ACORN’s “Muscle for Money” does the bidding of SEIU

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).

 

ACORN is under investigation in at least 14 states over voter registration fraud allegations stemming from the 2008 presidential campaign. The group endorsed President Barack Obama, despite federal laws barring partisan political activities by tax-exempt groups.

 

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.

 

SEIU has funded Muscle for Money activities in the past and continues to finance corporate shakedown efforts across the country as part of this program.  SEIU locals 100 and 880 have been identified as allied organizations on ACORN’s web site.

 

That information has since been removed from the ACORN web site, but 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.”

 

Inman and Marcel Reid, a former board member based in Washington D.C., formed ACORN 8 in October 2008 after the national leadership blocked their lawsuit seeking information about an embezzlement scandal involving top ACORN executives.

 

The lack of financial transparency and the continued use of Muscle for Money techniques remain top concerns for the whistleblower organization, which has about 30 dues paying members in multiple states, Inman said.

 

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.

 

Carlyle Group did not respond to an Examiner request for comment on its dealings with SEIU, ACORN and the Muscle for Money program.

 

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.

 

Eventually, H&R Block agreed to pay for the establishment of tax centers for the benefit of ACORN officials and members in exchange for stopping the protests, MonCrief said. H&R Block did not respond to an Examiner request for comment.

 

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 has used threats and intimidation to advance its agenda since its founding in 1970 by Wade Rathke, who adapted the tactics he learned as a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society - a group former New Leftist David Horowitz describes as "the first terrorist political cult."

In 1969, Rathke started a Massachusetts chapter of the militant Welfare Rights Organization founded by George Wiley. As Horowitz explains in his book, "The Shadow Party," Wiley used the Cloward-Piven strategy (named for left-wing Columbia University sociologists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven) to purposely overwhelm New York's welfare system and thereby encourage either increased benefits or social upheaval.

Rathke was later arrested for incitement to riot in Springfield, Mass. when the welfare recipients he led in a demonstration turned into a violent rock- and bottle -throwing mob.

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.

ACORN succeeded in ???? in blocking a House Banking subcommittee investigating proposed changes to the Community Reinvestment Act - legislation that would ultimately trigger the collapse of the housing market in 2008.

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.

In her book on ACORN entitled "Organizing Urban America," Rutgers political scientist Heidi Swarts called the group "oppositional outlaws" and "militants unafraid to confront the powers that be... a solitary vanguard of principled leftists...the only truly radical community organization."

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.

--Barbara Hollinsworth

 

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.

--Kevin Mooney

1970 – Former SDS member Wade Rathke forms ACORN in Little Rock, Ark.

1977 - After intense lobbying from ACORN members, Congress passes the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) to increase lending in “underserved” communities. The law also gives leverage to non-profits like ACORN by allowing them to derail bank mergers.

1990 – Illinois state regulators hold the first-ever public hearing to consider a thrift merger challenged by ACORN.

1992 - Project VOTE is launched. Barack Obama is hired by ACORN to run its voter registration project.

1993 – ACORN is given $55 million by 14 big banks to set up an 11-city lending program to comply with CRA.

1995 - A team of Chicago attorneys, including Obama, win a lawsuit on behalf of ACORN that forces the State of Illinois to implement the federal “motor voter” law. Meanwhile, ACORN sues the State of California to exempt its own employees from the state minimum wage, arguing that if it has to pay higher salaries, it won’t be able to hire as many people.

1996 - ACORN volunteers in Chicago work on Obama’s state senate campaign and picket Mayor Richard Daley as he welcomes delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

1997 - ACORN activists in Arkansas block the drive-through lanes of Pulaski Bank & Trust, while pressuring banks nationwide to ignore bad credit histories and low incomes when underwriting mortgages.

1998 - ACORN activists disrupt Federal Reserve hearings on Citicorp/Travelers merger even though Citigroup promised to provide home loans to illegal immigrants in California

2000 – ACORN volunteers work on Obama’s failed bid for Congress and the group endorses the Senate candidacy of Hillary Clinton.

 

2000 - A Senate subcommittee estimates that CRA directed $9.5 billion to non-profit housing groups like ACORN.

2001 - When workers in ACORN's Seattle office sign cards to join the Industrial Workers of the World, they’re locked out by ACORN management, which refuses to recognize the union. In New York, ACORN-sponsored candidates win a veto-proof majority on the New York City Council and torpedo Mayor Rudy Guiliani’s efforts to let non-profit Edison Schools manage the five worst public schools.

2003 - The National Labor Relations Board finds that ACORN violated federal law by interrogating employees about union activities and firing workers who threatened to organize its Dallas office.

2004 – ACORN volunteers work on Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign. The Wall Street Journal reports that one ACORN worker in Ohio who turned in voter registrations for “Mary Poppins,” “Dick Tracy” and “Jive Turkey” was paid in crack cocaine.

 

2006 – Under pressure by ACORN, the Chicago City Council requires big-box retailers to pay employees at least $10 hour. In Washington State, ACORN registers 1,800 new voters, all but six of whom were later determined to be fake.

2007 - The largest case of voter fraud in Washington State history is settled when three ACORN workers plead guilty to submitting nearly 2,000 fraudulent voter registration forms, which one prosecutor called “an act of vandalism upon the voter rolls.”

2008 – ACORN founder Wade Rathke steps down as chief organizer after his brother Dale’s $1 million embezzlement in 2000 is revealed.

2008 - Michael Slater, head of Project Vote, admits that 400,000 voters newly registered by ACORN in its $18 million voter registration drive were rejected by state and local elections officials as fraudulent.

 

2008 - Election officials in 14 states complain of widespread voter fraud, including Philadelphia’s city commissioners, who vote unanimously to hand over more than 50,000 fraudulent registration forms gathered by ACORN workers to the U.S. attorney.

2009 - Criminal charges are filed against ACORN members in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Ohio.

2009 - The House of Representatives passes the Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act, which provides $140 million in grants for legal assistance for foreclosed homeowners. Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., guts an amendment by Rep. Michele Bachman, R-Minn., that would have prevented ACORN Housing and any other groups under indictment from receiving federal funds.

2009 – Obama administration hires ACORN to “partner” with the Census Bureau to compile the 2010 census.

Obama's first judge appointment is an ACORN fund raiser:

U.S. District Judge David F. Hamilton of Indiana, nominated to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, worked as a fundraiser for the liberal activist group ACORN, now being scrutinized on myriad voter registration fraud allegations. The Judicial Confirmation Network calls Judge Hamilton "an ACLU liberal."
Blogger Weasel Zipper.

How Muscle for Money works:

"Bank of America pays quarterly. Chase when they feel like and are tired of getting bugged by me."
From an internal ACORN email, 2005, cited by "ACORN's Hypocritical house of cards," published by the Consumers Rights League.

Nice bank ya got there, be a real shame if anything happened to it:

"The banks know they are being held up, but they are not going to fight over this. They look at it as a cost of doing business."
City Journal contributing editor Sol Stern.

Inside an ACORN deal:

"ACORN agrees that it will not lobby for more restrictive terms and conditions and Citicorp agrees that it will not lobby for restrictive terms and conditions on such legislation."
Draft agreement, cited by CRL.

You pay, we stop the protests:

"The companies would pay money to get the protesting to stop. In addition to calling this activity 'Muscle for Money,'the insiders at ACORN called it "protection."
Anita Moncrief, former D.C. Acorn Chapter official.

IRS filed liens against ACORN:

"According to public records, the IRS filed three tax liens totaling almost $1 million against ACORN this spring. Also this spring, [ACORN-affiliate] CCI was paid $832,000 by the Obama campaign for get-out-the-vote efforts in key primary states. In filings with the Federal Election Commission, the Obama campaign listed the payments as 'staging, sound, lighting,' only correcting the filings after the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review revealed their true nature."