Glenn Beck Program

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.

The left delights in grave robbing, which helps to explain why support for inheritance taxes (which go by the more honest moniker, death duties, in the U.K.) remains so high among progressive activists.

But having the tax man shake down corpses is only one way the left helps fund both the welfare state and the progressive movement’s broader program of activism. Liberals love taking money away from dead philanthropists by subverting their charitable foundations.

The topic of fidelity to donors’ intent came up on the “Glenn Beck Program” today (video here) during a discussion of the left-wing entitlemania group AARP’s (American Association of Retired Persons) support for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) version of ObamaCare, which the House barely approved in the dead of night over the weekend.

The guest host said he couldn’t figure out why AARP decided to back socialist medicine.

Suggesting that there was a time when AARP wasn’t liberal, commentator Ann Coulter said

I tend to think the simpler explanation is [conservative writer] John O’Sullivan’s, that any organization that is not an explicitly a conservative organization will be taken over by left-wing loons eventually, from Carnegie Foundation, Ford Foundation, the Catholic Church for a while. Unless, I mean, it could be the choral singers of East St. Louis. Any organization that is not an expressly right-wing organization will be taken over by left-wing loons and that has certainly been true of AARP going back years and years.

Indeed, the grants handed out nowadays by the Carnegie Foundation (proper name: Carnegie Corporation of New York) and the Ford Foundation have little in common with the beliefs of those two foundations’ creators.

As Martin Morse Wooster, senior fellow at Capital Research Center has written both Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford “were heroic entrepreneurs who strongly believed in free enterprise and traditional virtues…[yet]liberals or leftists control the foundations that serve to perpetuate their names.”

Carnegie formed various nonprofits with specific objectives such as the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the Carnegie Hero Fund, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which still largely mirror the late industrialist’s wishes.

But Carnegie “ran out of ideas while he still had half his fortune to spend,” Wooster writes. He created the Carnegie Corporation without indicating that it was to spend money on. “Freed from any restrictions, the Carnegie Corporation became a pillar of liberalism.”

Henry Ford and Edsel Ford created their charity to avoid confiscatory inheritance taxes but they didn’t leave instructions on how the charity should be run. Henry Ford’s grandson, Henry Ford II, largely gave up control over the charity in 1948 and “[t]he result was that liberals quickly seized control of the foundation, and Henry Ford II resigned as a trustee of the Ford Foundation in a protest over the foundation’s leftward drift,” according to Wooster.

The longer a foundation exists, the farther it moves away from the ideals of the donor, Wooster writes. This “problem of donor intent”—is “a particularly acute problem for conservative and libertarian donors, given that the sorts of people who want to be program officers or presidents of foundations are usually liberals or leftists.”

A bit of an exaggeration perhaps, but you get the idea.

* * * * *

Long after purple shirt-wearing SEIU goons beat up conservative activist Kenneth Gladney outside a Missouri healthcare town hall meeting, not much has happened.

Almost three months after the incident the wheels of justice are spinning VERY slowly, Glenn Beck said on his TV show earlier this week.

Mike Flynn, editor of BigGovernment.com, said

the incident happened August 6th. Charges were filed. Gladney went to the hospital. Immediately, the Democrats brought in a high-powered attorney to defend the SEIU thugs who were charged with assault and it just kind of disappeared.

Flynn noted that the case has “disappeared within the jurisdictions of those individuals who are part of Buffy Wicks’s truth squad.”

Flynn is referring to Wicks, now deputy director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. As the leader of the Obama campaign in Missouri, Wicks organized an “Obama truth squad.” Flynn said she

organized at the Obama campaign headquarters a press conference of law enforcement officials, prosecuting attorneys, strict attorneys at the campaign headquarters who issued a warning that they would prosecute rival campaigns for any what they saw as misleading statements from their campaign.

Wicks also helped to oversee the infamous National Endowment for the Arts teleconference in August in which the Obama administration openly encouraged artists to produce pro-Obama art as political propaganda.

Naturally, the left has responded with vicious attacks on the victim, a diminutive black man with diabetes. Perhaps in the eyes of leftists Gladney hasn’t learned his “place” in society.

Watertiger at firedoglake calls Gladney “Joe the Dumber” and describes him as a “teabagging wingnut who tripped and fell while getting in the face of an SEIU member.”

Wndycty at Democratic Underground calls Gladney a “fraud” and a “fool.”

TBogg mocked Gladney and his injuries, calling him a “Teabagging Drama Queen,” and adding, “If the teabagging people weren’t such rage-filled imbeciles they would be the most adorable slow children on earth.”

Bronte17 at the far left hate site Daily Kos refers to Gladney as a “‘Don’t Tread on Me’ dork” and as ” a mouthy dork in a dark tan polo.” (That sounds a lot like “uppity” black, doesn’t it?) The blogger also suggests Gladney is suing SEIU because it has deep pockets. “[H]mmm… wonder if they think union money is easy pickin’?”

Oliver Willis, who works for the George Soros-backed slime factory Media Matters for America, inverts the perpetrator-victim relationship calling  Gladney “the black conservative who is the current poster boy for the thug right.” Willis can’t get the sequence right on his blog’s tagline either, “Like Kryptonite To Stupid.”

Wonkette derided Gladney as “the biggest whore in history. Like 100 times more whorish than Joe the Plumber and the world’s entire collection of actual street-walking prostitutes combined.” [emphasis in original]

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) explained to Glenn Beck on his TV show last night how  the radical left-wing activist group ACORN uses the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) to shake down banks.

The federal government, in effect, threatens banks into lending money to risky mortgage borrowers, Bachmann said. The CRA allowed groups such as ACORN to use the law to push banks into doing things they didn’t want to do.

CRA helped to change the way U.S. financial institutions operate. It didn’t cover all mortgages, but the law opened the door for community organizers to weaken lending standards. ACORN pressed hard for the legislation that forced them to take on riskier borrowers. To seek a race-based kind of social justice, CRA prohibited banks from restricting loans to more affluent, creditworthy markets, a business practice now known by the epithet “redlining.” The statute gave federal bureaucrats discretionary authority to make trouble for banks that failed to lend enough money to “underserved” minority communities.

 
After CRA took effect, ACORN and groups with similar goals entered the shakedown business. At one ACORN conference, Jesse Jackson urged an aggressive approach: “Why did Jesse James rob banks? Because that’s where the money was.” This megaphone-assisted panhandling intensified when the Clinton administration put the CRA on steroids.  CRA allowed activists to blackmail lenders into handing out mortgages to people with little regard for their ability to keep up payments. Banks felt the heat from community organizers and CRA examiners and instead of fighting, they made loans they shouldn’t have made, and they paid out millions of dollars in protection money to ACORN and its brethren.

If banks refused to play ball with ACORN, they risked receiving a failing CRA report card from government bureaucrats. Said Bachmann:

We’ve uncovered data of banks all across the country that made these gifts of money to ACORN — equipment gifts — or partnered with ACORN in order to get a good rating so they’d get out from under the radar screen of the federal government; in other words, so they don’t get their interstate branch banks shut down or so that they could expand.

Now ACORN has joined forces with other leftist groups in an effort to expand the CRA. As an added bonus, ACORN will be able to receive federal funds next month when the current congressional ban on funding ACORN expires. (The ban is included in the continuing resolution that is funding the federal government pending passage of the fiscal 2010 spending legislation.)

I was a guest on the “Glenn Beck Program” months ago and apparently that was the moment at which Beck “got” the ACORN story.

The segment from June was replayed on the program on Sept. 18 to show Beck’s ‘eureka!’ moment.

Here is the new video:

Wow, did Howard Kurtz of CNN (and the Washington Post) ever screw up the Van Jones/Glenn Beck story.

As Noel Sheppard of NewsBusters reported, in a segment of his CNN show, “Reliable Sources,” Kurtz accuses Beck of targeting Jones, a self-described “communist” who is now President Obama’s green jobs czar, because a group Jones founded called Color of Change is attacking Beck.

Here is a transcript of the brief segment that Sheppard prepared:

HOWARD KURTZ, HOST: Glenn Beck devoted some time this week to trashing a man named Van Jones, a special adviser at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GLENN BECK: Let’s start at Yale Law School. Van Jones showed up wearing combat boots and holding a Black Panther book bag. A major turning point came in 1993 when he was arrested during the Rodney King riots. He spent the next ten years as a full-fledged radical. Among other things, founding a group called STORM, Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement which held study groups in the Marxist and Lenin teachings. And why is it that such a committed revolutionary has made it so high into the Obama administration as one of his chief advisers?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

KURTZ: And why is it that the Fox News host would target this relatively obscure administration official along with that scary music? Van Jones was a co-founder of Color of Change, an advocacy group that has been promoting an advertising boycott of Beck’s show over his denunciation of President Obama as a racist. Some three dozen advertisers have pulled their spots from the Beck program, a detail that Beck somehow neglected to mention.

Had he bothered to prepare properly for his TV show instead of concentrating on Beck hunting, Kurtz would have realized that Beck has been attacking Jones for weeks on the “Glenn Beck Program.”

Long after Beck started pursuing the Jones story, Color of Change seized on Beck’s controversial characterization of President Obama as “racist” to urge an advertiser boycott of Beck’s show. After Color of Change began its anti-Beck boycott campaign, I broke the story that Jones was a co-founder of Color of Change and that the group had tried to cover up its ties to him by scrubbing its website.

Of course, the group’s outrage is probably fake. Color of Change was just waiting for an opportunity to lash out at Beck and Beck’s “racist” comment gave it to the group.

All in all, very sloppy work by Kurtz who seemed more interested in a “gotcha” than in getting to the bottom of the story. He should correct his embarrassing mistake.

Not surprisingly the mendacious, malicious idiots at Media Matters for America, anxious to destroy anyone on the right, fell for Kurtz’s misleading story. Media Matters ought to know better. At the initiative of high-profile fabulist Eric Boehlert, it has already opined at length about the Beck versus Jones story.

It’s worth noting that in the item linked above, Boehlert refers to the American Spectator, which has published my ongoing coverage of Color of Change and related stories, as a “fringe pub.”

of course, Boelhert failed to disclose in his rant that his boss, David Brock, used to be an investigative reporter for the American Spectator. Could this be because Boehlert, like his Media Matters colleagues, is deeply unethical?

My article “Obama’s Plan to Desecrate 9/11″ that ran in the Monday edition of American Spectator, was discussed on “The O’Reilly Factor” Thursday night.

Here is the video:

On his radio show Wednesday, Glenn Beck also discussed the article:

The race-baiting Color of Change, a group co-founded by self-described communist Van Jones, who is President Obama’s green jobs czar, is gloating about getting more advertisers to stop running ads on the “Glenn Beck Program.”

Co-founder James Rucker, a former MoveOn.org organizer, reports on the Huffington Post that Wal-Mart, Best Buy, CVS, Travelocity, Allergan (maker of Restasis), Ally Bank, Broadview Security, and Re-Bath have decided not to advertise on Beck’s TV show.

It’s unfortunate that these companies caved in to a left-wing hate group.

As I told Newsmax, the extremist racial grievance group isn’t happy that Beck did several news packages on Van Jones.

Jones is a founding board member of Color of Change, but Color of Change doesn’t want you to know that. The group deleted references to Jones on its website and only restored them after we exposed the coverup.

Maybe having an avowed America-hating radical on the group’s board is bad public relations.

The particularly unsavory left-wing pressure group Color of Change has an axe to grind with Glenn Beck — and it’s personal.

The extremist racial grievance group isn’t happy that Beck did several news packages on Van Jones, President Obama’s controversial green jobs czar who describes himself as a communist. (Green really is the new red.)

Jones is a founding board member of Color of Change, but Color of Change doesn’t want you to know that. Maybe having an avowed America-hating radical on the group’s board is bad public relations.

The group deleted references to Jones on its “about” page. That page used to say, “James Rucker and Van Jones came together in the wake of [Hurricane] Katrina to use the organizing power of the Internet to give Black Americans and our allies a renewed and strengthened political voice.”

But now it doesn’t.

The old page still exists in the Google cache.  (The cache will eventually be cleared, so for safekeeping, I made a PDF of the page here.) The 501(c)(4) group’s 2006 and 2007 tax returns (IRS Form 990) show Jones as a director.

Jones was also on the board of the Apollo Alliance, a hard-left environmentalist group that is now running large chunks of the Obama administration. Beck pounded away at the Apollo Alliance and Jones on a recent show.

On its website, Color of Change invited people to sign a petition to spare the life of convicted multiple murder Stanley Tookie Williams. From the petition:

Stanley Tookie Williams has become a true asset to our community. As a co-founder of the Crips, Tookie created untold suffering and death. There is nothing romantic or glamorous about the kind of violence the Crips unleashed. But Williams has taken responsibility for the harm he’s done. And since then, he has saved the lives of countless young Black males. He will continue to do the same—but only if he’s allowed to live. It would be senseless for the State of California to kill a man who is working every day to stop the madness of gang violence.

Mass murderers don’t usually get clemency. Williams was executed in 2005.

The race-baiting conspiracy theorists of Color of Change appear to be enjoying some success in their campaign to convince advertisers to boycott the “Glenn Beck Program,” which airs at 5 p.m. Eastern time on weekdays.

The group’s co-founder James Rucker gloats in an op-ed at the Huffington Post that Progressive Insurance and several other advertisers have dropped Beck’s show since Color of Change started promoting a boycott. Of course it’s not all that surprising that Progressive Insurance dropped Beck. After all, the company was founded by left-wing philanthropist Peter B. Lewis.

Rucker is a former MoveOn.org organizer. He is also a co-founder of the Secretary of State Project, the group that helped to elect Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie. Ritchie, a former community organizer who has worked hand in hand with ACORN, helped set the stage for Sen. Al Franken (D-ACORN) to steal the 2008 Senate election in Minnesota.

(Hat tip as to the existence of the boycott: Jeff Poor @ NewsBusters)

President Obama’s new “green jobs” czar Van Jones, an avowed militant communist, had been on the board of the pressure group Apollo Alliance, which aspires to flatten the U.S. economy by having government fund “green jobs” scams, according to the “Glenn Beck Program” earlier this week.

Even worse, the green gangster group, which has ties to ACORN, SEIU, and Center for American Progress president John Podesta, has significant pull in Congress and helped to write the stimulus bill.

The Apollo Alliance “is designed to bring together the elements of organized labor with the community organizers with the green groups, the environmental groups, and to access all of the big foundation money that’s been supportive of those causes in the past,” explained Phil Kerpen, director of policy for Americans for Prosperity.

Jones described the group’s “mission as sort of a grand unified field theory for progressive left causes; it ties all these things together,” Kerpen said. He added

They really admire the Apollo mission, the moon-shot mission, and they think that we need a similar centrally-planned, organized massive mobilization to reorder society and take control of energy and their various other objectives. They admire that and they want it like a moon shot.

Beck asked if Wade Rathke, the disgraced founder of ACORN who was expelled by the radical left-wing group last year for covering up his brother’s embezzlement of nearly $1 million in ACORN funds, had been a member of the Apollo Alliance’s board.

Kerpen responded, “Yes. He’s on — he was until this year on the board of the Tides Foundation and the Tides Center, which are the parent organizations that host the Apollo Alliance.”