noted Walsh, had been “the Senate’s second-largest recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” Is ACORN troubled by what many are calling a credit meltdown and the likelihood that many minority homeowners may lose their homes? Probably not, because the ideological aim of ACORN’s radical founders was to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism. In the current financial situation, government will get bigger, free markets will become less free, and vast amounts of capital will shift from private companies to government. For those like Barack Obama who share ACORN’s ideology, the situation is perfect — heads, government wins; tails, capitalism loses. If people keep their homes, many will naively thank the Democratic politicians and left-wing activists who caused their problems in the first place. If poor people lose their homes, they will be that much easier for ACORN to brainwash with class hatred against evil capitalists. And lest we forget, the first think that congressional Democrats put into their proposed “bailout package” to solve the financial crisis was a permanent slush fund to be extracted from capitalist institutions that would start growing at more than $20 million. The beneficiaries of this now-deleted slush fund were to have been radical Democrat-allied organizations such as ACORN. Greedy Lefists The Rathkes commingled ACORN’s socialist redistribute-the-wealth ideology with their own hypocrisy and personal greed. From ACORN, they spun off approximately 100 other legal entities. They then created a shell game under which money acquired by one ACORN front group, e.g., Project Vote, would be moved to other ACORN-controlled groups, in some cases to acquire property. One former Arkansas ACORN chair, Dorothy Perkins, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, described the organization as “building up a land portfolio” that was supposed to “translate to money and power for the national organization.” But that money was “never seen” by the poor people ACORN claimed to serve, she said, and “all the money ended up” under Wade Rathke’s control. Rathke, she said, ran ACORN “like a Jim Jones cult.” Relatively little of the redistributed wealth of Rathke’s ACORN conglomerate trickled down to the poor, and comparatively little went to the organization’s thousands of full-time “community organizers.” Typical pay was $25,000 a year or less, for which ACORN employees were expected to work 54 hours or more per week, weekends included. In 2006, ACORN required many of its workers in Missouri to sign an agreement that they would be “working up to 80 hours over seven days of work.” ACORN went to court in California, arguing unsuccessfully that it should be exempt from minimum wage laws. But in recent years, ACORN has staged many demonstrations to demand a “living wage,” typically a minimum of $12 or more per hour, for minimum wage workers. According to Mac Stuart, ACORN collected more than $4 for each completed, and illegally copied, voter registration. Its workers who found people and submitted their registrations were paid only $2, with ACORN and the Rathkes pocketing the difference. But ACORN had many other sources for its annual $37.5 million budget, including millions in government and foundation grants. ACORN head Wade Rathke was also chief organizer of a New Orleans local of one of America’s most radical labor unions, the Service Employee’s International Union (SEIU), and ACORN was a close ally of organized labor. Unions sometimes paid ACORN to have its low-paid workers march with picket signs pretending to be striking union members. When ACORN workers, as well as those in his SEIU union local, tried to form their own unions to bargain for higher wages and shorter hours, Rathke successfully used a wide array of union-busting techniques to stop them — the same kinds of techniques he routinely condemned other businesses for using. But the Rathkes fell from power in 2008 shortly before The New York Times on July 9 reported that in 1999-2000 Dale Rathke, then ACORN’s chief financial officer, had diverted $948,607 from ACORN and affiliated charitable organization accounts. Other ACORN officials in 2001 reportedly obtained a restitution agreement from Wade Rathke to repay the missing funds in $30,000 per-year installments. ACORN, meanwhile, continued to pay Wade Rathke considerably more than $30,000 each year, in effect covering these repayments, while Dale Rathke’s apparent embezzlement of almost a million dollars — in contributions to help the poor — was kept secret from the public and from those funding ACORN. “How did ACORN handle the crime?” asked a July 13 New York Post editorial. “By disguising it on the books as a loan from one of its contractors….” and only letting Rathke go “when word of his fraud leaked to donors…. most of the people who covered up the embezzlement are still working for ACORN.” “We thought it best at the time to protect the organizations,” said ACORN President Maude Hurd. “We did what we thought was right.” Or what served the interests of the left. Welcome to ACORN, the organization that made Barack Obama what he is today, and that may make him president of the United States.

O'Kema Lewis(410 - days ago)Page: Ralph Matire

I have the greatest respect for anyone addressing

the gross injustices in funding that affect the quality of

life for students and families today.


BUT, As I am aware with documentation about the money

not being used in School District 299 for education,

i.e. Federal dollars. Can't one also address making

those in charges of these valuable dollars more

accountable for how they are being used than to

speak constantly abou how Illinois ranks 49th in

the nation in the amount of funding provided to

the states revenue.

Ponder the thought that if without fail it cold

be demonstrated that real accountablity was in

place for what was being done with the dollars

(Chicago) received for education,


It would not be so difficult to get more funds.


Failure goes both ways, money not being used

that was given and money being requested

and you cannot show what you are doing with

what you have and finally how can anyone

justify not spending 54 million dollars of Federal

dollars by a given dead line yet you want more

money??


Just a Comment - nothing more

l_itzel@hotmail.com(414 - days ago)Page: Xochitl Bervera

Hola Xochitl.. soy Itzel Luna Bervera... ando buscando a mi prima, que creo que eres tú... hija de Antonio Berbera Mayo. ¿Estoy en lo cierto?


Saludos!!! desde México!!

?(420 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

yo solo quiero decir que los mexicanos que estamos aqui ciudadanos o no ciudadanos venimos de una vida triste y probe solo buscamos un mejor futuro para nuestras familias yo se que algunos americanos no quieren a los hispanos pero los hispanos venimos aqui para ser el bien y publicamente le pido disculpas a cada ciudadano americano que a sufrido por culpa de una persona de nuestra raza perdon

Guest(425 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

tienes toda la razon solo los indios americanos son los nativos americanos de este pais y ellos ni dicen nada lo que pasa es que no quieren dar una reforma migratoria por que todo el dinero que los inmmigrantes no reportan al I.R.S el gobierno se queda con el y con ese dinero a muchos americanos les pagan el welfer y si dicen que los inmmigrantes les bienen a quitar el trabajo es por que ellos no quieren trabajar

Guest(425 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

No one here is FULL American!


Every American ancestors are not Americans. some are Italians, Irish, polish , British ect. So I don't get why everyone is making a big fuss about it.


Immigrants came to America to built their own future, if you were in a country that was poor and had no money and you wanted to support your family, you would travel anywhere to make money. NO ONE came from to America just to have fun . I don't think anyone would leave their country unless they have to and they need too..


America has opened many opportunities for everyone. and helped everyone build their future. so before anyone saying that their shouldn't be immigrants in America, then they look at it in a different point of you. and need to stop being prejudice about it..

Joyce Jardine(430 - days ago)Page: Patricia Watkins

I need to say that I have only hear about you but would love to meet you as I am a member of the Church AFC in Africa.

Guest(442 - days ago)Page: Community Organizing

Dear sir/madam,


We are Papua New Guinean non government organization wanting to establish networking and partnerships with your organization.


If interested please contact us.


Regards


Ken Konafo

Chairman

Guest(449 - days ago)Page: Alberto Retana

Hola Alberto : Me gustaria contactarte ,mi nombre es Manuel

Retana , Soy originario de Mexico DF. Ahora vivo

en Texas y tambien soy graduado de la carrera

de Estudios Latinioamericanos y Ciencia Politica

en Mexico DF UNAM . Saludos



tmretana@aol.com

afharris1@hotmail.com(473 - days ago)Page: Oronde Miller

This is to encourage you, Oronde, for all of the hard work that you are putting in to tell the story of the African-American people, more specifically African-American youth and families. With the ever-widening gap of the disproportionate representation of African-American children in the foster care system continuing to enlarge itself and at the same time being ignored by itself, it takes someone committed to make sure that the truth is getting disseminated so that the truth can set the people free. I know tha it can get discouraging sometimes to fight the good fight when it appears as if the masses would rather snub the obvious rather than address it. But you stay encouraged. The good Lord knows your heart and the desires you have therein shall be granted by Him. Continue the good fight of faith. I'm in your corner. Somebody has got to tell the story. I'm praying for you.


Pastor Anthony Harris, MSW, LSW, LADC, PhD Candidate-Sociology

New Dominion Christian Center

Las Vegas, Nevada

Greg Gergen(481 - days ago)Page: Linda Jue

Linda,


I just saw you interviewed on www.democracynow.org regarding the decline of the newspaper industry. Something that no one addressed is one of the reasons, and my specific reason for no longer subscribing to any newspapers.


Even though I spend about $ 500 per year for web based newsletters I refuse to spend one penny towards any newspapers because of their liberal biase.


thank you.


Greg Gergen Wilmington DE

Guest(510 - days ago)Page: Nunu Kidane

Dear Brothers & Sisters:
We the slave descendants who have been in bondage in America for 453 years are planning to return to our original homeland in the near future. We have been working for years inside the international legal arena to establish our Human Rights and secure Reparations for all 250 million Afrodescendants in the western hemisphere. In order to learn more about the Reparations Movement please read each and every issue of Muhammad Speaks newspaper published by the Lost-Found Nation of Islam under the leadership of the Honorable Silis Muhammad. When the Lost Sheep return home we plan to help the entire continent elevate itself. We need each other to truly succeed.
Peace,
Malik Al-Arkam
Detroit, MIchigan
mathrise@netscape.net

Guest(514 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

MELINDA NUNEZ: QUE DICES QUE NO TIENEN EDUCACION Y MIRA COMO TE EXPRESAS DE TU RAZA,,SI TU RAZA POR QUE APUESTO QUE EN MEXICO NACISTE ,SEGURO TE CASASTE CON UN GRINGO Y TUVISTE LA SUERTE QUE TE ARREGLO PAPELES,AHORA TE CRES LA GRAN MIERDA QUE ERES HOY,Y NO LA DEMAS GENTE QUE VIENE A TRABAJAR Y NO A CRITITICAR SOLAMENTE COMO LO HACES TU,MEJOR PONTE A TRABAJAR Y DEJA DE HABRIR EL OSICO ESTUPIDA QUE DE TU BOCA SALEN PURAS PENDEJADAS.

la mera verga(537 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

El escándalo en torno al agotamiento de nuestras reservas no lo provoca su rol decisivo en nuestra economía, que no existe, sino las presiones y necesidades de los poderosos que nos compran el crudo. Y en contrapartida, ahí están los cientos de miles de mexicanos cazados como bestias feroces en la frontera yanqui; usados descaradamente como “tema electoral” por los aspirantes a la presidencia de EE.UU.; tratando de enternecer a los perros de presa que los persiguen y deportan exhibiendo su dolor humano por la separación de sus hijos y repitiendo, hasta el hartazgo, que no los deben echar porque son necesarios para la prosperidad y bienestar del blanco anglosajón, es decir, suplicando al poderoso que les permita servirlo cuando debería ser al revés. Esta vergonzosa situación podría revertirse de modo rápido y efectivo si disminuyera la oferta de brazos mexicanos; si México se pusiera en serio a producir a base de un uso racional y moderno de sus recursos naturales, el petróleo en primer lugar, en vez de estar disputando sobre si es inteligente o no darle una rebanada del pastel petrolero a la iniciativa privada. Por ese camino no lograremos otra cosa, evidentemente, que incrementar el desempleo, la pobreza y el desamparo de las masas populares, ya hoy mismo al borde del abismo de la desesperanza y del rencor social.


MELINDA NUÑEZ: CHINGA TU MADRE PINCHE PERRA IGNORANTE!! ERES UNA ESTUPIDA.

dragonslayers8@msn.com(551 - days ago)Page: Sharwline Nicholson

You are a ray of hope for those of us out there who have survived domestic violence and are in simular circumstances. Thank you for standing up!


Margi Jakobson

YERALDIN =)(551 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

YO LO UNICO QUE LE QUIERO DECIR ALA TAL MELINDA NUNEZ ES QUE ERES UNA IGNORANTE SIN EDUCACION...TU PARA QUE VEA NO TIENES EDUCACION TE PONEST COMO UN TONTA VERDULERE ANDAR AGREDIENDO A ESO QUE SIN QUE TU TE DES CUENTA TE DAN DE TRAGAR A TI...OTRA COSA LAS MEXICANAS NO SOMOS CHUZMA COMO TU DICES AL CONTRARIO SOMOS MEJORES QUE TODA ESA VOLA DE GRINGASD QUE SE DICEN TENER UN BUEN TITULO...HABLAS MUCHO DE EDUCACION ALGO QUE ATI TE HACE MUCHA FALTA CON ESE LENGUAJE DE TONTA QUE TIENES...YO TAMBIEN TENGO PAPELES PERO SABES NO POR ESO VOY A DESCRIMINAR A MI RAZA....ARRIBA LOS MEXICANOS!!!!!!Y LO DIGO CON MUCHO ORGULLO UVICATE Y APRENDE A ESCRIBIR EL ESPANOL...TIENES EL MENDIGO NOPAL EN LA FRENTE Y TE CREES LA MAMA DE LOS POLLITOS Y NI A GALLINA LLEGAS....AN YOU KNOW SOMETHING IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MEXICAN WE RULE THIS COUNTRY BEILEVE IT OR NOT AN YOU JUST ONE OF THE MANY WHO IMMIGRATED THIS COUNTRY...SO DON'T COME AN TALK YOUR DOME THINGS IF YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT UP.....YEAH FIRST LEARN THE HISTORY OF WHAT YOU CALL YOUR COUNTRY, Y LUEGO ABRES LA BOCA


ARRIBA TODOS LOS MEXICANOS, PORQUE AUI NOS VAMOS A QUEDAR!!!!!

Guest(562 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

i was once a immigrant and i came here without permission. I am now legal but that has not change me at all. im proud to be mexican and i feel bad about the people that are illegal and i think that they should be given a chance to be here and have a life. not only are they suffering but many of them have families to support and people who are against them have no idea what is like to be here illegal. i believe that one day all the immigrants will soon have a to be here legally.

alexus hailes(571 - days ago)Page: Eddie Hailes

please leave comments

alexus hailes(571 - days ago)Page: Eddie Hailes

my cozo I love him for acheiveing and good job make all that money eddie.

jgarcia(572 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

As I read these Posts I am just dumbfounded by the amount of hatred people of Latin American descent can have for one another. All Hispanics share much in common, most especially our language. I do not understand how some of you could post such sick nonsense about others who share your language and still concider yourselves God fearing persons. Do you not realize that you are generalizing a whole culture? Do you not understand that your bigoted attitude is exactly what great men like Dr. King gave their lives to rid this great country of? Why then do you perpetuate this racist mentality towards those who are of a lower economic status than you? You are hypocrites! Latinos come in all different shapes, colores and sizes. We are also all tied together through history. If you do consider yourself an American, then you should never use class, "smell", skin color, or language, to catagorize what a good person is, or should be. Remember, Americans come from all around the world, and smell or look all kinds of ways!


With that said, most Hispanics living here in the U.S. ( I say most because I can't generalize all) realize there has to be some sort of solution to solving Mexico's emmigration problem and our immigration problem. However, MOST of us believe that there has to be a better solution, and not just a better solution, but also a long lasting solution to these problems. Bickering about physical traits and cultural practices gets us no where. Doing so simply places us in a vicious cycle of hate and prejudice; and this is exactly what politicians like Dick Cheney want, because then they can make their corporate buddies richer.


Consider:


1.) The economy is in a recession, mostly caused by the Mortgage crisis and the bad lending practices of banks. Not because of Immigrants.


2.) Low Skilled Jobs are leaving this country because we are in a globalized economy (for those of still living in the 20th century as suppose to the 21st, this may come as a shock) where countries attempt to liberalize economic tariffs and have their corporations compete globally. As a result the U.S. job Market is quickly moving towards service sector jobs, ie. Intellectual Properties, Computer Software etc. What does this mean for our generation? Well it means a lot, but mainly it means GET YOUR COLLEGE DEGREE. All of you who were born here and competing with immigrants for jobs like Janitor, Construction worker, landscape, etc. are in a losing battle. Use the fact that your an American to demand that our Congress lower the price of public universities, raise the quality of primary and secondary education in your neighborhoods, Universalize Health Care, etc. Kicking every immigrant worker who works for less than minimum wage out at once will not guaruntee you the good future you desire. Health Care costs too much, gas cost too much, houses cost too much, Private education and college cost too much, etc.


3.) My friends, roofing, Cooking, Cutting the grass, Walking the Dog, Cleaning the Motel, Painting, etc. cannot and will not ever go to China. These jobs are here to stay forever because they can only be done by someone here in the U.S. It is silly to say that those type of Low Skilled labor jobs will be exported to China!!!

However, if there is no one to clean the motel 6 you sleep at for less than six dollars per hour, then your nightly rates will rise. The same goes for everything else.

However if you're complaint is that it is not fair that immigrants take these kinds of jobs because he or she is willing to work for less $ than you, lets consider the alternative.

You work for motel 6 as a cleaner, you demand that your pay be at least enough to sustain you. Let us just say that for this to occur you need to be paid at least $8.50 by the hour, well above minimum wage in most states. Well guess what, gas costs over $4 a gallon, good Health insurance is way over your price range, rent costs are going up, and that kind of job almost always has no union; so the moment you miss work or mouth off to a boss, your gone, because there are tens of thousands of other Americans who also want your job. Not only that, but all of us who do have a college education, and can afford to vacation, now have to pay more money for a room because the motel has to make up for the extra money they spend on having you work there for $8.50 per hr. In the long run we all end up back at square one.


4.) Stop getting all of your information from Lou Dobbs. He is not an expert, and he is not objective. Try reading about this subject from different sources and wathcing multiple media outlets. Expand your minds my friends!!!



So I say, why waist our time writing hate Posts? Articulate yourself respectfully and RATIONALLY. Let's talk about solutions, instead of arguing about who smells and such. Si SE Puede!!!!


Best wishes to all!!

Guest(588 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

-How can this,or any other, country afford to take in so many illegal immigrants who do not have even the most basic education to be successful in an advanced country like the USA? Yhey can come to COOK, CUT THE GRASS, WALK THE DOG, CLEAN THE MOTEL, DO ROOFING, PAINTING, ETC, but where will they be when more and more of the jobs in Ammerica are shipped to China and other undeveloped countries? Real legal Americans are having a hard time finding a job in this era. How are these illegal immigrants going to live in here. Calderon, Slim, Obrador, Televisa, Monsenor,,,,take them back to where they belong.

rosemary+allen/+son+nathaniel+grogan++erosetta@netzero.net(589 - days ago)Page: Ajamu Baraka

April 22, 2008 we have a court date, charge for car theft and category C felony. We plead not guilty. On Oct. 12 2007 I called the Sheriff Department for Abandoned Vehicle Report. For over three years my back yard neighbors had park 1976 Mirage Cadillac on my property on my property without my permission. By NV law this a misdemeanor. Officer Kantz listed in the report the Marge Ivy was the registered owner, and estimated value was $100, sun rot and rust. I sold it for $240. One or the reasons I sold it was intimidated and influence by Officer Kantz. My had decided to just move the car back on to their property, and I told Kantz this he yell at me, told me NO! DO WHAT EVER YOU HAVE TO DO TO GET RID OF THE CAR. Said many times, It's your responsibility to get rid of the car. I also saw on TV once that if someone leaves anything on your property that you could throw it away, keep it, give away or sell it. So sense I listen to the sheriff I don't everything should be laid at my doorstep, Officer Kantz should take some the blame. This wasn't the first time my neighbor left vehicle on my property without permission. That was the only reason I brought the property in 2004 from my son, because his renters and backyard neighbors was always fighting of this trailer he parked on his property. I think that the rented had an option to buy. She (renter) was so bad at the neighbors she lost her job at nearby casino, because she refuse to wait on Vergil Sr. (back yard neighbor). Sense she lost her job they were no longer could pay the rent and moved. Vergil Sr. die sometime in 2007, before he death I eveytime I would ask them to move the car, they would say okay, but never would. After his son Vergil Jr. took over, my son ask him about moving the car, he said that his intensions was to move more cars on the property. I think that he and his father was trying to establish an easement on my land. My last Public Defender Mr. Paul Yohey quit the case. My son got into such heated debate on my case, in the courtroom. It was getting too loud so they took it outside the courtroom. I didn't know that he had quit until the Judge told me. During that debate Yohey and son had, my son told me that he said that I was just some old women who didn't have any memory, that I wouldn't win in this hick town. When Yohey and I had our conversation, he wouldn't let my son come into his office, to hear what we were talking about. Confidential, just between him and I. So why would come to court that day and instead of talking to me, he gets into it with my son. The Judge gave another Public Defender Mr Kenneth V. Ward. I best he thinks the same thing about me having any chance of getting off. The Public Defenders in Lyon County only do what the District Attorney tell them to do specially when it's comes to Blacks. I had pride in my personal record, I pass a FBI probe while working for the Postal Service. To drive on the Airlines grounds for the Post Office. I worked 34yrs for the Postal Service, retired, handicap and live on a fixed income. I was writting the e-mail to ask what help and advice you or the Human Rights Nework could give me. In this town of Silver Springs NV, most times you can't get a hello from the neighbors. Just across the street my white neighbor has the yard sell. Get lots of sales, over the years I have had four yard sell, no even stop. String graffiti sprayed all over my car. My son get pull over the sheriff didn't like the way he came out of the driveway. This motorcycle driver, I call "Speedracer" go fying up and down the road all the time. The limit is 25, but he must be going 35 to 50 miles hr. In this isolated, the public transportation, not taxi service. No "chain" department stores, restaurants or fast food places. You mostly go to the corner market. When I go in I get funny looks and stares. When I start to the checkout, usually they close their counter. Gwyneth Paltrow made a movie 2003 (the same year I moved here) "View from the Top" the plot was that she had big dreams of leaving her poor town of Silver Springs NV to work as a stewardess for an Airlane. Maybe if I had seen this movie I wouldn't had come here. Only said all this show, some the atmosphere of racism I live with in Nevada.

1-775-577-9474 please call. Maybe pro-bono would like to help.

luis adriana y maria antonia lopera y mejia(590 - days ago)Page: Beatriz Ibarra

te querimos y segui para adelante

Lolita(601 - days ago)Page: Patricia Watkins

It is alway a blessing to hear from positive Woman of God that are making changes in others lives. Keep up the excellent work you are doing around the world.

RTM(609 - days ago)Page: Sonya Childress

Sonya Childress is amazing!

Guest(615 - days ago)Page: Levels of Racism

i am writing a paper about racism i was wondering if you can elaborate some more about the different types of racism

Guest(619 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

I am not against Immigration! I am against Illegals entering this country for many reasons. 1. They can be exploited and blackmailed. 2. they are most like to resort to criminal behavior. 3. They drive up the costs (of medical insurance) and down the wages. Anyone who is in the business of hiring illegals don't have to abide by labor laws.


I do have one question....if Emma Lozano is so bold as to fight for the rights of illegal immigrants...why can't she go to Mexico and fight that government to make a better country for them so they don't have to resort to fleeing across borders??? I just don't get it?

elmoby59@yahoo.com(620 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

I certainly hope that on May 1st, 2008 that I.C.E. will be out in force to check the "documentation" of all of those demanding rights & amnesty for those that do not belong here. Emma Lozano is a PIMP! Illegal Immigration is her WHORE, that she expolits on a daily basis.

Guest(621 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

Here is a quote from Emma Lozano: "We demand that you take responsibility and legalize the estimated 13 million undocumented...ah in this country."


Here is MY response to her demand: "We, the LEGAL citizens and residents of this country demand that the 13 million undocumented...ah in this country LEAVE this country."

SUSAN RIESEL horwitz@HUGHES.NET(627 - days ago)Page: Saket Soni

I LOVE YOU GUYS! KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK. I AM SO PROUD OF YOU.ARE THERE OTHER AREAS OF THE COUNTRY WHERE GUEST WORKERS ARE GETTING HELP FROM GROUPS LIKE YOURS? ANYONE IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA?

ksoda(629 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

Few Americans are against immigration, after all, most of us come from many generations of immigrants, LEGAL immigrants!


America welcomes immigrants from all walks of life, and immigrants are the back bone of America, without immigrants, we would not be a nation.


My grandfather came to Ellis Island in 1901 at age 16, alone and with ten dollars in his pocket. If he had not been so brave to take that step, I would not be here today. The same can be said for my other grandfather and two grandmothers.


My wifes family hails from Italy, they too came here legally and ALL helped build this nation.


But what they did, and millions more like him did, they came legally, waited their turn at a better life, they followed the law of the land, they learned English, they served our country both in uniform, and in the work force. They brought along with them many cultural blessings which every American benefits from.


The BIG difference today is millions of people, from all walks of life enter our country illegally, breaking the law of the land, breaking the laws of the Constitution and it just so happens the majority come from Mexico.


They use up benefits and funding designed for needy Americans, the elderly, children, veterans and the disabled.


I'd like to know why the immigrant's own home country will NOT take them back? Why are they fleeing in the first place?


Emma Lozano, Pueblo Sin Fronteras and all those DEMANDING amnesty, you make demands of our nation that you are not entited to make, Illegal immigration is just that, illegal.

I will continue to welcome immigration, but I will stand against illegal immigration! What makes you MORE ENTITLED TO RIGHTS AND CITIZENSHIP OVER AND ABOVE, AND BEFORE ALL THOSE WHO HAVE WAITED, AND ARE WITING THEIR TURNS?


How dear you make demands!

Guest(633 - days ago)Page: Ajamu Baraka

I am so glad that a much needed organization like this exsists. Please investigate the Headstart pre-school system. Please start in the southeastern U. S., Georgia. I am sure you will find violations of child human rights. Although the Federal Gov. knows what works in early childhood education. Headstart programs tend to do the opposite. Research shows a direct relation between a quality early education and a childs success in school and life. Quality early childhood education including early reading leads to high quality life. The oposite can lead to prison. the Gov. uses the number of Black boys who can't read by the age of seven to determine how many prisons to build.

Guest(635 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

pendejos putos !!

leeann in wonderland(640 - days ago)Page: LeeAnn Hall

what is this supposed to mean? i do not understand this one bit. who ever wrote this needs to learn to type and learn proper grammar and they need to know what a backspace bar is.

sorry.

hurrah for LeeAnn. my name is LeeAnn, too.

peace.

Miriam Chicago,IL(648 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

I THINK THAT ALL OF YOU HISPANICS THAT HATE YOUR OWN PEOPLE ARE THE ONES THAT NEED TO BE EDUCATED. I'M MEXICAN , I'M A CITIZEN AND I WORK FOR THE PUBLIC AID OFFICE AND FOR YOUR INFO IF YOU HAVE NO PAPERS YOU DON'T GET NOTHING FO FREE THE ILLEGALS AS YOU CALL THEM ARE NOT TAKING THE AMERICAN JOBS, THEY ARE WORKING WHERE THERE IS A JOB. THEY WIL DO THE JOB NO LEGAL WOULD DO. THEY NEED TO WORK TO FEED THEIR FAMILY BECAUSE THEY HAVE THE NEED. IF THEY HAVE A HOUSE IS BECAUSE THEY CAN AND IF THEY HAVE BIG SUV'S IS ALSO BECAUSE THEY CAN. MAYBE YOU CAN'T AND IT IS THE ENVY THAT IS TALKING. THE NACOS AND NACAS THAT YOU CALL THEM HAVE BETTER THINGS THAT YOU DO. MAYBE IF YOU WOULD GET A BETTER JOB AND A MAN TO SUPPORT YOU. I THINK YOU MELINDA NUNEZ ARE THE BIGGEST NACA. TALKING HOW THEY ARE EVIL AND CHUSMA AND YOU REPEAT YOURSELF SO MANY TIME AND CAN'T SPELL IN SPANISH AND I'M PRETTY SURE YOU CAN'T SPEAK WELL EITHER. FIRST YOU NEED TO EDUCATE YOUR SELF, THEN IF YOU THINK YOU ARE A TEXANA-CHICANA LEARN YOUR HISTORY. ESTADOS UNIDOS LE ROBO TEXAS A MEXICO. SI TUBIERAS UN POCO MAS DE CULTURA NO DIRIAS TODAS LAS INCUERENCIAS QUE DICES. TE CREES GUERA Y COMO CREES QUE LOS GUEROS TE VEN A TI COMO OTRA ILEGAL . GUERA DE COLA PRIETA. POR LAS CHICANAS QUE SE CREEN LA GRAN _______ COMO TU SON LAS MAS NACAS PRIETAS CON MAS CARA DE INDIAS QUE NADA . ERES UNA MALINCHE Y TANTO QUE HABLAS DE QUE DIOS LOS VA A CASTIGAR. NO ESCUPAS AL CIELO QUE EN LA CARA TE CAE. ADIOS NACA.

Guest(656 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

It is an excellent idea that this conference "Facing Race" is taking place in New York City this year and that Emma Lozano will be a participant. It is important that ignorance and hatred (self-hatred amongst Latin Americans and other people of color) as well as the hatred preached by the minute man type be confronted. The evil of Greed which pushes people out of their homes in Latin America and the evil impressed upon them by "hateful groups" needs to be confronted. Elections are today and will show that the majority of people in this country are tired of scapegoating and that Lou Dobbs is history because most people are smart enough to know that you don't blame immigrants for working, cutting their grass, cooking their food, or caring for their elderly relatives. That is called ingratitude, ignorance. Hate hate=hate. Truth love justice Those who promote hatred need to learn the formula so they too can be happy and stop blaming others for their personal failures.

Guest(663 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

WWWWW

Shirley@ShirleyJordan.com(667 - days ago)Page: Sonya Childress

Hi Sunny,

I was so excited to see your name on the Internet. Your Aunt Mary told me you were there. I just sent an email to WIKI. It was meant for you.


I love being able to keep in touch with you this way. Everyone in Houston is doing great. Your dad is doing great. He is moving to Floresville sometime this year. We'll keep you posted. I want to continue to read about you at this site so I will visit it often. Write sometimes. Love, your Aunt Shirley

janiscarol777@gmail.com(671 - days ago)Page: Susan Sandler

An Angel!

janiscarol777@gmail.com(671 - days ago)Page: Steven Phillips

I've followed this impressive man's contributions to the State of California, and indeed, our County. He is to be applauded for his acheivements and continued struggles.

Guest(696 - days ago)Page: Susan Sandler

And more!

MIKE AND ROSIE FROM CHICAGO(733 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

WHEN I SEE A MEXICAN ILLEGAL ALEIN, ALL HE OR SHE DOES IS STARE AT ME OR AT US, AND THEN THEY MAKE THAT UGLY GESTURE, THEY PUT THEIR FINGER IN THEIR NOSE, AND THEY PUSH IT UP IN AN UPWARD MOTION, THAT MAKES THEM LOOK LIKE STUPID WETBACKS BUNCH OF IDIOTS. THEY CAN FUCK THEMSELVES WITH THAT FINGER, THEY ALSO WHISTLE SOMEKIND OF A MEXICAN WHISTLE AT US OR AT MY WIFE, AND DO AN EVIL COUGH, LIKE AS IF THEY HAD A TACO STUCK IN THEIR THROAT, I THINK THESE IGNORANT MORONS, NEED TO GET EDUCATED, THEY NEED TO LEARN ENGLISH PROPERLY, NEED SOME LESSONS ON RESPECT TOWARDS EVERYTHING AND EVERYBODY, NEED TO TAKE A BATH EVERYDAY, NEED TO DRINK LESS, AND NEED TO GO TO CHURCH AND PRAY FOR MIRACLES. THEY NEED HEALING....THESE PEOPLE ARE FULL OF DEMONIC SPIRITS, THEY HAVE BEEN WORSHIPING LA SANTA MUERTA....ALL THAT IS DEMONIC GARBAGE......THEY HAVE A PAGAN CULTURE, AND I THINK IS TIME FOR RENEWAL OF THEIR MINDS. THATS WHY THEY ARE SO EVIL, AND HAVE NO RESPECT TOWARDS OUR COUNTRY. THEY NEED A NEW BEGINNING, AND THEY NEED THE TRUE GOD, NOT THE ONE HANGING ON THE WOOD, JESUS IS ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!THEIR PRESIDENT CALDERON, <br>NEEDS ALL THESE THINGS TOO.

MELINDA NUNEZ = TEXANA(733 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

I DO WANT TO SAY, THAT I HAVE NOTICED THAT THE ILLEGAL MEXICANS AND OTHER ILLEGALS, HAVE THE MOST HORRIBLE ATTITUDE, WHEN THEY SEE A MEXICAN AMERICAN TALKING ENGLISH OR JUST WALKING HOME, THEY STICK THEIR FINGER IN THEIR NOSE AND THEY PUSH IT UP IN AN UPWARD MOTION, THAT MAKES THEM LOOK LIKE A BUNCH OF IDIOTS. THEY CAN STICK THEIR FINGER UP THEIR ASS, AND THEY FUCK THEMSELVES WITH IT. ALL THAT IS NOTHING BUT JEALOUSY AND HATE. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH BEING EDUCATED AND SPEAKING ENGLISH, WE SPEAK ENGLISH IN THIS COUNTRY, I THINK THIS PEOPLE FROM MEXICO ARE DUMB AND STUPID. THERES NOTHING WRONG WITH TAKING A BATH, WEARING NICE CLOTHES, TALKING EDUCATED WITH THE WHITE PEOPLE, AND HAVING A PROFESSIONAL JOB OR POSITION. ESTOS NACOS Y NACAS DE MEXICO, SON UNOS FARSANTES SIN EDUCASION, Y POR ESO LOS GRINGOS LOS ESTAN REPORTANDO A WASHINGTON, PARA QUE LA INMIGRACION LOS DEPORTE Y LOS SAQUEN A PATADAS DEL PAIS. CON TODAS ESAS BURLAS, Y CHANTAJES QUE LE ESTAN CAUSANDO AL PAIS, TODAS ESAS FALSEDADES, TODO LO QUE LE ESTAN ROBANDO AL PAIS, Y A LOS HISPANOS DE AQUI, QUE PAGAMOS NUESTRAS TAXAS LEGALMENTE, Y CON DOCUMENTOS LEGALES, YA TODO MUNDO SABE DE TODO LO QUE ESTOS NACOS, SE HAN ESTANDO APROVECHANDO DE TODOS LOS RECURSOS DEL PAIS, SIN TENER NINGUN DERECHO. EN ESTOS 12 MESES, QUIEREN DEPORTAR A TODOS ESOS LAGARTONES DE MEXICO, QUE NADA MAS VIENEN A TRABAJAR, ES PURO CUENTO, TAMBIEN APROVECHARSE DE TODO, Y CRITICAR A LA GENTE DE AQUI, Y MAS A LAS CHICANAS. LAS MOJADAS NACAS RANCHERAS, LES TIENEN PURA ENVIDIA, QUE BUENO QUE NO VA A VER REFORMA, DREAM ACT, LICENSIAS, AMNISTIA, PERO SI VA A VER REDADAS/RAIDS, Y DEPORTACIONES EXPRESS, SACAR A TODOS ESTOS PAYASOS Y PAYASAS, Y DEJAR QUE GENTE EDUCADA CON TITULO, Y CON RESPETO VIVAN AQUI Y, SI ABRIRLERS LAS PUERTAS. Y CERRARLES LAS PUERTAS A TODOS ESOS NACOS, NACAS, INDIOS MEXICANOS, Y TODA ESA CHUZMADA DE MEXICO. LAS INDIAS SON LAS CHUZMAS DE MEXICO.ESTAN DESTRUJENDO A ESTADOS UNIDOS, Y QUIEREN AGARRAR TODOS LOS TRABAJOS DE LOS CIUDADANOS, SE CREEN LA GRAN MIERDA, YA LES LLEGARA TARDE O TEMPRANO LA MIGRA, Y SACAR A TODAS ESAS Y ESOS, DE LOS TRABAJOS, Y MANDARLAS A SU MEXICO, DONDE DEVEN DE ESTAR. <br>LOS GRINGOS LOS ESTAN REPORTANDO A LA INMIGRACION "ICE", CON ESOS SI NO JUEGAN, ESA MIGRA NO PERDONA. SI NO FUERAN TAN MALOS, Y CON ESA ATTITUDE DE PERROS QUE TIENEN, HACIENDO TODAS ESAS SENAS DIABOLICAS, CON LA NARIZ, Y LOS DEDOS EN LA CARA, SE AGARRAN MUCHO LA CARA, Y SE BURLAN DE LOS DE AQUI. DIOS LOS VA A CASTIGAR, A TODOS LOS DIABOLICOS, SIN RESPETO. LOS GRINGOS SON LOS RACISTAS, Y LOS QUE MAS LO ODIAN A LOS ILEGALES. THE MINUTEMAN PROJECT NADA MAS ESTA CONTRA LOS ILEGALES DEL TODO EL MUNDO, PERO MAS CON LOS MEXICANOS, PORQUE LOS ILEGALES DE MEXICO, SON LOS MAS APROVECHADOS, LOS TERRORISTAS SI ESTAN PEOR, PERO LOS DE MEXICO, CUANDO YA AGARRAN SANGRITA, SE CREEN LA GRAN MIERDA. LAS RANCHERAS SIN EDUCASION, SE CREEN LA GRAN MIERDA, Y NI SIQUIERA SON EDUCADAS, QUE ES LO MAS IMPORTANTE DE UNA PERSONA. SON CHUZMAS. YA LAS VAN A DEPORTAR A TODOS Y TODAS CON TODO Y LOS HIJOS MALCRAIADOS, IGUAL QUE LOS PADRES. <br>IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORECEMENT AGENCY ESTAN TRABAJANDO MUY DURO, DEPORTANDO A TODA LA GENTUSA, ESE ES EL TRABAJO DE ELLOS, Y POR ESO LES PAGAMOS. NOSOTROS LOS CIUDADANOS AMERICANOS DE ESTADOS UNIDOS. NESECITAN QUE LOS CORRAN PERO YA!!!!!!!!!!! CON RECORD DE DEPORTACION, YA NO PUEDEN REGRESAR O APLICAR PARA LA MICA, YA TIENEN MAL RECORD!!!!!!!!QUE BUENO!!!!!!!.QUE TENGAN BUEN VIAJE A SUS PAISES DESDICHADOS. PARA QUE APRENDAN A RESPETAR LAS LEYES MIGRATORIAS Y A LA GENTE DE AQUI. A LOS GRINGOS Y A LAS AGRINGADAS.....PREFIERO SER AGRINGADA, Y NO SER UNA MOJADITA SIN PAPELES Y SIN EDUCASION,TODA PANSONA Y MALA,CON UN MONTON DE HIJOS, PARA QUE NO ME DEPORTEN. ES LO QUE ASEN LAS MOJADITAS DE MEXICO, Y DE OTROS PAISES. CHINOS, KOREANOS, POLACOS, FILIPINOS, ARABES, SUR AMERICANOS, TODOS ESTAN CORTADOS CON LA MISMA TIJERA. PRIMERO ARREGLEN LOS PAPELES Y DESPUES COMPRAN LA CASA, YA HASTA LA CASA SE LAS VAN A QUITAR, POR FALSOS. CON LA MULTA QUE LES VAN A PONER, PARA QUE APRENDAN.

RITA(734 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

I want to say, that all mexican illegals and other illegals, should get the hell out of the country, they can not be here without legal papers. the immigration is continuing the raids, and deportations, don't they know, that they can not live here without rights. They do not have no rights. they are taking and stealing our jobs...all this has got to stop. We will no longer tolarate such bizarre type of people.....they have told them already in many words, to go back where they came from..no reform, no dream act. no drivers licenses, no nothing for all their disobedience and fraudulant behavior..Take all their economic problems to Calderon, and stop buying houses and cars, and showing off, all that is illegal......if they don't have a green card, they sure have alot of mexican balls!!!!!!!!because sooner or later, all these fools will be DEPORTED!!!!!!!!they are nothing but a bunch evil pigs...taking the Americans jobs......taking everything free....it is time for the AMERICAN PEOPLE TO TAKE ACTION......AND NO MORE GAMES....WITH THESE MORONS.......THEY ARE FRAUDS!!!!!!!!!the illegal mexican women, all they know how to do is make babies..so they can hook up to the country even more....the illegal men. they stink!!!!!!!!!!they are all EVIL.............full of the devil........full of shit.........nobody wants them here...they don't want to learn to speak English and used it as an everyday language....THEY WANT TO LIVE IN THE UNITED STATES, AND THEY DO NOT KNOW SHIT FROM SHINOLA!!!!!!!!they just want to keep their little Spanish......and be dumb forever. WE HAVE TO GET RID OF ALL THOSE 12 MILLIONS DISRESPECTFUL MORONS. THEY ARE JEALOUS OF THE AMERICANS, BECAUSE WE ARE CITIZENS AND THEY ARE NOT. SON LIMOSNEROS CON GARROTE.....Y PARCHES MAL PEGADOS.......THESE ARE THE NACOS AND NACAS, FROM THE RURAL PARTS OF MEXICO. LETS KICK THEM ALL OUT OF THE U.S.A. as soon as possible...

Diana at dandylion6@cox.net(756 - days ago)Page: Walter Mosely

Hi,
I was browsing in a store and came across "Little Scarlet" on CD.
I was enchanted. I played it in my car and couldn't wait to drive again so that I could be swept away in the story. What a great writer and so real.
I am an Australian and moved here in the 60's and well remember the mood of the times. I was very educated by the black insights and felt the prison of the culture of the times.
Thanks and I will look up more titles by Walter.

Guest(781 - days ago)Page: Tram Nguyen

Hi Tram,

Glad to know you and proud of you.

I am a part-time independent oral historian. I presented part of my research at the International Oral History Association 14th Conference in Sydney, Australia in 7/06. I also had a photo display at the OHA Annual Meeting in Little Rock, Arkansas in 10/06. The research is related to the student movemens in Viet Nam in the 60s.

Wish to correspond with you regarding the OHA Annual Meeting in Oakland (10/07) and other oral history projects.

Oanh Nguyen Ta, MSW, LCSW
Casework Specialist
California State Department of Corrections
ooaannhh@yahoo.com

Guest(786 - days ago)Page: Jean Anyon

Dear Jean Anyon, Quite a long time ago I read one of your articles which dealt with socioeconomic status. I read it and want a hard-
copy. If you can guide me to that particlar article, I would like to have it as a reference. Thanks, Gretta L. Patterson Hold onto your ideals--I was a victim of social-economic background as a child. Children are people too. Stop the rhetorical comments made by individuals who have a political agenda. Too many children and not enough qualified parents and/or teachers to effectively maximize talents.

Carolyn DeWitt(790 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

What doesn't suprise me about your comment is that you were too embarrassed by your ignorance to leave your name, "guest". Perhaps you should read up on you history and learn why much of the Mexican immigrant population came to the U.S. Because we wanted them here. There were incentives offered by the U.S. to try to bring Mexicans here to work in our farms in the summer and our factories in the winter. Funny that now our unemployment rate is up and our economy is down that we want to get rid of the Mexican population that farmers and big business owners wanted. Hypocritical just a little don't you think? And it isn't YOUR country it is OURS. I'm a sixth generation immigrant and if you are going to use Spanish, learn how to spell. "ADIOS" has no apostrophe.

Danny M(795 - days ago)Page: Patricia Watkins

Alright, go ahead Evangelist-Powerful woman of God!

Guest(801 - days ago)Page: Emma Lozano

ILLEGAL? Get out of my country, NOW. You are not welcome here. If you support ILLEGALS,Leave with them. You are supporting LAW BREAKERS, thus you are aiding law breakers. You are also breaking our laws. If you can't live under our laws, live in mexico where the laws suit you better. You, are not welcome here. ADIO'S fools.

Guest(804 - days ago)Page: Jean Anyon

I want to say that I think your books are really awsome and that they speak the truth about whats really going on in the schools out there.

Viagra sex stories(804 - days ago)Page: Op Ed

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Lorenzo Jones(861 - days ago)Page: Charlene Sinclair

I'm gald I found this post. Charlene gave me my start in community organizing and personally trainedme as a caommunity prior to my career as a paid commnity organizer. She is a brilliant person with tremendous committment to communityn organizing and leadership development. I would advise people to bring her in and utilize her talents. Thank you Charlene

Nellie(872 - days ago)Page: Maryellen Santiago

I am so proud of you.

Guest(881 - days ago)Page: Anisha Desai

i have the same name as you

Guest(884 - days ago)Page: Jennifer Allen

You are doing great work & have the support of many Phoenicians. I wish I really knew how to help you. Jeanne

Guest(906 - days ago)Page: Nunu Kidane

it is nice of u to share your history

Guest(909 - days ago)Page: Roberto Lovato

So sorry you do not have an interest in a student who was "pimped" of her award. Your choice but a shame that no one has the "guts" to honor this great student. Sadly we write about issues but don't take any action.

Guest(913 - days ago)Page: Agenda

"Racials" is not a word.

Sasha Hotmama@yahoo.com(936 - days ago)Page: Jarel Melendez

Jarel Melendez, you keep the good positive work that you do. I love your personality and movitativing. You inspired me to stay in school and now I'm graduting. Thank you for all that you do and keep the good work. Love always, Sasha

Guest(954 - days ago)Page: Mafruza Khan

Doesn't seem like this person has faced a situation regarding racial injustice.

Guest(954 - days ago)Page: Mafruza Khan

Why has the Tides Foundation hired this person?

Guest(956 - days ago)Page: HomePage

I'm so glad this tool is up, because I definitely could NOT afford to attend the actual conference and I look forward to reading though all the resources =)

epena@ufcw.org(968 - days ago)Page: Labor Organizing

If you want more information regarding the Justice at Smithfield Campaign please visit us at www.smithfieldjustice.com .

Sam Diener(969 - days ago)Page: Race Gender Sexuality

Sorry, I left the email address off of the last comment. To order, or to get a copy of the table of contents, please email sburke@afsc.org.

Dr. Andree-Nicola McLaughlin, Medgar Evers College(970 - days ago)Page: Agenda

A very timely and worthwhile conference.

Natalie(970 - days ago)Page: Race Debate

Thank you for this fun, interactive, and informative session on looking at issues of race and racism in our country. This workshop has given me great ideas about how to talk to about race differently than we have been doing with students on campus.

Micah(972 - days ago)Page: Beyond Web

Ibrahim and Deanna - this is so helpful - love the powerpoint and links to all the new tools - is there any way to get notes/audio/transcript of the workshop content? big love - MB

Guest(973 - days ago)Page: Challenges of Racism

LOVED THIS WORKSHOP! Materials were so applicable!!! our smal group bonded big time, I love my "sister circle"!

Guest(973 - days ago)Page: Improving Public Schools

this workshop did not match the description at all.

Larry Yates(974 - days ago)Page: Structural Racism

Not to be hung up on a theme, but this also was more practical than it seemed at first. It might have been more usefully presented to folks in terms of its local practical applications, though I understand the theorty is the fundamental piece.

Donna H.(974 - days ago)Page: HomePage

Last night's event put a great stamp on the important work ARC is doing to advance racial justice. It shows we can face race, organize and have fun...it never hurts to have great background music

Susan@firelightmedia.org(974 - days ago)Page: Affirmative Action

If you b

susan@firelightmedia.org(974 - days ago)Page: Affirmative Action

If you believe a good strategy to beat back Ward Connerly's initiatives is to appeal to white people's selfinterest and/or white people's fondness for diversity, PLEASE read Tim Wise's 2005 book AFFIRMATIVE ACTION.

susan@firelightmedia.org(974 - days ago)Page: Resources

Read AFFIRMATIVE ACTION by Tim Wise

Guest(974 - days ago)Page: Agenda

A bunch of elitist charging $350 dollars for a conference. I guess you didn't want to many of the "racials" at the conference

Valrie(974 - days ago)Page: Beyond Web

Great presentation! I got ALOT out of it and plan using alot of the info given out. Web 2.0 here I come.....

Folasade John(974 - days ago)Page: Racial Justice

This plenary was the perfect way to open this wonderful conference on racial issues. Like warming up before a long day of excersise, it set the tone for the day and personally, set my wheels turning.

Guest(974 - days ago)Page: HomePage

hwllo

llyates@shentel.net(975 - days ago)Page: Resources

Statewide program to disseminate op-eds www.virginia-organizing.org housing organizing and race http://comm-org.wisc.edu/papers2002/yates/home.htm

Amy Sonnie(975 - days ago)Page: Beyond Web

For folks in the Bay - don't miss the M-Tech official Launch Party with Youth Media Council, MyBloc.net and Future 5K: April 28th, 2007 at Tumi's: 22nd and International in the Fruitvale

jeff chang(975 - days ago)Page: Beyond Web

bringing the tools to the real masses is really important work. thank you so much for this, ibrahim!

Nick Connell(975 - days ago)Page: Resources

www.studycircles.org

Nick Connell (nconnell@studycircles.org)(975 - days ago)Page: Racial Justice

That was the most incredible, rich, empowering (and...) panel discussion I have ever witnessed. Even if I didn't attend another session, that plenary was worth the trip. Mmmm. Mmmm. Mmmmmm.

Guest(975 - days ago)Page: HomePage

Spread the word! Facing Race Wiki is where it's at!

Chip Berlet(975 - days ago)Page: HomePage

Congratulations! A great idea. We need new strategies to confront the contention that institutional and systemic racism are sins of the past. Sweeping injustice under the rug just pollutes our own living space.

Tarso Luís Ramos(976 - days ago)Page: Tarso Ramos

Together with Pam Chamberlain, Trishala Deb and Doyin Ola I'll be presenting workshop "Rightwing Intersections: Race, Gender and Sexuality."