"Forty percent was OK," said Anita Moncrief, referring to the number of bona fide registrations that officials at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now believed was acceptable...ACORN's works these "shake down" campaigns along with long time partner the Service Employees Union International (SEIU). The two groups have a long history, ACORN and the SEIU partnered with other leftist groups to help form the Socialist oriented "New" Party.
...Moncrief also testified about an effort she called "muscle for the money" in which ACORN would, for a price, organize protests against corporations on behalf of clients such as unions.
H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt and Sherwin Williams were among the companies targeted for protest in recent years, she said. Some of the corporations, she added, wound up donating money to the sponsoring groups to end the protests. She said some in the Project Vote office in Washington sarcastically referred to such payments as "protection" money.
While ACORN played an important founding role for the New Party nationally, ACORN was clearly the main force behind the New Party chapter in Chicago. In general, New Party chapters build around an ACORN nucleus were the most disciplined and successful party outposts. Nationally, the New Party’s biggest wins were in Chicago, very much including Obama’s victory in his 1996 run for the Illinois state senate. Chicago’s New Party was actually formed around two core elements, ACORN and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 880. Yet, as Sifry notes, SEIU 880 was itself an ACORN offshoot.Just to complete the circle, The New Party was tied to then State Senator Candidate Barack Obama:
Together ACORN and SEIU 880 were the dominant forces in Chicago’s New Party. True, there was also participation by open socialists, but these were not a majority of New Party organizers. You can certainly argue, as libertarian blogger Trevor Louden has, that whether openly or not, the New Party in Chicago and beyond was effectively socialist. It’s a powerful argument and worthy of consideration. After all, according to Rutgers University political scientist Heidi J. Swarts, ACORN’s leaders see themselves as “a solitary vanguard of principled leftists.” So a party outpost built around ACORN would be a party built around “principled vanguard leftists.” Sounds pretty socialist to me. Yet, as I’ve emphasized, we needn’t resolve the “socialism” question to conclude that the New Party, and particularly its Chicago branch, was far to the left of the Democratic party, and largely under the control of ACORN.
So the fact that Obama received the New Party’s endorsement in his first run for office in 1995-96 cannot be dismissed as insignificant. On the contrary, Obama’s ties to the New Party, and the New Party’s backers at ACORN (often the very same people), are long-standing, substantial, and reveal a great deal about his personal political allegiances.With those kind of connections, its no wonder how this pair of bullies is allowed to continue to shake down buisness as reported by the SF Examiner:
Corporate and political officials who defy workplace and community organizers risk being made objects of scorn by bright red-clad protestors in public and private, courtesy of an activist union and its close allies in the nation’s most controversial liberal non-profit advocacy group.
It’s officially called the “Muscle for Money” program within the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) where it was started, and unofficially by the same name among activists of Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN)... Muscle for Money includes multiple techniques for creating highly aggressive, organized efforts both to pressure businesses and officials to support the activists’ agenda or to discredit and intimidate opponents of their agenda, according to present and former ACORN members.
.... U.S. Department of Labor LM-2 financial disclosure forms
show over $600,000 in transactions between these same locals and ACORN operations in recent years.
Muscle for Money has generated significant opposition within ACORN.
“I don’t mind being up on a soapbox to get someone’s attention but I would much rather talk and negotiate, said Karen Inman, a Minnesota resident and former ACORN national board member. “But I just refuse to go someone’s home, that’s a privacy issue and I think this “Muscle for Money” program really went too far.”
...Some of the more prominent Muscle for Money targets to date have included the Carlyle Group, Sherwin-Williams, H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, Liberty Tax and Money Mart, according to Anita Moncrief, a former ACORN employee and now an ACORN 8 member. “The idea is to go to private homes where wives and children are present and stand outside so the family members of a company official could be harassed and subjected to intimidation,” said MonCrief. “Protestors would also go to company functions like banquets where they would be as disruptive as possible.”
ACORN actually had a contract with SEIU to target the Caryle Group, MonCrief said. The most aggressive campaigns directed against this company occurred in the fall of 2007.
“The company was building dental centers in downtown D.C. and SEIU wanted some union arrangement but Carlyle would not back down,” Moncrief said.
.....The program’s biggest score came against H&R Block, MonCrief said. The company was targeted beginning in January 2004 when ACORN promised demonstrations by its members in front of H&R Block offices protesting “overpriced tax refund loans” in at least 30 cities.
....Reid, who now chairs ACORN 8, said she became disillusioned with the program when the shakedown campaign targeted Sherwin Williams four years ago. She said an estimated 400 ACORN members dressed in red shirts stormed into a Sherwin Williams meeting held at the Renaissance Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio.
“The people in that room were absolutely terrified and I didn’t realize it was going to be like this,” Reid said. “These tactics were really heavy, many of us became disillusioned. The idea is to isolate the target so they don’t have time to build up sentiment with neighbors and co-workers. We would intrude into a person’s social life.”
..ACORN's so-called "muscle for money" strategy extorts "donations" from targeted government and corporate officials by offering them Mafia-like protection from protests by the group's own paid thugs, many of them convicted felons. ACORN has also blocked bank mergers until the targeted financial institutions agreed to change their lending policies to ACORN's satisfaction.
Rev. Jesse Jackson's Operation PUSH successfully utilized a similar approach by threatening boycotts and discrimination lawsuits to shake down major Fortune 500 companies. ACORN activists took Jackson's successful strategy a step further by physically blocking the entrances to banks that refused to make sub-prime loans.
Hundreds of ACORN members swarmed into the Washington Hilton in 1995, grabbing the microphone and forcing then- House Speaker Newt Gingrich to cancel his planned speech. Two years later, they pushed over a metal detector and prevented Chicago aldermen from leaving a closed session of the City Council.
And a bus full of profanity-chanting ACORN members targeted the private home of then Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, who complained that the protesters badly frightened his wife and children, during their "living wage" campaign.
,,,If "militants" and "outlaws" is how a sympathetic academic describes ACORN members, there can be little doubt that the group scrupulously follows the intimidation tactics outlined by Saul Alinsky in his 1971 book "Rules for Radicals" to force business and political leaders to do its bidding.
In "The Shadow Party," Horowitz writes that sociologists at the University of Chicago, where Alinsky got a master's degree in criminality, "defended and romanticized gangsters as victims of social injustice. Alinsky went further, pursuing actual alliances with mobsters...[even] "marrying the daughter of a prominent Chicago bootlegger."
In a 2003 article, National Housing Institute board members and ACORN apologists John Atlas and Peter Dreier said ACORN "is not shy about using the in-your-face tactics" because "public officials who decry ACORN's tactics wind up agreeing with its agenda - or at least negotiating with its leaders to forge compromises."
In other words, intimidation gets results.
ACORN's radical goals to transform the U.S. into a Marxist utopia have not changed in the four decades since Alinsky wrote: "The means-and-ends moralists, constantly obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the Have-Nots against the Haves, should search themselves as to their real political position. In fact, they are passive -- but real -- allies of the HavesÉ The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means."
Translation: Anything goes for those hoping to topple the political and economic system of a nation that has created more wealth and eliminated more poverty than any other in the history of mankind. Which makes their "muscle for money" intimidation tactics not only justified in ACORN's eyes, but a necessary and even moral means to achieve their desired political ends.
...Liberty Tax CEO recalls ACORN's "Mongolian Horde" Red-clad protestors besieged Liberty Tax headquarters in 2005 when the company refused to comply with demands by the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN), according to the company founder and chief executive officer.
Demonstrations against the Virginia Beach-based firm were part of a Muscle for Money campaign funded by the Services Employees International Union (SEIU) against mortgage loans ACORN viewed as being too costly for low-income people.
After Jackson Hewitt and H&R Block negotiated agreements with ACORN, the group's attention shifted to Liberty Tax, said the company's founder and CEO, John Hewitt. Harrassment in the ACORN campaign began with threatening letters and culminated with protests aimed against corporate offices throughout the country.
Hewitt recalled meeting Wade Rathke, ACORN's founder and then its chief organizer. "He was like a hippie right out of the 1960s," Hewitt said.
Liberty Tax agreed to make changes to give customers a better understanding of the mortgages they were receiving, but refused to go any further, Hewitt said.
"All of sudden, four bus loads of homeless people pull up in front of our headquarters here in Virginia Beach," he said. "They came pouring into the building like a Mongolian horde. There was screaming and fighting. One employee was bitten and another was scratched. They both had to go to the emergency room."
All of the protestors were arrested and Liberty Tax filed a complaint but it was later dropped because the legal expenses pursuing it would have required would easily have exceeded hundreds of thousands of dollars, Hewitt said.
Despite it all, Liberty Tax ultimately signed a long-term agreement to pay just under $50,000 a year to an ACORN affiliate, Hewitt said.
Read the full article HEREFolks, this is called extortion. And the extortion is being done with the full knowledge and consent with the Congressional leaders and the President. At the end of March there was some hope, after hearing testimony regarding the systematic pattern of voter fraud by ACORN, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) called for a probe of the Democrat's favorite voting fraud group. Admittedly his call for an investigation was shocking because of the fraud testimony indicated a relationship with the Obama campaign.
ACORN as been accused of voter registration fraud in 15 states. And since Conyers first made his declaration, indictments had been brought in Nevada and Pennsylvania, so why did Conyers changed his mind about a Congressional Investigation? Well according to the Congressman, he was forced to give up the fight by "The Powers that Be," implying that senior party members stepped in to protect the democratic party associated criminal enterprise.
That is the "transparency" of the politics of Change.
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