Wade Rathke

Disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke is urging Catholics to quit their church:

In the fall from grace of one institution after another, religious bodies have been on a steady decline for a generation.  No institution claims more members and fills less pews now that the Catholic Church on any given Sunday, nor has any outfit taken more of a licking in the public perception.  The inability to effectively manage the staff at the boundary lines between practice and principle has led to some dioceses declaring bankruptcy, multi-million dollar damage settlements, and a general uneasiness about how faith and flock have been stewarded by priests.  Couple all of that with a rigid hierarchy that seems committed to resisting change, pushing back the clock, some verifiable degree of misogyny, and a hardening attack on the victims of priestly misconduct and venerable institutions like the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and anything that still carries the torch of the Church’s long historic leadership in the fight for social justice.
What’s to be done?  Finally, it has become crystal clear.  It’s time to leave the church and follow the nuns! [emphasis added above]

That’s rich.

Wade is one of the worst managers in the history of nonprofit activism. His brother Dale embezzled nearly $1 million from ACORN in 2000 and Wade covered it up for eight years until it became public in 2008. As I note in my book Subversion Inc. Wade’s actions laid the groundwork for the collapse of ACORN. All ACORN needed was a push — and that push was provided by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles the next year when they caught ACORN employees on undercover video offering helpful advice on setting up a brothel for pedophiles. The video sting caused Congress to cut off funding for ACORN and scared away remaining institutional funders. ACORN filed for bankruptcy on Election Day 2010.

ACORN’s loathsome, corrupt founder Wade Rathke compliments the Tea Party movement in a new Daily Caller article:

Rathke was unequivocal about the Occupy movement, telling TheDC that “in no way has it had the political impact that the tea party movement has.” Yet because Occupy organizing is “still in its embryonic stages” while tea partiers have been organizing for more than two years, he cautions that “comparing the tea party movement to OWS is apples and oranges.”

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 »

Subversion Inc.: The Real Story of ACORN

By Matthew Vadum, Organization Trends, May 2011 (click here for PDF: OT0511)

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 profiled in the November 2010 Organization Trends and in the November 2008 editions of Foundation Watch and Labor Watch.

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 corruption and lawbreaking along with its brutal anti-social goals and tactics. It also examines the group’s intimate relationship with the Obama administration.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is part political group, part crime syndicate, part terrorist organization. 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 American system, so what Americans saw on the undercover “pimp and pro” videos released in 2009 was just another day at the office at ACORN. But the darkest side of ACORN has remained largely unexplored – until now.

ACORN, which until it filed 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 Organization (NWRO). NWRO was founded in 1966—the same year Richard Cloward and 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 destabilize 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 demonstrations.” In the late 1960s Wade Rathke signed on as an organizer for NWRO’s chapter in Springfield, Mass.

Read all »

Steve Kest, who was executive director of the organized crime syndicate ACORN, has become a senior fellow at John Podesta’s Center for American Progress.

Kest joins self-described “communist” Van Jones who is also a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Kest participated in the eight-year long coverup of a million-dollar embezzlement at ACORN perpetrated by Dale Rathke, brother of disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke.

According to a Canadian nonprofit, Drummond Pike, CEO of the San-Francisco-based Tides Foundation, an innovative leftwing grantmaker, has resigned as head of the group he founded 34 years ago.

A little-known benefactor to radical activist groups, Pike achieved notoriety in 2008 when he personally contributed $700,000 to help coverup and compensate the radical community organizing group ACORN for a nearly $1 million embezzlement by ACORN financial officer Dale Rathke. Dale Rathke is the brother of Pike’s friend Wade Rathke, who founded ACORN and was a founding board member of Tides. 

Tides has achieved reknown for revolutionizing the way money is gathered and distributed to left-leaning groups. The Tides Foundation maintains some 300 donor-advised funds. In 2008 it accepted $114 million from individual and foundation donors and made 1800 grants totaling $105 million. The Tides Center, a spin-off group, acts as a “fiscal sponsor” lending its management and fundraising skills and, more importantly, its tax-exempt status, to new and inexperienced activist organizations that are treated as Tides “projects” for legal and tax purposes.

Capital Research Center will examine Tides in its forthcoming October Foundation Watch publication. Word of Pike’s resignation reached us after our press deadline

According to a press release Pikes’ successor is Tides board member Melissa L. Bradley,  president and founder of New Capitalist, a venture capital firm.

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? [...]

Disgraced ACORN founder Wade Rathke says the group he created might not make it another year, reports the (Memphis, Tenn.) Commercial Appeal.

“The organization has become the focal point of the Right,” Rathke said.

The article says little more worth repeating.

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.

Mike Volpe, who blogs as The Provocateur, presents the third installment of his interview with ACORN founder Wade Rathke.

Volpe observes

I’ve come to the conclusion that Wade Rathke’s goal is to rule the world. If you think about what community organizing is, the whole thing makes perfect sense. A good organizer will organize a lot of people. A really good organizer will organize even more. How do you measure someone’s worth in community organizing? It’s by how many people they’ve organized. It’s by how much influence they’ve had in they issue they organize for. Furthermore, effective organizing means a synergy of media outreach, political outreach, and community outreach. Effective organizing means the ability to reach your tentacles into all levels of society. Make no mistake, the reason that ACORN became a force in our society has everything to do with the organizing genius of Wade Rathke.

Love him or hate him, Rathke is a fascinating guy.