Posted on 09/16/2009 7:18:01 PM PDT by BAW
The journalists at the center of an embarrassing scandal for the grass-roots organization ACORN also paid a visit to the ACORN office in San Diego County.
Grass-roots organizing has gotten a black eye on the national stage after undercover videos involving ACORN, a controversial group with a local office, were released that were shot during a series of visits from a hidden-camera crew.
At 6 p.m. on Wednesday, a video was broadcast on Fox's "Hannity" that purported to show a San Diego ACORN staffer discussing human trafficking with two people who were undercover.
Earlier in the day, local ACORN officials, at an office in National City, said they were upset over the fallout and admitted that the undercover filmmakers paid a visit to them. They say no "paperwork" wound up being filed. At that point, no "gotcha" video had surfaced.
"I think none of our offices are 100 percent perfect. Our office here in San Diego is no different. I think what is important is that every day we are saving people from foreclosure,” said David Lagstein with California ACORN prior to San Diego video's release. “Fighting for access to health care. We're helping families to become new citizens that are eligible for that."
In a statement released Wednesday afternoon, Lagstein wrote, “San Diego ACORN confirms that the unscrupulous undercover team visited the San Diego office some time last month. The incident will be investigated as part of the work of the Independent Advisory Council announced today. ACORN confirms that no paperwork of any kind was filed by the San Diego office. We are also demanding that Fox news release the full content of the tapes [and all of the undercover tapes].”
The organization is now launching an independent investigation and overhaul.
While ACORN cleans its house amid the hidden-camera scandal, the group is facing a cutoff in federal housing grants and calls for a Justice Department investigation.
An activist filmmaker and a friend, posing as a pimp and a hooker, have exposed deceitful practices involving ACORN offices in Brooklyn, Baltimore, Washington and San Bernardino
"Honesty is not going to get you the house,” is heard from one of the participants in the undercover video.
That "house" was to be used for prostitution -- a premise ACORN staffers offered help in concealing. The organization has fired or suspended several employees and brought in outside auditors.
ACORN has been active and taken to the streets in San Diego County since 2001 occasionally drawing criticism for its assistance in getting mortgage loans for illegal immigrants.
In last year's local voter registration campaign, 17 percent of the applications were red-flagged as "invalid' or 'deficient."
Meantime, we got this reaction to the ACORN scandal from Michael Rosen, secretary of the San Diego County Republican Party: "What's coming into focus now is that ACORN itself may be at the epicenter of the economic and political crises facing this country," said Rosen.
Glen Beck will be all over this, and has been for some time. He will connect all the dots until something more is done about it.
Clearly you harbor evil, hateful thoughts.... Everyone knows that word starts with a capital R.
;-)
(snip) ...Nate Toler, currently head organizer of an Acorn campaign against Wal-Mart in Merced, Calif.... In 2004 he worked on an Acorn voter drive in Missouri, and says Acorn statements aren’t to be taken at face value: ‘The internal motto is “We don’t care if it’s a lie, just so long as it stirs up the conversation.”...(/snip) ---------- "Anatomy of a Shakedown (ties between ACORN and SEIU)," by Anita Moncreif http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2009/09/09/anatomy-of-a-shakedown/?print=1
No!
Does it end with an “ism”?
Even our local 10 PM news is covering it right now, but of course they imply this is just some wacky conservatives - actually he is just rehashing the NBC story and is unaware another tape was released today. What a bunch of tools.
San Diego news has now called them journalists — about time some news organization admitted what they are doing is investigative journalism which is in short supply today.
FEBRUARY 1990 : (ILLINOIS : STATE HEARING : ACORN-CHICAGO DIRECTOR MADELINE TALBOTT -- See 2008 MORTGAGE CRISIS, OBAMA) ...ONE key pioneer of ACORN’s subprime-loan shakedown racket was Madeline Talbott - an activist with extensive ties to Barack Obama. She was also in on the ground floor of the disastrous turn in Fannie Mae’s mortgage policies. Long the director of Chicago ACORN, Talbott is a specialist in “direct action” - organizers’ term for their militant tactics of intimidation and disruption. Perhaps her most famous stunt was leading a group of ACORN protesters breaking into a meeting of the Chicago City Council to push for a “living wage” law, shouting in defiance as she was arrested for mob action and disorderly conduct. But her real legacy may be her drive to push banks into making risky mortgage loans.
In February 1990, Illinois regulators held what was believed to be the first-ever state hearing to consider blocking a thrift merger for lack of compliance with CRA [Community Reinvestment Act of 1977] . The challenge was filed by ACORN, led by [Madeline] Talbott . Officials of Bell Federal Savings and Loan Association, her target, complained that ACORN pressure was undermining its ability to meet strict financial requirements it was obligated to uphold and protested being boxed into an “affirmative-action lending policy.” The following years saw Talbott featured in dozens of news stories about pressuring banks into higher-risk minority loans. ------- From: http://www.nypost.com/seven/09292008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/os_dangerous_pals_131216.htm?page=0
There’s already a group called the “ACORN-8” who were former board members who asked to look at the outfit’s books. They were summarily kicked off the board. Other than those 8, how many people of character would even consider working with ACORN is a legitimate question.
1991 : (—See 2008 MORTGAGE CRISIS) ACORN showed its colors again in 1991, by taking over the House Banking Committee room for two days to protest efforts to scale back the CRA.[1977 Community Reinvestment Act ]-——— “Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis,” By James Simpson, September 28, 2008 http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html
1990s EARLY : (CHICAGO : ) IT would be tough to find an “on the ground” community organizer more closely tied to the subprime-mortgage fiasco than Madeline Talbott. And no one has been more supportive of Madeline Talbott than Barack Obama.When Obama was just a budding community organizer in Chicago, Talbott was so impressed that she asked him to train her personal staff.
He returned to Chicago in the early ‘90s, just as Talbott was starting her pressure campaign on local banks. Chicago ACORN sought out Obama’s legal services for a “motor voter” case and partnered with him on his 1992 “Project VOTE” registration drive.In those years, he also conducted leadership-training seminars for ACORN’s up-and-coming organizers. That is, Obama was training the army of ACORN organizers who participated in Madeline Talbott’s drive against Chicago’s banks.
More than that, Obama was funding them. As he rose to a leadership role at Chicago’s Woods Fund, he became the most powerful voice on the foundation’s board for supporting ACORN and other community organizers. ——— From:
http://www.nypost.com/seven/09292008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/os_dangerous_pals_131216.htm?page=0
APRIL 1992 : (ILLINOIS : ACORN-CHICAGO DIRECTOR MADELINE TALBOTT — See 2008 MORTGAGE CRISIS) IN April 1992, [Madeline] Talbott filed an other precedent-setting complaint using the “community support requirements” of the 1989 savings-and-loan bailout, this time against Avondale Federal Bank for Savings. Within a month, Chicago ACORN had organized its first “bank fair” at Malcolm X College and found 16 Chicago-area financial institutions willing to participate.
Two months later, aided by ACORN organizer Sandra Maxwell, Talbott announced plans to conduct demonstrations in the lobbies of area banks that refused to attend an ACORN-sponsored national bank “summit” in New York. She insisted that banks show a commitment to minority lending by lowering their standards on downpayments and underwriting - for example, by overlooking bad credit histories.
By September 1992, The Chicago Tribune was describing Talbott’s program as “affirma- tive-action lending” and ACORN was issuing fact sheets bragging about relaxations of credit standards that it had won on behalf of minorities.-——— From:
http://www.nypost.com/seven/09292008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/os_dangerous_pals_131216.htm?page=0
1990s : (ATTNY BARAK OBAMA, ACORN & THE CRA-— See 2008 MORTGAGE CRISIS ) As a young attorney in the 1990s, Barack Obama represented ACORN in Washington in their successful efforts to expand Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) authority. In addition to making it easier for ACORN groups to force banks into making risky loans, this also paved the way for banks like Superior {See SUPERIOR BANK CHICAGO BOARD CHAIR PENNY PRITZGER, ALSO FUTURE FINANCE CHAIR OF 2008 OBAMA PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN} to package mortgages as investments, and for the Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to underwrite them. These changes created the conditions that ultimately lead to the current financial crisis.
Did they not know this would occur? Were these smart people, led by a Harvard graduate, unaware of the Econ 101 concept of moral hazard that would result from the government making implicit guarantees to underwrite private sector financial risk? They should have known that freeing the high-risk mortgage market of risk, calamity was sure to ensue. I think they did...
...Most significantly, Penny Pritzker, the current Finance Chairperson of Obama’s presidential campaign helped develop the complicated investment bundling of subprime securities at the heart of the meltdown. She did so in her position as shareholder and board chair of Superior Bank. The Bank failed in 2001, one of the largest in recent history, wiping out $50 million in uninsured life savings of approximately 1,400 customers. She was named in a RICO class action law suit but doesn’t seem to have come out of it too badly....-——— “Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis,” By James Simpson, September 28, 2008 http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html
Rosen is correct. ACORN lobbyed the government heavily for sub-prime mortgages and they had a big role in the mortgage melt-down.
SEPTEMBER 1993 : (REPORT : ACORN-CHICAGO DIRECTOR MADELINE TALBOTT ) Talbott continued her effort to, as she put it, drag banks “kicking and screaming” into high-risk loans. A September 1993 story in The Chicago Sun-Times presents her as the leader of an initiative in which five area financial institutions (including two of her former targets, now plainly cowed - Bell Federal Savings and Avondale Federal Savings) were “participating in a $55 million national pilot program with affordable-housing group ACORN to make mortgages for low- and moderate-income people with troubled credit histories.”
What made this program different from others, the paper added, was the participation of Fannie Mae - which had agreed to buy up the loans. “If this pilot program works,” crowed Talbott, “it will send a message to the lending community that it’s OK to make these kind of loans.”Well, the pilot program “worked,” and Fannie Mae’s message that risky loans to minorities were “OK” was sent. The rest is financial-meltdown history.-——— From:
http://www.nypost.com/seven/09292008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/os_dangerous_pals_131216.htm?page=0
1994 : (ACORN ATTNY BARAK OBAMA-——See 2008 MORTGAGE CRISIS) Obama represented ACORN in the Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Fed. Sav. Bank, 1994 suit against redlining [claims that banks discriminated against minorities in mortgage lending.]. -——— “Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis,” By James Simpson, September 28, 2008 http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html
It’s looking like the Senate’s quick action to cut off some of the ACORN funding might be a CYA move! Normally they’d take several months and several hearings to do anything like that.
1999 & 2000 : (DALE RATHKE, BROTHER OF WADE RATHKE, STEALS $948,607.50 FROM ACORN AND ITS AFFILIATES, BUT THE THEFT IS COVERED UP FOR YEARS TO COME WITH THE AID OF GEORGE SOROS’ DEMOCRACY ALLIANCE” , SEIU {See ANDY STERN} , AND THE TIDES FOUNDATION {See SOROS} ) ...it was revealed that his [Wade Rathke’s] brother Dale Rathke stole $948,607.50 from ACORN and its affiliates, in 1999 and 2000. The embezzlement was kept quiet for eight years, until a covert arrangement with the billionaire funders of this “poor people’s” organization, to keep law enforcement away, became known. Among the players in this clique are the Soros-run billionaires’ club, “Democracy Alliance”; the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), whose pro-globalist president Andy Stern does Soros’s bidding in politics; and the Tides Foundation, that conduits Soros and other “charity” money into political causes.————.http://tinyurl.com/4qa3r3
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1999 & 2000 : (ACORN FOUNDER WADE RATHKE’S BROTHER DALE RATHKE EMBEZZLES $948,607.50 FROM ACORN AND ITS AFFILIATES) Wikipedia: “Dale Rathke, the brother of ACORN’s founder Wade Rathke, was found to have embezzled $948,607.50 from the group and affiliated charitable organizations in 1999 and 2000. ACORN executives did not inform the board or law enforcement, but signed an enforceable restitution agreement with the Rathke family to repay the amount of the embezzlement. Wade Rathke stated to the New York Times that ‘the decision to keep the matter secret was not made to protect his brother but because word of the embezzlement would have put a “weapon” into the hands of [...] conservatives who object to [ACORN]’s often strident advocacy on behalf of low- and moderate-income families and workers.’ A whistleblower revealed the fraud in 2008, leading to the departure of both Dale and Wade Rathke.” -———— Obama’s ACORN: A Corrupt Organization of Revolutionary Nuts
The Post Chronicle ^ | October 10, 2008 | Michael J. Gaynor
JANUARY 2001 or earlier : (?CLINTON PARDONS WOMEN WHO HAD BEEN INVOLVED IN VOTER FRAUD IN NM? -- NEED TO VERIFY , WHO WERE THEY?) You got it! The RATS in NM are trying to distance themselves from ACORN and the fraud that ACORN is perpetrating. However, the RATS in NM didn’t need any help. They had already worked at perfecting their own practices. In 2000, I registered to vote via mail, and I got my voter registration card 2 weeks after the election. They had my registration, but they claimed it was nonexistent. It had “Republican” on the registration, so it mysteriously was lost and then found again two weeks later. Meanwhile, the early ballots that were cast were counted via computer. As they were counted, one vote for Bush equalled two or three votes for Gore. When the total voters did not match the number of votes cast, some reporter asked why that was so. hah. The computer was programmed to count that way. Thank goodness there was a paper backup and that the ballots could be recounted accurately. And I’m not even getting into the mysterious votes that turned up a week after the election that put Algore over the top for NM. Bubba pardoned two New Mexican women on his last day in office. They had been convicted of vote fraud. 18 posted on Friday, October 10, 2008 11:15:21 PM by petitfour | To 8
I wonder if O’Keefe and Giles did a comparison “sting”, where they selected a legitimate mutual aid organization to present their story to, in the expectation that they would be kicked out. If they have such a tape, that would make ACORN look all the more criminal.
This is the Bridge that Beck was talking about building. One piece at a time, inexorably, it all gets tied together, and the Left goes Down.
I lived and worked in Chicagoallthroughthe 1990s, and ACORN was constantly in the news, heavily involved in manipulating and intimidating banks and other institutions. Chicago was the most radical of the ACORN branches.
I didn't pay that much attention to them, but as a regular working Joe who often watched the evening news, I was very very aware of this organization. For someone with time on their hands there's a ton of material to be gone over in the local press and court archives. I would not be AT ALL surprised to find Obama up to his neck in it.
Maybe, but can you do that without committing felonies?
I would shell out PPV to see that!!!
The timing of this is very important also, with the corrupt Obamacare, he and Congress will be very distracted and people are going to talk. Doncha just love it??? lol
I was about to post that... thanks!
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