"From Little ACORNs, Big Scandals Grow"

...The question remains as to why Obama chose to forge close links with ACORN during the 1990s, when its rock-throwing style of community organizing had been a matter of public record for decades...

...Most were devout Catholics, and, in order to organize them to demand better municipal services, Alinsky allied himself with Bishop Bernard Sheil and the Catholic labor organizer Joe Meegan...

...Indeed Alinsky himself was a far more complex and idiosyncratic fi gure than either his disciples or his ideological opponents (who assume that his last book, Rules for Radicals, published in 1971, was all about turning yourself into another Abbie Hoffman) typically admit...

...The IAF’s Edward Chambers told me that scarcely any act in ACORN’s three-ring circus of urban radicalism would have met with the approval of Alinsky, the man whose ideas supposedly underlie the rubber sharks and sacks of pennies...

...Nonetheless, such stunts, which seem to come straight from the yellowed pages of Tom Wolfe’s send-up of 1960s radical activism, “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” are remarkably effective even nearly 40 years after the Sixties offi cially ended...

...Judis quoted a primary stump speech of Obama’s declaring that community organizing was “the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School” and implying that politics was for him simply community organizing by different means...

...The 2006 New York Times article was about a cadre of utility customers wearing red ACORN Tshirts who descended on the Gary offi ce of the Northern Indiana Public Service Company to pay their heating bills out of bagfuls of pennies...

...he always focused on people who had a little but wanted more,” said Skerry, whose 1993 Mexican Americans, the Ambivalent Minority told the story of Cortes and COPS...

...COPS, the brainchild of the IAF-trained Ernesto Cortes Jr., is credited with giving political clout to San Antonio’s Mexican-Americans, who had lived in the city for decades but who had enjoyed little power under the city’s Anglo majority...

...The IAF insists that any organization that wants to affi liate with IAF—and benefi t from IAF’s training— come up with its own money, money voluntarily donated by people who believe in the group’s causes so fervently that they are willing to dip into their own pockets to pay for it...

...The potential for abuse in an interlocking arrangement governed top-down from New Orleans is as obvious as a thicket of “Change” signs at an Obama rally...

...The DCP was imbued with Alinsky’s philosophy of helping poor people band together at the grassroots level to confront a city government that frequently neglected them...

...There is a web of connections between Alinsky, ACORN, and the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama...

...senator forgot all about Saul Alinsky and what he stood for in order to link himself to a charisma-craving group that, at least right now, seems to be giving community organizing a bad name...

...And we never endorse political candidates...

...Corporate executives, bureaucratic lifers, and foundation grant-processors alike seem either cowed or impressed by such tactics as protesting a bankers’ dinner with infl ated rubber sharks, piling garbage in front of city hall, or yelling profanities at a mayor’s wife and children...

...Rathke was forced out of his job at around the same time he posted his optimistic budget projection because of another eyebrow-raising matter raised in Kingsley’s report: the way ACORN hushed up the embezzlement of nearly $1 million from the organization by Rathke’s brother Dale, who headed an ACORN affi liate that provides fi nancial-management and accounting services to other ACORN units...

...Although confrontation with the prevailing establishment was a key component of Alinsky’s efforts to turn lower-class communities into effective power blocs, he had little interest in class struggle...

...They might have felt marginalized economically (many worked low-grade jobs in the meatpacking industry) but they remained deeply conservative socially...

...If a movie analogy is apt, Alinsky’s ethos of activism was more On the Waterfront than Salt of the Earth...

...In a September 10 article in the New Republic, John Judis described what he called the “myth” that Obama had created about the centrality of community organizing to his political philosophy...

...In fact, Kingsley found, $215,000 had been charged to an American Express card paid by an ACORN pension fund that later wrote off the amount as a gift to ACORN in possible violation of federal pension-fund regulations...

...From 1985 to 1988, Obama worked for the Developing Communities Project, a church-based consortium operated by several Alinsky disciples on Chicago’s poverty-plagued South Side...

...Some of them told Strom they had no idea they were on the Project Vote board, which, like the boards of many ACORN affi liates, met seldom, if ever, and failed to keep minutes...

...Later on, during the 1960s, he was as much a foe of Lyndon Johnson’s big-spending War on Poverty as he was of conservatives...

...ACORN is secretive about its financial condition, which, because it is not tax-exempt, it has no legal obligation to make public...

...He also detested the 1960s New Left for its antinomian cultural hedonism and its insistence on smashing the “system,” as they termed it...

...Alinsky never tried to organize the really poor...

...Journal reporters Elizabeth Williamson and Brody Mullins analyzed the IRS fi lings of the tax-exempt ACORN Housing Corporation for 2007 and noted that some 36 percent of the funds raised by the housing affi liate last year—$2.8 million out of $7.7 million—came from the federal government, mostly in the form of grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development...

...On July 8, according to the Times, ACORN’s new top executive, Bertha Lewis, had said that 90 percent of the money had come from ACORN itself and the remainder from its charity affi liates...

...The movement failed to impress the general public, and the National Welfare Rights Organization went bankrupt in 1975...

...he never tried to organize welfare mothers, who are pretty hard to organize, as you might imagine...

...Dale Rathke had even been allowed to keep working for ACORN, although at a reduced salary and in the lesser capacity of his brother’s assistant, while the Rathke family agreed to pay back the organization at the rate of $30,000 a year (in other words, over 30-plus years...

...Because the IAF insists that its affiliates rely on grassroots contributions, not outside grants, its projects tend to be strictly local and relatively small-bore, centered around liberal Protestant and Catholic churches and their members...

...Obama contributed to the anthology After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois, touting the “impressive results” his Alinsky-inspired project had achieved...

...The internal report, by Washington lawyer Elizabeth Kingsley, pointed out that until very recently, Project Vote’s executive director, Zach Pollett, was also ACORN’s political director...

...Power, glory— and plenty of publicity—were also ACORN’s goals and its forte...

...It is not surprising that, as soon as the ink dried on Obama’s Harvard degree, the future U.S...

...Back in Chicago in the early 1990s, Obama represented ACORN in a voter-registration suit and directed a voterregistration drive for an ACORN affi liate, Project Vote...

...One of the most successful has been the Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), a consortium of churches, founded in San Antonio, Texas, in 1974...

...According to an October 14 editorial in the Wall Street Journal, that represented only a small part of the estimated $16 million in federal grant dollars that various ACORN affi liates bearing names such as American Institute for Social Justice and American Environmental Justice Project took in from 1997 through 2007...

...Elshtain, whom Chambers personally recruited to serve as an IAF trustee, said she had been drawn to the IAF precisely because of its commitment to “shoring up families and schools and personal responsibility...

...Alinsky, a self-styled radical who studied at the University of Chicago and began his professional career as a union organizer, was widely accused of being a Communist, but was in fact vehemently anti-Communist...

...I was very impressed by him,” Chambers told me...

...Alinsky believed that the liberal welfare state led to dependency, and that people should stand up for themselves and have the confi dence to assert their own interests,” said Peter Skerry, a political scientist at Boston College...

...ACORN’s political action committee, for example, endorsed Obama in February, and the Obama campaign in turn paid an ACORN consulting affi liate, Citizens Services Inc., more than $832,000 for its work in helping Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries...

...A Wall Street Journal article published on July 31 noted an additional source of ACORN funding: U.S...

...Furthermore, the report noted, Project Vote has had only one independent director (who served only briefl y) throughout its entire tax-exempt history...

...To hear it from people connected to IAF, though, Obama took an unfortunate turn when he linked himself to ACORN, whose activist shenanigans would have Alinsky spinning in his grave...

...Shakedowns” and “blackmail” were the words used by IAF’s director, Edward Chambers, a prot?g...

...Some IAF undertakings, such as a successful 1994 effort to have the city of Baltimore hire only contractors who paid their employees a higher-than-minimum “living wage”—a cause later picked up by ACORN in other cities— aren’t likely to appeal to freemarket conservatives who believe that the net effect of such measures is to increase unemployment by eliminating low-wage entry level jobs...

...Strom pointed out that ACORN is already facing demands for back taxes from the IRS and “various state tax authorities...

...ACORN is often referred to as the spawn of Saul Alinsky (190972), the godfather of radical community organizers, whose most famous aphorism was “Keep the pressure on...

...The New York Times in a 2006 article, however, stated that ACORN’s budget for that year, not counting its research spinoff and the ACORN Housing Corporation, another tax-exempt charity among ACORN’s affi liates, amounted to $37.5 million...

...It was the day before the New York Times published a story about a June 18 internal report by an ACORN lawyer which contained a laundry list of “potentially improper use of charitable dollars for political purposes...

...Later, during the 1950s, as Chicago’s meat-packing clout declined and its Eastern European ethnics moved elsewhere, Alinsky turned his attention to working-class blacks who were also socially conservative and church-oriented...

...When I was on the board, I heard more criticism of Saul Alinsky than anything else,” recalled Jean Bethke Elshtain, a philosopher at the University of Chicago’s divinity school, and a political centrist and prolifi c writer associated with the “communitarian” movement of the 1980s and 1990s, who until recently served on IAF’s board of trustees...

...I told him that once he fi nished his schooling, to get back in touch with us...

...money transfers among [ACORN’s 174 affi liates, some of them tax-exempt, others not], and potential confl icts created by employees working for multiple affi liates,” as Times reporter Stephanie Strom put it...

...On the very eve of the collapse of Wachovia Bank this September— done in by its fatal investments in home-mortgage instruments that the ACORN watchdog Consumers Rights League says were pushed by ACORN itself through its taxpayer-subsidized housing affi liate—ACORN was busy trying to mau-mau Wachovia into rewriting the terms of those swiftly defaulting loans by portraying the bank to the media as a piranha lender...

...From Little ACORNs, Big Scandals Grow Barack Obama: torn between two models of community organizing BY CHARLOTTE ALLEN The in-your-face Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) is currently being investigated for voter-registration fraud in 13 states...

...Just before he left Chicago for Harvard Law School, Obama also went through training with the organization Alinsky founded in 1940, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), and which carries on his legacy today...

...Even here, Kingsley’s report revealed that the version of the embezzlement that ACORN gave out to the public this past summer differed from what her perusal of internal ACORN documents revealed...

...But he never did get back to us...

...taxpayers...

...Once the ACORN embezzlement became public in May, however, along with the news that the Rathkes, thanks to the snail’s-pace terms of their restitution agreement, had reimbursed ACORN for only $210,000 out of the $948,000 stolen eight years ago, Dale Rathke was finally fi red and Wade Rathke obliged to resign, although he continues to hold the title of chief organizer for ACORN International, yet another entity on the seemingly endless list of ACORN affiliates...

...of Alinsky, about ACORN and its activities when I called the IAF’s Chicago headquarters (IAF today trains organizers in a loose network of some 57 affi liates in 21 states...

...One area of potential impropriety detailed in Strom’s story is the relationship between Project Vote, registered as a tax-exempt charity with the Internal Revenue Service since 1994 and thus barred from engaging in partisan political activities, and ACORN itself, a membership organization incorporated under Louisiana law that is nonprofi t but not tax-exempt and is thus free to be as partisan as it wants...

...They take other people’s money instead of raising it from the people they’re organizing,” said Chambers...

...Alinsky believed genuine radicals ought to work within for change...

...Since the allegations of voterregistration scams surfaced in the media in September, ACORN has taken pains to distract public attention from both itself (its website blames “the right wing noise machine” for its troubles) and its connections to Obama...

...ACORN’s using Project Vote to trawl for voters for ACORN-backed candidates—such as, um, Barack Obama—would be a clear violation of the IRS’s ban on partisan activity by a charity, as Kingsley noted in her report...

...They take federal money, money from foundations, and it corrupts them...

...The Rathkes were permanent fi xtures at ACORN...

...ACORN has a contract with Project Vote to conduct voter-registration drives using ACORN employees, who initially claimed to have signed up 1.3 million new voters at a cost of $16 million, then lowered that fi gure to around 450,000 (according to an October 23 New York Times story) after eliminating fraudulent registrations, duplicates, and incomplete forms...

...The rest of the board has consisted entirely of ACORN staffers plus two dues-paying ACORN members...

...Meanwhile, Wade Rathke had founded ACORN and soon brought his brother on board...

...They have also worked to sand down the edges of the founder’s harsh style to reposition the IAF as a service organization focused on training community organizers rather than provocation...

...Melees involving overturned desks, and broken glass often resulted from these encounters...

...Pablo Eisenberg of the Chronicle of Philanthropy covered the Rathke embezzlement and wrung his hands over the fact that ACORN’s “impressive group of smart, dedicated, and hard-working change agents” had gone wrong...

...Another successful IAF project is the Nehemiah Houses, which over the past 20 years has built nearly 4,000 moderate-income homes on once-desolate parcels of cityowned land in New York City...

...A friend of Wade Rathke has eased the cash-fl ow crisis somewhat by paying off the $738,000 the Rathkes still owed in restitution, according to the Chronicle...

...Alinsky’s self-selected territory as a community organizer during the 1940s was Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood, then a working-class slum abutting the city’s stockyards and peopled with ethnic Poles, Lithuanians, and Slovaks...

...After all, he could easily have returned to the lower-key, more centrist IAF...

...Nehemiah requires its buyers to demonstrate their commitment to home-ownership via modest but not negligible down payments, and so its projects have generally escaped the foreclosure blight that easier borrowing has brought to other low-income neighborhoods in recent years...

...Still, the IAF’s organizational emphasis on personal responsibility and commitment cannot help but resonate...

...ACORN’s founders certainly had Alinsky’s principles in mind when they founded the organization in 1970...

...Only $3 million of that came from the claimed 500,000 ACORN members’ dues, according to the Times story, with the rest rolling in from foundations, private donations, and arrangements called “partnerships” in which corporate targets of ACORN activism, such as the Household Financial Corporation (one of ACORN’s focuses is “predatory lending”) pay money to ACORN for the organization to operate, say, loan-counseling programs...

...When I called ACORN’s New Orleans headquarters to ask about its funding arrangements, its press spokesman, Charles Jackson, refused to answer my questions unless I put them in writing, and after I did via email, Jackson was not heard from again...

...Pollett resigned from Project Vote in July but continues to work for the charity as a consultant via another ACORN affi liate...

...Wade Rathke had cut his teeth in radical activism in 1967, when he helped George Wiley found the National Welfare Rights Organization, a quintessential 1960s group that mobilized hordes of welfare mothers to invade benefi ts offi ces with lists of demands...

...As for ACORN’s protest tactics, the kind that have netted it decades’ worth of counseling contracts and other cash handouts from corporations and municipalities, they indeed seem to fall into the category of “shakedowns...

...We work a lot with churches, with unions,” said Chambers...

...Not long before enrolling at Harvard Law School in 1988, Obama underwent IAF’s standard eight-day training session for organizers...

...A company spokesman pointed out that the utility already had an assistance program in place for poor people unable to pay for heat and said the ACORN tactics amounted to “bullying...

...They hire their own organizers, and they hold them accountable...

...All of these were part of a prolonged ACORN protest in Baltimore a few years ago that, according to Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, were the likely source of an annual $50,000 payout from the city to ACORN for providing housing counseling to the poor...

...He sat on the board of the Chicago-based Woods Foundation that made hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of grants to Project Vote and (according to a report published in an ACORN journal in 2004) ran a session on power as part of ACORN’s annual leadership training sessions for several years before his fi rst run for public offi ce in 1996...

...Charlotte Allen, a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s Minding the Campus website, is writing her doctoral dissertation in medieval and Byzantine studies...

...According to a recent article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the embezzlement scandal cost ACORN, already encumbered with debt and tax problems, grants from some of its key funding foundations, and the organization has had to close several offi ces and lay off employees...

...The effort at distancing has undoubtedly been eased by the soft spot in the hearts of many journalists for any left-of-center organization that claims to promote “social change...

...The theft occurred in 2000, but ACORN’s top management concealed it from both the board and law-enforcement authorities until this past May, when word leaked out at a meeting of ACORN organizers...

...Wade Rathke, ACORN’s founder and, until this past summer, CEO, writing on his blog “Chief Organizer” on June 18, the very date of Kingsley’s critical report, estimated that ACORN’s total budget for 2008, counting all affi liates, would likely be a record $110 million...

...These range from allegedly procuring thousands of phony and multiple signatures on voter registration lists (one 19-year-old in Cleveland claimed to have been bribed with cash and cigarettes to register 72 times over 18 months) to using taxpayer funds to strongarm mortgage companies into lending to the un-credit worthy, helping precipitate the current fi nancial meltdown...

...The aim was to force the utility, via hours of tedious coin-counting and unpleasant media coverage, to drop delinquency penalties for tardy bill-payers with hard-luck stories...

...The reality, noted Judis, after interviewing Obama’s mentor during the mid1980s—the Alinsky disciple Jerry Kellman—was that Obama had long before Harvard become disillusioned with the tedium and apparent pointlessness of trying to get toilets fi xed in South Side housing projects when a career in politics that law school would make possible offered him charisma, power, and glory...

...Alinsky’s legacy organization, the IAF, has continued his practices: working with churches, trying to shore up families and other traditional institutions, and insisting on fi scal independence...