Saul Alinsky

Citigroup executive Eric Eve (pictured below) has resigned from ACORN’s phony, allegedly independent panel, a move that removes one of the few people on the panel who could even remotely claim to actually be independent.

If you read between the lines, it also seems to mean Citigroup agrees the panel is a sham. According to ACORN, the advisory council was established in early 2009 “to help facilitate a transition to a new management team under the leadership of CEO Bertha Lewis.” The emergence of the undercover prostitution sting videos in September gave the council another problem to mull over. 

Eve, senior vice president of Global Consumer Group, Community Relations, at Citigroup, quit after the National Legal and Policy Center pressed Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit to cut ties with ACORN.

In a letter to NLPC president Peter Flaherty, Citigroup announced Eve’s resignation from the panel.

“We too are deeply concerned about the recent media reports regarding ACORN and, because of those reports, have suspended our charitable financial support and program relationships with ACORN, and we are awaiting the results of the independent audit of ACORN activities now underway,” wrote Natalie Abatemarco, Citigroup’s vice president, Global Community Relations.

“On a related topic, please be advised that Eric Eve has resigned his position on the ACORN Advisory Council,” she added.

Citigroup is a Big Government lovers’ bank that funds just about every trendy left-wing cause in America.

Long before it started drowning in red ink, the poster child for so-called corporate social responsibility was a longtime donor to left-wing pressure groups such as Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition and Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s Nature Conservancy. In tax year 2003, Citigroup’s foundation gave 20 times more money to groups on the left than to groups on the right, according to Capital Research Center’s 2006 study of Fortune 100 foundation giving. (Foundation Watch, August 2006.)

Citigroup’s foundation has given a staggering $1.4 million to the alarmist World Resources Institute, as well as $509,000 to ACORN in recent years. The ACORN funding included a $500,000 grant to ACORN’s American Institute for Social Justice, which offers Saul Alinsky-style training in community organizing. Other donations to liberal groups include the Aspen Institute ($762,500), Rainbow/PUSH Coalition ($750,000), Nature Conservancy ($380,000), Rainforest Alliance ($200,000), and the Council on Foreign Relations ($50,000).

For her part, former ACORN national board member Marcel Reid never believed the council would accomplish anything. Reid and board member Karen Inman were expelled from ACORN by chief organizer Bertha Lewis for asking too many questions about the $1 million embezzlement perpetrated by ACORN founder Wade Rathke’s brother and then covered up for eight years.

When Reid, who is now a member of a reform group called ACORN 8, first heard of the panel, she told me this:

As former members of the Interim Management Committee elected by the national board of ACORN, we say that all of the things that this so-called independent panel is going to examine are things that we tried to accomplish. We called for all of these things –an audit, examination of the books, restructuring of the organization— all of this was already demanded by us.

And because we were trying to exercise due diligence as duly constituted directors of ACORN, we were relieved from our positions, forced out by the board under Bertha Lewis’s direction.

We have no idea how an independent, thorough audit of ACORN can be conducted by these people who were not selected by ACORN’s national board but were put in place by the same senior staff who conspired with Wade Rathke to cover up his brother’s embezzlement for eight years and who subsequently silenced any voice that called for truth, transparency and accountability.

Former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger was appointed by ACORN to lead an investigation after the undercover videos made headline news. He’s a former president of the left-leaning group Common Cause.

The members of the advisory council are ACORN allies and funders.

The members are

* John Podesta, President and CEO, Center for American Progress

* Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Board Member, RFK Foundation, former MD Lt. Governor

* Andrew Stern, International President, Service Employees International Union

* Henry Cisneros, Executive Chairman, Cityview (and a former HUD secretary)

* John Banks, Vice President of Government Relations, Con Ed

* Harvey Hirschfeld, President, Lawcash

* Dave Beckwith, Executive Director, Needmor Fund

Podesta helped manage Obama’s presidential transition team and heads the aggressively left-wing Center for American Progress. The center is heavily funded by George Soros and the subprime mortgage hucksters Herb and Marion Sandler.

Podesta has always been there for ACORN in its time of need. When ACORN got hit with a new wave of election fraud-related charges in May, the Center’s “Progress Action Fund” invited liberal and radical groups – including Harshbarger’s Common Cause – to a meeting in Washington, D.C., to plan how to use rhetorical misdirection to take the focus off ACORN’s increasingly well publicized corruption.

Andy Stern of SEIU is a longtime crusader for something called “social justice.” Social justice is when you have more toys than your friends, so your friends hit you over the head and take some of your toys away. That way everyone is equal. That’s social justice.

SEIU is intimately connected to ACORN but since the undercover sting videos surfaced showing ACORN employees giving advice on how to break the law, it’s trying to distance itself from the group.

Good luck with that, SEIU.

The National Education Association actually recommends Saul Alinsky’s books.

At least NEA’s being honest.

A great Alinsky quotation NEA cites:

Radicals precipitate the social crisis by action – by using power. Liberals may then timidly follow along or else, as in most cases, be swept forward along the course set by Radicals, but all because of forces unloosed by Radical action. They are forced to positive action only in spite of their desires…

Human Events has posted my article, “Left-Wing Radicalism in the Church: CCHD and ACORN.”

The piece, which is based on the September Foundation Watch, begins:

It must have been a sad day at the offices of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD) in Washington, D.C., last year when the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) announced that its temporary suspension of funding for the embattled radical group ACORN was being made permanent. Each November around Thanksgiving, every Roman Catholic parish takes up a collection for the non-profit campaign.

CCHD is the grant-making arm of USCCB, which acts on behalf of the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops, a group widely assumed to be conservative defenders of traditional morality. However, CCHD and ACORN share a left-wing ideology that puts a premium on aggressive community organizing.

It is an error to think of CCHD as an ordinary charity. In fact, it is an extreme left-wing political organization whose ties stretch back to the “father” of community organizing himself, Saul Alinsky, and to Barack Obama in his community-organizing days in Chicago.

And unbeknownst to most Catholics, almost no CCHD grants actually provide direct relief to the poor.

CCHD cut off ACORN after channeling $7.3 million of parishioners’ money to the group over the last decade. Bishops came under intense pressure from conservative Catholics outraged by reports of gross legal and ethical improprieties involving ACORN. [...]

I’m pretty good at tracking things down on the Internet but a few months ago when I tried to find Hillary Clinton’s Wellesley College thesis on Saul Alinsky I couldn’t find it.

zTruth now posts the thesis, which appears to be genuine, here.

These things have a habit of disappearing from the Internet so I have saved a copy on this, the Capital Research Center blog.

Here is the thesis in PDF format.

Of course, Barack Obama too was inspired by the writings of Saul Alinsky.

My September Foundation Watch is up on the Capital Research Center website.

It’s called “Left-Wing Radicalism in the Church: The Catholic Campaign for Human Development.”

Here’s a summary:

Each November around Thanksgiving every Roman Catholic parish takes up a collection for the nonprofit Catholic Campaign for Human Development (CCHD), a program run under the auspices of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Last November, under intense pressure from Catholic parishioners, CCHD finally stopped collecting money for the fraud-ridden radical group ACORN. But the Bishops’ Conference continues to support other radical community activist groups with similar goals, such as the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) founded in Chicago by Saul Alinsky, the founding father of “community organizing.” President Obama, a self-professed community organizer, has ties to both ACORN and CCHD.

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:

Jim Geraghty gave a good interview on Sean Hannity’s TV show a few weeks back about his article, “The Alinsky Administration.” (transcript here)

Here’s the video:

Somehow I missed this in March.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a longtime admirer of community organizing guru Saul Alinsky, visited the European Parliament in Brussels on March 6, 2009. She told the assembled Eurocrats:

I’m actually excited by this opportunity. I’m very well aware that we are not yet through this economic crisis but the chief of staff for President Obama is an old friend of mine and my husband’s and was in the White House when Bill was there. And he said, you know, never waste a good crisis, and when it comes to the economic crisis don’t waste it when it can have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security. And that’s what we’re trying to do.

This makes it even more clear that the Obama administration’s highest priority is the radical transformation of American society. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel‘s statement after Election Day (“Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things.”) wasn’t just an offhanded remark. 

The economic crisis is simply an excuse to transmogrify American into a sclerotic European-style socialist state. The economically suicidal cap-and-trade legislation, which would have the effect of a huge national energy tax, is a primary vehicle to impose the left’s vision of “social justice” on America.

Who knew the Obama administration was being so blatant about it? They’re not even trying to hide it and the media, for the most part, isn’t even bothering to ask questions.

Here is a video of Secretary Clinton’s remarks in Brussels:

(Hat tip: Berit Kjos of Right Side News)

The Saul Alinsky-inspired National Training and Information Center (NTIC) has agreed to fork over $550,000 to the U.S. government to make claims that it misused federal grant money go away, Crain’s reports. NTIC has long been in the forefront of training radical community organizers.

According to Crain’s the nonprofit community organizing group that encourages the formation of other activist groups

was accused by the U.S. attorney’s office in a 2006 federal lawsuit of violating the federal False Claims Act when it used some of the millions it received from a division of the U.S. Department of Justice to lobby members of Congress with hopes of securing more grants. Federal law prohibits the use of federal funds to curry favor with congressmen or congressional employees in connection with a grant.

The government alleged NTIC misused some of the $3 million-plus it received in federal grants from 2000 to 2002 for use to carry out a federal program aimed at helping local groups improve their neighborhoods by fighting drug use, crime, and violence. Specifically, the government claimed NTIC spent $207,131 of the federal cash to send its employees to training conferences in the nation’s capital. An Office of Inspector General report found last year that NTIC tried to cover up the fact that the conferences were related to lobbying, not general training.

The group was founded by the late Gale Cincotta, whom some call the ”mother of the Community Reinvestment Act” because she led the effort to create the law that President Carter signed in 1977. Critics say the law, which was strengthened during the term of President Clinton, helped to cause the subprime mortgage crisis by pressing banks to lend money to people they should have known would not be able to pay it back. Taking their cues from activists, banking regulators were given the power to make trouble for banks that in their opinion failed to lend enough money to so-called underserved communities.