ACORN founder Wade Rathke also founded the huge public sector union, the SEIU (Service Employees International Union), which also happens to funnel funds to ACORN. Other ACORN affiliates, like the American Institute for Social Justice, also send millions directly to its parent.Worse, ACORN is competing for $8 billion in Stimulus dough, thanks to President Obama.
So where does the money go? Fox News traced the money to a single, small funeral parlor in New Orleans on Elysian Fields Avenue. It appears to be a bank for ACORN and as many as 268 of its far-left affiliates.
And some of its affiliates — like "The ACORN Institute" — are 501(c)(3) organizations.
To maintain its tax-exempt status, various arms of ACORN purport to be a non-partisan, community support organizations. These are laughable propositions, to be sure, but thus far have resisted attempts to puncture their complex corporate veils.
But Mitchell Blatt may have found a damning piece of evidence that destroys ACORN's claims of non-partisanship. It's an internal ACORN memo — dated January 26, 2004 — that spells out explicit gerrymandering strategies to benefit Democrats.
This is a long-term, multi-faceted project with the following goals:
a) Impact the post-2010 Congressional redistricting process by building progressive electoral majorities in swing state legislative districts in states where partisan control of legislative bodies is potentially in play.
b) Organize in 10 – 20 selected Congressional Districts where recent close elections and/or demographic shifts make them likely swing districts.
The strategy here is to build the long-term, targeted organizing and electoral capacity needed if we are to have a Congress with a progressive majority. The redistricting process is key, since it is unlikely that there are enough competitive House districts to end right-wing control of the House of Representative before 2012. But we need to start now.
The first step is to review the literature analyzing the redistricting process state-by-state, determine which states' re-districting processes are in the hands of state legislatures (most), which state legislative bodies have a close enough Democrat-Republican ratio to be in play, and which state house and state senate districts in those states are competitive. With this information, one can then target appropriate legislative districts. We have identified an organizer with previous experience with 21st Century Democrats and the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee who we would like to hire to develop this targeting plan.
In other words, ACORN plotted a national campaign to benefit a Democrat Party takeover of Congress, explicitly naming the Democrats as beneficiaries of their "largesse".
Sounds non-partisan, eh?
THERE'S MY TWO CENTS