Subversion Inc.: The Real Story of ACORN

Summary: Reports of ACORN’s death have been greatly exaggerated. More than a dozen of the infamous group’s chapters have broken off and separately incorporated themselves in order to evade authorities. Vadum’s new book examines ACORN’s history of corrup-tion and lawbreaking along with its brutal anti-social goals and tactics. It also examines the group’s intimate relationship with the Obama administration.

CONTENTS

May 2011

Subversion Inc.: The Real Story of ACORN

Page 1

Briefl y Noted Page 8

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is part political group,

part crime syndicate, part terrorist organi-zation. Much of the time it operates outside the legitimate political process, waging war against the framework of society. ACORN is in the business of subverting the Ameri-can system, so what Americans saw on the undercover “pimp and pro” videos released in 2009 was just another day at the offi ce at ACORN.

But the darkest side of ACORN has remained largely unexplored – until now.

ACORN, which until it fi led for Chapter 7 bankruptcy last year was America’s largest poor people’s group, was founded on political violence and intimidation.

ACORN grew out of another notorious group called the National Welfare Rights Organi-zation (NWRO). NWRO was founded in 1966—the same year Richard Cloward and

By Matthew Vadum

Empowerment by rioting: ACORN founder Wade Rathke started off his career in community organizing with a bang. With 250 followers, the Saul Alinsky disciple led an invasion of a New England welfare office. Two days of rioting followed. It made the pages of Pravda in Communist Russia. (screen grab from Fox News Channel)

Special Report: This paper contains excerpts from the author’s new book Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers (WND Books, 2011). Capital Research Center has been tracking ACORN since 1998. ACORN was most recently pro-fi led in the November 2010 Organization Trends and in the November 2008 editions of Foundation Watch and Labor Watch.

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Editor: Matthew Vadum

Publisher: Terrence Scanlon

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Frances Fox Piven’s seminal article “The Weight of the Poor” was published in the Nation magazine. The so-called Cloward-Piven Strategy called for activists to double America’s welfare rolls in order to destabi-lize the American system of government. Placing impossible demands on states and localities would force them to ask Congress for a guaranteed annual income scheme and thereby set in motion the transformation of America into a socialist state.

NWRO grew out of the organizing efforts of Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky and other veteran radical agitators. Cloward and Piven also helped bring NWRO into the world. They acknowledge they “were intimately involved in the affairs of NWRO: we participated in discussions of strategy, in fund-raising efforts, and in demonstra-tions.”

In the late 1960s Wade Rathke signed on as an organizer for NWRO’s chapter in Springfi eld, Mass. A few months after ar-riving in Springfi eld, Rathke had built up a local empire of activism. He constructed

an infl uential welfare rights organization consisting of 20 neighborhood groups with a combined membership of more than 2,000. The Springfi eld chapter of NWRO secured millions of dollars from the local welfare agency and encouraged hundreds of non-members to seek welfare benefi ts.

NWRO was also doing its best to swamp welfare departments nationwide. Between December 1960 and February 1969 the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) welfare program had grown 107 percent but in the 15-month period from February 1969 through October 1970 the program grew a staggering 55 percent as an extra 1.5 million families joined the rolls.

Rathke was arrested after he led an invasion of the Springfi eld welfare offi ce with 250 or more women and students armed with signs reading “More for the poor, less for the war.” The welfare director refused to give in to the crowd’s demands for winter clothing, benefi ts to which they were not entitled.

That provoked two days of unrest in which millions of dollars of property was destroyed. The Soviet government used Rathke’s riot as anti-American propaganda, publishing an article about it in Pravda. Rathke’s experiences “reinforced his belief that one important resource for poor people was their ability to disrupt.” He realized that despite the failure of the action to achieve its objective, his followers felt empowered by violence directed against the system.

This empowerment by rioting became a staple of ACORN’s playbook.

Meanwhile, over time Rathke came to agree with Alinsky that single-issue organizations were doomed to fail. A multifaceted approach was needed to radically transform the nation. Rathke moved to Little Rock, Ark., and got

down to work trying to turn the Natural State upside-down. ACORN was born with Rathke in place as its chief organizer, a position he was to hold for almost 40 years.

Saul Alinsky and ViolenceFor ACORN, anything goes, from rude pro-tests to crude intimidation and violence. The bigger, the louder, the more obnoxious, the more destructive, the better. Rathke summed up ACORN’s approach to doing business in a single sentence: “One can almost taste the adrenaline when people take a crowbar to a door and pop it open to begin squatting.” ACORN leadership doesn’t care if people get hurt or property is damaged: as long as the action advances the cause, it’s fair game.

“ACORN protests have turned violent, at times as soon as the rallies began,” writes Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute. “Some protests disrupted Federal Reserve hearings and busted into closed city council meet-ings.” In Stern’s opinion ACORN embraces “undisguised authoritarian socialism” when it demands that large companies that desire to leave the community be coerced into get-ting “an exit visa from the community board signifying that the company has adequately compensated all its employees and the community at large for losses due to reloca-tion.”

ACORN’s legacy of destruction and lawless-ness traces directly back to the fi endishly brilliant Saul Alinsky. Born in 1909, the group’s spiritual sherpa into the abyss of planned anarchy was always fascinated by violence. His defenders present Alinsky as an advocate of civil disobedience who rejected violence as a political tool. This is rubbish. Alinsky adored violence.

By the time he died, Alinsky had created an astounding 44 community organiza-tions that aspire to pulverize the American

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system. ACORN founder Rathke worked with Alinsky, who trained activists from the Massachusetts chapter of ACORN’s par-ent organization NWRO and other groups before he died in 1972. Alinsky “had done sessions with my staff at Massachusetts Welfare Rights in early 1970 and various other things,” Rathke blogged.

According to one of Alinsky’s senior organiz-ers at the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), Nicholas von Hoffman, Alinsky played no direct role in the creation of ACORN but believes the master, had he lived to see it develop, would have approved of ACORN’s approach to agitation.

The group’s “cheekiness, truculence and imaginative tactical tropes have an Alinskyan touch,” according to von Hoffman, a journal-ist who wrote a particularly nasty biography of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s counsel Roy Cohn. Von Hoffman soft-pedals the damage that Alinsky-style organizing does to the body politic, claiming Alinsky was sounding “the trumpet blast for democracy.”

If democracy includes “conking” picket line crossers on the head—something he admits Alinsky favored— then he’s right. Alinsky shied away from praising violence in public because “[t]he subject was too touchy and to bring it up was to invite misquotation and distortion.” But in private “he would say that violence has its uses.”

All of this was not lost on Rathke.

He is usually quite careful about what he says in public. Rathke soft-pedals his radicalism with positive-sounding phrases such as “citi-zen wealth” and “participatory democracy,” but from time to time even a master manipula-tor can slip up. His essay “Tactical Tension”

is a case in point. It dates back to mid-2001 when the Left was in a stupor.

Liberal and radical activists were angry and demoralized because their would-be savior, Democratic candidate Al Gore, had just barely lost the presidency to George W. Bush. Although there has never been any credible evidence that Republicans stole the election, it became an article of faith on the Left that the GOP had deprived the American people of their rightful president. Many on the Left had high hopes for Gore after Bill Clinton tacked toward the political center and now those hopes were dashed.

To this perceived affront to democracy, Wade Rathke offered his comrades a declaration of

war. His militant rant is very revealing.

Rathke argues that the Left is losing and needs to get more aggressive.

“We need an edge, some harder steel on the rim,” he writes. “If some day we want to make more just laws, then today we may have to just learn to break more laws.” In a “wish list,” he includes “[t]actics that include civil disobedience and political defi ance” and “[t]actics that include extra-legal activity.”

He praises the rioters in Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting as “progressive forces.” Their civil disturbances were “a colorful, exciting, smoky, hazy amal-gamation of helmeted police, broken glass, and righteous rage.” He continues admir-

Marxist academic and activist Frances Fox Piven and her late husband Rich-ard Cloward devised a strategy for the radical socialist transformation of America. ACORN followed it.

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4 May 2011

sabotage) that consists of harming the eco-nomic interests of those who are perceived threats to the environment. It might be arson, destruction of crops or sport utility vehicle dealerships, bombing, or tree-spiking, in which an activist drives metal rods into trees in order to prevent them from being cut down for commercial use. Tree-spiking has led to the injury and death of lumberjacks.

It further enrages Rathke that some of ACORN’s targets have not only defended themselves but have dared to fi ght back. ACORN’s founding Intimidator-in-Chief, whose stock-in-trade is thuggery, denounces these acts of self-defense as “intimidation.” Some targets fi led lawsuits against ACORN “designed to sap resources and chill member-ship organized campaigns,” he huffs.

ACORN Is I l legit imateACORN’s anti-democratic, un-American ac-tivities are not legitimate political advocacy protected by the First Amendment. They cry out for prosecution under federal racketeer-ing laws. [The push for a racketeering probe got a boost in April 2011 when ACORN was convicted in a massive voter fraud conspiracy in Nevada. The felony conviction came too late to be included in the book. –Editor]

Former Chicago ACORN leader Madeline Talbott is a master of the bank shakedown. She bragged about “dragging banks kicking and screaming” into questionable loans. Talbott thought highly of Barack Obama’s or-ganizing work in the Windy City and invited him to lecture her staffers. She also led a mob attack on the Chicago City Council during a “living wage” debate. ACORN demonstra-tors “pushed over the 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.” Six people, including a defi ant Talbott, were led away

in handcuffs.

Then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich had a taste of ACORN’s stormtrooper tactics in 1995, when about 500 ACORN activists took over the Washington Hilton, forcing Gingrich to cancel a speech to 2,500 county commissioners. Demonstrators chanting “Nuke Newt!” grabbed the microphone and commandeered the head table, then cheered when the speech was cancelled.

“ACORN is part of the enforcement wing and the intimidation wing of the left,” Gingrich said in an interview.

Members of ACORN assaulted New York state Sen. James Alesi, a Republican, and his chief of staff, during a raucous 2009 protest. Alesi said an angry mob nearly knocked him to the fl oor of the chamber and spat in the face of his chief of staff. ACORN was protesting after two Democratic state senators switched parties giving Republicans control of the New York Senate. ACORN’s political party, the Working Families Party, had invested considerable resources in state senate elections in the Empire State. WFP took credit for ending “30 years of right-wing Republican rule” in 2008.

Republican Mike Huckabee is another of many Republican offi ceholders to be terror-ized by ACORN. In 1998, while governor of Arkansas, Huckabee prepared to deliver a speech on civil rights. Like Gingrich he was silenced by hundreds of screaming ACORN activists armed with bullhorns who stormed a Little Rock hotel conference room and drove him away. “They surrounded not only the outer walls, but then, much to the dismay of the state troopers who were with me, they then mounted the stage,” said Huckabee, who cut the speech short and left abruptly.

ingly, “Dispersed affi nity groups operating on ‘street’ consensus [were] making a range of tactical decisions and holding ground in a way that made the momentum of the actions impossible to immobilize in spite of rain, gas, and cops.”

Rathke then attempts a delicate rhetorical balancing act, denouncing violent tactics in general while at the same time advocating specifi c examples of it: “We do not embrace violence, quite the contrary, but we need to create chemistry containing the elements of more explosive combinations in order to create more force and power through the equations of action and reaction that we push to the target.”

Despite this perfunctory condemnation of violence that fosters an illusion of respect-ability, the rest of the essay is fi lled with explicit endorsements of violent and illegal tactics. He praises the violent Black Pan-ther Party of the 1960s and longs for some computer hackers to come to the aid of the labor movement.

Crazy, computer viruses are started by young kids around the world or hackers bored out of their skulls that live right down the street. As union organizers we are still doing 8 point diffi culty dumpster dives for alpha lists of employees, when theoretically some good geeks could tap in, load up, and down-load the whole thing and throw it over our transom window. What a waste of talent when such a huge contribution could be made to the labor movement.

“Simply put, why isn’t there more ‘monkey wrenching’ in our world? Where is our Earth First!” he writes. Monkey-wrenching is a form of eco-terrorism or ecotage (eco-

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OrganizationTrends

much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is abnormal by any earlier standard.” Moynihan warned ominously that “we are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us.”

Early twentieth-century Americans were hor-rifi ed by anarchist and labor union-initiated violence. Many labor organizations at the time were revolutionary terrorist groups. They killed people, incited riots, and fo-mented rebellion. But over time corporations and governments began to ignore the cardinal rule: don’t negotiate with terrorists.

They took a short-term perspective, deluding themselves into believing they were buying peace by caving in to terrorists’ demands, all in the hope of gaining market share or a few extra votes on Election Day.

“It was a very tense moment. It was totally unnecessary.”

During the anti-Huckabee demonstration, Johnnie Pugh, head of ACORN’s Arkansas chapter, seized the microphone. “We want justice,” she said. ACORN is “trying to get the bills paid and make a living wage and welfare reform is not working.” ACORN members chanted “The people united will never be defeated,” “Justice for welfare; Huckabee don’t care,” and “We’re fi red up; we’re not going to take it no more.” A dozen ACORN activists ran after Huckabee. Some jumped on the governor’s car and pounded on it as others attempted to prevent him from leaving.

When Arkansas State Police investigated to determine if the demonstrators had broken any laws, Pugh called the probe “retaliation” and a “witch hunt.” She even threatened to hit Huckabee again with more in-your-face protests. “The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” she said.

This is hardly an exhaustive list of ACORN’s wrongdoings.

Radicals believe their goals warrant criminal means and “can be relied on to lie, steal votes and justify murder when committed by their political friends . . . because they are engaged in a permanent war whose goal is the salvation of mankind,” according to former radical-turned-conservative David Horowitz. “In this context, restraint of means can easily seem fi nicky.”

ACORN’s violence inciting techniques still fl ourish, practiced out in the open by organized labor and countless other radical groups. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, an ACORN ally, is unashamedly pro-thug-

gery. He told members of the United Mine Workers in Illinois to “kick the [expletive] out of every last” worker who violated the sanctity of his picket lines.

The outrageous behavior tolerated by po-lice today would have landed a person in jail earlier in America’s history. Political incitements to riot, which occur almost exclusively on the Left, fail to move law enforcement. Why? Because as a society we have gradually become inured to these evil tactics. It is “defi ning deviancy down,” to borrow a phrase coined by Daniel Patrick Moynihan to discuss the process by which society grows accustomed to antisocial be-havior, rationalizing it away over time and redefi ning it: “[T]he amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can ‘afford to recognize’ and that accordingly we have been redefi ning deviancy so as to exempt

SOME OF ACORN’S CORPORATE SHAKEDOWN VICTIMS

Unless they see a public relations advantage in going public with the fact they’ve been victimized by ACORN, corporations don’t necessarily relish the prospect of letting the public know they’ve been pushed around. In such cases, detecting the group’s corpo-rate shakedown campaigns can be hard work. Regulatory fi lings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sometimes reveal fi nancial agreements between ACORN and corporations.

Sometimes the documents disclose lawsuit settlements. ACORN usually sues its targets not because a wrong needs to be made right but because the group wants to extract money from a deep-pocketed business. ACORN’s lawyers might as well be members of its development department.

What follows below is a small sample from ACORN’s corporate blackmail portfolio:

Bank of New York

Capital One

Citigroup

Countrywide Financial

Exelon Corp.

Household Finance Corp.

H&R Block

HSBC Finance

Liberty Tax Service

National Paint & Coatings Association

Orkin Exterminating Co.

Roosevelt Financial Group Inc.

Sherwin-Williams

TCF Financial Corp.

OrganizationTrends

6 May 2011

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The left-wing, pro-radical media has played a role too, lulling Americans into complacency by telling them nothing’s wrong. Leftists using ACORN-style tactics are portrayed as well-intentioned mainstream activists, noble crusaders for social justice who have every-one’s best interest at heart. Activists may get out of hand every once in a while, according to journalists, but they mean well.

Of course when patriotic Tea Party activists, alarmed that America is being transformed into a socialist state by the nation’s Com-munity Organizer-in-Chief, express their well-founded concerns by merely booing a few congressmen and holding protest rallies, the media labels them heel-clicking fascist storm troopers. If there’s one thing the Left cannot tolerate, it is diversity of opinion and freedom of speech.

Americans have become so desensitized to in-your-face protest and shakedown tactics that ACORN’s jackboot activism, which rightly horrifi ed society in past years, hardly registers today. Unless ACORN or its lawless brethren in the so-called progressive move-ment are wrecking front lawns, obstructing businesses, burning bankers in effi gy, or chasing politicians from a stage, such groups are boring to Americans.

Maybe that’s why, in the words of former ACORN national board member Marcel Reid, it took “a half-naked 20-year-old” to spark the nationwide backlash that erupted against the group in 2009. Without the under-cover videos masterminded by conservative activists James O’Keefe III and Hannah Giles that showed ACORN employees offering advice on establishing an illegal brothel employing underage Salvadoran girls, Americans’ concern about the group’s persistent lawbreaking might never have reached a fever pitch that forced Congress to defund the group in September 2009, begin-

ACORN REBRANDING TABLE

ACORN Housing Corp. changed its name to Affordable Housing Centers of America Inc.

State-level chapters that have incorporated as new nonprofi t corporations:

Arkansas: Arkansas Community Organizations

California: Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE)

Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island: New England United for Justice

District of Columbia, Maryland: Communities United, Communities UnitedTraining and Education Fund

Louisiana: A Community Voice

Minnesota: Minnesota Neighborhoods Organizing for Change

Missouri: Missourians Organizing for Reform & Empowerment (MORE)

New York: New York Communities for Change

Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania Neighborhoods for Social Justice (PNSJ) andPennsylvania Communities Organizing for Change (PCOC)

Texas: Texas Organizing Project and Texas Organizing Project Education Fund

Washington: Organization United for Reform (OUR) Washington

Sources: author research; “ACORN Political Machine Tries to Reinvent Itself,” U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, April 1, 2010, available at http://republicans. oversight.house.gov/images/stories/Reports/20100401ACORNreport.pdf.

ning its fi nal slide into bankruptcy. ACORN was only conducting business as usual, but the videos provided graphic evidence that the group’s business was not only unsavory but illegitimate.

Matthew Vadum is a Senior Editor at Capi-tal Research Center. His book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, will be published this month by WND Books. The book and this article are Copyright © 2011 Matthew Vadum. All rights reserved.

OT

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OrganizationTrends

Ballot box stuff ers. Urban terrorists. Gangsters.

The History of an Organization Created to Destroy American Capitalism and Democracy

From WND Books, Subversion Inc., by Capital Research Center’s Matthew Vadum

Publication date: May 10

Available at Amazon.com and fi ne bookstores near you

OrganizationTrends

8 May 2011

Briefl yNotedLast month the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) received a felony con-viction for paying canvassers according to the number of persons they registered to vote. Nevada forbids the practice, reasoning that pay-per-vote compensation gives canvassers a fi nancial incentive to forge signatures or ignore legal requirements. ACORN faces a fi ne of up to $5,000. Two senior ACORN executives involved in the conspiracy were previously sentenced. (Amy Adele Busefi nk was fi ned $4,000 and placed on probation. Her subordinate, Christopher Howell Edwards, was fi ned $500 and also placed on probation.) ACORN typi-cally blames its own employees for overzealousness when they have been convicted of voter fraud, but this is the fi rst time ACORN itself has been found guilty of violating election law. The offense would seem to provide an opening for a federal prosecution under the Racketeer Infl uenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.

ACORN-like radical activist groups could receive a whopping $680 million in government funding as a result of the fi scal year 2010-2011 budget compromise reached by President Obama and Congress last month. The money will go to the Community Services Block Grant program that provides federal money “to states and organizations for projects that offer education, employment, health care, housing, and other services to low-in-come people,” according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. “Most of that money goes to about 1,000 community-action agencies across the country that manage local antipoverty projects.” It might as well be called the “Saul Alinsky Memorial Slush Fund.”

Budding Alinsky-inspired class warriors can earn a diploma in rabble-rousing from Community Action Part-nership, a nonprofi t association of over 1,000 community action agencies. The certifi cation, called “Certifi ed Community Action Professional” or CCAP, requires no coursework but goes to community organizers who sub-mit a resume and pass a four-hour exam demonstrating their knowledge. A “study guide” is provided. Maybe it’s a kind of left-wing Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons, lost 300,000 members who disagreed with the group’s support for Obamacare during the health care debate. Since 2008 when membership reached 40 million members, AARP has lost a whopping 3 million members, according to the Washington Business Jour-nal.

The Democracy Alliance, an organization of super-wealthy liberals inspired by the example of George Soros, is funding a new project called New Media Ventures. According to the project’s website, it is “the fi rst national network of early stage investors who are investing their time and money into new, cutting edge, start-ups focused on building progressive change.” Further details may be forthcoming – but then again maybe not. The Democracy Alliance is very secretive.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that left-leaning nonprofi ts and charities are growing nervous about their government funding as a result of the undercover videos that conservative activist James O’Keefe publicly released to the media, exposing the political biases of National Public Radio senior executives. “We need to recognize that these are not one-off attacks but instead connected events that require a collective and con-nected response,” said Soros protégé Gara LaMarche, who is president of Atlantic Philanthropies.

The New York Times has retracted allegations made in an article about Brandon Darby after the former far-left activist fi led a libel suit against the paper. Darby’s testimony helped put two left-wing terrorists in prison, yet Times reporter James C. McKinley Jr. wrote that he “encouraged” their anarchist plot to fi rebomb the 2008 Republican national convention. Darby is also the subject of a Soros-funded documentary fi lm called “Bet-ter This World,” which paints him as an agent provocateur who persuaded young people to undertake acts of violence.