Bertha Lewis

Later today ACORN whistleblower Marcel Reid debates Bertha Lewis, the former squatter who presided over the collapse of the corrupt community organizing outfit ACORN in 2010.

The one-hour matchup takes place at 10 o’clock a.m. (Eastern) on WPFW 89.3 FM (Washington, D.C.).

Listen live online here.

Reid was forced out of ACORN in 2008 after she demanded the group explain massive financial irregularities. She then co-founded a watchdog group called ACORN 8 with other whistleblowers. Reid contributed to the new book Race, Power & Politics: Memoirs of an ACORN Whistleblower, by Michael McCray.

Lewis is now president of the Black Institute, an ACORN-like organization in New York that focuses on African-American issues.

Glenn Beck likened Reid to Rosa Parks for her courage in taking on the powers that be at ACORN.

Lewis, on the other hand, is a thoroughly corrupt radical activist leader who doesn’t hesitate to throw her supporters under the bus if the money’s right, as I show in my book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.

Is ACORN Bullet-Proof? Radical Community Organizers Re-Organize

By Matthew Vadum, Organization Trends, September 2011 (PDF available:  OT0911)

Summary: Supporters of ACORN make long faces, lamenting the collapse of their sainted organization. Don’t believe them. It’s all for show. In 2009 Congress banned further federal funding for ACORN and last November the group declared bankruptcy. But ACORN operatives are rebuilding their organizing and fundraising apparatus, and ACORN is spawning new progeny. The groups have new names, but the faces behind them are familiar. They are roaming through government agencies in search of more federal grants. In this issue Matthew Vadum explores ACORN’s latest reinvention since the May publication of his book Subversion Inc.

Bertha Lewis chuckles about the collapse of ACORN, which filed for bankruptcy in November. “I think the Right is going be sorry,” she says, laughing. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and they didn’t really kill us. They just made us stronger.”

Lewis, who succeeded longtime ACORN “chief organizer” Wade Rathke, confirmed information revealed in leaked emails sent to supporters by ACORN spokesman Nathan Henderson-James: the dissolution of ACORN as a national organization is a complete fraud.

In September 2009 ACORN was rocked by videos showing undercover conservative activists receiving helpful advice from various ACORN employees on how to establish a brothel catering to pedophiles. The videos went viral, talk shows had a field day, and ACORN’s already-tarnished reputation was destroyed. The group lost its government grants and previously generous charitable foundations suddenly discovered they had better things to do with their money.

Unable to reclaim its reputation, ACORN tried to run away from it. As I report in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers (WND Books, May 2011), the group instructed its state chapters to reincorporate themselves as separate entities under assumed names.

Read all »

I have an article in American Spectator online today. Here is the top of it:

The Obama administration is stonewalling efforts on two fronts to investigate the still-operating ACORN and uncover what aid administration officials offered the radical advocacy group infamous for its thug tactics and election fraud.

The Obama administration is sitting on Capital Research Center’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that seeks correspondence between Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan and ACORN. HUD rules state that FOIA requests must be answered within 45 days, but at this writing our request has been pending for just over seven months.

The request was filed because Donovan is a longtime ACORN collaborator. He worked closely with ACORN for five years when he was New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s housing development commissioner.

“Perhaps no administration official has had more interaction with Acorn than” Donovan, the New York Times reported. ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis admitted as much. “We grew to respect him, and he grew to respect us.”

Ever since hidden-camera videos surfaced last year showing ACORN employees helping undercover conservative activists with financial and tax planning for a brothel for pedophiles, Donovan has remained silent about his relationship with ACORN. It’s unclear what Donovan is hiding. [...]

Here’s the top of my piece in today’s Daily Caller:

ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis praised socialism and said the Tea Party was a “bowel movement” filled with racists in a speech to a left-wing youth group, a new video shows.

The edited two-minute video surfaced on the Verum Serum blog Wednesday as a federal appeals court reversed a lower court ruling and temporarily upheld a congressional ban on funding the faltering community activist group.

The comments by Lewis came during a March 25 speech to the winter conference of the Young Democratic Socialists, which is the youth arm of the radical Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). DSA is closely tied to the Congressional Progressive Caucus, an 80-plus member group of left-wing Democratic lawmakers.

President Obama worked for ACORN’s Project Vote affiliate, trained ACORN organizers and represented ACORN as a lawyer.

Although ACORN leaders typically refuse to be labeled as socialists because they realize the term carries with it a negative connotation in American culture, Lewis openly embraced socialism. [...]

The organized crime syndicate known as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which has been making much ado about its feigned withdrawal from the national political stage, continues doing business as usual.

Proof comes in the form of an email, which went out to ACORN supporters on April 16 and which came two weeks after ACORN’s faked dissolution on April Fool’s Day as a national organization.

Writes ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis:

ACORN is not dead!

ACORN is alive because you are alive and still fighting for justice. Over the past 40 years, ACORN members have been through a lot in the fight to empower working families and families of color — and it has been the commitment of people like you, regular folks doing extraordinary things, that has made it possible.

In the email (PDF here) the perennially truth-averse Lewis, whose lies throughout the undercover video saga are well documented, continues to play the victim card arguing that ACORN, dozens of whose employees have been convicted of election-related crimes, was set up by shadowy corporate forces.

Nathan Henderson-James, director of ACORN’s online campaigns, already admitted ACORN isn’t really going away.

ACORN will probably run out of money and fold by year’s end but a dozen ACORN state chapters reincorporated to seem like new, independent organizations will spring up to carry on ACORN’s business, his leaked email suggested. At least a dozen of the group’s state chapters have already broken away under new names.

“The truth is that it is hard for us to forsee [sic] any scenario where ACORN continues beyond the end of 2010 and some of us think it might not last that long,” Henderson-James.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has already restored full funding to ACORN, which used to employ President Obama.

The fiscal floodgates are opening for ACORN, the president’s former employer and legal client, despite a congressional ban on funding the activist group that has long been a practitioner of election fraud.

In a March 16 memo Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Peter Orszag quietly ordered federal agencies to resume funding the group whose employees were caught on hidden camera videos last year condoning a variety of crimes including child prostitution and tax evasion.

The memo came a week after renegade federal judge Nina Gershon of the Eastern District of New York made permanent her temporary injunction prohibiting Congress from cutting off funding for ACORN.

The memo also came despite the fact that the Department of Justice is appealing Gershon’s ruling and seek a stay pending appeal.

It’s unclear why the Obama administration isn’t doing the responsible thing and waiting for the case to work its way through the judicial system.

(crossposted at BigGovernment)

Unlike leftist shills John Atlas, Peter Dreier, and the pathologically truth-averse Brad Friedman (BradBlog), City Hall continues to provide cutting-edge coverage of the transformation of ACORN, the left’s favorite organized crime syndicate.

City Hall, which covers New York City politics, reports that as ACORN allegedly “dissolves” its national structure the group’s ”affiliates will no longer provide foreclosure counseling or help low-income workers apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit, two programs that were funded in part by taxpayer dollars.”

From the newspaper report:

“We’re not going to be a service group,” said Jon Kest, the former head of the New York chapter of ACORN and now the leader of New York Communities for Change, a local successor organization run by many of the same people. “The key piece for us is going to be community organizing.”

Refusing government funding and shedding their social-services components will also allow New York Communities for Change and other ACORN successors to more easily engage in electoral politics without opening themselves up to charges of using taxpayer dollars for partisan purposes.

Nationally, the group ran a political consulting arm called Citizens Services Inc. A local incarnation called New York Citizens Services was contracted by several Council candidates and the campaign of Public Advocate Bill de Blasio in last year’s elections. Going forward, though, New York Communities for Change will operate as a nonprofit organizing group focused on public policy. [...]

Yes, you read that right.
 
Even with all its troubles, the ACORN organized crime syndicate is eligible for $4 billion (well, really $3.99 billion in CDBG slush funds) in President Obama’s fiscal 2011 budget.
 
That’s because a federal court order issued by a Clinton-appointed judge prevents Congress and the Obama administration from cutting off ACORN.
 
Will the temporary injunction issued by U.S. District Court Nina Gershon be lifted?
 
Who knows.
 
Will ACORN boss Bertha Lewis, who is currently doing a victory lap across America’s TV screens as she celebrates the legal troubles of hidden camera videographer James O’Keefe, ever be investigated for her role in the cover-up of a nearly million dollar embezzlement within ACORN?
 
Who knows.
 
Read my article at the American Spectator.

Esquire writer John H. Richardson is a smart man and a good writer but he clearly doesn’t know much about the organized crime syndicate ACORN.

His interview with Bertha Lewis, chief organizer of ACORN, reads like Scott Levenson‘s talking points. No discussion of ACORN’s million-dollar embezzlement, money laundering, abuse of government funding, or the role the group played in causing the subprime mortgage crisis.

Shame on him. 

And so Mr. Richardson earns a spot on the list of ACORN’s useful idiots (supplement to list here) alongside Joe Conason, Whoopi Goldberg, Ezra Klein, Michael Tomasky, Adam Serwer, Glenn Greenwald, Amanda Terkel, David Neiwert, Jamison Foser, Eric Burns, Jay Bookman, John Cole, and Charles Cooper.

This list is hardly exhaustive, by the way.

I have an article in today’s American Spectator about ACORN’s racketeering and money laundering activities.

Here’s the top of it:

Is ACORN engaged in a massive money laundering scheme?

Although evidence abounds that the radical left-wing advocacy group-cum-organized crime syndicate is recycling funds mafia-style, government investigators and the media have paid scant attention to ACORN’s money trail.

Red flags that appear to signal unlawful activities by ACORN are everywhere yet ACORN’s collaborators in the White House, Justice Department, and House Judiciary Committee, smugly ignore them.

If senior executives at a troubled publicly traded corporation were to provide completely different accounts of their company’s financial standing, how long would it be before federal investigators stormed their offices? If federal authorities failed to act, how long would it be before the media and the public began to accuse the powers that be of complicity in their wrongdoing?

We shall see.

I have just discovered that three senior ACORN officials have recently given wildly divergent accounts of the size of ACORN’s budget.

ACORN current CEO and chief organizer Bertha Lewis claimed in October that ACORN had an “average budget” between “$20 [million] and $25 million a year for everything, all of the offices combined.”

ACORN national president Maude Hurd reported in the ACORN entry of Erica Payne’s handbook for liberal activists, The Practical Progressive, that ACORN’s annual budget last year was $50 million. [...]

In “Understanding ACORN,” an essay published earlier this year, ACORN founder Wade Rathke said ACORN’s annual budget was north of $100 million. “Each year we raise and spend over $100 million, of which a significant part comes from dues and internal fundraising, but big chunks come from campaign support and labor and corporate partnerships,” he wrote.

So, is it $100 million, $50 million, or $25 million? [...]

New York State’s highest court has cleared the way for an ambitious $5 billion taxpayer-funded development to be built in Brooklyn.

On his TV show Monday Glenn Beck pointed out that a group that claims to protect the interests of poor people, ACORN, helped make possible the deal that will make current inhabitants of the Atlantic Yards project footprint homeless. (See video from the show here.) ACORN has long prided itself on fighting the so-called gentrification of neighborhoods as rising property values force the poor to move.

But not anymore. ACORN sold out in exchange for a bailout.

Specifically, ACORN sold out its own constituents for $1.5 million in loans and grants from project developer Bruce Ratner, whose communist brother Michael Ratner is president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. (The anti-American public interest law firm is also representing ACORN in its vexatious lawsuit in which it claims to have a constitutional right to feed at the taxpayer trough.)

In 2005, ACORN signed an agreement with Forest City Ratner Companies, LLC, a megabucks real estate development firm, pledging its support for the Atlantic Yards project. The 22-acre mixed-use project will be built in the neighborhood of Prospect Heights and would include the Barclays Center, a proposed sports arena that would become the new home of the New Jersey Nets basketball team.

Forest City Ratner indicated in a letter to ACORN that it would disburse $500,000 in grants but the money wouldn’t go to ACORN directly. The grants were to be made to the ACORN Institute, one of ACORN’s 100-plus tax-exempt nonprofit affiliates.

Whether the money will stay at the ACORN Institute, which trains aspiring community organizers, is anyone’s guess. ACORN routinely shuffles cash around its network. Its nebulous legal status and opaque corporate structure allow it to keep its activities largely hidden from public view.

For all Americans know, ACORN is being funded by the communist government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. It’s not that farfetched an idea.

ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis is friendly with the Marxist anti-American governments of two South American countries.

Within Lewis’s storied rogues gallery of a rolodex may be found contact information for then-Bolivian ambassador Gustavo Guzman and for Sabine Kienzl, a professional propagandist employed by the Venezuelan embassy. The listing for Guzman contains what appears to have been a direct office telephone number.

Add to this a listing in the rolodex for CITGO executive Andres Rangel and the whole picture begins to come into clearer focus.

Remember that CITGO is a wholly owned subsidiary of Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA). PDVSA is owned by the government of Venezuela and has been described as a “black box” because it is believed to also fund Chavez’s overseas political ambitions. Oil export revenues fuel Chavez’s petro-diplomacy.

I don’t have proof that Chavez is funneling money to ACORN but it is not outside the realm of possibility, especially given ACORN’s well-established criminal propensities and convoluted finances.

The despot sends the equivalent of millions of dollars to the U.S. every year as part of his public diplomacy campaign aimed at getting the American public to warm up to his government. Venezuelan oil flows to Citizens Energy Corp., a nonprofit headed by former Rep. Joe Kennedy II (D-Mass.) that gives some of the home heating oil away and sells some at a discount to poor people.

Citizens Energy is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, which means obtaining information about its donors is virtually impossible.