Text 8031, 349 rader
Skriven 2008-10-29 20:37:00 av TIM RICHARDSON (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av DAN CEPPA
Ärende: Obama BOMB!
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On 10-29-08, TIM RICHARDSON said to DAN CEPPA:



TR>Speaking of voter fraud........the outfit ACORN is neck deep in voter
TR>fraud, and its all aimed at getting Barracks elected. I haven't got time
TR>right now, but I'll be posting up some stuff I found on that subject
TR>probably tonight or early tomorrow morning. Stay tuned, Danny boy.


Here's some more to contemplate, Danny boy:


The Living Wage Campaign
By Eric Heubeck
October 1999

Largest radical group in America, with more than
400,000 dues-paying member families, and more than
1,200 chapters in 110 U.S. cities Implicated in numerous
reports of fraudulent voter registration, vote-rigging,
voter intimidation, and vote-for-pay scams during the 2004 election
Maintains close ties to organized labor.


The Association of Community Organizations for Reform
Now (ACORN) is a grassroots political organization
that grew out of George Wiley's National Welfare Rights
Organization (NWRO), whose members in the late 1960s
and early 70s invaded welfare offices across the U.S. --
often violently -- bullying social workers and loudly
demanding every penny to which the law "entitled"
them.


In the late 1960s, ACORN co-founder Wade Rathke was a
NWRO organizer and a protegé of Wiley. Rathke also
organized draft resistance for the militant group
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the
same period.


In 1970 Rathke -- along with the aforementioned Wiley
(best known for his effective use of the so-called
"Cloward-Piven strategy," which called for swamping
the welfare rolls with new applicants and thereby creating
an economic crisis) and Gary Delgado (a lead organizer
for Wiley's NWRO) -- formed a new entity called
Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). The
group's name was later changed to Association of
Community Organizations for Reform Now, but the
acronym ACORN remained. Instead of focusing only on welfare
recipients, ACORN's mandate included all issues
touching low-income and working-class people.


Rathke and his ACORN co-founders enlisted civil rights
workers and trained them in a program (at Syracuse
University) patterned after Saul Alinsky's activist
tactics.


Today ACORN claims more than 400,000 dues-paying
member families, and more than 1,200 chapters in 110 U.S.
cities. (The organization is also active in Canada and
Mexico). It owns two radio stations, a housing
corporation, and a law office, and maintains affiliate
relationships with a host of trade-union locals. ACORN
also runs schools where children are trained in class
consciousness; a network of "boot camps" for training
street activists; and operations that extort
contributions from banks and other businesses under
threat of racial violence and trumped-up civil rights
charges.



In 1998, ACORN founded the Working Families Party in
New York, which endorses candidates for political office.
It endorsed Hillary Clinton in her 2000 Senate race.
Canvassers from ACORN and its sister groups launched a
statewide voter-mobilization drive that proved
influential in Clinton's victory. In November 2001, a
coalition of radical politicians led by ACORN-
sponsored candidates running on the Working Families Party
ticket won a veto-proof majority on the New York City
Council, giving ACORN de facto control of the New York City
government.


With little opposition from Republicans or moderate
Democrats, ACORN radicals pushed laws tightening their
control over New York City government and stripping
the Mayor of executive power. Their current platform calls
for a rollback of welfare reforms; a crackdown on NYC
police, including a ban on "racial and ethnic
profiling"; and the appointment of a politicized
Civilian Review Board newly empowered to prosecute
police officers. ACORN also seeks to use its influence
to raise corporate taxes, increase regulation, and
empower unions with an array of new rights. ACORN
seeks to prevent any corporation from being free to leave
New York without an "exit visa" from the City Council.


On March 12, 2003, the ACORN-controlled City Council
passed a resolution, by a 31-17 margin, condemning the
U.S. invasion of Iraq.


In the 2004 election cycle, ACORN and its sister group
Project Vote ran a nationwide voter mobilization drive
that was marred by allegations of fraudulent voter
registration, vote-rigging, voter intimidation, and
vote-for-pay scams. ACORN's get-out-the-vote activists
were implicated in schemes that included the
falsification and destruction of thousands of voter
registration forms, and the registering of convicted
felons even in states where felons are ineligible to
vote.


In 2006, approximately 20,000 questionable voter
registration forms were turned in by ACORN officials
in Missouri -- virtually all in the St. Louis and Kansas
City areas, where ACORN purportedly sought to help
empower the "disenfranchised" minorities living there.
Similar allegations of ACORN voter fraud were made in
Pennsylvania, Ohio and Colorado. Between 2004 and
2006, ACORN employees were accused of submitting fraudulent
voter registration cards and forging signatures on
ballot initiatives in 12 states.


Syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin writes:


"[In July 2007] ACORN settled the largest case of
voter fraud in the history of Washington State.
Seven ACORN workers had submitted nearly 2,000 bogus voter
registration forms. According to case records, they
flipped through phone books for names to use on the
forms, including 'Leon Spinks,' 'Frekkie Magoal' and
'Fruto Boy Crispila.' Three ACORN election hoaxers
pleaded guilty in October [2007]. A King County
prosecutor called ACORN's criminal sabotage 'an act
of vandalism upon the voter rolls.'


"The group's vandalism on electoral integrity is
systemic. ACORN has been implicated in similar voter
fraud schemes in Missouri, Ohio and at least 12
other states. The Wall Street Journal noted: 'In Ohio in
2004, a worker for one affiliate was given crack
cocaine in exchange for fraudulent registrations
that included underage voters, dead voters and pillars of
the community named Mary Poppins, Dick Tracy and
Jive Turkey. During a congressional hearing in Ohio in
the aftermath of the 2004 election, officials from
several counties in the state explained ACORN's practice of
dumping thousands of registration forms in their lap
on the submission deadline, even though the forms
had been collected months earlier.'


"In March [2008], Philadelphia elections officials
accused the nonprofit advocacy group of filing
fraudulent voter registrations in advance of the
April 22nd Pennsylvania primary. The charges [were]
forwarded to the city district attorney's office."


ACORN makes a great deal of money from its "community
organizing" campaigns, and shows little tolerance for
rival leftist groups infringing on its turf. For
instance, when ACORN set up shop in San Francisco in
May 2002, it discovered that many of its potential
recruits - low-income blacks and Hispanics - were networked
with the Outer Mission Resident's Association (OMRA). The
San Francisco Examiner reports, "ACORN soon began a
process of intimidation by busing in activists from Oakland to
disrupt OMRA events. ACORN members then began showing
up at some neighbors' homes, and in one case jabbed a
person in the chest."


Since ACORN is a private corporation, it does not
divulge its finances. Further complicating any effort
to calculate ACORN's income is the fact that it operates
an unknown number of front groups, many of which conceal
their relationship to ACORN. But as of March 2006
ACORN claimed 175,000 member families on its website, each
contributing at least $120 per year, which amounts to
about $21 million in annual membership fees. ACORN's
website states, "Membership dues and a host of
grassroots and chapter-based fundraising programs pay
for 70 to 75 percent of the entire organization's
budget."


Since its inception in 1970, ACORN's overriding
mission has been to enact "living wage" ordinances at the
local, state and - ultimately - federal levels. It has
succeeded in getting many such laws passed. ACORN's
model legislation contains a clause that exempts
unionized businesses from paying the minimum wage. As
a result, those companies that stubbornly resist
unionizing founder and, in many cases, go bankrupt.
Those that unionize thrive, providing an ever-
expanding membership base for union recruiting. This is the main
reason that unions such as AFSCME and SEIU contribute
so generously to ACORN.


Housing activism is another major focus for ACORN,
which forms housing collectives in targeted areas. The
collective applies pressure on local authorities to
place it in charge of renovating and managing
abandoned or dilapidated properties for poor tenants. Local
authorities provide money for renovation -- much of
which ends up in ACORN bank accounts. The poor tenants
are compelled to "earn" their new homes by investing
"sweat equity" -- that is, working without pay on
renovating the properties.  ACORN or its designated
"housing collective" retains title to the land on
which the building stands.  If the tenants decide to move
out, they are required to sell their property back to
ACORN at cost, no matter what the market value of the
property.


In recent years, ACORN has received funding from many
foundations, including but not limited to the Annie E.
Casey Foundation; the Minneapolis Foundation; the Open
Society Institute; the Public Welfare Foundation; the
Surdna Foundation; the Woods Fund of Chicago; the
Scherman Foundation; and the Ben and Jerry's
Foundation.


At the March 2008 "Take Back America" conference
sponsored by Campaign for America's Future (CAF),
ACORN joined CAF and five additional leftist organizations
in announcing plans for "the most expensive [$350
million] mobilization in history this election season." The
initiative focused on voter registration, education,
and get-out-the-vote drives. Other members of the
coalition included MoveOn.org, Rock the Vote, the National
Council of La Raza, the Women's Voices Women Vote Action Fund,
and the AFL-CIO.


On June 2, 2008, Wade Rathke stepped down from his
role as ACORN's chief organizer.


Also in 2008, ACORN publicly acknowledged that Dale
Rathke -- the brother of Wade Rathke -- had embezzled
nearly $1 million from ACORN and affiliated groups in
1999 and 2000. ACORN further admitted that for eight
years its executives had kept this information secret
from almost all of their organization's board members
and from law-enforcement authorities. Wrote journalist
Stephanie Strom in July 2008:


"Dale Rathke remained on Acorn's payroll until a
month ago, when disclosure of his theft by foundations and
other donors forced the organization to dismiss him.
'We thought it best at the time to protect the
organization, as well as to get the funds back into
the organization, to deal with it in-house,' said
Maude Hurd, president of ACORN. 'It was a judgment
call at the time, and looking back, people can agree
or disagree with it, but we did what we thought was
right.'"


According to Strom, Wade Rathke "said the decision to
keep the matter secret was not made to protect his
brother but because word of the embezzlement would
have put a 'weapon' into the hands of enemies of ACORN, a
liberal group that is a frequent target of
conservatives who object to its often strident advocacy on behalf of
low- and moderate-income families and workers."


In September 2008 the Board of Elections in Cuyahoga
County, Ohio accused ACORN's paid workers, who had
been tasked with registering as many pro-Democrat voters as
possible, of submitting fraudulent voter-registration
cards. According to the Board, ACORN workers had
commonly turned in separate cards with duplicate names
but different addresses or different birth dates.


Other cards listed people living at an address that was not
a residence.


Also in 2008, there was evidence that ACORN corruption
was rampant in Pennsylvania. For example,
Philadelphia's City Commissioners voted unanimously to present to the
U.S. Attorney hundreds of fraudulent voter-
registration forms turned in by the organization. All told, at
least 50,663 registrations were rejected, among which were
35,888 duplicates, 689 that were filled out by people
too young to vote, some 2,108 with missing signatures,
another 5,093 with invalid addresses, and 6,161 not
eligible because they were missing a valid HAVA (Help
America Vote Act) number. Similarly, ACORN workers
submitted hundreds of fraudulent registrations to the
Delaware County, Pennsylvania Voter Registration
Office.


Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney's office in Michigan
indicated that it might prosecute ACORN for similar
voter-registration scams in that state. Registrars
there had complained about duplicate registrations and
fictitious names. "There appears to be a sizable
number of duplicate and fraudulent applications," said Kelly
Chesney, spokeswoman for the Michigan Secretary of
State's office. "And it appears to be widespread."


Since 1990, Steven Kest has been ACORN's national
Executive Director, and Maude Hurd has been the
organization's President.













Copyright 2003-2006



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